OMG!!! One party might control both houses of Congress and the Presidency!!!!
ALBUQUERQUE (Reuters) - Republican presidential nominee John McCain, trailing in the polls, raised the prospect on Saturday of a complete Democratic takeover of Washington as a reason to elect him over Democrat Barack Obama in 10 days.
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What the fuck have the last 8 years been? Bi-fucking-partisanship?
Oh, and to John McCain.
You say: I've been fighting for this country since I was 17.
I say: Me too.
You say: I've got the scars to prove it.
I say: Me too.
And then I say: I got 100 IQ points on your old ass and I in no way think I'm qualified to run the country. You're out of your league, old man, (always have been) and it's unfortunate you didn't realize it before you began this adventure. You are to be pitied.
First of all, let me state in no uncertain terms that I wouldn't watch 'American Idol' unless you paid me, and, despite rumors to the contrary, I ain't cheap.
I found this one while cruisin' fer some Bonnie. The kid's good, reminds me of Jewel a little, but the subtitles are terrific!
Anna Bergendahl, 16, is singing Have a heart by Bonnie Raitt.
As luck would have it, Jersey Guy's post this morning, just below this one, contains the phrase 'Dark Age inanity'. Looks like we're on a roll.
Here in California we got a buncha ugly goin' on in the form of Proposition 8. Basically, if it passes, it will amend our State Constitution to say that marriage is only legal between a man and a woman.
The TV commercials are on 24/7, funded largely by out-of-state Mormons. Some of the other proponents are the Knights of Columbus and, surprise, surprise, Focus On The Family.
They are using the tried and true tactics of Fear and The Big Lie, telling folks that if this prop is defeated, teachers will 'teach homosexual marriage' to elementary school kids and there's nothing parents can do about it. Apparently, approximately that did in fact happen in Massachusetts.
This ain't Massachusetts. In California, parents can opt their kids out of sex education classes and the No on 8 ads do their best to rebut the idea that 'homosexual marriage' would be 'taught' in any case. The ads are very weak. The pro-hate whackjobs' M.O. of Big Money, Fear, & Lies trump Facts every time.
There's about a bazillion videos you can go see, pro and con, but I chose this one that's too long for TV, sadly, at 8:47, but gives an excellent argument for eliminating discrimination from the law instead of installing it.
We are particularly troubled that your church is funding television and radio ads that are lying to Californians about the effects of a "No" vote against Proposition 8. We are disappointed that you have chosen to break the Ninth Commandment - "thou shalt not bear false witness." The ads that you have funded bear false witness by not telling Californians that parents actually have absolute rights to remove their children from sex education classes, unlike in Massachusetts.
We ask you to recognize that every education authority in the state has rejected the lies and distortions of the Prop 8 campaign, including the California Teachers Association and the California School Boards Association. We also ask you to listen to a member of your church, Brigham Young University adjunct law professor Morris Thurston, who has called on the Mormon Church to "instruct its members that reliance on misleading and false 'consequences' is not worthy of our basic values of honesty and fair dealing."
Me 'n Mrs. G signed it, but fat lotta good it'll do, like asking Genghis Khan to spare your town because pillaging, rape, and murder aren't 'nice'. We're all just infidels to them. I've had enough unpleasant dealings with Mormons that I don't like them. Yes, I know it's unfair of me to base my feelings toward all of them on the actions of a few, but I think they're a buncha insular, arrogant pricks anyway. So sue me.
Your response has been overwhelming -- 8,485 Californians have joined you in signing the letter in less than 48 hours!
Now, the Associated Press is reporting that ProtectMarriage.com (No, I will not link to it - G) -- the organization leading the "Yes on 8" campaign -- is embroiled in a shocking new scandal driven by a Mormon Church member. This week, the Prop 8 campaign sent a certified letter to several California businesses, demanding that they withdraw their support for Equality California, a nonprofit organization leading the "No on 8" campaign -- and instead donate to support the Prop 8 campaign.
