Republican News Update

Republicans Gone Wild

Rudy Quote I Forgot
New York Firefighters have been in Florida, helping ensure Giuliani loses the race there once and for all. They particularly don't like his slimy use of the WTC attacks to promote himself and his decision-making 'competence'.

"He didn't prepare us before, during, or after," says Riches.

Giuliani has campaigned strongly on his leadership during the attacks on New York, claiming he is the best suited to prevent an "Islamic terrorist war against us." But the firefighters were quick to question that courage.

"Yeah, the decision he made was, which direction he was going to run," says Riches. "And he ran north, and that's all he did."

Ouch.

Source: Raw Story

Fuckabee
So Mike Huckabee wants to amend the Constitution to conform with the Bible.

Darn. I really like my blended fabrics too!

If that sounds too extreme and aggressive to describe the smiling Huck -- who introduced himself to the country as "a conservative, but I'm not angry about it" -- then consider how he explained his urge to revamp the nation's founding document. At a public forum on the eve of the Michigan primary, while mocking Republican opponents who don't want to append a "marriage amendment" or a "life amendment" to the Constitution, he said: "I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."

Go ahead, try it Mike. See how far you get. There'll be another Civil War before you can get that amendment passed, I guarantee it.

Source: Salon.com

Despicable Semi-Human Monsters
I'm as sick of Heath Ledger news as the next person whose bloodflow reaches his brain, but this is just too horrible to pass up.

Opening his radio show with funeral music yesterday, Fox News host John Gibson callously mocked the death of actor Heath Ledger, calling him a “weirdo” with a “serious drug problem.”

Playing an audio clip of the iconic quote, “I wish I knew how to quit you” from Ledger’s gay romance movie Brokeback Mountain, Gibson disdainfully quipped, “Well, he found out how to quit you.” Laughing, Gibson then played another clip from Brokeback Mountain in which Ledger said, “We’re dead,” followed by his own, mocking “We’re dead” before playing the clip again.

...

Throughout the course of the show, Gibson continued to bring up Ledger’s death while discussing current events, jokingly claiming that current events may have caused him to commit suicide.

Of course, Gibson has tried to backpedal on his various obscene commentaries and hoping this will all blow over, as it surely will, what with being employed by Fox Noise and all.

On his Fox News show today, John Gibson apologized for his recent comments mocking the death of actor Heath Ledger. “I’m sorry that some took my comments as anti-gay and insensitive,” said Gibson. “Once again, to anyone offended by my comments, I’m sorry.”

...

UPDATE: Gibson said the same apology on his radio show this evening, though before mentioning that his comments were “anti-gay and insensitive,” he added the words “some gay groups.”

Oh yeah, it's just teh gay who are upset at him being a colossal prick.

Right.

Source: Think Progress (Initial Story)
Think Progress (Update/Apology/Update)

McCain Is Scum
So McCain thinks that getting out of Iraq is 'surrender' and handing a victory to Al-Queda... who weren't in Iraq before we got there.

Senator John McCain launched into a pointed critique of his Senate colleague Hillary Rodham Clinton today, saying that “for the first time in political history” a presidential candidate has called for outright surrender in a war.

“Candidate Clinton has called for surrender and waving the white flag,” he said during an appearance in West Palm Beach. “I think it’s terrible. I think it’s terrible.”

...

“I look forward to the debate with Senator Clinton on that issue. Americans don’t want to throw away the hard-earned gains we have made against Al Qaeda and Iraq. If Senator Clinton has her way, Al Qaeda will trumpet to the world that they have beaten the United States.”

Name one, asshole. Name ONE gain.

Go on. I'm waiting. One way in which we're better off now than before the war.

No, Halliburton stock prices don't count.

Clinton responds of course:

Phil Singer, a spokesman for Senator Clinton, emailed this response: “Senator Clinton and Senator McCain disagree. Senator McCain says it would be fine with him if our troops were in Iraq for 100 years. Senator Clinton wants to end the war and will bring our troops home quickly and responsibly. That’s the best way to defend our nation and protect our national security interests.”

He literally did say something like that at one point, that we could be in Iraq for a century, that it'd be like Korea, etc.

He's a complete loon.

Source: NyTimes Blog

Hunger in America and Right Wing Idiots
So Megan McArdle, right wing commentator and brainless moron, thinks that the 'stimulus' package designed to delay the recession a few weeks shouldn't include any food assistance for poor people because, and I'm not making this up, they're all fat to begin with and therefore should be eating less.

