BartBlog

November 15, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Miller Shills for the Wasilla Chinchilla on Billo and Other Atrocities Edition

Plus a Weird Election 2008 Factoid and a Plea to the GOP

“In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”
– H.L. Mencken

Gov. Snowjob said on Larry King Nov. 12th that there is nothing wrong with “calling people out” on their past associations, defending her lame McCarthyite attempts to link Obama to Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground. She added that she expected she would be called out on hers as well. Good. Let’s see, she’s openly palled around with and supported for reelection convicted felon Sen. Ted Stevens, corrupt ex-Governor of Alaska Frank Murkowski, and she’s married to a former member of the Alaska Independence Party, a group that despises and wants to secede from the United States. Imagine if Obama had strongly supported two crooks and his wife once belonged to an organization that hated America? C’mon, Big Media, time to apply some fairness here, and Sarah asked for it.

Speaking of Sarah the Terror: Miller and Palin, Sittin’ in a Tree:

“Listen, she’s a great dame. People are fascinated by her because the left hate her. I think the left hate her — mostly women on the left hate her, because to me, from outside in, it appears that she has a great sex life. All right? I think she has non-neurotic sex with that Todd Palin guy. I think most of the women on the Upper East Side, their husbands haven’t been aroused since Mailer signed copy [sic] of The Executioner’s Song at Rizzoli’s back in the early ’70s.
“So they look at her, and they hate her. I think that snowmobile looks like mechanized foreplay to me, and that’s why people are fascinated by it.”

Dennis Miller on “The O’Reilly Factor,” Fox News, Nov. 12, 2008.

I remember when Dennis had a functioning frontal lobe and was even occasionally clever, but years of drinking, drugs, chickenhawk fear, raging ego and his wiseguy notion that he’d just jump on the money train of what he thought would be generations of Republican rule softened his gray matter to the point where he’s defending a vacuous Alaska opportunist he once would have gleefully impaled with humor. BTW, I wonder what ‘non-neurotic sex’ is — the Moose Mama ‘Missionary Position’ (that would be a ‘rear mount’) or the opposite of whatever you call it when Miller picks up his paycheck these days?

My sympathies to the frustrated Mrs. Miller, if she’s still around – married to a goofball who thinks snowmobiles equate with foreplay can’t be a pleasant existence.

It’s was so bad even Billo took note of what had surfaced in his ‘No Spin Zone’ punchbowl:

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November 13, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Obama Meets Junior in the White House Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: , , , , , , , — RS Janes @ 8:02 pm

Obama meets with Bush at White House
– MSNBC headline.

That was the headline last Monday, but few details of their private conversation in the Oval Office have leaked out, leaving a vacuum for the Tattlehead to fill with imaginary dialogue.

JUNIOR: “Well, now that we got that photo-op thingy done with, let’s have ourselves a sit down.”

OBAMA: “Good idea, Mr. President. I’d like to discuss the economy…”

JUNIOR: “Whoa! Let me straighten yuh out on two things here right fast: First of all, since you’re gonna be a president, too, it’s okay, you can call me ‘Dubya’ and I’ll call yuh, uhhh… ‘O-Man,’ okay?”

OBAMA: “Uh, sure, that’s fine…Dubya.”

JUNIOR: “Good. Now the second part there about the economy – see, I’m the decider, but I’m not the policymakin’ guy. You gotta talk to Baldy – I mean Treasury Secretary Paulson – or maybe that Ben Bohunk guy over at the Fed about the economic policy and whatnot. I just make the decisions around here.”

OBAMA: “Uh huh, I see, domestic issues aren’t your forte. Well, then, let’s talk about the situation in the Middle East.”

JUNIOR: “Heh, heh, negatory there, O-Man. Now that would be Old Sourpuss’s – I mean Vice President Cheney’s – department or one of the boys over to his office. See, when you’re president they just bring you stuff to sign and you ask ‘em, ‘Is this a good idea?’ and they tell you ‘Yup’ and then you sign it. Believe me, you’ll sleep easy that way, knowin’ you didn’t come up with no failin’ policy like that Iraq disaster – Cheney really screwed the pooch on that one, heh, heh. See, all a this crap’s complicated as hell an’ if you get bogged down in every detail, you won’t have time for nothin’ else.”

