"A black sheriff?!": The Official Topic of Obama and New Era American Politics

[Phoenix Dark]

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904

ha

[Brehvolution]

So there is a liberal groups march in DC this Saturday. Thanks for the notice. 

[huckleberry]

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904

ha

The next paragraph offers up the gospel truth to the Tea Party -

the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky

I don't know about the rest of you, but this represents my home state perfectly.

[Human Snorenado]

Looks like Rahm is leaving, probably to go make a bunch of money for a couple years, then be Governor of Illinois or something.  I wonder if Jane Hamsher and Cheebs will throw a party to celebrate.

[Boogie]

the fact that nobody's actually gonna go through the official channels and instead use this as an awesome wowsome way to go on a drunk bender and look at your cock pics

and then we'll slap them on the wrist and say we've weeded out the bad apples, but oh we haven't

who are you referring to?

If law enforcement, I would suggest that is unlikely, as the companies would still require a law enforcement agency to present them with a judicial order before handing over the cock pics.

If you mean that the measures would make it easier for employees of said companies to break into their own systems in order to intercept the communications of others, I suppose that would be a serious and legitimate concern.

[Phoenix Dark]

Looks like Rahm is leaving, probably to go make a bunch of money for a couple years, then be Governor of Illinois or something.  I wonder if Jane Hamsher and Cheebs will throw a party to celebrate.

Leaving to be mayor of Chicago you mean.

good riddance.

[Brehvolution]

Obama should hire Grayson to replace him.

[Dickie Dee]

Obama should hire Grayson to replace him.

[Mandark]

I'm mostly with Boogie on this law.  Remember the problem with wiretapping wasn't FISA, it was the fact that they were circumventing FISA and doing it without warrants.

Any law enforcement agency not run by Terri Schiavo is gonna want to keep its surveillance capabilities up to date with the technology people use.  I don't think anyone has a right to a mode of communication that can't and won't be intercepted for any reason in the face of probable cause.  We let the  police do objectively much worse things (arrest would amount to forcible kidnapping if anyone else did it) because the threat of violence is a necessary part of the state, we just don't think about it.


All that said...


Does anyone think this won't be misused?  There's abuse of the rules in any large institutions, and you gotta expect this will be worse than most because 1) law enforcement regimes at every level are extremely protective of their own and resistant to oversight, 2) it's historically worse with the secretive branches in the federal government, 3) the trends of the last decade have almost entirely been in the directions of more authority with less transparency or accountability.

I understand why they'd feel these capabilities are necessary, but I'd feel much, much better if they came attached to strict rules for use, and a workable plan to enforce those rules.

[Mupepe]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/second-institution-claims-christine-odonnell-fudged-education-record;_ylt=Ah3kv5ctJQ9IFy8DGTjnjmms0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTVpOTA2ZXQ3BGFzc2V0A3libG9nX3Vwc2hvdC8yMDEwMDkyOS9zZWNvbmQtaW5zdGl0dXRpb24tY2xhaW1zLWNocmlzdGluZS1vZG9ubmVsbC1mdWRnZWQtZWR1Y2F0aW9uLXJlY29yZARjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzQEcG9zAzEEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl9oZWFkbGluZV9saXN0BHNsawMybmRzY2hvb2xzdWc-

Christine O'Donnell

[Mandark]

http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/29/from-pimp-to-punk-acorn-vid-kid-fails-to-seduce-cnn-reporter/

I mean, really?

[Brehvolution]

Why is Okeefe not in jail? He is a criminal!

[Mupepe]

holy crap

[Phoenix Dark]

"The joke is that the tables have turned on CNN. Using hot blondes to seduce interviewees to get screwed on television, you are faux seducing her in order to screw her on television."

[youtube=560,345]URtQAa3Y-ns[/youtube]

[Human Snorenado]

Here's a lengthy Rolling Stone interview with our Kenyan Muslin Soshulist Dictator President.

There's also an excellent Taibbi read on the Tea Party that I can't remember if it got posted or not; those of us who enjoy Taibbi will enjoy it, and those of us who feel the need to be offended by Taibbi because he uses naughty words and writes like a jackass will do their usual thing.  Circle of life and all that bullshit.

[Mandark]

It's an awesome piece.  If he ever realizes that he doesn't need to bend the truth to write good polemics, he'll be a hell of a writer.

