Tancredo's Hissy Fit

And this numbnuts wanted to be President!



Why MSNBC, or any other real news organization for that matter, would continue to have an overt racist on as an "expert" boggles the mind. That goes for Pat Buchanan too.

Why is it always the chickenhawks who complain about the VA? It's not like they ever qualified for that benefit and know them through usage.

Must Reads

The Rude Pundit: Fox "news" Takes Us To Its Leader

Dan Froomkin: Want Obama To Be Bolder? Take To The Streets!

Bob Cesca: Hope, Change and The Long Road: One Year Later

Robert Fisk: America is performing its familiar role of propping up a dictator

Mahablog: Republican Health Care Still an Oxymoron

Brian Beutler: Reid Continues To Target Republican Obstruction

President Obama's Weekly Address - November 7, 2009

Tragedy at Fort Hood

Classic

Jon Stewart goes all wingnut on us.

Doofus Quote of the Day

"I actually have to agree with Vice President Cheney, that the president is dithering. And I actually had to look up 'dithering,' and it means 'indecisive,' and that's exactly what he's being."

That's Republican Rep. Joe "YOU LIE!" Wilson (R-NoBookistan) agreeing with former VP Dick Cheney's assessment... after some lowly, eye-rolling staffer had to look up the word "dither" for him. Seriously, these are the idiots who oppose health care reform most likely because they don't understand it. These are the morons who complain when a piece of legislation is 1,000 pages long because they can't get through it with their third grade reading level.

Nope, we don't need no fancy book learnin' in Congress.

Wingnut Rejection

Well, yesterday was Election Day and yes, I was a little disappointed in a couple of races that the MSM was concentrating on. John Corzine losing in New Jersey to Chris Christie was anticipated as was the Democratic no-name running against the Republican no-name in Virginia. But Jersey is a fickle bitch. They want honesty in their politicians, but when someone like Corzine tells them their $8 billion budget deficit will mean cuts and higher taxes, they vote for Christie, the guy that told them what they wanted to hear, not what they needed to hear. What do they expect Christie to do, eat the shortfall?

And we all know that Virginia is a purple, if not a maroon state. We were all surprised Obama won the state in the presidential election just last year, so why would a Republican winning the Governor's race be a "referendum" on President Obama?

In my own home town, Michael "I'm Support Term Limits Until It Affects Me" Bloomberg bought his third term as Mayor of New York City. I was mostly disappointed in the voter turnout. A little over a million people voted in the election with Mr. Monopoly receiving 557,000 votes. Spending an estimated $100 million on the race against his former Comptroller Bill Thompson, that amounts to about $180.00 per vote. And he still only won by 50,000 votes. Had this race not been billed as a blowout which in my opinion contributed to voter indifference and indirect suppression, there might have been a different outcome.

But if there was a real referendum, it was in New York's 23rd District, where Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck were flatly rejected by upstate New York voters. This was supposed to be the beginning of something big for the Teabagger movement but it might turn out to be just a big bowel movement and the beginning of the end for them and the fractured Republican Party. Their anointed Conservative candidate, Doug Hoffman, who doesn't live in the district and therefore didn't know the important issues at hand lost to Bill Owens in a district that hasn't seen a Democratic congressman since the Fillmore administration in 1852. Eighteen-fifty-fucking-two!

They were so confident they were going to win the district, (because after all how can you possibly be unimpressed by endorsements from Ms. Wasilla, America's Mayor and the relatively rational Tim Pawlenty?) that GOP leader Rush Limbaugh put his intrepid reputation on the line, predicting a victory along with liberals downplaying such a coup post election. He was banking on it:

If Hoffman wins -- and polls suggest that he will -- the race there will be dismissed as an outlier...

Folks, I want you to print these words out. I want you to get the transcript off my website. I want you to print these out, I want you to distribute them, I want you to carry them with you, and we'll just see how close I am to being right. (When Hoffman wins) the State-Run Media will say, "New York-23, the race is more about the demise of the Republican Party and anger on the right than Obama or his policies."

Rush is right. The debacle in New York's 23rd District was more about the demise of the GOP and the anger of the fringe right toward Obama which is why their candidate lost.  The voters knew better than to listen to the teabag loudmouths who don't even know they're sponsored by the corporate interests they claim to despise. The country (at least conservative, rural upstate New York) didn't seem ready for a Party of Crazy and said so by electing their first Democrat in 157 years. That's a pretty damning repudiation of Palin's Facebook followers and Beck's 9/12 Boneheads.