Why not food stamps?

1) The poor don't need more food. Obesity is a problem for the poor in America; except for people who are too screwed up to get food stamps (because they don't have an address), food insufficiency is not.

Needless to say, the facts are against her, and Tbogg takes her apart like a cheap toy.

Food insecurity also has been linked to overweight and obesity, particularly among women (Townsend MS et al. J Nutr. 2001;131[6]:1738-1745; Wilde PE and Peterman JN. J Nutr. 2006;136[5]:1395-1400). This apparent paradox may be explained by the fact that high-calorie, processed foods often are less expensive than fresh, perishable foods such as fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy products.

"One of the first food groups that's cut out of an impoverished person's diet is produce," explained David H. Holben, PhD, RD, of the School of Human and Consumer Sciences, at Ohio University, in Athens. "Generally speaking, they often choose high-fat, high-sugar, low-cost foods that taste good," he added. Re searchers have found that marketing can also influence consumers, who are bombarded with advertising for unhealthful food and receive inadequate nutritional information, especially in restaurants (Hayne CL et al. J Public Health Policy. 2004;25[3-4]:391-407)

Go see the whole thing, it'll make you want to retch.

Source: Tbogg

Bush's Favorite Painting
So it turns out the fake cowboy President has a favorite cowboy painting that he finds inspirational.

George W. Bush is famous for his attachment to a painting which he acquired after becoming a “born again Christian.” It’s by W.H.D. Koerner and is entitled “A Charge to Keep.” Bush was so taken by it, that he took the painting’s name for his own official autobiography. And here’s what he says about it:

I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us...

So in Bush’s view (or perhaps I should say, faith) the key figure, with whom he personally identifies, is a missionary spreading the word of the Methodist Christianity in the American West in the late nineteenth century.

It turns out, not so much on the inspirational part.

[Jacob Weisberg]... gives us the full story in his forthcoming book on Bush, The Bush Tragedy:

...["A Charge To Keep"] is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist... executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

So Bush’s inspiring, prosyletizing Methodist is in fact a silver-tongued horse thief fleeing from a lynch mob.

Oops. This is what we get from the famed intellectual Bush, of course. It's not like he actually has to know about anything, anything at all, even things that are supposedly of deep personal significance.

Keep in mind: this thing hangs in the Oval Office.

Source: Firedoglake

Repugnant National Convention 2004
So during the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004, the city police brutally abused protestors and the citizenry, effectively cordoning off a wealthy area of town for the hillbilly rich, so they could parade around in Humvees and cowboy boots while voting for GW.

They threw protestors in makeshift prisons fashioned out of old parking garages filled with toxic waste, and so on, and so forth.

The ACLU has been fighting to get this exposed for years, and those efforts are starting to pay off, with the City being told that, no, it can't make SECRET ARGUMENTS that the ACLU is not allowed to see to prove that it was all saintly and innocent of wrongdoing.

The city must disclose its arguments about why documents on police surveillance of protesters before the 2004 Republican National Convention should be kept confidential, a judge ruled Tuesday.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV in Manhattan said the court won't consider a sealed affidavit by David Cohen, the New York Police Department's commissioner for intelligence.

Secret courts, secret trials, secret prisons, secret arguments... this is a country gone completely mad.

Source: Raw Story

Mega Republican Post

More Antics from the Right

Or is it Reich? Either way.

Republican Ex-Rep Turns Terror Lobbyist?
For what it's worth, the Feds are accusing another Islamic charity of being a front for terror groups to launder money. A lot of these accusations are petty hand-wringing -- if you donate money to the legally elected government of, say, Palestine, then you're aiding terrorists, because that happens to be Hamas; similarly, if you give money to the only competent government, and legal participant in the Lebanese parliament, Hezbollah, you're supporting terrorists.

On the other hand, if you give Israel money to buy a giant caterpillar bulldozer that they use to run innocent people over as they demolish Palestinian housing, why, that's charity.

*rolls eyes*
At any rate, this case sounds like it might have a bit more meat, since the money was supposedly being laundered to Iraq through Jordan, not to one of those legitimate governments I mentioned before, as well as to some religious nut in Pakistan. This sounds more credible.

The really interesting bit though is that they hired as a lobbyist, to try and get themselves off the terror list, and hence their assets unfrozen, a former Republican congressman.... and paid him with stolen money meant to aid needy people in the third world as well.

Siljander founded the Washington-area consulting group Global Strategies Inc. after leaving the government.

