April 2009

John Cole:

The only people left in the Republican party are crazier than an outhouse rat and have teabags hanging from their hunting cap. They are the people who feverishly emailed each other stories about Obama’s birth certificate, and who are convinced that joking about Obama’s teleprompter and making impassioned speeches about earmark reform are the only route to electoral recovery. They think Michelle Bachman is on to something and the Colbert Report is truth.

This is only going to get worse.

This will make things interesting in the Senate…

Veteran Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, intends to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party on Tuesday, multiple sources said.

A Specter party switch would give Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority of 60 seats if Al Franken holds his current lead in the disputed Minnesota Senate race.

How long, d’ya suppose, before some unhinged wingnut blogger calls for Specter to be assassinated for being a “traitor”? My money is on “Big Dog”…

UPDATE 04/28/09 12:58 PM EDT: Talking Points Memo has a Statement by Senator Arlen Specter

Hey kids! The US faces the threat of a possible swine flu pandemic, and our public health infrastructure isn’t all it could be! Why? Because the dipshit Republicans fought funding for pandemic preparedness, and won!

The attack on pandemic preparation became so central to the GOP strategies that AP reported in February: “Republicans, meanwhile, plan to push for broader and deeper tax cuts, to trim major spending provisions that support Democrats’ longer-term policy goals, and to try to knock out what they consider questionable spending items, such as $870 million to combat the flu and $400 million to slow the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.”

Famously, Maine Senator Collins, the supposedly moderate Republican who demanded cuts in health care spending in exchange for her support of a watered-down version of the stimulus, fumed about the pandemic funding: “Does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill? No, we should not.”

As late as Sunday, Collins was still using her official website to highlight the fact that she led the fight to strip the pandemic preparedness money out of the Senate’s version of the stimulus measure. On Monday, after her machinations with regard to the stimulus bill were revealed, Collins attempted to defend herself, dispatching a spokesman to declare that, “There is no evidence that federal efforts to address the swine flu outbreak have been hampered by a lack of funds.”

But, as The Washington Post notes: “Collins and the others who led the fight to axe the flu money three months ago can only hope that doesn’t change.”

If and when the elderly and young children start dying from swine flu, be sure to call up your local Republican representative and thank the ignorant fucknozzle for being so concerned about the health of the American people.

UPDATE 04/28/09 11:57 AM EDT: The CDC general Q&A on swine flu and advice on caring for swine flu sufferers at home will prove useful in the days and weeks to come, methinks.

UPDATE 04/28/09 01:42 PM EDT: Digby points out the wingnut weltanschauung:

If you are a conservative you can’t believe that something like an epidemic or a pandemic could even exist or you would have to grant that the necessity for public health — a government function. Indeed, you even have to grant that a pandemic requires that people are going to be forced to behave in ways that explicitly explicitly define their own personal survival with the common good… Something like that simply doesn’t fit into the conservative worldview. They see all problems and challenges in schoolyard terms of good guys and bad guys. This kind of challenge (like global warming) falls outside the paradigm by which they organize their world. Pandemics, like hurricanes, can’t be dealt with by using tough talk and threats. So, they are lost.

As Assistant Attorney General of the United States, Jay Bybee wrote legal opinions that authorized CIA interrogators to employ illegal interrogation techniques. Think Progress explains just how seriously wrong Bybee’s actions were:

Bybee attempted to give legal cover to illegal acts, and thus broke the ethical, professional, and legal standards that should govern lawyers. For this, Judge Jay Bybee should be impeached. Congress needs to assert some accountability for these heinous acts.

Think Progress has started a petition campaign to urge Congress to impeach Judge Jay Bybee. Go now and sign up.

Waterboarding was a war crime when it was employed by the Japanese during World War II.

It was prosecuted as a crime in the United States as recently as 1983.

Now, according to the terror weenies of the right, it’s a perfectly acceptable thing for red-blooded Americans to do to Terrifying Brown People™.

How, exactly, has waterboarding changed so as to make it a morally acceptable act?

(hat tip: Crooks and Liars)

Lizard bitch Cao is challenged to back up her claims with facts.

Lizard bitch Cao folds like a cheap card table.

Golly, isn’t that a surprise?

Is there any substantive difference between the methods and goals of the torture employed by the US against detainees in the the “war on terror”, and the methods and goals of the torture employed by the North Vietnamese against US servicemen?

Nope — no damn difference at all.

Mike Finnigan, writing at Crooks and Liars…

I don’t recall any eruptions of right-wing outrage when a beaming Richard Nixon shook hands with a man responsible for the deaths of untold millions. Or rending of garments and gnashing of teeth when he greeted this sworn enemy of freedom.  There were no reports of wingnut tantrums when St. Ronnie was palling around with this dictator. Of course, a mere handshake can’t compare to the love and support lavished on this butcher by every Republican president – and this GOP candidate – from Nixon to GWB. Hell, any semi-literate citizen could fill the page with similar examples for the history-challenged, but excitable denizens of Wingnuttia.  Obama shaking hands with other leaders does not endanger America, but cynical, calculated hypocrisy surely does.

Ben Grivno is yet another wingnut with a blog. He calls his blog The Crowbar, apparently in honor of the tool that was used on his head, resulting in the peculiarly malformed thought processes he is so proud to put on display. In a predictable post that pooh-poohs the whole idea that there could be anything the US does that could be called ‘torture’, he states:

Take a look at Wikipedia’s waterboarding entry – it has Liberalati fingerprints all over it. Who are those “legal experts, politicians, war veterans, intelligence officials, military judges, and human rights organizations”, anyway?

Well, gee, let’s take a look at the passage from Wikipedia that has poor Benjie so befuddled:

See those little blue numbers, Benjie? Those are called footnotes. You click them, and they show you more information about what’s being discussed. In this case, they show you bibliographic references where you can find out who those “legal experts, politicians, war veterans, intelligence officials, military judges, and human rights organizations” actually are.

You knew this, of course. When you copied that passage out of the Wikipedia article and pasted it into your blog, all the superscripted footnote links came with it. You had to manually strip them out of the text you had just pasted in. SO please spare us you faux puzzlement. You knew that the references were supplied. You simply decided that being dishonest was an easier way to make your “point”.

As with all wingnuts, Ben Grivno cannot help but provide ample evidence of his incompetence and mendacity. It would be so much harder to discredit them without their eager assistance.