These days are all, Happy and free (Those Happy Days)

Henry Winkler being led out of court after his indictment for

masterminding the world's biggest Fonzie Scheme

It's not a problem

I'm kinda sick, don't feel like writing, so here's some music by a great L.A. Band, The Eulogies:



It's a short clip, sorry, but a really nice song.

F*ck You, You Won't Do What We Told Ya

I think you've got it backwards, boys...



;>)

Ain't that what you said, Ain't that what you said? Liar, Liar, Liar!

Flashback: 2006 Poll Showed Most Democrats Wanted Bush to Fail

Rush Limbaugh took a lot of heat for saying he wants President Obama to fail -- but a lot of Democrats felt the same way about former President George W. Bush during his second term.

An August 2006 poll conducted by FOX News/Opinion Dynamics showed 51 percent of Democrats did not want Bush to succeed. Thirty-four percent of independents also did not want Bush to succeed.
[...]
Conservative radio talk show host Limbaugh says he doesn't want the economy to fail -- just Obama's policies.

I call BS ... AKA ... Liar,Liar Liar and a strawman!

1) I can't find any Faux polls from August 2006 that said Dems wanted Bush to fail. Maybe my Googly skillz is bad, but a Lexis/Nexis search backs me up.

2) Faux News can't be bothered to actually link to Faux News where it says this.

3) No one accused Rush, the drug addicted drug smuggler, of saying he wants "the economy to fail" No one wants the economy to fail, especially not multi-millionaires like Limbaugh. But he did say [WARNING: this link is to Limbaugh's site] I want everything he's doing to fail!

3a) The lede for this POS Faux News article said "Rush Limbaugh took a lot of heat for saying he wants President Obama to fail"

Well, that's just a fact. Limbaugh not only said it, he repeated it:[WARNING: this link is to Limbaugh's site] "If I wanted Obama to succeed, I'd be happy the Republicans have laid down. [...] I don't need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails"
&
[WARNING: Fox News Site]So I shamelessly say, no, I want him to fail

And why did he say it, repeatedly? I'm so glad you asked. Because, as Rush says, if Obama can fix the financial problems the country was left with after 8 years of Bush rule(s), then people might vote for Democrats . Because if they can fix the problems that Republicans caused, Dems will win more elections.

You know, like FDR did after Hoover, like JFK/LBJ did after Ike, like Clinton did after Reagan/Bush I, like Obama will do after Bush II if the Grand Obstructionist Party will put America first and not their political ambitions.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

If you'll only give me time. All the heartache that he left behind

Well, I guess it's official. Obama's stimulus plan has failed to fix the bear market on Wall Street that he created. The Democrats have flushed us all down the toilet and John McCain can say "I told you so" as his plan of just carrying on Bush's policies would already have us out of this mess. Oh, you betcha!

Or, at least, that's what the talking heads on the right are hoping to convince Americans of.

In this instant-messaging, short attention span society we are in, we think all things can be accomplished and all problems resolved in a 24-hour time span, and anything that goes beyond that is a failure.

Although the conservative wing is trying hard to get the term "Obama's Bear Market" into the nation's lexicon, here is a dose of reality from today's Ryan Chittum column in the Columbia Journalism Review:

We’ve seen a meme spreading like a fungus in the press, mostly on the editorial/analysis/commentator side so far, blaming Barack Obama for stock market declines since Inauguration Day. Today, Drudge is pushing a Bloomberg story headlined “‘Obama Bear Market’ Punishes Investors as Dow Slumps.”

Um, no. Let’s nip this nonsense in the bud before it gets out of hand.

[ ... ] The Dow peaked in October of 2007. The bear market became official (meaning, stocks dropped 20 percent from their peak) in July. The markets started really falling off a cliff in September, when the Bush administration let Lehman fail, AIG and Merill had to be taken over, the Congress voted down the bailout, and Paulson had to switch teams from free marketeer to interventionist. Those events, remember, are what insured Obama’s election in the first place.
The TARP helped keep the boat from completely capsizing, but it’s more like bailing water does than fixing the actual hole in the bottom does. The economy, already in recession since December of 2007, went into freefall after the September crisis and has kept plunging since, shedding more than 600,000 jobs a month. Since the election, we’ve learned that Merrill Lynch blew a probably fatal hole in the side of Bank of America, Citigroup has been left for dead, and General Electric has been on the highway to hell—or the Pink Sheets, anyway. There’s much more in that vein if you have all day.
This is what Messrs. Obama, Geithner, and Summers inherited. Tough gig.
But let’s step even further back a bit. Dude’s been in office six weeks. The stock market is a notoriously impossible-to-predict-or-interpret animal. It goes where it may, for reasons the smartest traders can only guess at.
To put it another way, big secular declines in stocks take years to play out. The Great Depression stock crash didn’t hit bottom until 1933, four years after it started. It seems like the current one has been going on forever, but we’re still only at about 1930 or 1931.
[ ... ] “To be sure, the stock market’s crash long preceded Obama’s inauguration and election, and the economy he inherited from Bush is in a tailspin not seen for eighty years. And the extent to which Obama’s proposals have impacted the stock market is impossible to calculate.”
[ ... ] And get some perspective, as Ritholtz says:
"But to hold him responsible for a market collapse on day 41 of his Presidency — following 8 years of gross negligence and ruinous incompetency under the Bush regime — is simply too much stupidity for any damaged nation to bear."