OBAMA: “I see. And that would probably apply to every other domestic or foreign policy question I might have as well, right?”

JUNIOR: “Bingo! Ask muh secretary an’ she’ll set yuh up with all the right folks to see if yuh wanta talk about all that borin’ stuff!”

OBAMA: “Well, Dubya, let’s talk about something else — what would you like to talk about?”

JUNIOR: “Well, I just got myself a new video golf game and Laura bought me this here fancy new Risk game. Heh, heh, lookit them little plastic soldiers and airplanes! You play Risk, O-Man?”

OBAMA: “Yes. In college.”

JUNIOR: “Sure is good preparation for the presidency, huh? You wanna play a game?”

OBAMA: “Don’t you think it might look a little unseemly – the president and the president-elect playing Risk in the Oval Office in a time of national economic crisis?”

JUNIOR: “What the hell do I care how it looks – I’m outta here in two months!”

OBAMA: “But, uh, there are only the two of us. How can you play two-man Risk?”

JUNIOR: “Ah, hell, most of the time I play with myself.”

OBAMA: “You mean you play Risk by yourself?”

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November 9, 2008

The Tattlesnake – More Zippity-Doo-Dah From the Fading Right Edition

In the anguished ‘why we lost’ analyses in the days to come from the Fox News-Karl Rove-Bill Kristol neocons and their compadres in the Big Media, still discombobulated over Obama’s landslide victory in what they think is a ‘center-right’ conservative nation – the ‘liberal socialist’ Obama of November 3rd even magically transforming into a ‘fiscal conservative’ 24 hours later to preserve this incredible myth — you’ll read much about how the economic meltdown in late September killed McCain’s chances after he had pulled even or ahead in the polls. Horse pucky. McCain and Palin’s sour performance in the debates, the GOP’s over-the-top negative ads, a miserably run campaign, Palin’s exposure as an ignorant nitwit, plus the general public disgust with the Bush Republican Party had as much to do with his loss as the financial crisis. Also underestimated are Obama’s superior organization, discipline, massive GOTV efforts in most of the fifty states, and that the country, already centrist-liberal except in name, has been trending more to the left for many years.

McCain got an expected uptick in the poll numbers following the Republican Convention, which is commonplace after any major party convention, but he was receding even before the banks and markets hit bottom in late September. In fact, except for McCain’s brief post-convention bounce, the individual poll margins had remained consistent since summer with Obama in the lead, as this chart shows:

CNN 6/26-6/29: Obama 50%, McCain 45%
CNN 7/27-7/29: Obama 51%, McCain 44%

CBS 7/7/-7/14: Obama 45%, McCain 39%
CBS 7/31-8/5: Obama 45%, McCain 39%

Ipsos 6/5-6/11: Obama 50%, McCain 43%
Ipsos 7/31-8/4: Obama 48%, McCain 42%

Time 6/19-6/25: Obama 47%, McCain 43%
Time 7/31-8/4: Obama 46%, McCain 41%

Pew 6/18-6/29: Obama 48%, McCain 40%
Pew 7/23-7/27: Obama 47%, McCain 42%

NBC/Wall Street Journal 6/6-6/9: Obama 47%, McCain 41%
NBC/Wall Street Journal 7/18-7/21: Obama 47%, McCain 41%

(Hat tip to Rich Gallagher of Fishkill, NY, who compiled and posted these numbers at Altercation, Aug. 8, 2008.)

Obama-Biden popular vote percentage: 52.3%

McCain-Palin popular vote percentage: 46.2%

Obama-Biden electoral vote total: 365

McCain-Palin electoral vote total: 173

(Final numbers from FiveThirtyEight.com.)

November 2, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Obama’s Not Black Anymore Edition

In my informal surveys of John and Jane Q. Public-Sixpack over the years (and usually conducted near a six-pack), I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon – the more well-known and admired a black person is, the less black they become in the mind of the average honky mo-fo.

Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, et al – their skin color faded to neutral as their popularity with whites increased. Oprah Winfrey’s audience is comprised mainly of white women – do they think of her as black? No, she’s just ‘Oprah,’ girlfriend. Caucasian-Americans have embraced Michael Jordan, William “The Refrigerator” Perry, and scores of black sports stars as one of their own without regard to skin shade – what white sports nut wouldn’t rather hang out with Jordan than some mediocre ofay B-Ball player? And the Super Bowl a couple of years ago between the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts was played by teams with black head coaches. No big whup.

In the music world, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, James Brown, B.B. King, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix and others have all transcended race and now have more white fans than black. The pop music of every generation since the beginning of the 20th century, true American music – blues, jazz, soul, rock, and even much of country – all originated with black musicians in the South. Generations of white children have been conceived to the colorless ballads of Barry White, Lionel Ritchie and Isaac Hayes.

Let me put it this way, Barack Obama has been part of the national public consciousness for about two years now and he’s generally perceived by white America as an affable, intelligent, calm, non-threatening man, and he’s world famous, so his color has become immaterial.

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November 1, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Electoral Enigmas and Other Wacky Weirdness Edition

Laugh-a-bull: McCain’s top pollster Bill McInturff appeared on MSNBC with Chuck “Not Related to Crazy Ashley” Todd on Halloween. To put it politely, McInturff was pissing up a rope trying to sell some bizarre notion that this election is somehow similar to 1984 and 1996 and is tightening up to the point that McPalin can pull off a win. Hell-o, Bill – both those years featured a popular incumbent peacetime president and an economy that wasn’t crashing to the ground and taking a devastated middle class with it. He also blabbered on inanely about armies of older, rural white voters crawling to the polls to catapult Wrinkles and the Winker into the Oval Office. This is big-box absurd – the majority of Americans, some 80 percent, live in or near a city – there aren’t enough rural voters, even if every single one voted for Mac and Cheesy, to elect him as president. Todd can be commended for keeping a straight face during McInturff’s lunatic raving, no doubt designed to buck up the flagging morale of the depressed Republican base. (Hey, Bill, poll this: Obama’s a point behind McCain in his home state of Arizona four days before the election.)

Laugh-a-bull Two: What if the polls showed Bush the Junior suddenly popular with independent and undecided voters? McCain would be rushing to the nearest microphone, “My friends, I’d like to remind you that I voted with President Bush 92 percent of the time and Governor Palin and I embrace all of his wonderful policies! Why, I’m just like him!” with the High-Heeled Sneaker nodding in agreement, “Oh, you betcha! President Bush is the original maverick all right!”

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October 30, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Obama Infomercial Seals the Deal Edition

While the Tattler doesn’t usually like the kind of wan-music-in-the-background soft emotional porn of the ‘Oprah-ized’ infomercial, Obama’s half-hour spot Wednesday night avoided most of the worst aggravations of this TV cliché, especially the forlorn solo piano music sound track with flourishes of swelling strings redolent of tacky video matchmaking and cancer treatment center ads.

It featured battleground-state stereotypes – a laid-off white male Ford Motors worker, a Latina woman trying to make ends meet, an elderly black couple hampered by chronic illness and worried about the future, et al — struggling with life in Bush’s downsized economy, but at least the people were real and their stories didn’t sink into cheesy Lifetime-channel melodrama; Obama’s interspersions in office surroundings reminiscent of Camp David were obviously intended to make the Low-and-Slow-Information-Voters of Middle America, awaiting the ballgame, feel comfortable with him as president, which was the main point of this smart $4 million investment.

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October 10, 2008

The Tattlesnake – The Turn of the Screwed Edition

And Other Worms in the GOP Apple…

Obama just made two very smart moves:

1.) Buying a half-hour of TV primetime on the Wednesday before the election. If he plays it right, this will be like a presidential address ahead of the election, making any part of America that still has doubts comfortable with Obama in the Oval Office. Better yet, he won’t have Grandpa Crank or a moderator to step on his message, and McCain doesn’t have the cash to buy a half-hour of his own.

