Free fat grams for veterans day

They serve and fight for their country, and this is how we repay them?

Then again, maybe a bacon quesadilla cheeseburger would sound good to one of Minnesota’s 4,000 homeless vets.

-

In a rare bit of good news, Jeff Huber says it’s bullshit that Obama has decided to send more troops to Afghanistan.

-

From the outer lobes of the reptilian minds from Inner Wingnutterdonia:

Hannity runs fake footage in support of Bachmann’s bullshit crowd claims

Fox News stabs Sarah Palin in the back (Murdoch’s evil empire not that evil? — which is not to say they’re not stupid)

Glenn Beck loses court fight with glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com

Glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com’s owner gave Beck the URL after winning the court case, but the content’s all still at 1990truth.org

Oddly, rickperryrapedandmurderedamanin2004.com is still available (I would have expected Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s ratfuckers to have bought this one up and redirected it to The New Yorker by now)

Steve King apparently never tires of being Steve fucking King, lying douchebag

If this is the suck up coverage of Sarah Palin’s book tour . . . .

Erik Prince: evil, truly evil, or really truly evil?

Jerking off because it’s all they know how to do

Keeping our nation safe from Arab Greek terrorists Orthodox priests

-

$140 billion for the geniuses who dismantled our manufacturing sector.

-

Microsoft moves more jobs offshore.

Meanwhile, I just installed the Mac OS 10.6.2 upgrade this morning and am very glad I did.

The mini is running much better now.

Now, if only Firefox would put out another upgrade to deal with the growing incomplete page loads issue.

-

I love both The Raw Story and the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which is why it’s so annoying that both went after Obama’s DOJ for a decision made by a Mukasey-appointed U.S. Attorney.

Privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation has released an extensive report on a “bogus” attempt by a US attorney in Indiana to get Indymedia.us, an independent left-leaning news site, to hand over all the data it had about all the users who visited the site on a particular day.

Neither TRS or EFF identifies which Indiana U.S. Attorney was responsible, but after a little digging I learned that it was Bush holdover Timothy M. Morrison.

Bush USAs refused to resign when Obama became President in record numbers, but I have yet to see a mainstream news article about it, or any numbers on what percentage of USAs are Bush bitter enders like Mary Beth “Tommy Chong’s Bongs” Buchanan, the hack’s hack who terrorizes Pittsburgh with her fundamentalist Dixie GOPulism.

More irritating, even Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey picked up on the Bush angle immediately. He noted that this DOJ action was initiated by Morrison before Holder was confirmed, and also notes that it’s not to the Right’s advantage for Morrison style rules to be used to let the DOJ regulate news aggregation sites.

But mostly I want to see an article explaining exactly who is running the DOJ’s “field offices,” and why any Bush appointees are still in place.

-

Six protesters arrested at Joe fucking Lieberman’s Capitol Hill office.

Sadly, none of them were armed or intent on violence.

More on Joe fucking Lieberman.

-

eTc.:

James Carroll on how the Catholic Church is sabotaging its broader moral mission

AMA takes common sense stand on medical marijuana

Nothing Shakespearean about British high court’s deliberations over who exactly is a Jew?

Half a million dollars to prescribe a garbage drug to your patients?

Garrison Keillor on healthcare

Harold Meyerson on healthcare

Stanley Works acquires Black & Decker (need tools? buy ‘em now before the price skyrockets) (or, as Mick would say, “you lose”)

Honduras

-

For Don and all my other “traditional” music loving readers.

There’s a lot of crappy Bill Withers stuff out there. This isn’t one of those videos.

This is the fourth day of the 46th week of 2009, and today is the centennial of Robert Ryan’s birth. Not the worst birthday coincidence imaginable for Veterans Day.

I was going to have contest to see who could be first to name this Ryan flick, but the picture caption gives it away.

Life needs more picture captions.

Tagged and in the bag

The new header’s actually scarier when you can read the tags. Not sure everyone realized it, but the tags do denote what passes for thoughts in my innermost cranial thinkspots.

Word cancers would be another way of putting it. Lots of word cancers. This iteration of Norwegianity isn’t even a year old but I’ve already set free 1,558 tags. I suspect many were tags that no one had thought to use yet.

