Bizarro World Headline of the Day

Inside the CIA Mission to Haul Plutonium Up the Himalayas

Headline of the Day

Justice O’Connor: Maybe Bush V. Gore Was A Mistake

Gee, ya think? Thanks a great steaming pile, lady.

Irate Boston man confronts ‘sh*theel’ Alex Jones reporter over ‘false flag’ claim

Via Raw Story:

In the YouTube video posted on Friday, a man can be heard tearing into Infowars.com reporter Dan Bidondi over “right wing conspiracy theories.”

The day of the bombing, Jones had tweeted that “this thing stinks to high heaven #falseflag,” adding that “the FBI has been behind virtually every domestic terror plot in the US.”

“Your boy said this was a false flag, the bomb that blew up people was a false flag,” the angry man in the video notes. “The FBI is behind the bombing, that’s what you’re here to cover. And that’s why I’m the asshole? Because the FBI blew up those people at the Boston Marathon? That’s right. That’s because you’re a dope. And what you say is dangerous and people like you shouldn’t be able to drive a car, much less espouse your opinions in public.”

“But we have a First Amendment, got to protect it. But you’re an asshole. And so is Alex Jones… And that’s the nicest thing I can say about you, you son of a bitch.”

“Anything else you got to say?” Bidondi asked.

“Yeah, I just said it, motherfucker,” the man shot back. “I am the smart guy because I’m not standing here saying the FBI blew up the people at the Boston Marathon, you fucking shitheel.”

“We got the photos to prove it,” Bidondi insisted.

“You got shit, you got jack shit, you got your dick in your hand,” the Boston resident replied. “You fucking asshat.”

Give that man a fucking medal! The wingnut asshats need to be called out like that every time they open their lying pieholes!

Here's the vid:

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

New Fears of Civil War in Iraq
According to Déjà Vu News Service.

Congress Quickly Allocates Funds to End Airport Delays
Just before booking flights home for one week vacation.

Let's hope their vacations are taken up with their constituents' complaints about cutting Meals On Wheels and Medicare cancer treatment.

Twinkies Return to Shelves Later This Year
Same ones that were removed from shelves early last year

FDA Finds Fraudulent Botox Being Sold in U.S.
And yet victims haven't raised an eyebrow.

Grooooan...

The Great Degrader

Paul Krugman on Bush, in toto.

I’ve been focused on economic policy lately, so I sort of missed the big push to rehabilitate Bush’s image; also, as a premature anti-Bushist who pointed out how terrible a president he was back when everyone else was praising him as a Great Leader, I’m kind of worn out on the subject.

But it does need to be said: he was a terrible president, arguably the worst ever, and not just for the reasons many others are pointing out.

From what I’ve read, most of the pushback against revisionism focuses on just how bad Bush’s policies were, from the disaster in Iraq to the way he destroyed FEMA, from the way he squandered a budget surplus to the way he drove up Medicare’s costs. And all of that is fair.

But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover.

Think about his two main “achievements”, if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is that both were sold with lies.

I suppose one could make an argument for the kind of tax cuts Bush rammed through — tax cuts that strongly favored the wealthy and significantly increased inequality. But we shouldn’t forget that Bush never admitted that his tax cuts did, in fact, favor the wealthy. Instead, his administration canceled the practice of making assessments of the distributional effects of tax changes, and in their selling of the cuts offered what amounted to an expert class in how to lie with statistics. Basically, every time the Bushies came out with a report, you knew that it was going to involve some kind of fraud, and the only question was which kind and where.

And no, this wasn’t standard practice before. Politics ain’t beanbag and all that, but the president as con man was a new character in American life.

Even more important, Bush lied us into war. Let’s repeat that: he lied us into war. I know, the apologists will say that “everyone” believed Saddam had WMD, but the truth is that even the category “WMD” was a con game, lumping together chemical weapons with nukes in an illegitimate way. And any appearance of an intelligence consensus before the invasion was manufactured: dissenting voices were suppressed, as anyone who was reading Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) knew at the time.