2.) Setting a trap for McCain by telling ABC’s Charlie Gibson “…[W]e’ve been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days that he wasn’t willing to say it to my face. But I guess we’ve got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate.” Biden also called McCain out for his Ayers-Rezko-Wright malarkey. This painted McCain into a corner: If in the Oct. 15th debate he doesn’t respond to the challenge and bring up the nasty personal attacks his campaign has been making, he risks appearing like a wimp to his own supporters; if he does, he looks like a petty jerk and takes the chance of Obama not only skillfully dispensing with the slurs, but also sticking it to McCain on the Keating Five, lobbyist Vicki Iseman, McCain’s campaign manager and lobbyist Rick Davis, Watergate crazy man G. Gordon Liddy, and McCain’s ties to the anti-Semitic and racist U.S. Council for World Freedom. Obama could rightfully point out that his casual connection to Ayers-Rezko-Wright never cost the taxpayers a dime; McCain’s association with the Keating Five and lobbyists Iseman and Davis, on the other hand, cost the public billions.

Surprise! Sarah Palin’s hired Munchkins up in Alaska just found her innocent in the Troopergate affair on Thursday, one day ahead of the release of the official report, ’cause that’s just the way we do business up here in the Great White North, buster.

Ya know, I betcha Palin’s whole ‘moose hunter and sport fisher’ thing is just a buncha staged photo-ops to enhance her Alaska political career and she never drank a six-pack in her life. (Gotta watch that figure, dere!) I’ve met women who hunt and fish and they don’t have long, beautifully-manicured fingernails of the type Sarah the Terror has had since her first beauty pageant. (In fact, it would be impossible to keep their nails like that and still do such things as ‘field dress a moose.’) This is like the Bush Boy putting on a Stetson hat and pretending to be a real Texas cowboy — the man is terrified of horses!

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October 4, 2008

The Tattlesnake – The Reverse Bradley Effect Edition

You remember the so-called Bradley Effect? That was named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley when he ran for Governor of California in 1982. Although ahead in late polling, Bradley, who happens to be black, lost to the white guy, Republican George Deukmejian. Pollsters believed that many white people they polled claimed they’d vote for Bradley, so as not to be perceived as racists, and then privately voted for Deukmejian.

This year, I think I’ve discovered a ‘Reverse Bradley Effect’; a few weeks ago, I was talking to a 30-something woman who has family and friends of all colors working in Big Box stores such as Walmart. She said these folks were being subtly intimidated into saying they’ll vote for McCain, and she mentioned an incident where one of the Blue Vest Brigade made the mistake of putting an Obama-Biden sticker on her car bumper. Suddenly she was handed the worst duties, treated dismissively by the manager, threatened with a write-up for nothing, and the Obama sticker was rendered illegible by indelible marker while her car was parked in the store lot. Then an absurdly fallacious gossip campaign started that claimed she was a drunken atheist who beat her kids. Employees got the message: Come out for Obama and the Top Management, all in the tank for the Republicans, will make your life miserable, but in devious ways that can’t be traced to your political leanings.

These days, her relatives and buddies tell anyone who asks they’re voting for McCain but, when they enter the voting booth, they plan to check the box for Obama. I wonder how many similar events are going on out in the Vast Wasteland of Generica and what effect this might be having on the polls?

With Indiana teetering Blue for the first time since 1964, and McCain’s campaign giving up on Michigan’s 17 electoral votes and running on empty in Ohio – recent reports of early voting in Columbus show that the Obama team got their people out to vote while the disorganized McCainiacs were snoozing – it appears Obama is poised to make a clean sweep of the Bush-battered Rust Belt states from Minnesota to Pennsylvania, including Iowa and Missouri, a net gain of 128 electoral votes. If that happens, it’s landslide city – Obama will win by over 300 electoral votes.

