August 8, 2008
July 30, 2008
July 25, 2008
Obama Mia!
Filed under: Toon — Tags: Baghdad, Barack Obama, Berlin, Europe, Germany, Iraq, Obama World Tour 08, Paris, Toon — Volt @ 8:55 am
July 23, 2008
Brought to You By the Letter N
Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, n word, nigger, nuts, Toon — Volt @ 8:57 pm
July 19, 2008
July 11, 2008
June 30, 2008
The Tattlesnake – Big Media Continue to Excuse or Ignore ‘Honest John’s’ McCainery Edition
Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: 2008 Presidential Campaign, Barack Obama, Campaign Financing, Flip-Flops, GOP, Iran, Iraq, John McCain, Keith Olbermann, Media, National Debt, Negative Ads, Oil Drilling, oil prices, Pundits, Republicans, RS Janes, Tattlesnake, Taxes — RS Janes @ 5:47 pm
And Some Questions His BM Camp Followers Should Ask Their Republican Paramour
Political junkies and other perverse creatures who tempt aching necks following this tennis match between John McCain and Barack Obama already know that if Obama had made the glaring blunders McCain has been prone to, he would have been crucified by the Big Media Punditocracy and his political carcass left for the buzzards.
Let’s look at McCain’s recent spate of arrant gaffery, just on Iraq, where he’s been anointed by his friends in the BM as an ‘expert’:
1. McCain said an occupation of Iraq of a hundred years or more wouldn’t bother him. His Pundit Pals said he didn’t really mean that and it was taken out of context.
2. On four different occasions in a 24-hour period, McCain mixed up the Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. His BM buddies excused that by exasperatedly fuming, ‘Of course, John McCain knows the difference – after all, he’s a foreign policy expert! He just misspoke!’
3. McCain has claimed repeatedly that the surge is working, although there has been no recent official report to that effect, no US general on the ground in Iraq has made that statement, and Americans and Iraqis continue to die in attacks over there. I have yet to hear the BM challenge McCain on this unsupported assertion.
4. Then McCain said on the Today Show that it doesn’t really matter how long we have troops there. He’s since backtracked while his reliable Hallelujah chorus in the Corporate Media have echoed the GOP Talking Point that he was, again, ‘taken out of context.’
On June 12, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann had a Special Comment on McCain’s statements, showing with video clips how many times the Straight-Talk Express has been circling the cul-de-sac — right turns only, of course, ‘my friends’ — and that putting his remarks in context is even more frightening than dismissing them as the senile obfuscations and precinct-captain pandering of a doddering old political fossil. It sketches a picture of McCain as a remote and careless dauphin who really doesn’t give a fig about the troops he pretends to support. Leave ‘em in there to rot as an occupation force, as long as they’re not getting shot at. This is the antiquated foreign policy of a King George III or Kaiser Wilhelm II, not a modern American president.
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June 26, 2008
The Tattlesnake — Random Head-Slapping Flapdoodle Edition
Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: 2008 election, Barack Obama, Bush Junior, Bush Senior, Conventional Wisdom, Democrats, Drug War, John McCain, Karl Rove, Media, Prediction, Pundits, Reagan, Republicans, RS Janes, Tattlesnake — RS Janes @ 1:35 pm
– How’s That Drug War Working Out for You? Traces of cocaine can be found on 80 percent of the US currency in circulation, according to The Discovery Channel’s ‘Mostly True Stories’ series. Come on, folks, let’s increase the budget for the War on Drugs and get that number up to 90 or 95 percent.
