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October 26, 2012

My trip to Reno: With Rove & Romney & the Big Bad Wolf

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Jane Stillwater @ 11:12 pm

After putting it off for several years, my family and I finally got around to taking a road trip to Reno, Nevada — just in time to get caught in an avalanche of deceitful election propaganda, compliments of the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and Karl Rove. And also just in time to get stuck in a huge snow storm in the Sierras as well.

Just try putting chains onto your tires in the middle of a blizzard sometime. So much fun!

Once in Reno, however, my four-year-old granddaughter developed a bit of a cough, so while Ashley and Hugo were out playing blackjack, I was busy reading Mena bedtime stories — starting with Little Red Riding Hood. You know the one. Where the Big Bad Wolf pretends to be Grandma? Good grief! Politics are even in fairy tales!

“The better to EAT you with, my dear!” cries the wolf — cleverly disguised as Riding Hood’s sweet little grandmother. And if Rove and the Koch brothers and Adelson (and, incidentally, Ryan and Romney too) win the 2012 presidential race, then THEY will be happily eating up Grandma and there will be absolutely no kindly woodsmen nearby to save us.

But in Reno right now, Rove and his pals are still happily disguised as our innocent and well-meaning grandmother, out to buy the 2012 election for our own good. Yeah right. Enough said about that. If America gets eaten by wolves this election, then it’s just our own naive fault.

Bon appetite, Rove, Koch and Adelson. Hope you enjoy snacking on Grandma.

Obama may not be perfect, but he has shown that he’s not all that interested in cannibalizing America.

PS: While in Reno, I also visited my wonderful Aunt Evelyn and went to a political fund-raiser put on by the Washoe County democrats. We all gathered at the Atlantis, ate rubber turkey, watched the final presidential debate together and listened to speeches by senators Harry Reid and Al Franken — who commented that Romney thought Iran wanted Syria so it could finally have a path to the sea. “Forgot about the Persian Gulf, did ya?” The Persian Gulf is a body of water named after Persia — aka Iran. Iran has had a path to the sea since approximately 3100 BC.

But Rove himself hasn’t forgotten about the Persian Gulf, no no no. He didn’t forget it during that costly and spurious war on Iraq — so why should he suddenly forget about it now? Or forget it in January, after he has stolen the White House again.

PPS: Someone just suggested that everyone in America should start registering Republican — so that there will be less of a chance that our votes will be stolen by GOP election fraud. Yes, folks, American politics have actually sunk that low, where we actually have UN monitors watching our elections.

So. What can we mere helpless citizens do to stop America from getting eaten by the greedy, corrupt and evil Big Bad Wolves who continually prey on us? Just hope that the good part of human nature will eventually win out over the bad and that kindly woodsmen will always come to our rescue. But how’s that been working for us so far? Not so good. However, cooperation always trumps subjugation in the end — but it sure is taking a long time for Grandma, er, the American people to see that.

But something else also happened in Reno that did give me hope. Of course I didn’t see hardly any Obama car-bumper stickers there — but I didn’t see all that many Romney stickers there either.

It appears that Americans had really gotten fooled back when Big Bad Wolf George Bush ran for president in 2000, cleverly disguised as our folksy and kindly woodsman hero and not as the Rove-owned sleazy used-car salesman con-man that he actually was. Now, however, many voters can see that Romney is also trying to imitate Dubya disguised as a used-car salesman/BB Wolf — and this time Americans have not been so easily fooled. Or to quote from GWB himself, “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

Hopefully.

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December 17, 2010

The Trumped-Up Espionage Case Against Julian Assange

cartoon-assange-spy-case

November 6, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Post-Election Portents and Predictions Edition

…And How the Big Media Speculators Got It Wrong Again

The usual Big Media Punchinellos were out in force the past few days, blaring and bleating the Beltway Conventional Wisdom that the Democratic Party’s loss of the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey are a sure referendum on Obama Administration policies. This is the sort of doomed facile reasoning found in the bottom of a Washington cocktail glass typical of Our Pundit Class who, from non-existent Iraq WMD to Fred Thompson’s popularity with voters, can never seem to fit the square peg in the round hole, pound though they might.

