Headline of the Day

Obama jokes he should make Clinton ‘Secretary of Explaining Stuff’

Ohhhhhh yeah...

You tell 'em, Rasta mon!

Raw Story

Snoop on Obama’s reelection: ‘He cleaned half [Bush's] sh*t up in four years’

“They need to give Obama four more years, man,” he told reporters. He proceeded to get more specific about why he supports reelecting the President:

I mean, Bush fucked up for eight years, so you gotta at least give [Obama] eight years. He cleaned half the shit up in four years, realistically. It ain’t like y’all gave him a clean house. Y’all gave him a house where the TV didn’t work, the toilet was stuffed up — everything was wrong with the house. Then he went and knocked down the most hated, most wanted, the one who had our terror alert on Orange or Red, whatever color it was on. He went and found him, the one that Bush couldn’t seem to find, that seemed to fly away the day of 9/11. Remember all that? He went and found him and knocked him down, so don’t forget about that. Now everybody is peaceful and able to move and have a good time — it’s because he made that happen.

I have always thought it was unrealistic to expect Bush's mess to get cleaned up in one term, much less clean up politics, but then I've been watching.

If you stop to think about it, Bush's mess won't be cleaned up 'til the last Iraq war casualty dies in about a hundred years.

Poll: Race Close Among Voters with No Television

Via The New Yorker.

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—A new poll released today shows the Presidential race extremely tight among voters who had no access to a working television for the past two weeks.

On the campaign trail, Republican nominee Mitt Romney seemed buoyed by the news, urging his audience not to watch television, read newspapers, or log on to the Internet between now and Election Day.

Mr. Romney attempted to rebut Vice-President Joe Biden’s biggest applause line from last night by telling supporters, “On Day One of my Presidency I will kill General Motors and bring Osama bin Laden back to life.”

As for President Obama’s biggest applause line, “I am the President of the United States,” Fox News said they were fact-checking it.

With the fall campaign officially begun, both Obama and Romney must now spend hundreds of hours and millions of dollars to become President of Ohio.

Only sixty days remain until the election, or in Paul Ryan’s words, “Forty days.”

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Wrecking Ball - Emmylou Harris & Daniel Lanois cover Neil Young at the Greenbelt Harvest Festival in Dundas, Ontario, Canada September 1, 2012.

Thanks to iused2BAfireman.

Light Blogging Today

In a thankfully rare alignment of the planets in the Honey-Do and Stack-'em-up-and-do-'em-later universes, four-plus projects have come to a head on the same day and I gotta deal with 'em. This will free me up to continue with other projects. You'll enjoy retirement too! :-)

In the meantime, go read The Rude One on Obama's speech:

This shit is hard, our President told us, harder than he ever imagined. He more or less dismissed the entire Republican platform as unworthy of discussion by adults in a nation with genuine problems, and that it is instead the wish list of deranged plutocratic children. Indeed, what he was trying to convince us with all of his talk of the "choice" was that it was not between him and Romney. It was between him and apathy because, and every so-called pundit everywhere knows this, if the energy of the electorate is within spitting distance of 2008, Romney is finished. Romney wins only through apathy and outright voter suppression. [...]

Later.

Rush Limbaugh is losing his mind

Actually, he lost it a long time ago, but the Kool-Aid, or maybe the tertiary syphilis, has rotted his brain to where it shows pretty plainly now. Kos, with deranged-fatass-gasbagcam video.

It is really hard to tell smug, winning, not-losing-his-mind Rush Limbaugh from Rush Limbaugh who sees a trainwreck coming and is desperate to do something, anything about it. But, judging by Limbaugh yesterday, he knows his team is losing and it's putting him over the edge.
...

The, ahem, highlights: The decision was made yesterday or the day before to move the speech indoors because the knew they wouldn't be able to fill, get this, "Black Panther Stadium." (Carolina Panthers fans are going to be thrilled with that one.) Also, Clint Eastwood's RNC "empty chair" routine totally shows how America is laughing at Barack Obama.

Oh, totally! Heh. "Black Panther Stadium" is actually a little funny.