The indictment says Siljander was hired by IARA in March 2004 to lobby the Senate Finance Committee in an effort to remove the charity from the panel's list of suspected terror fundraisers.

For his work, IARA paid Siljander with money that was part of U.S. government funding awarded to the charity years earlier for relief work it promised to perform in Africa, the indictment says. Under the grant agreement, IARA was supposed to return any unused funds after the relief project was wrapped up in 1999.

Instead, Siljander and three IARA officers agreed to cover up the money's origins and use it on the lobbying effort, the indictment charges.

Oops. Needless to say, the right wing media is going to work very studiously at looking the other way at this (former?) Republican's current legal situation. Ignoring Republican legal problems is a very well honed skill for them by this point.

Source: Raw Story

Count 9/11 Strikes Again
Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that he, and he alone, didn't wet himself in fear when the WTC went down in flames.

Rudy Giuliani's new ad, running in the West Palm Beach area, uses actual video footage from 9/11 to promote Rudy's candidacy -- and includes this surprising line about the terror attacks:

"When the world wavered, and history hesitated, Rudy never did."

I'll say he didn't; he was too busy plotting how to ghoulishly profit from the carnage and death he was complicit in causing through his ineptitude and focus on banging his mistress rather than building a functional emergency command system for the city.

It takes a lot of work to be this big a sleaze.

Source: TPM Election Central

South Carolina Primary Again Ugly for McCain
In 2000, a group tied to Bush ran a push-poll in South Carolina suggesting McCain had an illegitimate black child, in order to derail his campaign (which worked beautifully, FYI). This time around, someone is distributing flyers accusing him of being a collaborator with his North Vietnamese captors in the Vietnam War

This is ugly even by South Carolina standards: John McCain is being targeted by a nasty flyer that lampoons McCain's POW captivity in Vietnam. The flyer, which was sent to local newspaper editors, depicts a manacled McCain in a cell with the phrase "POW for President," and "elect me" scrawled on the walls, suggesting that McCain is trying to ride his POW status into the White House.

The mailer also accuses McCain of collaborating with his captors and betraying his fellow POWs.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the South is not really part of America. They have never earned the privilege they forfeited in the Civil War.

Source: TPM Election Central

White Power Huckster Hour
So it turns out that Huckabee gave a speech to one of the most infamous White Supremacist groups in the South (and that's really saying something):

Making coded appeals to white racism is nothing new for Huckabee. Indeed, well before he was a nationally known political star, Huckabee nurtured a relationship with America's largest white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens. The extent of Huckabee's interaction with the racist group is unclear, but this much is known: he accepted an invitation to speak at the group's annual conference in 1993 and ultimately delivered a videotaped address that was "extremely well received by the audience."

Descended from the White Citizens Councils that battled integration in the Jim Crow South, including at Arkansas' Little Rock High School, the Council (or CofCC) has been designated a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In its "Statement of Principles," the CofCC declares, "We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called "affirmative action" and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races."

Charming, I know.

Cooking squirrels is one thing, but I guess living in the same dorm with a darkie would have been too much, eh, Huckabee?

Source: Raw Story

Ron Paul Speaks at Bob Jones U
This should help further cement his white power street cred -- a speaking gig at pro-segregation, anti-miscegenation Bob Jones U!

Why Paul, who said just a month ago that fascism will come to this country wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross, and who is still mired in a major controversy with his newsletters containing racist garbage he claims he didn't write, would make a stop at a fundamentalist madrasah that didn't open its doors to students of all races until 1975, and banned interracial dating and marriage all the way through 2000 (after George W. Bush appeared there), is beyond comprehension.

Well, that's an easy mystery to solve: he's a race-baiting hypocrite, and the more attention he gets, the more moolah he rakes in. Duh.

Interestingly, Bob Jones won't be publicly endorsing him, because the university leadership already has another horse in the race:

Ken Herman at the Austin American-Statesman writes that he got an earlier press release from the Paul camp that said, curiously, "It should also subtly be conveyed that Dr. Ron Paul will be the only Presidential Candidate to speak at Bob Jones University (although this fact does not translate into an endorsement in any way, shape, or form)." That's probably so because Bob Jones U.'s president previously endorsed Mitt Romney, who (despite what the Paul release says) had already made a stop at the college.

The choice of Romney is odd as well, since BJU has a history of hostility towards Mormons. A former BJU president said in 2000 that Mormonism, along with Catholicism, are "cults which call themselves Christian."

So really, the hypocrisy more than goes around, on the Republican side of the aisle.

