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As the baby Jesus plans to bury most of the mid-Atlantic in another ice age (is it bad when the daily forecast icon is a laughing Satan wielding a dagger made of ice?), our elected betters have decided to make one last stab at health reform before our world is encased in another 20 feet of snow, permanently freezing our society for study by future alien archaeologists.
Is that plan actually passing a bill? No. God no. The plan is one more bullshit "bipartisanship" summit where the President hopes to take televised questions from the GOP and Democrats in order to negotiate a supposed way forward. .....Great. Can someone remind me again how that all worked out last time? Ah yes, numerous Republicans involved themselves in the process, slowed things down dramatically, got hundreds of amendments and concessions made, comprised half the group of six that essentially wrote the Senate bill, and then unanimously opposed it as they spent months completely lying about the content of the bill while spinning horror stories of death panels, socialism, government takeovers, and Bolshevik plots. I'm sure their plans and contributions will be equally constructive this time.
Eric Cantor’s office responds to Obama’s announcement of a bipartisan summit on health care with the most explicit and direct assertion I’ve seen yet that the only way Dems can win bipartisan cooperation is to fully embrace the GOP health care plan and nothing more:
After going it alone on health care reform for nearly a year, President Obama has decided he wants to bring Republicans into the conversation. Here’s the problem: unless the President and Speaker Pelosi are willing to scrap their government take over and hit the reset button, there’s not much to talk about.
Completely scrap health care and do what we want. Sounds great. Of course that's even if they bother to show up for all the "bipartisanship", as they're already complaining about being expected to negotiate in good faith.
I know Democrats think that if they just ask "pretty please" enough and reserve the right to add "sugar on top" at a later date that the GOP, contra to the last two decade's of worth of examples, will finally make an attempt to govern without naked political calculations in mind. Here's a helpful hint: Republicans don't want a health care reform bill, nothing you say will get them to contribute constructively as their goal is to completely kill what you are trying to do.
So, can you at least get that point through your thick Democrat skulls and just move forward, the House passing the Senate bill and then the Senate passing the conference committee changes through reconciliation, before we're all frozen to death? Not for the sake of this country. No, as I've said: most of us will be encased in ice by tomorrow. I'd just prefer it if the aliens that will be defrosting us in a thousand years won't be observing us at the pinnacle of our circle jerk government failing us yet again. It's probably probably too late to avoid that, but I'd like for us to try. Just so the aliens aren't totally embarrassed for us.
These Bastards is taking a Snow Day. Let me tell you that it is purely for completely adult reasons and not because some or all of us might be harboring skull crushing hangovers and deep regrets from Super Bowl Sunday. Congratulations to most of the Mid Atlantic, which still seems paralyzed by the snow, and to the city of New Orleans, whom we will be mocking in full tomorrow.
The Calculated Risk blog takes time out of their busy day to catalogue for us just how far up shit creek this economy is and to the extent with which our paddle has been rendered into unusable splinters that have floated out of reach from our desperately clawing hands as the boat we're in takes on shit and we slowly sink into the shit depths.
Yes, nicely reported. The story also reveals that Hitler extensively took anti-flatulence drugs. Let me say unequivocally: I am for this very kind of historically tendentious slander of dictators. I can't get enough of it.
So... anyone have any historical cross-dressing accounts of Joseph Stalin to regale us with?
Ladies and gentlemen, we sit on the precipice of a new world, a new future. The old way of doing things is dead and buried and we will now have to come to grips with The New Way and Our New Life. You can take your rocket boots and your HDTV's and your medical achievements and all your other shallow means of measuring societal advancement and I'll use mine: we're getting new ketchup packets!!!!!
That's right, no longer will we have to tear small corners off ketchup packets with our hands, or more likely our mouths, in order to gain the sweet tomatoey sustenance inside that we need to slather onto our fries of freedom, our burgers, and the collection of raccoon assholes, horse lips, and excess beaver tails that make up our hot dogs. You can dip or squeeze these new kind, people. DIP OR SQUEEZE!! This might even herald the end of the pump ketchup and paper cup station. Must I explain what this means to this country, nay the world, or are your minds already blown out the back of your asses?