Republicans are losing and Limbaugh knows it. He's only going to be getting worse, more racist, and more desperate over the next two months.

It would give me the greatest pleasure to see that asshole melt down on air.

Let's have a perp walk!

Maddowblog, links at site.

Last week, a federal judge ordered Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) to leave the state's early-voting window open for all of the state's eligible voters, overturning a Republican law approved last year. Husted's next step should have been, obviously, establishing expanded hours for early voting and setting a statewide schedule.

But Husted had other ideas. On Tuesday, the Republican official, who helps oversee Ohio's elections process, said he intended to ignore the court ruling until after an appeal.

I'm not an attorney, but it's my understanding that federal courts get a little peeved when someone tries to ignore their decisions.
...

Unfortunately for the Ohio Secretary of State, however, judges don't much care about defendants' expectations. Economus issued a ruling and he wants Husted to follow it. Decisions from federal courts are not suggestions and they're not optional.

I hope that voter-suppressin' Repug sonofabitch thinks he's more important than a federal judge and fails to appear. Around here, FTA gets you a back seat ride in bracelets. Heh.

Clinton Speech Was 'Moment That Probably Reelected Obama'

Repug operative Alex Castellanos finally gets one right. Via HuffPo:

Note to Alex: Show a little pride in your heritage. Start pronouncing your name CasteYAnos like a real Latino. Quit saying CasteLAnos like a wannabe gabacho.

DNC Day 2: Bill Clinton in Full Bloom

The Rude Pundit on The Big Dog's speech:

In substance (and, holy shit, that was a substantive speech - Clinton said more about specific policies than the entire Republican convention), what the former President committed last night was an act of vengeance against the vast right wing conspiracy that sought to destroy him and continues to try to destroy Obama. The theme of the speech was "I'm sick of this shit. Aren't you?" In simple, direct, compelling language, Clinton gutted not just the Republicans' arguments against Obama, but he dug in deeper and stabbed them in the soul. Too hyperbolic? Here's Clinton: "Well, since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our private economy has produced 66 million private- sector jobs. So what's the job score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42!" (And, by the way, those numbers are correct.) That one line undermines decades of GOP talking points.

Like the Repugs give a shit. They will lie to your face even as you call them liars.

[...] And then he got thousands of people to boo Mitch McConnell on national television. That's guns a-blazin', motherfuckers.

I have nothing to add to that. Heh. Go read the rest.

Update:

More from Rude-o's post:

(A quick note to the right: If you dismiss Clinton's speech by saying that he got a blow job in the Oval Office, then you deserve Mitt Romney as your president.)

Good fucking grief.

Associated Press ‘Fact Checks’ Clinton’s Speech By Bringing Up Monica Lewinsky

Now That's the America We Know

El Rude-o weighs in on DNC Day 1 and FLOTUS' speech.

The RNC's narrative was based on a fantasy, that the country is made up of entrepreneurs and entrepreneur-wannabes, a bunch of gun-toting freedom loving men whose wives proudly give birth to whatever children are ejaculated into their wild, untamed vaginas, a white rural fantasia where all anyone needs is to be left alone in order to fulfill one's destiny, the chimera of rugged individualism never so seemingly at odds with the true day-to-day lives of Americans.

The truth is something so very different and so very messy compared with the neat, white fictions the RNC laid out. The truth is that most people don't want to start businesses. They want jobs or better lives and if they get it through the government, then at least it's a fuckin' paycheck. The truth is that most people won't ever need a gun, even if they pretend they do. The truth is that this is a messy country, and stories move forward, into a hard-fought and unsure future, even if the GOP is stuck in a flashback to a nation that not only never existed, but could only exist in the most extreme dictatorial state. The RNC portrayed the citizens of the country as being in a locked battle with an evil government, as if the Obama administration was the Assad regime in Syria and they were just meagerly armed rebels, the better to appeal to the knuckle-dragging Tea Party, who were barely mentioned but whose neanderthal gruntings echoed constantly in the speeches. The Democrats, last night, at least, called "Bullshit" on their war.
...

