Weekend-Monday July 21-28, 2009 Vol
2368 - Red, black and snarly
Quote of
the Day
"This being my last time to speak to you as your governor, I do want to tell you sincerely that I love you." -- Palin, sincerely lying to a crowd of Alaskans,
Link
In
Today's Tequila Treehouse...
The Can't-Do
Blue Dogs
Palin Popularity
Crashes
The death
of professionalism
Bush and
Cheney's Final Days
Cambridge
Police Misconduct?
Rich never
had it so good
Poker Players
on Capitol Hill
Britney
to kill herself?
Like to write about beer? Professor Good Ales wants
you! Please contact us at
Ltsaloon.org.
"If we're able to kill
health care for all Americans, it will be Obama's Waterloo.
It will break him." --Sen.
Jim DeMint, bragging about hurting poor people,Link
"I'm from Chicago. I don't break."
-- Obama, rubbing DeMint's nose in dog poop, Link
Excerpt: Watching the centristbackstabbing
Democrats in Congress create more and more reasons why health care can't
be fixed,
I've been struck by a disquieting thought:
Suppose our collective lack of response to Katrina wasn't exceptional but,
rather,
the new normal in America. Suppose we can no
longer address the major challenges confronting the nation. Suppose America
is now the world's leading can't-do country.
Every other nation with an advanced economy long
ago secured universal health care for its citizens -- an achievement that
the
United States alone finds beyond the capacities
of mortal man. It wasn't ever thus. Time was when Democratic Congresses
enacted Social Security and Medicare over the
opposition of powerful interests and Republican ideologues. In fact, our
government
used to actually pave roads, build bridges and
allow for secure retirements by levying taxes on those who could afford
to pay them.
To today's centrist Democrats, this has become
a distant memory, a history lesson they cannot grasp. The notion that actual
individuals might have to pay to secure the national
interest appalls them. In the House, the Blue Dogs doggedly oppose proposals
to fund universal coverage by taxing the wealthiest
1 percent of the nation's households. Their deference to wealth -- whether
the
consequence of our system of funding elections
or a byproduct of the Internet generation's experience of free access to
information
and entertainment -- is not to be trifled with.
As always, the Democrats are screwing up a sure and certain thing.
With 60 in the senate and Obama at the helm, we could have everything
we want, but the sons of bitches don't want to come to work and follow their
Commander in Chief.
We defeated the other team, so what do our nutty-assed Democrats do?
They turnaround and tackle their own quarterback when he gets the
ball.
"Al Franken signaled in his Sotomayor questioning
that he will spend the next few years playing the part of the reasonable fellow who's awed to be here,
eager to learn and ready to work. He's doing a Full Hillary. When Mrs. Clinton entered the Senate 8 years
ago, there was about her the constant air of fisticuffs and scandal. But she did the absolute commonsense
thing, keeping her head down and charming people with her hardworking, non-Diva-like attitude. This
was not only a great move, which opened her to subsequent journalistic reassessments, it was also probably
an actual relief for her. Removed from the daily grind of White House attack-and-defend, with a solid
six-year sinecure,
she was free for the first time to be what she likely wanted to be when she started out.
She tapped into the part of her that really was a policy wonk who wanted to work on legislation, wanted
to be liked, and wanted, even, to like. She tapped into her seriousness. We will see if Mr. Franken has
any to tap into. "
-- Piggy Noonan, forgetting it's her job to lie like a rug, Link
"If we chase this attitude...that you have
to say 'no' to every Democratic proposal, you can’t help the president ever, you can’t ever reach across
the aisle, then I don’t want to be part of the movement because it’s a dead-end movement. I have no
desire to be up here in an irrelevant status. I'm smart enough to know that this country doesn’t have
a problem with conservatives. It has a problem with blind ideology. And those who are ideological-driven
to a fault are never going to be able to take this party back into relevancy."
-- Lindsey Graham on why he is gay for Sotomayor, Link
Excerpt: The foot soldiers are the Land Rover Liberals.
These Democratic lawmakers secure their lefty labels by wearing pink-ribbon
lapel pins and supporting good causes like abortion
rights. However, being affluent and/or from affluent districts, they routinely
drive their luxury cars over middle-class economic
interests. Hence, this week's letter from Democratic dot-com tycoon
Rep. Jared Polis, of Boulder, Colo., and other
Land Rover Liberals calling for the surtax's death.