[Phoenix Dark]

Posted it on facebook yesterday, got a couple tea party friends to respond. It would be pretty hard to deny many points in that article, and they didn't even try (for the most part). One of them is a consistent "grrrr spending" guy who didn't like Bush, but for everyone one of him there's 100 tea partiers who didn't give a shit when Bush was spending.

[Mandark]

Yeah, there's one really simple question that belies the idea that this is all about deficits:  "Where were these protests when Bush was in charge?"

Every single person you ask will say "Oh, I was angry with Bush too.  This isn't a partisan thing blah blah blah."  It's like how by the 80's, about 20 million people attended Woodstock if you believe everyone who claimed to have been there.

But for the 1% of Tea Partiers who are sincere deficit hawks, I'd advise them not to fall in love with their new friends.  Same for the libertarians.  When you've got a fringe political philosophy, or an unpopular/obscure pet cause, it's very tempting to convince yourself people are sincere when they start using your talking points.  It gets lonely after a while and it's easier to accept new allies than to say "these people don't really give a shit, and will stop pretending to give a shit as soon as I help them get back in power".

So I get why so many people want to see the Tea Party as a populist uprising that validates their own personal crusades, but it's just going to lead to disappointment.

[Human Snorenado]

Disappointment or, God Willing, Senate Minority/Majority Leader Jim DeMint and Speaker Boner.  I need more laughs in politics.

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

To read between the lines, tea partiers didn't object to the massive debts that Bush was running up because the debt was funding a better cause (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.)  Obama's debt is funding a worse cause (various stimuli, health care, etc.) in their eyes.

The only reason why tea partiers object to the deficit spending is because it is going towards poor people and minorities.  The genuine few that dislike deficits at any rate are going to find themselves alone again when President Romney gets elected in 2012 and wants to adopt a far right wing authoritarian system, with most of the tea party congresspeople going along with it.  I don't recall people like Jim DeMint ever giving a damn about rampant spending unless it was done by a Democrat and going towards causes other than vaporizing poor brown people halfway across the world.

[Oblivion]

http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/29/from-pimp-to-punk-acorn-vid-kid-fails-to-seduce-cnn-reporter/

I mean, really?

John Cole put it best.

To answer DougJ’s question about what O’Keefe thought he might accomplish, it is just this simple. These are wingnut activists feeding a wingnut audience. Any video he got from the boat would have been “proof” of whatever they claimed it would be. These are the folks who took a video of Shirley Sherrod rejecting racism and used it to… call her a racist. These are the folks who had Acorn officials fired for… calling the authorities when they went in and pretended to be sex traffickers and the Acorn folks did the right thing.

All they needed was videotape of anything involving Abbie Bordreaux on that boat. It doesn’t matter if she was repulsed or what she actually did, they would lie and edit the video and it would become whatever they wanted it to be. The wingnut blogs would all circulate it, Howie Kurtz and Fox news would mainstream it, the WaPo Ombudsman would three weeks later issue an apology for not looking into the sluts at CNN earlier, and the Politico would have a dozen “thought” pieces up discussing how this is bad news for Obama and Democrats.

When you make up your own reality and have a media that refuses to call you on your bullshit, the sky is the limit. The video didn’t have to have any evidence, it just had to exist. The wurlitzer could then turn it into whatever they wanted.

It’s just that simple.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/09/29/its-this-simple/

[Phoenix Dark]

that's some real talk

[Phoenix Dark]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/30/michael-jordan-scott-brow_n_745250.html
 

smh

[Stoney Mason]

Stolen from a gaf thread

First, Sanchez started out expressing an anecdote from his own experience, when someone who was “top brass” at CNN told Sanchez to his face that he saw Sanchez as “more as John Quiñones,” referring to the Hispanic ABC News reporter. Sanchez’s example was an illustration that the problem of racism in the media business goes further than many expect, enveloping “not just the Right,” but also “elite, Northeast establishment liberals” that “deep down, when they look at a guy like me, they see a guy automatically who belongs in the second tier, and not the top tier.”

That’s when Sanchez really let his feelings loose: “I think to some extent Jon Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert are the same way. I think Jon Stewart’s a bigot.“

Pete noted that Stewart is his former boss, and pressed Sanchez to explain himself further. “How is he a bigot?” Pete asked.

Sanchez:

"I think he looks at the world through, his mom, who was a school teacher, and his dad, who was a physicist or something like that. Great, I’m so happy that he grew up in a suburban middle class New Jersey home with everything you could ever imagine."

Pete pressed, “What group is he bigoted towards?”

