Sen. Daniel Inouye 1924-2012

AP: Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), World War II veteran and Medal of Honor recipient, died from respiratory complications at 5:01 p.m. ET at Walter Reed Medical Center on Monday, his office announced. He was 88. 

His last words were, "Aloha."

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President Obama's Weekly Address - December 15, 2012

Nation Grieves for Those Killed in Tragic Shooting in Newtown, CT

What President Obama Should Say About The Latest School Shooting

There was yet another mass shooting today in Newtown, Connecticut. At a school. An elementary school. Maybe as many as 26 dead including 18 children. And what we are bound to hear is that today is not the day to talk about gun control. Today is not the day to be so callous as to politicize this tragedy.

But this isn't about politicization for political gain. This is about bringing to the forefront something that is brushed aside all too often under the misguided pretense that the time for mourning is now and the time for solutions is later. But later never comes. And then we go on our merry way completely or conveniently disregarding the tragedy as the act of a crazy person. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Yeah... people WITH GUNS kill people. People with automatic weapons kill people a lot faster.

This is the type of moment that Obama should seize to talk about the lax gun laws in this country, but he won't. No politician will say what needs to be said. Something like this:

Let's take a moment to think about the victims of this horrific tragedy, and those whose lives have been permanently affected by this senseless violent act.  

Now, what are we going to do about this? I know I've been vilified by the NRA and the right wing. Their fear-mongering ways have led many to believe that I'm going to take away your guns. If you look at the actual record, it couldn't be further from the truth. But now enough is enough. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to have the ability to attain semi automatic weapons or large capacity pistol clips. Show me a hunter that says he uses automatic weapons to hunt and I'll show you a liar.  

This is not about taking away your Second Amendment rights. This is about making sure that people who would do someone else harm doesn't have easy access to purchase a weapon. And if they do fall through the cracks, hopefully the lack of available automatic weapons will curtail the amount of damage done the next time something like this happens.  

If now is not the time to address the growing concern of the easy access to guns, when is the right time? Someone can walk into a gun shop and walk out with a gun, even if he or she doesn't know how to use it. It's harder to obtain a driver's license in this country. You have to take a written exam and then you have to take a driver's test with an instructor to make sure you're ready to operate a vehicle. None of this applies to owning a gun. How does that make any sense? 

I am calling upon Congress to immediately take up assault weapons ban legislation similar to what was already in place during the Clinton years which was stupidly allowed to sunset under the previous administration. I am also asking for sensible federal gun legislation that will put in place a list of rules and guidelines, applications and mandatory background checks for anyone wanting to legally purchase a firearm. And I don't want to hear any excuses. None. 

If you cannot find it in your heart to do what you know is right, you will be held to account by everyone who has been touched by gun violence, not just today, not just in Portland, Oregon a few days ago, not just in Aurora, Colorado, but everyone who has had a loved one die needlessly - something that possibly could have been prevented. You'll have to look them in the eye and explain why you think their loss is less valuable than campaign contributions from the NRA and their gun lobbyists. 

If you don't have the guts to do what is right, if you cannot step up and pass legislation that will surely save lives in your district or state, that can possibly save the lives of some of your constituents in the future, I will make it my life's mission to see that you are not re-elected to such a vital and important position as a place in Congress. Lets get to work.

Wouldn't it be great if he said something like that?

John McCain, Go F*ck Yourself

It's too bad he's not following his friend, Holy Joe out the door.

UN Ambassador Susan Rice has withdrawn her name from consideration as a nominee to replace Hillary Clinton as the next Secretary of State, after a constant barrage of criticism leveed at her from Republicans following her intelligence community sanctioned statements on the Sunday talk shows a few weeks back, with Senate curmudgeon John McCain leading the charge.

“If nominated, I am now convinced that the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive and costly - to you and to our most pressing national and international priorities,” she wrote in a letter to Obama that was released to the public on Thursday afternoon.

 ...Rice said in November that she “relied solely and squarely on the information provided to me by the intelligence community” in delivering her assessment. Intelligence officials said that they approved her talking points, having decided ties to organized terrorism, and specifically al Qaeda, were still unclear at that point just five days removed from the attack.

The knives were out from the very beginning, and McCain certainly knows this as I'm sure he got the same intelligence reports that Rice used to make her comments. But it wasn't very long ago when John McCain defended another Rice, Condoleezza, in her nomination for the same position after "mushroom clouding" us into a war. But that Rice was a Republican, wasn't she...



