"Legislation is the art of compromise. Consensus-building." Harry Reid, on why he let Bush steamroll over him for eight years Link
Hey Harry, when you "compromised" with Bush, what did our side get? Another broken promise?
###
Following the example of his father putting a guy with a real talent for sex harassment in charge of the EEOC, George W. Bush put his own stamp on how the EEOC should operate:
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...has itself willfully violated the Fair Labor Standards Act on a nationwide basis with its own employees, an arbitrator has ruled.
The agency's practice of offering compensatory time off to its employees rather than overtime pay amounted to "forced volunteering" and was a knowing violation of the law, according to the ruling.
This is what you get when you let Cons rule. You might as well put toddlers in charge of the china cabinet: they do as good a job keeping that whole as Cons do running the government.
"Am I the only American who remembers that candidate Obama had a plan to capture Osama and fix our previous 'mistakes' in Afghanistan? Obama doesn't have a clue." Ralph Peters, LTC, USA-Ret Link
I'll bet Ralph was okay with Bush ignoring Osama and acting like a total drunken dick for eight years...but he's tired of waiting for Obama to act after 70 days?
####
Cheney's Lurid Legacy
The GOP's most toxic asset did more than commit war crimes, lie the nation into an unnecessary war, and mount wholesale attacks on the Constitution and Bill of Rights during his string-pulling stint in the White House. Dick Cheney was also a champion and defender of George W. Bush's fiscal madness.
Cheney supported Bush in forging public policies that drained the Treasury to provide tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and ran up record deficits while spending at rates that exceeded LBJ's pace. Johnson, at least, raised taxes to pay for Vietnam. Cheney and Bush preferred to create billions of dollars of debt to finance their military and nation building experiments.
In late 2002, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill argued another round of massive tax cuts would result in staggering deficits and warned Bush the move would harm the economy. Cheney, infamously, cut off O'Neill snarling, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." O'Neill persisted in urging caution thus committing an unforgivable sin in the Bush administration - speaking the truth.
A month later, O'Neill was fired. Dick Cheney, not the cowardly Bush, told O'Neill he was getting the heave-ho. The last voice of fiscal restraint in the Bush administration and only cabinet member with the guts to say deficits do matter was unceremoniously sacked. In Bush world, no one ever again, within earshot of Dick Cheney, would dare utter the heresy that debt financed tax cuts create problems.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/21020
###
"If you take what I say as gospel, you're an idiot." Glen Beck, hatriot, scolding his sheep Link
###
One by one, America's rightist luminaries are being quarantined to Fox News. The latest to join cable news' most popular leper colony is Doughy Pantload, Jonah Goldberg, who promises to make Sean Insanity sound like the Sage of Monticello.
###
27 infographics pertaining to the republican credit crisis.
###
This Fox News/Wikipedia report is hysterical. Why bother to distort real news when you can just make up your own?
###
A case of political camouflage: http://griperblade.blogspot.com/2009/03/case-of-political-camouflage.html
###
As you most likely know from this story in the Post, waterboarding and other forms of torture did not foil even one significant plot.
Jonathan Turley adds:
The Bush torture program is a wonderful example of not just the time-proven junk that comes from torture, but also the value of legal process as a way to acquiring legitimate information in legitimate ways. Putting aside the obvious immorality of the program, the reports show how we tortured people for little more advantage than the visceral and political benefits of "getting tough on terrorism." It turns out that we sold our collective soul pretty cheap in creating this torture program. The question is now whether Obama will continue to buy into the same cover-up by continuing to block a special counsel.
I'm ashamed that I live in a country that committed torture and is currently doing everything possible to prevent those responsible for it from being brought to justice. It's an abhorrent practice, an immoral practice, an un-American practice, and we are all responsible for it if we allow Obama to sweep it under the rug because he thinks it is politically expedient to do so. There must be trials. The people must face the horrors of what has been done in our name and see that it is wrong. And we cannot afford another generation of Negropontes and Abrams. We cannot risk for the likes of John Yoo to be available to serve in a future administration. Our nation's very soul is at stake here.
