THESE BASTARDS

Monday, December 7, 2009

For your edification

IF we are about one thing here at These Bastards, it is education. We're also about laughing at the misery of others, lamenting the state of affairs, wishing ill to our social/financial/elected betters, and dick jokes, but we're mostly about education.

Take the tea party movement. For months we've been laboring under the assumption that they were a fringe offshoot of right wingers, as well as being too crazy for words. We were wrong. Rasmussen polling told us so.

Running under the Tea Party brand may be better in congressional races than being a Republican.

In a three-way Generic Ballot test, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Democrats attracting 36% of the vote. The Tea Party candidate picks up 23%, and Republicans finish third at 18%. Another 22% are undecided.

That's right, the people in the “Project 912 Glenn Beck Tea Party” video below, which includes immortal discussion on “infiltration by the Communist Party” in government and the rallying cry “Burn the books!...The ones in college, those, those brainwashing books.... Like, the evolution crap”, are more popular than the Republican Party.

So we're sorry teabaggers and teapartiers, you aren't a fringe offshoot of the GOP, the GOP is a fringe offshoot of you.

It' a shame though, Sean and I are going to go broke helping support you and groups like you. Ah well, that's the price of purposes of unending amusement & disdainful blog fodder

Broken In Brief: Woods claims infidelity proof he's greatest of all time

JUPITER ISLAND—Amid mounting reports of mistresses and illicit affairs surrounding pro-golfer Tiger Woods, sports commentators and media analysts have been quick to note how these events have degraded Woods’ legacy as one of the greatest athletes of all time. But in a surprising move today, Mr. Woods combated that notion, claiming that these transgression have proven that he is, without doubt, the best golfer in modern history.

“Are you kidding me?” and incredulous Woods said during his opening remarks to the press assembled in front of his residence. “14 majors and 71 PGA victories, all the while juggling dozens of random bar whores, wannabe actresses, and porn stars? Beat that!”

He continued, marking his statements with his trademarked fist pump, “Phil Mickelson only won three majors and he just fucks his own wife. I’m nailing bridesmaids like Sonny in The Godfather and I still have time to win the Masters four times. Doesn’t this prove I have the greatest concentration and skill set in the history of the game? I’d like to see Phil win just one major with that much side action.”

After producing a pit chart and several diagrams, Woods pressed his case that, while Jack Nicklaus currently holds four more major championships, the man lovingly known as the Golden Bear had done it over a longer period of time and had done it without “nearly as sordid a collection of scattered ass as I have,” surmising that Nicklaus had “4-5 mistresses tops.”

“And that’s over his whole career,” Woods added. “Those mistress numbers your’re hearing about in the press is just what I’ve done this year. And I’ve been injured! You should see me when I’m healthy.”

Tiger vowed to soon be back out on the course, cruising for trim, winning majors, avoiding his humiliated wife and her flaw-riddled 9-iron swing in his ongoing effort to usurp Wilt Chamberlain and sement his legacy as the greatest of all time.

Video of the day

H2oil animated sequences from Dale Hayward on Vimeo.

What with our eminent Copenhagen related disappointment on the horizon, today we bring you an environment themed animated sequence about America's biggest oil supplier: Alberta, Canada. And you thought it was the Muslims! Edmonton's hockey team isn't called the Oilers for kicks.

More specifically this video is about the Athabasca oil sands and all the glorious side effects of oil that you tend to forget about when you're just thinking about oil and the burning of it. The video is from the documentary H2Oil, which is about oil, water usage, NAFTA, politics, trade, and human costs surrounding what is going to be one of the biggest industrial projects...ever. And you probably never heard of it.

Today in weird GOP racism

First there's the case of the gift that keeps on giving: Sarah Palin and her new book. Seems that she had a rather interesting reason for transferring out of the University of Hawaii, aside from the fact that lurking nearby was the sham birth certificated menace that would one day control the media conspiracy against her. See, Asians make her feel funny.

But Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to Conroy and Walshe. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.”

This is why Sean and I are donating to the Palin 2012 campaign. This woman can not be allowed to go away for any reason. As a side note, Minority Type Thing just happens to be my favorite Stone Temple Pilots song.

