Thursday Stuff

post from The Liberal Doomsayer on 12 April 2012 11:56:00 PM. © The Liberal Doomsayer

Looks like it?s time again for ?the professional left? in the form of yours truly to take Number 44 to task over this; sooo?he quite rightly supported overturning DADT, but he apparently has no problem with LGBT discrimination in the workplace (here)? And that goes on top of the JOBS bill BS as noted here (the first sign of trouble is when sleazy weasel Eric Cantor showed up for the signing into law ? he shouldn't even be in the same area code...I give you Matt Taibbi on this here).

Oh, and you know the recent strip search ruling by the Supreme Court? It was actually supported by the Obama DOJ (here).

There are some things that can be excused by right-wing looniness, but not this?

...meanwhile, looks like Willard Mitt and his GOP playmates continue to have self-inflicted ?woman trouble? (here)?

?leading to this potentially game-changing development (wink)?

Romney To Travel Back In Time To Kill Liberal Versions Of Himself

?but returning to the Obama stuff, I happened to hear this tune once more recently, and sadly, I think it still fits.

Read The Full Article:
http://liberaldoomsayer.blogspot.com/2012/04/thursday-stuff.html

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Picture Emblematic Of The Idiocy And Laziness Of
Much Of Everyday Life

post from Texas Liberal on 12 April 2012 11:42:43 PM. © Texas Liberal

I took this picture at the Houston Zoo a few days back. The person who bought the ice cream or whatever in the plastic dish that you see, was unable to get the used dish to the trash can that was just a few feet away. This picture is just so emblematic of the idiocy [...]

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http://texasliberal.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/picture-emblematic-of-the-idiocy-and
-laziness-of-much-of-everyday-life/

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Open Thread

post from Crooks and Liars on 12 April 2012 11:30:45 PM. © Crooks and Liars

video details and more

Happy National Grilled Cheese Day. (Yes, that's a real thing.)

Open thread below...

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/bluegal-aka-fran/open-thread-280

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Open thread for night owls: Rep. Todd Akin mourns
inability to impeach Obama over nothing

post from Daily Kos on 12 April 2012 11:30:04 PM. © Daily Kos

Open Thread for Night Owls A small word of warning: I am very, very tired of dealing with human stains like Mr. Todd Akin and his ilk, and so am not going to be very nice here, nor very lucid about it. Mea culpa.

At a Tuesday meeting with his Missouri constituents, Republican Rep. Todd Akin (yes, sigh, he's yet another crackpot) was asked the very serious and not at all insane question of why President Obama hasn't been impeached yet for, you know, stuff. Now, there are two ways to go with a question like this. One, you can calmly and gently remind your crackpot constituent that presidents of These United States ought not to just be impeached willy-nilly because you do not like them, or because you suspect them of being secretly Muslim, or because blah-blah-freaking-blah. Or two, you can agree with your batshit crazy constituent about what a travesty it is, and express great sadness that Congress won't impeach this fellow for all these terrible things you've been imagining him doing because the Senate wouldn't let you:

"[Y]ou?re never going to get something through the Senate. That doesn?t mean that at a certain point you just say enough, I don?t care enough about the Senate, duty calls us to just get up and just impeach this guy. And maybe he?s not quite gotten to the point where you?ve got the Republicans ? basically all the Republican bloc is not quite mad enough for that.?

When Mr. Akin makes a statement about the Republican Party not being quite mad enough yet, forgive me for taking that in a way other than the way he meant it. Or maybe he indeed meant it that way. I'd say they're as mad as a March hare on acid, personally.

The bar for impeachment of a sitting president seems to be getting lower by the year, but even still; seeing that the last said impeachment was for the high crime of lying about extramarital sexytimes (something that has never happened before or since, in Washington, and pay no attention to that Newt Gingrich fellow who I seem to recall was very, very put out by whole affair), you might wonder what it is that Congressman Jesus Q. Nutbar here thinks the current president of the United States has done to deserve impeachment. Well, it's because of stuff, of course.

Obama, he said, ?ignores the Constitution, he ignores the laws, he wants to impose all of the czars, he completely ignores the train wreck of the economy, which he?s causing with trillion-dollar-plus deficits every year you go along.?

You know what? I'm sick of these people. Have I mentioned recently that I'm sick of these people before? I have? Ah.

So Obama "ignores the Constitution" and "laws." Well, that's just peachy keen. Our last administration committed acts that some of their own effing lawyers considered war crimes, but we couldn't possibly fault them for that. You've got the Republican candidates bragging about how they'd ignore laws all day long if they didn't agree with them. (Newt: I'd shutter the whole damn 9th Circuit if they said things I didn't like.) I'd be interested in seeing what parts of the Constitution Akin thinks Obama is ignoring, because the only ones I suspect our current president might be botching are the exact same ones our previous president lit fire to as well. I don't think those are the parts Akin is referring to, though.

