July 2010 archive

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!!!  Do I have a FANTASTIC topic for your next Teabagger rally:

Iowa GOP jumps on the ‘Thirteenther’ bandwagon

A provision in the Republican Party of Iowa’s platform calling for the “reintroduction and ratification of the original 13th Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution got some national attention this week, with the party’s spokesman admitting the plank is focused solely on Barack Obama.

The current 13th amendment bans slavery, and Iowa Republicans are not in favor of its repeal. They are, however, interested in reintroducing an amendment originally put before the states for ratification back in 1810. It outlawed any person who accepts a “title of nobility” from a foreign country from ever holding political office.

Does that bring to mind a certain President who flew to Sweden to accept a Nobel Peace Prize that he didn’t earn?  Hmmmm?  (oh, wait . . . it already said it was about Obama?  That just blows my suspense buildin’ all to heck!)

I know it’s confusing (well . . . it is to me), so let me help ya out a bit.  Instead of activist congresses bannin’ slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment, here is what the real Thirteenth Amendment, known as the Titles of Nobility Amendment (or TONA) was meant to say way back in 1810 already:

If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain, any title of nobility or honour, or shall, without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.

It’s a hour and 15 minutes. Which is not too far into the future, you say?

But you don’t have to watch it all. Just watch the first 8 or 10 minutes.

You may or may not decide to watch the rest of it, but I’ll bet you will, and you’ll be shortchanging yourself if you don’t.

If you watch the first half hour I’ll buy the drinks. You’ll want one.

Hat tip to Sagebrush Bob

No Keith, Rachel.  The Boys are back in town for their final appearance this week.

You know, it’s not just his ignorance, arrogance, and hypocrisy that puts me off Schwarzenegger, or even his Republicanism; it’s the misogyny of his movies, epitomized by True Lies but equally evident in vehicles like Eraser.

I’ll never watch another one again except under duress.

• Comedy– Futurama (premier)
• ESPN– X Games!  First night, Moto X Freestyle Round 1, Women’s Super X Final, Men’s Super X Final, Moto X Freestyle Final, Skateboard Big Air Final.
• E!– ID4
• Food– Good Eats, Honey and Pound Cake
• Lifetime– Project Runway (Season Premier)
• History– The Universe (Season Premier)
• Turner Classic– Rock Rock Rock!, Rock Around the Clock
• USA– Burn Notice (premier)
• Disney– Underdog

Later-

• AMC– The Negotiator
• Turner Classic– Bye Bye Birdie

Dave has Paul Rudd, Bill Burr and Interpol.  Jon has Liev Schreiber, Stephen Andy Cohen.  Alton cooks with alcohol.  Mid-life Chrysalis.

Apparently this is the reward I get for years of screwing with super-science. In short, I pissed in God’s eye, and he blinked.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Shell defends deep-water oil production, as profits soar

by Ben Perry, AFP

Thu Jul 29, 12:30 pm ET

Just what every Democratic President wants the approval of Karl Rove, aka Turdblossom, for the Afghanistan War

Turdblossom Tweets:

Victory in Afghanistan requires two things: the right strategy and the resolve to see it through. http://bit.ly/da0JrQ

The link is to his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and what he thinks is missing from Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan, “Victory” . LOL

Mr. Obama has acted impressively so far on Afghanistan. He changed strategy based on facts on the ground, increased our troops by tens of thousands, and picked exactly the right man to lead our military into battle.

The president has the right pieces in place. Now he needs to signal to the world that he believes in the cause with all his heart. Let’s hope he does.

As Glen Greenwald points out Karl  had 7 years to get achieve “victory” and is now “claiming with a straight face that he knows the key to “Victory in Afghanistan””.

Obama is so far down the rabbit hole that even Karl Rove is saying he’s doing a good job.

In case you thought that the “Journolist” controversy over a now defunct, left leaning e-mail list created by Ezra Klein when he was 22 and working for The American Prospect, which was the source of the leaked e-mails by Washington Post right wing blogger, David Weigel that got him fired, well, it still rages among journalists from the left and the right. As Joe Conason points out it isn’t the left that has the problem it is the right wing journalists who have their knickers in a knot.

