Monday, May 12, 2008

Bill O’Reilly completely loses his shit on the set of Inside Edition. This is classic stuff and sure to go viral. Lots of cussing, so careful at work.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

This is one of the best things I’ve seen on The Colbert Report. Stephen interviews astronaut Garrett Reisman live from the International Space Station.

Friday, May 09, 2008

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

I think it’s fairly logical to deduce from this morning’s appearance by John Edwards on Morning Joe that he voted for Obama and will eventually endorse him:

Another interesting quote from Edwards after they played him audio of Hillary’s “white Americans” comment:

I think it’s fine for Hillary to keep making the case for her. I think when that shifts to her contention about everything that’s supposed to be wrong with him--and I don’t agree with some of what she just said, by the way--but I think that then we’re doing damage instead of trying to be helpful.

But maybe the best part was when a visibly irked fill-in co-host Tiki Barber cut to the chase....

Race is going to play a part in this. I think what you were saying Mika, but you kind of walked around it, which I’ll say directly. Do you think that Hillary Clinton believes Barack Obama cannot win the presidency because he’s black?

I don’t know if this is a campaign-ender for Hillary, but it’s starting to look awfully Macaca-like when folks like Barber begin asking questions like that.

SOMEWHAT RELATED FROM RASMUSSEN:

Rasmussen Reports will soon end our daily tracking of the Democratic race and focus exclusively on the general election competition between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. Barring something totally unforeseen, that is the choice American voters will have before them in November. While we have not firmly decided upon a final day for tracking the Democratic race, it is coming soon.

Ouch. [via a commenter at Balloon Juice]

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

I’ll roll most of this transcript below the fold since it’s fairly long, but a big bravo to CNN’s John Roberts for not letting Clinton senior adviser Ann Lewis get away with dodging a logical question about Hillary’s gas tax holiday pander:

JOHN ROBERTS: Well, what about that Anne Lewis, Barack Obama is charging that this is a political gimmick? Where is this the legislation for this gas tax holiday that Senator Clinton has promised. It’s only three weeks now to Memorial Day.

ANN LEWIS, SR. ADVISER, CLINTON CAMPAIGN: Well, I would agree that it’s an example of leadership. Hillary Clinton says let’s take on the oil companies. You impose a windfall profits tax. You use that money to pay to make the difference so that you can suspend the federal gas tax and you make sure with the Federal Trade Commission that those profits are passed on to the consumers.

I’m sure we all need a quick palette cleanser after that last post.  Here’s Jimmy Kimmel’s “Unnecessary Censorship” from last week, featuring a foul-mouthed Elmo:

(Hat tip to my lovely wife Chris)

Monday, May 05, 2008

It’s been disheartening to watch some fellow Dem bloggers shamelessly turn into Anti-Obama Rottweilers this primary season, but it’s downright depressing to see one of my favorite polisnarkers mutate into fucking Tonya Reiman:

If I were an Obama supporter, I’d spend less time making jokey parallels about yesterday’s Kentucky Derby and more time trying to defend/explain away the startling, unflattering contrast between Hillary and Obama on the Sunday morning talkshows: She, so commanding and “up” on ABC’s This Week; he, so slumped forward, beleagured-looking, and low-energy on NBC’s Meet the Press. Because he sure isn’t carrying himself with the aura of a winner.

Posted by: James Wolcott | May 04, 2008 at 11:55 AM

I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

Friday, May 02, 2008

A new one from the people who brought you “Baracky: The Movie”…

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

One thing that may shock a few people who have only started visiting Rumproast in the last few months is that one of the most heavily-trafficked posts I’ve written was one supporting Hillary Clinton against what I saw as unfair attacks by Chris Matthews.  I thought the media and Matthews in particular were willfully trying to dictate the outcome of the primaries and I found the piling on unseemly after Clinton suffered just one, albeit shocking, primary loss (Iowa). You couldn’t find one cable news channel that wasn’t declaring that Hillary was toast pre-New Hampshire and trying to yank the will of the people away from the electorate.