To repeat... Obama has been President for 41 days. His plans, which the right have already deemed to be failures, are just starting now to be implemented. To expect him to turn everything around in the economy this quickly is kind of like slamming on the car brakes while flying down a rain-soaked highway at 100 mph and expect it to suddenly stop on a dime. Anyone who thinks that could happen aren't living in the real world with a grasp of just how deep this problem goes.

As Robin Williams once said, "Reality... what a concept."

No disguise for that double vision

This from Sam Stein at the Huffington Post:

Moments after declaring that the country needs earmark reform, Sen. Lindsey Graham offered an arduous defense of his own, well, earmarking.

Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, the South Carolina Republican was asked about his good friend John McCain's pork-focused critique of the omnibus spending bill that was held up in the Senate on Friday."We do need earmark reform," said Graham. "I wish [the president] would veto the bill, we'd get back together and come up with the earmark reform process."

Seconds later, however, Graham was reminded that he himself had inserted 37 earmarks in the legislation, including $950,000 for "a convention center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina."

After defending the transparency and necessity of such an expenditure, Graham finally finished the 180, saying of the Myrtle Beach funding: "I voted to take all earmarks out, but I will come back in the new process and put that back in."

In other words: earmarking is terrible, but I should have the ability to earmark.

To be fair, Graham -- like every other member of Congress who inserted pork into the omnibus -- had to do it publicly. Moreover, the number of earmarks has dropped significantly since Congress passed legislative changes to the process after Democrats regained control.

Really not much to add to that. It just gave me an excuse to make up a silly graphic portraying a two-faced politician. Hardly a unique species, but funny to look at none-the-less.

Oh, you mean like White House spokepeople?

Obama: "'rarely' reads blogs, says they're misleading"

The simple fact is that what blogs often lack in access to 'factual' data (read: classified government reports and reportorial access to officials) they more than make up for in critical thinking and moral clarity, subjective ideological bias for the most part notwithstanding - Something which cannot be said for the current purveyors of mainstream mass media...like 'newspapers – in their paper form – and weekly news magazines', for example.

;>)

Come see victory, in the land called fantasy

The American Conservative sometimes has reasonable things to say. Daniel Larison, for example, is readable:

Conservatives seem to have spent the last year rapidly regressing from cheering on lame politicians who could at least intelligently recite their platitudes (Romney) to worshipping pseudo-populists who could not even do that (Palin) to elevating random guys who didn’t like taxes (the Plumber) to rallying around a radio host who makes Romney’s own brand of Reagan nostalgia and three-legs-of-the-stoolism seem deep and meaningful by comparison. Of course, there isn’t that much substantively different between Romney’s opportunistic recitations and Limbaugh’s boilerplate, but at least with Romney you knew that he was capable of saying something else and would have said it if he had thought it was to his advantage. The boilerplate is not only all Limbaugh knows how to say, but if you pressed him to elaborate on any of it he would just repeat himself.

But this masturbatory fantasy from Pat Buchanan is really, well, near delusional:

Not only is Barack running a deficit four times as large as Bush’s largest, he has called for $1 trillion in new taxes on America’s most successful, who have already seen their savings and pensions ravaged.

He wants a cap-and-trade system to deal with a global-warming or climate-change crisis many scientists believe is a hoax. He is going to provide health care for all, including immigrants, millions of whom arrive uninsured every year. He is going to plunge scores of billions more into education, though education has eaten up the wealth of an empire, as SAT scores sink further and further below the apogee of 1964, before LBJ and the feds barged in. He is going to ask Congress for authority to spend another $750 billion rescuing the banks.

He is going to find the cure for cancer. He is going to ensure every kid gets a college education. He is going to drop half of all wage-earners off the tax rolls, while the top 2 percent, who already pay 40 percent of all income taxes, are forced to cough up more.

Obama is misreading the election returns. When America voted to cancel the White House lease of Mr. Bush, it did not vote Barack Obama a blank check.

By misinterpreting his mandate, Obama has accomplished something John McCain could not — unite the Republican Party and instill in it a new esprit de corps. For the Obama budget is an insult to the core belief of the party — that free people, not coercive government, should shape the character of society.

Taxes on the most successful, who make the MOST FUCKING MONEY? Quelle surprise! I won't bother beyond saying that the proposal is for taxing the upper crust at the Clinton-era level. We're not exactly talking Scrooge economics here.

And Pat? Saying this:

climate-change crisis many scientists believe is a hoax

puts you squarely in the camp of those who firmly believe that they can fly, that gravity is only an opinion.

