That's Bull Shit!

The Truth

Good Story

Utah Phillips

What is a pacifist?

Republican Hissy Fits

That is what they are good at. Krugman on health care.

Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”

So, how’s it going?

Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

There is no lie that the conservative media will not repeat.

So True

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
The New White Face of Crime
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Daily Show Full Episodes Important Things w/ Demetri Martin Political Humor

It reminds me of this Frank Zappa comment," I'm not black, but there are a lot of times I wish I could say I'm not white"

Evil: It's The New Good

Mark Morford in the San Fransisco Chronicle.

The devil isn't evil, he just has lousy PR.

Examples? They are legion. Here's one the Powers That Be desperately hope you'll swallow, a nasty piece of marketing gall meant to stab at your intelligence and bitch-slap your intuition, but which is nevertheless being force-fed to you as happy environmental manna, a viciously deformed version of something called "progress."

Here is "clean coal." Isn't it beautiful? Truly, the hell-bound ad agency that coughed up that one even had the nerve to film a commercial featuring Kool and the Gang's "Celebrate" playing over perky scenes of manic Americans sucking down electricity like John McCain sucks down extra oxygen, claiming that coal is America's namesake resource and we should therefore kneel before it and worship it like apple pie and horrible sex-ed and Lindsay Lohan's nipples. Did I mention the coal industry's PR people are going to hell for this? Count on it.[...]
And lo, in the spirit of Wal-Mart and the Corn Refiners Association and the clean-coal cretins trying to make their rampant evils seem slightly less, well, evil, we humbly offer to McPalin this new marketing slogan: "The Republicans: An entirely new kind of contemptible you hadn't even thought of yet."

Hold Your Heads Up

Bob Herbert tells it like it is.

Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?

Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.

Liberals have been so cowed by the pummeling they’ve taken from the right that they’ve tried to shed their own identity, calling themselves everything but liberal and hoping to pass conservative muster by presenting themselves as hyper-religious and lifelong lovers of rifles, handguns, whatever.

Read It all. No really read it all.

Patriotism

Juan Cole has some good patriotic quotes today. I like this one.

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it."

-Mark Twain

Smokey The Bear Sutra

I am not exactly sure what a Sutra is but via Mahablog the monks at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center have requested the Smokey the Bear Sutra.

A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.

Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

Read it all. I really like this line as it rings true to me.

all true paths lead through mountains

Sheeple

Every election there is some political adviser claiming some group is going to swing the election. You know soccer moms, nascar dads, or yuppies. Jon Swift has found the true swing group.

But this election is not going to be decided by RAMs or any of these other groups that pollsters and political consultants like to re-invent every election cycle. This election is going to be decided by the same people who decide every election. I call them Scared High-strung Easily-manipulated Egocentric Pinheads or SHEEP. SHEEP are flaky not particularly bright voters who make up their minds at the last minute and vote instinctively for whichever candidate promises them the most and frightens them the least. They are people like Betty Bukowsky, 49, who lives in Dinkytown, Minn., who told me, "There's a Presidential election this year?"

Special Comment

Keith Olbermann's special comment 2/14/08. He is on fire. Transcript at Crooks and Liars.

Criminal Enterprise

Yes, the conservative movement and their leader Bush. From the most esteemed Juan Cole.

The Bush administration consistently gives us Attorneys General who lie about what the law is. Ironically, the defense Mukasey suggests for telecom companies that illegally turned over consumer records to government officials who had no warrant to request them, is that they were "following orders." I think there were some trials where that excuse was disallowed.

Also McCain as Nixon.

Wisdom

Of Thomas Ten Bears:

The American people are like baby birds waiting each night in front of their television sets for the corporate news bird to land in their living room and lovingly puke down their necks that day’s regurgitated news.

Atrios

Atrios cuts through the bs again.

Got Stimulus

Bob Herbert discuses the children running the show in the republican White House.

They’ve made a hash of a war that never should have been launched. They can’t find bin Laden. They’ve been shocked by the subprime debacle. They’re lost in a maze on health care.

Now, like children who have eaten too much sugar, they are frantically trying to figure out how to put a few dollars into the hands of working people to stimulate an enfeebled economy.

They should stop, take a deep breath and acknowledge the obvious: the way to put money into the hands of working people is to make sure they have access to good jobs at good wages. That has long been known, but it hasn’t been the policy in this country for many years.

He also talks about how we are not making money but loosing money over time.