Sanchez replied: “Everybody else who’s not like him. Look at his show, I mean, what does he surround himself with?”

Pete asked for a specific example, saying the term “bigot” is pretty strong.

“That’s what happens when you watch yourself on his show every day, and all they ever do is call you stupid.”

Asked again what group Stewart is bigoted against, Sanchez replied, referring to Stewart in the second person:

Anybody who’s different than you are, anybody who’s not form your frame of reference; anybody who doesn’t look and sound exactly like the people that you sound [like] and grew up with. The people that you put on your show, who always reflect somebody who’s, “I’m bringing in to sit around me,” you know, who’s very different from me. I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy this thing that the only people out there who are prejudiced… are the Right. There’s people that are prejudiced on both sides.

Sanchez went on to claim that Stewart’s worldview is “very much a white, liberal establishment point of view.” Sanchez added:

He can’t relate to a guy like me. He can’t relate to a guy whose dad worked all his life. He can’t relate to somebody who grew up poor.

“Yeah,” Sanchez snickered sarcastically at the idea that Jews are as much minorities as Latinos in the US.

"Very powerless people… [snickers] He’s such a minority, I mean, you know [sarcastically]… Please, what are you kidding? … I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah. [sarcastically]"

[Stoney Mason]

Here's a lengthy Rolling Stone interview with our Kenyan Muslin Soshulist Dictator President.

There's also an excellent Taibbi read on the Tea Party that I can't remember if it got posted or not; those of us who enjoy Taibbi will enjoy it, and those of us who feel the need to be offended by Taibbi because he uses naughty words and writes like a jackass will do their usual thing.  Circle of life and all that bullshit.

Don't like Taibbi because I just think he let's his viewpoints over-ride the need to write actual journalism pieces. He's the type of writer who's writing only for the people who already share his viewpoint so he doesn't ever feel the need to balance or support his argument with a lot of support from other sources.

I didn't mind when Hunter Thompson did the same thing because he was writing often from a more novelistic approach with actual characters and his voice often clearly interjected in there. Taibbi's pieces instead often get treated as straight up journalism which they aren't. 


Or maybe it just boils down to me thinking Hunter was just a much better and more interesting writer.

[Van Cruncheon]

wow, arbitrary comparison there!

[Stoney Mason]

They both were "political" writers/essayists for Rolling Stone in different eras is the only reason I reference Thompson. I could remove Thompson from the equation and still not like Taibbi's writing or his writing style. Someone is free to have a different opinion of course.

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

Here's a lengthy Rolling Stone interview with our Kenyan Muslin Soshulist Dictator President.

There's also an excellent Taibbi read on the Tea Party that I can't remember if it got posted or not; those of us who enjoy Taibbi will enjoy it, and those of us who feel the need to be offended by Taibbi because he uses naughty words and writes like a jackass will do their usual thing.  Circle of life and all that bullshit.

Very good article.  Thanks for linking to it.

[Stoney Mason]

Rick Sanchez, a daytime anchor at CNN, was fired on Friday, a day after telling a radio interviewer that Jon Stewart was a bigot and that “everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart.”

The latter comment was made shortly after Mr. Stewart’s faith, Judaism, was invoked.

CNN said in a statement Friday evening, “Rick Sanchez is no longer with the company. We thank Rick for his years of service and we wish him well.”

Mr. Sanchez’s comments came Thursday during a contentious conversation with the comedian Pete Dominick on satellite radio. By Friday afternoon, a recording of the conversation had circulated widely on the Internet.

In the conversation Mr. Sanchez, who is Cuban-American, repeatedly suggested that he had experienced subtle forms of discrimination in his television career.

He said that “a lot of elite Northeast establishment liberals” viewed him as someone “who belongs in the second tier and not the top tier.”

Among those establishment figures, he said, was Mr. Stewart, the host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central and a friend of Mr. Dominick’s.

At first, Mr. Sanchez called Mr. Stewart a “bigot,” but later took the word back, calling the comedian “prejudicial” instead.

Prejudicial “against who?” Mr. Dominick asked.

Mr. Sanchez said, “Against anybody who doesn’t agree to his point of view, which is very much a white liberal establishment point of view.”

One of the co-hosts of the radio show brought up the fact that Mr. Stewart was a Jew, saying to Mr. Sanchez that he was a minority “as much as you are.”

Mr. Sanchez answered sarcastically, “Yeah. Yeah. Very powerless people.” He let out a high-pitched laugh.

“Everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart,” Mr. Sanchez said. “And a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.”