Like #$%@, 14 Defining Characteristics of Gasbags, 4 legs good, Afghanicranken, Being Eaten Last, Collin fucking Peterson, corporate assholes, corporate parasites, crapping up kosher, Cult of Wege, douche baguettes, drink as you think i am, drink to think not, dry peeps and we’re just up to the D’s.

But mostly I like the colors. Warm, autumnal. The leaf fire that is my chain of thought, an illegal burning often accompanied by still more illegal burning.

And vodka.

I’m training for Wegestock. The last couple of times I drank publicly I clearly crossed the line from irascible to asshole. It’s a hard line to see because it’s so scuffed and covered up from years of my walking on it. Like this officer? Heel and toe and no it never seems to occur to them that I’m not that coordinated when I’m sober.

Working towards the light.

Odd. Didn’t expect to see Sarah Palin come out this far down but alphabetization is like that sometimes.

The effect is better than I’d hoped for, frankly. I’m not geometrically inclined enough to have realized that last alphabetically would translate into rightmost on top and on the bottom in this rotation.

wingnuts

Right where they belong.

-burmashave-

 

Change change

Kill it.

Yes, people will die, but people will die if this bill passes as is.

Joe Lieberman should die.

No, I don’t need Peter fucking Beinart to tell me it was a smart move. And I’ll ask the U.S. Conference of Bishops for their opinion the next time they chain themselves to the White House fence over poverty, war and failing schools. [more]

-

It takes a Muslim to get Jonah Goldberg to look in the mirror.

But he can’t can’t make Max Boot think.

Tom Hayden on why Max is full of shit.

-

Wisconsin Republicans cheering Sarah Palin:

Larisa Alexandrovna on the Jew-baiting right

More on Gov. BridgeFail’s Talledega Night in Des Moines

And more on Michele Bachmann’s disruptive yammering, not to be confused with Fred Phelps’ whelps’ whining. [more on the yammering from Digby]

-

Neal Boortz, an asshole’s asshole.

-

It’s not at all unfair to ask just how dangerous is the right?

WINston smITh argues that the real extremists/terrorists come from within.

Some even resort to robo-calling.

-

Money:

Doing God’s work

Bill George: one of my favorite millionaire CEOs (ret.) talking about the mess Wall Street put us in

Debunking more lies about Reagan [and remembering his greatest failures]

If you have to argue about delivery, I’d say the battle over content’s already been lost [more] [more content/quality going out the door]

Overtime for workers: we’re still fighting this battle because corporations are still run by law-bending weasels who overcompensate themselves and have to fuck someone over to make up the difference

VAT: Vagina Added Tax

Hating on workers

-

And the difference between an entertainment reporter and a political reporter is….?

-

Inching towards a free and independent Kurdistan.

-

Fifteen-year-old St. Paul kid comes home so drunk he can barely walk, a few hours later he’s dead.

Very sad.

Do we still teach kids about how how alcohol can kill them? Or does Just Say No mean that we teach booze/substance abuse like we do reproductive science?

Tragic youthful mistake, or politically driven, school-induced ignorance?

The article mentions that a new state law makes it a felony to give alcohol to anyone under 21 if it turns out badly.

I’m sure punishing the other kids at the party will make the dead kid’s family a lot happier.

Almost as happy as if he’d had a biology teacher explain alcohol poisoning to him.

-

More on how KBR kills people by using the world’s worst project management ever (toxic fumes?).

-

Firing janitors (because we don’t have the balls to regulate Wall Street).

-

Dizikes to ChiTrib, Derek Wallbank Jr. to cover the Village for MinnPost.

-

Google News: not your mother’s media.

-

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has leukemia.

-

When you’re in power, you cut your folks some slack. Not to be all feminazi about it, but using healthcare reform to fuck with abortion services is the affront too far for me.

O, you’re on notice. Sign anything that restricts a woman’s right to an abortion and I’ll be looking for someone new in ‘12.

Someone who doesn’t remind me of Joe fucking Lieberman, the Armey of Dick, or Lincoln freaking Chafee.

Someone who has the balls to vote for principle, even in a tough district. [Yes I mean you, Tim Walz — even if it is bullshit that your CD leans right.]