Source: Jazz From Hell

Great History of Jonah Goldberg
So Jonah, aka Doughy Pantload, makes the specious argument that the real racists, evildoers, even FASCISTS in America come from the left side of the aisle, especially those eeevil progressives. Republicans/Conservatives are free of all sin, and in fact have always been racially neutral, believing in the purity of the market-based meritocracy.

Jonah writes, if you can call it that, for the National Review, an infamous right-wing screed. Sadly, No! has called him out on being part of a magazine with such a colorful racist history while he lambasts progressive historical figures for not being as PC as he might like:

Okay, so Jonah, a contributing editor of National Review, fer chrissakes, is throwing an accusation of racism against progressives and the left. That doesn’t just take the cake, it takes the fucking cake platter, the table under the cake platter, the whole fucking dining room, the house too, and the block on which the house is located, and the city, state, nation, planet, galaxy and universe. At its inception, the whole point of the National Review, the magazine that pays for Jonah’s triple bacon cheeseburgers, was the virulent racism of William F. Buckley and his cohorts, all of whom spilled truckloads of ink over the virtues of segregation.

If you don’t believe me, let’s take on instructive trip down memory lane and read stuff that was printed in the National Review in its halcyon days. Here’s what NR had to say about the Birmingham church bombings after they occurred:

Let us gently say the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur — of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro.

And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court’s manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice. Certainly it now appears that Birmingham’s Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free.

It only goes downhill from there. Way, way downhill.

Source: Sadly, No!

CIA Agrees with Bush Ally on Bhutto Death
Big surprise, the CIA has come down on the side of Musharraf, despite copious evidence of his indifference to, if not active compliance in, Benazir Bhutto's death... including her disturbing letter from beyond the grave laying blame at his feet for cutting her security detail.

Of course, the CIA has now dedicated itself to the quest to find the 'real killers'. And who do they blame? Why, Al-Queda, of course!

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The CIA believes extremists associated with a Pakistani tribal leader are responsible for the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, according to a U.S. intelligence official.

The official, who spoke under condition of anonymity, said the agency concluded that Baitullah Mehsud -- the leader of the Pakistani Taliban who has ties to al Qaeda -- was behind the attack.

This is really starting to get sad. Al-Queda might as well be blamed for making kids wet the bed, ice cream melt too fast, and apple pies to burn if left in the oven too long. At this point, we're just a few screens shy of having the Two Minutes Hate.

Source: CNN.com

FEMA FEMA FEMA Chameleon...
So after gutting FEMA and merging it with the equally useless Department of Homeland Security, Bush has been forced to restore most of its power by angry state governments.

About time.

After years of aggressive lobbying by unhappy state governments, the administration chose to restore FEMA's power to coordinate federal disaster operations. That power was undermined in the administration's previous plan -- used just once, after Katrina -- when the secretary of homeland security appointed his own officer to oversee disaster response.

Under the new plan, the head of FEMA will appoint the top coordinating officer, clarifying responsibility and, according to the states, ending confusion that caused critical delays. Congress ordered that change to the plan last year.

Ahh, it's nice to get an early start on fixing the gaping holes in government that the Republicans created. Still so much to do, though.

Source: The Washington Post

Pure As the Driven Snow
I know technically General Tommy Franks supposedly isn't considered a big time Republican (despite endorsing GW Bush in 2004), but he went along with the Rumsfeldian/Neoconservative plan to conquer the World/liberate Iraq eagerly enough, despite it being a fool's errand from any sane person's perspective.

Turns out his opportunism doesn't end there.

"Retired U.S. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, was paid $100,000 to endorse a veterans charity that watchdog groups say is ripping off donors and wounded veterans by using only a small portion of the money raised for veterans services, according to testimony in Congress today," ABC News reports.

The article continues, "Gen. Franks' involvement was revealed as members of Congress questioned Roger Chapin, who operates Help Hospitalized Veterans and the Coalition to Salute America's Heroes Foundation, charities that congressional investigators say spend only 25 percent of the money they raise on projects for wounded veterans."

"General Franks was paid $100,000 to lend his name. We understand he developed misgivings and asked that his name be taken off," Congressman Henry Waxman, D- Calif. said.

Of course, it's easy to develop misgivings when the check's been cashed and the donor in question is under Congressional investigation.

Source: Raw Story
Wikipedia on Tommy Franks

The Infamy of Republican Rule
We're here at last; where even our most stalwart allies are forced to admit that yes, under El Presidente, the United States is a nation of torturers.