The price of not complying with this letter's demands? Placement on a public blacklist of anti-Prop 8 businesses published by the official "Yes on 8" campaign.
Mark Jansson, a "Yes on 8" Executive Committee member and self-described member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was one of four signers to this blackmail letter. This latest episode is yet another example of intimidation by the Mormon Church to pass Prop 8 and dictate public policy to Californians.
There's a lot of rocks in Utah. Get back under 'em, Mormons. Better do it. We won't pile enough rocks on you here to keep the coyotes from gettin' you.
The McCampaign and other more local ones of its same despicable ilk have me so pissed off I decided to start my weekend early. I figured a nice sad motorcycle song was just what I needed to cheer me up. I feel a helluva lot better thinking about having "destiny in my right hand" than in the Repugs' wrong hands.
My colleague at The Hill, A.B. Stoddard, said on MSNBC that McCain was unlucky. No, A.B., it was not bad luck that did McCain in, it was miserable judgment, bad decisions, bad policies, an angry demeanor. It was not bad luck that led McCain to say the economy was strong and sound while it collapsed; it was that McCain was on another planet than most Americans. It was not bad luck that led McCain to pick Palin, it was bad, miserable, small-minded judgment to pick a right-wing know-nothing, which I and others immediately wrote would be a total disaster. It was not bad luck that led McCain to be confused about economic policy, to have a ridiculous airlift into urgent negotiations over the bailout that made him look like the Keystone Cops.
Picking Sarah Palin was a farce destined to fail, a farce by a McCain who did not know or vet the person he chose, a farce that put a shallow, vindictive and often ignorant person who has no business being a heartbeat away from the presidency in precisely that position. It wasn't bad luck, it was a small-minded decision done in the most incompetent manner with the most predictable result.
This was a decision that McCain had months to plan for. This was the only presidential decision that a nominee will ever make. Barack Obama may have chosen someone who talks too much, but he chose a president. John McCain chose someone who is a joke.
The nation wants Franklin Roosevelt, and McCain gives them Joe McCarthy. It is not a matter of luck; it is a failure of temperament and presidential character and judgment.
A plumbing license is not the only license "Joe the Plumber" is having troubles with. The former Mesa resident has a suspended driver's license and outstanding court fines in Arizona, according to Mesa Municipal Court records.
The man portrayed by McCain to be the typical, hardworking American revealed this week that he actually does not have a plumbing license, and now court records show he should not have a driver's license either, making it potentially even harder for him to get to work.
America's new political icon, who owes nearly $1,200 in back taxes, according to public records, still owes more than $700 to the Mesa court system.
With a suspended license in one state, it should not be possible to get a new license in another, said Cydney DeModica, spokeswoman for the Arizona MVD.
The only way "Joe the Plumber" could have slipped through the cracks is a clerical error in which his driving records were not entered into the Problem Driver Pointer System, the national database of information about people with a checkered driving past, said Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles spokeswoman Lindsay Komlanc.
Komlanc added if the Ohio BMV were to receive the information, appropriate action could be taken, including suspension of his Ohio license.
My next-door neighbor Clancy is a plumbing contractor. He wears out trucks from all the crap he has to lug around to do his job. Pipe, fittings, devices, all the heavy metal-working tools he needs to do his job.
When ol' Joe shows up three days late to do a re-pipe, we'll know why when we see all that stuff on his back! Maybe he's lucky and his local codes only require he carries some plastic pipe, a hacksaw, and a can of glue. Heh.
In fairness to the new mythical 'real'-American icon of the working stiff, we believe in second chances and redemption. Maybe Joe could scale back his fantasy of buying a business that isn't for sale and get a fresh start as a plumber's assistant. Not only could he study up* to get a plumbing license, but the real plumber could do the driving.
*How hard could it be? Clancy tells me that all a plumber really needs to know is that shit flows downhill and payday's Thursday. He oughta know. He once accidentally hooked a hot water line to a bidet. Likes his beer, too...