But there's basic racism and there's our new favorite brand of racism: Obama inspired crazed rant racism. We knew that electing a black man was just going to screw with your fringe constituents and southern lawmakers pretty good. Hell, we didn't even like Barry, we were just in it for the imagined racial comedy. That's why were so glad that men like Arlington, Tennessee Mayor Russell Wiseman exist. Otherwise we wouldn't have gotten this beautiful Facebook rant on Obama's decision to talk on the TV about the Afghan troop escalation.

The second term mayor wrote, "Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it....w...hen the answer should simply be 'yes'...."
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"...you obama people need to move to a muslim country...oh wait, that's America...pitiful...you know, our forefathers had it written in the original Constitution that ONLY property owners could vote, if that has stayed in there, things would be different..."

See what happens when someone fucks with a man's Charlie Brown? You get bizarre, misspelled rants against Muslims and the basic concept of Democracy. I'm just glad Obama didn't preempt Rudolph, otherwise we might have had a full blown race war on our hands.

You know even though he is kind of fucking up health care (or at least aiding and abetting its fuckup in the Senate) and his record on war on terror related measures has been less than inspiring, this Obama Presidency is working out better than expected just for shit like this. It's a shame he didn't pick a Latin guy as his VP.

Fake ID! Kenyan! Moselm!

We all know that the President is a foreign sleeper agent who, after his birth in Kenya, was smuggled into this country, given falsified documents forging his US citizenship, indoctrinated in the ways of communism, socialism, Islam, and radical black nationalism, set with the fairly easy task of becoming a viable Presidential candidate, and then going and getting elected...with help from George Soros and ACORN. I know it, you know it, Orly Taitz knows it, and Sarah Palin knows it.

But as we try to unravel this nefarious global conspiracy (the body count of those who have tried to expose this truth has to be somewhere in the tens of thousands), we never thought that little Barry Soetoro himself would provide us with a gun so smoking, that the truth can barely be seen. From his Kennedy Centers speech to Mossad agent Mel Brooks.

Unfortunately, many of the punch lines that have defined Mel Brooks' success cannot be repeated here. I was telling him that I went to see Blazing Saddles -- -- when I was 10. And he pointed out that I think, according to the ratings, I should not have been allowed in the theater. That's true. I think I had a fake ID. But the statute of limitations has passed.

Where did you get this fake ID? Was it from the same fake ID that was used to gain you US citizenship... BECAUSE YOU WERE BORN IN MOMBASA!?!? Fake birth certificates, fake ID's, and Mel Brooks vehicles starring Gene Wilder and Slim Pickens? My God, it all makes so much sense now. This is going in the file. This will be part of the new batch of lawsuits. You got too cocky, Mr. Soetoro, now we have enough to take you down.

What else didn't he mention?

Over the weekend the President made yet another trip up to the Senate to meet with the Democratic caucus, remind them yet again of the importance of health care reform, and to remind them yet again of the hellfire and wrath that will be visited upon them by the voters if they show themselves to be completely incompetent instead on only mostly incompetent. Is the 17th time the charm? Well, when the meeting was over, the Senators emerged, their faces filled with smiles, and recommitted themselves....to petty political gamesmanship based on and around what the President did and didn't say.

As President Obama finished his speech to the Democratic caucus in the Capitol's Mansfield Room on Sunday afternoon, Joe Lieberman made his way over to Harry Reid.

The independent who still caucuses with Democrats wanted to point something out to the Majority Leader: Obama didn't mention the public option.

Lieberman was beaming as he left the room and happy to re-point it out when HuffPost asked him what Obama had said about the public health insurance option, perhaps the most contentious issue still facing Democrats as they negotiate their way toward a final health care reform bill.

Ahh Barry, you can't even throw a pretend bone of support in a private meeting to an idea you championed during the campaign. But I'm sure when the public option is stripped out and replaced with some bad compromise (newest plan: make the public option private run), you'll talk about how you wished it could have been in, but it just slipped your mind to ever fight for it once over a nearly one year period. Also not mentioned: abortion. So I'm sure that bodes well for Ben Nelson's "Silly women, don't you know that old men from Nebraska have more sense about your lady bits than you do?" bill. On the bright side, Joe Lieberman was thrilled by everything that went on in the meeting. So, I'm sure the American people at large are going to be fucked hard, because I can't recall him ever being ecstatic about anything that made my life better.

