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It’s hard to get around the fact that this is an example of Obama playing on the stupidity of the media to get Hillary off of the television screen. It is a fact that by having him up in front of microphones, the utility of his most famous You Tube clip as a weapon for Hillary and the right becomes diminished. Clearly it is time for everyone to talk about Reverend Wright.
Airtime is oxygen to a campaign.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Politics at 9:34 PM MDT
Senator Voinovich A big moment…
Posted by Al Swearengen as Video, Politics, History, Military at 10:55 PM MDT
I guess you can’t have a radio show and be controversial at the same time…she should sue Air America. To me it looks like she’s doing an appearance somewhere. So if her contract doesn’t stipulate what she can and cannot do when she’s not on the air…eh, I don’t even care really, I just wanted to post this video because as much as I’d like to ignore this election for the next couple of months, Hillary’s campaign makes me feel like Randi in this clip. It’ll probably be pulled shortly, but while it lasts:
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Video, Politics at 11:07 PM MDT
There’s this idiot over at Control Congress named bb who back in November agreed to wager on which party would win in 2008. I’ve been working hard lately, so the blog world is pretty much dead to me. Never forgetting about an opportunity to take money from a fool, I check back in after a long hiatus to remind everyone…and being the little baby that he is, of course he’s backing out. A couple of comments were posted, and then tonight I think about ten pounds of stress was unloaded in the span of under 200 words…here’s a taste:
bb, you thought you knew something about the world, and like most of the ideas you and other right-wingers push in lockstep year after year, when it’s time to act, you either:
A) Go through with it and end up looking foolish
or
B) Back out and go off to talk some more shit about something else you know nothing about
The Iraq war is a fine example of right-wingers putting their money where their mouth is, and look how that turned out. At least you can recognize the fact that you’re not smart enough to predict how things are going to turn out before you push in all of your chips…that said, knowing the right-wing mentality, no amount of failure and disaster will ever convince you of the fact that your thoughts and ideas are wrong.
You meddle in areas of seriousness, where adults are discussing important things, and slip in a dick joke (read: “* adverb adjective Liberal *”) every now and then.
Your bullshit is of no consequence to me - besides the scientific thrill of conducting an experiment to see precisely how full of it you actually are - so you can wipe your ass with that greenback in my honor and then stick it in the collection plate for all I care. I didn’t mean for you to mistake my engaging you in a wager as anything more than the opportunity to make some money…sincerely, I’d rather cut off my own feet than toss treats at your stupid repetitive yap from now until November.
To prevent this retard from somehow finding his way over here, I’ll just point you to ‘Control Congress’ on my blogroll. Rest assured, he’s by far the dumbest you’ll find over there. Everyone else is great, and most of them have a healthy sense of humor.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Politics at 10:52 PM MDT
One of the best speeches in my lifetime:
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Politics, History at 4:47 PM MDT
“…Dwarf thieves had infested Swedish buses,9 Lithuania was pondering changing its name,10 and a plot by retired Turkish Army officers to kill Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was foiled. 11 Police in Malda, India, were battling avian flu by conducting a poultry massacre. “We have planned to collect ‘backyard chickens’ from the houses in the evening and kill all of them late at night,” said the district’s deputy director of animal-resources development, N. K. Shit.12 George Piro, the FBI field agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein, recalled his last meeting with the Iraqi dictator, when the two smoked cigars and Saddam kissed Piro on the cheek three times. “It made me feel,” he said, “somewhat awkward.” (by Christian Lorentzen)
Scott Horton is without a doubt my favorite writer at the moment. Harper’s online has his work up for free on the site’s front page. You can find out why John Yoo hasn’t come over for dinner lately. Keynesian economics, Leo Strauss, J$hn Ashcr$ft, Afghanistan, “Blitzwasser” or hot-water incident (so named for the kettles of boiling water that the citizens threw at federal tax collectors), Don Siegelman…
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Justice, Politics, Economics, History, Military at 11:25 PM MST
BlackBoxVoting.org on top of things up in New Hampshire:
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Video, Politics at 10:44 PM MST
This is a good one…
(Lead Story - NYTimes Sunday Business Section - By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ) …Linking Mr. Scruggs, Mr. Patterson and other figures in the case is an obscure former college football star, farmer and politically well-connected adviser to Mr. Scruggs named Presley L. Blake (Google Search). At the hearing on Tuesday, prosecutors described Mr. Blake as a key go-between in an elaborate bribery plot, and they are now examining his ties to Mr. Scruggs. No charges have been brought against Mr. Blake.The story of Mr. Blake, who has received at least $10 million from Mr. Scruggs, threatens to reveal just how Mr. Scruggs worked the political back rooms of Mississippi — and Washington — to win a huge settlement with cigarette makers that garnered him approximately $1 billion in fees as well as a role in “The Insider,” the 1999 movie about the battle with Big Tobacco. Mr. Scruggs’s connections have never been a secret: his brother-in-law is former Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi. But the expansion of the investigation is especially significant because for Mr. Scruggs, law and politics have been closely intertwined…
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Politics, Economics at 2:39 PM MST
Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty fucking serious about their candidate.