Well then you better sit down Sally, because the world's bold leap into the 23rd century isn't done yet. Might you be interested in... unbreakable pint glasses?
No longer will a dropped beer necessarily going to result in the loss of the entire contents of the glass. No longer will you be forced to profusely apologize to the poor barmaid who has to clean up after your staggeringly intoxicated ass as you vainly try to apologize to her and lament the fact that if it weren't for this incident, you totally would have had a shot with her. On the negative side: pint glasses as weapons are out. But isn't this the more Utopian ideal of a less violent, or at least more creatively violent, society that we all aspire to? I think it is.
Take heed, dear readers: the future is here. You can dip french fries into your ketchup packets while dropping as many pints of beer as you like. I just hope you're ready for our new way of life.
It's not been a good month for NBC, what with the Conan/Leno fiasco, their terrible ratings, and all that money they're losing. So with a clear history of bad judgment on their side, I guess it's not all that surprising that they'd go and do something like this to celebrate black history month:
You may have heard about the proposed NBC Universal/Comcast merger that would make them one of the largest entertainment/content/cable/internet companies in the world and further shrink the number of people in this country who control what we watch and how we access information.
Amidst the House and Senate committees tasked with judging whether or not this merger is legal and should be allowed, there were many statements from our elected betters about how media monopolies are great and boy isn't in wonderful when competition is strangled and we have fewer and fewer sources with which to get an unbiased look at things. However there was one Senator who decided that maybe it isn't such a good idea to rubber stamp this merger and that maybe large media conglomerates are a bad idea. That man? Al Franken.
I know it's confusing to see, but that's an actual sitting US Senator standing up for what he believes is the common good, questioning the intelligence of media consolidation, and not trusting what he is told by the CEO's who are pushing for the merger. Baffling.
I am not an economist. I think that much has been made clear by my blinkered bafflement with even the most basic of numbers. It's even in my official title: Brutal Overlord of the Northern Hemisphere, Direct Conduit to God, Party Chip and Dip Specialist, and Chief Non-Economist of These Bastards. But even I had to notice something bizarre with the jobs numbers. More people lost their jobs... but the unemployment and underemployment numbers went down. Guh?
The United States economy shed 20,000 jobs in January, the government said Friday, deepening concern that relief from the deepest economic downturn in a generation would be slow to come. But even as the economy struggled to start creating jobs again, the unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent from 10 percent in December.
As the broader economy gains steam and crucial sectors like manufacturing spring back to life, analysts say the recovery appears to be intact. But the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate remains a persistent thorn in the side of optimists, and economists expect the situation to worsen before it gets better. ... Many more Americans, even those with jobs, are feeling the pinch. The underemployment rate, which counts people who have given up looking for work and those who are working part-time because of a lack of full-time positions, rose for much of last year. In January, it touched 16.5 percent, down from 17.3 percent in December.
It think I have it figured out: it has to do with alternate timelines, a seemingly evil timeless being made of smoke impersonating another man, a secret island existing outside of time and space, and wizards. Don't forget about the wizards.
Lesser wizard Paul Krugman explains that economics in general and the jobs numbers especially are all just a meaningless, confusing crapshoot and that nothing concrete can ever be drawn for the pointless void of numbers and math with which he has devoted his life to. OK, maybe he didn't say that, but he did say that these numbers were derived from multiple surveys and only rough indicators of economic strength. Yes yes, an endless nothing, existence is meaningless... we get it, Paul.
So what next? Will we shed more jobs while unemployment still falls? Will a discernible human ever get a new job in this country? Will these numbers spur or slow our elected betters in the Senate to actually start up on that jobs bill thing that they just had to kill health care reform in order to get to? Or are we all just going to continue to slog through a middling economy with 10% employment as nothing is done to improve the situation of actual Americans and we permanently teeter on the brink of total collapse? According to most economists, it's that last one. Oh well, good luck finding a job! It theoretically got easier, supposedly.