– A Prediction: In 50 years all of the ugly truth will emerge about the Reagan and Poppy Bush presidencies, should the country survive, and they will be relegated to their proper places on the list of US presidents, lounging down near the bottom with Milliard Fillmore and James Buchanan. While you may find the occasional Ronald Reagan Memorial Corn Crib or George H. W. Bush State Penitentiary for the Insane in parts of the south and Midwest, the Reagan Airport in Washington will have a new name and the aircraft carrier that bears Bush Senior’s moniker will have turned into rust in dry dock. And what of Bush Junior, the worst president in our history? Americans will spit disgustedly after saying his name and he will have the distinction of coming in dead last on every presidential scorecard, if he manages to avoid jail. San Francisco has shone the way regarding appropriate memorials for Shrub’s occupations of the nation’s highest office – some of the city’s residents have plans to name a sewage treatment plant in his honor. Speaking of shrubs, perhaps a future landscaper will create Mount Bushmore – a large hedge trimmed to look like Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Newman reading ‘My Pet Goat.’
May 8, 2008
The Tattlesnake – The End of the Clinton Era Edition
Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: Barack Obama, Democratic party, Hillary Clinton, Indiana, North Carolina, politics, primaries — RS Janes @ 8:58 am
“Election II – Tracy For President” is Finally On Its Last Reel
“This is Hillary Rodham, calling from Emerson Junior High School in Park Ridge. I want you to tell Mayor Daley that it was wrong of him to steal the election, and that Richard Nixon should have won!”
– Hillary Clinton calling Chicago City Hall on Nov. 9, 1960, when she was a Teenage Republican, as quoted by In These Times.“A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.”
– Tennessee Williams
Although Your Tattlesnake’s been on hiatus recently, recharging batteries and working on other projects, he hasn’t neglected politics, and the post-May 6th unraveling of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Let’s start off with everyone’s favorite, an anecdote:
The Tattler knows of two women who fit into Hillary’s core demographic, the people she’d need to get elected president: white middle-class women in their 50s. One is a psychologist and the other a small business owner. Both initially strongly supported Sen. Clinton until two months ago when she descended into this Rovian nightmare of innuendo, sleaze and negative campaigning. They are disgusted with her these days — the psychologist said she would have to ‘force herself’ to vote for her in November, but she’d rather have Obama. The small business owner said there is no way she could live with her conscience if she voted for Hillary since she’s seen this ‘obsessive, manic, anything for a vote’ side of her. If Obama doesn’t get the nomination, she may vote third party or sit this one out. They are particularly incensed that she is campaigning on her ‘testicular fortitude’ — they wanted, after all, a Democratic woman as president, not a fake Republican man.
Of course, this is just anecdotal, but I wonder how many other women in their age group are having the same reaction?
“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
– Mark Twain
Meanwhile, Your Tattlesnipe has also been hanging with his Homies at the local bars. Having once worked the kind of physically exhausting jobs that required a medicinal dose of whiskey by the shot and several bottles of beer at the end of the day just to lower the pain and stay sane, I well know what type of liquor is served in Working Class Palaces, the constituency Hill was trying to impress by sipping a shot of Crown Royal and tipping a beer at a saloon in Indiana. The real Blue-Collar Heroes were highly amused at Mrs. Clinton’s photo-op – first off, none of these guys would drink a pricey blend like Crown Royal. The actual Members of the Working Non-Elite throw down Jim Beam, Ten High, Jack Daniel’s or whatever cheap rotgut whiskey the dive has on hand. They also don’t sip, they pour it down in one quick snort – another blunder by the Regular Salt-of-the-Earth Midwestern Gal from suburban Park Ridge whose net worth just happens to be over $100 million dollars.
April 15, 2008
The Tattlesnake – The Media Elite Highlight Their Own Elitism Edition
Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: Barack Obama, Elite, Elitism, Hillary Clinton, Media, MSNBC, Norah O'Donnell, RS Janes, Tattlesnake, This Day in Hell, Titanic — RS Janes @ 7:09 am
The bored and restless Punditrocracy, maintaining their staunch avoidance of relevance or importance, furiously lit like garbage scow flies upon Barack Obama’s alleged ‘elitism’ for pointing out that people in small towns are bitter and angry at being ignored by politicians once they’ve been elected. He added, if one bothered to listen to more than the out-of-context soundbite of his San Francisco comments, that they tend to vote for things such as guns and God and against immigrants because these are issues which the GOP has carefully constructed as distracting vents for their boiling frustrations. Contrary to the Pundicrats gasping shock at such a blunder as telling the truth – they hate that – Obama didn’t seem to rile voters much with his ‘bitter’ talk – many even agreed wholeheartedly.