So now everyone gets to be paranoid and angry over what is and isn't mentioned in 'rally' speeches to cretins. But soon these important battles over omissions and inclusions will be over, and in the next few months and over the next seven times the President heads up to Capitol to rally everyone, the Senate can start arguing on more important things: like his syllable emphasis and voice inflection. Maybe after that, there will be an actual debate on the actual worthiness of some of the proposals being considered.

Chart of the day

What is this? Well, it's something you have to expand to an absurd degree to even comprehend. Frankly, you need an epic powerpoint presentation to have it make sense to you. It's our escalation counter insurgency strategy and it has more arrows in it than Custer's chest. Yes, it's an exact diagram of why our new strategy in Afghanistan, unlike all the others that came before it, is going to succeed.

On one hand, I'm at least glad it's complicated and filled with phrases like "Influence neutral-minded individuals to adopt a supportive disposition". It certainly best the Bush era power point display of "Put troops in ---> win". On the other hand, if this is the complex web of plans we have to successfully negotiate just to have a shot at success....then wouldn't all those billions be better spent just instead building some colossal monument to futility? Ah well, just take solace in the fact that someone in our government put together this complex orgy of arcane sentences and meandering arrows, then sat back and said to himself "You genius, this makes perfect sense."

Friday, December 4, 2009

Broken In Brief: State Department pretty sure it heard laughter when it told Russia about Afghanistan escalation

FOGGY BOTTOM—In the days since President Obama announced his plan to add an additional 30,000 troops to the war effort in Afghanistan, those within the diplomatic community aren’t certain, but are pretty sure that Russian ambassadors, ministers, and military establishment were giggling to themselves.

“You know, I’m not certain, but I swore I heard the Foreign Affairs Minister snort and then muffle the phone as he chortled to himself. I hadn’t even finished saying the world ‘escalation’,” explained Philip Gordon, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.

“But then when I confronted him about it, he assured me that it wasn’t the case, that what we were doing was a totally smart idea, and that he wished us well in our ‘brilliant and never before conceived-of endeavor.’ But during that last part his voice went all high pitched and his speech was halting, so I think he might have been trying not to laugh again. Must be some Russian joke.”

Indeed, reports are preliminary but it seems that most of the Russian establishment found the escalation of war in Afghanistan, a country with which they also had a previous conflict, to be of the utmost comedy.

Several ministers were reportedly treated in local hospitals from desk banging-related hand injuries. There are also rumors that one General had to be administered oxygen, and an expense report from the Foreign Affairs office cites a reimbursement request from a staffer for 14 pairs of slacks that had to be purchased due to “extensive soiling of several analysts’ original pants.”

In an effort to quell any diplomatic tensions, Prime Minister Putin was supposed to give an extensive speech praising America’s judgment, but stopped only a few sentences in before doubling over the lectern as tears streamed down his face. The Prime Minister did, however, manage to squeak out a terse “well done” before flashing a thumbs up and stumbling into the back room with both hands clasped over his mouth.

As of press time, the State Department, Defense Department, and White House were unable to see just what was so funny.

Arlen Specter's raging hard-on for socialism

The health care debate has brought us many grimly hilarious revelations about the specific way with which our legislative branch has caught fire and is burning to the ground, taking all of us down with it. But there is one man out there valiantly fighting for all that is just and right: committed socialist and leftist agitator Arlen Specter, who went after Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins over the public option.

The trio spoke at an event in support of a cost containment amendment to the health care bill that they hope to introduce shortly. About 15 minutes in, though, Specter, who's tacked significantly to the left since he switched into the Democratic party, put his colleagues on the spot about their public option opposition.

