What’s up with Tweety? He almost seems to have a soul on occasion and then he goes and swills some cocktail weenies with Sally Quinn and declares that the only reason Hillary got elected to the Senate was because people felt sorry for her, unlike Scott Brown who is a braintrust. Jeez, it still pisses me off whenever I remember that but that’s not the subject of this post.
This post is about how Tweety and Barney Frank took on Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the kind of guy some in my family adore like he is a dreamy uber-Christian demigod, striding the marbled halls of justice with the wind in his fists and the stars round his wrists. Anyway, someone must have spiked Tweety’s tea because he went after Tony relentlessly going as far as showing instant replays. It’s a thing of beauty. Why can’t we see the conservatives get swirlied like this on a regular basis? I might even reinvest in cable to see that.
But the best part (or worst part, depending on you perspective) is when Tony Perkins goes all psycho on special needs children. Apparently, they’re not worthy of loving parents and no one wants to adopt them anyway. Well, well, well, we can now see what Tony really thinks of children born to the wrong parents. Nice white, asian and south american infants are peachy keen for intact heterosexual families but an older kid or a kid with the wrong skin color or HIV status or disability doesn’t deserve parents at all no matter what kind they are. Anyway, check it out.
Yeah! Give’im hell, Tweety. Ask him to explain that whole ugly business with Lot’s daughters and the bear that ate the kids who made fun of Elisha’s hair. Why stop with Abraham?
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Also, there’s this little bit on Fox where the hosts are discussing Obama’s drug use. I guess it’s a tit for yesterday’s tat on Romney’s stupid and mean haircutting escapade. If I were the Obama campaign, I wouldn’t have gone there because now, Fox is going to feel justified bringing out all of the drug stuff and even if they tip towards the racist side (and how could they not, they’re Fox), nobody is going to care when the Obama campaign cries “wolf!”. The crocodile tears and faux outrage over racism is going to backfire this year. Fox goes as far as accusing Obama of selling drugs- and then apologizes for getting that wrong.
What’s that saying about a lie making it halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on?
When I first wrote that I really thought it was a good morning. I just spent around 2-1/2 hours writing a long morning news post, and when I tried to save it, I discovered that WordPress had logged me out. Therefore, my entire post was wiped out. I’ll try to recreate some of it, but here are some non-political stories to get you started. Too bad I got so involved in writing that I didn’t save till the end…
We were back in the deep freeze this morning in New England–12 degrees where I live, but we aren’t facing what the Twitter folks are calling “snowmageddon” and “snowpocalypse.”
the main event with this storm will be heavy snow in the Mid-Atlantic States. Snow will begin in the Washington area this afternoon and spread northward towards Philadelphia by evening.
Heavy snow will continue into Saturday before winding down by evening. Travel may grind to a halt for a time, especially overnight and Saturday.
By the time the storm ends, many areas in northern Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and southern Pennsylvania will have over a foot of snow. Some places may end up nearly two feet of snow from this storm.
As the low pushes off the coast, it will strengthen quickly and produce very strong winds, especially along the Mid-Atlantic coast. Gusts between 45 and 50 mph are possible from southern New Jersey to the Norfolk area Friday night and Saturday morning.
Blizzard warnings are in effect for southeastern areas of New Jersey as well as much of Delaware.
It is also worth mentioning that this storm will spread snow as far west as the Ohio Valley.
Amazingly, the storm is expected to blow out to sea before it can get up here to New England. It’s our second weekend of nice weather while those south and west of us suffer. I feel for the people in the areas that will be hard-hit, but I’m sure glad I won’t have to shovel snow this weekend (fingers crossed, because you never know with the weather).
A Florida woman has been arrested in connection with the death of a lottery millionaire, whose body was found buried under recently added concrete at a home, authorities said.
Dorice Donegan Moore, 37, was arrested Tuesday evening on charges of accessory after the fact regarding a first-degree murder in the death of Abraham Shakespeare, 43, said Hillsborough County Sheriff David Gee.
Moore befriended Shakespeare after he won a $31 million Florida lottery prize in 2006 and was named a person of interest in the case after Shakespeare went missing, authorities said.
Sen. Al Franken ripped into White House senior adviser David Axelrod this week during a tense, closed-door session with Senate Democrats.
Five sources who were in the room tell POLITICO that Franken criticized Axelrod for the administration’s failure to provide clarity or direction on health care and the other big bills it wants Congress to enact.
The sources said Franken was the most outspoken senator in the meeting, which followed President Barack Obama’s question-and-answer session with Senate Democrats at the Newseum on Wednesday. But they also said the Minnesotan wasn’t the only angry Democrat in the room.
“There was a lot of frustration in there,” said a Democratic senator who declined to be identified.
“People were hot,” another Democratic senator said.
But apparently Franken was the only one with real guts.
What redeems my faith in the system is the fact that every so often, a politician comes along who actually exceeds my expectations, who comports themself the way we expect a politician to — without fear of losing, with more of a focus on the people they represent than the next election. The late, great Sen. Paul Wellstone, DFL-Minn., was one of those politicians. He ran a spirited campaign and talked a good show, but once elected he backed up his words with actions. He walked the talk.
And now, the man who holds his seat in the Senate is doing the same thing.
On Tuesday, Sen. Al Franken, DFL-Minn., served as the keynote speaker for the NARAL Pro-Choice America Roe v. Wade anniversary luncheon. And his remarks to the group were outstanding. Franken gave a full-throated, unapologetic defense of the right of women to choose their own reproductive destinies — and did so with both humor and grace.
Another loudmouthed politician whom I don’t like or trust as much as I used to, Barney Frank, made a very good speech recently about how the Right Wing Noise Machine works.
