Monday, February 22, 2010

Headlines - Monday

Let's see...gazillionaire golfer/Alpha male has extramarital affairs = fourteen-minutes of internationally-televised apology.

Former Justice Department lawyer issues legal advice to Bush administration that okayed the wanton massacre of civilians; at first faces disbarment for "violating professional standards", then has infraction downgraded to school report-card-like comment: "(used) poor judgment" = hours and hours of... *crickets*

The OPR report included an exchange between an OPR investigator and Yoo regarding what he referred to as the "bad things opinion," what Yoo felt the President could do in wartime.

"What about ordering a village of [resistance] to be massacred?" an OPR investigator asked Yoo. "Is that a power that the president could legally—"

"Yeah," Yoo said.

"To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?" the questioner replied.

"Sure," Yoo said.

But Margolis, who suggested Yoo and Bybee's flawed legal work was due to efforts to prevent another 9/11, dropped OPR's "misconduct" conclusions.

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Taibbi: Wall Street's Bailout Hustle
 
Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren't just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy - they're re-creating the conditions for another crash.
 
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h/t Dick:
 
International terrorists who have nuclear weapons see little fallout from Dubai killing.
Republicans 'ready to participate' in Obama's health care summit. If they do, the word 'participation' will be redefined. 
Think it's bad now? Just wait a bit. 
The Fat Lady Has Sung.
 
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http://indiedesign.typepad.com/2009images/ipd2009/file_fotos/mitch-mcconnell-collage.jpg
 
McConnell: 'Not clear' if GOP can block partisan tactic on health care
 
Mitch McNoLips on Fox News Sunday:

It's "not clear" whether enough Democrats will defect on a majority-vote procedure on health legislation to stop it, the Senate's top Republican said Sunday.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that opposition to using a maneuver to bypass filibuster rules would be bipartisan, but hedged as to whether it would be strong enough to block such a tactic.
Mitchy? Hedge? Nooo....

McConnell and Reid, along with other House and Senate leaders from both parties, will also head to the White House on Thursday for a bipartisan, televised summit on healthcare.

McConnell said he would attend the event "in all likelihood," putting to rest doubts that he or other Republicans may not show up.
Good for them. Now they can say "no" in person.
 
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h/t Andy
 
Garrison Keillor: It's just a matter of (free) time

If you wake up in the morning with the blues because people treat you mean, you could sing a song about it, or you could shop around for an enormous conspiracy that has denied you your constitutional right to liberty and happiness -- and how about Central Standard Time? What gives the feds the right to set your clock for you? It's tyranny.

Keep reading: http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_14434432

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How long will this keep going on?
 
Another day, another air strike in Afghanistan by "NATO" forces has killed 33 people after an aircraft fired on civilians mistakenly hought to be insurgents. 
 
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Glenn Beck's tiresome rant on freedom

Glenn Beck's reached the point where he's become a caricature of himself. Here's the ass deriding Michelle Obama's campaign to fight child obesity.

So now going all out to have government limit the food choices available at our kids' school, to make sure that grocery stores pop up in what they are calling — and I'm not kidding you — food deserts. There's no salad bars; it's a food desert. Then we are going to put the grocery stores instead of fast food businesses.

They'll limit what we can watch on TV, what ads we can run and how long we can watch. No doubt we'll start mandating certain kind of activities as part of this wonderful government campaign.

This is torn from the pages of the progressive playbook. You're too stupid. You need the government to fix your life, and they agree with you that government has no place in this business. But we're just going to help make things better.

Yes. They're coming and they are slowly but surely taking away your freedom under the guise of helping you.

Really, does it get any more dumb than this?  Every single move by the White House is now a tiresome rant on Obama's evil plot to take away your freedoms.  And as long as he's got teabaggers lapping up his every word, he's going to keep on laughing all the way to the bank.

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16.6%
 
That is the percentage that the top-earning households paid in taxes in 2007. Their incomes have quintupled in fifteen years.

I don't know anyone who is working for a paycheck who pays only 16.% of their income in taxes.

If you want to know why the Republican party is so unconcerned about the recession, consider this:
Those whose incomes were over $150,000 a year have an unemployment rate of 3%.

At the other end of the scale, the unemployment rate is over 30%. At the bottom of the economic scale, this recession is a depression. At the top, this recession is indistinguishable from full employment. This recession is a textbook case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

As we should all know by now, the Republicans and the Blue Dog Democrats don't give a flying fuck about anyone who does not make at least a six figure income. So don't expect the government to do anything to try and help you.
 
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Recent surveys suggest that the public is losing faith in science, because what has science ever done for them except give them penicillin and jet packs? Financial Times
 
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I'M IN CHARGE HERE

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'Amaricas Congress Woman,' moron Bachmann, is entitled to her own opinion, not her own history

You read that right. The Web site www.michelebachmann.com actually has America misspelled, and with no apostrophe. Do a search. I don't frequent her home page, so I have no idea how long the Yahoo! search engine has been like that.

