Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiberals!!!!!!!!!

Fantastic article about all those liberals in the media. (via atrios)

Another scary article

From my friend Domenic:

"It keeps getting scarier when you read how much religion there is in politics now. I have a hard time seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Although I do feel if more people knew how much power these religious extremists had, they would be more pissed off. The ultimate fight against this radical power has to be the battle to stop "scare" and"manipulation". People really fall victim to the whole "you aren't a patriot if you aren't with us", and "if you believe in Jesus you better vote for people who want the Baptist Council Chief to have a Cabinet level appointment". Obviously this concern over manipulation and scare isn't a new one, but every once a while its got to hit you: this battle is REALLY hard to fight. Calling into question peoples patriotism and faith is a low low move, but it does work really well. How do we get around it? It gets really frustrating to me."

Besides donating to the opposistion, reading and passing on the truth about these nutcases and the GOP/Christo-fascist agenda, and volunteering your time to help rational, sane, reality-based people win elections, I don't know how to get around it. I have conversations with two people in my office that are just as fundamentally insane as Brownback is and our conversations would frighten you. Example: We actually had a conversation about Noah's Ark not actually happening and the frustration level of the person I was trying to talk sensibly to rose to a level of steam coming out of her ears. "How did he feed the animals?" "How big was the Ark?" "It must have been huge, where did they get the wood or labor force to put it together?" "What did he feed the animals?" "What about the animals that eat other animals?" "How did he maintain healthy conditions for the two (assumed already healthy) picks of every animal on planet Earth during a forty day voyage through nonstop rain?" Not able to answer any of these questions with any logic, facts, etc, she ended up leaving the room in disgust. That was not my goal, my goal was to say "Listen, you are a critical thinker in every other aspect of your life. So why are you a follower in this case, putting your brain on autopilot to be filled with such fantasy?"

Another example is the evolution "debate" that I had with another co-worker, who not only did not believe that we did not evolve, but refused to accept scientific evidence that we did because "The Bible says we are made in God's image and we are not monkeys." Ahhh... Que? Didn't God also create monkeys? Have you personally seen God? What does he look like?

Yeah "really hard" and "frustrating" are only the beginning to describe what this is like.

Read Me

Spies, Lies and Wiretaps (via Huffpo)

Dean was right... again.

Josh Marshall has found some new evidence to discredit claims by the Russerts, Courics, Laurers, etc of the world on the Republican corruption scandal.

Wow, I wonder if this will make it into the "liberal" media's news cycle.

Friday fun facts for you f*&#ers

The opening scene of the movie "Saving Private Ryan" is loosely based on games of dodgeball Chuck Norris played in second grade.

and many more...

(thanks to calise)

Update: this is really, really funny. (thanks to Daily Kos)

Destroy all evidence

Read this.

Kerry steps up

Thank Christ.

Fox News Employs Corporate-Paid liar...

Big shocker.

And when Katie Couric starts spouting GOP talking points (translation- 100% horseshit), you know the end of the world is near. This is the same woman who gave Bill O'Reilly a pass twice in the last two months. Thanks liberal media!

Hilarious.

Patton Oswalt is pitched a few movie ideas.

Grow a Pair, You Sackless Bastards!

Yep, this pretty much sums up how I'm feeling.

This Is Huge

This is a story that might have slipped below the radar but is really, really important. Please read it carefully. It is about internet neutrality and if some lobbyists get their way, it could effect how we get our information, news, emails, downloads, etc. Think about how you use the web. Yeah, now think about what would happen to sites like iTunes, Google, videos, blogs, free email, internet radio, etc if this went through.

I first found it on TPM but then have been bombarded by emails about it. One of those emails was from freepress.net and they have set up this website devoted to the issue. You can also sign a letter to your Congressional leaders here.

Word.

Good Idea

David Sirota on a possible public-financing of elections movement in California.

More Gay Porn from MSGOP

Unreal.

BiPartisan?

From Josh Marshall at TPM:

"Jack is directly involved in the Republican party and conservative movement leadership structures and is one of the leading fund raisers for the party and its congressional candidates."

From Jack Abramoff's bio on the Greenberg-Traurig website, circa 2003.