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ― Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter "B" in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.
Ashley Todd, 20, of Texas, initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield and that the suspect became enraged and started beating her after seeing her GOP sticker on her car.
Here's what I suspect really happened:
Her boyfriend/whoever beat the crap out of her because she only had $60 available from the ATM, which was only enough for three quarter-grams of crank instead of the $120 or so (may have changed since my day. Heh.) he needed for a 'teener.
This just might have been a little embarrassing for the folks in her church back in Texas to hear about, so
Of course she blamed it on an Obama supporter. She's a Repug.
Of course she blamed it on a black man. She's a Repug.
Pure conjecture on my part, of course.
Update:
From our bud gallery in 'comments':
This evil little cow has been exposed as a race baiting fraud.
Let's hope it starts a trend of exposing the rest of the Repug race-baiting frauds.
You really only get a handful, a smattering, maybe three or four per lifetime if you're lucky or blessed or just so happen to be paying the right kind of deeper karmic attention.
Historic events, I mean. Major shifts, upheavals, great leaps forward, the Thing That Changed Everything.
I'll cut to the chase: he's talking about Obama. A little over the top maybe, but maybe not. We desperately need the change anyway.
Here's the fun part:
Hell, you might argue that, infuriating ditzball or not, even Sarah Palin is historic. Not because she's rumored to be an actual woman on a GOP national ticket, but because she is such an incredible icon of inanity, every bit the insufferable, pseudo-folksy con-artist she is satirized to be.
And yet here she is, closer than any woman in history to sneaking into the White House without the slightest clue as to how she got there or what to do when the door opens. In short: Sarah Palin is historic because she makes Dan Quayle look like a f--king genius.
And what about John McCain? Really, who else in American electoral history had his first presidential run destroyed by some of the nastiest, most repulsive smear tactics imaginable, and then turned around and hires the same vile, cold-blooded tacticians to try and disgrace his opponent?
The historic part? When this is all over, these Rove-trained dung-flingers will have destroyed this once-dignified war hero not once, but twice. Once from the outside by attacking his honor, and once by eating him alive from within, with his own endorsement. Historically pitiable, is what it is.
No pity from this quarter. None at all. I am a little impressed that he spread his cheeks and fucked himself.
Addendum: I got ta thinkin' (dangerous, I know) about the phrase "... she is such an incredible icon of inanity, every bit the insufferable, pseudo-folksy con-artist she is satirized to be."
I meant to link to this the other day but my real world is crazy and I forgot. Remembering now (as I head out the door) to send you to Left of College Station. Liberal Texan makes the case against McCain with quotes from vet bloggers. Our great thanks to be included in the 'evidence'.
As we pick our way through the landscape of rubble, failure and debt that 30 years of Conservatism has left in it wake -- pushing our brooms and shaking our heads -- it is important to keep our sense of humor. And I gotta tell you, other than, say, Bill Kristol cranked to the gills on X trying desperately to lick peanut butter off of Bill O’Reilly’s bald spot, there is nothing funnier than watching a recently apostatized Conservative "independent" who Suddenly!Discovers! his Party is being run by degenerate lunatics going completely "Mercy land-sakes alive, where did alla these bah-barians evah come from!" apostal ™ .
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Of course, as long as the Pig People were helping Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich win, "independents" like Larry were perfectly content to warm their little hands on the bonfires onto which their culture and country were being tossed. But now that its all going to shit, and the "independents" want to get off the merry-go-round, the devil wants his due.
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Gotta go there for the best parts. As my pardner Gord would say: "This is today's must-read".
So I'm cutting everything (except for the most expensive shit and the stuff that's important to the people I'm speaking to at the time):
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) frequently faults “wasteful spending” and “earmarks” as contributing to the current economic crisis, and has campaigned on a promise to take a “hatchet” to the federal budget and to impose a spending freeze on all non-essential government spending. However, the Wall Street Journal reports that, in an effort to court Florida voters, McCain has now pledged to increase funding for NASA, a major employer in the state ...
