What Did I Say?

From the "I Knew It Hadda Happen" Dept:

Liz Cheney, she of the fanatical stare and hell-borne bloodline, has manufactured a reason to complain about President Obama's visit to Dover AFB:

Via TPM:

Cheney, on Fox News Radio's John Gibson Show yesterday:

"I think that what President Bush used to do is do it without the cameras. And I don't understand sort of showing up with the White House Press Pool with photographers and asking family members if you can take pictures. That's really hard for me to get my head around...It was a surprising way for the president to choose to do this."

It's not clear exactly what Cheney is referring to when she says, "Bush used to do it without the cameras."

It's true that Bush's Pentagon continued a long-standing policy of banning cameras at Dover when the nation's fallen arrived in flag-draped caskets from foreign battlefields. (Upon taking office, Obama lifted the ban.)

So that covers "without the cameras."

Cheney's only claim to fame is that her daddy was the Vice President and Demon-in-Chief; she got her State. Dept. job - and virtually ever other paying position she's ever held - purely through nepotism. Otherwise, she has no standing, little experience, and less intelligence. She's not even a good liar: Bush never showed up to received the caskets at Dover, he couldn't give a flying fuck about the men and women he sent to their deaths for no good reason at all. Somebody please give Lyin' Liz a nice, big cup of shut the fuck up.

OK, Now Let's See Them Bitch About This....

Something else Barack Obama has done, that George Bush never did:

President Obama at Dover Air Force Base last night, honoring fallen soldiers as their remains are returned from Afghanistan.

Oh, Please!

As I've been suffering through my own health problems recently, the debate on health care reform--besides being a very personal interest of mine--makes me sometimes laugh at the depths to which the opposition will sink.

Case in point: Sen. Minority leader Mitch McConnell has lost his goddamn mind. Appearing on Dennis Miller's propaganda hour radio show, McConnell said:

MCCONNELL: Well, it doesn’t make any difference frankly whether you opt-in or you opt-out, it’s still a government plan. You know, Medicaid, the program for the poor now, states can opt-out of that, but none of them have. I think if you have any kind of government insurance program, you’re going to be stuck with it and it will lead us in the direction of the European style, you know, sort of British-style, single payer, government run system. And those systems are known for delays, denial of care and, you know, if your particular malady doesn’t fit the government regulation, you don’t get the medication.

MILLER: Right.

MCCONNELL: And it may cost you your life. I mean, we don’t want to go down that path.

Get real, Mitch.

As If Airport Security Wasn't Slow Enough Already...

From Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram newsletter, comes a report on the appearance of the world's first "ass bomber":

Nobody tell the TSA, but last month someone tried to assassinate a Saudi prince by exploding a bomb stuffed in his rectum. He pretended to be a repentant militant, when in fact he was a Trojan horse: "The resulting explosion ripped al-Asiri to shreds but only lightly injured the shocked prince -- the target of al-Asiri's unsuccessful assassination attempt."

For years, I have made the joke about Richard Reid: "Just be glad that he wasn't the underwear bomber." Now, sadly, we have an example of one.

Finally, a new excuse for delayed flights!

The Thirty Evil-Doers in the Senate

Finally got the list of the thirty senators, all of 'em Republicans, who voted against Sen. Al Franken's first bill, "To prohibit the use of funds for any Federal contract with Halliburton Company, KBR, Inc., any of their subsidiaries or affiliates, or any other contracting party if such contractor or a subcontractor at any tier under such contract requires that employees or independent contractors sign mandatory arbitration clauses regarding certain claims."

Or, as Mark Morford put it, "requiring the Pentagon no longer do business with any contractor -- hi, Halliburton! -- that requires its employees to agree that she cannot sue said contractor if she is, oh let's just say, gang raped by its employees." That's right, gang raped. It's already happened at least once. But somehow, thirty Rethug senators sided with Halliburton, and against rape victims.

