Remarks by President Obama at White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, April 28, 2012

In case you missed it on C-Span. Heh. Via Kos.

Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) April 30, 2012 – In the first term in office, President Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the previous eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.
...

Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements, as well as his insistence on the correct pronunciation of the word "nuclear," has harmed his reelection hopes among millions of voters who find his unusual speaking style unfamiliar and bizarre.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, after eight years of George W. Bush many Americans find it "alienating" to have a President who speaks English as if it were his first language.

Those are the ones who want English as our official language, most of whom couldn't make a complete sentence if their lives depended on it.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Suppressed Dissenting 2006 State Dept. Memo Regarding Torture Seen for First Time
Identity, whereabouts of author still unknown.

House Republicans Working With Big Business to Mine Grand Canyon
Which you’ll be able to watch from Vista del Grand Canyon Luxury Condos & Golf Course.

Pizza Hut Debuts Pizzas With Cheeseburgers in Crust
Delivered right to your hospice.

President of Southern Baptist Ethics Commission Faces Charges That He Plagiarized Racist Comments on His Radio Show
Church wants original racist remarks from its leaders.

NFL Draft, NBA Playoffs, NHL Playoffs Converge
Beer briefly passes gold on commodities market.

Seen this movie before ...

Stolen from the Rethink Afghanistan FB page.

War?

What war?

Yesterday John McCain took to the Senate floor and shook his fist in the air at the sky and proclaimed there is "no Republican War against Women". Meanwhile in reality: The Violence Against Women Act was renewed by a vote of 68 to 31.

The 31 votes against looked like this, obviously all Republican and naturally...:

Whaddaya mean I can't beat her? She's my wife.

Quote of the Day

Mme. Dowd via our pal Montag:

... The church leadership never recoiled in horror from pedophilia, yet it recoils in horror from outspoken nuns...

I have two aunts and one great aunt who are/were nuns. All did missionary work throughout their careers in some of the most impoverished places in the world. For them, the gospel came a distant second to doing the right thing for the people who lived there, even if it regularly brought them up against the local priests and church hierarchy.

Closure ...

Nothing will replace the friends and relatives we lost on 11 September but to New Yorkers, it means a lot to see the hole in our skyline filled again. Excellent vid of the new Freedom Tower and 9/11 Memorial going up in time lapse.

Manzanar Revisited

Click to embiggen

A few years ago, me 'n Mrs. G visited Manzanar. Interesting photo gallery in today's LATimes.

Also see Manzanar National Historic Site.

Manzanar is notable as an example of what the government can do to the civil rights of American citizens out of unfounded fear. Who'll be next?

Update:

Our friend Chris, whom Mrs. G went to High School with, was born in one of the concentration camps gulags War Relocation Centers. He's nominally Filipino but his mother was Japanese. When Reagan paid off made "reparations" to the internees, Chris used the money to buy an extra-long Dodge van for his carpet business.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

From A Prairie Home Companion.

Emmylou Harris ~ Someday My Ship Will Sail

Thanks to cweiandnd.

"A glass of your finest green, Garçon!"

MSN

Pot-infused wine is all the rage in dope-friendly California

How could you make a substance like wine, with chemical properties that make you pleasantly woozy and a bit euphoric, any better? Infuse it with another substance whose chemicals make you pleasantly woozy and a bit euphoric, of course! Enter marijuana-laced wine. A bit like the pot brownie's more refined big sister, the aromatic red spirit is on the rise in California where increasingly lax pot laws have brought the decades-old fad back into fashion. The recipe calls for dropping a pound of pot into a fermenting cask of wine, which yields about 1.5 grams of weed per bottle. Plenty enough, we think, to get a group of sophisticated vintners chanting "duuuude" and eating Funyuns.

Earthy nose, hard to light...

Obvious ...

It's obvious that our most prosperous days, as a nation, are when we tax the shit out of the very rich.

Stolen from the Being Liberal FB page.

Funeral today. Back in form soon ...

Willard Campaign Warns Of Soviet Threat

TPM

Romney and his surrogates have revealed an ongoing Cold War fixation. Former Reagan Navy Secretary John Lehman and former Bush administration Ambassador Pierre Prosper, on Thursday derailed Romney messaging in a conference call with reporters by raising the specter of the “Soviet Union” and slamming Obama for not protecting Czechoslovakia — a country that was peacefully dissolved in 1993 and now exists as the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Thursday. That's today they said that. 2012.

