Agitprop: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Propaganda

And So It Begins

Eric Holder better get his ass in gear if he wants a crack at everyone’s favorite war criminals:

MADRID, (AP) — A Spanish court has agreed to consider opening a criminal case against six former Bush administration officials, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, over allegations they gave legal cover for torture at Guantanamo Bay, a lawyer in the case said Saturday.

Human rights lawyers brought the case before leading anti-terror judge Baltasar Garzon, who agreed to send it on to prosecutors to decide whether it had merit, Gonzalo Boye, one of the lawyers who brought the charges, told The Associated Press.

Gonzo can’t get a job, so maybe he could do some jailhouse lawyering once he gets to The Hague.

jaw dropping

Bachmann Introducing Bill to Ban Use of Made-Up Global Currency.

That is all.

Save the Bentleys

I know, I know ... more car blogging.  Get over it.   

The great British marques aren't what they once were.  Who owns Bentley?  The Germans.  Rolls Royce?  The Germans. Mini Cooper?  The Germans. Jaguar? The Indians (but before that it was owned by a company known for its fondness for Germans). Same with Land Rover.

Wingnut of the Day

From one of my favorite stops in Wingnuttia - Clown Hall:

Take Michelle Obama…please. Every time I turn around, there she is on a magazine cover. Now, normally, like the Mafia, I lay off the spouses, but inasmuch as this particular spouse attended the same racist church as her hubby for 20 years, I’ll make an exception in her case. After all, in spite of the fact that affirmative action got her an Ivy League degree and a $7,000-a-week salary and, moreover, has sent billions of dollars for no particularly good reason to Africa, she insists this is a mean country. The burning question in my circle is: if the First Family gets a female dog, will she be the First Bitch or will she have to settle for second place?

Wow - you’d think all those professional Christians over at Town Hall wouldn’t call people names. Would Jesus use language like that?

Naturally, the left-wing media is now trying to convince us that this James Brown-look-alike has all the allure, glamour and fashion sense of Jackie Kennedy.

James Brown?  Huh?

Shorter Burt Prelutsky: You black kids get off my lawn!

Townhall: Michelle Obama is a Bitch, Get It? [Huffington Post]

Bentley Abuse

This is a Bentley GTC.  It has a six liter, twelve cylinder engine.  It gets twelve miles per gallon. It costs around $197,500, and it will go from zero to sixty miles per hour in less time than it takes you to read this sentence. It's one impressive Volkswagen.

And this is one is really really ugly.

Snakehandler of the Day

Another day, another compassionate conservative:

MARCH 16–A Florida man wearing an “I ♥ My Marriage” t-shirt was arrested last night for allegedly choking his wife during an argument in their Tampa-area home. Bradley Gellert, a 32-year-old financial consultant, was busted by Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office deputies and booked into jail on a felony domestic battery by strangulation charge.

Would have been funny if Joe the Plumber had been wearing a McCain t-shirt when he beat up the missus.

Insuring Failure

Remember yesterday, when AIG CEO Edward Libby said that AIG’s other insurance businesses were just fine thank you?  Not so fast:

Thomas Gober, a former Mississippi state insurance examiner who has tracked fraud in the industry for 23 years and served previously as a consultant to the FBI and the Department of Justice, says he believes AIG’s supposedly solvent insurance business may be at least as troubled as its reckless financial-products unit. Far from being “healthy,” as state insurance regulators, ratings agencies and other experts have repeatedly described the insurance side, Gober calls it “a house of cards.” Citing numerous documents he has obtained from state insurance regulators and obscure data buried in AIG’s own 300-page annual reports, Gober argues that AIG’s 71 interlocking domestic U.S. insurance subsidiaries are in hock to each other to an astonishing degree.

Maybe someone should take a look at this.

Douchebag of the Day

Still classy:

Bush joked that he’d need more such engagements to pay for the house his wife, Laura, bought without him seeing it. “I actually paid for a house last fall,” he told the crowd. “I think I’m the only American to have bought a house in the fall of 2008.”

We are well rid of him.

Poor Richard

From his fainting couch, Richard Cohen clutches his pearls and complains that Jon Stewart was mean to CNBC and Jim Cramer:

What Jon Stewart needs is Jon Stewart. He could use a droll comedian to temper his ferocity and correct him when he’s wrong, as he was about the financial media, particularly CNBC and its excitable analyst Jim Cramer. They didn’t cover up the story of financial shenanigans. They didn’t even know it existed. 

Setting aside the fact that lots of people knew - shouldn’t CNBC have known about the problem? They’re the experts.