"I continue to support a robust public option," Specter said. "There are differences on that, and my two colleagues have expressed their own reservations."
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Specter went on: "And when Senator Lieberman talks about single payer, I think he's putting his finger on the pulse of it. That's what people have concluded [but] the public option isn't single payer, and it is not going to add to the deficit, it's going to be a level playing field. So I would like everyone to read the fine print and [for my colleagues] to re-read the fine print."

Oooh, collegial Senate burn! "Re-read the fine print" is the Senatorial equivalent of "Get fucked and die, you hatchet faced cretins."

But it's nice to see Senator Specter so committed to the left fringes that he'll publicly call out the actual dishonesty in both Collins and Lieberman's arguments. Funny though, if his re-nomination for the GOP ticket hadn't been such a longshot and he didn't have to switch parties, he'd probably would have taken to the Senate floor to rail about how Obamacare would have ensured his death at the hands of cancer. Odd what the threat of having to get a real job and a Democratic primary challenge does for one's ideological commitments. God bless the integrity and decency of the world's greatest deliberative body. Thanks for being afraid enough to cheaply pander to us, Arlen. We appreciate it.

Headline of the day

Tupac song selected for Vatican playlist

The song in question was the Bruce Hornsby-sampling Changes, released posthumously. I personally would have gone with California Love but Pope Benedict likes what Pope Benedict likes.

You can check out the Vatican's playlist on MySpace.

Picture of the day

From Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves comes this look at the license plate of Morgan Stanley Vice-Chairman Rob Kindler. It's nice these guys have a sense of humour about bankrupting the world and the government using trillions to bail out their unending stupidity. Shame he couldn't afford something better than a Porsche, I'd really like to see that plate on a Maybach. Maybe next time Kindler invents something that destroys all the world's money, he can work out a more lucrative bonus package.

Thanks for all the help, Ben

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is up for confirmation again as our nation's chief money overlord and coin czar. So, in the face of high unemployment, a Fed that is viewed as completely uncaring as to the suffering of actual people/subservient to Wall Street/an unthinking cash spigot to the financial sectors that shitted our economy/completely abdicated it's oversight capabilities, and the fact that Jim DeMint, Jim Bunning, and Bernie Sanders have all placed holds on his confirmation, Benny is probably going to try real hard to show that he cares and fight for his job, right? Not exactly.

In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee today, where he's seeking re-appointment as the Fed's chairman, Bernanke called for cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security even as unemployment rises and the middle class is endangered.

And there was this, on efforts to create a stimulus that targeted jobs and employment.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Thursday threw cold water on efforts to push a major new fiscal stimulus package.

Well, it's not like it's in the Fed's mission statement to "promote effectively the goals of maximum employment" or anything.

So let's see, in his bid to get reconfirmed he not only advocated for cutting Social Security and Medicare, but decried a second stimulus to address the whole employment problem our jobless recovery is having, all while the Fed isn't really living up to it's mandate to deal with unemployment, is freaking out over a non-existent inflation threat, is a non-existent regulatory authority, and is a money funnel to our financial betters. Is there anything else he's like to do? Perhaps sodomize all of our mothers while pouring sugar in our gas tanks? Maybe I'm naive, I just thought he'd maybe try to do something other than yell "Fuck you peasant, don't look me in the eye" before advocating the Fed's "go pound sand" posture towards America's jobless masses.

Thanks for all the help, Ben. I'd be nice if we had a Fed Chairman that had a better plan for unemployment than "do nothing", but I guess I was just hoping against hope. Luckily, this will probably cost him a less than unanimous confirmation. He'll probably only get 90 votes now.

For Jesus

Because He's the reason for the Season, Jesus is getting a lot of press recently. He's also getting his name dropped a lot by our elected betters in order to justify whatever it is they want at the moment. Like Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) who has read the bible at least twice and knows for certain that Jesus would be opposed to the permanent extension of the estate tax the House just passed.

Now, after someone dies and someone comes in and steals from them, we consider that in most society reprehensible. … But when the government comes in, because we have the power to pass laws and legalize theft that otherwise would be considered reprehensible, it’s okay. But it is not okay. … Jesus never advocated the government go steal. He said ‘you do it. Do it with your own money, don’t steal it from somebody else.’ And that is why this should not pass.

