Michael Scheuer, digging himself deeper. As Will would say, it’s so ironic my balls hurt.

COLMES: You don’t think the President of the United States, Barack Obama, cares about protecting this country.

SCHEUER: No, I don’t. Because I don’t think he realizes what the world is like outside the United States. [...]

COLMES: You don’t think he wants to protect the country?

SCHEUER: I don’t think he can, sir. [...]

COLMES: He doesn’t want to protect the country?

SCHEUER: Not if it costs votes.

I’m not even sure how he thinks that works. Does he think a terrorist attack wouldn’t cost votes? Does Al Qaeda only target Republicans or something?

That’s what this dumbass is saying.

Let me get this out of the way: I love Helen Thomas, for the most part. She’s about two hundred years old and is the absolute bane of every administration because she’ll ask quite literally any question. She’s a little like that one grandma that’ll blurt out the question at Thanksgiving dinner that everyone else is trying to avoid in order to be polite. Everyone’s sitting all quietly talking about whether or not the turkey is slightly dry and then Gramma Ethel blurts out “So why is Bobby in the special classes?”

The problem is that not everything is an apocalyptic calamity, and I don’t think ol’ Helen Thomas has quite managed to separate them. It seems like the press is in an absolute uproar over the fact that a writer on the Huffington Post was allowed to ask a question, causing Helen Thomas to (no shit) accuse the Obama administration of being worse than Nixon in terms of media control.

Thomas said she was especially concerned about the arrangement between the Obama Administration and a writer from the liberal Huffington Post Web site. The writer was invited by the White House to President Obama’s press conference last week on the understanding that he would ask Obama a question about Iran from among questions that had been sent to him by people in Iran.

“When you call the reporter the night before you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you,” Thomas said.

“I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well–for the town halls, for the press conferences,” she said. “It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.”

Plus a rather amusing exchange between Gibbs, Thomas, and another guy about the administration’s stranglehold on the media. Or something.

Some background here. Nico Pitney is a writer for the Huffington Post. He’s made a heck of a name for himself over the past month by covering the Iranian election with almost frightening intimacy. Constant blogging, videos, a deeper look into the situation than anyone in the “traditional” media has been willing to give it. So the Obama administration, impressed with him, invited him to the press conference to ask about Iran and said they might call on him. No guarantees. This has now been blown up to mean the president is screening questions.

Oh by the way, here’s the “softball” that Pitney threw him.

“Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn’t that a betrayal of the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

Ironically, the “screened and preapproved” question that the guy asked was harder and more pointed than anything out of the normal press pit.

Let’s shoot back a few years for one name: Jeff Gannon. Remember that guy? The Bush administration had a man in his press corps that did not work for the media whatsoever (he was actually a male escort) whose job was to sit in the pit and if the press secretary took questions that were too hard, he’d call on Gannon and get an easy one. The guy’s entire purpose was to cut off any line of tough questions. Yet there’s Helen Thomas, screeching about this as though it were the worst thing ever.

Their fundamental issue is somewhat valid, if overblown here. Traditionally, the press corps is called on at random and their questions have in no way been predetermined. The president or press secretary hasn’t told anyone who’ll be called on and doesn’t know what questions are coming. So, on the surface, this is a huge break.

However, again, this wasn’t a case of Obama calling up David Gregory and saying “I’ll call on you first as long as you ask me about my daughter’s first day at school.” He invited a prominent internet reporter on Iran down into the pit to ask about Iran. The difference between the two accusations is a mile wide, and the fact that Gibbs was up at the podium arguing with these two about it is proof positive that Obama doesn’t plan on forcing anyone to toe his line. Even that’s ignoring the fact that Pitney gave a hell of a harder question than anyone else did.

There are a million and one reasons to bitch at Obama. This is totally not one of them. The moment Obama legitimately starts infiltrating and controlling the press I’ll be on him like white on rice, but this is nothing at all.

Anyone who’s tracked Steelio has pretty much figured out that he isn’t playing with a full deck. Still, up until now he always struck me as a guy who’s up on the national stage and wasn’t sure how to best grapple with that. But in this rambling, incoherent mess bitching about how Democrats “hijack” elections somehow, Steele has gone Palin* on us.

I defy you to make sense of any of this.

STEELE: Well, you know, I think you raise a very important and frightening concern here, and that is the Democrats have spent the last six to eight years building in place an infrastructure to allow them to basically hijack elections at their whim.

…

Steele claimed that Democratic secretaries of states are working with ACORN in a way “that basically land locks these elections in such a way that they basically walk out of the election with the votes that they need.” He added that “they have activities by groups like an ACORN, or individuals like George Soros through their funding, to help them augment the taking of these elections.”

Honestly, what the hell does any of that mean? What infrastructure? How is Soros’ funding of whoever he wants to fund tantamount to election stealing? What the fuck does “landlock” mean in this example? Why is he still talking about ACORN? Does Michael Steele actually have a clue what he’s talking about?

We talk about “fearmongering” a lot on here and in the liberal blogosphere in general, but let me offer a useful definition. When a politician uses language to cause people to fear certain entities but offers no explanation why, we’re dealing with fearmongering. Saying that Democrats can hijack elections through “activities” and “funding” but not even attempting to say what any of that actually is, that’s fearmongering. To instill fear in people simply for the sake of doing it.