But that doesn’t mean I support netroots pantswetting, or just about anything spearheaded by the always ambitious, never shy, creeptacular, self-promoting John Aravosis.

Boycotts? The only currency that means anything are votes. A donor boycott is the kind of lame shit you do after you forgot you used to be for campaign finance reform.

Look at the people who represent you. Who’s running against them in a primary next year? Why not? You don’t change the Village by re-electing these so-called Democrats. You get change through change.

We need more change.

Better change.

Change change.

Bitterenders waiting for the new Saddam

Krugman:

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings….

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit….

[S]omething snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.

Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.

Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

It’s the fate the Republican party deserves, but not a fate this country should have to endure. This Republican party is never coming back. If conservative Americans do manage to rescue the GOP from the dustbin of history, it will only be because they ridded themselves of the neo-Confederates and Dixiecrats, i.e., the people most responsible for what Rush would call the anal poisoning of the Republican party.

More from Krauthammer, who definitely did not get the memo, and more from Ed Markey who says G.O.P. now stands for Grandstand, Oppose and Pretend.

-

-

Chris Cillizza dumps on Gov. BridgeFail.

As you can see from this front page display from the Des Moines Register, Pawlenty’s not exactly setting Iowa on fire.

Yes, Gov. BridgeFail was at that event as well. And the doofus on the right? That’s the schlub who ran Iowa during the Reagan years. Blame his obsessive job destruction compulsion for me moving to Minnesota.

-

McClatchy has an insanely stupid story about how students and workers staying home sick could crash the Internet.

The catch? 40% of us would have to stay home sick. Without, of course, being so sick you pass on the internet and go with the tube instead.

Yes, once upon a time you could tell when the kids got home from school. The intertubes did slow down that noticeably.

I think we’ve moved past that now, however much the suits desperately desire to gate the ‘net and create new levels of service for which they can charge more.

-

An economist is somebody who did not have the personality to become an accountant.

-

Best Buy is shifting to download über alles this Xmas.

Do not buy download cards for young people on your shopping list. Just don’t. Not unless they ask, and then pat them on the head and praise them for being polite honest suckers.

I’m even thinking about picking up a Nano. I think I could fill one up.

Actually, I’m backing up my iTunes library starting last night. I realized that the RIAA goons were never going to break down my door, and that the biggest threat to my 76,000-song library was a hard drive crash.

I also suspect iTunes would run better if I reloaded it from one hard drive instead of the current five-drive array (yes, the USB drive is still kaput, but it just held movies and comics).

-

Courts stop Blue Beat from selling The Beatles catalog at a quarter a song.

The order set back a novel legal argument by BlueBeat that songs produced through digital regeneration are akin to songs performed by cover bands and therefore do not run afoul of copyright law. BlueBeat had argued in court filings that its downloads were legal because the company had created entirely new versions by computer through a process called “psychoacoustic simulations” that makes the re-created songs sound just like the original recordings.

But, as the article goes on to say, the court didn’t buy it.

-

A state senate candidate was furious that I went to work for her because he’d assumed I’d help out on his campaign. I was Joe Labor on a feminist campaign, office manager and volunteer straw boss for a woman who stood next to Gloria Steinem at the NYC Playboy Club protest back in the ’60s.

Roxanne Conlin is running against Chuck Grassley for the U.S. Senate in Iowa, and I wish her all the best.

Someone needs to unseat that twittering fool.

-

Palin’s “no cameras or recorders” speech.

-

This means it’s all bipartisan, right?

-

When a beard and a yarmulke speak as loudly as sheets and burning crosses: Sholom Rubashkin’s trial continues in Sioux Falls.

Lubbavitchers don’t believe they have to be honorable in their dealings with non-Lubbavitchers. It’s them against the world, or, in this case, them against the USDA, OSHA, and the State of Iowa.

If America were truly anti-Semitic, we’d let the Rubashkins sell all the fecal-contaminated meat they like.

-

Glenn W. Smith:

The debate over health care reform, for instance, has been bright with it. Just about every word uttered by the opponents of health care reform has been moonshine. Every word, and everyone knows it.  The House managed to shield its eyes from the glare just long enough to pass a health reform bill. And in retrospect, the attacks on reform look all the more ridiculous.