A brief review of the Dem candidates in VA and NJ clearly shows why progressives and like-minded independents didn’t bother to vote for Creigh Deeds in Virginia or Jon Corzine in New Jersey, and it had nothing to do with Obama. For various reasons explained below, they were both terrible candidates.

Creigh Deeds: In an era of change, Deeds was a shambling throwback, a dismal campaign clunker with four flat tires, who rejected Obama’s advice and help until it dawned on him in the final weeks he was going to lose in a landslide. He ran a miserably negative campaign, devoid of ideas, and presented his pap on toast so dry even peppy Dem loyalists fought to stay awake during his speeches. A Dem Blue Dog so blue he threatened to opt out of a public option should it become available to Virginians, he was nearly as conservative as his GOP opponent Bob McDonnell. Why leave the house to vote when the choice is between a Republican and a Dem who thinks like a Republican? Seen clearly, this was a referendum, and portent of the future, for Blue Dog Dems rather than President Obama.

Jon Corzine: The one-time ‘Garden State’ US Senator who was just bounced from the governor’s mansion is a Goldman Sachs Golden Boy who made piles of money on Wall Street and insists on spending it on vanity campaigns. Why he doesn’t just buy a new summer home or sumptuous overpriced yacht instead of squadering his fortune to impose himself on our political process is beyond me, but Corzine has never shown much talent for governing once elected, and what few things he has accomplished were always moderate to the point of invisibility. Jon is the kind of drab Dudley Do-Nothing the Democratic Party needs to send packing, if they expect to keep the majority in the future. Again, the portentiousness of Corzine’s defeat was not his affiliation with Obama’s policies, but the yellow line up the middle of his back from avoiding tenaciously either the right or left lane. He will not be missed, at least by this writer.

The point? Neither of them were progressives and didn’t stir independents or liberal Dems to go out and vote for them.

And now to stare into the crystal – but not Kristol – ball for some predictions on the Republican winners of those two elections:

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February 13, 2009

The Tattlesnake – GOP Fiddles While America Burns Edition

Or, Nero Was No Hero

“But one of the good things about reading history is you learn a good deal. And, we know for sure that the big spending programs of the New Deal did not work. In 1940, unemployment was still 15%.”
– Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), speaking the untruth of the powerful, Feb. 6, 2009.

“[O]ne of the things that really has gotten dumber about our culture: the media constantly talks about truth as if it … were always equidistant from two points. In other words, sometimes the truth is one-sided.” […]
“[I]t’s exactly like saying … ‘so-and-so says, two plus two equals five. But, of course, mathematicians say that it really equals four.’ The mathematicians are right. The people who say that two plus two equals five are wrong. The media blurs that constantly.”
– Susan Jacoby, from Bill Moyers’ Journal, PBS, Feb. 15, 2008.

That great economic historian, Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, took to the floor of the Senate last week to excoriate the memory of FDR and claim the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression. In fact, Roosevelt’s New Deal programs put millions of average Americans to work and reduced unemployment from a high of over 35 percent to 14 percent. Aside from that, if FDR was such a failure, why did he win by 62.6 percent of the popular vote, and 98.5 percent of the electoral vote, in 1936, and 55 percent in 1940, with 84.6 of the EV? Why was he retained in office for 12 years, from 1932 until his death in 1945, the longest-serving president in our history, if he accomplished nothing toward solving the primary issue of that time – the economic crisis? Some smart reporter should ask McConnell those questions.

“Only with the New Deal’s rehabilitation of the financial system in 1933-35 did the economy begin its slow emergence from the Great Depression.”
– Ben Bernanke, the Republican-picked Fed chief, from his book, “Essays on the Great Depression.”

“I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.”
– President Franklin D. Roosevelt

In his first press conference on February 9, Obama put the screws to the GOP, albeit wrapped in enough padding that no blood was drawn but, to mix metaphors, this is Obama’s style – wear them down with civility while you score with shots to the gut and dance away. Our ‘Gentleman Jim’ President nimbly peppered the punch-drunk Republicans just as ably as the original did in 1892 to win the heavyweight crown from the blundering beast that was John L. Sullivan who had only his ‘strong right arm’ as a weapon.

