Needlenose

The Billionaire...and the rest!

Unattributed photoshop, tip ‘o the Nose to Cannibal Buddy!

About a week ago some self-proclaimed ‘moderate’ (I suspect he was really a Tea Bagger in disguise) called me an ‘extremist’ and an ‘alarmist’ when I joked that the GOP was on a mission to roll back all significant labor, consumer protection and other legislation of the last 100 years in the rush to turn us into a 3rd world cleptocracy.  I guess he doesn’t actually listen to what his leaders are saying.  Check out today’s latest- Newt Gingrich wants to put the children of America to work!  Interesting thought, although with roughly 1 out of 5 adults out of work, not sure what he’d have the kids do…sell True Grit?  They can’t deliver newspapers anymore, that industry is dying.

I wonder if Gingrich and Senator Mike Lee get their radical agenda from reading Needlenose snark…

With Halloween coming up on Monday, there’s going to be a lot of grown-ups attending masquerade parties this weekend. Which, unfortunately, has meant a lot of long, last-minute lines in crowded costume stores — including the one in Washington, D.C., where all the Republican presidential candidates went shopping earlier this week.

As you might expect, they all wanted to dress up as Ronald Reagan, but someone had already snatched that up before the GOP contenders got there… and things just got uglier as they all scrambled for other choices.

Michele Bachmann took the easiest route, deciding to go as Bat Boy.

Jon Huntsman settled for being the Invisible Man.  (Some thought Tim Pawlenty did, too, but it turned out he didn’t stay long enough to buy a costume.)

All of his fellow candidates wanted Ron Paul to be the Invisible Man, but he kept asking if he could be Ross Perot.  Amid all the crosstalk, he wound up as Perot’s crazy aunt in the basement.

Sarah Palin, who showed up even though she isn’t running, opted for Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

Herman Cain decided to go as Sarah Palin, but people are just beginning to figure that out.

Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich both wanted to be Elmer Gantry, which resulted in a terrible fight where they tore the costume in half.  Perry completed his outfit with a cowboy get-up once worn by George Bush — and when he worried people might recognize it, he dyed a Jimmy Carter wig to put on top of it all.  Newt combined his half with a science-fiction robot costume.

Mitt Romney took the same concept way too far, stitching together pieces from so many different costumes that no one really knows who he’s trying to be.

(Adapted from a post at Firedoglake.  Tip of the ‘Nose to Green Boy for his suggestions!)

(Image by Oliver Willis.)

I have bad news for all of you election/schadenfreude junkies out there… like all good things, Newt Gingrich Humiliation Week is drawing to a close.  Yes, there may be a few last sparks from whatever Sunday talkfest Newt is gracing with his presence this weekend, and he’ll continue trudging through the small towns of New Hampshire and other early primary/caucus states next week.  Between the media’s gnat-like attention span and a presumed (if woefully late) improvement in message discipline by Gingrich and his press secretary, though, most of the fun probably has already been had.

The good news, however, is that starting Monday, it will be Tim Pawlenty‘s turn in the barrel… with Michelle Bachmann lining up a possible announcement toward the end of the week, and Jon Huntsman claiming dibs for sometime in June.

It’s downright considerate for the Republican presidential wannabes to present themselves to the public like this — one after the other, close together but evenly spaced like… um, well, like the revolving ducks in a shooting gallery.

Which probably isn’t how they envisioned it, of course.  Given the amount of hubris involved in thinking one has a shot at the White House, the candidates and their staffs likely imagine it as more like scheduling the big opening weekend of a Hollywood movie.  You know, the kind of thing where you want to have the spotlight of public attention all to yourself.

Unfortunately, running for the GOP presidential nod isn’t quite like that.  It means subjecting yourself to the crossfire of multiple litmus tests, struggling to differentiate yourself from your competitors even as you all pander to the same interest groups, practicing your dog-whistle techniques… in short, advertising your unlimited affection for the fiercest lunacies of your party’s base (a group with more collective resentments than common sense) while trying to simultaneously hide it from any sane voters who may be watching.

No wonder it goes so badly for so many of them.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

…to be Fabulous!

Feel the Rainbow, Newt!

Tip of the ‘Nose to Film Critic Buddy!!