We were told that freedom would be destroyed by our better health. We were told health care reform was communism, or fascism, for socialism, or some other non sequiturism. We were told we’d go broke. Or maybe die. Well, at least if it makes us sick we can afford to see a doctor.

Now the Senate, then the conference committee.

A long way to go and more projection to overcome. (health insurance reform is LITERALLY THE SAME THING AS STALIN TIMES THE HOLOCAUST!)Do we have the courage to kill this beast if the Blue Dogs keep shoving poison up this bill’s ass?

Oh, and fuck Collin Peterson.

-

Greenwald on Friedman on Israel and leverage.

-

Bachmann gets leied.

-

Have I mentioned the unemployment rate for young adults lately?

 

 

Marri[gay]age

Your biweekly Kerdle from wordle.net.

You know, sometimes I think her wordles open windows into her real obsessions. Click to read her actual post at your own peril, or just take my word for it that this Tom Toles ‘toon covers everything she has to say and then some.

-

A Day in the Life: Who is Minnesota? Look online at some blogs to find out.

A long hed from Alleen Brown but her story contains a list of links to Minnesota blogs, of which I am one.

Interesting list filled with blogs I did not know about. Here’s the screenshot they took of some atypical content from me:

As well as a companion piece: Why do you blog? I did not make the cut on this one, but I dug out my email and this is what I sent Brown:

“I blog because I’m dissatisfied with the news media we have today”

or

“Because it’s become a habit.”

Use whichever works best for you.

[Note to self: try not to say fuck today.]

[Self to note: too late!]

UPDATE: I’ve been clicking on the other blogs in Brown’s article and I have to give Weapons of Massdistraction some kudos for what is easily the most disturbing picture I’ve seen since I did a nude centerfold of myself for an underground newspaper almost forty years ago.

-

Frank Rich writes about NY23. More from Eric Boehlert and related content from Phoenix Woman.

-

PZ has text to go with, but mostly I’m in awe of this visual:

-

Anyone who thinks you should tax land instead of property doesn’t know any farmers.

-

An adjustable chart that lets you see how many people like you are unemployed right now.

This is me:

People like me usually do better than me.

-

Gov. BridgeFail hasn’t hit rock bottom yet, but he’s getting there fast enough:

[Pawlenty] asked if they were tired of having “Democrats shove health care down your throats,” begging China to pay America’s debts and having the French president “lecturing us on the danger of appeasement.”

Each time, the crowd shouted, “Yes!”

Because healthcare is a scary big French dick of the sort you encounter in Chinese bankdellos.

-

Honduras.

-

I think the fact that Michele Bachmann voted at all is more noteworthy than her nay vote on health care for non-seniors (over the summer Bachmann racked up a 31% absentee rate on roll call votes). She was joined by Eric Paulsen, John Kline and Collin fucking Peterson.

Nice map, btw.

-

The coloring book sounds nice.

-

No Vikings today but Timberwolves tonight and in the meantime access to my kitchen sink has been obstructed by dishes.

Republicans disrupt House

Screaming, shouting, pantswetting Republicans doing their damnedest to disrupt the healthcare debate this morning.

And, in a last minute effort to swing votes for the anti-abortion crowd, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has just weighed in on healthcare reform.

-

Not fame I had sought out but it appears I’m being credited with having coined a new word. Scozzafavaed. Not the first word I’ve invented as the name of this blog would suggest.

Google blog search says I said it first, but the important thing is that people continue to use Scozzafavaed to describe the batshit insane civil war raging within the Republican party.

-

A new nickname for Michele Bachmann has wormed its way out of the Republican caucus and has found its way to The Raw Story: Captain Crazy.

More on the Party of No and efforts to spin the Fort Hood shootings.

-

Wolcott on Doug Hoffman and Sarah Palin.

-

Teabaggers force NRSC into a neutral corner as the base rocks the GOoPers’ world. David Dayen comments:

If this were happening in the Democratic Party, I would praise it, so let me briefly do the same here. People on the ground should decide who they want to be their nominee, not Senators playing favorites from back in Washington. Committees like this should respect their base and allow them to pick the candidates, and primaries are generally healthy events for parties. I certainly wish Rahm Emanuel heeded this.

