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.

Sorry, Dick.

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

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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?

Is it wrong to love James Wolcott so much?

Fox News is so good because its writers are such fine, upstanding citizens.

We all know that marriage between one man and one woman is the keystone that balances the grand arch of civilization. Were we ever to remove it, the entire edifice would crash down upon us, destroying all we know. Just imagine it. In the false twilight of dust and choking ash, ghostlike figures layered in white powder have man-on-dog sex among the smoldering rubble and twisted rebar.

Chilling.

Thank God for proud Americans like Nevada Senator, John Ensign, who has spent his entire career in the Senate defending the citadel of marriage against the barbarian hordes of sodomites and lesbians locked outside the city walls.

Oh wait.

He just screwed some other guy’s wife.

UPDATE:

Thanks to Buffy in the comments who found this perfect video:

More right-wing domestic terrorists. I’m sure that the fine folks at Fox will discover that they were closet Marxists.

These guys just can’t bring it like my homeboy.

Object lesson in why it’s best not to torture people.

Nobel prize-winning author, José Saramago, on Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi:

I don’t know what other name I could give it. It’s a thing that looks dangerously like a human, a thing that throws parties, that organises orgies and rules a country called Italy. This thing, this illness, this virus threatens to become the cause of the moral death of Verdi’s country. If a deep vomit doesn’t succeed in ejecting it from the consciousness of Italians, the poison will end up corroding the veins and destroying the heart of one of Europe’s richest cultures. The basic values of human coexistence are trampled daily by the viscous feet of the Berlusconi thing; amongst its many talents, it has a funambulesque ability to abuse words, perverting their intention and meaning, as in the case of the People of Freedom, the name given to the party with which the thing took power. I’ve called the thing delinquent and I don’t regret it. For semantic and social reasons that others will be able to explain better than I can, the term delinquent has in Italy a much stronger connotation than it has in any other language spoken in Europe. I use the meaning given to the term by Dante’s language in order to translate clearly and forthrightly what I think about the Berlusconi thing—though it is more than doubtful that Dante ever used the term. In my Portuguese, and according to the dictionaries and the current practice of communication, delinquency means ‘the act of committing crimes, disobeying laws or moral codes’. This definition fits the Berlusconi thing without a wrinkle, without any jarring, to the point that it seems more like a second skin than the clothes that the thing puts on itself. For years and years the Berlusconi thing has been committing crimes of a variable but always demonstrated seriousness. It’s outrageous that it not only disobeys laws, but worse, it invents them to safeguard its public and private interests as politician, businessman and the companion of minors. Where the moral codes are concerned, it’s not even worth talking about it, there is not a person in Italy or the rest of the world that doesn’t know that the Berlusconi thing fell into the most abject of states a long time ago. This is the Italian prime minister, this is the thing that the Italian people have elected twice to serve them as a role model, this is the path to ruin which is dragging along the values of liberty and dignity that suffused Verdi’s music and the political actions of Garibaldi—the ones that, during the struggle for unification in the 18th century, made of Italy a spiritual guide for Europe and for Europeans. This is what the Berlusconi thing wants to throw into the rubbish bin of History. Will the Italians end up allowing this to happen?

Barack Obama’s Inauguration Speech:

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

Mahmoud Achmadinjad’s Inauguration Speech:

Today, thanks to great achievements, the threat to Iran has been lifted, and no power in the world entertains the notion of taking action against the Iranian nation. Even if someone were to entertain this notion and want to undertake any act of aggression against the nation… he should know that the Iranian nation is ready, and any hand outstretched in order to attack will be cut off.

Could this guy be any more right?

Today, as global geopolitics is shaken to its core by events in Iran, I turned on cable news this morning, and saw endless ads for a Larry King Jonas Brothers “interview”, Morning Joe yukking it up discussing Kuwaiti massage therapists, a video of a tomato throwing contest on CNN, talk radio blowhard Bill Bennett…and occasionally a phone call from Christiane Amanpour in Tehran.  I can’t even bring myself to turn on the network morning programs, I might vomit.

And the NY Times rubs it in.

Juan Cole has a meticulous analysis of what seems like a “stolen election.”

I’m not sure where Andrew Sullivan got this graph; it isn’t clear from his post. It purports to track the official vote tallies during six counting announcements. And you’d have to say that there is an unmistakably stable ratio involved in the data.

There are widespread reports and accusations of fraud. Some suggest a military coup.

People don’t seem happy:

Glenn Greenwald on the childish, self-centered tribalism that lies at the core of the conservative mind.

Clearly this guy is a liberal:

Center City employees and shoppers were given quite a scare this morning by a man who was ranting and wielding a knife for nearly an hour at 8th and Market streets, police said.

What they didn’t see was the hand grenade that police later recovered from his bag.

Witnesses said that the man, with the knife pulled, began ranting on the sidewalk shortly after 8 a.m., but police weren’t contacted for nearly an hour, said police spokeswoman Officer Tania Little.

When police arrived, they saw the man threatening passers-by with a large army knife. Authorities detained the man and found a hand grenade inside a camouflage backpack he wore, Little said.

Andrew Sullivan with today’s must read.