I believe it was in the Gospel of Paul where Jesus said "And lo my Father was set to let me inherit the earth. But I said to Him 'Father, this is a valuable thing and thus Rome will tax it at a rate of 45%, crippling my small carpentry business. Let the meek inherit it, for they are stupid and will not understand the immense personal freedoms of theirs that are being crushed.'"

Then I believe he said to Luke "Listen man, why does the fuckin' government gotta be so hostile to small business? No, shut up Saul, this isn't about me bitching 'cause I'm not gonna inherit as much as I thought I was. Fuck off with that 'It doesn't affect 99.8% of estates' shit, you fucking bookworm. I'm talking about freedom man. Fuck it's hot out, this climate change shit is also a scam."

So now you know: Jesus was opposed to the estate tax. He probably hated the fuck out of capital gains taxes as well, but I haven't been able to find the passages.

11k

Good news everyone, the job losses last month were so low that they were able to print all their names in the paper. So we would like to offer our condolences to Freddie Wallace of Dubuke, Harriet Sanderson of Portland, and Dick Jauron of Buffalo.

Just kidding, 11,000 people lost their jobs, which puts us into another one of those 'bad news is good news' type situations where a decrease in losses is a positive. But it is nice to see our economy move from shedding jobs at a "10 NFL stadiums full of people" clip to a "1 minor league hockey arena" area. Also, in a development that shows me how I don't understand how the unemployment numbers work, that 11k job loss actually resulted in the unemployment rate dropping to 10%. We're inching towards the employment levels of a 1st world country again!

In the strongest jobs report since the recession began, the government reported Friday that the nation’s employers had all but stopped shedding jobs in November, taking some of the pressure off of President Obama to come up with a jobs creation program.
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The government also significantly revised September and October numbers. September was adjusted to show a loss of 139,000 jobs instead of 219,000, and October 111,000 instead of 190,000.
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“We’re moving toward stability in the labor market and the end of the tremendous firing that has plagued America,” said Allen L. Sinai, the founder of Decision Economics, a research firm. “But it’s going to be bleak for years. While it is going to be better than what we’ve seen, it’s still going to be terrible.”

Allan Sinai everyone! That was an exquisite hope crushing. Still, I'm going to have to disagree with the article's observation that merely moving our employment numbers to "civil war torn eastern European/former Soviet satellite" levels probably isn't going to cause Barry to wipe the sweat off his brow and start plowing through that book off crossword puzzles he's been putting off. But, the news is slightly improving, with even the "I got my hours cut/I'm too discouraged to even look for work" epic misery numbers dropping from 17.5% to 17.2%.

So the possibility lies that in the next few months this economy might actually produce a job. It'll probably be a job as a human shield for Goldman-Sachs executives as they try to get to their luxury sedan without being hit by garbage or as a member of the Gruesome Suicide Clean-up Squad in one of our many economically depressed Midwestern cities, but it'll still be a job. So stay positive, in a month or so you could be that guy who takes a cabbage to the sternum to protect a well heeled Goldman executive from the indignity of contact with peasants and their peasant food. You'll be able to take that cabbage home to eat and you'll probably get to meet Matt Taibbi. Things are looking up for you.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Pictures of the day

From a new book from National Geographic entitled "National Geographic: The Image Collection", which takes 450 photos, many never before released, and puts them together for your enlightenment. Among the many great things about the book are the the early century looks at some of the exotic locales of the world, as shown below. You can take a gander at the website they've put together here.

Antarctica 1922. The ship Terra Nova framed by an ice grotto by Herbert Ponting

Peru 1913. Macchu Picchu by Hiram Bingham

France 1890's. Early mountaineering in the Alps

Afghanistan 1931...or is it 2009? You can't tell the difference. by Maynard Owen Williams

Fake quote of the day

One of the runners up from Slate's write like Sarah Palin contest, which was looking for the best combination of Palin's "pastoral lyricism" and "unlikely metaphors". I guess they'll have to have another contest for quotes that sum up the childish blame shirking and petty grudge holding.