Ditto the A-listers who think they have the right to raise money and influence primary and caucus races.

And just what the fuck ever happened to campaign finance reform?

-

Phoenix = Birmingham?

-

Robert Parry on the two times in my lifetime when Republican operatives scuttled U.S. foreign diplomacy to achieve domestic electoral results.

-

Pricetag for the $2.4 billion unemployment benefits extension? Try $24 billion.

-

The death of newspapers, cont.

-

EtC:

Obama’s evil empire?

The poetry of Helen Thomas

Mexico’s drug war

Deconstructing The Weekly Standard

Alexander Cockburn with a blistering take on America’s weight problem

Obama’s court appointments not white enough

-

You don’t care but my world just got a whole lot better. The railroad construction on Raymond Avenue is finally finished. The truck backup beepers going off all week made it clear they were packing up and leaving but I didn’t expect the street to be re-opened before rush hour last night, a full four days ahead of schedule.

I can now vote by walking two blocks instead of driving two miles.

Best of all, the three-story piledriver that drove me nuts last spring never came back.

And Iowa’s scozzafazaing Northwestern 10-7 early in the second quarter.

Eye openers

Dept. of What Comes Around:

The firm that designed the fateful Interstate 35W bridge has asked the National Transportation Safety Board to reopen its investigation into the Aug. 1, 2007, collapse.

The request by Pasadena, Calif.-based Jacobs Engineering Group was made in a 19-page letter sent within the past few weeks to the NTSB and obtained by the Pioneer Press….

“Most agree now that the NTSB it got wrong,” said victims attorney Chris Messerly, citing work by Boston-based engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti, which was hired by the victims. “They thought the initial cause was the gusset plate, and everyone knows now it was the frozen bearings.”

Frozen bearings? When the hell did they decide this was about frozen fucking bearings? I just searched Google News and of all the news stories on the entire planet, only this PiPress article comes up when you search for “frozen bearings.”

A steel truss structure, the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River was partly supported by large roller bearings set atop piers, which allowed the bridge to flex during hot and cold cycles, relieving tension on the bridge’s steel beams and connector plates, known as gussets.

But according to state inspection reports, one of those bearings was locked. And the collapse occurred on a hot summer day, when tons of construction materials were loaded on top of the bridge as part of a resurfacing project.

Congratulations to Bush’s NTSB for keeping the truth buried until well after Gov. BridgeFail got his sorry ass re-elected. And congratulations to Gov. BridgeFail for somehow getting this story buried on a Saturday.

-

Another Minnesota bank shut down by the FDIC.

See also Digby on how banks want to change the rules to let them get away with more, longer.

-

I know it’s just to burn Obama, but I like that the NY Times has finally discovered the real unemployment rate.

17.5%

There, now don’t you feel better?

-

We know there is a statistically significant association between having more than one deployment and P.T.S.D.

-

Best Joe Lieberman jokes ever!

-

Tom Tancredo storms off set after being challenged by Markos Moulitsas on The Ed Show.

Apparently Tancredo didn’t like be reminded of how he dodged the draft during Vietnam. You’d think he’d be over that by now, but I guess a coward is always a coward, and leaving the stage was the only response Tancredo had to Markos’ facts.

-

News flash: There are 237 millionaires in Congress.

Now what I’d love to know is this: how many have taken money from or invested with Goldman Sachs?

-

Julio Ojeda-Zapata reviews the Microsoft v. Apple battle of the commercials.

-

They took down the atheist ads on buses in Des Moines, then put them back on the buses but now they’re about to experience some pro-Christian ads.

A profitable controversy for public transit folks, I guess.

-

Uploaded some music last night. Details here.

-

And, as Atrios so often says, Mars, bitches.

 

A rubber ball the size of a coconut

Picked up a case of much riper pomegranates so by all rights this post should go up on the other blog, me already being well on my way to being that way.

But these are N links, not M links, and frankly, I don’t think they’d age well. Friday night stuff for the kind of people who stay home and glower on Friday nights.

My kind of people.

-

So by now I guess you’re not surprised that for a moment I was misremembering Jeb Bartlett as the good president we had in between Clinton and Bush II.

Cute video though.