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 29, 2008

The Tattlesnake – McCain’s Bonfire of the Inanities Edition

The ‘Stop Making Sense’ Campaign Just Did

“Never mistake motion for action.”
– Ernest Hemingway

In one of the topsy-turvy, fun-house-mirror aspects of this election, the hypothetically conservative Palin-McCain bid for the White House is being run as the most post-rational, incoherent, chaotic, image-driven, short attention span, non-factual, theatrical, emotional, ‘truthiness’-spewing political campaign in our history, worthy of the amorphous meanderings of a liberal French deconstructionist or a parody of reactionary outrage by Stephen Colbert.

Sure, we know that the Bush neocons like to create their own reality and let the rest of us catch up but, eventually, as has happened to King Junior, reality does come thundering down — as it has in Iraq, in Katrina, in our economy — where it can’t be ignored anymore, but the wildly lurching Palin-McCain extravaganza has decided to tempt fate and test the limits of the public gag reflex one more time by resurrecting every sordid, dishonest battering of reason and civility that Atwater and Rove have ever dreamed up.

Like the TV show “Seinfeld,” it is really a campaign about nothing: McCain’s economic policies – cut taxes and wait for a miracle – are a sour joke that we are feeling the punch line to as BushCo asks for a $700 billion bailout for trying the same thing; McCain’s phony Surge – which was really mostly just bribing the warlords to keep quiet — has worked successfully to keep our combat forces tied down in Iraq with no end in sight; his health care proposals will actually cost middle-class families more money for health insurance, and on and on it goes. Slip the rug out from under the rubes and call it real conservatism while you soften the fall of your rich cronies with golden parachutes – McCain should more accurately use the campaign slogan, ‘Country Club First.’

That McCain, a man who once campaigned against the interference of religion in secular politics, signed on as his Veep pick a born-again Christian zealot who knows more about the Rapture than she does the world she lives in and wears her narrow-minded ignorance and screwball religious beliefs as a badge of pride, to cynically solidify his hold on what remains of the Republican base says more about the current corrupt state of his character than five years in a POW camp in North Vietnam thirty-five years ago.

So, this is the shell game McCain and Palin are running: It’s not about what he or she would do as president or vice president – that’s archaic thinking — but rather the two-word message and the photo-op – McCain putting ‘Country First’ by suspending his campaign, yet still airing ads and keeping his campaign offices open, and jetting to Washington to appear for the cameras as if he’s already president, supposedly to deal with our economic crisis that he helped create and still doesn’t fully understand. That he just sat on his hands with no real authority is a reality trumped by the man-in-motion image – or so his Rove-trained advisors hope. There’s Palin, now appearing in several interviews and displaying her keen memory for brief neocon clichés and homey aphorisms provided by her handlers, but little grasp of what she’s babbling about, culminating in the low spot of her performance thus far, appearing in frothy TV talk-show spots with Hamid Karzai, Bush’s installed president of Afghanistan; a bulbous and lethargic Henry Kissinger, and a bemused President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, wondering if this insipid woman will help him get more foreign aid if he cooperates. She discussed babies with Karzai, emitted vacuous platitudes with Uribe, and flattered Kissinger’s obese ego in his blubbery senility. (Perhaps, for a fleeting moment, he thought he was dating Jill St. John again.) She increased her knowledge not one iota, but she ‘knows’ world leaders – see we have pictures!

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September 27, 2008

The Tattlesnake – The Rate the Debate Edition

And, Don’t Worry, I’ll Keep It Brief…

The best and the worst of the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain in Oxford, Mississippi, Sept. 26, 2008, plus a little free advice to Barack:

– Obama’s Best Moments: Nailing McCain on how often he’s been wrong about Iraq; hanging Junior around McCain’s neck like a millstone.

– McCain’s Best Moments: Remembering part of his record accurately, if not all of it, and the names of some obscure foreign leaders, which he probably practiced all afternoon to pronounce correctly.

– Obama’s Worst Moments: Letting McCain interrupt him and get away with it, and the unanswered charges by McCain, such as the $900-some million in earmarks supposedly racked up by Obama. Also, agreeing with McCain too often.

– McCain’s Worst Moments: Aside from accidentally admitting, as Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, that the US had tortured people in their custody in defiance of international and national law, after all these years of BushCo denials, McCain brought up Sarah Palin briefly and expressed his pride in her. Hasn’t this doofus been paying attention? She’s a disaster on wheels, and she just dropped 14 points in the polls.