When liberals talked about stealing elections, we had actual justification for it. Diebold machines were notoriously unreliable and hack-prone, caging lists were discovered to toss out ballots, for pete’s sake Tom Delay gerrymandered Texas to solidify Republican rule. We didn’t just throw out names and verbs and act like if we wave our arms enough that supplants the need to explain ourselves.

Steele, in that mess of a rant, basically had conservative Tourette’s. He threw out a bunch of random bogeymen and acted like it made sense. Just because your sentences contain the right parts of speech doesn’t mean you had a coherent thought, and Steele just showed how out of it he really is.

*By the way to “go Palin” means that an individual who had previously been mocked for lacking intelligence, but really might simply have been inexperienced, has proven the criticism not just apt, but understated.

Guy on Beck suggests we need to be attacked again to remind us how dangerous terrorists are, Beck agrees, guy offers bullshit apology.

Wow, that was a hell of a ride, wasn’t it?

Who would have guessed in 2004, when the “permanent Republican majority” was looking to be cemented and we couldn’t even beat George W Bush when it felt like the entire world was against him, that the pendulum would swing so far in the other direction? A scant two years ago just regaining the majority seemed like a pipe dream, let alone taking control of every branch.

Yet here we are. A Democrat in the White House, a Supreme Court that’s in the process of being re-shaped, a huge majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate that doesn’t even need Lieberman (if you count Specter). The Democratic Party is, for all intents and purposes, bulletproof. If you guys wanted to just trample all over the Republicans and pretend like they aren’t there, you could. There is nothing, at least nothing of substance, to stop you from finally getting all those reforms and policies pushed through.

So let me just say: don’t fuck it up.

Continue reading An open letter to the Democratic Party

Happy days are here at last!

…except it’s to celebrate the fact that we’re leaving.

Iraqi soldiers paraded through the streets in their American-made vehicles draped with Iraqi flags and flowers, chanting, dancing and calling the pullout a “victory.”

One drove a motorcycle with party streamers on it; another, a Humvee with a garland of plastic roses on the grill.

…

“The American forces’ withdrawal is something awaited by every Iraqi: male, female, young and old. I consider June 30 to be like a wedding,” said Ahmed Hameed, 38, near an ice cream bar in Baghdad’s upmarket Karrada district.

Crucial quote here:

“It is a big joy to see them leaving,” said Abu Hassan, 60, a shop owner. “There might be some more attacks because of struggles between the different parties, but Iraqis are controlling security now. It’s up to our forces now.”

Even if attacks go up a tad, Iraqis themselves are happy because they themselves are the ones in charge of securing it. They’d rather some more violence than another day of American occupation.

I think what’s comically… curious about the above statement is that we have an Iraqi shop owner better embodying Ben Franklin’s famous statement than the American conservative movement. Remember this one? “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The Iraqis are eager to live by this motto, living a life that’s not quite so secure but one run by their own, and over here we still have politicians squealing about bombing half the country and placing surveillance on every bit of data in the name of “security”.

We’re at a point where we can draw inspiration from the Iraqis and Iranians, folks.

The right-wing persecution complex rather comfortably nestles into the scientific sphere. Any hackneyed “study” that supposedly shatters a point made by mean old liberal scientists was obviously “suppressed” because there’s no other reason to fathom why scientists don’t accept a theory that God magically created life or that homosexuality is just a lifestyle choice that can be changed with the help of Jesus.

This time it’s that an anti-global-warming study was silenced just to pass the Cap and Trade legislation.

The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington (where I served as a journalism fellow in 1995) obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama’s willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of “consensus.” In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, asked agency officials to distribute his analysis on the health effects of greenhouse gases. EPA has proposed a public health “endangerment finding” covering CO2 and five other gases that would trigger costly, extensive new regulations of motor vehicles. The open comment period on the ruling ended this week. But Carlin’s study didn’t fit the blame-human-activity narrative, so it didn’t make the cut.

Notice the presumption that the reason Carlin’s study was rejected was because of an attempt at agenda control. It couldn’t possibly be because the study itself was flawed. No no no. See, that theory doesn’t fit the blame-liberals-for-everything narrative, so it doesn’t make the conservative cut.

The following quote was plucked out as proof of said conspiracy.

“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision… I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

The wack-a-doodle interpretation is that this is proof that the Obama administration is shutting out any contrary voices. The more reasonable way to look at it would be that they’d already spent a while deciding whether or not global warming is a problem and now the time was what to do about it. Then in comes Carlin with his big stack of papers saying “no wait it’s all crap!” Does the Administration stop everything and go back to square one?

Just like Intelligent Design and gay therapy, right-wingers want to shove junk science down our throats and if it doesn’t work they bitch and cry about “discrimination”.

This may come as a shock, but the avalanche of Republican sex scandals is not something I particularly like seeing. Really, no one should. Watching someone’s personal life laid bare for the world to mock and tear apart, plus the havoc it wreaks on their generally innocent family members, is not that much fun.

However, it should serve to remind us that the “common wisdom” in American politics that Republicans stand for strong, stout moral values while Democrats stand for hedonism is an artificial categorization with nothing in reality to prop it up.

Affairs happen, people are imperfect. As George Carlin once said, “you’re all diseased.” It’s an absolute shame and represents a downright terrible failure of judgment, but it does happen and fairly often. I do not believe there is one person that saw of these stories who was not closely affected by infidelity in some manner, be it their own relationship or that of a relative or close friend.

Continue reading Why the GOP sex scandals matter