Republican Realignment

First it was Rush and Michael Steele, now it’s these two:

Writing about the spat with [Laura] Ingraham on her Daily Beast blog this weekend, [Meghan] McCain wrote that “instead of intellectually debating our ideological differences about the future of the Republican Party, Ingraham resorted to making fun of my age and weight.” “At this point, I have more respect for Ann Coulter than I do for Laura Ingraham because at least Coulter didn’t come back at me with heartless, substance-less attacks about my weight,” wrote McCain.

Ingraham fired back while McCain was appearing on The View.

A Weekful of Wingnuts

A little inside baseball to get everyone ready for the new week:

1) Michael Steele, having been thoroughly humiliated by the GOP faithful, will stop giving interviews for a while.  A Republican spokesman who can’t speak. I like it.

2) The latest thing among the selfish classes is “going John Galt” - this means that Randians stop contributing anything useful to society (in the event they were doing so in the first place) and settle back to watch civilization collapse.

Steele Bends Over Again

Well that didn’t take long.

Yesterday:

GQ: Are you saying you think women have the right to choose abortion?

STEELE: Yeah. I mean, again, I think that’s an individual choice.

Today:

I am pro-life, always have been, always will be.… In my view Roe vs. Wade was wrongly decided and should be repealed.

First Rush, then Joe the Plumber, now this.  Guy must be bleeding from the asshole.

Steele Bends Under Far-Right Pressure [Think Progress]

Bush's Body Count

Deep thought:

President Obama lifted the restrictions on stem-cell research yesterday.  But suppose Preznit Bunnypants hadn’t put them in place to begin with? 

Sure, we know about the dead in Iraq - the people, the soldiers - and we know about what happened in New Orleans. But how many people would be alive today if Bush hadn’t put his religion before the rest of us?  How many people would be walking instead of in wheelchairs had science not been hobbled for the past eight years?  How many people would be enjoying their lives instead of suffering?  We’ll never know.

Nothing Left

Sarah Palin. Joe the Plumber. Rush Limbaugh. Eric Cantor. Bobby Jindal. The GOP all stars who would save their party are a pretty sorry bunch. They are deeply ignorant and breathtakingly selfish people. Yet the wingnuts heap praise on these loons and clamor for one of them to ride to the rescue. And now there's another candidate:

SITTING in the back seat of his mother’s van as she drives through Atlanta suburbs, Jonathan Krohn is about to sign off with a conservative radio talk show host in Florida. In the 40 minutes he’s been on the air, with the help of his mother’s cellphone, this hyper-articulate Georgia eighth grader has attacked the stimulus bill, identified leaders he thinks will salvage the Republican Party’s image, and assessed the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Would it surprise you if I told you he's home-schooled?

My ADD is Kicking In

Can’t concentrate today, so I’ll just post a bunch of stupid shit, and you can take your pick.

1) Another day, another wingnut:

Did you ever wish there were a Christian version of kosher salt? I thought not. But apparently a retired barber, Joe Godlewski, did.

Godlewski, who lives in western Maryland, has named his new product Blessed Christian Salt. It went on the market this week.

Vitter Goes Bareback

You’re shitting me:

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), whose career became mired in the D.C. Madam prostitution scandal back in 2007, and is now headed into his 2010 re-election campaign, is championing the cause of family values in the omnibus bill, and the need to stop government spending on family planning. Really.

That’s the same David Vitter who did the following:

Bobby Bends Over

Michael Steele dropped to his knees before Rush Limbaugh, what?  Twenty-four hours after criticizing him?  And now Bobby “The Exorcist” Jindal wants sloppy seconds:

Jindal also responded to Michael Steele’s recent flap about Limbaugh: “I’m glad he apologized. I think the chairman is a breath of fresh air for the party. As I said before, I think Rush is a leader for many conservatives and says things that people are concerned about.”

“Says things that people are concerned about”? What the fuck does that mean?

Now We're Paying Their Defense Costs

We just gave AIG $30 billion.  AIG is also suing us over a tax matter, so we’re paying to sue ourselves.  And now we’re going to pay for AIG to defend itself from … it’s former CEO:

This is sad and kind of awesome. Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the man who built up AIG into the global powerhouse, before being forced out by Eliot Spitzer, is suing his old company for securities fraud. Greenberg says that mirepresentations by the company caused him to overpay for the stock.

It’s as though he killed his own parents and is now complaining because he’s a fucking orphan.

Six More Random Things

Six more things pushing me towards that inevitable psychotic meltdown:
 1) D.L. Hughley - I have never sought this person out. On the few occasions when I've been watching CNN and he has appeared, he has not been funny. Yet his entire job is to be funny. Why does he have a show, much less a career?