Why did the Bush administration want war? There probably wasn’t a single reason, but can we really doubt at this point that it was in part about wagging the dog? And right there you have something that should block Bush from redemption of any kind, ever: he misled us into a war that probably killed hundreds of thousands of people, and he did it in part for political reasons.

There was a time when Americans expected their leaders to be more or less truthful. Nobody expected them to be saints, but we thought we could trust them not to lie about fundamental matters. That time is now behind us — and it was Bush who did it.

I have nothing to add.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

An oldie but a goody!

Published on Apr 26, 2013
The wonderful Emmylou live on the OGWT in 1977. Luxury Liner features some Hot Guitar Pickin' from Maestro Albert Lee...........

The Hot Band: Glen D.Hardin, piano; Rodney Crowell, rhythm guitar & vocals; Emory Gordy, bass & vocals; John Ware, drums; Hank De Vito, pedal steel guitar; Albert Lee, lead guitar & vocals

Thanks to Muppet1950, UK.

Quote of the Day

From Charles Pierce in "The George Bush Manure Locker Is Now Open".

The coverage of the opening of this vast temple to prevarication and ruin is not about bricks and mortar. It's about an attempt by the courtier press to absolve itself of a dereliction of duty that rivaled even that of the president in question while New Orleans drowned, and while the economy was bubbling toward disaster.

Yep.

What If Bush Had Done Nothing?

Charles Pierce via Kos.

The elite press is dedicating an entire day of coverage to the perpetuation of a monstrous public lie. Electing George W. Bush twice was a monumental act of democratic self-destruction from which the country has yet to recover. Celebrating him celebrating himself is simply to pour battery acid into the still-open wounds.

In order to take in the ginormous magnitude of Dubya's project to destroy the American Dream, ponder this simple question -- what if he'd done nothing? Follow me below the fold for this speculation...

It's a deep dive. Hold your breath...

What always struck me about Bush and his incompetent cronies is the activist nature of their "wreck everything quickly" administration. All Bush had to do was NOTHING to have a successful presidency. Everything he touched turned (immediately) to shit...and yet he couldn't wait to destroy more. Thank goodness the American people turned on him during the post 2004 "Wind At My Back" "Hand Social Security Over To Wall Street" debacle.

I'm convinced that someday, 50 years from now when historians are analyzing the moment that "broke the back" of the American dream, they'll focus on the Bush Administration -- specifically the catastrophic response to 9/11. Karl Rove's goal was always to repeal the New Deal, monkey-wrench the government to make it untenable, and hand the burning wreckage over to his billionaire pals who are greatly inconvenienced by all those middle class "entitlements", environmental protections and Union rights.

All he had to do was nothing. Instead, he almost wrecked everything.

Word.

The 1 Percent’s Solution

Paul Krugman on austerity.

Thus, the average American is somewhat worried about budget deficits, which is no surprise given the constant barrage of deficit scare stories in the news media, but the wealthy, by a large majority, regard deficits as the most important problem we face. And how should the budget deficit be brought down? The wealthy favor cutting federal spending on health care and Social Security — that is, “entitlements” — while the public at large actually wants to see spending on those programs rise.

You get the idea: The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.

Does a continuing depression actually serve the interests of the wealthy? That’s doubtful, since a booming economy is generally good for almost everyone. What is true, however, is that the years since we turned to austerity have been dismal for workers but not at all bad for the wealthy, who have benefited from surging profits and stock prices even as long-term unemployment festers. The 1 percent may not actually want a weak economy, but they’re doing well enough to indulge their prejudices.

And this makes one wonder how much difference the intellectual collapse of the austerian position will actually make. To the extent that we have policy of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent, won’t we just see new justifications for the same old policies?

Yep. What the 1% wants, the 1% gets. So far. This may change after we eat them and turn them into liberal shit. Heh.

Update:

Business Insider

The Economic Argument Is Over — Paul Krugman Has Won

You can go read the details, but was there ever any doubt? :-)

I'm down wid da ol' dude!

Thanks to oldfartrants.

