United Methodist Church Rejects Bush Library at SMU

The governing body of the United Methodist Church has come out against the George Bush Library being constructed on the campus of Southern Methodist University. This rejection overwhelmingly passed 844-20 on Wednesday morning at the 2008 Quadrennial General Conference of the United Methodist Church that is still meeting in Fort Worth.

I believe the main reason for the rejection is the preference for someone to have a library named after him, he would have needed to at some point in his life, read a book.

The group’s opposition is centered around the partisan think tank that will be attached to the library. The institute reportedly under the control of Karl Rove will have no academic oversight by SMU. But there may also be some concerns about associating the school with some of Bush’s policies.

“Many are offended by the contempt shown by the administration in areas like torture,” says Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D. a minister and psychologist in Brooklyn, New York. “Torture is not a value of the Methodist church.”

Well at least Rev. Weaver is on the right side of this controversial position. After all, if it's good enough to be a value of the United States government...

T Minus 262/261 Days

"We ended the rule of one of history's worst tyrants, and in doing so , we not only freed the American people, we made our own people more secure."

- Crawford, TX, May 3, 2003

Note the date. Two days after the staged aircraft carrier landing 30 miles off the coast of California to declare "Mission Accomplished," our fearless leader was clearing brush in Crawford.

McCain: No More Blood For Oil

McThuselah is losing his mind.

“My friends, I will have an energy policy which will eliminate our dependence on oil from Middle East that will then prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East."

Again? Prevent us from sending our kids to the Middle East... AGAIN?! Five years ago, when "No Blood For Oil" was being chanted by anti-war protesters, the right wingnuts were calling that theory absolutely insane and the tinfoil hat liberals were at it again, conjuring up some crazy conspiracy to defame the intrepid president and his astute administration officials.

Of course McCain's campaign tried to wipe off the shit he stepped in and expected us to be stupid enough to believe that Mr. Double Talk was speaking about the FIRST Gulf War. When pressed, McCain conceded he wasn't thinking of Gulf War I. Nice try, fellas.

Republican John McCain was forced to clarify his comments Friday suggesting the Iraq war involved U.S. reliance on foreign oil. He said he was talking about the first Gulf War and not the current conflict.
...The expected GOP nominee sought to clarify his comments later, after his campaign plane landed in Phoenix. He said he didn't mean the U.S. went to war in Iraq five years ago over oil.
"No, no, I was talking about that we had fought the Gulf War for several reasons," McCain told reporters.
One reason was Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, he said. "But also we didn't want him to have control over the oil, and that part of the world is critical to us because of our dependency on foreign oil, and it's more important than any other part of the world," he said.
"If the word `again' was misconstrued, I want us to remove our dependency on foreign oil for national security reasons, and that's all I mean," McCain said.

McThuselah is making it a habit of misspeaking, although he would like us believe it is we who are "misconstruing" his words. The "no more blood for oil" gaffe comes on the heels of blaming the deadly Minneapolis bridge collapse on too much pork-barrel spending... and then backing off that one too.

I suppose the campaign should just hire an interpreter for Grandpa Moses and have him attached at the waist at all times, so they can decipher what he means to say from what he actually says.

T Minus 263 Days

"But I also made it clear to [Vladimir Putin] that it's important to think beyond the old days of when we had the concept that if we blew each other up, the world would be safe."

- Washington, DC, May 2001

Hillary "Goldilocks" Clinton

“Sometimes I feel like the Goldilocks of this campaign, not too much, not too little, just right. And I think we should have a gas tax holiday and pay for it."

Yay! Holiday! Woohoo! Will it be a federal paid holiday? Will we be off from work?... No?... What? Oh... it's not a "holiday"? What the fuck?! Is Clinton giving us a holiday or not?

Well if by "holiday" the Clinton campaign means suspending the gasoline tax for three months and losing 300,000 highway construction jobs and $9 billion in highway trust fund revenue in the process, only to jack up the tax again after Labor Day, which will be called a "tax hike" by Republicans and blamed on the Democrats, then... yes.