Michelle Obama brought the soul. Tonight, Bill Clinton will bring the funk (and, frankly, you can bet that Mitt Romney is shitting himself over what Clinton is gonna say, no matter what the GOP says).

Note: "It's okay," the Rude Pundit told himself this morning. "It's okay to every now and again put aside the cynicism and the rancor and the doubts and just enjoy a good patriotic boner."

Purple is a mix of red, white, and blue, isn't it? Heh.

Camp Superfund

I was stationed at Camp Lejeune in 1965 and '66, during the affected time frame of the contaminated water supply. I have not been affected by it physically - yet - probably because I lived in a barracks that used a different water supply than the on-base dependent housing where most of the problem was. Also, in those days I drank more beer than water.

The Corps covered this up for years and it only came out a very few years ago. I've been involved since then and have participated in the "Historical Water Study" as it's called. The cover-up was reprehensible, and also disappointing in that the Corps threw "Semper Fidelis" out the window to try and avoid the problem of taking care of the Marines and their families that they should have known was going to happen someday, which is now. Learning to handle disappointment is one of the great lessons learned in the Corps, which disappoints Marines every day though seldom at this level.

I was lucky. This gentleman was not:

Lejeune Water Victim Speaks Out

Spina bifida. Asperger's syndrome. Tourette's. Bipolar disorder. Organic brain dysfunction. These are just a few of the diseases William McMurray Jr. suffers from, ailments he says his doctors couldn't explain for the first 20 years of his life -- until they learned of water contamination aboard Camp Lejeune.

His is but one story in what many call the greatest case of contamination in U.S. history. A million Marines, sailors and their families drank, bathed, brushed their teeth, cooked, swam and washed their cars, clothes, dishes and pets in bad water at Lejeune for decades.
...

The horrors of the contamination weren't understood immediately. One base housing resident reported the unexplainable death of his dog. Another said goldfish always ended up floating at the top of the aquarium. More than 1,000 babies were stillborn or died in infancy aboard the base from 1947 to 1987, according to an exhaustive survey of death certificates filed at the Onslow County Register of Deeds.

The Department of the Navy recommended 50 years ago the regulation of many of the worst chemicals that found their way into Lejeune's water supply, according to 1963's Manual of Naval Preventive Medicine, which was just recently made public.

But throughout the 1960s and 70s, military and civilian employees poured oil into storm drains, improperly disposed of car batteries and tossed out used tires and countless other items around the base, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which recorded an incident involving the burial of dog carcasses used in radiological testing.
...

[...] When the contamination made headlines, the base's commanding general assured his Marines and their families that their water was safe when chemical levels were among the highest ever seen in a public water system, according to a series of investigative reports published by newspapers in Florida, which is home to more than 12,000 veterans affected by water contamination -- the most of any state except North Carolina.

Go read how they tried to blame the whole deal on an off-base dry cleaner at the same time they had fuel storage tanks losing 1500 gallons per month into the soil. Fuel aside, it was a perfect storm of chemical contamination.

Civilians may have trouble believing that the military would shaft its members and their families like this. Veterans will not.

‘Of Course It’s Getting Better’

Think Progress

The Romney campaign this week is reprising former President Reagan’s “are you better off?” question, in an attempt to paint President Obama as a failure when it comes to the economy. [...]
...

“Saying that things are better off is an insult,” added Romney campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom. But if it’s an insult to say that the economy is better off, then Mitt Romney has been slinging some insults of his own, considering how he answered a question from conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham back in January:

INGRAHAM: You’ve also noted that there are signs of improvement on the horizon in the economy. How do you answer the president’s argument that the economy is getting better in a general election campaign if you yourself are saying it’s getting better?

ROMNEY: Well, of course it’s getting better. The economy always gets better after a recession, there is always a recovery. […]

INGRAHAM: Isn’t it a hard argument to make if you’re saying, like, OK, he inherited this recession, he took a bunch of steps to try to turn the economy around, and now, we’re seeing more jobs, but vote against him anyway? Isn’t that a hard argument to make? Is that a stark enough contrast?