Reagan and Bush guys, huh? Figures. What, they're tapping out foreign policy advice in Morse code with their canes from the Geezer Room?

Next they'll be telling Willard that Yugoslavia has weapons of mass destruction. Yeesh.

Question of the Day

Thanks to YubaNet for "veepwannabe".

The gasbags talk about Rubio in terms of his appeal to Hispanic voters.

Here's my question:

There are lots of Mexicans out west, and lots of Puerto Ricans back east. There's a little bloc of Cubans in southeast Florida. Do the east coast and west coast (and just about every place else these days) Hispanics think of the Cubans as being the same sort of people they themselves are or are the Repugs pissin' up a rope by lumping them all together as one voting bloc?

The difference, to me, is that the Cubans came here as political refugees and are known to vote the wrong way because they don't like Castro, and the others came here largely as economic refugees and vote Dem because the Repugs dump on them.

Shorter: Do Messkins and Boricuas identify with Cubans or do they consider Cubanos as Hispanic cultural outliers and an obvious and transparent desperate attempt by Repugs to get their vote if they nominate Rubio which I don't think is going to happen anyway?

I'm down wid the latter but I'm askin' what you think.

Repug Job One

GOP's Anti-Obama Campaign Started Night Of Inauguration

I'm actually a little surprised at that. I would have thought they'd have done that on election night, if not as soon as they realized what they'd put up as their Vice-Presidential candidate.

After all, they're only women

GOP Tries To Water Down Violence Against Women Act, Expresses Willingness To Tolerate Some Domestic Abuse

As despicable as that is and as much as we've come to expect that from Repugs, I must admit I would love to watch Callista beat the crap outta Neutie for being such a pathetic loser. Or Crazy Eyes beating the crap outta her husband because she's such a loser. Nah, he probably likes it when she does that. Heh.

The Twit's Death Spiral

A little Thursday Schadenfreude at Salon. Twit-boy ain't worth five minutes of your time, but this piece about him is.

In many ways Tucker Carlson’s a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following. Glenn Beck started as a no-account shock jock and is now a no-account Internet show host. Breitbart at least went from Drudge lackey to successful right-wing media mogul. Carlson, though, began his career in the most respectable fashion possible and has spent the ensuing decades gradually lowering himself into the gutter. His story illustrates why we can’t have a responsible or at least slightly less hysterical conservative media.
...

No one watched “Tucker.” Cool, no-tie Tucker was just as loathed by TV viewers as prep school prick club-tie Tucker had been. [...]
...

Carlson’s Daily Caller was supposed to be a home for edgy, independent voices and serious, well-reported journalism from a conservative perspective. No one actually wants that — if they did, it would exist, right? — because the online right-wing audience simply wants to be told reassuring and outrageous lies. [...]
...

Carlson is now engaged in giving the people — the idiotic, angry, paranoid people — what they want, which became incredibly apparent once The Caller began tackling the Trayvon Martin tragedy by launching a campaign to prove that Martin had been a thug. It was barrel-scraping racist garbage. [...]
...

Some particular low lights from an increasingly regrettable career: The time Carlson said he beat up some gay guy who tried to be gay all over him because Carlson is deathly afraid of gay people and the prospect of anyone ever thinking he is gay. The time he got a video store employee fired, and threatened to “destroy” him, for mentioning that Tucker Carlson rented a video from his store. His remarkably stupid and creepy interview with Elle in which he embodied every repulsive fratty asshole stereotype imaginable [...]

Downward spirals end only one way. I'm curious to see how big a hole he makes when he finally augers in or if he just goes splat. Either way is fine with me.

Headline of the Day

Prison Industries: "Don't Let Society Improve or We Lose Business"

There should not be private prisons. Incarceration is the business of the state.

I got ...

A couple nominations *cough*bushcheney*cough* for the role of "defendant" now that they're done with this asshole:

A UN-backed international court has convicted former Liberian president Charles Taylor of war crimes - the first African head of state to be found guilty by an international tribunal.

Taylor, 64, was charged 11 counts of war crimes including murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery during intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, in which more than 50,000 people were killed.

...

Hey!

I actually found the time to sit down yesterday and have a beer and a smoke on the deck.

Quote of the Day

Raw Story, with video.

A Fox News host who joked that women have all the rights the need because they can shop got a two-word response from The Young Turks co-host Ana Kasparian on Tuesday: “Fuck you!”

Those F**Noise assholes need to hear that so often they change their name to BLEEPNews.