Echoing that demand are the Corrupt Cowboys --
those like Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who come from the heartland's
culturally conservative and economically impoverished
locales. These cavalrymen in both parties quietly build insurmountable
campaign war chests as the biggest corporate
fundraisers in Congress. At the same time, they publicly preen as jes'
folks,
make twangy references to "voters back home,"
and now promise to kill the healthcare surtax because they say that's what
their communities want. Cash payoffs made, reelections
purchased, the absurd story somehow goes that because blue-collar
constituents in Flyover America like guns and
love Jesus, they must also reflexively adore politicians who defend 1-percenters'
bounty.
That fantastical fairly tale, of course, couldn't
exist without the Millionaire Media -- the elite journalists and opinion-mongers
who represent corporate media conglomerates and/or
are themselves extremely wealthy. Ignoring all the data about inequality,
they legitimize the assertions of the 1-percenters'
first two battalions, while actually claiming America's fat cats are unfairly
persecuted.
Excerpt: Sarah Palin gained fame — and to some infamy
— since she embarked on a vice-presidential bid less than a year ago.
Her surprising departure from Alaska's top office
is gaining her something else: questions over her motives and next big
move.
She leaves office Sunday with her political future
clouded by ethics probes, mounting legal bills and dwindling popularity.
A new Washington Post-ABC poll puts her favorability
rating at 40 percent, with 53 percent giving her an unfavorable rating.
The Republican governor also faces an array of
queries about why she is quitting.
When Grandpa picked her to be his running mate, she had an 84% approval
rating in Alaska.
Once the world found out how stupid she was, and how arrogant she was
and how proud
she was of her stupidity and arrogance, she dropped to 40 percent.
Yet 70 percent of right-wing handjobs want her to run for president..
"Another governor has been tagged as a client
of the same hooker that Eliot Spitzer used. Well, I know who it is, but I don't
have a source that's firm enough. Yes, it's a blue state, and there's lot of eagles in this state." -- the vulgar
Pigboy, making more wild claims,
Well, Alaska has more eagles than anybody.
Is that why Palin quit?
Because she got caught with Spitzer's hooker?
Or is he talking about Gov Ed Rendell and the Philadelphia Eagles?
Or is he talking about Gov Musclehead and the Henley/Frey Eagles?
It's easy
- just call the BartPhone at 1-800-530-2979
and
leave your 2 minute message or question or joke or impression to be played
on BCR. If you screw it up, just say it again and I'll edit the bad part
out.
Ditto Monkeys
are welcome to call!
Keep your
language decent so I can
play it in BCR@
Excerpt: Two big things about Cronkite and his times made
him different from today's multimillionaire news celebrities.
First, he came up as a print journalist, covering
ball games, school fires, city council meetings and the Texas state Legislature.
He knew a fact from an opinion, how to distinguish
a reliable source from the other kind and how to construct an airtight
story.
He was a news professional, devoted to craft.
I suspect he'd have walked off the set rather than devote an entire newscast
to a pop singer's death, never mind entire weeks.
Second, Cronkite grasped the purely arbitrary
aspects of TV celebrity. Fame never went to his head. In retirement, he
conducted
a long-running feud with CBS executives he thought
sacrificed journalistic values to the star system and bottom-line greed.
"Something is seriously out of balance," he wrote
in his 1996 autobiography, "when the top people receive such huge wages
while the networks drastically cut their staffs
to meet grossly reduced budgets."
The exacting standards that Cronkite and his colleagues
established have all but vanished. One of the right-wing noise machine's
signal achievements has been to devalue even
the possibility of his kind of professionalism. It's all propaganda to
them.
Excerpt: Hours before they were to leave office after
eight disasterous years, Bush and his Dick had one final and painful piece
of business to conclude. For over a month Cheney
had been pleading, cajoling, even pestering Bush to pardon Scooter Libby.
Libby had been convicted of obstructing an investigation
into the Plame leak by senior White House officials. The Libby pardon,
aides reported, had become a crusade for Cheney,
who seemed prepared to push his nine-year-old relationship with Bush to
the breaking point - and perhaps past it - over
the fate of his criminal friend. "We don't want to leave anyone on the
battlefield,"
Cheney argued. Bush had already decided the week
before that Libby was undeserving and told Cheney so, only to see the
question raised again. A top adviser to Bush
says he had never seen the Dick focused so single-mindedly on anything.