The peak income year for the bottom 90 percent of Americans was way back in 1973 — when the average income per taxpayer (adjusted for inflation) was $33,001. That is nearly $4,000 higher than the average in 2005.

It’s incredible but true: 90 percent of the population missed out on the income gains during that long period.

This is why there are so many illegal aliens. We use to pay Americans a living wage. Now the companies find who ever is cheapest and grind them into the ground.

Guess Which Drug Is Legal

Mark Morford has a great piece up at the SFGate. It covers all the truth about the government and their evil relationship with the pharmaceutical companies to keep us down. The finish:

Maybe it really is just that simple, just that odious. One drug, nasty and of hugely questionable value, essentially designed to numb your body and mock your spirit and shut you down like a land mine shuts down a cat, is legal. Another drug, relatively safe, enormously effective in how it opens you up like a flower and pours white hot life straight down your throat and helps you feel God without forcing you to kneel before, well, anything at all, is violently illegal. And thus doth the brutal irony of the capitalist machine floweth over once again.

It is, you could say, just another tale of the tense, vicious battle ever raging between the government/corporations/church, all of whom seek to control and profit by murdering any notion you may have that you might be far more powerful, divinely connected, empathetic than you imagine, and the humane, common-sensical universe of peaceful reality. Do you know that fight? Do you ever sense that common sense is losing? I have a suggestion for something you might want to try.

Really read the whole thing.

Pottersville Is Not Dead

It seams the bank has not killed JP yet. JP is still ranting. This is a good thing.

Think about this: 65-75 years ago, some of our biggest banking institutions were openly acting as America’s most prominent financiers and corporate bedfellows with Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party.

The single biggest financier, as posterity reluctantly tells us, was Prescott Bush, Dubya’s granddad. He was permitted to do this, undermining the war effort, until the Roosevelt government finally woke up in 1942 and seized some of the assets of Bush’s Brown Brothers Harriman that was doing more than playing footsie with Hitler and his fascist empire that was already well on its way to murdering over 6,000,000 Jews, homosexuals and other "deviants".

Fast-forward those 65-75 years and look around you. The Third Reich is a bad, shameful memory and what’s left, the neo-Nazis, have been relegated to fringe status living on through a bunch of moronic skinheads.

But the ironic thing is that now every one of our banking institutions, the latter-day descendents of the banking industry that had cheerfully handled Hitler’s blood money, reserves the right not to do business with hard-working middle class American citizens simply for standing up for their dignity and calling a spade a spade.

Why?

Via Avedon, we get Thers wisdom:

As a matter of strict accuracy, nobody is quite clear on precisely why Democratic campaign managers and consultants are hired, especially repeatedly. Whatever the explanation, it is certainly a gross exaggeration to say that their purpose is to "win." It instead seems more their function to lose in a humiliating fashion and afterwards to collect fat paychecks and then go on TV and talk smack about the Democratic Base.

We Don't Need No Nukes

Cernig read now

Truth

Atrios says:

We need a Democratic president so that the Republicans and their Blue Dog allies in Congress are finally inspired to take back the executive power grabs that they temporarily thought were necessary for the survival of the nation.

What this will mean in practice is that Democratic president will face a firestorm of "scandal" which will make Monica Madness pale in comparison. The powers that Bush claimed will be turned against a Democratic president and will likely be their undoing.

And this scenario is much better than the alternative.

Digby fleshes it out a bit.

Atrios says this is better than the alternative, which is sadly true. The country can't survive another GOP administration right now. But Democratic presidents are going to have to learn that their most important and difficult job will be dealing with relentless baseless political attacks from the Republicans and the media. It's the way our politics are currently constructed. Republicans accrue vast amounts of power and wealth for themselves at the expense of the taxpayers, and the Democrats are expected to clean things up by paying the debts for them. The Dems don't do it out of altruism or commitment. They do it because they are held to standards of integrity and effectiveness that aren't expected of Republicans --- and they refuse to effectively fight them, even when they have the advantage.

Read the whole thing.
Update:Avedon adds her two cents:

But what if that's too optimistic? I mean, sure, it sounds okay in a get-back-to-square-one kind of way, but I have a bad feeling that this may be too local a perspective. Are there credible national governments at all in the west anymore, or are we all under the thumb of one great big international corporate oligarchy? Is there much any individual country, let alone one as seriously weakened as the United States is now, can do to recover state power and vest it in its people? I don't know. (And that's just assuming the environmental damage isn't as far gone as it is beginning to look like. Archeologists find whole civilizations buried under layers of sand, or under water. We could be next.)

You should read her whole article.