Fuck you, John McCain. You can't retire fast enough.

Goodbye and Good Riddance, Joe Lieberman

Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman made his farewell speech yesterday to a mostly empty Senate chamber. And for good reason: nobody gives a shit about him.

Whenever I hear the name Joe Lieberman my reaction is "fuck that guy."

Lieberman droned about the need for bipartisanship in the Senate. He recalled the days when things got done by working with friends on the other side of the aisle. But Lieberman lost Democratic support not because he sided with Republicans on occasion, but because not only was he was an opportunistic scumbag who would stab you in the back, but more importantly because he was so goddamn consistently wrong.

He almost blew the 2000 Election (before the Supreme Court actually blew it) when he gnashed his yellow teeth on the Sunday talk shows and couldn't stick to what he knew to be the truth, what he was told by his own advisers. I remember that day well, as I was watching with bleary eyes and suddenly my hair caught fire. Here's the dramatized scene from HBO's fantastic movie, Recount.



The Democratic Party didn't leave Joe Lieberman. Joe Lieberman left the Democratic Party.

He left it when he supported the Iraq War even after we found out the truth. Joe Lieberman left the Democratic Party when he lost his 2006 Democratic primary against Ned Lamont and decided to run as an "independent." After he won the election in a three way race, he then he held his vote hostage to keep leadership positions on certain committees.

Joe Lieberman left the Democratic Party when he endorsed John McCain for president and speechified his mind-numbing patented drone that only Lieberman can drone at the Republican National Convention in 2008.

And don't fool yourself about why he's quitting. If he thought he had a chance to win he would have run in a second. He lost his support because he's become completely untrustworthy. He supported lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55 until then Rep. Anthony Weiner and other liberals touted it as a great idea and included a Medicare buy-in in the Affordable Care Act. Then Lieberman completely backed off the idea. Was it because of fiscal reasons as he states, or was it payback for feeling rejected by the party he walked away from? So much for that bipartisanship he was mumbling about on the floor yesterday.

Whenever I hear idiots on the right whine on and on that President Obama had majorities* in both the House and the Senate, including that the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate, where Republicans have engaged in record filibusters to stymie every bill that comes their way, all I can think of is three words: Joe. Fucking. Lieberman. He was consistently a thorn in the side of the Democratic party and leadership when his vote really counted. Sort of like McCain was after 2000. The only difference between McCain and Lieberman is that you know McCain is just prison fucking you in the ass out of spite, while Lieberman smiles that yellow toothy smile as he reaches for the Vaseline. Both are nasty, old, bitter warmongers who legislate out of spite while the latter tries to do it in sheep's clothing.

So goodbye and good riddance, Holy Joe. I'd say, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" but actually, I don't give a fuck.

__________________
* And don't get me started about waiting for Al Franken for six fucking months and then Ted Kennedy dying less than two months later. The fact is that Democrats NEVER HAD 60 fucking votes.

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Steve Benen: Jindal Re-embraces 'Dumbed-down Conservatism'

Bill Maher: The Fiscal Cliff Part II: Electric Boogaloo

President Obama's Weekly Address - December 8, 2012

Congress Must Extend the Middle Class Tax Cuts

Dave Brubeck 1920-2012

Legendary Jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck died today, one day short of his 92nd birthday.

Brubeck is best known for Take Five.

 

Light Blogging - A New Direction? Who Knows?...

For anyone still swinging by my blog and wondering why it's atrophied so quickly, I apologize. It's been a very busy fall work-wise and finding the time and energy to post has become a lot harder these last couple of months.

My intention is to keep carrying on, but judging by the way things are going, it may not be as often as I'd like. I'll still keep posting President Obama's Weekly Address and Saturday Must Reads on a weekly basis, but my posting during the week has hit a brick wall, and for the first time since I started blogging almost exactly 6 years ago, I wasn't able to post anything during the week. I began a post that I'll hopefully finish today or tomorrow, but it kind of makes me a little sad that I wasn't able to publish it before week's end.

I feel like I've made some good friends through this blog, whether I've met you personally or chatted on the phone, or just connected via email or snail mail. Some of my little cyber-family actually got together and sent gifts for my daughter when she was born two and a half years ago. Every time I think of that I still feel truly touched and awed. So in a way, not posting this week feels like I let some people down, including myself. I'm sorry.