Today, in Dover, Francine Torge, a former John Edwards supporter, said this while introducing Mrs. Clinton: “Some people compare one of the other candidates to John F. Kennedy. But he was assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson was the one who actually” passed the civil rights legislation. The comment, an apparent reference to Senator Barack Obama, is particularly striking given documented fears among blacks that Mr. Obama will be assassinated if elected. (link)
Don’t you always hear the pundits and politicians talking about how America is sick and tired of the ‘yo mama’ politics, and all the negativity it spawns? I think that’s a load of crap. Negative campaigning is what wins elections. Bringing up cocaine and the fact that in some places the noose is making a comeback (albeit a pussified passive aggressive one) are a couple of the only smart things the Clinton campaign has done recently. I’m not happy about the thought of Hillary winning the nomination, but I am happy anytime this game happens to produce a real moment or two along the way. The Clinton campaign foreshadowing Obama’s assassination was one of those moments.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Politics at 10:09 PM MST
Joe Lieberman is Gollem, and this storyline (Lieberman Endorses McCain) connecting him with McCain is Tolkenesque in that two men who had been considered in the past as throw-backs to a time when the Senate was occupied by men whose willingness to toe the party line at the expense of the country wasn’t nearly what it is today. These were two men who each got close enough to the ring for it to horrifically deform the both of them. The success that President Bush has enjoyed all these years, running around with the same shameless playbook, combined with their aspirations to create the monsters of today. After the 2004 election you could almost hear the rusty wheels turning, as the war continued to get worse by the day, by being forcefully dishonest and impugning the patriotism of his opposition, even a sleazy lout like Bush could pull it off. Obviously, “being real” wasn’t going to work, so the two tired old men figured they’d scheme out a way to win in 2008, and the devil had a contract for them to sign.
The game plan was to stake out an area over to the right of just about everyone else when it came to Operation Kill Brown People, and if possible, to somehow master the trick of getting the entire country to quiver on command when hearing the word “terrorism”. To be able to set up their base camp way out there in Bauersville, theoretically it would be difficult for another candidate to outflank them. Just blabber on about progress, Iran, terrorists in the heartland if we lose in Iraq, and pull out the bear mace on whoever talks back (see Ron Paul). That was and continues to be the game plan for Lieberman and McCain, and the ticket was set long before anyone mentioned how their positions curiously became identical overnight.
Being a guy with bills to pay, mouths to feed and no press credentials, it’s up to professional journalists to finally get to the bottom of this. Triangulation is the word that gets correctly associated with Hillary’s logarithmic politics, but in the case of McCain/Lieberman, the word doesn’t work. It’s not bloody enough…
Here’s my previous coverage of this McCain-Lieberman deal:
(h/t Think Progress) I’d had a feeling for a while that McCain and Lieberman had made a deal, and now that McCain is all but out of the race, here come the neocons to try and rescue Lieberman. I can’t wait for the staffers w/ knowledge of all this to start talking with Bob Woodward about it. The beltway writers didn’t seem willing to point out or even aware of how the senator’s positions appeared to be so closely aligned with McCain’s, and typical of the beltway echo chamber, Lieberman’s gravitation towards power - this Greenspan-esque character flaw of his - wasn’t given the attention it deserved. Presidential politics regularly ravage the minds of human beings, never more so than when someone who was at the top suddenly finds himself at the bottom in the blink of an eye. After failing to come close to the nomination in 2004 or a VP slot on Kerry’s ticket, Lieberman went out hunting for coattails willing to drag him along. McCain took him in, and seemingly overnight, Lieberman became a Teddy Ruxpin doll loaded up with a tape of familiar talking points. He has taken it to the extreme, and if his goal of attaining Presidential power isn’t advanced at all following the 2008 election, expect him to either drift off into obscurity or immediately identify the Republican with the best chance to win in 2012 and do the same thing that he did with McCain this time around.
I don’t think any writers pre-dated my assertion below.
Al on 7/17/2007 - In terms of the latter, Senators McCain and Lieberman, whose backroom deal to share a Presidential ticket having been made (my gut tells me this) a long time ago, who now flail and sputter violent predictions of what’s to come, how it would be fun to kill Persians for a while, yet assessing Iraq’s security situation today as positive, reassuring, not so bad, safe…
And now we have the circumstantial evidence to go along with this theory:
Say It’s So, Joe
Vice President Lieberman?
by William Kristol - Weekly Standard, 11/19/2007, Volume 013, Issue 10
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Politics at 12:03 AM MST