Mr. Stewart has made jokes about Mr. Sanchez more than 20 times in the last five years, according to a search of the show’s Web site. Or as Mr. Sanchez put it, “You watch yourself on his show every day and all they ever do is call you stupid.”

Mr. Stewart was far from the only person known to mock Mr. Sanchez, who was once tasered on camera for a segment. He was a polarizing figure within CNN, but under the channel’s former president, Jonathan Klein, he was rewarded with more air time, most recently a two-hour block in the afternoons. Mr. Klein was fired last week.

On Wednesday, Mr. Sanchez ended two months as an interim prime-time anchor. He appeared on the radio show as part of tour to promote his book “Conventional Idiocy.” Attempts to reach Mr. Sanchez were unsuccessful.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/business/media/02cnn.html?_r=1&src=busln

[Boogie]

Make distinguished mentally-challenged, bigoted, ignorant comments....in light of a career of being generally stupid on air...

get fired.

No tears here.

[Stoney Mason]

He'll be scooped up by Fox News I'm sure where such comments would be championed.

[Phoenix Dark]

Mr. Stewart was far from the only person known to mock Mr. Sanchez, who was once tasered on camera for a segment. He was a polarizing figure within CNN, but under the channel’s former president, Jonathan Klein, he was rewarded with more air time, most recently a two-hour block in the afternoons. Mr. Klein was fired last week.

[ToxicAdam]

lol @ people even knowing who that guy is.

[Fresh Prince]

They live for trivial shit like that.

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

Here's a lengthy Rolling Stone interview with our Kenyan Muslin Soshulist Dictator President.

There's also an excellent Taibbi read on the Tea Party that I can't remember if it got posted or not; those of us who enjoy Taibbi will enjoy it, and those of us who feel the need to be offended by Taibbi because he uses naughty words and writes like a jackass will do their usual thing.  Circle of life and all that bullshit.

Very good article.  Thanks for linking to it.

Oops, I meant the Taibbi tea and crackers article, not the Obama interview.

He'll be scooped up by Fox News I'm sure where such comments would be championed.

That comment reminds me...whatever happened with Carrie Prejean?

[Phoenix Dark]

Probably going on dates with rich old republican donors

[Stoney Mason]

Probably going on dates with rich old republican donors

She's going to marry Joe the Plumber and they will have perfect conservative children.

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6911YX20101002

Apparently up to 200,000 people attended the liberal rally in Washington DC

[Oblivion]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6911YX20101002

Apparently up to 200,000 people attended the liberal rally in Washington DC

but michelle bachmann said at least a million people attended glenn beck's tea bagger rally

[Phoenix Dark]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6911YX20101002

Apparently up to 200,000 people attended the liberal rally in Washington DC

Can't wait to see this covered on Fox News

oh wait

[Himu]

wrong thread

[AdmiralViscen]

You make the molotov combination with whisky and newspaper, not beer.


edit: nice edit

[Phoenix Dark]

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/jim-demint-gays-and-unmarried-women-shouldnt-be-allowed-to-be-teachers/

 

[Mandark]

Hey PD, have you seen Street Fight?

[Phoenix Dark]

No, not that Street Fighter

hmm that sounds interesting though. Gonna rent it

[Tristam]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=4

For years, Graham had lived in McCain’s shadow. But, as the rebellious politics of 2010 transformed McCain into a harsh partisan, Graham adopted McCain’s old identity as the Senate’s happy moderate. To Graham’s delight, on December 23rd Time posted an online article headlined “LINDSEY GRAHAM: NEW GOP MAVERICK IN THE SENATE.” The photograph showed Graham standing at a lectern with Lieberman and Kerry.

McCain, worried about his reëlection, had been throwing rocks from the sidelines as the cap-and-trade debate progressed. When Waxman-Markey passed, he Tweeted that it was a “1400 page monstrosity.” A month after K.G.L. was formed, McCain told Politico, “Their start has been horrendous. Obviously, they’re going nowhere.” After the Time piece appeared, he was enraged. Graham told colleagues that McCain had called him and yelled at him, incensed that he was stealing the maverick mantle. “After that Graham story came out, McCain completely stopped talking to me,” Jay Newton-Small, the author of the Time piece, said.

 

Jesus Christ, how old is McCain? 70-something or 7? The article confirms not only that powerful interest groups determine the fate of all legislation but also that most American politicians suffer from narcissistic personality disorder to the extent that they make Green Shinobi look like a well-adjusted man.