-

Republicans:

Bernie Kerik pleas guilty (one of eight so seven more to come!) [go ahead, wallow]

Right Wing Nut House lashes out at extreme right nutters

Teapartiers embrace Russian doomsday sooth

Tom Coburn

Bachmann [more, more, more

Jim Gilchrist update

LitCritting O on his Fort Hood remarks

Lies and more lies

Atlas drugged

Neiwert on “right-wing Minnesota superblog True North” (featuring scads of lefty MN bloggers!)

Frottage

-

Shorter RNC gift story: The guy who let Norm Coleman sleep in his DC basement just got a $400,000 “gift” for volunteering to run the RNC last year.

And to think we’ve been arguing in the comments over at Brauer’s about whether Bill Kling’s $600,000 a year is too much!

-

The world we live in:

Orlando workplace shooting

Actors denouncing characters they were paid to play

13% Sure, Why Not?

World Net Daily already exploiting Fort Hood shooter to sell books

Whales and squid: what nature does when it’s not fucking season

TBogg

Pt V of Spotty’s Civil Forfeiture tutorial: Screwing the kid’s mom

Yaakov Teitel

At long last, justice

-

The media who program us:

Digby with Twin Cities video (I’m so proud)

Andrea Mitchell, acting out her husband’s age

Wall Street Journal has yet to mention outcome of NY23!

Copying from Politico

In case you’d forgotten how much you loathe Chris Matthews

TC radio ratings by corporation

Poniewozik on centrist bias (death to Flash!) (inside joke) (seriously, don’t kill Flash!) (OK, but I told you not to)

-

Etc:

I’d like to have some of this

Chomsky on Obama’s Nobel

Triceless in the Cities?

-

Time for the Bucks-Timberwolves game. Sports are so much more fun when you have to hunt down an illegal stream for yourself. (Hunting in this case meaning parking where you see all the pickups.)

Still, it seems odd to watch an NBA game without the World Serious on the other channel. An addiction I was totally totally ready for. In fact, I’m in favor of merging the two sports, creating the MLBNBA. Split the year between the two “divisions” with summer and winter rules and championship rounds in late spring and fall.

You go with a rubber ball the size of a coconut. I think that would be obvious. Bats are out but everyone gets an oversized hardwood jai alai cesta. Did I mention that the rubber balls would have soylent green covers? (The harvest from Obama’s death panels being put to utilitarian use just as The Great Helmsman would have done.)

Think basketball on grass except a smaller ball, no dribbling, no basket and lots of short fast guys. Rules would be greatly simplified. During the regular season the winner would be the first team to “take out” three players from the opposing team. Boxing rules with the ref there mostly just to count out the fallen. Championship games would be played to the last team standing.

Unpredictable duration like baseball, fast moving action like basketball. Plus you’ve got the body count of football with an insanely fast ball (hockey) and the expectation of serious injury to some of the players (NASCAR). After each game hard core fans would be hanging out at hospital website chatrooms waiting for updates on their favorite players.

More American than Sean Hannity with rules a child could figure out (or not — no rules is no rules). As many strategies and nuances as there are Chuck Norris infomercials and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies combined.

The only flaw in my thinking that I can detect is — and I’m sure most of you have picked up on it — this game is clearly meant to be played on horseback. And you’re right, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how we’d get it past the SPCA and PETA folks.

Music later at the other place. Old-fashioned basketball now.

 

 

Freedom bowling for freedoms

Michele Bachmann had her little rally on Capitol Hill and then, at her urging, the demonstrators stormed the Capitol building with twelve arrests being reported outside Speaker Pelosi’s office alone.

Because that, ladies and gentlemen, is what law and order abiding social conservatives do.

When they’re not shooting abortion doctors. Or engaging in escalating rhetoric that conflates health care with death camps.

Dana Milbank unloads some of the snark he usually reserves for Obama.

They came as directed, about 5,000 tea-party regulars and antiabortion activists, to the West Lawn of the Capitol on Thursday for what Bachmann called a “Super Bowl of Freedom,” sponsored by Republican members of Congress. And what a game it was.

Many of the demonstrators chanted “Weasel Queen,” their pet name for the speaker of the House. Others wore masks of Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.); they were covered in fake blood and carrying dolls representing aborted fetuses, as the Grim Reaper led them in chains to hell.

