I Hate What You Just Said

Rumors of federal indictments against Sarah Palin.

Some memorable moments in Palin’s resignation speech:

On Alaska:

Alaska’s mission - to contribute to America. We’re strategic IN the world as the air crossroads OF the world, as a gatekeeper of the continent. Bold visionaries knew this - Alaska would be part of America’s great destiny.

Our destiny to be reached by responsibly developing our natural resources. This land, blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, AND oil and gas. It’s energy! God gave us energy.

In a list of accomplishments:

We broke ground on the new prison.

Of life and fish; Or, how to win by quitting:

Life is too short to compromise time and resources… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and “go with the flow”.

Nah, only dead fish “go with the flow”.

On point guards and Liberal Media:

Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me - sports… basketball. I use it because you’re naïve if you don’t see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket… and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can WIN. And I’m doing that - keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities - smaller government, energy independence, national security, freedom! And I know when it’s time to pass the ball - for victory.

News from South Carolina:

Sheriff’s deputies searched Friday for a serial killer blamed for four deaths over the past six days . . .

I’m guessing Mark Sanford.

Sarah Palin will shortly resign from office as governor of Alaska. Nobody knows why. Place your bets.

Todd Purdum’s VF piece on Sarah Palin contains lovely little tidbits like this one:

By the time Election Day rolled around, the staff had been serially pummeled by unflattering press reports about the gaps in Palin’s knowledge, her stubborn resistance to direction, and the post-selection spending spree in which she ran up bills of $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family at high-end stores. The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin—Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist; Nicolle Wallace, the communications ace; and Tucker Eskew, her traveling counselor—were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and a “whack job.”

And this is even better:

More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”

And, happily, Purdum seems to have touched off yet another internal squabble inside the distressed and befuddled Republican Party.  From Politico:

William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and at times an informal adviser to Sen. John McCain, touched off the latest back-and-forth Tuesday morning with a post on his magazine’s blog criticizing the Todd Purdum-authored Palin story and pointing a finger at Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager.

Kristol cited a passage in Purdum’s piece in which “some top aides” were said to worry about the Alaska governor’s “mental state” and the prospect that the Alaska governor may be suffering from post-partum depression following the birth of her son Trig. “In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote.

Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an e-mail: “I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”

“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”

Nice!  Keep it up, jackasses.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy.  Are you as sick of this stuff as I am?

Conservatives are jumping up and down over a report by an EPA analyst expressing skepticism about climate change, which, they claim, was suppressed by agency brass because it didn’t conform to Obama administration orthodoxy on global warming.

…

But it’s hard to blame EPA for not paying much attention to the study. And it’s more than a little ironic that DC Republicans have chosen its author as their new standard-bearer in the defense of pure science against politics. Because the author, EPA veteran Al Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist. EPA says no one at the agency solicited the report. And Carlin appears to have taken up the global warming topic largely as a hobby on his own time.

Sorry, Dick.

The Minnesota Supreme Court just ruled unanimously in favor of Al Franken.

One of the really frustrating things about arguing with right-wing true believers is that they have a security blanket, and they cling to it.  It’s the market.  The magical market will fix everything.   Capitalist fundamentalists are willing to ignore all manner of actual historical and economic evidence in order to assert that market forces are the best solution to every problem.  This phenomenon is quite evident in the health care debate.  Our system costs more, is less efficient, is more riddled with pointless bureaucracy, and covers far, far fewer people than the various systems employed by most other industrialized nations.  Nevertheless, conservatives (American ones, anyway) cling to their security blanket.  The market is always the answer - evidence be damned.  Health care, their argument goes, is just another commodity, so the market will save the day.  (In my view, a lap top computer is a commodity;  access to health care should be a human right).

Paul Krugman’s recent post “Health care is not a bowl of cherries” is brief but makes an important point:  the health care debate is bogus.  There are many parties involved who are honestly trying to figure out how to improve the American health care system.  Many on the right, however, are contributing nothing of value, and only making the process more difficult.  Because they insist, with something that is quite close to religious zeal, that the market will always fix everything.  Krugman responds, in particular, to people like Greg Mankiw and George Will.  Here’s an excerpt from Will’s column, illustrating his childish attachment to market fundamentalism:

As market enthusiasts, conservatives should stop warning that the president’s reforms will result in health-care “rationing.” Every product, from a jelly doughnut to a jumbo jet, is rationed — by price or by politics. The conservative’s task is to explain why price is preferable. The answer is that prices produce a rational allocation of scarce resources.

