Friday, May 16, 2008

I actually saw this yesterday when it aired on MSNBC. Say what you want about Chris Matthews (and I have), but his takedown of Los Angeles wingnut radio spewer Kevin James was a thing of beauty.

Friday, May 09, 2008

I guess it’s not too hard to check them when they’re resting on your chin…

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

All photos taken yesterday and pulled from The Charlotte Observer‘s slide show.

And in case you’ve been living in a cave ... Options dwindling for Clinton.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Michael Dyson and Marc Hill appeared on The O’Reilly Factor yesterday. Can we see more of them on my teevees, please?

Thursday, April 24, 2008

This article by Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, the best political writer working the circuit these days, hasn’t been getting a lot of attention, but it should:

One Sunday about three months ago — on the day before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in fact — I got out of bed very late and lazily switched on CNN. On the TV screen, Sen. Hillary Clinton was smiling broadly and wearing a black jacket over some strange Oriental get-up. She was standing next to influential black pastor Calvin Butts, in front of the latter’s famous Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Camera bulbs were flashing. An important announcement was about to be made.

Butts, it turns out, was endorsing Hillary over Barack Obama in the upcoming New York primary. I raised an eyebrow. It’s not that I expected Butts — perhaps the most prominent black minister in New York — to automatically endorse Obama simply because he is black. But I certainly didn’t expect to see Butts go on national television and make swipe after thinly veiled swipe at Obama, sounding like he was reading a script prepared for him by Hillary’s campaign team.

“This is no time for waiting or hoping for solutions,” quipped Butts, making an obvious reference to The Audacity of Hope author Obama and echoing the hope-ain’t-shit theme that had been pounded on the campaign trail by the Clinton camp over and over again.

The predominantly black crowd barely had time to scratch its collective head and ask what the hell was going on before the endorsement party abruptly ended, leaving the stunned audience to break out in scattered boos and dueling chants of “Harlem for Obama!” and “Hillary! Hillary!” The strange scene left some in the audience wondering what exactly they’d just seen. “What’s frustrating about ministers endorsing candidates,” an Obama supporter named Rafael Mason wondered to a reporter, “is it makes you question if their decision is representative of the church or if there’s a backroom discussion going on.”

Months later, while researching pork-barrel spending by the presidential candidates, I came across three federal budgetary awards requested by Hillary Clinton in this fiscal year:

• $446,500 Abyssinian Development Corporation, New York, to support and expand youth and young-adult after-school and summer programs (Discretionary Grants — Juvenile Justice Programs) COM 08 D Rangel Schumer Clinton
  
• $893,000 Abyssinian Development Corporation programs for at-risk youth, New York (Discretionary Grants — Juvenile Justice Programs) COM 08 D Rangel Clinton Schumer
  
• $146,000 Abyssinian Development Corporation, to support and expand youth- and family-displacement prevention programs (Social Services — Department of Health and Human Services) LABHHS 08 D Clinton Schumer
  

If you haven’t already guessed, Calvin Butts is the chairman of the Abyssinian Development Corporation. The above-mentioned $1.5 million in federal funds that Hillary requested on behalf of Butts’ organization had been approved by Congress a month before she received the minister’s timely endorsement. Maybe the minister was following his conscience in endorsing Hillary — but then, it never hurts to have a little financial incentive when it comes to difficult decisions like these, does it?

Read it all.

MORE: This reminded me of Tom Vilsack’s abysmal performance on Faux News’ Insanity and Coma last week:

From KCCI in Des Moines:

Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack gave Sen. Hillary Clinton his endorsement for her presidential campaign.

The Clinton campaign has promised Vilsack to help pay off a $400,000 campaign debt he built up during his run for the White House.

A representative for Clinton’s campaign said they are not sure how their campaign will do that. They concede that at some point, Clinton will have to contact her supporters.

The campaign said there is no connection between Vilsack’s endorsement and their commitment to help pay off his campaign debt.

Monday, April 21, 2008

From ABC News:

John McCain further displayed tough talk in an interview airing on “Good Morning America” Tuesday. ABC News’ Chris Cuomo asked McCain what he would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” McCain said. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Oops, nope, sorry, that wasn’t McCain.  That was Hillary Clinton.

MORE: Here’s the clip…

MORE: She went all Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper on Olbermann, too.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

I’m sending these next two numbers out to every fucking moron who thinks Obama can’t beat McCain in the general election. Wake up!

[second video via Balloon Juice]

RELATED: From TPM…

Today’s Gallup tracking poll gives Barack Obama an 11-point lead over Hillary Clinton, his widest margin ever in Gallup’s polling. [...] The poll was conducted entirely after the “small town” controversy first erupted, a further indication that the whole flap has yet to actually harm Obama’s poll numbers.

Someone put alegre on a suicide watch.

FLASHBACK: I thought I overplayed my hand a bit with this post from January, but who knows. If he takes Pennsylvania after this overblown “bitter” brouhaha, I think my boomerang candidate label might be perfectly valid.

Monday, April 14, 2008

McCain: “Show daddy you love him.”
Lieberdog: ”Arf. Arf.”
McCain: “Thatta boy.  Here’s a biscuit”

What an asshole.

Chris Matthews this weekend on The Chris Matthews Show (about 4:15 in):

Okay, let’s talk turkey here.  Everybody likes John McCain because he makes mistakes.  That’s why we like him. He says things like, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” like he’s the Beach Boys and then he says things like, well, what, recently, what, a hundred years of military presence and then spends weeks trying to explain what that means, how limited that statement was.