It is the bit about "imposing all the czars", however, where Mr. Akin happily runs off the rails and then some. Czars. He's proposing that Obama be impeached because Republicans started calling a bunch of very normal and boring government functionaries czars, and were suddenly upset that the administration was "imposing" them when all of the other past administrations of the country apparently put nobody in government that was not directly birthed from the noble gasses of Grover Norquist's noble posterior. We're talking about impeachment for the czars talking point. I wasn't even aware there were still people alive who still were dumb enough to even cop to being faux-outraged at Washington "czars," but once again, I have misunderestimated the depths of congressionally mandated stupidity.

Ignoring the economy? Sweet merciful crap, have you seen the lengths to which Congress has gone to avoid addressing one damn thing about the economy? Were you not there, Mr. Akin, when your party held up the entire government in their effort to extend deficit-extending tax cuts? If we're going to start impeaching people for ignoring the dismal economy, I will make a list. And you're on it, jackass.

Again, what is remarkable is that there just seems to be no lower bound on how outlandish the Republican Party can become, or how gullible, or how conspiracy-addled. People grumbling about impeaching the president for purely partisan reasons is the new normal. People ranting about "communists" in Congress is normal. Birtherism is now normal. The whole damn party has devolved into the sort of thing that used to be passed out in pamphlets written by crazy people in front of airports, back when we Americans were still allowed in airports, but we're all supposed to go on our merry little way pretending that none of it is all that exceptional. What's next, tattoos of Reagan punching hippies? Mass not-gay marriages? Can we please at least start drug testing these people before letting them write laws for us?

?He is a complete menace to our civilization,? he said. ?The question is what?s the best way to get rid of him, I think probably at the ballot box next election, we need to get that done.?

This person is either high or crazy. I don't care how nice your suit is, if your compass is so badly bent that now even someone like Barack Obama looks like a secret Muslim communist bent on destroying your way of life, you are deranged. A note to Mr. Akin's staffers: Get this man some help. Don't just sit there, call someone. Stage an intervention. Start going through his desk looking for suspicious-looking pills. Anything.

It should be noted that Akin followed up the Tuesday constituent meeting with, today, a conference call with ex-Rep. Tom "Still Appealing My Prison Sentence" DeLay to pray and talk about how liberals hate God and how good conservative convicted criminals like Tom DeLay are goodness and light and absolutely riddled with Jesusness and oh my effing eff I cannot believe how little shame this collection of dipshits has. If these are the best clowns we can come up with for governing our country, we are very, very screwed.

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:

NEWSCASTER BOB: Good evening, and welcome to the news. A disturbing revelation tonight, as reports indicate the abusive treatment of prisoners in United States custody was specifically endorsed at the highest levels of government. Vice President Richard Cheney, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft and CIA Director George Tenet specifically signed off on torture techniques like "waterboarding" that could be used on prisoners, including specific numbers of times some techniques could be used.
This contradicts frequent statements by the administration that these torture techniques were not used, and may have legal ramifications as --
PUNDIT 1: Bob, I'm going to have to break in here. We have breaking news that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama today turned down a cup of coffee, asking for orange juice instead. Could this be the gaffe that brings down the Obama campaign? Let's talk to our panel of interchangeable political experts.
PUNDIT 2: This is remarkable, Interchangeable Pundit 1. Can a man be president if he turns down a cup of coffee? I think that shows a remarkable elitism -- just a shocking blunder, on his part. How will Obama connect with rural America if he doesn't show respect for them and their beverages?
PUNDIT 3: I agree, Interchangeable Pundit 2. I mean, Obama is trying to court small town voters -- where does he think he is, the Ritz? How many of these people does he think have ever heard of something called "orange juice?"
PUNDIT 1: Exactly, Pundit 3. I mean, you have to think he's just offended so many of these folks. I wrote a column last year about how much good, decent rural Americans like their morning coffee. These people don't know what "orange juice" is. They've never had it. To have some guy come in to their town and ask for "orange juice", like he was a Prussian king or something -- I mean, that's really not going to go down well with these old fashioned, everyday yokels. Really, really a blunder. It really shows his lack of respect for these small town Americans. [...]

Tweet of the Day:

Charles Manson is denied parole, effectively ending his bid for the GOP presidential nomination: http://t.co/...
? @BorowitzReport via web

High Impact Posts. Top Comments.

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http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/7-tZKMneSkg/-Open-thread-for-night
-owls-Rep-Todd-Akin-mourns-inability-to-impeach-Obama-over-nothing

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I Made The Sun Look Like A Flower

post from Texas Liberal on 12 April 2012 11:25:41 PM. © Texas Liberal

I took this picture of the sun a few days ago, and I made it look like a flower. I don’t know why it turned out that way.

Read The Full Article:
http://texasliberal.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/i-made-the-sun-look-like-a-flower/

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The Koch Brothers Are Perfectly Sincere

post from The American Prospect on 12 April 2012 11:23:05 PM. © The American Prospect

I've thought before that if I had a few billion dollars to give away, one of the things I'd do would be to bend the political world to my will, much like Charles and David Koch do. Not only would you get the satisfaction of helping to produce positive change, you could, if you were clever enough, destroy politicians who irritate you. A Republican state legislature somewhere tries to force women to endure some novel kind of slut shaming? Hey, Mr. State Rep who spent $82,000 on his last campaign, how're you going to feel when I drop a million dollars of attack ads on you? Bwah hah hah.