Krugman’s response is spot-on (and I can identify with his palpable frustration):

Um, economists have known for 45 years — ever since Kenneth Arrow’s seminal paper — that the standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care: adverse selection and moral hazard are so central to the enterprise that nobody, nobody expects free-market principles to be enough. To act all wide-eyed and innocent about these problems at this late date is either remarkably ignorant or simply disingenuous.

I guess it doesn’t matter what economists know, or what evidence suggests.  Conservatives will cling to their security blanket.  It makes them feel good.

This time it comes from the tax-evading, prostitute-frequenting gasbag Dick Morris.  Obama has already been accused of being Hitler, of hoping to institute Sharia law in America, of wanting to build concentration camps for children, of attempting to nationalize the whole American economy, and of generally being a terrorist’s best friend.  Now, the revolting Morris tells us that Obama has effectively repealed the Declaration of Independence.  I hesitated to post this video, as it is a particularly transparent and disgusting attempt to sell books.  But it is also important to confront this sort of nonsense.

I hate what you just said, Dick. You ass.

H/T: Media Matters

I hate what you just said:

Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.

Jesus wasn’t a liberal hippie fag with long hair. Just ask this young Baptist firebrand. He worships flat top Jesus.

UPDATE:

I’ve seen a lot of people preach in their own homemade basement chapels with particleboard altars, but this guy is f-ing charismatic.

One of mine may be gone.

Mega-thief Bernard Madoff (71), has been sentenced to 150 years in prison.

When it comes to health care, our right-wingers are just a lot more doctrinaire, less practical, and less humane than many right-wingers elsewhere.  Case in point - in an attempt to show the superiority of America’s absurd and inefficient system, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) decided to diss Ontario.  And he got an angry response from Conservative senator Hugh Segal of Kingston, Ontario.

In a blistering statement this week before the Canadian Senate, Mr. Segal took on the U.S. Republican Senate Leader who is leading the charge against government-funded health care in his country.

Senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky made the mistake of suggesting that the residents of Mr. Segal’s hometown of Kingston, Ont., are provided with health care that is inferior to what is available in the United States.

…

“According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average lifespan in Kentucky is 75.2 years and according to Statistics Canada, that number is 80.4 years in Ontario, 78.3 years in Kingston,” [Segal] told the Canadian Senate after discounting Mr. McConnell’s numbers.

“Furthermore, according to a Fraser Institute study, in 2006, the U.S. spent $6,714 per capita versus $3,678 in Canada.”

Mr. Segal said in a telephone interview yesterday that the statistics indicate that Canadians are actually doing a better job at health care than their southern neighbours.

Mr. Segal is a Conservative, both with a small c and a capital one.  He is not a “socialist.”  But unlike conservatives in the United States, Canadian cons seem willing to confront access to health care as a serious issue, rather than an opportunity to express their mindless loyalty to the concept of private insurance and their reactionary hatred of anything that resembles single-payer health coverage.  And, as Matthew Yglesias points out, the Conservative Party of Canada, in its statement of founding principles, includes the concept that “all Canadians should have reasonable access to quality health care regardless of their ability to pay.”

“There are two positions . . .”

The Vatican has performed “scientific tests” on bones believed to be the remains of the Apostle Paul:

The first-ever scientific test on what are believed to be the remains of the Apostle Paul “seems to confirm” that they do indeed belong to the Roman Catholic saint, Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday.[. . .]

Benedict said archaeologists recently unearthed and opened the white marble sarcophagus located under the Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome, which for some 2,000 years has been believed by the faithful to be the tomb of St. Paul.

“This seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that they are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul,” Benedict said, announcing the findings at a service in the basilica to mark the end of the Vatican’s Paoline year, in honor of the apostle.

Benedict said scientists had conducted carbon dating tests on bone fragments found inside the sarcophagus and confirmed that they date from the first or second century.

Wow, I’m totally convinced.

Bad paintings of Barack Obama.

I think Jenny should run for governor against her husband.