Of course the Hill People, sensing the nearness of electoral oblivion, had to get what political mileage they could out of Obama’s ‘gaffe,’ but Hillary herself might have left out the prosaic and artificial-sounding anecdote of her father taking her out as a small child and teaching her how to shoot a firearm. Growing up in the same ’50′s America as Hillary, it just doesn’t seem credible to me that Dad Rodham would have grabbed his young daughter and stuck a 30-06 rifle in her tiny hands – more likely he would have told her to go join Mom in the kitchen for pointers on creating the perfect Kraft cheese casserole while he took his sons out hunting. Ah, well, truth is the first casualty of war and political campaigns.
But the stern media consternation over Obama’s remarks, and their desperate flailing in trying to dub him as another hapless, out-of-touch Kerry ‘elitist,’ reached a pinnacle of absurd hilarity yesterday on MSNBC when Norah O’Donnell, as attractive as she is vapid, chuckled and smirked over Obama referring to the high price of arugula when he was campaigning in Iowa earlier this year. “Why,” hooted O’Donnell, “they don’t even have arugula there!” Although she and her pundit guests didn’t catch it, Norah was displaying her own aloof elitism, as if it were a scarlet ‘E’ emblazoned on her forehead. Our six-and-seven figure Nationally Televised Media don’t get out much among the rabble; if they did, they’d realize the rubes in Iowa, as Media Matters has noted, not only know what arugula is, but grow it and eat it, and even occasionally wash it down with cappuccinos and lattes. (Yes, they actually have Starbucks and other gourmet coffee outlets out in the Hawkeye State, as well as many other parts of Fly-Over Country.) Why, even my local little coffee shop, which used to feature only one humble grind poured by a pleasant middle-aged waitress from a glass Cory carafe, now has some foreign-sounding caffeinated drinks on the menu.
April 1, 2008
‘Obama Mamas’ Deployed in PA to Help Candidate in Primary
Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: April Fool, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Humor, Pennsylvania Primary — RS Janes @ 4:35 pm
‘Obama Mamas’ Deployed in PA to Help Candidate in Primary
By J. J. Gingleheimer-Schmitt
The Wilkes-Barre Citizen-Review
Updated 45 minutes ago at 2:58 pm ESTExclusive to the Citizen-Review — According to Steve Puta, Barack Obama’s Pennsylvania Campaign Co-Chair, thousands of women between the ages of 19 and 45 have been sent out across the Keystone State with the mission of convincing male voters to cast their ballots for the Illinois senator April 22.
“It’s really important that we bring in working-class male voters in the 21 to 50 demographic,” Puta said in an interview. “To that end, we’ve been enlisting attractive women to join what we call the Obama Mamas to entice those men into the polling place, in a manner of speaking.”
Puta went on to say that the group was concentrating on sports bars, truck stops, diners, rest stops, hardware stores, unemployment offices and other places where men gather. “We’re in a long hard fight here, but our numbers have been quickly growing since we announced the program last week,” Puta said, “and it’s really awesome that we have these young hotties and MILFs out there, in mini-skirts and high heels, committed to making this a super-sized victory for Barack.”
Maudie Frickert, Director of Hillary Clinton’s Wilkes-Barre County campaign, dismissed the Obama Mamas, “This is a really disgusting sexist stunt. I think he’ll lose a lot of support among women with this. It should be called Bimbos for Barack.”
Obama’s national campaign refused to comment on the Obama Mamas.