Chris Kelly has more.

Like Armadillo Joe, Hoping to Pop in Here More Often...

Posted by Fraulein

Finally checking back in after a shamefully long absence, I've been inspired by Armadillo Joe's recent posts to give a brief update on my own disappearance. I've been dealing with some minor health issues, and hope to have it all resolved soon. Once I'm on the mend, hopefully in a week or so, I plan to dive back into the political news!

Take care, Blog-o-Maniacs, and keep the faith for decent health care reform--we may see that happen yet.

Very Classy, Rush

Limbaugh's remarks on Dierdre Scozzafava, the Republican candidate for the Congressional seat in New York's 23rd District, who has suspended her run for due to wingnut mania and has since endorsed the Democratic candidate:

"We can say she is guilty of widespread bestiality. She has screwed every RINO in the country. Everyone can see just how phony and dangerous they are. 2010 might be a nightmare for PETA. Tow animals may become extinct: RINOs and Blue Dog Democrats."

They just keep eating each other alive. Let the feeding frenzy continue!

The Price of Prosperity

posted by Armadillo Joe

A new photography exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. documents the price our oil dependency -- not just in the US but across the whole planet -- exacts on our landscapes both near and far.  It is sobering to contemplate and we really must ask the hard questions about how much is enough and what else we can do.


Edward Burtynsky: Oil from Corcoran Gallery of Art on Vimeo.

O'Donnell Rips Liz Cheney on Dover Lie

Compulsive lying must run in the genes of the Cheney family. Playing Renfield to Dick Cheney's Dracula, daughter and pseudo-pundit Liz Cheney was one of the first to criticize President Obama's presence at Dover Air Force Base to meet and honor the latest fallen coming from the Middle East, something the previous president failed to do. But that didn't stop her from opening her cakehole and lying about it. Lawrence O'Donnell does an excellent job at a little reality check while ripping Liz a new one.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

For the last few months, we've seen Liz Cheney parade around on the talking heads circuit (only on networks that wouldn't seriously challenge her, of course) backing up daddy's atrocious White House years and authoritarian policies. Is this a precursor for a possible run at political office? If so, she may be the only person to possibly have a lower approval rating that her father before announcing her candidacy in her continuation of the soulessness and classlessness of the Cheney family name.

Must Reads

John Cole: Fair Questions

Steve Benen: False Positives

David Michael Green: Big Bad Government Is Coming To Get You

Scott Ritter: McChrystal Doesn't Get It - Does Obama?

Abby Zimet: Everybody Is Supposed to be Equal In This Country

Frank Rich: The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York

Petro Sapien™ (Part Two)

posted by Armadillo Joe

NoWhereMan wrote the following comment on my last post, Petro Sapien™:

Great to have you back Joe but, as life long resident of the city who makes his living delivering goods to those stores that dot what was once Times Sq,it is so aggravating and ridiculous for me to have to park 5 or 6 blocks from my vehicle to my delivery point.Its time consuming which means less $ in my pocket.These past two dickheads weve had for mayor have reinvented Times Sq for thw worst.Giuliani made it into Disneyland now the present munchkin sized mayor has turned it into Oz.I don't see either version as an "improvement".

October 29, 2009 2:04:00 AM EDT

To which I responded:

I understand your difficulty as a delivery man in coping with a car-unfriendly arrangement. It most certainly would be better for you and for all delivery men if you could just drive right up to the door and roll your packages into the store through the front door. The same goes for cabbies with their passengers and for single-passenger vehicles driving in from the suburbs rolling right up to their destination.


But when we scale any one of these specific issues upward and apply it to city-life generally, we run into a NIMBY problem, applied to transportation resources.


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President Obama's Weekly Address - October 31, 2009

Milestones on the Economy and the Recovery Act

It’s a Jerry Springer Episode

From John Cole regarding Sarah Palin's attempt to bilk $100,000 for a speaking engagement from the Iowa Policy Center. You know, Iowa? The same state that potential presidential candidates bend over backwards for a year before their campaign run? For free? Yeah, that Iowa.

Umm, guys? SHE’S. A. GRIFTER. She quit her damned job to go on the wingnut welfare circuit. Seven in ten people think she is unqualified to be President. She’s just in this for the money, and she is currently having a public feud with the father of her teenage daughter’s child who is himself cashing in by posing for Playgirl.

This isn’t a credible politician. It’s a Jerry Springer episode.