Obama wants to close Guantanamo Bay because of its association with the Bush brand. But he’s working hard to ensure that he can imprison anyone he wants, for as long as he wants, at some other location:

Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

According to some of “Obama’s top legal advisors, along with a handful of influential Republican and Democratic lawmakers,” Obama is considering the creation of a “national security court” that will oversee the detention of “detainees deemed too dangerous to release but who cannot be charged or tried.”

This is just arbitrary executive detention dressed in a black robe. You can call it a “national security court,” but it only exists to deny the right to a fair trial — you know, that pesky Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution and Article 10 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Our good friend MC Steele busts out a new metaphor:

BECKMAN: And the people who are out of work, you know, they’re not much concerned right now about, about who saves them, whether it’s the private sector or public, they just want to be saved.

STEELE: Yeah, that’s true, but there’s a danger that lies in that. And I think that’s where an appreciation, if not an education, of the consequences of certain policies has got to get talked about and people really need to understand. You know, it’s like the guy who, you know, is in the water and you know, he wants to get saved from the sharks, but then — from the sharks — but then he gets picked up by a bunch of pirates or, you know, or some bad guys. You know, what’s worse being in the water or being in the boat where they’re beating the heck out of you every day? So, you know, the reality of it is, it does matter who saves you.

So true.

Be prepared to hear nothing about health care, Iran, the economy, torture, or anything of substance for the next week. Michael Jackson may die from cardiac arrest.

Update:

He’s gone.

Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenting justice in a Supreme Court judgment on behalf of a 13 year-old girl who was strip searched by Arizona school officials who were looking for . . . tablets of Advil:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the strip search of a 13-year-old schoolgirl violated the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

In a closely watched case filled with poignant facts, the court ruled 8-1 that Arizona school officials violated student Savana Redding’s Fourth Amendment rights when they searched her down to her bra and underpants. Officials were looking for pain relievers, which they didn’t find.

The details of the search were pretty unbelievable:

A school nurse and administrative assistant, both female, took Redding into a back room.”With both officials staring at Savana, she took off her pants and her shirt,” Redding’s legal brief recounted.

“The officials did not notice any pills hidden in Savana’s clothing, on her body, or under her panties or bra. Still, they told Savana to pull out her panties and bra and to move them to the side.”

The strip search exposed Redding’s “genital area and breasts” to the school officials and was “the most humiliating experience” in the girl’s life, according to a legal brief. It didn’t detect any pills or contraband, and Redding said it harmed her.

Sounds dreadful. Did I mention that she was an honor student? How is a judge supposed to respond to such a clear violation of this student’s right to privacy?

If your name is Clarence, like this:

Justice Clarence Thomas was the only member of the court to decide that the search of Redding was reasonable.

Thomas is making the world safe, one pair of panties at a time.

And although they voted with the other 6 justices, Scalia and Roberts appeared close to supporting the invasive search. Justice Scalia used the same logic that governed the search for WMD in Iraq:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia . . . sounded sympathetic to the school’s actions, with Scalia in particular suggesting that “the drugs must be in her underpants” if every other reasonable hiding place on the student had been searched.

And I suppose, by that reasoning, if no Advil were found in her underwear then school officials would be forced to take the inquiry into the vagina and colon. And if that doesn’t work there’s always the water board or sensory deprivation to break the case. Then we’ll get to the bottom of this analgesic cabal.

Nice work, gentlemen.

I hate what you just said:

I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light…

Ah, love. Reads like the Captain’s Verses.

Is there, in all of recorded history, a similar example of a political party undergoing such a devastating and complete self destruction than what we’re witnessing with the Republican party?

It is almost literally unbelievable.

The Republicans are now a big tent party stocked with drooling, barely literate snow machine operators, toe-tapping airport bathroom Johns, torture-porn loving Bible-thumpers, closeted meth-heads, pseudo varmint hunters, bizarre paraphilic infantilists and diaper fetishists, fat racists with erectile dysfunctions, cross-dressers who suffer from debilitating 9-11 obsessions, and an entire army of  whats-the-matter-with-Kansas fuctards with a predilection for teabagging.

This is the perfect storm. The black swan. It is a privilege to live through such a rare and remarkable moment in our nation’s history.