###
Setton Farms sent out 1 million pounds of contaminated pistachios to 36 wholesalers across the US. Check out the dire warning about the Salmonella on their website: http://www.settonfarms.com/
###
"Let's start with a premise that I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have five percent of the world's population; we have 25 percent of the world's known prison population. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice." - Senator Jim Webb, D(Va)
###
They were Nazis, Walter? By BooMan
In fact, they were anything but.
The Nazi Party presented its program in the 25 point National Socialist Program in 1920. Among the key elements of Nazism were anti-parliamentarism, Pan-Germanism, racism, collectivism, eugenics, antisemitism, anti-communism, totalitarianism and opposition to economic liberalism and political liberalism.
That's not to say that the Nazis didn't engage in populist demagoguery. They equated finance capitalism with a Jewish conspiracy to screw regular working folks. They proposed nationalizing all corporations.
The onset of the Great Depression, which preceded the coming to power of Hitler, greatly discredited capitalism in the eyes of the world. The Nazis were not capitalists, but (at least on economic policy) an attempted mid-way between capitalism and Soviet communism. So, if you are an American right-wing laissez-faire capitalist, much of the rhetoric and many of the actions of the Nazis are going to appear in retrospect to be left-wing in nature. But the economic policies of the Nazis are not what has earned them eternal condemnation. Take a look at the following terms and tell me if they better describe America's right-wing or left-wing.
Anti-parliamentarism (anti-Congress)
Pan-Americanism
Racism
Antisemitism
Anti-communism
Opposition to economic liberalism
Opposition to political liberalism
On those last two, 'liberalism' doesn't mean left-wing per se but more like principles of free markets, private property, and human and political rights.
The modern-day American right supports economic liberalism but they're pretty squishy on political liberalism. There's a reason the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is considered an enemy by the Republican Party.
In any case, nationalizing the car industry is something Nazis might do. But you know what else they might do?
1. Demonize ethnic and religious minorities like Hispanics and Muslims.
2. Discriminate against homosexuals.
3. Fetishize female fertility and discourage female employment in the work force.
4. Characterize the homeland as the rightful property of ethnically pure (white) citizens
5. Promote a nationalistic and imperialistic foreign policy
6. Call all of their opponents 'communists' or 'fifth-column communist sympathizers'
7. Suppress the black vote
8. Call President Obama a 'magic negro'
9. Support torture and do warrantless surveillance on political enemies and reporters
10. Fetishize an idealized past when the country was truly great
I could go on, but you get the picture.
###
###
Groups may sue Obama administration for "demonizing lobbyists"
America's favorite hair helmut and cult member is positioning himself for another $40 million vanity play for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
###
###
Conservatives falsely assert that green economy legislation would impose $3,100 tax on families
Conservatives in Congress are resting their objections to effective green economy legislation on a bogus stat. Conservative leaders like Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. McConnell (R-KY) are attacking the cap-and-trade proposal before Congress by claiming that it would "cost every American family up to $3,100 per year in higher energy prices."
This is a deliberate LIE: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/31/3100-lie/
###
Filibusters skyrocket under Republican MINORITY in 110th Congress
Yesterday, Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) slammed the idea of passing health care reform and other Obama priorities through a simple majority of the Senate, a process called reconciliation. "Now, if they do that, that, in effect is the nuclear war," Kyl said. The Republicans have become experts at using Senate filibusters — or often just the threat of filibusters — to block the Democratic agenda while in the minority. As this chart from Norm Ornstein shows, the use of filibusters have skyrocketed under Republicans:
Ezra Klein writes, "If you want to understand why the earth is likely to heat and why comprehensive health reform is unlikely to pass and why the government is increasingly letting the Federal Reserve govern its response to the financial crisis, that graph basically tells the story."
###
After sneakily splicing out 15 seconds from the middle of an ad critical of Satan's porcine handmaiden, Chris Wallace and Karl Rove just sit around playing with themselves, though Rove does call Chris a tool.
Wallace spliced out 15 seconds from the middle of the ad without disclosing or indicating that it had been edited. Wallace and Rove then went on to discuss the ad as if they had just played the full thing, even though some of the toughest criticism of Rove (including the firing of U.S. attorneys and the outing of a CIA agent) had been removed from the ad they aired.
[B]y treating it as if it were the full actual ad Wallace violated every journalistic principle that there is, which should serve as a reminder that nothing on Fox is real journalism. It's all conservative propaganda.
Video here.
No comments:
Post a Comment