Pushed by such withered toads as McConnell, blatant numbskulls like Mike Pence of Baghdad street bazaars are ‘just like any open-air market in Indiana in the summertime’ fame, and the inchoate babblings of the evidently very corrupt new RNC chair Michael Steele, the GOP is collectively lurching toward irretrievable disaster, one every bit as bad as anything the Dimbulb Son who just left the White House wrought — you know, the one whose name must never be mentioned in public by any Republican ever again. They seem determined to take the mean-spirited, unpopular opinion on nearly every issue, just to gratify a shaky base of fringe nutcases, religious retrogrades, Fox News employees, Wall Street Journal editorial board members, Coulter cultists, racist rednecks, professional malcontents, crumb-bum lobbyists, and off-shored-assets tycoons channeling Leona Helmsley.

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January 29, 2009

Why should he?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Bob Patterson @ 3:18 pm

There doesn’t seem to be much commentary available on-line, in the way of handicapping the odds about whether Karl Rove will or will not show up Tuesday and testify.

He can:
Show up and lie. Not good for him if it turns out that it can be proved he lied.
Show up and take the Fifth Amendment. It will seem like an echo of the Senate Rackets Committee hearings in the past when the gangsters made taking the fifth a cliche and that won’t be good for Bush’s image or legacy.

He can:
Not show up.

If he doesn’t show up, it can go either slow or fast.
If Rove doesn’t show up and fights it in court it could be a long legal battle which would fit the new Republican strategy of delay, disrupt, and destroy during the Obama term in office. It could take years to settle and that would get Bush off the hook.
It could go fast if the high priced Republican lawyers put it on the fast track to the Supreme Court for a quick hearing to resolve a Constitutional Crisis. The Supreme Court has a conservative majority so that looks like the deck would be stacked in Rove’s favor.

The world’s laziest journalist, like most of the high paid pundits for the mainstream media, is too busy to think this through, so, dear reader, think it through and, if you can, post a comment below on how you think it will play out.

January 1, 2009

The Tattlesnake – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of 2008 Edition

Coverage of the Big Stuff of 2008, in the form of cheesy top ten lists and lofty-worded think pieces, will be churned out endlessly by Our Corporately-Owned Media over the next few weeks, so here are some of the lesser-reported annoyances, intrusions on sanity, and other head-smackers of the year past.

The Good: It’s a new year and Obama takes office in less than 20 days! (Happy 2009, BTW.)
The Bad: Bush and Cheney can still stir up trouble in their ‘Final Days.’
The Ugly: What if they decide not to leave?

The Good: The already-weakened Republican Party is splitting apart in a war between the ‘Jesus Camp’ Christopublicans and the Neocon Corporate Pragmatists. (The true principled conservatives having ditched the GOP years ago.) The latter are willing to bend rather than break; the former can’t, since they arrogantly believe, apparently without the assistance of hard drugs, that their Invisible Omnipotent God of the Infinite Universe Who Hates Liberals and Homos has nothing better to do than whisper in their ears what kind of retail politics and holy wars against his other creations will set them straight with Heaven.
The Bad: There’s a good chance the NCP will dump the Republicans entirely and put all their money into the Dems, which will have the result of making the Dems as debased and corrupt as the GOP.
The Ugly: Even though the Theocrats-for-a-Better-Armageddon are a small minority, the GOP in their hairy paws will become a rural party of ranting rubes, bedeviled boobs, slick hicks, hypocritical hucksters, predatory politicians, snake-handling simpletons, and mumbling morons (not that it mostly isn’t already) and, thanks to our unique system of apportioning two senators to each state no matter what the population (another nasty legacy of the era of slavery), the Christopublicans will continue to wield enough influence to block legislation and stir up other governmental mischief to the detriment of us all. The future of the Republican Party might very well be an army of pious Puritan dunderheads marching in righteous lockstep, infecting the US body politic like a bad case of psoriasis – it won’t kill you, but it can be damned aggravating.