Seriously, America did vote Barack Obama a "blank check", and no one on the immediate horizon can:

unite the Republican Party and instill in it a new esprit de corps

no matter how hard Rush tries.

Pat, sometimes you make sense. This time, you FAIL.

Because Newt is thinking about running for prez

I thought I'd start running some of his wonderful old hits. This is a post right after the horror at Virginia Tech, where he thought he could scrape off the blame on to liberals:

Newt Gingrich explains why liberals caused the Virginia Tech massacre

By trying to say his bizarre statement after the Columbine school shooting still applied. Read (and hear) his intelligent and logical response as to why the liberals are at fault:

GINGRICH: Well, who has created a situation ethics, essentially, zone of not being willing to talk about any of these things. Let me carry another example. I strongly supported Imus being dismissed, but I also think the very thing he was dismissed for, which is the use of language which is stunningly degrading of women — the fact, for example, that one of the Halloween costumes this last year was being able to be either a prostitute or a pimp at 10, 11, 12 years of age, buying a costume, and we don’t have any discussion about what’s happened to our culture because while we’re restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold, we say it’s impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech. And I would argue that that’s a major component of what’s happened to our culture in the last 40 years.

Aren't we already getting eight years of this weird make-your-own-reality stuff? I think we've had enough.

Besides.

Who wants a president named Newt?


(Picture of Warty Newt from here.)

Update 4/23: Mustang Bobby of Bark Bark Woof Woof reminds us of another time Gingrich worked very hard to link society's ills and liberals together.... and it didn't work:

It is easy for Mr. Gingrich to blame society for the ills and tragedies of one demented man. He has done it before, with the tragedy of Susan Smith, the woman who drowned her two children in 1994. At first Mr. Gingrich implied that liberals were to blame and that it would be advantageous for the Republicans in the upcoming 1994 mid-term elections by reminding voters that liberals could be held accountable: "Slightly more moving our way. I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things." He dropped that when it came to light that Ms. Smith had been molested as a teen by her stepfather, a prominent South Carolina Republican and leader of the Christian Coalition. But obviously that smack-down in irony has not been enough to deter him, and onward he goes, doing what Republicans do best: finding a problem, making people afraid of it, and then finding someone else to blame for it. He doesn't offer solutions, nor does he bother to contemplate the fact that it was under the Reagan administration that federal assistance for mental health services for people like Mr. Cho was cut back and the Republicans have been very successful in defeating every effort by the Democrats to restore it, leaving it to the states, who have barely enough resources to pay for existing facilities, or the private sector.

Run, Newt, Run! I'm going to post more about your family values and three wives in a bit!

crossposted at Rants from the Rookery

The things you say... you're unbelievable

I'm not sure why I'm even bothering to mention this latest Limbaugh gutterism, but:

WASHINGTON (March 7) - A Democratic official rebuked conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh on Friday for suggesting a health care proposal will be named in memory of Sen. Edward Kennedy, who is battling brain cancer. On his radio show, Limbaugh said President Barack Obama's proposed health care revisions will be championed by "the liberal lion Teddy Kennedy."

"Before it's all over, it'll be called the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care bill," Limbaugh said.
Brian Wolff, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, called the remark outrageous and reprehensible.

Nice. But why should anyone even be surprised anymore by bad taste coming from the new GOP leader? Dittoheads pretend he is the voice of conservatism (and I guess he is for the far right wingnuts), but the truth is he is less a commentator than a high paid radio shock jock. And like all shock jocks, it's all about ratings and publicity. And Rush is reveling in the limelight he gets by saying stupid and offensive things. Put a few strippers on his show and he's not far off from the level of Howard Stern.

Yeah, I suppose by even posting this I'm giving Rush just what he wants. But by the same token, they say the best way to reveal cockroaches is to flip on the kitchen light. I think apart from the handful of hardcore dittoheads who live in the same uncompassionate, self-centered world as he does, the rest of America who actually would like to see our country rebuild and prosper and not "fail" just so some fat loudmouth can chortle "See, I told you so!" from his multi-million dollar mansion far above his audience who wouldn't share that advantage, the majority of Americans want this country fixed - by whatever means works - so EVERYONE, and not just the small handful like Rush who won't be hurt by it getting worse, can again afford housing and pay for healthcare.

It's easy for someone making hundreds of millions of dollars to say "everyone should pay for their own healthcare", but when it's skyrocketed to the point the average family in this economy can hardly afford it, that's not a statement that is based anywhere near reality. If universal healthcare isn't the answer, then what would the Republicans offer as an alternative? Frankly, I'm open to any plans. Bush in his 8 years certainly didn't do squat to deal with the problem. Then again, Bush pretty much ran with the "status quo" as being the solution to everything, that the market would take care of everything on its own, which is the same all-purpose plan multi-millionaires like Rush believe in, as well. Well, Rush, that sure didn't work, now did it?

Any other bright ideas? I mean, apart from taking potshots at a man seriously ill with brain cancer?

(graphic by Dancin' Dave)