Disasterpiece Theater

Watch this! More at The Daily Show.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

A More Realistic Bush Museum

An absolute "must read" from The Rude Pundit!

There's so many rooms that it would be hard to see them all in one visit. The "Gitmo Yourself" experience lets you put on an orange jumpsuit and get waterboarded, feared up, and forced into stress positions, all while assuring you that you're not being tortured because America doesn't torture. There's Halliburton Hall, devoted to all the money given to contractors and subcontractors for nearly every support aspect of the wars. There's the Wall Street Rules room, which is empty, but there's a check at the end. There's the artifacts room: the flight suit from the Mission Accomplished aircraft carrier landing; the plastic turkey Bush served to troops in Iraq; the dog pillow Tony Blair slept on at the foot of Bush's bed; and the funding promised but never delivered on No Child Left Behind. This is not to mention the interactive exhibits, like Can You Tell When Ari Fleischer Is Lying? (hint: the answer is "Always"), Is That a War Crime? (hint: the answer is always "No"), How Would You Punish Joseph Wilson?, and Would You Call the Air Around Ground Zero Safe? (Christine Todd Whitman gives a thumbs up). Of course, there's a bunch of t-ball pictures. And a piece of the fallen Twin Towers because Never Forget.

- The final room is a simple space. Rows of chairs are aligned in front of a screen. In the center of the seat is a dildo molded, in detail, on Karl Rove's penis. You are asked to position yourself so that the dildo enters your anus, the better to feel like an American during the early years of the new millennium. On the screen, a series of people tell you how misunderstood George W. Bush is: Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, Jack Abramoff, Scooter Libby, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, and more.

Next to your chair is a small whip. That is for people who voted for Bush at least once. They are encouraged to beat themselves, leaving scars and welts on their back, so that they walk out bleeding, asses reamed, in order to remember all the harm they did to the rest of us.

Almost as an aside, in yesterday's Grand Opening of the Bush Whitewashatorium Iraq was never mentioned once. Nor was the "Mission Accomplished" banner on exhibit. The Chimp'll never admit it, of course, but he knows.

API to saddle up!

The American Patriot Institute is pissed off at this and I don't blame us:

Military.com

VA Silent on Exec Bonuses for Manipulated Data

A year after testifying that some executives received bonuses by manipulating appointment data for veterans needing mental health care, a former Department of Veterans Affairs hospital administrator said officials have avoided the issue “like the plague.”

“They avoid it with a 10-foot pole,” Nicholas Tolentino told Military.com in a telephone interview Monday.

They'll be damn lucky if the pole we shove up their ass is only 10 feet!

Go read the rest of the article and you will know why us creaky old Vets are pissed off enough to groan our way to our feet and head for the sound of the guns. Our newer Vets, from Iraq in particular, were suckered into giving it up for a neocon lie and we owe them big time. All Vets are affected by this as well.

Stay tuned.

More Bush Lie-Bury

These would be funnier if he hadn't sent 4400 of our men and women to die in vain for a neocon lie.

Click to embiggen

Thanks to YubaNet.

Headline of the Day

An op-ed by our Lt. Governor:

Time for California to Decriminalize, Tax & Regulate Marijuana

And moybe our next Guv if he keeps talking like that!

Battleaxe Bush Speaks

Barbara Bush Thinks There’ve Been Enough Bushes In The White House, No Room For Jeb

One too many, actually.

Update:

From Mrs. Betty Bowers, America's Best Christian in a response to this article in Time:

Barbara Bush, a perennial role model for the husky drag queen set, just stuck a pin in poor Jeb's genetically bequeathed ambitions. Gore Vidal once recounted Richard Nixon begrudgingly admiring her “because she really knows how to hate.” Praise indeed from Mr. Nixon. But it's nice to hear Bar finally say something most Americans can agree upon, even if she is two Bushes too late.

Being of a generous frame of mind, I'd say ONE Bush too late. GHW wasn't the worst President in American history, but Dim Son WAS. A Bush too far.