The Good: Speaking of Sarah Palin, her 18-year-old daughter Bristol had a healthy baby recently.
The Bad: As Bart of Bartcop fame wrote, “[Sarah] Palin promised her daughter ‘and the young man’ would get married but that was during the campaign so she can’t be held to it.” So, now that Bristol’s bun is out of the oven, where is the fuming outrage of the Big Media and the Christopublicans that she’s officially an unwed mother and, since Ma holds down a gub’mint job, she’s being supported by taxpayer money?
The Ugly: The kid’s father, Levi Johnston, remains a proudly ignorant redneck oaf, and he just went to work for a ‘let’s-rape-the-wilderness’ energy company.

The Good: A Democrat has finally vowed to fight back against Republican smears and refuses to cave in to their demands.
The Bad: That Democrat is the convicted-by-the-media-without-a-trial Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich.
The Ugly: Here is the dumb-bunny guilt-by-location smear the RNC and every right-wing website will be repeating ad nauseum as long as Obama is president, even if Blago is cleared of all charges: “Obama and Blagojevich are both from Chicago, Illinois, which is, like, the most corrupt city and state in the union – the FBI guy said so! – and, hey, common sense says they must both then be completely corrupt, right? This is another one of those unanswered questions about Obama that the public deserves to hear the full truth about!” 2010 BM pundit’s comment: “Let’s say ‘hello’ to Illinois’ newly-elected Republican Governor Patrick Fitzgerald! At least he’s ethical, even if he couldn’t convict Blagojevich of anything!”

The Good: Illinois finally has a US Senator to replace Obama, a man with a clean and honorable record, former IL Attorney General Roland Burris.
The Bad: He is being morphed into Blago’s Rev. Wright by the scandal-happy ‘Whitewaterized’ Big Media, eager to toss him into the same ‘guilty-even-if-he-hasn’t-been-convicted-of-anything’ pot with Blagojevich. Burris is now ‘tainted’ just because he accepted the appointment. Note to the Big Media: What about all of those prominent Washington Senators of the Republican persuasion – Mitch McConnell, John Ensign, Saxby Chambliss, Richard Shelby, Orrin Hatch, et al — who openly dined and danced with the likes of Jack Abramoff and Karl Rove? Oh, right – Rove hasn’t been convicted of any crime – but when has that stopped you? (Hey, the Clintons weren’t convicted of any crime in the Whitewater land deal; and no crime was even committed in the ‘Travelgate’ fiasco, but that didn’t matter – they were still media-created ‘scandals’ that filled up newspaper columns and media airtime for years.) Lack of conviction, so to speak, certainly hasn’t been any bar to gleefully drubbing Blagojevich and Burris with the corruption stick. Abramoff is in prison and Rove is being subpoenaed and investigated all over the place for bribery, fraud and other assorted dishonesty, yet their close connections to prominent Republicans, not to mention the White House, somehow doesn’t carry the same ‘taint’ of corruption? Is the BM afraid of the GOP High and Mighty, or is it just your ingrained conservative bias showing?
The Ugly: Congressional and Illinois state Democrats are incredibly doing the Republicans’ job for them, sticking the blade in deep and twisting it not only with Blago, but now Burris, too. Hey, dingbat Dems, a simple ‘innocent until proven guilty, it’s the American way’ would be the way to go.

There’s more below the fold…

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October 2, 2008

The Tattlesnake – I Knew Sarah Palin Edition

…Or, At Least, Someone Like Her

Centuries ago, before personal computers, Blackberries, cell phones and The Google, Your Decrepit Tattler worked for a company that published a glossy magazine in a mid-sized, Midwestern US city. The glossy was eponymously named after the city, and the company also owned the local civic-booster travel guide and an FM radio station.

One day the word went out – the company had hired that year’s winner of the state beauty pageant to flack for the magazine, and proudly announced that the owner/publisher was confident she would go on to become Miss America, thereby enhancing the magazine’s ‘national prestige and image.’ All of us Worker Bees were ordered to come up with ways to promote the wonderfulness of Wendy Jo Stepford – her real name has been lost in the mists of age, but that’s a serviceable substitute – making sure we ‘excited’ local and state media coverage of her and, of course, the magazine for which she stood.

