When Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen took Mitt Romney to task for putting his wife, Ann, front and center as an expert when it comes to women's economic issues with the factual statement that Ann Romney hadn't "worked a day in her life," the Romney campaign and the right lost their collective shit, accusing Rosen of waging a war on stay-at-home mothers. They work hard too, dammit! And they weren't going to let an opportunity pass to misconstrue Rosen's comment and try to tie her to the Obama camp even though she doesn't work for the Obama campaign. The faux outrage was palpable - enough for Rosen to apologize while clarifying her comment - and for the story to run at least three news cycles.
Fast forward just a week or so later. Today, rock-n-roll has been and NRA gun nut Ted Nugent, whose endorsement was sought out by the Romney camp to bring the NRA into the fold, made some pretty scary comments regarding President Obama and Democrats in general.
"If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year." Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are criminals. We will be a suburb of Indonesia. We need to chop their heads off.
While the White House basically shrugged off the rantings of a crazy, stupid person, this threat was enough of a concern to have the Secret Service launch an investigation. Now, while I haven't been watching much cable news lately, my guess is that the right will come to the defense of Nugent with yet more misunderstanding of the First Amendment and they too, will shrug off what I consider to be a disturbed man discussing thoughts of assassinating the President of the United States. Eh, it's only Obama, right? It's not like someone was threatening George W. Bush. But I digress.
You'd think that Mitt Romney would come out and denounce these types of comments and specifically tell Ted Nugent that he can take his endorsement and shove it up his rifle warmer. Right?
...Andrea Saul, a campaign spokesperson, said in an email, "Divisive language is offensive no matter what side of the political aisle it comes from. Mitt Romney believes everyone needs to be civil."
Lamest. Condemnation. Ever.
No matter what side of the political aisle? Ms. Saul, Mr. Romney, are you trying to equate what Hilary Rosen said (not related to the Obama campaign) about Ann Romney to an assassination threat on President Obama by a man who is ENDORSING YOU for the Oval Office?
AnAlabama high school math teacherwho used a hypothetical presidential assassination to illustrate a geometry concept has been put on paid leave, the Birmingham News reports.
Where is Malkin stalking this unnamed teacher and publishing his or her address?
"Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail or for a delivery from any post office or by any letter carrier any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, the President-elect, the Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President of the United States, or the Vice President-elect, or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."
Looks like maybe Bill Clinton had Osama bin Laden in his sights for more than one reason.
Former President Bill Clinton came within minutes of being assassinated in the Philippines by terrorists controlled by Osama bin Laden, a new book has revealed.
...The foiled attack came during Mr Clinton's visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the city in 1996.
At one point during his stay, he was scheduled to visit a local politician, his route taking him across a bridge in central Manila.
But as the presidential motorcade was about to set off, secret service officers received a "crackly message in one earpiece" saying intelligence agents had picked up a message suggesting an attack was imminent.
The transmission used the words "bridge" and "wedding" – a terrorists code word for assassination.
The motorcade was quickly re-routed and American agents later discovered a bomb had been planted under the bridge.
The subsequent US investigation into the plot "revealed that it had been masterminded by a Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan – a man named Osama bin Laden".
By now we all know that Bill O'Reilly is unofficially King of the Douchebags and if I really wanted to, I could find something each week that would put him at the top of the list. So I guess you can say being named Douchebag of the Week is judged on a curve. If you're normally a douchenozzle, it should take something pretty extraordinary to have the dubious distinction awarded to you. Well, never let it be said that Bill O'Reilly disappoints in this regard.
Bill O'Reilly's Boston Herald Op-Ed:The other day, left-wing muckraker Seymour Hersh went on MSNBC and said he had information, provided by the usual anonymous sources, that Dick Cheney was running an assassination squad out of the White House.
I have but one simple observation: If Cheney really had such a crew, Hersh would have been dead a long time ago, and so would most everybody at MSNBC.
If you can stomach the six remaining short paragraphs, O'Reilly feigns humor with possible "lefty" news headline predictions with a wild swing and a miss; this along with the comments section continue to add justifiable proof to the theory that conservatives have no sense of humor.