Yeah, what a bipartisan scandal this is.

I had a fever all weekend and nearly lost my lunch watching idiots like Mary Matalin and Tim Russert try to AGAIN paint this as a bipartisan scandal. It is not. Abramoff is a Republican. His and Delay's work have helped to destroy Congress and hurt this country. He raised over $100,000 for the Preznit and has met with him and his administration numerous times. Money given to Demoocrats by indian tribes hardly makes this a "bipartisan scandal." The White House is feverishly trying to distance the President from Abramoff and I have read that they are even distroying pictures of the two together. TIME has more on the pictures of the two best buddies and see here for more of the so called "liberal media" towing the line for Republicans and their newest talking point.

BTW, what would you do if the stink of corruption was hitting your office? Talk about terrorism and lie about your opponents!!! On that note I was so glad to see Senator Kerry on This Week defend the Constitution and Democrats against these lieing sacks of shit.

Are You Afraid Yet.... Gooooooood....

... This way you'll continue to obey, continue to ignore the truth, and (to quote the Great Bill Hicks) continue to "Go Back to Bed America."

Does anyone find it odd that Osama released another mix tape just as the polls are coming crashing down around Republicans and the Abramoff stench is reaching the White House? It's just like him to release his messages just when possibly troubling things are happening to Republicans here. Wow, if he isn't as tapped in as ever to our own political rumblings. He must get Hardball and the Daily Show in that cave we are not able to find him in "Dead or Alive." Wasn't his last tape "released" four days before one of the closest elections in history?

Hmmmmmmm.... On that note, does anyone reading this (no, not you NSA guys, but anyone else) have a computer that can trace the similarities between "Bin Laden's" voice on the tape and Bin Laden's real voice? Oh no wait, only our government has that capability. Go back to bed America, our government will keep us safe.

Also, who besides Karl Rove, GWB, Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Joe Scarborough, Chris Matthews, Glen Beck, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, John Gibson, and every Republican Senator, Congressmen, etc noticed the similarities between the rock and a hard place Bush has put himself in- as pointed out by critics (you know, America haters) - and the rock and a hard place the "voice on the tape" pointed out? By that I mean, Bush knows the war is unwinnable. Bush knows Murtha's posistion is slowly but surely going to be exactly what happens. He can't look like a "defeatist" even though Murtha's posistion is not one of defeat. Whatever will he do in this predicament while facing crashing poll numbers? Viola! Scary man saves the day again! I bet the color coded terrorist alert levels are jumping up just as they did everytime John Kerry did something newsworthy (like naming a VP, or accepting the nomination) right? Oh no wait, they didn't move up at all. Wow. Does anyone else feel that maybe, just maybe, we are being manipulated? Or is that just America hating? (updated)

Anyway, thank Thor that tape came out the same day the NY Times ran a story that pretty much put the Bush-lied-about-the-uranium-claim-that-led-us-to-war story to bed. Did anyone read that story? Mike Malloy, one of my personal heroes, did and here are his thoughts on it...

(Mike's show can be heard every night on Air America and his thoughts can be read here.)

Bush's Uranium Lies
George W. Bush is a pathological liar. By definition, a pathological liar. How else to explain what the NY Times revealed today: "A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was unlikely because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declassified by the State Department. Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department's intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send 25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border. The analysts' doubts were registered nearly a year before President Bush, in what became known as the infamous '16 words' in his 2003 State of the Union address, said that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Click here to read the full article. If the doubts regarding the possibility - in addition to the probability - of this shipment of uranium were made known to Bush a year before his [State of the Union] address, why would he make the claim knowing it was false? Because he is a liar. Because he and his corrupt administration are following, to the letter, the playbook compiled by Fascism's worst: The Nazis. As we have said repeatedly on the program, everything that comes from the Bush Crime Family, from any member of the Bush Crime Family, under any circumstance, is simply not true. This criminal organization deals in death, torture and lies in its dedication to greed and power. If the Constitution of the United States is to survive, Bush and his thugs must be removed from office.