Gingrich has been gradually creeping out from the shadows into the limelight since his fall from grace when leading the impeachment crusade against the very popular Bill Clinton.  But the Gingrich of the 90s seems relatively tame compared to the teabaggers and birthers of today – and even compared to Gingrich 2010!

In a recent speech to the reactionary American Enterprise Institute, Gingrich seems to have planted one foot firmly amidst the teabagger camp with his calls to forbid the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (which is neither a Mosque nor at Ground Zero), and the other solidly planted in the Wolfowitz/NeoConArtist era of never-ending war on Radical Islam:

“I believe [Bush] was right but in fact could not operationalize what he said. That is, there was an Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq, North Korea. Well we’re one out of three. And people ought to think about that. If Bush was right in January of 2002 — and by the way virtually the entire Congress gave him a standing ovation when he said it — then why is it that the other two parts of the Axis of Evil are still visibly, cheerfully making nuclear weapons? And it’s because we’ve stood at brink, looked over and thought, “Too big a problem.”

“If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in ‘41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won,” Gingrich said. The U.S. has to “over-match the problem,” he said, adding, “That’s what Americans are all about.”

I wonder if he got the memo that various Repug leaders were starting to bail on Shrubya’s Afghanistan Folly?  Palin/Gringrich in 2012 – the worst of 3 eras of Repug misleadership!  It would be kinda luck the Germans in WWII – invading a bunch of weak countries (Iran, N. Korea), then going crazy and attacking Russia from Palin’s house…I don’t even want to think about the hell they’d create.

David Dayen at Firedoglake wrote this morning about how Sen. Richard Shelby’s attempt to block 70 Obama administration nominees over a couple of earmarks “does amount to what you would call a ‘teachable moment’ about the dysfunctional Senate.”

In his initial reaction overnight, Josh Marshall went a bit further, noting that Shelby’s hostage-taking attempt showed “gallons more audacity than Obama ever could have hoped for”:

… I wonder if this story might not end up amounting to much more than the sum of its parts because it brings together three or four of the issues roiling American politics today in a bundle of smack-you-in-the-face arrogance that’s too much to ignore.

For Republicans and the Tea Party set you’ve got pork-barrel spending and earmarks… for Democrats, there’s the outrage at archaic Senate obstructionism.

Perhaps more important, it crystallizes the essential pettiness and hubris of the Republican in such a vivid way that even Democrats should be able to sell the image of GOP selfishness to a generally inattentive public.

It’s happened before, back in 1995 when Newt Gingrich led the newly Republican-controlled Congress in forcing a shutdown of the federal government, trying to force President Clinton to capitulate on budget issues.  Thanks to an inopportune remark by Gingrich about a personal snub he had received from Clinton, the White House successfully embarrassed the GOP into ending the standoff.

That Shelby would try such a stunt barely a couple of weeks after the Republicans snagged their coveted 41st Senate seat shows that his party hasn’t outgrown Gingrich’s penchant for overreach.   But, as D-Day also wrote today, President Obama and the Democratic leadership can’t let themselves be even less willing to stand up for their own interests than the famed triangulator, Clinton.

Perhaps Obama should make a high-profile visit to various GOP senators’ home states, asking locals if they’re as fond of Shelby’s earmarks as Massachusetts voters were of Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker kickback.”  Or maybe there’s a better attention-getting maneuver.

But hell, they need to do something.  Don’t let this teachable moment pass.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Now that the dust has settled over the bad financial waves that Emperor Shrubya vainly tried to whip back (at least until after the election), more information is now filtering out about the architects of the junk mortgage disaster – starting with the Freddie Mac’s “enablers.”

As you might presume, Freddie’s ‘bad government’ partners include some of the usual suspects, like Newt Gingrich, who pulled in $300,000 to lobby his good buddies in Congress and the misAdministration about “the benefits of the Freddie Mac business model” – i.e. against moves to break up Freddie Mac’s business and spread it among other companies such as commercial banks.

But the Grinchster wasn’t alone – here is the current Repug list of shameful enablers:

•Sen. Alfonse D’Amato of New York, at Park Strategies, $240,000
•Rep. Vin Weber of Minnesota, at Clark and Weinstock, $360,297
•Rep. Susan Molinari of New York, at Washington Group, $300,062
•Susan Hirschmann at Williams and Jensen, former chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, $240,790
•Viet Dinh, $300K

Just don’t expect any of these ‘Grinches’ to return any of the misbegotten dough.