Headline of the Day

Horning in on Gordon's schtick for a day because I couldn't pass this up:

Gingrich Pledges Not To Commit Infidelity A Third Time (Not Satire)

"And you told us ...

To fuck off." Now the GOP has to live with the monster they created:

...

For the Conservatives -- both Apostate and Brahman -- who are now wailing and gnashing their teeth over the possibility of Newt Fucking Gingrich being the standard bearer for the GOP next year, what is there left to say but...

....we told you so.

Holy Mother of God did we ever tell you so.

Over and over again. Begged you to listen. Begged you to stop and consider what long-term horrors you were visiting on this country in exchange having your bigot G-spot stroked.

And you told us to fuck off.

...

And now we get to sit back with our popcorn and watch with bemusement and laughter.

Heh ...

Pic stolen from our pal Montag.

Things We Learned From the Republican Debate on Saturday

Damn, I wish I could write like this PHD'd m**********r!

So it was that the Republican candidates who are deemed worthy of attention (which somehow includes Rick Santorum but not John Huntsman or Buddy Roemer, both former governors) held another goddamn debate in goddamn Iowa last night. Goddamn Iowa, we might note, is one of the whitest goddamn states in America, which means it tells us approximately nothing about how nominations or elections are going to go, but its caucus is still honored like some bloated, louche lord of the manor who must be fed peeled grapes by the nude boy children of his subjects.

Other horrors in this spectacle of the decline and fall of the Republican party:

1. Benjamin Netanyahu is the greatest living American. And Israel is the most important state in the union. It's the location that got mentioned more than any other (besides the United States), and Romney and Gingrich got into a fight over who's got the longest Bibi: "I've known Bibi since 1984," said Newt. Countered Mitt, "I've also known Bibi Netanyahu for a long time. We worked together at Boston Consulting Group," which was in 1976, so Romney's balling Bibi for nearly a decade longer than Newt.
...

Oh, hell. What else do you want to talk about here? Bottom line: Santorum's a creepy idiot who has family values shoved up his ass like spiked beads. Ron Paul is Ron Paul is Ron Paul (even if he seemed like Don Knotts running for president in a kooky movie with a chimp as his running mate). Most frightening, Michele Bachmann actually came across as saner and more in control because, compared with the flailing Romney and the failing Perry, she was (or maybe it was just fun to see her go after Romney and Gingrich).

I think Crazy Eyes got off a great zinger with the "Neut Romney" line. Heh.

Republicans have lost this election before it started. All that matters now is seeing how long Mitt Romney goes before the barely contained rage inside him bursts out. And how long until someone actually listens to exactly what the hell Newt Gingrich believes.

Frankly, President Obama should just ignore these fools and merely campaign on giving him a Congress that wants to accomplish something.

Indeed. His line oughta be "You want anything to happen, anything at all, good, bad, or indifferent, hold yer nose and vote straight Democratic."

Frum: Fox News creates an ‘alternative knowledge system’

'Alternative TO knowledge' is more like it. I don't like Frum very well for obvious reasons, but I fully understand his reasoning: F**Noise is on Neutie's side and he's not, and the bickering is going to blessedly kill the Repugs' chances of taking over.

Imagine the fun when the battle for the soul of the Repuglican't party between the 'money', or 'establishment', end and the 'base', or 'batcrap crazy', end is won and the victor finds he has won something that doesn't exist. Soul? What soul?

Via Raw Story. By David Edwards of Crooks and Liars. Links at site.

In an article published by New York Magazine in late November, Frum had argued that conservative media like Fox News and talk radio “immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.”
...

“The question is what is the impact on the viewer?” he continued. “And we know, for example, that people that watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events. That’s a correlation that we know.”

Recent polling appears to back up Frum’s assertion.

Fairleigh Dickinson University found last month that “some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who say they don’t watch any news at all.”

Headline of the Day

National Guard Soldier Allegedly Arrested For Being Unwilling To Shoot American Citizens (VIDEO)

Uncorroborated. Disturbing nonetheless.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

U.S. Criticizes Mexico for Torturing Jailed American
They could have at least flown him to another country.

Congress Considers Cameras in Supreme Court
They'd be hidden, out of sight, and the justices wouldn't be told about them.

I doubt if this will work. I think Congress wants to see if SCOTUS is getting more money from special interests than they are. Scalia and Thomas have great respect for the law and the court and accept their payoffs elsewhere.

England: Queen's Pay Frozen Until 2015
She's already told Prince Philip to “drink the cheap stuff.”

Freeway Pileup in Japan Totals 8 Ferraris, 1 Lamborghini and 2 Mercedes
Subaru that caused it went unscathed.

And its driver, Mrs. Fukuhara, 97, never even noticed.

GOP Voters Less Enthusiastic About Voting in 2012
The tea party's over.

Halle-fuckin'-lujah.

Also go see the Best Cars of 2011.

Ferrari Berlusconi - looks a little cramped from the outside, but fits up to six prostitutes comfortably in the roomy back seat. You’ll say bunga-bunga!

Mary on the Half Shell Day

La Dia de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe commemorates the day in 1531 when Juan Diego saw a vision of a young lady surrounded by light near Mexico City, apparently after a nice comida of mushrooms he had found, and gave Mexico its most popular religious image and tattoo. One stoned indio kid changed Mexico and the Americas forever.

Linda Ronstadt, Los Lobos and the Chieftains: Ireland meets Mexico. A wonderful ranchera that will put you in a dancing mood.