March 27, 2008
The Tattlesnake – Throw Them All Under the Bus Edition
Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, James Carville, John McCain, Martial Law — RS Janes @ 4:27 pm
This, That and Other Scat
– “Throw under the bus”: Isn’t it time to throw this exhausted Mediocracy line under the bus and back over it a few times for good measure?
– The country’s deeply in the debt and borrowing money to keep afloat, our economy’s ‘under the bus,’ and our military is near the breaking point, yet I didn’t hear McCain asked even one question regarding how he intends to pay for his endless war in Iraq, nor how he plans to find fresh bodies to sacrifice to his vague idea of victory over there.
– Will Tonya Harding object to her tactics of ‘knee-capping’ Nancy Kerrigan being compared to Hillary Clinton’s going negative against Obama? I can hear Tonya now, “I’m voting for that McCainey guy – I don’t truck with them pinko liberal commies like Clinton.” (Side note: Will Hillary be appearing on “Celebrity Boxing” in a few years?)
– Speaking of Hillary, what could she be thinking by proposing to alleviate the housing crisis by dragging in Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan to fix it? Rubin is the ultimate Wall Street insider and rinky-dink deals by his Big Money cronies caused the crisis in the first place while Greenspan’s fetid policies as Fed chief set the stage for the economic disaster we’re wallowing in now. Would a President Hillary invite McCain and Cheney in to help her during a Middle East crisis?
March 16, 2008
The Tattlesnake — Obama’s Wright Wing and McCain Trained Monkeys Edition
Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Jeremiah Wright, John Hagee, John McCain — RS Janes @ 6:46 am
“But as I travel around this big ol’ world,
There’s one thing that I most fear:
It’s a white man in a golf shirt
With a cell phone in his ear.”
– From “Who’s Gonna Build Your Wall?” a Tom Russell song.
Obama’s Wright Brother Flap: In responding to the media furor over Jeremiah Wright’s remarks on rich, white people and the reasons why this nation was attacked on 9/11, Obama should have said that, while he disagrees with his pastor and old friend on some things, he supports his right to free speech, and to openly express his opinions, just as he would support the right of any American or theologian to speak out freely, even those with whom he profoundly disagrees. Rather than go on the defensive, Obama should have made this a free speech issue, which it is, instead of the ‘judgment’ issue the Punditrocracy is trying to frame it as. And, incidentally, someone tell Chris Matthews to quit mischaracterizing Wright’s comments as ‘blaming the victims of 9/11′ – Wright did no such thing. Note to the Big Media: Stop playing Wright’s “God damn America” line out of context. A lot of Americans might agree with Wright if they heard the 120 seconds preceding the ‘offensive’ three words, but, of course, you knew that, didn’t you, you little McCain Trained Monkeys.
Quotable: “Let me be clear on this: This is only a problem for Barack Obama in that there are still a lot of pinheads around that don’t understand that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. And he’ll distance himself from it because he has to and because Wright’s style isn’t his. It’s not how Obama rolls. But there’s nothing untrue about Wright’s statements in and of themselves.”
– From “Truth Time: Wright Is Right,” by DF, TPM Cafe, March 15, 2008.
And, BTW, when does the BM go after McCain for accepting endorsements from such certifiable fruitcakes as John Hagee, Rod Parsley (wasn’t he once a porn star?) and the late Jerry Falwell?
“All I can tell you is that I am very proud to have Pastor John Hagee’s support.”– John McCain on Feb. 27, 2008.
Here’s what McCain is “very proud” of: Hagee babbles nonsense like, “I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. … I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.” (So why did Katrina devastate areas of heterosexual Republican Mississippi as well? God has poor aim?) He has also condemned the Catholic religion as “The Great Whore” and the “anti-Christ,” thinks Harry Potter books are propaganda for Satan, and held a ‘slave sale’ in 1996 to raise job funds for high school seniors. In his Cornerstone Church’s newsletter, Hagee publicized the event with, “Slavery in America is returning to Cornerstone!” and “Make plans to come and go home with a slave.” If this idiot worked a real job, his employers would have fired him by now.