OTTAWA, Jan 17 (Reuters) - An official Canadian government document has put both the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners run the risk of being tortured, CTV television reported on Thursday.

The revelation is likely to embarrass the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch U.S. ally.

The document mentions the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where a Canadian man is being held.

CTV said the document was part of a course on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats to help them determine whether prisoners they visited abroad had been mistreated.

It said the document mentioned U.S. interrogation techniques such as "forced nudity, isolation, and sleep deprivation."

God Bless America.

Source: Reuters

(Adding, I like the headline category -- latestCrisis. It seems like we bounce from one to the next and back again under this administration, does it not?)

More Random News

Let me show you..

..how much I care.

Polite Society Means Not Discussing Politics At Dinner
Even if you're the President, it seems.

President Bush followed up a mild lecture about expanding democracy among the Mideast's comfortable dynasties with an opulent picnic at the desert playground of one of the region's wealthy leaders.

Bush traded his suit for a casual jacket and took a helicopter as close as he could get to this remote encampment where Abu Dhabi's crown prince, Sheik Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, raises horses and prize falcons.

...

Bush has avoided any direct criticism of human rights or political freedoms in the governments hosting him in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere in the Arab world, although U.S. allies surely knew who he meant when he decried the treatment of opposition political candidates and dissidents in the region.

Yeah, he meant 'Those people that you can round up and shoot for all I care, so long as there's seconds on that tasty lamb.'

Source: Raw Story

Drug Resistance Spreads
While Bush dines at his rich oil patrons' expense, we have some rather serious emerging problems here at home that a less anti-science administration might be tempted to deal with.

First, a new, tougher and quite nastily contagious strain of MRSA, or Multiply Resistant Staphyloococcus, has emerged, centered on the gay community in San Francisco. So expect to hear a lot more of that special right-wing gay bashing rhetoric we get with regard to AIDS (you know, the 'gay plague' stuff).

Source: BBC News

Meanwhile, a much more dangerous and agressive form of an Adenovirus, the wimpy little common cold bugs, has broken out, hitting the military community amongst others. It causes a nasty form of pnuemonia, and has led to a few deaths already. Since adenoviruses are normally so non-threatening, there really isn't anything medicine can do to treat it if it gets out of hand. We're not talking Captain Trips here, of course... but, you know, two serious disease outbreaks might prompt attention from a slightly more competent government. Instead, we have Bush trying to appoint a rabidly anti-gay minister as the Surgeon General. So it goes.

Source: CNN.com

The War on Terror Never Comes Home
So we're committed to fighting terrorists, world-wide, whenever they rear their ugly heads, right El Presidente?

Unless of course, they're Cuban terrorists plotting to overthrow Castro.

Tristam Korten and Kirk Nielsen, writing for Salon.com, profile a group of Cuban exiles who are believed to have plotted attacks against Cuba and continue to operate in Florida with virtual impunity.

"[O]ther than an occasional federal gun charge, nothing much seems to happen to most of these would-be revolutionaries. They are allowed to train nearly unimpeded despite making explicit plans to violate the 70-year-old U.S. Neutrality Act and overthrow a sovereign country's government," they write.

"In Greater Miami, home to the majority of the nation's 1.5 million Cuban-Americans, the presence of what could credibly be described as a terrorist training camp has become an accepted norm during the half-century of the anti-Castro Cuban diaspora, Alpha 66 and numerous other paramilitary groups -- Comandos F4, Brigade 2506, Accion Cubana -- are so common they've taken on the benign patina of Rotary Clubs with weapons."

Ahh, Miami. What a cesspit.

The article also brings up the long-running outrage that is the U.S. giving sanctuary to an anti-Castro terrorist by the name of Posada Carriles, who is wanted for a series of hotel bombings and the downing of a plane in 1976 that killed 76 people. He's also implicated in an assassination attempt in Panama, and was tied up with our gun running in Central America during Iran-Contra. He recently fled into this country to avoid prosecution, and the Americans fudged Venezuela's extradition request so that he can stay here, indefinitely. He won't even be prosecuted for that pesky illegal immigration.

Border fence? Only for the dirty Mexicans, not bloodthirsty bombers.

Source: Raw Story (from a Salon article)

Thin is In
So Apple has a new laptop in the works that is about three quarters of an inch thick at the thickest point. It's absurdly slim, weighs 3 lbs, and costs about 2 grand.

Think of it as the extremely high-priced cousin of the EEE PC from Asus, or, alternately, the laptop so thin you have to worry about breaking it in half all day long.