Joe Conason: On the team: The stunning hypocrisy of Journolist’s critics

They speak at GOP banquets. They meet to plot in Grover Norquist’s office. Yet the wingers find a listserv shocking

Nothing much can be learned from the manufactured media uproar over Journolist, except as a case study of how the right-wing propaganda machine still dominates America’s daily narrative — and how conservative journalists remain astonishingly exempt from the standards they are pretending to uphold.

Look no further than the outrage feigned by two of the nation’s most prominent right-wing journalists, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard (and Fox News) and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, both of whom could barely contain their indignation over the revelation that a few hundred progressive writers and academics engaged in political discussion via e-mail. Having read a single Journolist e-mail that suggested tarring him as a “racist,” Barnes suddenly detects a departure from “traditional standards” :

  When I’m talking to people from outside Washington, one question inevitably comes up: Why is the media so liberal? The question often reflects a suspicion that members of the press get together and decide on a story line that favors liberals and Democrats and denigrates conservatives and Republicans.

   My response has usually been to say, yes, there’s liberal bias in the media, but there’s no conspiracy. The liberal tilt is an accident of nature. The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal … Now, after learning I’d been targeted for a smear attack by a member of an online clique of liberal journalists, I’m inclined to amend my response. Not to say there’s a media conspiracy, but at least to note that hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.

   My guess is that this and other revelations about JournoList will deepen the distrust of the national press.

More:

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Is this what the American people really voted for? More war?

Robert Scheer at Truthdig

Thank God for the Whistle-Blowers

What WikiLeaks did was brilliant journalism, and the bleating critics from the president on down are revealing just how low a regard they have for the truth. As with Richard Nixon’s rage against the publication of the Pentagon Papers, our leaders are troubled not by the prospect of these revelations endangering troops but rather endangering their own political careers. It is our president who unnecessarily sacrifices the lives of our soldiers and not those in the press who let the public in on the folly of the mission itself.

What the documents exposed is the depth of chicanery that surrounds the Afghanistan occupation at every turn because we have stumbled into a regional quagmire of such dark and immense proportions that any attempt to connect this failed misadventure with a recognizable U.S. national security interest is doomed. What is revealed on page after page is that none of the local actors, be they labeled friend or foe, give a whit about our president’s agenda. They are focused on prizes, passions and causes that are obsessively homegrown.

Gaius Publius at AMERICAblog

Ellsberg: Obama ‘has indicted more people for leaks than all previous presidents together’

Daniel Ellsberg is asked to comment on a clip of press secretary Robert Gibbs complaining about the leaks:

   

KING: Daniel, do you understand why Mr. Gibbs, representing the president, is so upset?

   ELLSBERG: Well, he’s very upset in part because he’s working for a president who has indicted more people now for leaks than all previous presidents put together. And two of those people — Thomas Drake and Shamai Leibowitz — have been indicted for acts that were undertaken under Bush, which [the] George W. Bush administration chose not to indict.

   So this is an administration that’s more concerned about preventing transparency, I would say, than its predecessor which I’m very sorry to hear. As somebody who voted for Obama and expect to vote for him again, despite all this.

Yikes. That’s all – yikes. (Video of the Ellsberg intervew is available here.)

Has anyone wondered what happened to FISA reform that President Obama promised to do after he took office? Well if this is his idea of reform, he is no better than the gang that occupied the Executive for the last 8 years.

In today’s Washington Post, the White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity by adding four little words, “electronic communication transactional records“, the government will have access to the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. The government lawyers are claiming that it would not grant access to content. If you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you.

From emptywheel at FDL:

Make no mistake. This is one of the most important pieces of civil liberties news in a long time. The Obama Administration is asking Congress to sanction the collection of internet records without a warrant that has been going on-the kind of shit they used to do without a warrant, until people expressed their opposition.

But then Democrats took over and now they want legal sanction and now-Voila, a request that presumably provides cover.

As Glen Greenwald said, “One Point, contrary to blatant strawman incessantly raised by Obama loyalists that the criticisms are NOT grounded in the complaints that Obama has failed to act quickly enough to usher in progressive policies but instead are based on the horrendous policies which Obama himself has affirmatively and explicitly adopted as his own, many of which directly contradict what he vowed to do as President.”

Obama has gone further than Bush by ordering the assassination of an American citizen abroad without due process and now this. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones said it best last night

You know, if I’d wanted Dick Cheney as president I would have just voted for him.