I haven't written very much because of my schedule lately, but I just read a Huffington Post item that I couldn't let pass.
I speak with fellow blogger Armadillo Joe and our habit of surfing around and comparing our findings of posts we read blaming everyone and everything - the media, misogyny, sexism - for Hillary Clinton's downfall, rather than where it should truly lie, her terrible campaign leaders and campaign strategy, GOP-style negative smear tactics and "insert both feet" gaffes that have wasted her name recognition status and cause over half of voters to find her untrustworthy, when once she was the odds-on favorite to win the party nomination for the presidency.
"How Dare You!" written by Jill Iscol is just another example in a long line of reasons that Hillary Clinton's campaign has failed time and again and why any good will towards her has diminished. Iscol's first few lines read like a parody. I was waiting for it to get funny and show it's sarcasm and irony, but that paragraph never came.
We need to talk. How dare the leadership of the Democratic Party turn on Hillary Clinton! How dare they betray Bill Clinton! How dare they not speak out when Hillary is disrespected by words like bitch, whore and the "c" word!
Really? Who called her a "whore" or a "cunt"? Did anyone from her own party talk about Hillary that way? Did Obama? The only one I remember calling Clinton "bitch" was Tina Fey on a Saturday Night Live skit, and it was "in a good way." Did that offend women or were they pumping their fists in agreement?
Iscol describes herself as a "Hillary supporter... along with millions of Democrats throughout our country" and is outraged at the treatment of her preferred candidate and that the Democratic leadership is not sticking up for her. What she doesn't mention is that, unlike millions of other Democrats throughout the country, she isn't just a supporter but a Campaign Finance Chair for Clinton. Not much disclosure there, huh? She goes on:
...This is not the party I thought I belonged to. ...That Party stood proudly by a president who many called the first black president because both he and his wife had demonstrated a lifelong commitment to civil rights and human rights.
Women are outraged. We are still fighting for her, and we are ashamed of how our candidate, a woman who has devoted her adult life to serving others... has been treated not just by the media but by her own Democratic Party.
Yes, it's true women are outraged. But not just female Clinton supporters. How about the outrage of Obama supporters who happen to be women? Do they not count? Are they so vapid that they don't know what they're doing and therefore dismissed?
I said it once, I'll say it again and now I'm putting it in writing: Hillary Clinton is not losing/did not lose the Democratic nomination because of her gender, no matter how many times you may scream it at the top of your lungs. She lost because she was the hare, and thought she could take a break after February 5th, while Obama the tortoise looked at the whole race and didn't nap under a tree after Iowa.
- your insistence that there have been widespread calls for you to end your campaign, when such calls had been few.
- your misspeaking about Martin Luther King's relative importance to the Civil Rights movement.
- your misspeaking about your under-fire landing in Bosnia.
- insisting Michigan's vote wouldn't count and then claiming those who would not count it were Un-Democratic.
- pledging to not campaign in Florida and thus disenfranchise voters there, and then claim those who stuck to those rules were as wrong as those who defended slavery or denied women the vote.
- the photos of Osama Bin Laden in an anti-Obama ad.
- fawning over the fairness of Fox News while they were still calling you a murderer.
- accepting Richard Mellon Scaife's endorsement and then laughing as you described his "deathbed conversion."
- quoting the electoral predictions of Boss Karl Rove.
- the 3 a.m. Phone Call commercial.
- President Clinton's disparaging comparison of the Obama candidacy to Jesse Jackson's.
- Geraldine Ferraro's national radio interview suggesting Obama would not still be in the race had he been a white man.
- the dozen changing metrics and the endless self-contradictions of your insistence that your nomination is mathematically probable rather than a statistical impossibility.
- your declaration of some primary states as counting and some as not.
- exploiting Jeremiah Wright in front of the editorial board of the lunatic-fringe Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
- exploiting William Ayers in front of the debate on ABC.
- boasting of your "support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans"...