– Worst Attempt at a Joke: McCain, slamming federal research money for studying bear DNA: “I don’t know if it’s a criminal issue or a paternal issue.” Head smack! He meant ‘paternity.’

– Best Physical Appearance: Obama — he looked calm and presidential throughout the debate.

– Worst Physical Appearance: McCain’s hunched and hunkered-down stature, and grimacing during some of Obama’s answers – he looked like he was either trying to pinch a loaf in his Depends or do a bad impersonation of Don Rickles.

– Best Debate ‘Strategery’ (a tie): Obama for pounding McCain with the hideous specter of the loathed Dubya and staying cool, fool, in the face of McCain’s attacks; McCain for pummeling Obama on his lack of ‘understanding’ and ‘naiveté,’ even though it opened the way for Obama to prove him wrong, which he did.

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September 23, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Flying Under the Cuckoo’s Nest Edition

“In fact, now I come to think of it, do we decide questions at all? We decide answers, no doubt: but surely the questions decide us? It is the dog, you know, that wags the tail — not the tail that wags the dog.”
– Lewis Carroll

“Welcome to the conservative’s worst nightmare: The law of unintended consequences. Why? Nobody wants to admit it, folks, but the conservatives’ grand ideology is backfiring, actually turning the world’s greatest capitalistic democracy into the world’s newest socialist economy.”
– Paul B. Ferrell, “11 reasons America’s a new socialist economy,” MarketWatch, July 22, 2008.

“The US economy had better have luck on its side. Luck is about all it has left.”
– Clive Crook, “Only Luck Can Save America’s Economy,” Financial Times, Aug. 3, 2008.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke are a couple of dimwitted chuckleheads who shouldn’t be in any position of authority related to solving this current GOP-generated economic catastrophe. Either Paulson and Bernanke didn’t see it coming, in which case they were asleep at the switch; or they did see it coming, and did nothing to stop it. Either way, they are useless at effecting a solution; both should be handed their walking papers. Good replacements might be Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research as Treasury Secretary – he appreciated the danger of the approaching tsunami years ago – and Princeton economist Paul Krugman for the Fed. NY Times columnist Krugman also had to brains to read the signs indicating that the bridge is out up ahead and we were entering the Twilight Zone financially long before most of the various Up with People-Eaters ‘experts’ on The Street realized we were cruising to sure doom. Paulson and Bernanke should exit quickly with their heads held in shame, lucky they haven’t been forced to walk the plank for their egregious ignorance and incompetence. Oh, and the Bush Boy? Keep making speeches about the economy you still don’t understand, Junior, and reminding voters why they don’t need another neoconservative Republican in the White House next year.

The current economic meltdown, which some of us left-wing nuts like Mike Whitney and yours truly have been predicting for years, is the direct result of neoconservative policies, starting with Ronald Reagan. When Reagan said government is the problem, he apparently forgot that the government of the United States is of, by and for the people, so he was actually saying that ‘we the people’ are the problem. And so we are – if not for our demands that rapacious corporations and the greedy wealthy obey the laws, pay us and treat us fairly, and otherwise conduct themselves with some modicum of decency, the Corprocracy could have a field day, in the same way the Mafia could prosper wildly if there weren’t any ‘regulations’ governing their activities. For the last 25 years, the neoconservative Republicans, and especially John McCain, have successfully done all that they could to deregulate banks, business and the markets and it has culminated in the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, as even one of the ardent handmaidens of the collapse, flank-coverer Alan Greenspan, recently confessed. This is also a failure of F.A. von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Paul Wolfowitz, Grover Norquist and every other neoconservative jackass who has come down the pike banging the drum for the delusion of trickle-down wealth, the deception of free international trade, the hallucination of cheap privatized government services, and the myth of self-regulating markets.

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September 20, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Joan of Snark Jumps the Shark Edition

Serial-Liar Mom Palin Tanks Along with the Economy

“The trouble you brew today, you will drink tomorrow.”
– From “Samson and Delilah,” a 1949 film.