God’s Rod Parsley has hallucinated that our Constitution somewhere says our national mission is to destroy Islam, and Falwell was so far over the edge that he, like Hagee, thought we were attacked on 9/11 as a judgment from God for allowing gays and women basic civil rights, among other head-slapping nutballery from the creepy far-right fringe of his reptilian brain.
– Speaking of McCain (from Jamison Foser at Media Matters):
March 13, 2008
The Tattlesnake – The Media Monsters in a Box for John McCain Edition
Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Howard Kurtz, John McCain — RS Janes @ 4:37 pm
“A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news ‘filters,’ fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) ‘flak’ as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) ‘anticommunism’ [or 'anti-terrorism'] as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.”
– Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “Manufacturing Consent,” Pantheon Books, 1988.
A barely awake Tattlesnake caught Time’s Ana Marie Cox on Col. Howie Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources” (CNN) on March 9, gassing about the importance of access to politicians and maintaining a career rather than informing the public as the US journalists’ main job. Then there was the now-fired Tucker Carlson grilling Scottish journalist Gerry Peev who printed Obama aide Samantha Powers’ remark that Hillary was ‘monster’ even though Powers asked, right after she said it, that it be off the record. Carlson, as noted in this excellent article by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com,”Tucker Carlson Unintentionally Reveals The Role of The American Press,” seemed to also believe that the role of an American journalist is to protect their lines of access to the movers and shakers at the expense of letting the public know what they are really like, not that Tucker would qualify as a real journalist in anyone’s mind but his own.
This all smacks of so much EST-driven, psychobabble-laden, Outward Boundish, Bonfire-of-the-Vanities-Masters-of-the-Universe “I’m an asshole and proud of it!” yuppie doodah that it makes your Tattler slightly ill. Who but a yuppie idiot would think their ‘career in journalism’ was more important than the public’s right to know – I mean aside from their yuppie publishers, program directors, editors, and other executive suite backwash?
And now we have the media boys (and girls) on the bus unabashedly playing footsie with John McCain because – gasp! – he talks to them like normal human beings! In return, the media darlings have been covering up, diminishing, or glossing over McCain’s temper tantrums, flip-flops, and blatant lies. Notice that no one called him to task for wholeheartedly accepting the recent endorsement of a Rapture-Ready neocon Christian goofball like John Hagee, while Barack Obama receiving the unwanted nod from religious nutcase Louis Farrakhan was chewed over endlessly.
So, it’s no secret that the US Big Media has a kissy-face love affair with the current Republican candidate for president — they all seem to be fighting to see how far to the bottom of the tank they can sink for their straight-talking war hero, as this wincing exchange between NBC’s Chris Matthews and Brian Williams when President Junior endorsed McCain last week elucidates (h/t to Media Matters). Warning: Swallow your coffee before you read this next part:
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The Tattlesnake – Gramm Cracker of Dunder, Jesse’s Fake Thunder, and Obama’s FISA Blunder Edition
– An Early Xmas Present for Obama: They don’t come much dumber than former GOP Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, the UBS corporate shill who is the McCain campaign’s senior economic advisor, and he proved it July 10th by calling America “a nation of whiners” for complaining about the miserable state of the Bush Boy’s economy that he helped craft when he was in the senate. McCain quickly jetted away from Gramm’s remarks, denying they represented his opinion, but he notably didn’t fire the fifth Mutant Ninja Turtle from his campaign. Gramm, finally noticing he had wet his pants at the dance, attempted to back track, claiming desperately that he meant the leaders of the country, not the citizens, but think about it – how is that better? After all, isn’t McCain trumpeting himself as a leader of the country? He just called the War Hero he works for a whiner? I can see this line replayed on Dem oppo ads in the fall to show just how boneheaded and crass the Republicans really are. Crawl inside your shell, Phil, and hope they don’t roll you on your back before you arrive home in Stupidville.
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