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

Snortle

Via.

The fate of my ferals, Fleabus video, lotsa music, here.

Good Idea

Remember last week, when I suggested that impeaching Jay Bybee might be a good idea? Well guess what …

The New York Times:

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him.

No shit.

Bush's Body Count

Never fear, our former Preznit is still servin’ up steamin’ heaps o’ that deeelicious freedom!

LONDON, March 30, 2009 – Ground Zero for the so-called ‘war on terror’ is a nation where gays and lesbians live in real terror every day. Among the suffering of gay Iraqis is the regular threat (and carrying out) of rape and murder. In July, CNN reported on the case of a young gay man abducted for ransom and raped daily for more than two weeks.

Well, like Rummy said, freedom is untidy.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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:

Vitter's Glass House

 

hyp·o·crite Function: noun Etymology: Middle English ypocrite, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin hypocrita, from Greek hypokritēs actor, hypocrite, from hypokrinesthai Date: 13th century

1. a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion;

2. a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings.

Senator David Vitter (R-LA) has called on Senator Roland Burris (D-IL) to resign. Senator Vitter, you'll recall, refused to resign when exposed as a hooker fucker.

Despite his own refusal to resign after admitting to being a former patron of the “DC Madam”, Vitter dismissed the notion that his demands of Burris are hypocritical. “I honestly don’t know anybody who would compare these situations. They are dramatically different,” Vitter said.

When Fundies Attack

Nice Vitteresque twist on this one:

A man held a woman captive in handcuffs and an adult nappy for three days while he read Bible passages to her in the US state of Ohio, police said.

Troy Brisport, 34, picked up the woman last Wednesday night in Detroit after she told him she had nowhere to stay, and brought her to his home in Toledo, about 90 kilometres away, police told The Toledo Blade newspaper.

The Bible passages might be the worst part.

I Can Stop Anytime I Want ... Honest

My pal and favorite N’awlins blogger oyster fills us in on the latest Stormy happenings:

In a telephone interview Thursday from Tampa, Fla., Daniels said that while [Larry] Flynt had nothing to do with the “Draft Stormy” boomlet that has drawn her into contemplating the 2010 Louisiana Senate race, “I have reached out to him in the last couple of days that I want to discuss if he wants to be my campaign manager.”

Can you imagine the possibilities? Can you imagine the embarrassment? Vitter.  I want his head on a PIKE!

Latest video from Draft Stormy after the jump.

wingnuts still tilting at windmills

They'll never give up:

A Supreme Court decision apparently isn't enough for Tennessee lawmakers in the House. Despite the fact that the Court rejected an effort to contest President Barack Obama's citizenship in a case earlier this year, four Tennessee lawmakers are still pushing a legal action to force the president to turn over his birth certificate and other documents to prove his citizenship.

I'd always assumed that Oklahoma's congressional delegation was the stupidest - after all, it includes Senator Inhofe. Now I'm not so sure.

The Dark Side

Now can we have war crimes prosecutions?

The American Civil Liberties Union has released previously classified excerpts of a government report on harsh interrogation techniques used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. These previously unreported pages detail repeated use of “abusive” behavior, even to the point of prisoner deaths.

The documents, obtained by the ACLU under a Freedom of Information Act request, contain a report by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, who was tapped to conduct a comprehensive review of Defense Department interrogation operations. Church specifically calls out interrogations at Bagram Air base in Afghanistan as “clearly abusive, and clearly not in keeping with any approved interrogation policy or guidance.”

I know this is what we all surmised, but to see it in print ….

Stormy Polling Well

I am really, really enjoying this.

Stormy Surges

Vitter Reelection Hopes Sag as Daniels Comes on Strong
NEW ORLEANS, LA.- February  10, 2009 – Today, in an online poll conducted by the Baton Rouge Business Report, potential candidate for senate Stormy Daniels surged to a strong second place finish against incumbent Louisiana Junior Senator David Vitter.  The final numbers were Senator Vitter 39%, Stormy Daniels 32%, and Baton Rouge businessman Jim Bernhard 28%.

Even more surprising than the early strength showed by Daniels  were the anemic numbers of the incumbent, embattled Louisiana Junior Senator David Vitter , who polled under 40%.  Zach Hudson, a spokesman for DraftStormy, said he is encouraged by the numbers.

Stormy Needs More Support

I’ve got nothing today, but my email tells me that support for Stormy Daniels’ run against David Vitter (R-LA) for his Senate seat is “swelling”:

We thought we had momentum last week, but looking back now, we could never have foreseen the excitement that our campaign to Draft Stormy Daniels would generate!