Our Advertising Director Ron, the dog, eagerly took it upon himself to be her personal escort and tutor, and arranged photo-ops around town to display her at various events – inaugurating the Oktoberfest celebration, cutting the ribbon at a car dealership opening, saluting the interstate trucking industry, dining at a new trendy restaurant – where she could smile with incredibly large teeth, open her eyes unnaturally wide, and proclaim forgettable hooey with the breathy guileless sincerity of a pretty 20-year-old in a miniskirt.

At first, the plans of the owner/publisher went smoothly – wherever she went, Wendy Jo attracted crowds of young women asking her about her choice in cosmetics and wardrobe, and leering old lechers who lusted to be her Sugar Daddy, and the media couldn’t get enough of her blandly sweet persona and trite, platitude-laden lexicon. Plus, she looked good in a two-piece bathing suit – somewhat incongruous for a German beer festival where she was posed with ruddy men in lederhosen, but it put her picture on the front page of the city’s highest-circulation newspaper.

The first crack in Wendy Jo’s edifice occurred during that suds-soaked Teutonic rave-up when she was asked about the history of Oktoberfest – they might as well have asked her to define Quantum Mechanics. She paused for a long uneasy moment, eyes practically bugging out of her head in naive intensity while her mouth froze in a large-mouthed professional beauty contestant grin; then came the groaner, delivered brightly: “Uh, those Nazis in Germany had a lot of bad stuff about them, but I think we can all agree that Oktoberfest was a pretty darn good idea!” Oh, you betcha! Gemütlichkeit!

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September 30, 2008

The Tattlesnake – McCain Failin’ ’08 Edition

Or, The Rake and Raquel Drop Down the Well

You Can’t Make This Up: Sarah Palin blows the two interviews she has with CBS’ Katie Couric, so she comes back for a rematch bringing her Grandpa John to help out. In-frigging-credible. Palin already looks lame, so you make her appear even lamer by sticking McCain in there for another sit-down with Katie? Whose idea was it to put that on the air? Is Grandpa going to go onstage and hold her hand during Thursday’s debate with Biden, too?

McCain also invoked what was perhaps one of the dumber ripostes in a campaign festooned with them when he accused an average voter, asking a question of Palin about attacking terrorist camps in Pakistan, of playing the ‘Gotcha’ game. So now asking St. Sarah about anything to which she gives the wrong answer is playing ‘Gotcha’? Should be an interesting debate Thursday – “Uh, that question you just asked me about borrowing money from China is a ‘Gotcha’ question and I don’t answer ‘Gotcha’ questions, sir.”

Latest Big Media Euphemisms for McCain’s Lies and Flip-Flops, collected over the past couple of weeks from various sources: “His position has evolved,” “He’s finding a new mechanism to present his case,” “He’s altering his message,” “He’s appealing to the Republican base,” “He’s responding to change by changing,” “He’s proving his maverick streak,” “He’s reforming his position on the issue,” “He’s looking for the right message here,” “He’s fine tuning his message to the base.”

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August 8, 2008

ALONG CAME BUSH!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — kerry @ 2:36 pm

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People beginning to ask why a paranoid, delusional and obsessive scientist was allowed to work with, you know, ANTHRAX

Privacy concerns, bureaucracy, demands of case allowed Ivins to keep job

What a bunch of BS!  They can arrest and send elderly ladies to federal prison for being a couple feet onto government property while demonstrating for peace, or standing in front of a recruiting office with anti-war signs. They can arrest Iraqi children and “detain” them in Gitmo prison for years without legal representation and anyone else they choose for any or no reason.  Yet they claim they couldn’t arrest someone they claim is a nutcase who has made numerous death threats while working at a high security lab facility???  My kids could have told a better, more believable story than that when they were pre-teenagers.

The man was a scapegoat, murdered to cover some bushco criminal crony or cronies.  GK

 

WASHINGTON – What took so long?

Army scientist Bruce Ivins had a history of paranoia, obsession and delusional thinking. And newly unsealed court documents show he didn’t keep them to himself.

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