In the front of the protest, a sign showed President Obama in white coat, his face painted to look like the Joker. The sign, visible to the lawmakers as they looked into the cameras, carried a plea to “Stop Obamunism.” A few steps farther was the guy holding a sign announcing “Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds” [sic], accusing Obama of being part of a Jewish plot to introduce the antichrist.

But the best of Bachmann’s recruits were a few rows into the crowd, holding aloft a pair of 5-by-8-foot banners proclaiming “National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945.” Both banners showed close-up photographs of Holocaust victims, many of them children….

“Who knew a casual comment on TV could generate this?” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) exulted as he stood in front of the Dachau banner.

It’s hard to imagine the right going any lower, but Milbank’s not done.

[U]npredictable things tend to happen in the wide-open spaces of the Capitol’s West Front. Minutes into the rally, a breeze toppled the American flag from the stage.

More ominously, a man standing just beyond the TV cameras apparently suffered a heart attack 20 minutes after event began. Medical personnel from the Capitol physician’s office — an entity that could, quite accurately, be labeled government-run health care — rushed over, attaching electrodes to his chest and giving him oxygen and an IV drip.

This turned into an unwanted visual for the speakers, as a D.C. ambulance and firetruck, lights flashing, pulled in just behind the lawmakers. A path was made through the media section, and the patient, attended to by about 10 government medical personnel, was being wheeled away on a stretcher just as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) stepped to the microphone. “Join us in defeating Pelosi care!” he exhorted. A few members stole a glance at the stretcher. Boehner may have been distracted as well. He told the crowd he would read from the Constitution, then read the “we hold these truths” bit from the Declaration of Independence.

As you’d expect at a political protest, the messages on signs and buttons were provocative: “Waterboard Congress,” “A Commie Is in the House.”

But this protest was unusual because it was an official House GOP event, and because some of the remarks on the stage were as outrageous as those in the crowd. The actor Jon Voight, standing with the lawmakers, said of Obama: “Could it be he has had 20 years of subconscious programming by Reverend Wright to damn America?”

Even the Rev. Stephen Broden, at the microphone to deliver the closing prayer, fumed about “death panels inside this death care,” adding: “It is tyranny! It is socialism!”

The lawmakers set the tone early, when Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) asked for the Pledge of Allegiance because “it drives the liberals crazy” to hear the “under God” part (his bravado was premature, for he left out the word “indivisible”). The tone continued to the end, when Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.) beckoned to the House office buildings and shouted, “Go get ‘em!”

In my life the only thing I’ve seen anything like this was the defiance from Dixie over desegregation. Nutters leading nutters in a charge of the white brigade into the valley of deathers.

Half a brain, half a brain,
Half a brain onward,
All in the valley of Deathers
Rode the six thousand….

-

Jon Stewart on Glenn Beck.

Eight minutes of grind-it-out, unrelenting satire.

-

Back in the days of yore, conservatives mocked every new thing with exaggerated affect. Or pissing and moaning as we used to call it.

Opinuendo isn’t greeting instant runoff cheerfully or in good faith, so saeth the Wege.

-

Some major flipped out and shot a dozen of his fellow soldiers because he was going to be deployed to Afghanistan.

It’s past time we got the fuck out of Afghanistan.

-

eTc:

Krugman

10.2%

Ehrenreich on vaccine

Wingnuts celebrate Phillies’ Series win

Bill Kling’s compensation (check out the commentfest)

Getting closer to a cure for common diarrhea

Mitch Berg shamefully amps up some AP flimflammery to suggest that KY census worker Bill Sparkman tied himself up and committed suicide

Atlantic school says strip searching is NOT OK

Honduras

LA Times gives free article to anonymous fuckwad [almost reads like The Onion]

-

You don’t have to like this cartoon, but the point is absolutely correct. We’re getting Wall Street solutions to Wall Street created problems.

-

MinnPost’s second birthday party is this Sunday at St. Anthony Main.

It sounded like fun, and then I saw there’s going to be a program.

There will be no program at Wegestock.

Just remember to pass on the brown acid and dress for mud.

-

Carl Ballantine, R.I.P.