UPDATE: Sanford’s press conference video below.

In Mark Sanford’s news conference this hour, he has admitted to an extramarital affair, apparently with a woman from Argentina.

Gotta love those revoltingly preachy conservatives, with their family values and such.

Anyway, that leaves us without a clear winner in the Sanford Pool.  But many thanks to all of you who participated.

I guess we were all thinking too hard (so to speak).

And by the way - prepare yourself for nauseating amounts of attempts at humorous headlines, all of which will be variations on a “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” theme.

The Damascus Citadel

There have been a number of things about the Obama administration that have been somewhat disappointing thus far.  But stories like this one show that there is reason to believe that Obama’s victory in November is resulting in some real, significant changes.  In particular, it is important that we now have a president who seems interested in diplomacy as a path to progress in foreign relations.  Unlike those of  his predecessor, Obama’s first instincts aren’t to engage in sabre-rattling and pre-emtive war.  And it is refreshing to have a president who doesn’t think that diplomacy and a desire for peace are signs of weakness.   From TPM:

President Barack Obama has decided to return a U.S. ambassador to Syria after a four-year hiatus as talks between the two nations intensify, U.S. media reported Tuesday.

…

By returning a senior U.S. envoy to Damascus, Obama is seeking to carve out a far larger role for the United States in the region as he works to rehabilitate U.S. relations with the Islamic world and the Arab Middle East, the newspaper said.

“It’s in our interests to have an ambassador in Syria,” a senior administration official told CNN.

I guess you could say Bill Clinton is a guy who knows what he likes.

H/T: D

I hate what you just said (a while back).

“If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality of health care, if they tell us that they are offering a good deal, then why is that the government, which they say can’t run anything, is suddenly going to drive them out of business?” Mr. Obama asked.

Good question.

It is clear by now that the Sanford story doesn’t add up. [See update below - Argentina?  WTF?]   If he was hiking, why didn’t he tell his wife?  If he was working on a writing project, as his wife maintains, then why did his staff say he was hiking?  Why didn’t he tell the lieutenant governor, his security detail, or other government officials that he was going to be away for a while, and that he would be out of touch?  And what’s with the Atlanta airport thing?

The time has come, my gentle friends and readers, for wild speculation.  So place your bets - let us know in the comments section which of the following is the most likely scenario.  And feel free to add a write-in if I didn’t mention your favorite theory.

What is Sanford covering up?

1.  An extramarital affair that produced a child

2.  An embarrassing or otherwise inconvenient medical procedure

3.  A visit to a mental institution

4.  Something gay

5.  Some sort of illegal business deal

6.  Secretly giving testimony about something

7.  A serious bender

8.  Drug rehab

9.  A visit to his secret, second family

10.  WILD CARD:  Conversion to Islam

UPDATE:  He was apparently hiking the section of the trail just to the south of the Smokey Mountains.  Actually, pretty far south.

Thanks to D, who co-authored this post.

The Greenville, SC NBC affiliate has a scoop:

On Tuesday, sources told News 4’s Nigel Robertson that a state vehicle is missing and was tracked down, not to the Appalachian Trail, but to the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta.

Sources told Robertson that a federal agent spotted Sanford in the airport boarding a plane. Robertson was told that the governor was not accompanied by security detail. Sanford has been out of reach for more than four days, including Father’s Day.Sawyer has emphasized that the governor was hiking on the Appalachian Trail and that it wasn’t something the staff or Jenny Sanford were concerned about. But sources told WYFF News 4 that the federal agent who spotted Sanford saw him at the Atlanta airport, which is about 80 miles from the start of the trail. WYFF News 4 has not yet confirmed where the plane was going or how the governor got to the airport, but it is clear there are two very different stories.

When it comes to the politics of vampire entertainment, a family-values vampire (wretch!) is no match for Buffy.

H/T: Majikthise

As long as no super rich tax evaders go to jail, I’m all for it.

The U.S. Justice Department may drop a legal case aimed at forcing Swiss bank UBS AG <UBSN.VX> <UBS.N> to reveal the names of 52,000 wealthy American clients suspected of offshore tax evasion, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

This is a strange story.  South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who has been quite visible in the national media in the past year or so, and was often mentioned as a possible candidate for President or V.P., appears to be missing and out of touch.  His wife says she doesn’t know where he is, but that she’s not worried.   State law enforcement and the governor’s office say they haven’t been able to reach him since Thursday.  And at least one state legislator wants to know who is in charge of the state if no one knows the whereabouts of the governor.

