Seriously?
What a far, far cry from the comedic genius of this just four short years ago.Washington Post: White House Correspondents Association has picked this week's most unpopular stand-up comic Jay Leno be the keynote speaker at this year's White House Correspondents Dinner.
An NBC rep confirmed the invitation to The TV Column.
In fairness, the association asked Leno weeks ago -- when he was just the host of a primetime show that was failing five nights a week.
Congress isn't the only thing that needs revamping.
I know these things are spit out automatically by the industrial judicial machine, but come on!Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed reported that Obama's jury duty summons was sent to his home on the South Side of Chicago asking him to report on Monday at the county courthouse in the suburb of Bridgeview. The White House said the court was told weeks ago - no surprise - that Obama could not make it.
Brian McGrory: Seduced By Our New Senator
Paul Krugman: Do The Right Thing
Corey Kilgannon: Serpico on Serpico
The Rude Pundit: Random Observations on Last Night's Massachusetts Knockdown
Michael Winship: Progressives: Don’t Mourn, Organize
President Obama Addresses This Week's Supreme Court Decision
Read the transcript here.
NY Times: Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.
The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.
The 5-to-4 decision represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision, which also applies to labor unions and other organizations, to reshape the way elections are conducted.
“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”
Justice John Paul Stevens read a long dissent from the bench. He said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings. His decision was joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing.
Some genies (and hymens) can't be put back in the bottle. Completely In Touch.NY POST: ...in a classic example of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, Bristol -- who gave birth to son Tripp in 2008 after a brief liaison with Playgirl-posing flop Levi Johnston -- told In Touch the experience has made her a born-again virgin and announced, "I'm not going to have sex until I'm married. I can guarantee it."
Paul Krugman: Jonathan Gruber
Rude Pundit: Why Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh Ought to Be Dropped Into Haiti as Food
Roger Ebert: A Letter To Rush Limbaugh
Sen. Bernie Sanders: Where Do We Go From Here?
Yifat Susskind: David Brooks Blames the Victim in Haiti
Getting Our Money Back from Wall Street
ADDING... What will the Republican spin be in support of the banks? After hearing for almost a year now that TARP was Obama Socialism even though it was started before he took office, everyone should be on board with trying to get bailout money back from the "too big to fail" criminals. How many right wing pundits and wingnuts are going to agrue the opposite now?
Evil is everywhere. And no, I'm not talking about natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, or the tsunami in Indonesia or the most recent devastating earthquake in Haiti that we're witness to now, but to some of the reaction that it is garnering.
Regardless of political ideology or religious persuasion, I never expected some public, prominent figures to not even bother taking a breath before using this horrible situation as an opportunistic opening.
A supposed man of the cloth, the televangelist shyster Pat Robertson spewed the usual hateful crap in the guise of religion.
...Or whatever... True story."Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it," he said on Christian Broadcasting Network's "The 700 Club." "They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal."
Robertson said that "ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other" and he contrasted Haiti with its neighbor, the Dominican Republic.
You have to wonder what Limbaugh's reaction would have been had it been his favorite sex tourism spot, the Dominican Republic, where he loves to travel with an illegal cache of Viagra. Of course, Limbaugh would have been the first to criticize the President had he not made a statement for being aloof or indifferent. It's a win-win for the Obama's enemy political pundits.LIMBAUGH: I want you to remember it took [Obama] three days -- three days -- to respond to the Christmas Day Fruit of Kaboom bomber. Three days. And when he came out after those three days, he was clearly irritated that he had to do it. He didn't want to do it. He comes out here in less than 24 hours to speak about Haiti.
[...]
Oh, this is what he lives for. He lives for serving those in misery. Now don't misunderstand here, folks. See, this is -- I wonder -- I don't have the whole press conference, but I wonder: Did he apologize for America before acknowledging we are the only people on Earth that can possibly help them out down there in any significant way?
[...]
This will play right into Obama's hands -- humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their -- shall we say -- credibility with the black community, in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community, in this country. It's made-to-order for 'em. That's why he couldn't wait to get out there. Could not wait to get out there.
The year before Katrina, Bush had faced international complaints about what was seen as a sluggish response in both U.S. aid and manpower to the Asia tsunami that killed 226,000 people in 13 countries.
His administration's initial cash assistance of $35 million for tsunami victims was widely derided as paltry. What helped to salvage the U.S. image in affected countries was a goodwill tour then launched jointly by Bush's father, former President George H.W. Bush and former President Bill Clinton.
The earthquake that hit Haiti yesterday was pretty devasatating, taking out communications, collapsing the largest hospital in the capital and practically flattening Port-au-Prince, with some two million residents.
You can donate to the American Red Cross or text "Haiti" to 90999 to donate as well to help out in this tragic situation.NY Times: The earthquake was the worst in the region in more than 200 years and left the country in a shambles. As night fell in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s densely populated capital, fires burned near the shoreline downtown, but otherwise the city fell into darkness.