We are in a crisis right now. The constitution is being torn to shreds by these monsters. We are fighting a war based on lies told repeatedly because of these "Christians." Our government is for sale to the highest bidder. Our laws are being ignored by our own government. Quaker peace activists are being spied on. Our emails, phonecalls and even web searches are being read without warrants all in the name of national securtity and yet, a guy who killed 3,000 of our citizens still roams free to taunt us whenever Republicans are in trouble.

Freedom is on the march.

Update: Here's more from Martin Garbus:
...
Samuel Alito, John Roberts (in his Circuit Court decisions), Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, and wunderkind John Yoo give the President unchecked domestic and foreign powers to create that world. Bush can start his own wars, preemptive or otherwise, is the ultimate interpreter of foreign treaties, he defines enemy combatants as he wishes, he detains prisoners for as long as he wishes, he continues surveillance on foreign intercepts for as long as he wishes, he tortures as he wishes, he can ignore Congressional directives and statutes such as those creating FISA, as well as essential elements of our Constitution.

This litany has no end. We cannot now anticipate all the ramifications of the "unitary" president and his claim of "inherent powers," except that it clearly allows him to fully take over the government.
...

The new power the President has come from somewhere. If you give him new powers, it comes at the expense of the people who previously had the power through the Congress to make those decisions.

This idea of this change of the power structure was not a flash in the pan idea -- it is not a concept without a meaning -- it is very serious and must be treated as such.

Gonzalez, Alito and Roberts argue that if the Constitution does not very specifically preclude the President's actions, he has a free hand. They claim they are writing on a clean slate. If the Founding Fathers did not anticipate everything a President might try and do and did not prohibit it, then Bush can do it. Only a document far, far longer than this Constitution could even attempt to scratch at the surface of these unforeseen events.

The Bush Administration ignore centuries of Constitutional decision-making that limits the President, decisions during the Civil War, World War II, World War II and the Korean, Vietnamese and Cold Wars. In the unlikely event the new Supreme Court does not give him all he wants, he will ignore those decisions as well.

That is truly what a "unitary" president means. If America did not pay attention before, it must now.

More liberal media

This should make anyone who watches Hardball furious. What a fuckin idiot Matthews is. And what kind of "liberal" refers to America-hating racists as "wonderful"???!?!?!?!?!!!!

CNN goes with hate.

And finally, what's the definition of insanity? Arianna has the answer.

Update: Check out C&L for more from MSGOP's favorite "liberal."

Two must reads

Ashcroft loses bid to stop Oregonians from dying with dignity. Fantastic news.

And also check out this preview/site for "Why We Fight." (Thanks to IAVA)

Al Gore make's a great point...

Peep Out Gore's Speech

...So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped—one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the “most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country” and vowed to “take him off his pedestal.” The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King’s murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King’s life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Good Readin'!

Did somebody say Impeachment? (via HuffPo)

Also, on a totally unrelated topic, I am going to see Bill Burr tonight. Check out his site here. He is wicked funny dude.

Jim Rice

Rice got dissed again for Hall of Fame honors. Here's his stats. What will really be outrageous is if Mark McGuire makes it next year and Rice does not.

Zappa

Crooks and Liars has a great Frank Zappa clip up. Check it out.

On Bullshit

A few links for your bullshit detector...

How can you honestly say this and expect people to think you are qualified to sit on the highest court in the country?


James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" is getting a million little fact checks.


Remember how Iraq was going to last a couple of weeks and cost only "$1.7 billion"? Well, that figure was a wee bit off.


George Will is worth reading today. (via Donklephant) I disagree with him a lot, but he is pretty pissed off at his party nowadays.


And lastly David Sirota is still my hero (full post here and well worth reading):
...The White House is desperately trying to distance itself from the corruption scandals - and Time Magazine is doing its best to help. In a big story this week, the magazine creates the veneer of a President totally isolated from the corruption, claiming President Bush supposedly "does not like to have contributors or local officials in his cars, planes or holding rooms unless they are there for a good reason, and he sometimes questions his underlings sharply if someone he considers extraneous is admitted." Readers are expected to swallow this virtuous image and forget that "GOP fundraiser Jack Abramoff and his lobbying team logged nearly 200 contacts with the new administration," according to a May 2005 story by the Associated Press. Meanwhile, Bush has returned just $6,000 of Abramoff contributions - a far cry from the at least $100,000 Abramoff raised for the Bush campaign as one of the President's top fundraisers..UPI reports that President Bush's former Attorney General, John Ashcroft, "has banked $269,000 from four clients just three months since registering as a lobbyist...Payments include $220,000 from Oracle Corp., which won a multibillion-dollar Justice Department contract a month after hiring Ashcroft."

