What we need is a FEMA Camp cookbook.
mmm, lemon chicken.
***Update***
An interesting point – now would be a good time for some loyalty oaths, no? To the country would be fine, Ms. Taylor.
by Tim F| 68 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
What we need is a FEMA Camp cookbook.
mmm, lemon chicken.
***Update***
An interesting point – now would be a good time for some loyalty oaths, no? To the country would be fine, Ms. Taylor.
by Tim F| 87 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Assholes, General Stupidity
The same thing about which John warned the Malkin fringe again and again, illustrated this time by Glenn.
When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it’s going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. That’s its nature.
A rightwing “patriot” blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 Americans. Another rightwing activist committed a series of bombings that killed two people and injured at least 150 others. A heavy FOX News consumer shot up a Unitarian church in Knoxville for reasons that he plainly described as politically eliminationist. Last week a white supremacist shot three police officers in cold blood after posting a string of online commentary that echoed hysterical rightwing radio rants almost word-for-word. The shooter admitted that he would have killed more if he could.
Here is a suggestion if Michelle still needs shoulder to cry on. Go find a cop. There’s no need to come to southwestern PA; I saw squad cars from Michigan, Massachusetts and Canada at Thursday’s funeral. Tell him or her how completely unfair it feels to have the government keeping an eye on paranoid gun fetishists. She can explain to her new friend how the government was never meant to use unrestrained police powers on her kind of American.
—
At least now I can stop wondering whether rightwing torture-and-wiretap freaks ever understood that putting ‘Islamic’ or ‘terrorist’ in the title of a law is not a great way to limit its scope to people they consider Islamic terrorists. If the meaningful part of a law has no penalty for using supposed ‘antiterrorist’ powers on anyone that a law enforcement agency damn well pleases then that is what it will do.
Republicans were not just trying to grease laws with titles that nobody would want to vote against. They really believed that a law’s title and its preamble, if the author even bothered, had some totemic power to protect conservative ultrapatriots from the vile treatment that they wanted to impose on others. Evil, yes, in the obvious pleasure they took in seeing mostly innocent prisoners tortured. But definitely also stupid.
Watching Malkin, the other Boleyn girl, squirm now after she smugly cheered the disappearance of Catherine of Aragon Jose Padilla only a few years ago does not exactly feel good. But it sure isn’t wrong.
***Update***
by John Cole| 25 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, Clown Shoes
Gotta love these guys:
This just in from Columbia County: when Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s absentee ballot came up in the queue, the poll watchers for Jim Tedisco objected to it, saying the senator was in the county on election day and should have voted in person.
But, but but…. ACORN!
(via email)
This post is in: Humorous
Some of you had mentioned the Shuster piece on MSNBC last night, but I had no idea it was this over the top:
That was almost like an SNL skit.
*** Update ***
The title to this post is a Family Guy reference.
by DougJ| 79 Comments
This post is in: Clown Shoes
Of persecution:
As anti-tax protesters organize tea parties across the country on April 15, rumors are swirling that a backlash is brewing.
Some believe ACORN, which has been under scrutiny for accusations of voter fraud, is preparing to crash some of the tea parties. But ACORN says it is only helping to organize dozens of rallies on the same day in support of President Obama’s first budget.
Speaking of the baggers, if you haven’t seen this, you’re in for a treat.
(via)
by John Cole| 36 Comments
This post is in: Music
I’m sitting here reading a book I really, really, do not want to read but have to, and while I am doing it I am cataloging some old cd’s I have not yet put into Itunes, and I just came across a band I used to hear a lot in undergrad but have not listened to in a decade. Whatever happened to the Screaming Trees?
I guess they would be considered protypical grunge, but they sure fit the zeitgeist of the early 90’s and when I turned Nearly Lost You on, I was transported from my desk with a book I don’t want to read to a beer bash in the sun in 1993. I guess like many of the other bands from that time period and that genre, the country changed and they sort of just faded away.
And if anyone cares, I think I liked their 1996 Dust better.
by DougJ| 82 Comments
This post is in: Media
That’s what this exchange in today’s WaPo chat sounds like:
Kensington, Md.: Am I the only one who finds it irritating and childish when the media (and the public) assigns credit or blame to a president for the outcome of a small-scale touch-and-go military operation on the other side of the world? I’m a huge Obama supporter, but he is no more a hero because the waves held steady as our Navy sharpshooter took his aim than Jimmy Carter was a goat because an unexpected sandstorm jammed the helicopter engines during the 1980 hostage rescue mission. Does the media truly have no idea how irrational (and unrealistic) this hero/goat assignment practice is?
Michael A. Fletcher: No comment there. But it is our common practice. Think of the instant analysis after political debates about who “won.” Remember Al Gore’s eye roll? What did that have to with the substance of his answers? But did it say somehting about his personality? Rightly or wrongly, these incidents often come to define presidents, and I don’t think it is just because of the media coverage. It probably speaks to the few windows we get into their decision making. In this case, Obama could have said we’re not going to do something that risky. Or he could have done what he did–I think that says something, even if it doesn’t say as much as we often make it out to.
Until this begins to change, our political system is largely screwed. Leaders are now judged, at best, by random events over which they have little control, and, at worst, by Villagers’ sad attempts at psychoanalysis. Bush managed to transcend that through the magnitude of his incompetence, but, even then, it took the Village until 2005 to realize it, so wowed were they by the straight talk and the flight suit and what not.
Maybe some day that will change. But I’m not optimistic.