Now Fox & Friends' Steve Doocy can claim that Fox News has someone on their staff who isn't as stupid as he is. At least he knows that Africa is a continent. Maybe.The controversial former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate will not have a regular program of her own on Fox News...
A lovely little quote from America's second stupidest Governor* ever.
Blagojevich later walked back the quote and said it was a stupid thing to say and that he didn't believe it anyway. That's okay, Rod. We never believed you in the first place. Now we're even."I'm blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived," Blagojevich said. "I saw it all growing up."
Chris Kelly: A Horrible Thing to Think About Casey Johnson
Bob Cesca: The Twisted and Dangerous Republican Record on Terrorism
Gail Collins: Oh, Byron, We Hardly Knew Ye
Bruce Schneier: Our Reaction Is the Real Security Failure
You can't watch any cable news television nowadays without coming across a lying Republican. They just can't help themselves. It seems to be in their DNA. Whether they're talking about death panels, or a government takeover of health care, or wanting to protect Medicare in a sudden reversal of the GOP agenda to kill Medicare before health care reform was in the forefront. But the latest egregiousness really takes the cake.
America's Mayor, Rudy Giuliani was on Good Morning America today and since the GOP blue plate special has been to attack President Obama and blame him for the failed terrorist attempt of Taintman™ on Northwest Airlines flight 253 landing in Detroit, Rudy thought he'd up the stakes.
Giuliani: "What [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did -- one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama."
I suppose Rudy forgot about 9/11, although I don't know how that's possible since "9/11" was his middle name during his pathetic presidential campaign. But to give Rudy the benefit of the doubt, maybe he's blocked the trauma. Maybe he doesn't remember running through the streets of lower Manhattan, away from the Emergency Command Center that he decided to move to the same location that was attacked in 1993. I guess he equated terrorist strikes with lightning strikes; Rudy probably thought they never strike twice in the same place.
But even if you forgive Giuliani his little slip and assume he meant to say that we had no domestic attacks under Bush post 9/11, which is now what a spokesperson for America's Mayor is saying in an attempt to pull Rudy's foot out of his big, fat mouth, it's still not true.
Does Rudy not remember the anthrax attacks in the weeks after 9/11 that killed five people? Does Rudy not remember the DC Sniper who killed ten people in October of 2002? Does he not remember Richard Reid, the failed shoe bomber in December, 2001? I certainly do every time I have to remove my shoes at the airport. Oh wait, my mistake. Rudy does remember the shoe bomber, but says that attack happened before 9/11. Just another lie by another Republican. Just like the lie Rudy told that President Obama waited 10 days before addressing the failed attack when it was three. But it's so easy for them to lie. It's in their DNA.
Does Rudy not remember the attack at Los Angeles International Airport in March of 2006 when two people were shot to death at the El Al ticket counter by an extremist in an incident that was deemed an act of international terrorism?
Of course he does. Rudy remembers all of these attacks, but he decides to deny them. He decides to remain with the Republican meme that Democrats are weak on national security although all signs point to the contrary in terms of actual attacks. Because it's easy for them to lie. It's in their DNA.
This follows on the heels of former Bushie Press Secretary Dana Perino and resident Wicked Witch of the GOP Mary Matalin pushing the same lie; that the Bush administration kept us safe from attacks... pay no attention to those fallen towers behind the curtain. And that doesn't even begin to address the daily Dick Cheney report from Politico or whatever Sunday talk show is scheduled to kiss his ass that particular week.
You can't say that the US wasn't attacked under the Bush administration while discounting the worst terrorist attack in US history. And even if you dismiss 9/11, yes, we were attacked... multiple times. And shame on the mainstream media for letting the lies go unchallenged. George Stephanopoulos has since admitted he should have followed up on the Giuliani lie, but too little too late, George.
I know that the GOP got used to creating it's own reality during those very long Bush years, but do they actually think that revisionist history is going to work on such a traumatic event as the deaths of 3,000 people in one day on their watch? And the GOP making political hay out of this and using the failed Underpants Bomber attack as an opening to malign President Obama and his administration for partisan advantage diminishes the importance of those deaths.
But then again, they just can't help themselves. Being lying jackasses seems to be in their DNA.
On the northwest corner of 41st Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan, here's what I spotted on the way home.
Weatherproof did not ask permission to use President Obama's likeness, nor does the White House approve. My guess is that the billboard will be down within a day or two.
President Obama: "Here at home, we will strengthen our defenses, but we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don't hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust. That is exactly what our adversaries want, and so long as I am President, we will never hand them that victory. We will define the character of our country, not some band of small men intent on killing innocent men, women and children."
Click on portrait for a complete list of President Obama's Executive Orders, Presidential Memoranda and Proclamations
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