As we near 150,000 visits to DraftStormy.com, we continue to be amazed at the outpouring of support from individuals united behind a message of honesty, passion and strength of character. Make sure you are kept up to date on our campaign’s efforts by joining the DraftStormy Facebook group and subscribing to the DraftStormy YouTube channel.

Stinquers, we need to help this woman any way we can.

Snakehandler Update

Not only was Ted Haggard a busier perv than we thought, he’s not the only perv at his “church”. Signorile:

A Colorado Springs bail bondsman and sometime bounty hunter who has been investigating New Life Church and Ted Haggard for several years appeared on my show late on Friday and told me that he now has information on ten more cases of sexual misconduct on the part of Ted Haggard and that three of these involve minors. He also said that New Life Church had suppressed from the media an earlier case of a pastor at the church (which has many pastors under the senior pastor) who was convicted of sexual assault against a child under the age of 15 and got off easy with help from the church, only to later have his probation revoked. The convicted pastor then illegally left the country, he said, and he speculates that New Life Church may have helped him do so.

Is there something in the fucking water?

A Fitting Opponent

 

Senator David Vitter (R-LA) pays for fucking. Stormy Daniels gets paid to fuck. On camera. She's a stripper and a porn star. And she just might run for Vitter's senate seat. You have to admit - she's an opponent Vitter can understand.

Washington DC— Against the backdrop of the annual Washington Mardis Gras, DraftStormy, a non-partisan grassroots movement to draft Baton Rouge native Stormy Daniels into the 2010 Louisiana Senate race, celebrated its official launch on Thursday. To commemorate the launch, DC Mardis Gras attendees were greeted Thursday morning with a complimentary string of Mardis Gras beads featuring the soon-to-be iconic DraftStormy logo in metallic pink on a white medallion. Hours before, the official DraftStormy website went live.

The Superbowl, and Schadenfreude Too

This weekend, not only do we get to watch what should be a good football game, we get to enjoy the demise of Pajamas Media. Via Instaputz:

And so it ends. Pajamas Media, a laughingstock even in the embryonic stage, is no more. Putz, one of the founders, is already attempting to distance himself from the operation, despite spending more than three years driving most its traffic:

I don’t have much to do with the PJM business side...

But what will those bright lights at Protein Wisdom, The Anchoress, Atlas Juggs, and other rightblogs do now that they only thing left is PJTV (which they plan to charge for)? The Anchoress:

...　[T]he Lord’s overgenerous endowment in my chestal area makes any notion of camera work unthinkable, particularly in HD where the girls might terrify some.

Shorter Anchoress: "I'm too fat to be on TV ... pass the Cheetos."

Who could have predicted that a business model based on xenophobia, hate, and right wing bromides would fail? Check for the latest schadenfreude here.

Vini, Vidi, Vitter

Another day, another GOP wanker :

Today, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 16-1 to approve President-elect Obama’s nomination of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Casting the sole “nay” vote was Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), who was concerned about Bill Clinton’s “multimillion dollar minefield of conflicts of interest.” Vitter has long been a Clinton foe, calling on President Clinton to step down in 1998 because of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In 2007, Vitter also revealed that he had been a client of the D.C. Madam’s escort service, but refused to resign.

Actually, this post is simply an excuse to post what might be the best YouTube video ever: You're welcome.

Vitter Casts Lone Vote Against Hillary Clinton [Think Progress]

The Poodle

Guess who’s getting a Medal of Freedom?

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair will receive the highest civilian award in the US - the Presidential Medal of Freedom - next week.

In his last week in office, President Bush will award the medal to Mr Blair, former Australian PM John Howard and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

All three leaders had been “staunch allies” of the US, particularly against terrorism, said the White House.

I am enraged.  And he has 2 more weeks to keep doing this shit.  The Dear Leader has made everything in this country valueless. 

Blair to Get US Medal of Freedom [BBC]

George W. Bush: An Appreciation

As a lefty blogger, I will miss him. Sure he’s a dangerous sociopath, a pathological liar, and a national embarrassment.  But he’s also The Decider, The Commander Guy, and Commander Codpiece.  Think about that as January 20, 2009 approaches.  When, I ask you, have liberals had it so good?

Shoe Guy is Screwed

This poor guy is so fucked:

Maythem al-Zaidi contacted a judge to ask him if what his brother [Muntader] did is a crime under Iraqi law. The judge told him that he might serve two years in prison or pay a fine for insulting a president of foreign country unless Mr. Bush withdrew the case. “If they manage to imprison Muntader, there are millions of him all over Iraq and the Arab world,” Maythem al-Zaidi said.

Anyone who expects clemency from the Commander Guy should recall his remarks about Karla Faye Tucker.