Condi Rice

"Dr Rice has a Chevron Oil Company tanker named after her.  She's a perfect symbol for the corporatocracy..." --Larry Wilkerson

I can't get the audio player to embed, so you'll hafta to go over to truthdig to listen to the interview.

And BTW - I'd like to know how Col Wilkerson doesn't get better traction for the things he'd trying to get us to hear.

Willard's GOP

What in the blue-eyed buck-naked fuck were they thinking?

Old (and maybe a little tipsy?) white guy arguing with an imaginary Obama.  That was the big electrifying surprise?

Really, Repubs?  You wanted us all talking about Clint Eastwood the day after your convention, and not about the guy you just got done nominating for president?



I can get a little squirmy when Alec Baldwin or Barbara Streisand start diving into it, but that Eastwood schtick was cringe-worthy on an epic scale.

The Mavericks

If McCain and Palin coulda covered Gram Parsons like these guys, I mighta been persuaded to vote for 'em.

Today's Pix

DumFux News

This kinda thing makes me wonder if the very fabric of the cosmos is raveling.

I felt compelled to copy the whole post because I have to think it's bound to be stuffed down the Memory Hole any minute now.

Under the title "Paul Ryan's Speech in 3 Words" at Fox News.com

1. Dazzling

At least a quarter of Americans still don’t know who Paul Ryan is, and only about half who know and have an opinion of him view him favorably.

So, Ryan’s primary job tonight was to introduce himself and make himself seem likeable, and he did that well. The personal parts of the speech were very personally delivered, especially the touching parts where Ryan talked about his father and mother and their roles in his life. And at the end of the speech, when Ryan cheered the crowd to its feet, he showed an energy and enthusiasm that’s what voters want in leaders and what Republicans have been desperately lacking in this campaign.
To anyone watching Ryan’s speech who hasn’t been paying much attention to the ins and outs and accusations of the campaign, I suspect Ryan came across as a smart, passionate and all-around nice guy — the sort of guy you can imagine having a friendly chat with while watching your kids play soccer together. And for a lot of voters, what matters isn’t what candidates have done or what they promise to do —it’s personality. On this measure, Mitt Romney has been catastrophically struggling and with his speech, Ryan humanized himself and presumably by extension, the top of the ticket.

2. Deceiving

On the other hand, to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.

The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth. Said fact checkers have already condemned certain arguments that Ryan still irresponsibly repeated.

Fact: While Ryan tried to pin the downgrade of the United States’ credit rating on spending under President Obama, the credit rating was actually downgraded because Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling.

Fact: While Ryan blamed President Obama for the shut down of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, the plant was actually closed under President George W. Bush. Ryan actually asked for federal spending to save the plant, while Romney has criticized the auto industry bailout that President Obama ultimately enacted to prevent other plants from closing.

Fact: Though Ryan insisted that President Obama wants to give all the credit for private sector success to government, that isn't what the president said. Period.

Fact: Though Paul Ryan accused President Obama of taking $716 billion out of Medicare, the fact is that that amount was savings in Medicare reimbursement rates (which, incidentally, save Medicare recipients out-of-pocket costs, too) and Ryan himself embraced these savings in his budget plan.

Elections should be about competing based on your record in the past and your vision for the future, not competing to see who can get away with the most lies and distortions without voters noticing or bother to care. Both parties should hold themselves to that standard. Republicans should be ashamed that there was even one misrepresentation in Ryan’s speech but sadly, there were many.

3. Distracting

And then there’s what Ryan didn’t talk about.

Ryan didn’t mention his extremist stance on banning all abortions with no exception for rape or incest, a stance that is out of touch with 75% of American voters.

Ryan didn’t mention his previous plan to hand over Social Security to Wall Street.

Ryan didn’t mention his numerous votes to raise spending and balloon the deficit when George W. Bush was president.

Ryan didn’t mention how his budget would eviscerate programs that help the poor and raise taxes on 95% of Americans in order to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires even further and increase — yes, increase —the deficit.

These aspects of Ryan’s resume and ideology are sticky to say the least. He would have been wise to tackle them head on and try and explain them away in his first real introduction to voters. But instead of Ryan airing his own dirty laundry, Democrats will get the chance.

At the end of his speech, Ryan quoted his dad, who used to say to him, “"Son. You have a choice: You can be part of the problem, or you can be part of the solution."

Ryan may have helped solve some of the likeability problems facing Romney, but ultimately by trying to deceive voters about basic facts and trying to distract voters from his own record, Ryan’s speech caused a much larger problem for himself and his running mate.

Sally Kohn is a writer and Fox News contributor. You can find her online at http://sallykohn.com or on Twitter@sallykohn.

Please, Mr Ryan

...can we try a little harder to keep the Nazi salutes to a minimum?

(my apologies to Mr Godwin)

Condi's Speech

I like Condi Rice - kinda.  I think she's exactly what we needed in the White House and over at the State Dept - in about 1983.  What the fuck, lady?

Fred Kaplan at Slate:

After describing a world of freedom fighters and tyrants, Bush’s former secretary of state and national security adviser lamented, “Everyone asks, where does America stand?’ Indeed that is the question of the hour,” she continued, for when “friends or foes alike don’t know the answer to that question, unambiguously and clearly, the world is likely to be a more dangerous and chaotic place … We cannot be reluctant to lead, and you cannot lead from behind.”

The solution, she concluded, is to elect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. “They know what to do,” she said. “They know that our friends and allies must again be able to trust us.”

First, it’s not at all clear that they have the slightest idea what to do or even—judging from Romney’s disastrously tin-eared trip to Europe this summer—how to think about what to do.

Second (this is the chutzpah part), Condi Rice—a top adviser in the most disastrous, reputation-crippling foreign-policy administration in decades—has no business lecturing anybody on this score.

Finally, Obama has done pretty well in foreign policy, and polls of actual foreigners—including allies—suggest that they think so too.

 Rice was Nat'l Sec Adv when the Daily Brief came out in August 2001, saying "bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The US".  It said exactly that - not buried on page 11; not parenthetically; it wasn't implying anything.  That was the fucking title of the fucking memo.

But when she's asked about it at he 9/11 hearings, she practically says the warning wasn't deemed actionable because it didn't say exactly when and where and how the attack would happen.



Same ol' nonsense - if the facts don't fit your narrative, then just make shit up.

Legitimate Rape

Wanna beat Repubs in an election?  Just remind the voters of what these fucksticks actually say once in a while.

Chick-Fil-A "Promo"

From the makers of Mr Deity.

And BTW - lotsa people try to frame this as a Free Speech issue - it isn't.  This is indeed very much about the 1st Amendment, but the point is not freedom of speech.

The 1st point is that he doesn't get to buy elections for politicians who then attempt to deny citizens equal rights and equal protection under the law.  Dan Cathay uses his money and his position and his access to political power trying to do exactly that.

Second, nobody's trying to silence Dan Cathay or to keep him from having his say - they're just trying to get him to stop being such a colossal douche nozzle.

And finally, this is about denying Mr Cathay the ability to impose his personal religious beliefs on all of us through the force of law.  Sometimes it actually is as simple as it seems.

RNC Pharmaceuticals