If you ever wanted a great example of the mind shattering stupidity and the open corruption within our political system, yesterday was a good day for you. Over the past few years financial giants and banks have been giving copious amounts of money to Democrats. Why? Because Democrats were in power and most of the places the financial sector of our country is headquartered in is represented by two Democratic Senators and a bunch of Democrat House members. But, sensing a change in their political fortunes, Republicans saw an opportunity to make their own case that they were the true party of the banks and financial services sector and that all that filthy lucre should be getting dumped into their coffers. And they decided that this case should be made publicly, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Last week, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio made a pitch to Democratic contributor James Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of J.P. Morgan, over drinks at a Capitol Hill restaurant, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Boehner told Mr. Dimon congressional Republicans had stood up to Mr. Obama's efforts to curb pay and impose new regulations. The Republican leader also said he was disappointed many on Wall Street continue to donate their money to Democrats, according to the people familiar with the matter. ... "I sense a lot of dissatisfaction and a lot of buyer's remorse on Wall Street," said Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.), the second-ranking House Republican and a top Wall Street fund-raiser for his party.
Great news for Democrats, right? I mean the top two ranking members of the House GOP openly begging bailed out companies for donations by pointing out how helpful their party had been to killing reforms... just before they were about to start another round of efforts to kill the big financial reform package that will come up? I mean how could an opposing party take that kind of obvious misstep and not have it cheaply exploited by flagging Democrats in order to whip up poulist rage, support for their reform package, and to remind people just what kind of government the GOP likes to run?
Waxman, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said he could think of two specific examples offhand of why Wall Street is better off with Democrats: the bailout and the stimulus. ... Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) also said that his party deserves the support of the industry based across the river from his home state. Wall Street, he said, shouldn't run from Democrats because of some heated rhetoric, but rather should look at the bigger picture.
Of course Democrats would rush out to say that Boehner is wrong, that Democrats are still the party of the massively unpopular group of companies that wrecked the economy. Well done. At least Barney Frank had the foresight to realize that Cantor and Boehner had made a mistake, but he seemed to be the only one, with most Democrats either rushing to defend their credentials as money whoring lickspittles for the industry or noting how they didn't want to make a political issue out of a massive political blunder.
So rest easy, our elected betters are out there engaged in a pitched and heated battle... to see who is a more worthy servant of the financial sector and deserving of their golden blessings. Isn't it a great country we have?
Cuomo also sued the bank’s former chief financial officer Joe Price and the bank itself for not disclosing about $16 billion in losses Merrill had incurred before it was bought by Bank of America in an effort to get the merger approved. Afterwards, Lewis demanded government bailout funds, Cuomo said.
“We believe the bank management understated the Merrill Lynch losses to shareholders, then they overstated their ability to terminate their agreement to secure $20 billion of TARP money, and that is just a fraud,” Cuomo said today at a press conference. “Bank of America and its officials defrauded the government and the taxpayers at a very difficult time.”
Hey, at least there's one guy out there who is willing to use his power and legal jurisdiction to fight for some accountability for the financial giants and banks that molested our economy. Good luck with that.
And he's a political legacy kid, imagine that. I think the odds are that one out of every twenty isn't some kind of simpering idiot. I think NY is finding that out with Harold Ford Jr.
What is this, you ask? It is a photo of the oldest known light and primordial helium gas in the universe. With this discovery six different teams of scientists were able to determine that the universe is is 13.75 billion years old, give or take .11 billion years. The old bitch looks good for her age, I wouldn't have pegged her for a day over 12 billion.
Although these measurements were taken with state of the art techniques that will have large applications in explaining galaxies and measuring space stuff (caution: technical term) this info does conflict with one other major scientific text. See if you add up all the ages in the Bible, you find out the universe is only around 6,000 years old, give or take 6 days plus another day of rest. So I'm not sure how these scientists are going to reconcile the differences.
In a Daily Show piece on the decision to roll back Don't Ask Don't Tell, John Oliver offers up his own suggestions for who should and should not be allowed to serve.