With one day to go before both men left office,
Bush informed Cheney that Libby would not get a pardon. On Inauguration
Day,
the Dick gave a warm tribute to Bush in a private
ceremony as the Fuhrer prepared to leave for Texas. A day later, Cheney
gave
an interview saying he disagreed with the Fuhrer's
decision on the Libby pardon. Other Libby backers were quoted in
the article,
calling Bush "dishonorable" and saying he had
left a soldier on the battlefield, language Cheney had used throughout
the debate
over the pardon. Bush believes that his Dick
was "probably blinded by his personal loyalty to Scooter," a White House
aide says.
Cheney had pressed the issue as far as he could
but finally conceded. "The Dick knew there was a line out there that he
was getting
very close to but couldn't cross," says a former
senior official. 'The Fuhrer knew that he needed to help make sure that
Cheney
didn't cross that line either."
But if Attorney General Eric Holder declines to prosecute the Bush bastards
for their crimes,
Libby won't ever be forced to talk so there's no reason for the Dick
to be sure he stays quiet
Excerpt: Interesting as it is to speculate about Henry
Louis Gates and the Cambridge Police Department, the attention reflects
an unfortunate feature of American public discourse:
you've got someone like Radley Balko who spends the bulk of his
career documenting the most grave instances of
police misconduct imaginable -- including cases that involve the incarceration
of innocent people for years on end -- and most
of even the egregious cases he writes about never break into mainstream
conversation, whereas a minor altercation involving
a Harvard professor who isn't even being charged with a crime spawns
wall-to-wall media coverage.
Wrongly arrest a black men who happens to be a
Harvard professor, release him without filing charges, and the national
press corps asks the president to comment. Wrongly
imprison for years on end a black man who happens to be working class
and without celebrity, and the national press
corps continues to utterly ignore a criminal justice system that routinely
convicts
innocent people. Apportioning blame for this
sorry state of affairs isn't as important as recognizing that the news
we get on
these matters reflects a value system that is
seriously flawed, and that news consumers bear blame for too.
Isn't it most likely that all three - the cop, the professor and Obama,
over-reacted?
The cop taught racial sensitivity classes to other cops for 5 years.
He was hand-picked
by the Black mayor for the job, so why would he arrest an old man who
walks with a cane?
And Gates was, apparently, screaming "Racist
sons of bitches" at the cops and he refused to stop.
The cops claim they told him to calm down or he'd be arrested and he
kept going.
I've been plenty angry, but never so angry that I wouldn't calm down
when the man
with the badge and the gun ordered me to under threat of arrest.
And why did the usually cool-and-calm Obama say the cops acted "stupidly?"
Obama pulled a Mama Judd and - in effect - claimed he was there, which
is crazy.
But the bigger point this article makes is more serious.
There are innocent people doing life in prison because some fucked
state attorney
ruled that the innocent man didn't get his Innocence
Project paperwork together in time.
Law enforcement tends to have a lot of Nancy Grace's (not a compliment.)
They KNOW these (usually) Black men are innocent, but they just don't
care.
If it was their white friend or white relative, they'd move
f-ing mountains to get them out.
"See, you won with 52 percent but the president
took your district with 59. And I think it's high time we come back and say thanks. Do you have any
idea how much noise Air Force One makes when it lands in Eau Claire, Wisconsin? We're going
to have a party Congressman, you should come, it's going to be great. Right in town square, right in
the band gazebo, that's where the president is going to drape his arm around the shoulder of some assistant
DA we like, and you should have your camera with you, you should get a picture of that, because
that's going to be the moment you're finished in Democratic politics. President Bartlet is a good man,
he's got a good heart, he doesn't hold a grudge. That's what he pays me for."
-- fictional Josh Lyman from West Wing, on how to keep Blue Dog
Dems in line, Video
It's very simple: his mother was a US citizen,
so therefore, he is as well.
If I had been born on a airplane over the Pacific,
what would I be a citizen of ?
( My mother WAS a US citizen)
Case closed, regardless of paperwork.
Bob in Leicester, NC
The President and by extension the Democrats may
be losing the message on health care reform.
Of course having members of your own Party (The
Blue Dogs) oppose your efforts each step of the way, doesn't help.
To accomplish something (fill in the blank),
the President has to fight members of his own party, the media, and
the Republicans.
Why do we have Blue Dogs anyway? Can you tell
me?
There's nothing to compare in the GOP. They get
on and stay on the same page or message.
You never see the phrase "divided Republicans".
But I see, and hear, about "divided Democrats"
all the time these days.
A Blue Dog is little better than a Republican.
They are going to cost the Democrats seats in
2010
and maybe even the President a second term if
this keeps up.
Mary Lou
.