Texas has long had a Republican Party platform that makes John Birch Society screeds from the 1960s look moderate. So, I would have thought that no other state could produce a blend of moronic and psychotic quite like this. I'd have to say that Minnesota "Congress Woman" Michele Bachmann wins the prize, far and away, over anything this state has ever produced. Her head is so far up her ass, it's threatening to emerge from her throat.

Here's a video, courtesy of no-spin C-Span, showing Bachmann in all her egregious reign of error:

For someone who knows anything about American history, this batshit insanity is so breathtaking that it's hard to know where to begin. And it was spoken by a member of Congress, on the House floor. Of course, I have to throw in that this is a member of Congress who went to college at Oral Roberts University. (aka "Anal" Roberts)

Well, OK, for starters -- the "Hoot-Smalley" tariff was actually the Smoot-Hawley protectionist tariff. It was enacted in 1930, by a Republican-controlled Congress, and signed into law during the first year of the Great Depression by Republican President Herbert Hoover. It predated the New Deal by well over two years. Hoover told the American people that "prosperity is just around the corner." Joblessness rose to nearly 25% before he left office.

Bachmann's Ignorance About History is Nothing Short of Obscene

Let's go on. Calvin Coolidge became president in August 1923, closer to the middle 1920s rather than the "early" 1920s that she talks about. The postwar recession in America was long over by then. It was his thick-headed, horny predecessor, Warren Gamaliel Harding, who inherited a recession. If I recall correctly, Harding played poker and drank whiskey with the larcenous Ohio Gang, and made lots of kissy-face and little nasties with Nan Britton in the White House broom closet, waiting for the whole ugly mess to blow over. He died relatively young, dumb and possibly happy.

Anyway, by Bachmann's "historical account," the "Roaring Twenties" are supposed to have followed Coolidge's supply-side economic policies, which could not have gone into effect until the midpoint of the decade. I have the historical impression that the unbalanced "boom" of the Twenties was already well under way by 1923. Unfortunately, a lot of small towns and rural farm areas weren't included in the "boom." I recall this as one of the weak underpinnings of the 1920s U.S. economy.

Then, according to the scribes of Bachmann Land, the economic downturn that followed the stock market crash of 1929 was supposed to have been a manageable recession. I hear this is what she told CPAC conventioneers in her recent speech to them.

But that evil collectivist demon FDR managed to get the "Hoot-Smalley" tariff passed in 1930, which was an unprecedented feat, since Roosevelt was governor of New York state at the time and the Republicans still controlled Congress.

Yep, then the unemployment rate during that "manageable recession" got close to 25 percent during the grim winter of 1932-33. FDR, still governor of New York, had his evil collectivist tallons dug into the country's fair loins, long before he took office on March 4, 1933.

Aleister Crowley, eat your Satan-worshipping heart out. That FDR dude had astounding mind-control powers that left you and your magic circles in the damp English dust.

Anyway, the American people supposedly suffered for 10 long years under the yoke of that demonic collectivist FDR. But somewhere in the dregs of my mind, I seem to recall that unemployment, though still high, generally trended down after he took office. And, he was obstructed by a right-wing Supreme Court that declared two of his crucial programs unconstitutional. He managed to eventually work around them, and by 1940 the annual unemployment rate was down to 14.6 percent. Then it plunged into single digits when that demonic, collectivist federal government stepped in and put the country on a war footing.

A Basic U.S. History Test for Members of Congress

I hear that Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., proposed during a speech to Tea Party imbeciles that the U.S. should bring back literacy tests for voting.

I have a better idea -- not mine originally, but I want to help give this a hearing. Michele Bachmann is a prime example of why all members of Congress should be able to pass a basic literacy test in American history.

I'm not a historian, but I almost didn't have to be. I took a CLEP test when I was a senior in high school and placed out of 6 hrs. of American history. (Yeah, I know, what a braggart, and why the hell ain't you rich?)

Point is, I would expect even the fucking dumbest member of Congress to know more genuine American history than Michele Bachmann. I don't think a basic cultural literacy test for our Washington reps is something that should be out of the question, since Mr. Tancredo is bringing up standards of republican democracy here.

I find it deeply embarrassing that someone with this much shit for brains can even hold office this high. It makes me feel shame for our country that anyone out there even listens to this fool. Then, there's the matter of how she ever got elected to be anything, even dogcatcher. I own dogs that seem smarter.

By the way, where have the news media been during all this? I know they've been treating right-wingers deferentially, for fear of being accused of liberal bias. But reporters aren't supposed to be just stenographers with amnesia. Joseph Pulitzer said the 3 most important things in journalism are "accuracy, accuracy and accuracy." Politicians should be held to a similar standard. They are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.

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The Deflationist: How Paul Krugman found politics.

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