An elite US interrogation unit will conduct "scientific research" to find better ways of questioning top suspected terrorists, US intelligence director Dennis Blair said Wednesday.
"It is going to do scientific research on that long-neglected area," Blair told the House Intelligence Committee, without elaborating on the nature of the techniques being tested.
Why doesn't that "scientific research" part fill me with a lot of hope? Sure sure, they say that their charter requires them to abide by the US Army Field Manual, but... US interrogators haven't exactly inspired the most confidence in their.. let's say... humanitarian concerns with people we deem to be bad Muslims. Plus, I'm not sure I'd say that research into interrogation has been a "long-neglected area." I'm pretty sure we've just done almost a decade's worth of research into the field.
Still, I must applaud them. This is a much better policy than their previous "Did the Spanish Inquisition or Khmer Rouge do it? Yes? Good. But did they do it to elicit false confessions? Yes? Even better." line of interrogation based scientific research. Baby steps.
With the early week dedicated to budget talk (which I pointedly slept through to avoid) and the retarded (RAHM~!) budget freeze and today going to be largely taken up by the phony Republican budget that thinks it's a popular idea to gut and privatize Social Security, cut Medicare, while promising to end the deficit... in 50 years. So instead of jumping into that sad rabbit hole, I'll talk about the one budgetary thing I do like: increased science funding!
That's right, pending the interminable budgetary nonsense that Congress goes through, most of the governmental organizations that do sciencey type stuff will get more money. If you remember back to the Bush years, sciencey governmental organizations got money... but it was appropriated into programs that mandated they pray that God would solve the issues they were working on.
As I said this is all subject to the sausage making horrorshow that is the Congressional budget process, so things like Obama's idea to cut NASA's Constellation program might get scrapped and some science funding might get cut out in order to placate a bloc of Southern Senators who want abstinence education for cells that are considering mitosis and meiosis.
Still, everyone but the CDC gets more money. But that's a calculated decision. Given the current state of economic affairs, if a horrid Captain Trips super virus (like the one Sean has now) fans out into a global pandemic, do you really want to survive it? No. Hence the budget cut. So with this and the stimulus spending on science, it looks like it's a pretty good time to be figuring out stuff based on something other than an old book written by primitives. Unless the rapture comes. Then you're all heretics who caused God to pass His cruel judgment on us and I renounce your witchcraft.
There's got to be a sort of sad realization about your life when you realize that all you do is take large sums of corporate money to help politicians find the best poll-tested ways to lie about something hat could benefit Americans. But such is the life of Frank Luntz. First he partnered up with health giants and the GOP to take on health care, but with Democrats willingly giving up that fight the new battlefront is financial reform.
And because not enough House members and Senators are completely owned by the banking and finance lobby, he's devised a series of dishonest new talking points that will soon drive you crazy with the repetitive frequency with which you hear them and by the sheer, ball out dishonesty of them. Here are the words he advises be used by people seeking to kill any financial reform. Because doing things as they've been done for the past decade is the only way forward.
ACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY & OVERSIGHT, LOBBYIST LOOPHOLES, ENFORCEMENT OF CURRENT LAWS, BUREAUCRATS, WASTEFUL WASHINGTON SPENDING, NEVER AGAIN, GOVERNMENT FAILURES AND INCOMPETENCE, LET’S HELP SMALL BUSINESSES, BIG BANK BAILOUT BILL, BLOATED BUREACRACY, FINE PRINT, UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES, SPECIAL INTERESTS, HARD WORKING TAXPAYERS, ANOTHER WASHINGTON AGENCY, UNLIMITED REGUATORY POWERS, DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS, RED TAPE
Bold print for bold words. Some of them are also an alliterative delight. We'll ignore the spelling errors on 'bureaucracy' and 'regulatory', because who cares about spelling if you aren't going to care about basic truth? Yes, that's right, a bill which intends to put new restrictions of credit card companies, banks, financial institutions, mortgage companies, and all the other groups that shitted the world economy and provide new protections to consumers is going to be attacked as something that will “punish taxpayers" while rewarding “big banks and credit card companies.” Creating a strong Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which smart people like Elizabeth Warren feel is absolutely integral to getting real reform and real protection for citizens, is creating an “unaccountable czar.”
