Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., had just finished addressing his Republican colleague Todd Akin Thursday.
Skelton then turned to the side and muttered “stick it up your ass.”
What he said.
Wing-nut over at Redstate.com figures Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is ‘affirmative action’:
I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it, but that is the only thing I can think of for this news.
WTF? He’s getting the prize because he’s black – that’s your argument?!?
This is just another racist attack like the raft of other crap we’ve been seeing from the Wrong (e.g. watermelon-eatin’ emails, photoshopped pics of the President in turbans or tribal garb) that belies their indignation when called on this bullshit.
Tip of the ‘Nose to Film Critic Buddy
Wrong-wingers start the ‘Conservative Bible Project’ to cut out the “Liberal” bits. Seriously? It’s a wasted effort unless they just bite the bullet and delete the New Testament to eliminate all that Jesus stuff about healing lepers (free healthcare), helping the poor (socialism) and general bleeding-heart Liberalism.
“I’m more likely to win the Nobel Peace Prize than you are to make this shot!”
(President Obama challenging a jump shot by aide Reggie Love, via Twitter and whitehouse.gov.)
heart attack on a stick?
1,500-calorie ‘Craz-E Burger’: beef patty, bacon and cheese on Krispy Kreme donut
Tip of the ‘Nose to Film Critic Buddy
Matt Yglesias wrote yesterday:
Representative Alan Grayson’s statement that the Republican plan for health care amounts to “don’t get sick” and if you do “die quickly” probably doesn’t meet a test of literal accuracy. . . . But so what? The idea of a hubbub about this is absurd.
I think the real issue—and the real import—of Grayson’s statement is that it involved breaking one of the unspoken rules of modern American politics. The rule is that conservatives talk about their causes in stark, moralistic terms and progressives don’t. Instead, progressives talk about our causes in bloodless technocratic terms.
This isn’t a terribly new insight (for instance, Drew Westen attracted a lot of attention with a book about it two years ago), but it’s accurate nonetheless –and it’s a big part of why Grayson’s remarks have drawn such disproportionate condemnation from people who routinely give Republicans a pass for similar rhetoric.
Having written some on the subject myself, I disagree with Matt’s rationale for the discrepancy (“substantially more people identify as conservatives than identify as liberals. Consequently, progressive politicians are at pains to describe their proposals as essentially pragmatic and non-ideological, which doesn’t lend itself to moralism“). Plenty of Democratic politicians’ tics can be ascribed to an inordinate fear of offending non-liberal voters, but I don’t think this is one of them.
Instead, my sense is that progressives approach politics from an essentially rational perspective — “What solves the problem?” — whereas conservatives tend to think more in terms of respecting authority, if not outright opposition to the notion of solving problems (which, for many politicians, is encouraged by their fealty to the special interests responsible for causing the problems). As I wrote back in 2007:
Too often, Democrats and other progressives treat politics as a courtroom or a classroom, where the most comprehensively documented and tightly reasoned case will carry the day. While that may appeal to our way of thinking, sadly it just isn’t so for everyone; many voters simply don’t have the time or the inclination to pay that much attention.
And as I wrote even longer ago (in 2006), I think the ultimate goal for progressives should be to reframe the pragmatic value of pursuing real solutions to real problems as being just as morally grounded as (and, in fact, more genuinely so than) the latest sanctimonious Republican posturing.
With a president who often seems unwilling to say “I’m right, and you’re wrong” — indeed, who consciously positions himself as a walking advertisement for calm, dispassionate politics — that can be difficult. But not everyone has to approach the problem the same way; you can have “good cops” like Obama who promote a rational, problem-solving mentality as well as “bad cops” who show that passion and moral clarity are not exclusively conservative characteristics.
So, the specifics of what Grayson said aside, it’s good to see a Democratic politician willing to inject some raw emotion and a sense of morality into our discourse. It’s a start.
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
Well at least I’m glad they are finally talking about the ‘new strategies” for the Afghanistan war. Not sure why they waited so damn long though.
Frankly I’m with Colin Powell on this one – Mr. Obama, please be clear on what you hope to accomplish with U.S. Troops, and what conditions will trigger the end of the operation – give us a frickin’ exit strategy!!
The unspoken exit strategy, of course, is the neutralization of the Taliban & the destruction of Al Qaeda’s safe haven in the region, which as I’ve suggested before, is impossible without expanding the conflict into Western Pakistan.
Since the Pakistani government is scared to death of inviting US troops into the country to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the ground, and since we can’t invade without their permission, this pretty much rules out the current exit strategy.
So I imagine the conversation is pretty much revolving back to the old Nixon standby “how do we translate ‘Peace with Honor’ into Pashtun.”
From Josh Gerstein at Politico:
A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department to release notes and summaries of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2004 interview with Special Prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald in the CIA leak case, but is allowing the deletion of what may be some of the most interesting details in the documents.
In a ruling issued Thursday morning, Judge Emmet Sullivan flatly rejected claims by both Bush and Obama appointees at DOJ that the entirety of the records should be withheld because their disclosure could discourage White House officials from cooperating in future investigations. . . . He said the impact of such an argument would be “breathtakingly broad” and “be in direct contravention of ‘the basic policy’ of” the Freedom of Information Act.
The judge’s ruling came in response to a FOIA suit filed by liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. . . .
In a likely disappointment to aficionados of the CIA leak case, however, Sullivan appears to have okayed the withholding of details about Cheney’s talks with CIA Director George Tenet about Ambassador Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger, talks with National Security Adviser Condi Rice, discussions regarding the 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union Address, discussions about how to respond to press inquiries about the leak of CIA officer Valerie Wilson’s identity, and Cheney’s involvement in declassification discussions.
But… but… that’s all the good stuff! Oh, well, maybe we’ll be able to learn something from the fragments that aren’t redacted.
See emptywheel and CREW for more information, speculation, etc.