Vito and his Vetoes

Check this out.


Also, in a totally unrelated item, check out how Dean refutes to the latest GOP talking point and leaves Wolfie speechless.

Meet the Press

I watched Meet the Press this week and almost gagged. I couldn't believe how bad Russert was. Hardly ashamed of being the network version of the misinformer of the year, Tim Russert conducted what I thought to be the worst Meet the Press in years. It was absolutly horrible. Yelling-profanity-at-the-screen-like-with-Madden-bad. I considered writing Russert about his souless, auditioning-for-a-good-seat-next-to-Satan-performance, and then I read this and felt like nothing I could write would even come close to the accuracy and succintness as Arianna's piece. Nor would it get his attention as I am sure her piece did. Bravo to her, and 'you owe me an hour of my life back' to Lil' Timmy.

This is starting to sound like a movie...

Just when Republican's in D.C. thought things couldn't get any worse, they learn today that criminal GOP Congressmen Randy "Duke" Cunningham wore a wire. (via HuffPo)

Snow

This is a great pickup in the late-inning defense Doug Mankeviwichtekqhtp kind of way.

Abraham Jackoff

or Is it Jack Abramoff? (this is actually a joke form Al Franken's new book). Either way he raised over $100,000 for Bush/Cheney '04 of which the president has 'given back' $6,000 to charity.

Anywho, Fineman picks his winners and losers in the Fun With a Dick Named Jack saga. (Thanks to the great minds deep in the bowels of the MacGray Company for sending this along)

More Letterman

This is the best explanation to the "War On Christmas" that I have seen:

David Letterman: "... I mean, but isn't this the kind of thing where, like, once or twice every 20 years somebody gets outraged and says, 'Oh, my god, we've got to put diapers on horses'? Isn't it just about, is this like, 'So what? Let it go. It'll take care of itself'?"

And isn't it great that it is in response to a Bill O'Reilly lie?

Good readin'

Good for Lil' Rhody for legalizing medical marijuana. "Doc, it hurts when I don't smoke pot..." Yuk Yuk.

Here's a pretty good Abramoff rundown.

See the Washington Post also:
The biggest corruption scandal to infect Congress in a generation took down one of the best-connected lobbyists in Washington yesterday. The questions echoing around the capital were what other careers -- and what other familiar ways of doing business -- are endangered.Jack Abramoff represented the most flamboyant and extreme example of a brand of influence trading that flourished after the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives 11 years ago. Now, some GOP strategists fear that the fallout from his case could affect the party's efforts to keep control in the November midterm elections.Abramoff was among the lobbyists most closely associated with the K Street Project, which was initiated by his friend Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), now the former House majority leader, once the GOP vaulted to power. It was an aggressive program designed to force corporations and trade associations to hire more GOP-connected lobbyists in what at times became an almost seamless relationship between Capitol Hill lawmakers and some firms that sought to influence them.
(via TPM)

And since the "Clinton used to spy illegally too" bullshit excuse has already been debunked, I feel it is appropriate to post the newest debunking of the newest GOP (lie) talking point. Abramoff gave $ZERO to democrats.

Honest to Christ

David Letterman levels Bill O'Reilly

New Years Observed Reading

Larry David reviews a movie he'll never go see:
And I love gay people. Hey, I've got gay acquaintances. Good acquaintances, who know they can call me anytime if they had my phone number. I'm for gay marriage, gay divorce, gay this and gay that. I just don't want to watch two straight men, alone on the prairie, fall in love and kiss and hug and hold hands and whatnot. That's all.

Matt Taibbi, as always, rocks:
God bless George Bush. The Middle East is in flames, and how does he answer the call? He rolls up to the side entrance of a four-star Washington hotel, slips unobserved into a select gathering of the richest fatheads in his dad's Rolodex, spends a few tortured minutes exposing his half-assed policies like a campus flasher and then ducks back into his rabbit hole while he waits for his next speech to be written by paid liars.
If that isn't leadership, what is?