Who are these thirty Republican paragons of virtue? I've finally got the list. Here are the nays:

Alexander (R-TN) Barrasso (R-WY) Bond (R-MO) Brownback (R-KS) Bunning (R-KY) Burr (R-NC) Chambliss (R-GA) Coburn (R-OK) Cochran (R-MS) Corker (R-TN)	Cornyn (R-TX) Crapo (R-ID) DeMint (R-SC) Ensign (R-NV) Enzi (R-WY) Graham (R-SC) Gregg (R-NH) Inhofe (R-OK) Isakson (R-GA) Johanns (R-NE)	Kyl (R-AZ) McCain (R-AZ) McConnell (R-KY) Risch (R-ID) Roberts (R-KS) Sessions (R-AL) Shelby (R-AL) Thune (R-SD) Vitter (R-LA) Wicker (R-MS)

I think that their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters should be sent letters of thanks and appreciation, in care of their senate offices. Personally, I'd rather send them the ingredients and recipe for dead gopher stew, but I digress. Here's the address:

Office of Senator (Name)
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

and the phone number: (202) 224-3121

How about it, folks?

With Friends Like Her, Who Needs Republicans?

Sen. Mary Laudrieu (D-LA) doesn't know what the hell she's talking about, when she talks about health care reform:

Asked specifically about polling data showing the public option with strong national support, the conservative Democrat added, "I think that when people hear 'public option,' they hear 'free health care.' Everybody wants free health care. Everybody wants health care they don't have to pay for. The problem is that we as government and business have to pick up the tab, and as individuals. So I'm not at all surprised that the public option has been sold as free health care. But there is no free lunch."

This is pretty foolish. For one thing, Mary Landrieu, as a senator, takes advantage of a very generous health care plan that lawmakers give themselves. "Everybody wants health care they don't have to pay for"? I suppose that's true, but it's odd to hear the comments coming from someone whose coverage is subsidized by taxpayers.

Who the hell thinks that the public option is a "free lunch?" Who's calling it that? Is she polling the gators or something? What an idiot!

Thanks also to mcjoan at DailyKos.

Wake Me, I Must Be Dreaming: Interracial Couple In Louisiana Denied Marriage License

WTF? What country am I living in??

NPR:

A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed-race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

"I've got black friends...I let them use my bathroom." Again I say, WTF?? Who does he think he's kidding? This is so unbelievable, so incredibly outrageous, racist, stupid, and incomprehensible, that it takes my breath away. Wasn't Loving v. Virginia more than forty years ago? Who does Bardwell think he is, to arbitrarily decide who should marry and who shouldn't? He cares about the children? Bullshit!

The NAACP agrees:

"He's an elected public official and one of his duties is to marry people. He doesn't have the right to say he doesn't believe in it," Patricia Morris, president of the NAACP branch of Tangipahoa Parish, located near the Mississippi line, said Thursday.

"If he doesn't do what his position calls for him to do, he should resign from that position."

This is amazing. I myself am in an interracial relationship, and if some judge ever told us that, I'd sue the hind legs off of him (assuming I'd be able to restrain myself from kicking his ass in the first place)! Who are these people who think that they have to right to tell others they can't marry? It's a basic human right for all humans, regardless of race, age, creed, or sexual orientation.

Dammit, what's happening to this country? Despite some wishful thinking by far-right pundits and what's shown on cable news, the right is NOT ascendant nor in the majority in this country. We had an election a year ago, and the majority of Americans voted for progressive, competent government. Yet we get 24/7 coverage whenever 6 wingnuts assemble with their "Obama=Hitler!" nonsense, hatemongers like Beck and Limbaugh walk safely among us, and racist demagogues like this judge think that they can defy basic morality and the settled law of the land.

I'm pissed. More later.

Baucus Health "Reform" Bill Passes 14-9

Whoopee! That piece of shit health care bill that Max Baucus dreamed up passed the Senate Finance Committee with just one Republican vote:

The Senate Finance Committee voted on Tuesday to approve legislation that would reshape the American health care system and provide subsidies to help millions of people buy insurance, as Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, joined all 13 Democrats on the panel in support of the landmark bill.

The vote was 14 to 9, with all of the other Republicans opposed. 