Don't laugh. Well, OK, laugh, but there are a lot of Irish Mexicans.

Thanks to aslefree.

If you live in PA ...

You might want to buy a helmet of some type:

WAYNESBURG, Pa. – Through the hilly fields here in southwestern Pennsylvania, crews worked for months this year, cutting a trench through woods and past farms for a new natural gas pipeline.

Like many other lines crisscrossing the state’s Marcellus Shale regions, this pipe was big – a high-pressure steel line, 20 inches in diameter, large enough to help move a buried ocean of natural gas out of this corner of the state. It was also plenty big enough to set off a sizable explosion if something went wrong.

...

We don't need no steenking regulation ...

Like I always say ...

Put 'em all up against the wall and start fresh ... with term limits:

...

About three-quarters of registered voters (76%) say most members of Congress do not deserve re-election, the highest such percentage Gallup has measured in its 19-year history of asking this question.

...

Anybody ...

Who makes Karl Rove and the GOP soil themselves in fear is great in my book. That's why I support Elizabeth Warren in whatever office she feels like running for.

Why are they ready and willing to spend $Millions on attack ads a year out from the election? Because they know that Ms. Warren will pound Scott Brown like a tent peg if the voters know who she really is.

...

Repent and reload ...

Click to embiggen.

Some things never change

Every once in a while Turner Classic Movies sneaks in a good flick in the middle of the night. I was lucky to catch the 1946 Till The End Of Time (fair synopsis, but skimmed over the point I'm trying to make) last night. I never heard of the flick before, but I'm glad I saw it.

It's about three Jarheads who muster out after WWII and their problems with adjustment to civilian life. Here's the setup clip. More clips here.



I couldn't find a clip of the part that really got my attention so I'll try to describe it. After a buncha trials and tribulations, girl trouble, etc., the next-to-last scene brings it all together. The three Marines are drinking in a saloon and trying to come to answers. At one point they play pinball with a black GI. Some shady looking characters approach them offering membership in a Veterans' group called the "America War Patriots" which was unknowingly prescient of today. One of the bennies of membership is $200 a month "without those foreign commie unions".

Uh-oh...

Then the Marines are told of certain "restrictions" of eligibility to join - "No Catholics, Jews, or Negroes". Perhaps not exactly the point of WWII...

Mitchum's character says, and I must paraphrase, "A buddy of ours, Maxie Klein, would spit right in your face for saying that. He's dead on Guadalcanal, so I'll do it", and he does and the fight is on. Great bar fight scene. The bigots get well and truly thrashed, as they should in a perfect world, and the movie goes on to a pretty happy ending with hope for the future. No way this flick was trying to predict anything other than a possible good future for WWII GIs, which mostly they went on to have, I think.

My point is they had right-wing racist assholes then and we've still got them now. That old flick caught it and we're still dealing with it.

I'm going to try and get a DVD or VHS of the movie and get that scene for you. Seeing those assholes get what I wish I could give them will warm the cockles of your heart.

The Clown Car ...

Rolls on:

Click to embiggen.

Word

And not in MY face either.

There'a an art to condensing important subjects so they'll fit on a bumpersticker. Right-wingers are very good at doing it with talking points. They have to be, given the attention span of their base. It's much harder to do with the truth.

An example of "compassionate conservatism"?

Thanks to YubaNet.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Bremen - 1977

Thanks to modoBLIND.

Duh.

Thanks to YubaNet.

Super-sized Lunar Eclipse on Dec. 10

This'll be totally bitchin'! Go see. Good graphics.

Ron Paul gets it right

I like Ron Paul. I like guys who go against the common idiocy, and his personal idiocy is anything but common. He'll never be President, of course, and he knows it, so we're safe from him. He's a pure Libertarian, which means he's a right-wing anarchist. The rest of the right wing, who claim to be against big government, really only want the current big government to be replaced by their big government so they can tell the rest of us what to do and make money. I picture a totalitarian right-wing United States as sort of a minimum-wage fundie-or-die coast-to-coast chain gang. Paul's idea of actual every-man-for-himself personal freedom will never fly with them. Or, frankly, with any of us who think if we don't hang together, we'll hang separately.

Another reason the righties don't like him, or maybe the main one, is that, batcrap crazy as he seems, he occasionally commits the biggest gaffe of all: sometimes he tells the exact truth, which is anathema to wingnuts on both ends, money and base alike.

Raw Story, links at site.

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul said Thursday that President George W. Bush’s administration was actually happy after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011.

Speaking to about 1,000 students on the Iowa State Campus in Ames, Iowa, Paul explained that the Bush administration was eager to capitalize on the attacks.

“Think of what happened after 9/11, the minute before there was any assessment, there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq, and so the war drums beat,” Paul told the crowd, according to Politico. “That’s exactly what they’re doing now with Iran.”
...

“Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda have been explicit, and they wrote and said that we attacked because you had bases on our holy lands in Saudi Arabia, you do not give Palestinians a fair treatment,” Paul said before being interrupted by boos from the tea party crowd. “I didn’t say that, I’m just trying to get you to understand what the motive was behind the bombings.”

As you can guess, the neocons/Busheviks are not exactly thrilled with this, having spent ten years trying to hide the truth which was expressed in public in ten seconds. They're calling Paul crazy. Heh. The truth will set you free, which is the last thing they want because it will put them outta business.