Yes, she's a con artist. Just like the book that she didn't write. To think that it was only a week after the country (and John McCain) discovered her that she reached her political peak for delivering a snarky Convention speech from a teleprompter. How soon before it all catches up with her?

John McCain Plays David Letterman

Boy, does the old man love to tweet. Forgive my naiveté, but don't these projects at the Energy and Water conference Johnny Boy calls "pork" have to do with, oh, I don't know... energy and water?

Joe Lieberman is a Fucking Scumbag

I'm in the middle of a post about the opt out option for health care reform, but I had to put it aside to mention this:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Tuesday that he’d back a GOP filibuster of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care reform bill. 

Lieberman, who caucuses with Democrats and is positioning himself as a fiscal hawk on the issue, said he opposes any health care bill that includes a government-run insurance program — even if it includes a provision allowing states to opt out of the program, as Reid has said the Senate bill will.

"We're trying to do too much at once," Lieberman said. “To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else is just asking for trouble for the taxpayers, for the premium payers and for the national debt. I don’t think we need it now."

Lieberman added that he’d vote against a public option plan “even with an opt-out because it still creates a whole new government entitlement program for which taxpayers will be on the line."

Another fucking douche who doesn't understand the difference between health care reform that we have to pay for and a "government entitlement program." We don't need it right now? What do you mean "we," white man? Fine, we'll start by dropping your governement-run health coverage. And now Lieberman is trying to position himself as a fiscal hawk after we've spent trillions of dollars on wars that he supported in Iraq and Afghanistan? Fuck you, Joe. Harry Reid has sent two versions of the bill to the Congressional Budget Office for scoring and Holy Joe already thinks he knows better. At least the other fence sitters are taking a "wait and see" attitude... you know, the responsible thing to do.

The reason this pisses me off to no end is because all I've been hearing is how President Obama is stabbing us in the back for Olympia Snowe's vote just to say reform was a bipartisan effort, when the fact is the 60 vote threshold we all boast about is nothing of the sort. We never had sixty. We have 58 plus two Independents, one of whom I trust. We lost Lieberman when he lost to Ned Lamont in his primary and decided his political life was more important than his political party.

Ben "Helmet Head" Nelson, "Bayou Mary" Landrieu and Blanche "Hatchet Face" Lincoln are all straddling the fence on health care reform as if it were topped with gyrating dildos, not to mention Kent "The Ferret" Conrad and Max "The Insurance Man" Baucus. And now the one dickhead who I was worrying about the whole time but no one mentioned is wielding the knife into the back of the Democratic Party yet again. If we were worried about Ted Kennedy dying before this legislation came to the floor and Robert "Methuselah" Byrd who breaks hip when he blinks too hard to give us our sixty votes, then we were never actually there to begin with. We were never close to sixty. Can we now please stop blaming the White House for trying to coddle Snowe? There's a reason for it, and now we're seeing why. It's time to strip Lieberman of any seniority he has left. They should have done it two years ago.

Great job on Lieberman in 2006, Connecticut!

Jon Stewart Takes On Net Neutrality

How many schlubs are going to think the Internet Freedom Act actually means what it means?

Douche Quote of the Week

Rush Limbaugh: I'm also told that the blog containing the passage on Obama's thesis is a satire blog. So it's one of these sites like ScrappleFace or The Onion or some such thing. So I shout from the mountaintops: "It was satire!" But we know he thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth. He's mad at the courts for not going far enough on it. So we stand by the fabricated quote because we know Obama thinks it anyway. That's how it works in the media today.

Petro Sapien™

posted by Armadillo Joe

Hey, Blog-O-Maniacs, Armadillo Joe here. I've been absent these parts for quite some time and hope to start working my way back over with a tad more frequency in the coming months. I've been crazy with work and then traveling for my anniversary and then trying to buy an apartment (first time!) and, (same as last year during the election season) I am in a deep, existential political fight with my parents, which is only intensified by the emerging contours of the looming health-care debacle and the political atmosphere surrounding it. I couldn't even bring myself to read HuffPost or watch Olbermann or Maddow. When I opened the Blogger editor, the words just wouldn't come. Though I did have a number of trains of thought pile up in my head and I'd like to get them out over the next few days.

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Soupy Sales Dies at 83

NY TIMES: Soupy Sales, whose zany television routines turned a pie in the face into a madcap art form, died on Thursday in the Bronx. He was 83.

His former manager, David Usher, said Mr. Sales had died in a hospice after suffering from multiple health problems.