In an effort to revamp and maybe recharge my batteries a little, I may rethink the format of my blog. Perhaps one or two posts a week with a little more meat on the bone. I was trying to get some guests whose opinions I respect to write and lighten the load in the process. It worked for a bit, but life is hard, time is short and that's fallen by the wayside a bit.

Okay, so what's next? I don't know - I'm still thinking about it even as I write this - but whatever it is, I'll know it when it feels right. Still, this being the holiday season and - for those that don't know - with a second child on the way, time will probably get scarcer and scarcer. So look for me in the coming year. A fresh new start may be what is needed to get the ball rolling again. After all, I have to rant somewhere.

Thank you for coming along on my blogging journey these past six years. It's been a wild ride at times. Things will be slow here for a bit but you can still feel my wrath on Twitter @BwayCarl and on the occasional post over at AngryBlackLadyChronicles.com. Anything that's posted there will always be cross-posted here.

Onwards and upwards.

Must Reads

Bill Maher: God Hates Flags

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Robert Reich: Organizing McDonalds and Walmart, and Why Austerity Economics Hurts Low-Wage Workers the Most

Charles Pierce: Foreign Policy's Bad List of Big Thinkers

The Rude Pundit: Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Smoke Charas While Downing a Six-Pack of Crown

Asawin Suebsaeng: The Latest Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory: Obama's Third Term

Jim Wright: On The Beating Of Dead Horses

President Obama's Weekly Address - December 1, 2012

Urging Congress to Extend the Middle Class Tax Cuts

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Bob Cesca: Marco Rubio is Definitely Not a Scientist. Man.

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Melissa Jeltsen: Cory Booker To Live On Food Stamps After Making Twitter Challenge

Greg Sargent: Poetic justice: Romney likely to finish at 47 percent

Angelo Carusone: Why Macy’s Must Stop Selling Donald Trump’s Brand

Joe Klein: The Benghazi Circus

Bill Maher: The Common Cult

Paul Krugman: Grand Old Planet

Jim Wright: It's The Racism, Stupid

Oh, Sweet, Sweet Victory

Mitt Romney's Facebook page is losing followers by the thousands. I guess they don't want to be associated with a loser.

Happy Thanksgiving

Wishing the American People a Happy Thanksgiving

John McCain's Sour Grapes Doctrine

The Politics of Hate and Revenge

I've been obsessing about John McCain lately - but only because he's such a vile, little man. You don't have to look very hard to see through McCain's thin skin into his black heart to recognize that holding a grudge is Johnny Maverick's forte.

I mean, seriously, what else is this guy good at? Foreign policy? Hardly. Just because you were a war hero doesn't make you an expert at all things foreign policy. Unless that sole policy position is war escalation no matter the circumstance. Rachel Maddow had a great piece on this earlier in the week, showing McCain's response to foreign affairs over the years. 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

But McCain's biggest flaw, of a myriad of flaws is that he is a sore loser. He ran for President in 2000 and after winning the New Hampshire primary, was attacked with a George W. Bush whisper campaign about fathering an illegitimate black child. That child happened to be McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh. After Bush won the nomination and eventually became President, John McCain adopted a policy of revenge. What I call his Sour Grapes Doctrine.

In hindsight, what looked like McCain opposing Bush policies and voting against them for what Democrats at the time assumed were the right reasons, it was all a matter of getting back at the dweeb who beat him in the 2000 primary, especially after those vicious smear tactics.

Steve Kornacki: "...McCain’s various self-reinventions as a politician are best understood as acts of sore loser-dom. A decade ago, for instance, he took up a sudden interest in closing the gun show loophole, enacting a patients’ bill of rights, and stopping tax cuts for the wealthy. Not at all coincidentally, this came just after he’d lost a bruising campaign against George W. Bush. Bush and his team had been rough – very, very rough – on McCain, and McCain had deemed them unworthy victors. His sudden cooperation with Democrats in 2001 was his version of payback, giving the new Bush White House fits."

Of course, that all ended with 9/11 and by 2004, McCain was ignoring the swiftboating of another war hero, John Kerry, while supporting the re-election of Dubya, complete with head-on-shoulder man hugs. And apparently being presented a birthday cake while a major US city drowned is all you need to let bygones be bygones. Sorry about that bastard black baby thing... Here's a cake!