Let's see, cutting everything but healthcare, military, and vets' programs. Well, the military and Social Security make up nearly half the budget (Medicare and other health programs take up another 20%) and vets' programs cost so little, they don't even show up. Another 10% is spent on interest on our national debt. So what are ya gonna cut in the last 20% that's gonna balance the budget? Don't seem like there's enough there to make a dent, even if you cut it all out.
More horseshit plans from the McLame campaign that'll amount to nothing.
Between her clothes budget and her creative billing of travel expenses to the State of Alaska, Palin is qualified to go to work in the billing department of a major defense contractor, such as Halliburton, KBR or Blackwater ...
I was just saying this to Mrs. F this afternoon after having to listen to Greenspan testifying before Congress on CNN as I was sanding plaster:
Apparently, it never occurred to the great guru that wealthy people would be greedy enough to destroy the system. It didn't show up in his "models."
Greenspan, who called the current financial crisis a "once-in-a-century credit tsunami," said that he remained "in a state of shocked disbelief" that banks and investment firms did not do a better job of analyzing the risks involved with investing in home mortgages extended to less creditworthy borrowers.
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Shocked disbelief? Maybe that you'd live long enough to get splattered with the shit from this, but you knew the banks and mortgage houses would milk it for all it was worth.
Fucking Greenspan the Thinker. He spoke gibberish all those years and everybody thought he was a fucking genius. Nobody knew what the fuck he was saying; even he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. This is all on him but if he points the finger any faster he'll break his arm. Fucking asshole.
According to Sarah Palin, she and John McCain "believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."
Um, very, um. ... Yeah.
The GOP code isn't hard to crack: There's the America that might vote for Obama (a suspect America populated by people with liberal notions, big-city ways and, no doubt, dark skin), and then there's the "real" America, where people live in small towns, believe in God and country, and are ... well ... white.
About 80% of Americans live in metropolitan areas, not small towns. A third of us are ethnic and racial minorities, but that's changing: Already,nearly 45% of children under 5 are minorities. Although 88% of us believe in God, 70% think that religions other than our own are equally valid routes to truth. And while 59% of us think that wearing an American flag pin is a decent way to show patriotism, even more of us (66%) think that protesting U.S. policies we oppose is a good way to show patriotism. These days, more than half of us say we prefer the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
Given this, why do McCain, Palin and their team keep pushing the message that the America where most of the electorate lives isn't "real"?
The GOP hasn't been the party of reality-based thinking for some time now. "When we act, we create our own reality," a "senior Bush advisor" (assumed to be Karl Rove) told journalist Ron Suskind in 2002, and this became the administration's version of a game plan. Thus Donald Rumsfeld's conviction -- shared by McCain -- that we would be "greeted as liberators" in Iraq. For GOP leaders, the Iraq that erupted into a violent insurgency just wasn't the "real" Iraq.
We're now seeing the same pathology at work in the McCain-Palin campaign. McCain and Palin look at America and see what they wish was there, rather than what's actually there: an America in which they'll be greeted as liberators and rightful heirs to the mantle of leadership. America, after all, has been led by white Anglo-Saxons for the last two-plus centuries and, for the last 40 years, mostly by Republicans. For that to change is almost unthinkable. And so Team McCain just edits out the inconvenient America that doesn't seem likely to vote GOP. That America's not real. It just can't be.
Ah, but it is.
I for one am thankful that McCain and his cohorts are the last to see that their 'reality' of America is no more if it ever was. Even the normal American is starting to wise up after eight years of an insane president and his failed ideology and policies.
I'm thankful that McCain is using Rovian tactics and personnel. It's all he's got. You can fool Americans pretty easy if they're not really watching what's going on. You can fool them twice just as easily. You could probably fool them this time as well if it weren't for the fact that some of them have noticed they've been burned bad over the last eight years. Lies, lies, and more lies with horrid results across the board.