ROMNEY: Have you got a better one, Laura? It just happens to be the truth.

In the infrequent and probably inadvertent instance, Willard has the odd ability to shoot himself in the foot by telling the truth. Heh.

Be well, burn on

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford sharing his vacation photos.

Burning Man 2012 in photos, in captions, in deep and dusty moans

Six days, three mediocre cameras, an excitable but random eye, multiple delicious inebraints and a truly glorious burn. I hope these photos give you a slight hint of a taste of a glimpse. Be sure to check out the captions (in light gray text – sorry, it’s a glitch) just beneath the row of photos, too. -mm

Enjoy.

The Battle Of Chavez Ravine

I'm kind of in an L.A. frame of mind today. I was only about 14 years old when this happened. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. I lived less than 5 miles from Chavez Ravine for all my 35 years in L.A.. I've never been to Dodger Stadium and never will.

Thanks to amarus12.

The Stealth Convention

Some snippets from Will Durst on the Repug convention:

And now a few words about the Republican National Convention. AKA: Women with Big Hair and the Men in White Shoes Who Love Them. And white certainly was the operable word in Tampa. Mashed potatoes on paper plates with a side of leeks white.

Word. Absolute absence-of-any-color-whatsoever white. Whiter than "Stepin Fetchit done seen a ghost" white.

The only speaker to mention Mitt’s name out loud on purpose was Ann Romney in a gracious and endearing turn. Facing the tall task of climbing the plateau of humanizing her spousal cyborg, this mother of five boys constructed an entire flight of stairs by herself. But with a husband stiffer than Rick Santorum on a gay pride parade float, it was the basement stairwell of what needs to be skyscraper scaffolding. Baby steps.

Paul Ryan growled the requisite Veep Nominee pit- bull snarl. Then gave 40 minutes worth of credence to the Romney pollster who proclaimed earlier in the week “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” The Janesville Congressman trotted out more bad lies than Employees Day at St. Andrews. The Old Course.
...

Normally these gatherings are to spontaneity what Richard Simmons is to mule skinning. Lots of shiny smooth seamless spandex. A 3 day holiday in a hall full of Ken dolls. But in a dubious celebrity stretch, some soon- to- be ex- staffer woke Clint Eastwood from a nap to upstage the nominee’s acceptance speech by losing an argument with an empty chair.

More.

Romney Tells 530 Lies in 30 Weeks

Thanks to the Brain's far-flung network of operatives, in the person of Bustednuckles, we get this from Crooks and Liars.

Steve Benen has truly done yeoman's work this campaign season in documenting the astonishing onslaught of Romney's lies, and Fred Clark helpfully compiled them.

Click those links. Read the lists. List after list of lie after lie. Hundreds of them — 533, to be exact, although Benen does not make any claim to providing a comprehensive chronicle.

...
While the sheer number of Romney's lies are indeed unprecedented for a presidential campaign, his fact-free campaigning is simply the logical continuation of a trend that started in the George W. Bush administration, when Republicans literally walled themselves from reality.
...

So this has been going on for a while. Right-wingers just don't have to confront facts they don't like any longer. They no longer have to watch to Edward R. Murrow dress down Joe McCarthy for his un-American demagoguery. They don't have to listen Walter Cronkite telling them the Vietnam War is lost. Those days are over -- they can simply switch the channel.

Now, they are tightly cocooned in the cozy world of FOX News, right-wing radio, conservative newspapers and wingnut blogs where high taxes and burdensome regulations are crushing the American dream, inflation is running rampant, businesses are suffering, global warming is a joke, homosexuality is a choice, illegal immigration is at all-time high, our scary Muslim enemies are on the march -- and if only Republicans could take power over the entire federal government again, those problems would all magically disappear.

Because of this highly-profitable right-wing media infrastructure so willing to deceive its consumers, and because conservative dogma has replaced fact-based analysis on the right, Republican candidates don't have an incentive to tell the truth. Quite the opposite.

It's going to get worse before it gets better.

I don't care how bad it gets any more, just so long as there aren't enough throwback morons to elect Willard the Vulture and Lyin' Ryan. If there are, we're done.