- repeatedly praising Senator McCain at Senator Obama's expense, and your own expense, and the Democratic ticket's expense.
This Olbermann list doesn't even mention her comparison of the Democratic party process to the Republican one and how she claimed if we were playing by their rules, she'd be the nominee by now. For anyone still using that argument and the threat of not voting for Obama, the Democratic candidate, when he wins the nomination, I say, "Please review your party affiliation and re-register to vote as a Republican. We don't need your triangulating, Republican-lite kind around here."
But now, Senator Hillary Clinton, after shooting herself in the foot countless times, often with Mark Penn's finger on the trigger, takes the sawed-off shotgun and sticks it in her mouth on her own with her awful comment regarding the 1968 election and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. When I first heard this secondhand, I thought surely there was some mistake. Did she actually use the word "assassinate"? And of course, I know that she doesn't want any harm to befall Barack Obama, but how brain dead or "sleep deprived" do you have to be to make such an idiotic comment?
I was still confused about her comment, not knowing what to make of it. Then I remembered a pundit on Countdown (I believe it was Howard Fineman) speaking of a previous Hillary comment ("Obama's not a Muslim.... as far as I know.") and saying that Clinton doesn't say anything without thinking about it. Wow. Could she be thinking, "Let me stick around... you never know what can happen... remember Bobby Kennedy?" Then Keith Olbermann set me straight.
The fact is that it doesn't matter what Clinton was thinking. In fact, it shows that if anything, she wasn't thinking when she made that comment, effectively ending, in my opinion, any possible shot of wresting away the nomination from Obama.
Comparing the media's treatment of Hillary to that of Obama's is a bad joke. How do you compare the Rev. Wright's six week debacle (where Obama renounces his Christian Pastor and there are still 11% of voters at this point who still think he is Muslim), questions of patriotism and lapel flag pins, the sham of the ABC debate, pundit after pundit during primary after primary trying to make it look like a horserace, asking why Obama can't "close the deal" when in fact they should be asking why the well-known Hillary couldn't "close the deal", how does Clinton compare that to anything the media has thrown at her?
Jill Iscol's delusion of how the Democratic party has "betrayed" Hillary Clinton is laughable when in fact it is Hillary that has, at almost every turn done or said practically anything to try and stop the Obama tidal wave from flooding her dingey of a campaign with a bailing bucket the size of a thimble. Any excuse save reality keeps these people grasping for something that they themselves have squandered.
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Kuther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee.
King went to Memphis in support of the black sanitary public works employees, represented by AFSCME Local 1733, who had been on strike since March 12 for higher wages and better treatment. (For example, African American workers, unlike white workers, were not paid when sent home because of inclement weather.)
On April 3, King... addressed a rally, delivering his "I've been to the Mountaintop" address at Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ, Inc. – World Headquarters). King's flight to Memphis had been delayed by a bomb threat against his plane. In the close of the last speech of his career, in reference to the bomb threat, King said the following:
"And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."
New video from Britian's Channel 4 analyzes the last moments before Bhutto's assassination and the subsquent suicide bomb detonating.
The idea that Pakistan is tyring to pass this off as an accident when Bhutto hit her head on the way back into the car is ridiculous. As far as the US government demanding a full investigation, what are they going to do? Put those that conspired to assassinate her in charge?
Associated Press:RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, aides said.
The death of the 54-year-old charismatic former prime minister threw the campaign for the Jan. 8 parliamentary elections into chaos and created fears of mass protests and violence across the nuclear-armed nation, an important U.S. ally in the war on terrorism.
The attacker struck just minutes after Bhutto addressed thousands of supporters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, 8 miles south of Islamabad. She was shot in the neck and chest by the attacker, who then blew himself up, said Rehman Malik, Bhutto's security adviser.
At least 20 others were killed in the attack.
New York Times:The assassination also adds to the enormous pressure on the Bush administration over Pakistan, which has sunk billions in aid into the country without accomplishing its main goals of finding Osama bin Laden or ending the activities of Islamic militants and Taliban in border areas with Afghanistan.
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