[etiolate]

california voters

polling shows california voters split 43%/42% on prop 23 which would suspend AB 32

polling shows 67% of california voters support AB 32

[Oblivion]

california voters

polling shows california voters split 43%/42% on prop 23 which would suspend AB 32

polling shows 67% of california voters support AB 32

Which poll is that from? I thought people overwhelmingly opposed AB 32?

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gIXWYBTpLtSayJtg41LKXpxSxVPAD9IMDG4O0?docId=D9IMDG4O0

WASHINGTON — The White House blocked efforts by federal scientists to tell the public just how bad the Gulf oil spill could have been, according to a panel appointed by President Barack Obama to investigate the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

In documents released Wednesday, the national oil spill commission's staff reveals that in late April or early May the White House budget office denied a request from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to make public the worst-case discharge from the blown-out well. The Unified Command — the government team in charge of the spill response — also was discussing the possibility of making the numbers public, the report says, citing interviews with government officials.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But Jerry Miller, head of the White House science office's ocean subcommittee, told The Associated Press in an interview at a St. Petersburg, Fla., conference on the oil's flow that he didn't think the budget office censored NOAA.

"I would very much doubt that anyone would put restrictions on NOAA's ability to articulate factual information," Miller said.

The April 20 blowout and explosion in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers, spewed 206 million gallons of oil from the damaged oil well, and sunk the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

BP's drilling permit for the Macondo well originally estimated the worst scenario to be a leak of 6.8 million gallons per day. In late April, the Coast Guard and NOAA received an updated estimate of 2.7 million to 4.6 million gallons per day.

While those figures were used as the basis for the government's response to the spill — they appeared on an internal Coast Guard Situation report and on a dry-erase board in NOAA's Seattle war room — the public was never told.

In the meantime, government officials were telling the public that the well was releasing 210,000 gallons per day — a figure that would be later adjusted to be much closer to the worst-case estimates.

"Despite the fact that the Unified Command had this information, relied on it for operations, and publicly states that it was operating under a worst-case scenario, the government never disclosed what its...scenario was," the report says.

University of South Florida oceanographer David Hollander, who was also at the St. Petersburg meeting of 150 scientists studying the oil flow on Wednesday, said he was surprised to find that the White House budget office gagged NOAA. He said public disclosure would have helped scientists to figure out what was going on.

"It would have been much better to know, from a scientific point of view, the reality," he said in an interview with the AP.

[Mupepe]

I love how there is no coverage anymore on the oil spill.  Claims are being denied left and right and the economy for the entire region is even more in the shitter.  Has anyone seen the prices on gulf shrimp??  Ridiculous. 

[Stoney Mason]

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/11/mccain-201011

durrr. I've been saying this for many years.

[Mupepe]

I liked McCain when he was denouncing the military industrial complex and not whining about a fucking wall with Mexico

[Stoney Mason]

I liked McCain when he was denouncing the military industrial complex and not whining about a fucking wall with Mexico

Always struck me as a bogus act since he was just mad at not getting the nomination. He picked all his positions just to be the anti-Bush and then quickly renouced them when it wasn't in vogue anymore.

[Phoenix Dark]

I'm certainly guilty of buying into the McCain maverick meme. During the 08 election he seemed unwilling to sell himself completely out for the presidency, at least to me. He refused to go along with the Palin idea of going full throttle negative fear mongering. I'll always remember him taking the mic from that old woman who claimed Obama was an Arab; while McCain's answer wasn't exactly artful, it was a clear and forceful dismissal of racist bullshit. Compare that to the almost standard republican response of "well I don't really know/we don't know much about him/that's an interesting question/etc."

But this primary race has really exposed McCain. Plus that New Yorker piece about McCain turning on Lindsy Graham because he had been labeled the "new" maverick by a Time article.

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

I never bought into the maverick thing.  He always seemed to pursue his self interests uber alles, which doesn't make him much better than most of the other politicians.

[Oblivion]

[youtube=560,345][/youtube]

PD bringing the real talk.

[Phoenix Dark]

not black enough

[Phoenix Dark]

[youtube=560,345]utA511RPguA[/youtube]

he's an asshole, but he's OUR asshole god dammit

[ToxicAdam]

Well, he'll make for a good talking head on MSNBC when he loses in a month.

[Phoenix Dark]

you're probably right. dude has raised a lot of money and done some good things, but the hyper partisan rhetoric makes him a target. I hope he wins but he's currently down in the polls