But don't worry, she's proposing a "windfall profit tax" to offset those lost monies, even though a windfall profit tax has already been brought up by Sen. Byron Dorgan and has died in Congress (surprise, surprise...), and even though she's already spent that money by saying revenues from a windfall profit tax would be used on researching and developing renewable energy.

Good job, Golidocks.

Superdelegate Joe Andrew Flips To Obama!

Here comes the avalanche! Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Joe Andrew of Indiana has flipped his endorsement of Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama.

"This has got to come to an end," former Democratic National Committee Chairman Joe Andrew told reporters in his hometown of Indianapolis just days before Tuesday's crucial state primary. He said he planned to call all the other superdelegates he knows and encourage them to back Obama.

...In a lengthy letter explaining his decision, Andrew said he is switching his support because "a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to continue this process, and a vote to continue this process is a vote that assists (Republican) John McCain."

"The ship is taking on water right now," Andrew said at the news conference. "We need to patch those holes, heal the rift and go forward to beat John McCain."

...Andrew said the Obama campaign never asked him to switch his support, but he decided to do so after watching Obama's handling of two issues in recent days. He said Obama took the principled stand in opposing a summer gas tax holiday that both Clinton and McCain supported, even though it would have been easier politically to back it. And he said he was impressed with Obama's handling of the controversy surrounding his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

..."He has shown such mettle under fire," Andrew said in the interview. "The Jeremiah Wright controversy just reconfirmed for me, just as the gas tax controversy confirmed for me, that he is the right candidate for our party."

That's what I'm talking about! A Democrat with... how shall I put it... "testicular fortitude."

Music Break! Green Day

T Minus 264 Days

Today is the fifth anniversary of Bush declaring victory in Iraq aboard an aircraft carrier. If that doesn't piss you off, I'll add visual aids.

How about now? Are you pissed off yet?

We Need An Angry Black Man On Front Page

Don't you just loooove the tabloids?

Barack Obama gives another stirring news conference regarding his now ended relationship with Rev. Wright, and this is what the New York Daily News puts on its front page.

Let's look for a picture of an angry Barack Obama... it doesn't matter if it wasn't from the news conference. We've lost one angry black man, we've got to invent another.

She's One Of Us!

Because she pumps gas! Or maybe not...

...The Clinton campaign arranged for Mrs. Clinton to “commute” with a sheet-metal worker on his way to work; she rode shotgun in a white Ford pick-up truck and to stop by the gas station to fret over the cost of filling up.

No shock, but David O. Selznick could not have staged the thing better.

The Marathon gas station was effectively closed to other customers for more than an hour as 30 reporters and photographers gathered at the station to await Mrs. Clinton’s visit. A caravan of 10 vehicles – 10! – finally arrived, including a van carrying cameramen to record the drive, and a white Ford pick-up truck driven by the “commuter,” Jason Allen Wilfing, with Mrs. Clinton in the passenger seat.

And it turned out the pick-up belonged to Mr. Wilfing’s boss; they used it so they could fit a Secret Service agent and Mrs. Clinton’s traveling aide in the back seat.

Reporters speculated beforehand about whether Mrs. Clinton would pump the gas herself, but it was not to be...

...Mrs. Clinton said she had not pumped gas in a long time, given the Secret Service role in her life since 1992.

No elitist here. Oh, no. ...Ooh look, the numbers turn fast!

Surprising that she wouldn't pump her own gas after endorsements describing her as making "Rocky Balboa look like a pansy" and having "testicular fortitude." I shit you not.

Here's her reaction after the comparison to being ballsy.

Of course, it was meant as a compliment. If an opponent had said something like this, well, who knows what the campaign reaction would be or what claim of misogyny they would come up with.

But are we really surprised what comes out of the Clinton campaign anymore? A staged event, making a man drive forty-five minutes out of his normal commute to pick up Clinton at her hotel in a truck that isn't his, only to have her talk on her cell phone the entire length of the trip and then to stop for a fill up at a gas station that's been closed to other customers for security and press reasons (who knows how much money they lost during that time) and then speak to the press about how she knows the hardships of Joe Average even though she hasn't pumped gas for herself in at least the last 16 years if not more.

Yes, she is "in touch" with the average voter. There's always the full service pump, Hill.

Here's Keith's take on it.