There was much early September hand-wringing and angst amongst Obama supporters that, after a strong finish at the Democratic convention in Denver, he was allowing the Palin-McCain ticket — for that’s what it truly is now as the aging Republican’s candidacy is overwhelmed by the media incandescence of Gov. Horse-Hockey Mom — put him on the defensive, dropping his inspirational charisma in favor of dull ‘wonky talk’ on the issues and curling into a timid Kerryesque ball, fighting off scurrilous and specious charges, while fecklessly laughing at or ignoring ludicrous accusations such as that he voted to teach Sex Ed to kindergarten tots. All of this is the standard GOP endgame of the past twenty-some years – wildly slander with Big Lies while the Dem refuses to ‘go negative’ – that results in another humiliating Dem defeat in November.(Bill Clinton, of course, being the notable exception.)

But that was last week. Now Palin is in free-fall, exposed as a pathologically prevaricating, power-abusing, crony-hiring GOP cipher, ignorant on foreign policy and most everything else, and pit bull-tenacious only at regurgitating her prepared Talking Points, kowtowing to the interests of large energy corporations, and using her office to conduct vendettas on those who contradict or are perceived as disloyal to her. In short, she’s Junior in a beehive, albeit more articulate and better at reciting her Bushian bumper-sticker slogans.

Meantime, Sarah’s more boring co-pilot McCain is himself treading sewer water, hauled up in buckets from the same sea of Republican red ink that swallowed do-nothing big business Republicans in 1932; he’s even taken to quoting Herbert Hoover’s peculiar dictum that the economy is fundamentally strong, while banks fail, wages fall, prices rise, and Americans are losing their jobs and homes. Well, what should one expect from a man who thinks shady corporate lobbyist Phil Gramm is the second coming of John Maynard Keynes?

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September 17, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Pondering Political Ponderables Edition

– If McCain and Palin are such maverick reformers, why haven’t they quit the corrupt Republican Party?

– Why doesn’t Obama, Biden or the Big Media ever mention that McCain’s tax cuts are going to directly benefit John and Cindy McCain, worth over $100 million? Meanwhile, under Obama’s tax increase for those making over $250,000 per year, the Obama’s would be paying more in taxes, since they’re worth about $4 mil. Who is really putting country first here ahead of their personal interest?

– Is McPalin actually trying to say that we are going to cure our current economic crisis by continuing to do the same things that caused it? Listen to them closely; yes, they are, only they are going to appoint a panel to study it.

– If the McCain-Palin ticket has so energized the Republican base, how come there are so many glum faces among the party hacks assembled behind them at campaign stops?

– Who do the McCain handlers think this ‘deference and respect’ for Palin nonsense is playing to – ‘dissed’ working-class women who shop at Walmart? Think again – it reminds them of their hated country-club bosses. Uh, not to be disrespectful of the Ice Princess Moose-Killer or anything, but they are making her sound like a tinhorn Queen Victoria. Was this the best Frank Luntz could come up with to cover her alarming ignorance?

– Speaking of the Thrilla From Wasilla, she’s fading in popularity now that the public has gotten a good look at her — why doesn’t McCain replace her with Tina Fey? She’s funnier and more talented than the original, and most Republicans would never know the difference, as long as Tina didn’t slip up and tell the truth.

– Who’s dumber: ‘First Dude’ Todd “How’d You Get Pregnant Again So Quick?” Palin or McCain ‘advisor’ Carly “I Nearly Destroyed HP and They Paid Me $20 Million to Go Away!” Fiorina?

– Laughable: Following yesterday’s Wall Street meltdown, some Republican half-wit on one of the cable news channels that isn’t Fox said, without irony, “There’s a danger here we might slip into a recession.”

– Laughable Deux: Did I hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson just praise Bush’s economic programs today? Yes, I did. And did he really tell us all to “remain calm”? Yes, calm in the Kevin Bacon at the end of ‘Animal House’ sense, right before he was flattened into the sidewalk.

– Laughable III: If Sarah Palin’s husband Todd is Alaska’s ‘First Dude’ does that mean we can call her the ‘First Chick’? (Or would that be the ‘First Dudette’?)