Former CIA Agent Larry Johnson recommends a new book:
The book the CIA didn't want you to read, JAWBREAKER by Gary Berntsen, is out and it kills. ... Gary spent most of this year battling CIA censors, who were refusing to release the book. They insisted on excising parts of the story that have already appeared in other books about CIA operations in Afghanistan...
Gary Berntsen was the second CIA officer sent to Afghanistan and put in charge of directing the destruction of al Qaeda, and the hunt for Bin Laden. He arrived in the fall of 2001, replacing veteran officer Gary Schroen, who had led the first CIA element into Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Gary 2, i.e., Berntsen, built on Schroen's foundation and played a critical role in directing the offensive that broke the back of the Taliban and scattered al Qaeda.
The key news from Gary's book is that we had bin Laden in our sights, but Tommy Franks and JSOC Commander, Dell Dailey, dilly dallied and did not deploy US troops requested by Berntsen to the battle at Tora Bora. We could have had him; we should have had him; but we let bin Laden get away.

Ruth Conniff on Impeachment:
...
And now there also seems to be a groundswell of political interest in holding the President accountable. House Democrats John Conyers and John Lewis and Senator Barbara Boxer all raised the possibility of impeachment as Congress adjourned in December. Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, took the lead, drafting three bills: HR635, to set up a select committee to investigate the Administration’s intelligence manipulation, support for torture, and retaliation against critics, and HR636 and HR637 to censure of Bush and Cheney for blocking access to information on these acts.

Conyers’s bills spring from a report, released by the Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff, entitled ”The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution and Coverups in the Iraq War.”

Last May, the foreign press, progressive activists, and the leftwing media inside the United States shouted themselves hoarse over what they considered the smoking gun in Bush’s Iraq war deception--the Downing Street Memo. (That was the leaked report in which a British intelligence officer summarized a meeting in Washington during the lead-up to the war, saying,

”Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”)
It took months before the Downing Street memo began to receive serious coverage in the mainstream media. But a group called After Downing Street helped launch Cindy Sheehan’s crusade against Bush’s war. And activists like Tim Carpenter, director of Progressive Democrats of America, and John Bonifaz, author of a book on impeaching Bush and now a candidate for Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, continued to beat the drum for impeachment. Bonifaz began talking with Representative John Conyers’s office last summer about drafting articles of impeachment.

The Administration’s actions “clearly rise to the level of impeachable conduct,” Conyers writes in an introduction to the report on his website. “However, because the Administration has failed to respond to requests for information about these charges, it is not yet possible to conclude that an impeachment inquiry or articles of impeachment are warranted.” Instead, Conyers wants to establish an investigative committee that will refer impeachable evidence to Judiciary.

Among the grassroots supporters of Conyers efforts, there are those who would like to go further. “We support Conyers’s effort, but we really want articles of impeachment introduced now,” says Bob Fertik, president of ImpeachPAC, a political action committee dedicated to supporting Congressional candidates who favor impeaching Bush. “We really think there is sufficient grounds. Impeachment is the equivalent of indictment. The standard of proof is not beyond a reasonable doubt, it is probable cause. There is probable cause Bush lied about Iraq simply based on the Downing Street Memo.”
...

And the Onion goes through its Top 10 of 2005. My personal favorite is #5, and then there's always this that you might have missed earlier in the year.

Happy New Year

OK, so my week of "slacking" is over. What a shitty year, huh? 2006 will hopefully be better. Just think impeachment and a Democrat congress. Anyway, I was going to ring in the New Year with some music, but I wasn't really "feeling it" so I chose to work instead. The show I worked had Patton Oswalt, Greg Proops, and Arj Barker - all quite funny and well worth your time.
Anyway, I'm back, so the blogging will continue at a more regular pace. Happy New Year!

ps: Over the holiday, I saw the hilarious Chonicles of Narnia rap for the first time. If you haven't seen it, please check it out. If you liked it, you might also enjoy this site from the writers - The Lonely Island.