T Minus 265 Days

"It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber."

- Washington, DC, April 2002

Lame Dick pResident

Bush had a pretend press conference on the economy today... and tried to blame the Democratically led Congress for the administration's problems. Watch and be appalled.



And that's not all. According to Crooks and Liars, Raisinbrain got testy with Martha Raddatz for asking him a question relating to Afghanistan, not the economy. I guess he didn't have his propaganda notes for such questions.

Q: Can I just add to that, a couple weeks ago —

THE PRESIDENT: No, you can’t. This is the second follow-up. You usually get one follow-up, and I was nice enough to give you one. I didn’t give anybody on this side a follow-up, and now you are trying to take a second follow-up.

Q: Can I just say —

THE PRESIDENT: They just cut off your mic. You can’t, no.

What a dick.

Worst. President. Ever.

Can We Stop Calling It Fox NEWS Now?

For anyone who still watches this "news" organization and thinks it's worth its weight in shit, please read a book... any book will do.

In trying to characterize Senator Clinton's challenge to Barack Obama to debate "Lincoln-Douglas" style, the MENSA members over at Fox & Friends tried to put up a graphic of what video they might find from those debates in a cute little segment. Here is what they came up with:

















Should anyone bother to tell Fox that the "Douglas" in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 was Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, not abolitionist and freed slave Frederick Douglass ?

...Oh, nevermind. Idiots.

Obama Denounces Wright...

... a little more forcefully this time.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – For the second day in a row, Senator Barack Obama sought to distance himself from the remarks made by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and forcefully denounced the incendiary comments he feared would provide “comfort to those who prey on hate.”

“I’m outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to reporters here today. He added, “I find these comments appalling. It contradicts everything that I’m about and who I am.”

Seeking to quell the political damage the controversy is dealing to his campaign, Mr. Obama called a press conference after a town meeting here this afternoon to raise the volume of his criticism of his former pastor. In his speech on race last month in Philadelphia, where he tried to put the matter behind him, Mr. Obama said he gave Mr. Wright the benefit of the doubt. But after watching three days of Mr. Wright’s commentary in televised speeches and interviews, Mr. Obama said, “there are no excuses.”

“They offend me, they rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced,” he said. “That’s what I am doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.”

I was having a debate with a family member about this issue yesterday. He felt I was siding with the spin of the media on the Wright issue and that Wright had said nothing wrong. But the difference here is, that Wright made appearances and comments over the weekend in direct contradiction to Obama's defense of Wright with the speech in Philadelphia last month.

For Wright to say that Obama did not denounce his comments and infer that Obama said what he said because he's a politician, basically calling him a liar - wink, wink - was the equivalent of throwing Obama under the bus. And what made things worse, in my opinion, was the arrogance with which Wright made his statements.

McThuslelah's Big Gas Price Solution

Here's the skinny: John McCain is suggesting a gas "tax holiday" between Memorial Day and Labor Day - about 3 months - 13 weeks. I'll do the math for the extreme end of savings. 18.4 cents per gallon multiplied by a 15 gallon tank equals $2.76 per tankful. Assuming you fill up your tank weekly, multiply that by the 13 weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day... that equals $35.88. For a 20 gallon tank, the total savings is $47.84. The savings for a 12 gallon tank is $28.70 or basically less than a tank of gas. Great solution, huh?

Yet McThuselah calls Barack Obama "out of touch" with what poorer, low-income people need because Obama rejects the idea of a tax holiday for two reasons: it does little to ease the strain on the pocketbooks of consumers and it would deplete the highway trust fund by $9 billion and would cost 300,000 highway construction jobs. The man who married a $100 million beer baron heiress - Mr. Campaign Finance Reform, who had been using his wife's private jet for campaigning through a loophole in the rules - thinks he's more in touch with the common folk.

Here's Obama telling the truth himself.