"The snow machine pummeled through the white-dusted plain like a jubilant beaver; snow spewing out from both sides, building its dam of snow like a beaver builds one of wood as Todd rode gallantly upon it."

My God, it's a plausible outtake. Slate has 12 examples, including the phrase "harvest our meat-bearing animals" that I now want to work into every conversation. Read them, laugh, and then imagine 400+ pages of shit like that, then weep, then laugh, then weep again while laughing.

Broken News: Responding to Health Care Reform, Senator Coburn Threatens Further Disaster, Mythical Creatures

WASHINGTON--Emboldened by the media attention surrounding his assertion that senior citizens "are going to die soon" if health care reform passes, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has elected to press the issue even further.

At a hastily-convened press conference earlier today, Senator Coburn announced several other nightmare scenarios that would inevitably occur if various legislative changes on the Democratic Party's wish list came to pass.

"My fellow Americans, I come before you today to warn of grave dangers facing our nation," Said Coburn. "I refer not to the threat of terrorism or the crippled economy, though those are surely legitimate concerns. No, I am here to cast light on unforeseen perils that, should the Democrats accomplish anything at all, will surely bring doom to our great land. Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to talk to you about dragons."

Coburn maintains that, apart from mowing down senior citizens by the dozen, health care reform would unleash, "a winged, fire-breathing medieval menace whose wrath would reduce the world as we know it to a smoldering pile of ruins inhabited only by a mutated race of subterranean cannibals."

When informed that this threatening vision was merely a hybrid of the plots from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and the 2002 box office disappointment, Reign of Fire, Coburn coldly stated, "the facts are the facts" before moving on.

"What do you think will happen if the liberals in Congress institute an automatic weapons ban? Or perhaps repeal portions of the PATRIOT Act?" Continued the junior senator from Oklahoma. "I'll tell you what. Not only will the Yankees take the next seven World Series titles, but a great fire serpent will rise from the ocean and the citizens of this great republic will immediately begin bleeding simultaneously from both the eyes and anus."

Coburn then went on to claim a federal recognition of same-sex marriage would result in roving bands of impeccably dressed, well-groomed dog rapists ravaging the countryside. He then stated that unencumbered stem cell research would bring about the, "death of all kittens and bunnies, everywhere, possibly as a result of wyverns" before asserting that ratification of the Kyoto Protocol would ensure that none of the Black Eyed Peas will be forced to return to their spawning grounds in the Eighth Circle of Hell.

While some alarmist reactionaries and several health reform groups were quick to decry what they saw as Coburn's, "reactionary, fearmongering nonsense", several scholars and historians were more reserved.

Noting the 1906 San Francisco earthquake caused by angry mole people furious over lax Chinese immigration policies, increased minotaur attacks after the passage of Medicare, and the previous dragon assault that occurred when Woodrow Wilson proposed joining the League of Nations, experts were quick to urge caution on passage of many of these new laws.

"Look, we all remember when a gryphon gored President McKinley on the steps of the Capitol for his wavering support for the Philippine-American War. I don't think we want to go through that kind of thing again," observed Dr. Franck Haber, Professor of Mythological Horrors and Political Science at Columbia University.

"If Senator Coburn is intimating that the mystical protections erected during the Ford Administration to prevent us from facing the wrath of vengeful mythical beings enraged over liberal policies have weakened or, I shudder to think, been completely removed, then we can't risk moving forward with any of these so-called reforms without suffering horrifying terrors from dragons, evil spirits, Brobdingnagian giants, frost monsters, cyclopes, and other monsterous enemies of socialism. I think we should trust the Senator on this one. After all, he is a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Mythological and Legendary Creatures."

Calmly noting that he alone could not protect them from dragons, Coburn urged that those who did not wish to live a dystopian nightmare of underground flesh reaving and sky attacks from monstrous fire lizards should do whatever they feel is necessary to prevent the passage of health reform.

"We're on the precipice of catastrophe here, citizens," Coburn gravely intoned. "If you wish to be fire roasted as a giant iguana with wings eats you alive, be my guest. But don't say I didn't warn you. This is the only future that an America with 'health care reform' can look forward to."