We’re now seeing the media pull the same stunt with Obama and their incessant and self-serving obsession with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Once again, they’re manufacturing a controversy and flicking the auto-repeat switch to keep it wedged into as many news cycles as possible.  That beady-eyed butthead Joe Scarborough can’t got three seconds without barking out Wright’s name like a Tourette’s tic and, unfortunately, a majority of MSNBC’s hosts and anchors who follow him are nearly as bad. Many pro-Hillary bloggers have become even worse, cheering about how Wright is “the gift that keeps on giving” and plopping YouTube embed code for anti-Wright videos into every other of their posts.  There used to be a time when liberal blogs defended Democrats against repugnant and relentless intellectually dishonest media attacks, now it seems to be all the rage to not only endorse those attacks but to outdo them. The political blogosphere has become, in many ways, no better than mainstream media, if not worse.

So I’m giving a tip of the hat to pro-Hillary blogger Riverdaughter from The Confluence, who I’ve taken issue with before, for trying to inject a little sanity into the debate.  While she writes a few things in her “Whoa! The wheels are coming off Obama’s campaign” post and her follow-up comments I disagree with, overall she makes some very thoughtful and intelligent points regarding Wright and the media’s manipulation of what she refers to as a “manufactured scandal” that several pro-Hillary bloggers and supporters should take to heart. And if you’re an Obama supporter it may do you well to read her post and her comments and realize that there may be enough wood to build a bridge across the Great Divide regardless of how this fucking mess turns out.

Jean Weiss: “You’d better be president.  You’ve gotta be president.”

From CNN:

It’s official: Barack Obama has offered the vice presidency to an 82-year-old woman.

At a town hall meeting in Wilmington, North Carolina, Monday supporter Jean Weiss stood up to ask a question and began by telling the Illinois senator that he’s “captured her heart” with his foreign policy stands.

“When you said ‘yes I will sit down with all my enemies, we’re gonna sit around the table, we’re gonna work this thing out,’” Weiss said, “sir, that was not naiveté—that was wisdom.”

She then moved on to a question about water supply. “Before I answer the question,” Obama said, “I just want to know–will you be my running mate?”

The crowd erupted in applause, and Weiss ran up to the stage and gave him a hug.

“That’s my running mate there,” Obama said as she trotted back to her seat, her arms in the air. “She is 82 years old. She’s got some fire!”

Weiss wasn’t done, though, until she offered some advice on how to handle his rival Hillary Clinton.

“Don’t hit on Hillary,” she said. “Bring us all back. Let her do that stuff. Leave her alone, you don’t need to do that. You are higher than that. Bring us up higher than that.”

MORE from The News & Observer:

Eighty-two-year-old Jean Weiss sees in Sen. Barack Obama the wisdom and courage of her late husband, a German-born American hero who flew 50 missions in World War II and later became a peace activist.

Her husband, E. Karl Weiss, died in 1992 of cancer of the esophagus, just four years into the New York couple’s retirement to Wilmington.

And so Weiss knew Obama was her candidate when he said at a debate many months ago that should he become president, he would sit down with America’s enemies and try to work it out.

Weiss told Obama as much Monday in an exchange that brought down the house at UNC-Wilmington.

What brought her there, though, was a long life that gave her three children and a caring husband, who was a grounds and building superintendent at a parochial school in New York.

“He was a peacemaker,” she said. “I loved him.”

Now Weiss lives on a tiny pension and Social Security, but having once lived in Africa with her husband as a missionary, she realizes her wealth.

She attends a conservative evangelical church, where good people support the war and President Bush, she said, but when she heard Obama was coming to Wilmington, Weiss had to see him.

[...]

“I would have loved to have my husband here with me today,” Weiss said. “He would’ve said, ‘Go up there and talk.’”

I love this woman! Pass this story and video around. This needs to go viral.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Here’s some more John C. Reilly as Dr. Steve Brule for you. This one had me laughing so hard I nearly threw my back out again.

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?

Today I woke up to Joe Scarborough, Andrea Mitchell, Willie Geist and Mike Barnicle, four of the whitest people you’ll ever encounter sharing a split-screen, blabbing on and on about Rev. Jeremiah Wright and how hard it is for American Caucasians to shoulder the burden of his very existence.

Insecure white people suck.  If you need me I’m going to be out in my garden enjoying a beautiful Brooklyn day.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Remember that loathesome appearance by McAwful on Faux News that I spotlighted yesterday? Well, they’ve turned it into a promotion:

That about says it all, doesn’t it? (video via Talking Points Misogynist)

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.