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Quotes
"These are ludicrous claims, there is no factual
basis for them. Why give the birthers any airtime? Lou Dobbs on his radio show said, "I believe
the president is a citizen of the United States." But he keeps raising these questions, complaining
about criticism from "limp-minded, lily-livered lefties." Is it responsible for Dobbs and others to
go on the air, talk about these claims, demand proof, when we have seen a copy of the birth certificate?
Hawaii officials say Obama was born there in 1961." -- Howard Kurtz, in
a rare flash of sanity,
Link
Bart:
It seems that some Democrats in Congress think
that they can vote
against Obama’s health care reform proposal.
I don’t want to have more than one loyalty test
for Democratic politicians, but I do want one, and that one is health care.
When it comes time to vote on health care reform,
any Democrat that doesn’t vote for it is worse than a Republican.
Any Democrat that doesn’t vote for health care
reform needs to be booted from the caucus, stripped of committee chairs
and seats and voted against at the polls in the
next election. This is the issue our party has fought hard for forty years.
I have never voted or walked a precinct for a
Republican, but I will do both if it means removing any Democrat
betraying the party from office on the issue
of health care.
The Republicans have whipped their party into
oblivion by demanding this kind of loyalty,
and we should not do it except on this one issue.
If Democrats don’t stand for something, then we
stand for nothing.
E.L. Deflagrante
I live in the same town as Bowe Bergdahl, the
private captured in Afghanistan. I know this kid (only casually,
from visiting
with him in the coffee shop where he worked before
he signed up for this mess). He is a good kid; just another victim of the
Military Industrial Complex.
The reaction in our small town has been incredible,
all the shops have "Bring Bowe Home" signs, candlelight vigils, ect.
I hope this event helps people understand the
fallacy of encouraging our kids to sign up to "protect and serve".
He wasn't over there protecting anything other
than the profits of the war industry. In his video he says
"Please, please bring us home so that we can
be back where we belong and not over here, wasting our time
and our lives and our precious life that we could
be using back in our own country,"
Prompted by his captives or not, wiser words have
not been uttered on the MSM.
I sure hope he gets home safely.
Mike
In 1993 the Democrats failed to pass health care
reform. They also turned on the Clintons distancing themselves
from him as far as possible. As a result the
Democrats lost both the House and the Senate in the 1994 election.
Today Democrats are faced with the same choice.
Hopefully they won't make the same mistake again.
In this Internet age, if the Democrats fail to
put the interests of the corporate bribers ahead of the people
then the people will rise up against them in
2010. We'll see if they remember 1994.
Excerpt: With health-care dominating the news, you're
forgiven for not knowing that it is also National Poker Week.
Dozens of dedicated players have descended on
the Hill over the past few days to argue against the fed's fight with poker.
The Poker Players Alliance contends that poker
should not be subject to the stringent regulations applied to other forms
of
online gambling because theirs is a game of skill
and strategy involving complex risk calculations. Most other forms of gambling,
like slot machines, are simple matters of luck,
they
claim. While dealing cards introduces an element of chance, poker
players
say beyond that, it is a game that rewards learning
and analysis. They believe that the act of placing a bet is more akin to
"making a move" in other games than it is to
basic gambling.
Well, duh!
If poker is just luck, then any schmoe can sit down with the pros and
take their money, right?
Years ago - it might even have been Inhofe when he was mayor of Tulsa
- they tried to make foosball illegal.
They said it was a game of chance, not skill.
Someone offered to play the mayor or District Attorney (I forget) and
after smoking him 5-0 again and again,
he was forced to admit it was a game of skill.
Whoever claims poker is not skill needs to mortage their
home and take $100K to Vegas and prove it.
Those sharks will take your $100K in a matter of minutes.
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Excerpt: A doctor who briefly dealt with Britney Spears while she was forcibly
committed in Cedars-Sinai hospital
has broken his silence on the affair and expressed
concern over Britney's current regime.
Dr Martin Chan was working in the Psychiatric
ward when he was temporarily asked to observe Britney.
'She was totally imbalanced and seemed seriously
disturbed' Chan noted.
'I don't believe for one minute that such systemic
and at that time serious embedded mental issues could
have gone away in less than two years. Now she
is back on the gruelling concert circuit and this seems
highly irresponsible and dangerous. I fear if
she is allowed to continue touring her she will again experience
a breakdown. She might end up being the next
Michael Jackson: this could kill her."
Isn't this an odd time to make that prediction?
She's back in shape, the radio is playing her songs and she's showing up
for work on time.
Where's the instability that's worrying this headline-seeking doctor?
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