More here and here.

English only crowd make their case.

Andy McCarthy has read Liberal Fascism very closely:

The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.

John Hodgman was good. Starts off slow, but stick it out:

Doughy-looking strawberry enthusiast and Missouri State Representative Cynthia Davis is apparently sick and tired of all of those poor, hungry kids in her state who are receiving - you guessed it - food.   Food.  Food for the hungry.  Cynthia Davis is against food for the hungry.

(Here’s a shocker - she’s a Republican).

There are 100,000 more unemployed people in Missouri now than there were two years ago, and twenty per cent of children in the state live with hunger.  Representative Davis, however, questions whether food assistance programs are necessary, since “hunger can be a positive motivator” and “if you work at McDonald’s, they will feed you for free during your break.”

Cynthia Davis, you preposterous buffoon, I HATE WHAT YOU JUST SAID.

H/T: D, Think Progress.

Conservatives love to denigrate any alternative to our ineffective and ineficient health care coverage system.  “We have the best health care system in the world,” they like to say.  It has become a ubiquitous cry.  Well, millions of Americans without coverage aren’t wild about our system, nor are millions more who pay outrageous premiums for lousy coverage, all to support a bloated insurance infrastructure.  And, by the way, the World Health Organization isn’t so sure that USA is #1, either.  In fact, their research says we’re number 37.  Here’s the top 40, as of 2000:

1         France
2         Italy
3         San Marino
4         Andorra
5         Malta
6         Singapore
7         Spain
8         Oman
9         Austria
10        Japan
11        Norway
12        Portugal
13        Monaco
14        Greece
15        Iceland
16        Luxembourg
17        Netherlands
18        United  Kingdom
19        Ireland
20        Switzerland
21        Belgium
22        Colombia
23        Sweden
24        Cyprus
25        Germany
26        Saudi Arabia
27        United  Arab  Emirates
28        Israel
29        Morocco
30        Canada
31        Finland
32        Australia
33        Chile
34        Denmark
35        Dominica
36        Costa Rica
37        United States of America
38        Slovenia
39        Cuba
40        Brunei

Matthew Yglesias points out that there is a wide array of healthcare systems out there, and that many of them work better than ours:

[Systems that work better than the U.S. system include] systems with Beveridge-style models (like the UK), systems with a single-payer insurance model (like Canada), and Bismark-style regulated-competition models (like Switzerland and the Netherlands)—all kinds of things work better than what we do. Another things liberals point out is that the Veterans’ Health Administration, which is an island of Beveridgism amidst America’s capitalist health fiasco, performs much better than the rest of the system.

72 percent of your constituents want a government-run “public option” for health care.

John McCain, Eric Cantor, Paul Wolfowitz, Charles Krauthammer and Mike Pence all wanted to blow up Iran, but now they’re criticizing Obama for not being more vocal in supporting a grassroots, pro-democracy movement in that country.

Since US meddling in the electoral politics of Iran has been so productive, it makes sense to try it again.

Why is anyone paying any attention to these grandstanding ignorant clowns?

It seems he’s at it once again (remember this time?  And this one?)  Pat Buchanan - who regularly appears in the big commerical media and is generally accepted as a mainstream (if idiosyncratic) pundit - appears to think that Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination is worse than segregation, slavery, etc.  In other words, he likes the old-school racism better than affirmative action. Check it out:

Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance — No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review — her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.

…

…Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.

This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.

One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated “with the base alloy of hypocrisy” [bold added].

Lots of people have problems with affirmative action.  I know.  But this is beyond insane.  The “old bigotry,” it seems to me, involved slavery, the slave trade and middle passage, segregation, beatings, lynchings, cross-burnings, and a host of other brutalities.  The “bigotry” that Buchanan really hates, however, is that which helps people from traditionally oppressed groups get opportunities to go to college and such.

Pat’s Analysis:

-Slavery and Jim Crow:  Not great.

-Hispanic Woman goes to Princeton:  Worse.

Right.  Got it.