If you're going to do that with your few billion dollars, it's part of the deal that the other side is going to attack you. The more effective you are, the more visible you'll become, and the more nasty things will be said about you by people you don't like anyway. And you can't really let that get you too upset. I'm sure George Soros doesn't lose sleep every time Bill O'Reilly claims he's at the head of a sinister conspiracy. It may not be enjoyable to be criticized that way, but it's the price you pay for playing at that level.

But Molly Ball at The Atlantic tells us that the Kochs, the oil magnates who fund all manner of libertarian and Republican causes, get very upset when Democrats claim they're trying to manipulate the political process for their own profit:

This is only the latest back-and-forth between the Kochs and their antagonists -- they recently got into it, along similar lines, with Obama campaign manager Jim Messina after he put them to similar symbolic use as stock villains in a fundraising missive, with a response that charged Messina with wanting to stifle honest ideological debate. The real issue appears to be the Kochs' unwillingness to accept their lot in life -- the place they've been assigned in the liberal demonology. Rather than ruthless industrialists pursuing profit above all, they want to be seen as honest brokers -- sincere, philosophically motivated political actors who want nothing more than to make the world a better place.

Well, yeah. Of course that's how they think of themselves. No man considers himself a cartoon villain. As far as the Koch brothers are concerned, their profits are the result of their virtuous business acumen, free markets unencumbered by government meddling are a moral good, and the money they give away to advance free markets (i.e. a lack of things like environmental regulations) does indeed make the world a better place. The fact that the policies they favor would also help their business' profitability actually proves how worthy those policies are, since private profits are also a moral good. If they didn't think those things, they wouldn't be libertarian Republicans. They'd be Democrats. But they aren't.

That they see themselves as creating a better world isn't surprising at all, nor is the fact that they'd like everyone to see them that way. What would be surprising, however, is if they think such a thing is even remotely possible.

Read The Full Article:
http://prospect.org/article/koch-brothers-are-perfectly-sincere

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Thought Of The Day

post from Texas Liberal on 12 April 2012 11:03:03 PM. © Texas Liberal

It is easy to join a permanent opposition or to make common cause for a brief time with the enemy of your enemy. It is a more difficult thing to “govern” in the sense of offering a viable alternative to the powers that be even as you remain a figure of opposition.

Read The Full Article:
http://texasliberal.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/thought-of-the-day/

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C&L's Late Night Music Club With Lambchop

post from Crooks and Liars on 12 April 2012 11:00:23 PM. © Crooks and Liars

Title: 2B2Artist: Lambchop

Lambchop's literate, soul-infused Americana is often overlooked here in the States. Whereas you might find them playing to a half packed room at a dive here in their hometown of Nashville, they are widely heralded across Europe, filling theaters and large clubs easily. Tonight's video was filmed on their Spring 2012 European tour, and the song is off of their 11th studio album Mr. M. Check it.

2B2

Price: $0.89 (As of 04/12/12 05:43 pm details)

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/jared-shade-reynolds/cls-late-night-music-club-lam

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Late Night FDL: The Struggles Ive Seen

For Republicans and the media who coddle them, nothing is more painful and likely to induce mass fainting spells than the truth, and the faux "controversy" over Hilary Rosen's disparaging comments about Ann Romney's idle life in the lap of luxury is a[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/bgxGogkqUKE/

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Daily Kos Elections Polling Wrap: Obama behind!
(But only if 2012 turnout looks like 2010)

We got a new national poll today, and it no doubt damned near broke the Drudge Siren (I didn't bother to check, to be honest with you).

And, on a light polling day, it actually offers a teachable lesson about how to read polls. But, first, all the other nums on a relatively light Thursday:

GOP (PRESIDENTIAL) PRIMARY NUMBERS:

NATIONAL (Fox News): Romney 46, Paul 16, Santorum 15, Gingrich 15
NEW JERSEY (Quinnipiac): Romney 51, Santorum 14, Gingrich 9, Paul 7

PRESIDENTIAL GENERAL ELECTION TRIAL HEATS:

NATIONAL (Fox News): Romney d. Obama (46-44)
NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking): Obama tied with Romney (45-45)
NEW JERSEY (Quinnipiac): Obama d. Romney (49-40); Obama d. Santorum (51-36)

DOWNBALLOT POLLING:

NJ-SEN (Quinnipiac): Sen. Robert Menendez (D) 44, Joseph Kyrillos (R) 35
PA-SEN--R (McLaughlin for Tom Smith): Tom Smith 29, Sam Rohrer 14, Steven Welch 9, David Christian 7, Marc Scaringi 2

One quick thought about that Fox News poll after the jump.