Bush Lie Bury Opens

The Rude Pundit

Yessirree, the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Whitewashatorium of Wonders is opening in all its Panglossian glory, forcing us to look backward and think, "Aw, schucks, that dumb shitkicker wannabe was just doing the best his little ol' brain could do. He didn't mean to set the nation on the path to its imminent doom." Truly, it's like creating a library to a gorilla that wasn't quite as gentle or articulate as Koko. Well, look, here's a pile of kitten corpses it petted to death, but, goddamn, wasn't it adorable to watch them together briefly. And at least it could use sign language to say, "Me throw poop now." You might have to duck, but don't say you weren't warned.
...

The whole thing seems designed not just to cover-up for every horrible thing done to the United States under Bush. Actually, it reflects the essential emptiness of the man who led the country as an incurious figurehead, a meat puppet with Dick Cheney's and Karl Rove's hands up his ass at different times. In recent interviews, you can hear the reporters trying to get Bush to have a scintilla of self-awareness, a moment when he says he regrets something or made a wrong decision. He doesn't, though, because he can't. He can't because he was never secure in anything but his rightness, no matter how much of a failure he was.

Now, though, George W. Bush wants to be forgotten. He has disappeared because he is incapable of doing anything. He bumblefucked his way into history. His library merely represents his non-entity status. And it costs 16 bucks to see it.

No thanks. I can get something useful for 16 bucks that WON'T make me sick. Like a Mexican dinner

Quote of the Day

From The Mudflats:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a phenomenally stupid man. Someone like this shouldn't be entrusted with monitoring a summer camp foosball table, let alone with governing a state of 26 million people.

Can't argue with that.

World’s. Dumbest. Enemies.

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford on the Boston Bombchuckers and our idiot wingnuts' reaction to them.

Chechnya! Of course! Chechnya wants America dead because they hate our freedoms, our shopping malls and our shiny perfect Jesus. Right? Because we have invaded their homeland and destroyed their culture with Burger King and Walmart and…um, wait, what? We haven’t? They don’t? The Boston bombers, while originally ethnic Chechens, are largely “self-radicalized?” And the younger one, Dzhokhar, is an American citizen? And they acted alone? And they’re basically dumb as logs? Oh.

It’s all so… confusing. So frustrating. How are we supposed to handle this? Who are we supposed to hate upon? The idiot Tsarnaev brothers don’t fit our beloved terrorist stereotypes, do not play the role we wanted them to play. Damn them!
...

This shall not do. No wonder he haters and the finger-pointers feel so gypped. No wonder hothead GOP numbskulls like Lindsay Graham and John McCain wanted Dzhokhar tried as an “enemy combatant,” mostly because they like saying the words “enemy combatant” on Fox News with a sneer and a total disregard for American law. If there’s one thing the GOP loves, it’s finding someone to despise and combat. Besides Obama, of course.

What a strange moment in American history. No clearly defined enemy, Islamophobia at a (relatively) low ebb, gay marriage foregone and obvious, the Red Scare of yore now a pale footnote, even our normal modalities of racism and sexism lacking the same bitter tang now that Obama won a second term and all the nasty old white guys who used to control everything have become less relevant and/or are dying off en masse.

Truly, to much of America – but especially the pundits of the right – the Tsarnaev brothers and their insipid act of violence have been a major disappointment. Can’t blame Obama, can’t blame Islam, can’t blame the lefties or vegans or immigrants, can’t hate upon Mexico or Europe or Iran – all our normal machinery of bias and intolerance left with nothing to gnaw upon. What’s a enemy-loving populace to do?
...

This much we do know: the enemy is definitely not well-funded, expertly trained clans of wild-eyed terrorists from foreign lands. The truth is, most terrorist attacks since 9/11 have been of the lone wolf variety, which, given the general idiocy, ignorance and ineptitude of most who attempt these plots, is a direct insult to wolves.

True dat. The Boston bombers bear more relation to the Columbine shooters than they do to al Qaeda. Read the rest.

Serves ya right, sucker

Click to embiggen

Thanks to YubaNet.