– Laughable the Fourth: Is it true Sarah Palin’s kids actually hate hockey?

– Laughable de Cinco: The Obama camp should start referring to McCain as ‘Republican John Sidney McCain the Third’ and Palin as ‘Republican Gov. Vinnie Barbarino.’ Of course, Sen. John Blutarsky and Gov. Hockey Rink to Nowhere are possibilities as well.

– Finally, Obama in Elko, Nevada, Sept. 17th, and I wrote this down fast so every word may not be verbatim: “McCain says he’s going after the old boys network in Washington … the thing is, the old boys network in Washington is called a McCain campaign staff meeting.” Ha, ha, keep punching, Barack, they’re on the ropes and McCain’s no Ali.

September 1, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Palin’s Failin’s, Luntz’s Futzes, and Other Random GOP Goop Edition

More On Sarah Palin: Nico Pitney over to the Huff Post reports that Alaska’s Gov. Hockey Mom appeared on a shock jock’s radio show in Anchorage and laughed her head off when her opponent in the Alaska State Senate, Lyda Green, was called a “bitch” by the show’s host. The slammer was that she also cackled when the idiot-with-a-microphone referred to Green, a cancer survivor, as “a cancer” twice and joked about her weight. An op-ed in The Anchorage Daily News called Palin’s giggling, “one of the most unprofessional, childish and inexcusable performances I’ve ever seen from a politician.” Classy lady, that Sarah.

– Yet More Palin: Whatever facts shake out regarding her firing of the Alaska Public Safety Commissioner for allegedly failing to dismiss a state trooper who went through an acrimonious divorce from her sister in 2005, Palin, like most Republicans, doesn’t seem to see that there is a glacier-sized conflict of interest here: She should have encouraged an investigation into his conduct and then left it to her AG or other independent body to prosecute the case. For that matter, if the guy beat his ex-wife, was drunk on the job and abused his son, as Palin has claimed, why wasn’t he arrested? (Many of Palin’s complaints have been dismissed after further investigation.) That she didn’t recuse herself from the case entirely shows she has no respect for, or knowledge of, how the law works, and we’ve had enough of that in the Executive Branch in the past eight long years. (BTW, Palin originally recommended this guy for the trooper job when she was Mayor of Wasilla. Judgment?)

– Soon to Be Breaking News: Something nasty will rise to the top regarding Palin’s close connections to large energy corporations – she’s the only so-far unindicted major Republican in the state and, contrary to Old Man McCain’s guff, she didn’t get there by being a ‘reformer.’ (Her ‘reforms’ were mainly just dumping her political enemies.) In Alaska, if you’re a GOP politician, you make the deal with Energy Money to move into the Big Leagues. This will be enough to sink the USS Maverick once as for all, as his ‘judgment’ is revealed to stink on ice (not much of a pun intended).

– Flanders? Palin calls her good Christopublican, Iron Dog racer husband Todd the ‘First Dude.’ Isn’t that cute and endearing? Gee, at least she’ll bring dignity to the vice presidency.

– ALPO Update: The AP reports that both Bush and Cheney have now pulled out of the GOP-O-Rama in St. Paul entirely. Seems someone realized that being visually associated with the most loathed president and vice president in our history is maybe not the best thing for Republicans this year. Instead, the hapless Junior will be down in Texas ‘monitoring’ Hurricane Gustav (read ‘vacationing’); and Deadeye Dick is on a four-day jaunt to Europe, including a drop-by in Georgia (uh oh). Incidentally, McCain’s handlers have decided to curtail the Republican convention activities from four hours a day to two, purportedly due to deference for the possible victims of Gustav, but really it’s likely because they didn’t think they could dredge up much of an audience the Right’s Last Rites. This speaks volumes about what terrible shape the GOP is in; no wonder Rep. Tom Davis III (R-VA), in a rare flash of honesty, told CNN last May: “The Republican brand is in the trash can. If we were dog food, they would take us off the shelf.”

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August 8, 2008

ALONG CAME BUSH!

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

along-came-bush.jpg

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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