Fast forward four quick years and this time John McCain wins the Republican nomination but botches the general election while singing "Bomb Iran, "picking The Hockey Mom From Wasilla as his unfortunate running mate, suspending his campaign to sit in on a financial Wall Street crisis meeting where he promptly adds nothing by keeping his mouth shut, and referring to his opponent as "that one" in a debate.

But since he's had so much practice at grudge politics, McCain tacks to the right and decides to become a thorn in President Obama's side as he did with Bush, to the point of not just accusing US Ambassador Susan Rice of being incompetent and "not very bright" by repeating intelligence reports given to her by the CIA which happened to be vague and still pending information (intelligence reports that McCain himself probably had a copy of),  but threatening to filibuster not only her possible nomination as the next Secretary of State, but ANY nomination President Obama would propose to succeed Hillary Clinton, because he wants answers on what happened in Benghazi. And he'll even miss classified briefings about what happened in Benghazi to hold a press conference to demand answers on what happened in Benghazi!

John McCain is a vindictive, curmudgeonly, sour little prick who can't get over the fact that he blew his chance. And now he's using his elected office to continue an obstructionist strategy, despite seeming more and more unhinged. If only he'd use his powers for good instead of pettiness.

ADDING... Here's Steve Kornacki's rant on The Cycle. It's worth watching if you can stomach S.E. Cupp... which is not an easy task.

Must Reads

Henry Rollins: The American People Kicked Your Ass, Republicans

Eliot Spitzer: Why the GOP Quashed a Superb Report on Income Tax Rates for the Rich

The Rude Pundit: They've Lost Their Fucking Minds Again (Limbaugh Edition)

Bob Cesca: Evidence that John Schnatter is Big Whiny Pouty Sore Loser

Tim Murphy: Top Georgia GOP Lawmakers Host Briefing on Secret Obama Mind-Control Plot

Igor Volsky: Romney Says Obama Only Won Because He Gave ‘Big Gifts’ To Blacks And Latinos

Mike Polk: A Letter To Texas From The Remaining 49 States

President Obama's Weekly Address - November 17, 2012

Working Together to Extend the Middle Class Tax Cuts

Reid to McCain: Cut the Crap

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had some words for John McCain about his ongoing sour grapes. And he put them in a letter addressed to the Maverick, and CC'ed Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte because they are now being insufferable assholes on this Benghazi thing.

"I refuse to allow the Senate to be used as a venue for baseless partisan attacks... 

...You already have the opportunity to engage more fully in the fulsome and ongoing investigation in the events in Benghazi... [but] failed to attend a classified briefing held by the Senate Homeland Security Committee on this very issue."

In other words, you're making a fool of yourself. Knock it off, you idiot.

View the full letter here.

McCain Needs to Go Away

How much hate can one man hold against another? How bitter must a person be to look for any misguided excuse to fingerpoint and shake his fist in outrage despite making himself look like a complete loon in the process?

Arizona Senator and former 2008 losing Republican presidential candidate John McCain is still in stage two of the five stages of loss and grief: Anger. And since he doesn't have the balls to challenge the president directly, he'll hypocritically go after UN Ambassador Susan Rice for expressing CIA intelligence at the time almost verbatim in regards to the Benghazi embassy attack.

But no matter. McCain can keep tilting at windmills along with his personal Sancho Panza, Sen. Lindsey Graham, about the Benghazi attack and claim a coverup or incompetence in this instance, but defend then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in her "mushroom cloud" assessment because that's what the intelligence assessment said at the time. Why is that explanation good enough for Condoleezza Rice when it then had a direct result of taking the country into war on false pretenses, but not good enough for Susan Rice who had no direct involvement with the State Department and whose statements were consistent with CIA intelligence at the time? Oh right, it's okay if you're a Republican.

John McCain needs to go away. His mind is muddled with anger and revenge, never getting over 2008's loss. If he were so interested in the actual information about what happened in the Libyan embassy attack and the intelligence leading up to Benghazi on September 11th, he should have attended the classified briefing for members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, of which he is a member, instead of holding a photo op press conference demanding information that was being disseminated in said meeting simultaneously, and calling for another investigation, also known as another witch hunt.

 Reporters would do well to skip McCain's pressers from now on, else they'll risk missing actual news.