'Tis the season

With Christmas only a few short weeks away, Santa Claus has a few messages for you. First, as always, is to be good to each other. Secondly, 9/11 was an inside job!

St. Nick is a truther.

No foreigners

The Sarah Palin "I wroted a word book" tour goes ever on. This time stopping at America's own monument to consumer culture: the Mall of America. If you'd like to see Sarah in person and maybe even report on it, they just have one request: no foreigners.

But the mall also was banning foreign reporters, permtting "only English speaking press." That's not a common requirement.

Mall officials, calling the proposed guidelines a mistake, apologized to Palin today for "an internal miscommunication" that was "inadvertently distributed."
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"That should never have been in any kind of press release," said Tina Andreadis, a publicist for HarperCollins, publisher of Palin's hot-selling memoir. "That's not the message the governor wants to send out.''

Actually, judging from her various speeches on immigration and foreign policy, "no foreigners" is exactly the message she wants to get out. But the apology for accidentally exposing her expressed wishes was nice.

It's just a shame that they're banning the only people that could possibly appreciate the Palin signing and come away mentally unscathed: those who experience it through a nearly intractable language barrier, secure in the knowledge that she can't do anything to ruin the country they're actually from.

Brilliant ideas

Over the last few weeks, as the escalation in Afghanistan become a unavoidable reality, some of our elected betters, David Obey being one of them, decided to challenge the conventional wisdom that war is free by arguing that we should actually submit our happytime bombing adventures to the same budgetary principles we make everything else fit into. Even though Obey's "war tax" proposal, which only actually covered spending for 6% of the war, was laughed out of the room by the "serious people" who know that military spending doesn't count as spending, it has given others ideas on war spending. People like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told his colleagues during a closed-door GOP lunch Tuesday that the best way to fund the war would be to use unspent stimulus funds, according to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the third-ranking Republican.
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"We know the stimulus failed. It was sold to the Congress and to the American people with the suggestion that it would hold unemployment below 8 percent. We know unemployment is over 10 percent," said McConnell. "If we're looking for a way to fund several years of the war I would suggest unexpended stimulus funds would be a good place to start."

Brilliant. I mean even though there's a litany of information showing things like, I don't know, how the stimulus actually averted a much larger crisis and how there's still a lot of good it can do, seeing as only a quarter of it has been spent, we need to stop undertaking measures to fix the economy and job markets and plow all of our remaining money into a largely pointless, unwinnable war.

Thanks Mitch, with Susan Collins actually contributing substantively to health care earlier, I had filled my head with childish notions of rational behavior in the Senate and GOP caucus. Thank you for reminding me that the vast majority of your party is a childish group of pro-war halfwits who want to pull the economy down on top of themselves because they see political benefit in doing so. Short circuiting the economy to pay for more war.....priceless Mitch, just priceless.

What the hell is happening?

I don't want to alarm you, but the natural order of things has been uprooted. In a realization that people like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman are rotten fuckers who should be left on a hill to be tormented by vultures, Harry Reid has been negotiating with the last two moderately sane Republicans, the ones from Maine, in order to get them on board for health care. I know you just grimaced right now, thinking about what further concessions will be made. But that's where it gets weird. Not only is Susan Collins offering up proposed changes to the bill in order to get her support, most of the changes....make the bill better. You're fucking with the natural order of things, Collins!

Collins met Monday with White House health reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle and Health and Human Services health reform director Jeanne Lambrew. The senator said she put several amendment requests on the table: raising the penalty on hospitals with high rates of hospital-acquired infections, changing the small business tax credit to prevent it from discouraging hiring and increasing wages and boosting the affordability of insurance.

My God, all of these things are largely good ideas on the merits that would expand the reach of reform. Does she not understand how "getting support" works? It's by making the bill worse. Hello? Plus, both Collins and Snowe are quite the pro-choice advocates and Ben Nelson's recent pledge to out-Stupak the House bill might further bring them aboard in a bid to, you know, protect things they actually believe in.

My world is spinning and I feel dizzy. I have to go sit down. It's just....using swing vote power to improve health care access for Americans and protect women's rights? In the Senate? I think the sun is going to explode any second now.

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