Just like health reform, where anything and everything that could conceivably be proposed was going to be knocked as a socialist government takeover/Bolshevik plot, anything that attempts to look at the last few years, the state of the economy, and effect it has had on the country and go "Hey, wait a minute, maybe we should do something" is going to get accused of bailing banks out and stealing taxpayer money to give to Goldman-Sachs. So a quick round of applause for men like Frank Luntz and the country we live in that enables their cheap bullshit. I know you probably didn't have high hopes for financial reform, I didn't either, but you really need to lower those hopes. A lot.
Here's the latest ad for Carly Fiorina's primary bid against Tom Campbell for the GOP nomination for the upcoming 2010 Senate race. In this little segment, which someone actually thought was a good idea, Fiorina attacks Campbell for not being sufficiently sheep-like in regards to tax pledges and GOP orthodoxy, knocks him for being an adult and trying to find solutions to California's massive budget problems, and then decides the ad should devolve into some Dadaist farming nightmare. Literally! I also think the sinister narrator guy lapses into a British accent at some point.
When Marine units approach Marja, the dangers rise. The insurgents run an active picket network, some of the workings of which were visible late last week on a Bravo Company security patrol that left Observation Post ManBearPig at Treekha Nawa.
That's just childish. Weren't there any Star Wars outpost names they could think of?
Gates Makes $10 Billion Vaccines Pledge Over the next decade the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will pour $10 billion dollars into the development, funding, and distribution of vaccines to the world's poorest countries. Why? Because apparently they base their scientific based philanthropic ideas on so-called science and not on the hankerings and notions of former Playboy models slash MTV dating game-show co-hosts. That's a mistake. I think all of Africa is going to have autism soon and I don't think Bono can write a song good enough to fix that problem. You've doomed the continent with your science and philanthropy, Bill and Melinda.
3 G.I.s Killed in Pakistan. Now Can We Start Treating This Like a Real War? Hey, did you know we're essentially waging a secret ground war in Pakistan with special forces troops and air-strikes and all that good stuff? Well, 3 soldiers got killed in a battle inside the Pakistan border, that not only was in Pakistan and a Taliban stronghold (shocking), but had been declared to be free of militants/insurgents by the Pakistani military, so now you definitely know. Whoops! Much discussion ensues about when we can start admitting that this is an important front, probably the most important front, in the war on terror? Well, considering that we can't admit we're even there in a support capacity, I'm guessing those odds aren't good.
Iran Sends Mouse, Turtles Into Space Here we are, cutting NASA's Constellation moon program and Iran is launching a mouse, two turtles, and a worm into space for what experts deemed "no scientific purpose." I think we know what the purpose is. With us seemingly abandoning our aim to return to the moon and Mars, Bitches! seemingly in flux, it seems that in the future America will rest it's head under a moon that is half Red Chinese and half Islamofacist. A Christmas themed satellite of terror and communism. This is our future, people: the moon has been ceded to our enemies. We beat everyone to the moon by 50 years and then spend the rest of that time ceding back that superiority in sad gasps.
Iraq war was illegal, Dutch panel rules I know, what a surprise, but the Dutch have conducted their own inquiry into their own support of the war and have found the war not only to be inconsistent with Dutch government policies but with "no basis in international law". This to go with the ongoing UK Iraq Inquiry, which is finding generally the same thing, but just spent considerable time grilling former PM Tony Blair over his own conduct and complicity with Bush Administration lies. What are we doing? The sound you hear is crickets chirping because to take a look at the massive fuckup that was (and still is) the Iraq war, that would mean we were "looking backwards" and not "looking forwards". So we just have every other country on earth act like adults, review their and our conduct, and declare the whole thing a fraudulent sham that didn't improve anything, while we sit around and pretend everything is fine and don't even make our leaders answer basic questions about what happened. America, fuck yeah! We're adults.