Chris loves McCain because he makes mistakes. Obama and Clinton, not so much.

Watching Matthews and Kelly O’Donnell openly admit that they’re fully aware of how many mistakes St. Maverick makes but that’s okay because he’s just a non-stop straight-talking machine is really one of the saddest and most pathetic things I’ve ever witnessed on one of these Sunday yap fests.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Troubling news from The New York Times:

Senator John McCain has long made his decades of experience in foreign policy and national security the centerpiece of his political identity, and suggests he would bring to the White House a fully formed view of the world.

But now one component of the fractious Republican Party foreign policy establishment — the so-called pragmatists, some of whom have come to view the Iraq war or its execution as a mistake — is expressing concern that Mr. McCain might be coming under increased influence from a competing camp, the neoconservatives, whose thinking dominated President Bush’s first term and played a pivotal role in building the case for war.

The concerns have emerged in the weeks since Mr. McCain became his party’s presumptive nominee and began more formally assembling a list of foreign policy advisers. Among those on the list are several prominent neoconservatives, including Robert Kagan, an author who helped write much of the foreign policy speech that Mr. McCain delivered in Los Angeles on March 26, in which he described himself as “a realistic idealist.” Others include the security analyst Max Boot and a former United Nations ambassador, John R. Bolton.

Prominent members of the pragmatist group, often called realists, say they are also wary of the McCain campaign’s chief foreign policy aide, Randy Scheunemann, who was a foreign policy adviser to former Senators Trent Lott and Bob Dole and who has longtime ties to neoconservatives. In 2002, Mr. Scheunemann was a founder of the hawkish Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraqi exile and Pentagon favorite, Ahmad Chalabi.

The next time you see or hear a Clinton or Obama supporter say they will vote for McCain if their candidate doesn’t get the nomination, please rub their out-of-joint noses in those four paragraphs.

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Funny: Memphis coach, fans call for new rule to apply retroactively
Funnier: Lindsay Graham Likes That McCain Calls Him “Little Jerk”
Funniest: Heh. Indeeb.

Friday, March 28, 2008

Matt Taibbi just keeps getting better and better:

The word “squeeb” is a crude mix of squid and dweeb, and by inventing it I mean no disrespect to the squid, which in most respects is an excellent and admirable animal. In the ocean there’s almost nothing you’d rather be than a squid, one of nature’s most perfect predators — fast, resilient, ruthless, more intelligent by leaps and bounds than your average fish, and able to squeeze into impossibly tiny cracks. In the ocean, there is no hiding from a squid, I tell you.

But on land, a squid is about as useless as it gets. It’s a spineless, squishy little hunk of seafood that wouldn’t stand a chance in a cage match with a baby squirrel. It has no heart, and its first instinct when trouble comes is to hide in a cloud of its own excretions. This is why a squiddy word like squeeb seems to me to be a good way to describe the American voter during a presidential election season.

That’s especially true now, during a “controversy” like this latest flap over Barack Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright. This Wright business is a perfect example of the American electorate at its squeeby worst — panicky, gutless, acting more on reflex than thought, incapable of retaining information for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s also a great example of how the presidential election process has become more about enforcing the attitudes of a cultural orthodoxy than a system for choosing leaders. Through scandal after idiotic scandal, the election process has become a painfully prolonged, deeply irritating exercise in policing conventional wisdom, through a variety of means keeping the public in a state of heightened, dumb animal panic, and ultimately turning the election itself into a Darwinian contest — survival of the Squeebiest.

Read on.

MORE: Both of his collections, Spanking the Donkey and Smells Like Dead Elephants, are excellent reads.  Highly recommended.

If you’re a female Democrat and you plan on voting for McCain if Obama is the nominee just to be spiteful, you are not a feminist, so please stop pretending to be one. It’s embarrassing.

In addition, your uterus has asked me to tell you it hates you.

This concludes today’s feminist fun fact.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Betty Cracker:

In his brave speech yesterday, Barack Obama gave us a preview of what it would be like to have a president who addresses US citizens as if we were adults capable of understanding complex issues and nuance. In stark contrast to what we’ve been exposed to for the interminable length of the Bush administration, not only was the speaker able to assemble multi-syllabic words into coherent sentences, paragraphs and themes, he did us the honor of assuming we were able to comprehend more than bumpersticker slogans and monochromatic portrayals of us vs. them, good vs. evil.

Obama staked his entire candidacy on our ability to get it. He must have known Fox News, the National Review and Rush Limbaugh would cherry-pick his speech to pair nuggets like “Jeremiah Wright is like family to me” with clips of Wright’s unhinged rants. Obama must have known Limbaugh’s sole take-away from the speech would be that Obama has become “the candidate of race.”

But to Limbaugh and his regrettably numerous ilk, Obama or any other black man was always the candidate of race. The speech had nothing to do with that. To the Limbaughs of the world, Donovan McNabb, Doug Williams or Vince Young will always be the black quarterback propped up by a fawning media. It doesn’t matter how many playoff games they win or how many white quarterbacks they outperform. A black quarterback could win the Super Bowl single-handedly, and Limbaugh would discern affirmative action in the referees’ calls. That’s just how Limbaugh rolls, and nothing will ever change it. Obama knows this.

Read it all. And if you’re a blogger and you haven’t added Betty to your blogroll yet, what in the hell are you waiting for?