Never Let Them Forget

Who it is that pulls their strings.

Murdoch Goes

Full Gonzalez


If you think anything is going to happen to Murdoch on this side of the Atlantic, you're living in a Frank Capra movie:


Murdoch owns a majority share of the Party of God, has had most of its candidates for President on the payroll, and more importantly, owns the souls of every bigot, lunatic and slack-jawed imbecile who gets his opinion piped directly into his tiny, tiny brain via Fox News.

Remember that.

And then try to remember the name of the prison in which that slimy little fuck Gonzalez is rotting away the rest of his life.

Words Cannot Adequately Express

how much I am looking forward to the upcoming round of GOP ADD Twister for all the wrong reasons.

Why not since Rod and Todd Flanders' crushed Lisa and Bart Simpson in "Bible Bombardment":

For one gold star, what Persian king exempted the Levites from taxation?

Artaxerxes.

Righty-o!

From the political blog at the Network Which Shall Not Be Named:

GOP Presidential Candidates to Debate in the ‘Twitter-Sphere’

by Jason Donner | July 15, 2011

Republican presidential candidates are preparing for another debate, but this one’s a little different. It will be held via Twitter on Wednesday July 20, in what organizers are calling the “First Presidential Debate on Twitter.”

The 90-minute debate will be hosted by a group called ‘TheTeaParty.Net.’ Organizers confirm Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter will participate.

Organizers say they are hoping for a very fluid and conversational debate.

“The succinct nature of twitter will force the candidates to provide clear direct answers and the public will see who is providing those answers and the public will see who is just playing politics and providing non-answers,” says ‘TheTeaParty.net’ Coordinator Kellen Giuda.
...

Word has it, Michele Bachmann has already loaded a dozen nonsense phrases like "common sense freedom-based Conservative solutions", "Obamacare will destroy America" and "Constitutional originalist" into her laptop's function keys exactly as they've long been spring-loaded in her amygdala.

Meanwhile, unnamed inside sources indicate that Sarah Palin will be shouting at the teevee and playing her home version of Teabagger Bumpersticker Bombardment ("I'd like to spin the wheel, Jebus!"), while Mitt Romney plans to sit this one out and wait for the Double Jeopardy round.

When the stakes can really go up.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Left

For his entire adult life, Barack Obama has succeeded by offering himself as the perfect midpoint between others. As a mathematical function, not a leader. As an averaging equation, not a true believer.

Since he showed up on the political radar, he has marketed himself relentlessly as

Half black and half white...
Half American urbanite, half world-citizen...
Half wonk, half preacher...
Half Harvard Yard, half Back o' the Yards...
Half red and half blue...

And this bone-deep reflex -- plus his formidable intellect and ability to rise to the rhetorical occasion -- would have prepared him perfectly for the Presidency...if this were 1960.

But it is not 1960 -- nor is he dealing with Harvard Conservatives pals or Springfield Republican pols -- and being a results-agnostic "process guy" when the process is utterly broken no longer works.

Instead, the ideologically-lockstepping Right led by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have found in Obama their perfect patsy: the Democrat who seems constitutionally incapable of counter-punching, who can only feel comfortable while suspended between two opposing positions and who will, therefor, find a compromise between opposites even when he has to invent wholly fictional opposing views to which he can cede half the playing field.

From Paul Krugman:

Lacking All Conviction

Mark Thoma directs us to an appalling story — apparently Obama held a meeting after the midterm to debate whether our unemployment problem is cyclical or structural.

What I want to know is, who was arguing for structural? I find it hard to think of anyone I know in the administration’s economic team who would make that case, who would deny that the bulk of the rise in unemployment since 2007 is cyclical. And as I and others have been trying to point out, none of the signatures of structural unemployment are visible: there are no large groups of workers with rising wages, there are no large parts of the labor force at full employment, there are no full-employment states aside from Nebraska and the Dakotas, inflation is falling, not rising.

More generally, I can’t think of any Democratic-leaning economists who think the problem is largely structural.
...

In order to avoid wasting his presidency, squandering the opportunity we have given him, and letting the country spiral into a permanent corporate feudal pest-hole, Barack Obama must do the hardest thing of all: he must exceed his design specifications. This is not unprecedented, but like Franklin Roosevelt the capitalist-turned-social-Democrat or Abraham Lincoln the compromiser-turned-Emancipator, Obama must let go of a central pillar of his identity and embrace the brutal fact that our modern house divided against itself cannot stand.

That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

That we will become all one thing, or all the other.

And that this is your fight, President Obama.

This burden has fallen to you: it cannot be shirked and cannot be delegated.

If you take up this challenge, millions of us will have your back, Mr. President.

But if you cannot summon the inner strength to evolve past your reflexive need to compromise with people who want to destroy you, then we are all well and truly fucked.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

The Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party was on teevee today.

Not on basic cable or Fox, but on ABC.

He sat with Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman, George Will and the mortal remains of Baba Wawa.

He had to unhinge his jaw to accommodate the sheer volume of lies and wingnut twaddle he disgorged during this time on camera.

The Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party explained that he was not "in the business of politics".

Arianna Huffington whined to the Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party that "words have consequences". The Chief Propagandist for the American Fascist Party figuratively put his cigar out in her face.

The Baltimore Beatdown -- arguably one of the most important political and cultural events in recent memory -- was glossed over for about 11 seconds.

As it was glossed over on every other network teevee show this morning.

The Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party opined that the Kenyan Usurper had grossly misread the 2008 elections: that the Kenyan Usurper somehow got the idea that America had given him a mandate a to ram through his Secret Commie Pinko Marxist Treehugger Agenda, whereas the real reason Americans had voted for him was that they were "tired of seeing George Bush on teevee".

Arianna Huffington whined to the Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party that Glenn Beck says terrible things.

The Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party said that every word Glenn Beck has ever uttered (with one exception) was gold-plated awesome. That we don't want "word police". And that someone had once said something mean about the Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Partyon Huffington Post, which meant that anything anyone does on the Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party's teevee network had now been immunized against any such ciricism by anyone ever.

Then George Will lied for awhile about the history and meaning of the modern filibuster.

Then, for several uncomfortable hours, Baba Wawa riffled through the pages of the Scott Brown nudie "Cosmo" from the 1980s to find the the page where she -- Baba Wawa -- appeared, in order to underscore how brutally time had ravaged her.

Or something.

She did this in the interest of "full disclosure", thus prompting the only moment of genuine, bipartisan unity I have seen in a long time as the rest of the panel looked on in mute horror.

Towards the end, Arianna Huffington asked why the network run by the Chief Propagandist of the American Fascist Party cut away from the Baltimore Beatdown.

Baba Wawa stepped in and said "We're out of time!"

She might have also flashed her tits, but by this point I was in the powder room throwing up everything I had eaten since John Anderson ran for President.

More later.

Ignorance Remains Strength

Film at 11...

...and a certain Ornery Bastard has more here.