Darfur Genocide Charge Being Reconsidered Against Sudan President Omar al-Bashir Bad news for all you Omar al-Bashir fans out there. It seems that they might just add "killing a fuckload of people" and "concentration camp type stuff" back on to his arrest warrant. The only thing stopping them? No one could really seem to muster up the energy to care or even do something when the genocide was ongoing (and is still ongoing), so they're having the same kind of trouble mustering up the same kind of gumption it takes to add "and also for being a rotten, genocidal, murdering shit" onto the end of a warrant. Fair is fair. At least they're consistent. Here's hoping they can find the time to bother charging him with this and then trying him for it. I'm not really hoping for much though.
Via the Bad Astronomy blog and the Hubble space peeper comes this look at the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy, apparently named in reference to the fact that the galaxy resembles a rather famous jacuzzi and indoor swimming pool salesman named Frank Emfiftyone. I don't see the resemblance.
It's one of the closest galaxies to ours (23 million light years away) and you could conceivably visit it, provided to lived hundreds of years in the future when society invariably finally gets around to having some decent goddamn spaceships.
Paul Krugman during a This Week round-table, telling FOX News head Roger Ailes just what he thinks of his network. I think he's gunning for this year's Nobel Prize in Gettin' Up in Yo Face, Bitch!
If there is one thing we know about the war on terror and terrorists in general, it's that the only way to get useful information is though not only violating the Constitutional rights of Americans and through the brutal interrogation methods that are totally not torture. If you want intel you use waterboards, stress positions, hot and cold rooms, sonic and mental warfare, sensory deprivation, beatings, barking dogs, rendition to countries that aren't so nice, and the removal of all ethical, moral, and legal protections. As we've learned from some of our manliest and patriotic elected leaders and political pundits: it's the only way.
The family of the failed Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab, played a pivotal role in getting their son to start cooperating with federal authorities in sharing information about Al Qaeda, a senior administration official said Tuesday evening. ... “One of the principal reasons why his family [helped] is because they had complete trust in the US system of justice and believed that Umar Farouq would be treated fairly and appropriately," the senior official said. "And that they would be as well.”
The FBI and Abdulmuttalab's family approached the subject and “gained his cooperation. He has been cooperating for days," the official said.
Talking? Getting the family involved? Engaging in a "'thorough and comprehensive' background investigation"? Trying to gain an "understanding of the subject”? Miranda rights? Trials in US courts? No torture? I mean, no enhanced interrogation? This doesn't give me a war on terror boner, no, this doesn't give me a boner at all.
How this country supposed to feel like a man if it doesn't know that terrorists aren't being brutalized in order to extract intelligence? How is this country supposed to feel about freedom if at the very least thousands of volts haven't been applied to the testicles of a suspected terrorist in an Estonian gulag? How does this make us feel a sense of revenge for that thing with the buildings that happened a while back? God damn these seemingly more effective methods and Abdulmuttalab's co-operation!
We need to decide, as a country, what's more important: feeling good about ourselves my beating up terrorists and suspected terrorists while attempting to cover up and legitimize Bush era abuses or do we want and effective defense of this country and sensible terrorism policies. I think we know the answer to that question. Someone go get 183 buckets of water and a barking dog.
As we look at the shattered remnants of our political discourse, two things about our elected betters are clear: that Democrats are money hungry, timid, spineless, fuckups and the GOP is comprised of money hungry, deranged, conspiracy theorists. Now there is no great constituency holding marches on Washington encouraging the Democrats to so completely bungle their current majority, but there are large swaths of Americans who descend upon Washington to argue that Republicans need to get crazier and espouse more and more incoherent conspiracy theories about government and the President.
The only question is how much do these fringe teabag enthusiasts represent the mainstream of Republican voter thought. Thanks to Daily Kos and Research 2000, we know that answer: they represent and disturbingly large margin.