Democrats, including President Obama, had courted Ms. Snowe’s vote, hoping that she would break with the Republican Party leadership and provide at least a veneer of bipartisanship to the bill, which Mr. Obama has declared his top domestic priority. Ms. Snowe was a main author of the bill but she had never committed to voting for it. 

But shortly after 1 p.m., she announced that she was on board, in a speech that silenced the packed committee room and riveted colleagues on both sides of the dais. 

“Is this bill all that I would want?” Ms. Snowe asked. “Far from it. Is it all that it can be? No. But when history calls, history calls. And I happen to think that the consequences of inaction dictate the urgency of Congress to take every opportunity to demonstrate its capacity to solve the monumental issues of our time.”

I wouldn't say that it was "history" calling; rather, I think it was United Health Care, Cigna, and Blue Cross that called Snow. As mcjoan at DailyKos noted:

By voting yes, Snowe remains relevant--the Baucus bill passes with that shiny "bipartisan" sheen that seems still to matter to in Washington. But don't forget that she has her finger on the "trigger"--her trigger that would kill the public option. As BTD says, she's kept the Baucus bill alive, and through it the best chance of a making what now seems inevitable--reform of some kind--as watered down as possible.

So whoopee, we got one Repug on board!--for now. It won't last. It's going to take a strong, concerted, and relentless effort by Speaker Pelosi and the House Progressive Dems to keep the public option alive. (And thank all the gods that my congresscritter, Keith Ellison, is among them.) I do think that it's possible, I think that we can get a public option, but we've got to keep the pressure on.

Congratulations, Mr. President!

By now you must know--unless you've been living under a rock for the past 24 hours--that President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:

President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” a stunning honor that came less than nine months after he made United States history by becoming the country’s first African-American president.

The award, announced in Oslo by the Nobel Committee while much of official Washington — including the president — was still asleep, cited in particular the president’s efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

“He has created a new international climate,” the committee said.

Meanwhile, the GOP hate parade, led by "political commentator and snowman model" Rush Limbaugh and GOP chairman and one-man minstrel show Michael Steele, has already started. Of course they've already started!-they know what this is really about. Obama didn't win the award for just his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy," he also won it because the last guy in the White House was such a fuckup that any change is noteworthy.

Obama's "star power" notwithstanding, the Nobel committee obviously supports Pres. Obama's agenda of fighting climate change, expanding human rights, and economic prosperity for ALL. Yeah, yeah, I know: he hasn't done that much so far. Nothing world-shaking, I'll grant. But give him time. And does anybody remember that Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, after delaying the very peace accords cited in his award until after Nixon's reelection? But I digress.

Obama's efforts towards stabilizing the international order and halting the spread of nuclear weapons by themselves merit recognition and support; besides, anything that pisses of Limbaugh has to be a good thing. Let the sheep bleat about this. It's just another sign that their time has passed. Congratulations, Mr. President!

Updating An Old Joke

Rush Limbaugh asked his astrologer on what day he would die.

"On an American holiday," the astrologer replied.

"But which holiday?"

"Any day you die will be a American holiday."

On Second Thought, Yes--Give Up Your Day Job Too!

MN Governor Tim Pawlenty, in addition to thinking he's a viable candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, also thinks he's a comedian:

The Minnesota Governor called Cash for Clunkers "misguided" and "ludicrous" before saying, "There's a joke out now that says the main value of the Cash for Clunkers program may be that we'll get a lot of cars with Obama stickers off the road." The implication of that "joke" seems to be that it's poor Obama supporters who own old clunkers that were the beneficiaries of this government program.

Coming after Pawlenty's slash-and-burn tactics with the state budget, this latest bon mot again reveals T-Paw's essential indifference to the poor, as well as his ignorance to the fact that plenty of Beamers, Lexuses, and Benzs around here had Obama stickers on them last fall (and still do). I guess trying so hard to be the wingnut candidate of choice while still pretending to give a shit about people has him spindizzy.

Hey Tim, find another line of work, willya? Preferably one that doesn't give you any impact on other people.