Obama: Half a tank of gas. That's [John McCain's] big solution...this is at the same time he is proposing hundreds of millions of dollars of more tax breaks for corporations and the wealthiest Americans...that's typical of how Washington works, there's a problem, everybody's upset about gas prices, let's find some short-term, quick fix so that we can say we did something, even though we're not really doing anything...and then we pretend like we did something. So I'm here to tell you the truth. We could suspend the gas taxes for six months, but that's not going to bring down gas prices long term...we have to go after the oil prices and look at their price gouging, we've got to go after windfall profits...and we have to stop using less oil, that means raising fuel efficiency standards on cars, and developing alternative fuels, that's the real honest answer to how we're gonna solve this problem, that's what you need from a president, someone who's gonna tell you the truth, who's gonna tell you not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear.

Who are you going to believe? John McCain or your lying eyes and shrinking wallet?

(H/T Bob Cesca)

Another McThuselah Flip Flop

I've been working on a post in my head about the flip flops of John McCain; there are so many, it's taken me a little longer to write than I've anticipated. But in the meantime, here's one that was recently uncovered.

On military presence in Iraq -

John McCain, January 2008: "Maybe a hundred [years]. We've been in South Korea, we've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That'd be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."

John McCain, January 2005: "...I think one of our big problems has been the fact that many Iraqis resent American military presence. And I don't pretend to know exactly Iraqi public opinion. But as soon as we can reduce our visibility as much as possible, the better I think it is going to be."

Now you can say that he's re-evaluated his stance on judgments he's made between then and now - which is fine - but 1) being in Iraq strategically doesn't change the fact that our military presence is resented which then makes whatever mission du jour harder and more dangerous and 2) if a Democrat had said this, the GOP and the media would be jumping all over this as a classic case of flip flopping and not looking at the "nuance" of the answers. So, if it's okay with the Republicans to criticize in this manner (because you know it's coming), then it's okay for Democrats to respond in kind.

Fuck You, RNC

Please forgive the light blogging these past few days (I'm feeling a bit under the weather) but I had to get something off my chest before I hit the sack.

Has the Republican National Committee gone fucking nuts?

"As a legal matter,'' RNC chairman Mike Duncan said today, this is a "maliciously false'' campaign ad. "The advertisement in question falsely and maliciously'' quotes Sen. McCain as saying that extending the war in Iraq for 100 years would be fine with him, and places it in a context of images of combat. "Clearly this ad is just another attempt by the DNC to mischaracterize Sen. McCain's statements.''

As Mark Ambinder writes:

The RNC provided no evidence to support their charge that the communication was illegally coordinated, aside for a few newspaper articles pointing out that some Democrats work for both a candidate and the committee, like pollster Cornell Belcher. DNC chairman Howard Dean said this morning that neither campaign saw or heard the ad before the put it out.

The RNC is ginning up the threat of legal action to give weight to their criticism of the ad's content. Cairncross would not say whether the party will sue CNN or MSNBC, the two cable networks airing the ad, if they refuse to kill it.

The RNC's content charge is not black and white. The DNC wrote the ad carefully. Nowhere does the narrator or any chyron state that McCain is fine with the Iraqi war persisting for 100 years. The visuals -- explosions, bloodied troops -- take care of that association.

So what are they saying, that as long as the negative ads are geared towards Democrats, it's fine? Fuck you, RNC, McCain said it and the DNC has a right to use it. Whatever caveat McThuselah added after ("as long as Americans are not being injured... harmed or killed.... It's fine with me'') is all well and good, but how long before we get to that point? How many more deaths, American and Iraqi, will it take? I wonder what they'll say if a "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" ad comes out. Are they going to deny that McCain sang it?

Sure, take it out of context, it was just a joke, he was just pandering to the audience du jour, what's the big deal? I don't know about you, but I don't want ANYONE running for the Oval Office who "jokes" like that, or says something stupid about "obliterating" another country.

T Minus 266 Days

"We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation tha will make - it would hope - put a free press's mind at ease that you're not being denied information you shouldn't see."

-Washington, DC, April 2005

T Minus 267 Days

"Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican."

- Refusing to answer reporters' questions while having his picture taken with the Canadian Prime Minister, April 2001

New DNC Ad - McCain's "100 Years In Iraq"

The Democratic National Committee seems to have decided that since Hillary and Barack are still fighting with each other, they might as well do their job and start questioning John McCain, since we can't expect the MSM to do it.

Here's their latest ad - hard to argue with actual video, eh, Maverick?