Either or.

Source: Macworld

Ahh Fox, Is There Any Corporation Not Your Master?
Except for GE of course, because they let that mean old Olbermann on the air.

This time it's Fox Noise berating John Edwards, Nurses, and humanity in general for being too hard on Cigna, who denied a woman the liver transplant she needed and her doctors wanted, until of course, she died.

I'd wonder how they sleep at night, but I suspect they don't get much rest, as they're all on day-leave from Hell.

Source: Raw Story

Vintage Phoenix Takes My Money News

So Close To a Complete Marvel Zombies Collection

Only Black Panther #27 to go and I have every issue either in hardback or single issue. Huzzah!

Phillip Agee and the non-Kage Baker Company
So Phillip Agee, the ex-spy who wrote a tell-all book on the CIA that exposed many of its less savory assets to public scrutiny in the 70s, has died in Cuba after illness.

His legacy is an odd one. Aside from a law banning ex-spys and government types from doing just what he did, which Scooter Libby et al broke on Valerie Plame without consequence, he certainly put a wrench in some of our CIA activities in that era... which were almost universally bad, bad things.

On the other hand, he's spent much of his later years as something of a mouthpiece for the Cuban government, which is neither as bad as Americans think, nor as good as they themselves profess. Odd for a civil libertarian, at least a supposed one, to become a shill for a country without a great record on liberty.

He apparently has been making his money arranging trips for Americans to Cuba in spite of the embargo. I approve of this as well, but on the whole, the guy seems sort of skeezy.

Ah well. Life goes on, for the rest of us at least.

Full Disclosure: I had a great-uncle who was CIA and supposedly had his career ruined by Agee's book. The family still thinks this is a horrible scandal. From what they've also told me about his 'work', I can't say I agree.

Source: Raw Story

Fox Noise: Factually Challenged
So on primary day in New Hampshire (Motto: A Rifle in Every Hand, We Matter Every Four Years), Fox ran a story saying that Paul Begala of CNN had joined the Clinton campaign, based it seems on anonymous sources. Without calling him to confirm it.

Ok, not a great practice, but not a huge deal?

Turns out the story was false, so Begala contacted Fox to tell them so, tell the 'journalist' in particular that he was not joining the campaign.

They refused to retract it, saying their sources were, err, better than Begala. They then added to the story, expanding it by saying he'd been on a conference call with the Hillary camp. That he hadn't.

Fox's official response to Begala's request not to, er, lie about him?

After I told Fox it wasn't true -- and this is the surreal part -- they kept reporting it anyway. In fact, Fox's Garrett told me he'd "take it under advisement." Take it under advisement? I realize I'm generally seen as just another liberal with an opinion, but this was not a matter of opinion, it was a matter of fact. Fox now knew their story was flatly, factually wrong, and they took it "under advisement."

Fox Noise, ladies and gentlemen.

Source: The Huffington Post

Do I Own Anything Orange?
The ACLU wants Americans to wear orange to protest the sixth anniversary of our legal netherworld in Guantanamo.

I guess I'll be making a run to Target for a nice orange t-shirt.

Source: Talk Left

Hillary Hecklers
From before the primary, some hecklers who apparently think because Hillary is a woman, that she should iron their clothes.

I don't own any clothes to iron. Or an iron. But if I did, I'd get punched a lot for trying to make the roommate do it for me.

Source: Raw Story

More Ballot Wackiness
So it seems in New Hampshire, people have very short attention spans, and will tend to vote for the name at the top of the list slightly more just because it's there.

Keep in mind in the primary this list is like 6 lines long.

Until this year, they solved this problem by having different ballots at different polling places, same candidates, different order. Studying the returns at these places is what allowed some political sciency guy to determine that the top listed viable candidate gets a 3% boost from being there.

This year, they went by random letter alphabetical order; the alphabet started at Z and wrapped around. Hillary was thus the first 'viable' candidate listed.

As the article notes though, Obama didn't lose by a 3 point swing; he lost by like a 12 point swing from early polling. Many theories are being advanced, including the old 'white guilt' one, where supposedly white voters lie in the entrance/exit polls because they don't want to be seen as voting against the black guy.

Shrug.

Whatever the case, just another random oddity of elections, and people who hate to read and yet turn out to vote. Yes, I know, there's bound to be a slight psychological effect on undecideds just seeing the name first. But if you're undecided, don't go vote! Yeesh. Random voting does not actually help the process.

Source: Raw Story