Next Right Wing Media Lie

Of course by the time I post this it will be the last Repug lie. They come like title of a movie - "Fast And Furious". Following up on Friday's post.

Eastwood Was a Sabotage Agent for the Obama Campaign

Given that the Republican presidential campaign this year has exponentially increased the use of lies – although that would appear a difficult threshold to cross after the Bush 2000 and 2004 campaigns – it may not be long before the right wing media echo chamber starts accusing Clint Eastwood of being an Obama campaign mole.
...

So, one figures it won't be long – given Eastwood's socially progressive and fiscally right wing politics – before FOX and Limbaugh start sending out the meme that Eastwood was an Obama campaign mole.

There is, in fact, little the Obama campaign could have done to tarnish Romney's acceptance speech evening, but Eastwood – in his own flip seedy stunt -- did it for them.

Of course, Eastwood's appearance was the brainchild of the Romney campaign – and allegedly Romney himself.

But that may not keep the right wing media echo chamber – which glows bright on the embers of lies – from claiming that Eastwood was a sabotage agent for the Obama campaign.

Tweet:

Obama to Eastwood: Fine job! The check's in the mail!

I mighta made part of that up. :-)

Rosie Ruiz Republicans

Paul Krugman

Remember Rosie Ruiz? In 1980 she was the first woman to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon — except it turned out that she hadn’t actually run most of the race, that she sneaked onto the course around a mile from the end. Ever since, she has symbolized a particular kind of fraud, in which people claim credit for achieving things they have not, in fact, achieved.

And these days Paul Ryan is the Rosie Ruiz of American politics.
...

It started when Hugh Hewitt, a right-wing talk-radio host, interviewed Mr. Ryan. In that interview, the vice-presidential candidate boasted about his fitness, declaring that he had once run a marathon in less than three hours.

This claim piqued the interest of Runner’s World magazine, which noted that marathon times are recorded — and that it was unable to find any evidence of Mr. Ryan’s accomplishment. It eventually transpired that Mr. Ryan had indeed once run a marathon, but that his time was actually more than four hours.

In a statement issued by a spokesman, Mr. Ryan tried to laugh the whole thing off as a simple error. But serious runners find that implausible: the difference between sub-three and over-four is the difference between extraordinary and perfectly ordinary, and it’s not something a runner could get wrong, unless he’s a fabulist who imagines his own reality. And does suggesting that Mr. Ryan is delusional rather than dishonest actually make the situation any better?

Which brings us back to the real issues of this presidential campaign.
...

So what is this election about? To be sure, it’s about different visions of society — about Medicare versus Vouchercare, about preserving the safety net versus destroying it. But it’s also a test of how far politicians can bend the truth. This is surely the first time one of our major parties has run a campaign so completely fraudulent, making claims so at odds with the reality of its policy proposals. But if the Romney/Ryan ticket wins, it won’t be the last.

Shorter: They're frauds and lying sacks o' shit and THAT'S their whole "platform" and the rest of the Repugs are totally down wid it. Win at all costs, get rid of President The Other, doesn't matter WHAT gets in as long as it's more Amerikkkan.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Federal Court Strikes Down Texas Voter ID Law
Legislation requiring voters to present their decoded human genome ruled “excessively restrictive.”

GOP Starts Effort to Humanize Romney
Includes new campaign slogan, “It's alive!"

Among Black Voters, Obama's Lead Over Romney 94% to 0%
Here's the complete breakdown:

Obama 94%
Oprah 1%
Yo Mama 1%
Yo-Yo Ma 1%
Oh My Papa 1%
Don't Know 1%
David Duke 1%
Romney 0%
(Margin of error: ± 0%)

125 Students in Harvard's “Introduction to Congress” Class Accused of Cheating
If proven true they will all receive A's.

Report: Most New Jobs Low Paying
And require wearing a paper hat.

You can make a nice one out of a Harvard degree in political science.

Stavanger ...

As promised ...

Amsterdam ...

Sorry for the tardiness but I finally got a few pics up from Amsterdam.