He was already old when I was young, but I like the crowd he hung out with.

Saving the plant for later

Nothing like a late night meeting with an attorney to make me reach for the bottle and pipe. Not my attorney, but the meeting was about stuff I’ll have to help with so there you go.

I did get some kind of potted plant to go with my retainer. Actually I was asked to throw it in the dumpster on the way out but it wasn’t dead yet so I figured why not take it home? That gives me the entire winter to torture it and then, just as spring arrives…I’ll kill it.

All part of my 50-year master plan to exact my revenge on the crops I had to tend to in my youth.

|•-·

Bernie Horn has an interesting observation about the off-off-year elections.

Voters continue to allow conservative candidates to define themselves. The Republican candidates for governor in both New Jersey and Virginia promoted themselves as practical, mainstream, and moderate—and persuadable voters believed them. But even bedrock Republicans will reject candidates who openly embrace the extremist, tea-bagger philosophy that dominates Republicans in our Nation’s Capital.

It’s not good news that average Americans continue to buy into rightwing crap when they take the time to lie about their agenda, but it’s good news that when the right runs as the right, the voters make a face and pick the Democrat. [additional post-mortem]

More of the lies and greasy truths as told by Republicans:

John Fund’s bullshit about ACORN [PW's take]

Steve King dispelled

Dick Armey makes Doug Hoffman, then rakes him

Super Bowl of Freedom

Dickpicking

As well as the usual media smirkprop:

I’ve been waiting for this one: Bill Kling’s total annual compensation [more]

Diane Sawyer jumps the tofurkey

Net neutrality

|•-·

Matt Taibbi:

Nothing else explains people like Alan Greenspan and Megan McArdle and all those other idiotic Ayn Rand devotees, big and small, who continually go out there in public and flog pseudo-religious beliefs about the self-correcting free-market as a cure-all for anything and everything, even as evidence to the contrary rains down from the sky like volcanic ash.  These people actually believe this shit and they believe it with the imbecilic ferocity of teenagers, even the ones who are 190 years old like Greenspan (who incidentally finally conceded a “flaw” in his thinking, but only after the entire world exploded and even all the reality-proof friendly data sources he had relied upon for his whole life told him his ideas were fucked), and it’s nearly impossible to get them to let so much as a sliver of their belief systems go.

Hard not to love a guy who ends a post with “What a bunch of assholes!”

It does come down to that. When the status quo is klepto, anything beyond “assholes” is overwriting. It’s time for reductive assessments and direct speech.

Taibbi:

They lie to themselves and think up elaborate reasons to do the bad acts they were already hoping to do anyway. Some day, when historians finish peeling back all the different onion-layers of this financial disaster we’re living out right now, they’re going to find at the heart of it all this social Darwinist mantra wherein a very small group of overeducated twerps agreed to believe that stealing every last dime they could get their hands on was something other than what it looks and sounds like to the rest of us.

Since the ’70s I have been asking for an explanation as to how the stock market makes any sense whatsoever. Banks call it quit when you pay them off but with stock Wall Street owns a piece of you forever, which is way longer than the time it took you to spend the original investment.

It doesn’t please me that people I know who worked hard all their life have nothing more to show for it than a bum like me who grasshoppered his way through both Bush interregnums. People have been swindled, conned, Ponzied and left hanging out to dry. Survivors are being worked like dogs and they’re the lucky ones.

It’s OK to be mad about this. It’s even more OK to insist something be done about it.

|•-·

Honduras.

|•-·

Obama has now named a total of 25 nominees to the federal bench since taking office. So far, he has won confirmation for only three of the nominees — including Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The others have been caught in anonymous holds and filibuster threats from Senate Republicans that have slowed the proceedings.

|•-·

Bishop Spong draws a line in the sand, then turns his back on it and walks away.

I can see why Tild likes the dude.

|•-·

Three-quarters of 17- to 24-year-olds aren’t fit for duty. Reasons? Poorly educated, overweight, criminal records, drug use, mental problems, physical ailments and all the other problems associated with poverty and a culture debased by corporate values.

They were ages 9 through 15 when George W. Bush took office. Imagine what the next batch will be like.

[via MinnPost]

]•-·

EtC:

German healthcare

Gayest gubernatorial race ever