I said right after the '04 election, and no I'm not going to go look it up but you may if you wish, that getting Bush foisted on us for a second term may have actually been a good thing in the long run because it meant he would dig a hole deep enough that the Repugs would be out of power for a generation. It looks like such may come to pass. It may take a generation to dig the country out of what they have done to it, but it can't be helped. Looking at the sky instead of into the abyss will be a huge improvement.
All it's going to take is just enough of us to realize what's going on to kick the dark clowns out. 'Just enough' meaning that our next President (with a capital 'P' again, I hope) and Congress need to win by a large enough margin that the Repugs can't steal it again.
I am totally glad that McFuckup and Moosebreath are doing the things they're doing the way they're doing them. I'm actually starting to think things are going to go our way.
Then we can take a deep breath and a sigh of relief and hit the deck runnin' to deal with the Democrats. We've been tested by the worst imaginable long enough. It'll be a pleasure.
Yesterday I wrote a piece intimating that the real City of West Hollywood and its real mayor, Jeffery Prang, had called for a ban on real Sarah Palin drag queens/female impersonators.
But that was a lie. Balderdash. And in my mind…a satire.
Though it’s hard to find anything that West Hollywood wouldn’t allow, there are some in the media, as well as civilians, who took my piece seriously and inundated the web as well as West Hollywood City Hall with questions pertaining to the “ban.”
That is why I am taking the exceptional step of apologizing for any confusion.
While Sarah Palin might consider a ban on gay marriages in West Hollywood, West Hollywood is not considering a likewise ban on Sarah Palin drag queens.
If I might mangle a joke from the esteemed Ms Elayne Boosler, West Hollywood will allow as many Sarah Palins with penises as can fit on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Sorry for the misunderstanding…who I believe just might be the queen of this year’s parade.
I just threw this in because I grew up in a town that borders West Hollywood. It's where I went to go bowling, do my laundry, listen to live music, lotsa stuff. I worked in a gas station there. It's kind of a humdrum, workaday place in the daytime, but when the sun goes down you might say it flames into life. Legions of dragsters dressed like Sarah Palin is an aspect of Moosebreath's candidacy that I hadn't considered before. Fits W. Hollywood like a glove. A long sequined cocktail glove. I thought it was funny.
It got funnier.
While I had the linked post on the screen, Mrs. G came in. And started laughing. She's a small town girl who moved to L.A. when she turned 18 to go to college and seek her fame and fortune. She found me instead, but that's another story.
She lived in W. Hollywood for a while. Just as an aside, we used the same laundromat on Sta. Monica Blvd, so we were whirling around each other but our trajectories didn't collide 'til years later.
She and her friends went to Arthur J's coffee shop* at about 4AM after a night of partying. She mentioned to one of her pals that, considering the lateness of the hour, there sure seemed to be a lot of fairly tall gals there in very nice cocktail dresses. I'd like to have seen the look on her face when her friend wised her up! Welcome to the Big City, Clementine! I'm not sure if it made her laugh back then, but it sure did today! Heh.
... At a [McCain] rally in the blue-collar Philadelphia suburb of Bensalem on Tuesday morning, fewer than 500 people showed up ...
And then there are supporters:
... The event provided a sharp contrast to a pair of Obama's weekend rallies in Missouri, attended by 75,000 and 100,000 people.
Anecdotally, working in the reddest county (Nassau) in New York as I do, I see a lot more Obama lawn signs than I do McCain (by about 3 to 1) as I drive around. Seems to be true that most folks have had enough; astonishing to me because I figured the American people had the appetite to swallow a hell of a lot more shit before they reached their limit. I guess, if you want to motivate people, hit them in their wallets. I wonder how long it'll be before the Rethugs start saying the economic collapse was arranged by the Dems to get Obama elected?