•"Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?" Yes 63%, No 21%, Not Sure 16%. • "Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?" Yes 39%, No 32%, Not Sure 29%. • "Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?" Yes 42%, No 36%, Not Sure 22%. • "Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?" Yes 24%, No 43%, Not Sure 33%. • "Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?" Yes 21%, No 24%, Not Sure 55%. • "Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates White people?" Yes 31%, No 36%, Not Sure 33%. • "Do you believe your state should secede from the United States?" The answer here is Yes 23%, No 58%, Not Sure 19%. Among Republicans in the South, secessionism is stronger at Yes 33%, No 52% Not Sure 15%.
I don't know what's more disturbing, that the Yes and No answers are so close together or the fact that the Not Sure numbers are so high on whether Barack Hussein Obama is Kenyan born socialist Muslim racist who wants America to lose, was installed into power by ACORN, and should be impeached. They can see the pro and con arguments for believing such a thing, but just need to do a little bit more research before coming down one way or the other.
That's in addition to the other finding in the poll which show, by large margins, that GOP voters don't want people in trade unions and don't wants gays to be allowed to do anything. Also: over a third believe that contraception should be outlawed and that birth control equals abortion.
So in case you had any illusions of the GOP and Democrats holding hands and working together, stow them away in the same place you put those dreams for world peace. Not only are the elected ones some of the worst conspiracy mongers out there, there exists a baseline of at least a quarter to a third of Republican voters that believes said craziness and a "not sure" base that could push support of that conspiracy up into fifty percent or two-thirds range.
So no, a battle of ideas won't be coming to our national political discourse anytime soon. Unless you think that "Run away and don't do anything" vs. "Impeach the Muslim socialist appeaser" is what a battle of ideas is. If it is, then you'll certainly be thrilled by the next few years of governance.
With Valentine's day fast approaching and the fact that These Bastards is the #6 site on the web for dating, marriage, and general romance advice (as voted in a 1996 poll by the citizens of Bolivia), it's time that we handed out some tips to prospective brides out there.
We know the lure to wed a state politician is high, what with the intoxicating thrill of state governance and the lure that someday you could be married to a state comptroller. But sometimes those starry dreams of state level political fame are tarnished by bizarre episodes involving Argentina and the Appalachian Trail, so it's best you might want to heed TB Romance Tip For Lovers #2 (#1: be wary of a man with a trunk full of Quicklime and shovels). Be aware of small signs on your wedding day that might presage future problems.
South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford recalls how she made the "leap of faith" to marry husband Gov. Mark Sanford even though the groom refused to promise to be faithful, insisting that the clause be removed from their wedding vows.
"It bothered me to some extent, but ... we were very young, we were in love," she said in an exclusive interview with Barbara Walters to air on "20/20" Friday. "I questioned it, but I got past it ... along with other doubts that I had."
Well, at least he was being honest and didn't want to violate any oaths he took. You can say many things about the man, but you can't say he didn't have foresight and a vision for the future.
Another tip for all you lovers out there: be wary of someone who seems to be trying to set a sort of cheapness world record. Not only isn't it a Guinness recognized world record, any organization that recognizes that achievement is going to be too cheap to spring for a plaque memorializing it.
"He drew me a picture of a half a bike, and then for the next birthday or Christmas I got the picture of the other half a bike, and then he delivered the $25 used bike," she recalled.
For another birthday, Mark Sanford gave her a diamond necklace, which she adored, but then he took it back.
A long term planner, doesn't make vows he doesn't plan to honor, handy with a visual aide, fiscally responsible, hiking enthusiast, and travels abroad; it's easy to see why the voters of South Carolina responded to Mark Sanford so well.
S0 ladies, if you follow our three tips (especially the one about avoiding being murdered with a shovel and buried in the woods), you'll be well on your way to finding that perfect man.
And we're back, after a little extended hiatus. What happened? The story of the day became about the federal budget and I went into complete catatonic shock due to boredom. Also, I may have had spotty/nonexistent internet coverage over the past few days and Sean may or may not be dead of some new, ultra-virulent super plague. But good news: people stopped pretending to care about the budget, the internets are working, and, after a tasteful funeral, a search to find a new Sean (to also be named Sean, so I don't have to change the site any) will be held.
Here, watch this video about terrorist Alaskan polar bears, I think it explains pretty much everything.