I have to agree with Frank that John Fund is a slimy, scurrilous liar and he deserves to be shunned.
The verdict in Massachusetts was a verdict on the overall economy. But it was also a commentary on how the entire health care debate was flipped upside down by insurance interests who were able to intervene so that the final product that was offered out of the Senate was nothing more than a sell-out to the insurance industry.
We can still have health care reform in America. We need to take a short-term and a longer-term view. On the short-term: We need to take away the antitrust exemption that insurance companies have. We need to make sure, on the short-term, that we can see everyone with a pre-existing condition have access to insurance. There are things that we can do with single-initiatives to help regain the momentum on health care.
And for the longer-term: The answer is “Medicare for All.” The answer was never to continue to give the insurance companies one out of every three dollars in our health care system.
OK, that’s about all I can remember of my lost post. I know I had more links, but I can’t remember them all. I’ll leave it to you Conflucians to post your stories in the comments. I love you guys!
As a candidate, Mr. Obama vowed that he wouldn’t abuse the presidential signing statement, a declaration issued by the president when he signs a bill to give his interpretation of that law. President George W. Bush used so many signing statements — more than 750 — that the American Bar Association criticized it as an abuse of power.
After Mr. Obama’s issuance of his second signing statement last month, even some Democrats say he isn’t keeping his word on reining in unilateral presidential actions.
“Of course there’s a broader issue here,” said House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.), referring to the brewing battles with Mr. Obama over presidential prerogative. “It’s outrageous. It’s exactly what the Bush people did.”
Oooooh! Barney may have to be called to the Oval Office for another charm injection. It sounds like the last one is wearing off.
On June 24, Obama issued a signing statement claiming that he did not have to follow the limitations on funds that Congress appropriated for the World bank and International Monetary Fund. Incensed,
The House rebuked President Obama for trying to ignore restrictions to international aid payments, voting overwhelmingly for an amendment forcing the administration to abide by its constraints.
House members approved an amendment by a 429-2 vote to have the Obama administration pressure the World Bank to strengthen labor and environmental standards and require a Treasury Department report on World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) activities.
In a letter slated for delivery on Wednesday, Mr. Frank, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D., Wis.), and New York Democratic Reps. Nita Lowey and Gregory Meeks will inform the president that if he issues another signing statement on IMF and World Bank funding, Congress will cut off the funds he wants.
Interestingly, Sonia Sotomayor was asked about presidential signing statements in her Senate Confirmation Hearing today. Senator Diane Feinstein asked Sotomayor if it is Constitutional for Presidents to refuse to enforce certain parts of laws passed by Congress. Her response:
Justice Jackson, in his concurrence in the Youngstown steel seizure case, and that involved President Truman’s seizures of steel factories” — that was a 1952 case in which the court dealt a stinging rebuke to what it considered to be Truman’s executive overreach — “there, Justice Jackson … says that you always have to look at assertions by the president that he or she is acting within executive power in the context of what Congress has done or not done…. First, you look at, has Congress expressly addressed or authorized the president to act a certain way.” If so, she said, “then he is acting at his highest stature of power. If the president is acting in prohibition of an expressed or implied act of Congress, then he is working at his lowest ebb.
“If he is acting where Congress hasn’t spoken, then he is acting in what Justice Jackson called ‘the zone of twilight.’ ”
She concluded: “You can’t speak more specifically than that… Other than to say, a president can’t act in violation of the Constitution. No one’s above the law.”
Okay, so is it Constitutional for the President to be in the twilight zone? Sotomayor didn’t quite commit herself on that one.
Though I make no claims of being a financial wizard, or a political maven, even I can see that all is not right on Wall Street, D.C. where the heart and soul of our country is on life support, currently being administered to by second graders who want to be doctors when they grow up. And, I’m sophisticated enough to recognize that a lot of what I read about our dire national situation is presented in the media by people representing the political party so far out of favor they have to look to bloviating blowhards for advice, or worse, can be made to appear to need to do so. I get that. However, in spite of all that, the forces pretending to represent the white-hatted good guys in this classic Adventures in Administration movie, armed with their heralded sky-high approval ratings for their poor man’s Dark Gable leading man, simply can’t mount enough of a stampede to disguise the fact that the dustcloud that follows them like Charlie Brown’s pal Pigpen’s is not the result of riding hard and strong over the dusty trail, but merely the wispy smoke trails from their “throw ’em off the path,” hastily built, diversionary cookfire. In other words, they got nothing.
Stalwart bastion of the Obamedia protection service, Salon Magazine, has an article by former Clinton labor secretary and Obacolyte, Robert Reich, in which he pitifully attempts to pooh-pooh rightwing claims that the Obamessiah himself is responsible for our economic woes by trying to lay them at the feet of the finger-pointers:
When it turns out that people like Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who took home $68 million in 1997, was the only Wall Streeter in a meeting last September at the New York Federal Reserve to discuss the initial AIG bailout with Tim Geithner, then New York Fed chair, among others, at the very time Goldman was AIG’s largest trading partner, a distinct scent of self-dealing begins to emanate. When it turns out that Citigroup got a bailout deal last October far more generous than that given to any other distressed bank, when a top Citi executive was advising the Treasury and Fed, the scent increases. Goldman’s past CEO was treasury secretary at that time, by the way, and another former Goldman CEO was a top Citi official and also a former treasury secretary. I am not suggesting anything so crude as corruption. But could it be, given these tangled webs, that — innocently, unintentionally, perhaps even subconsciously — the entire bailout effort was premised on saving these companies rather than protecting the public? Or that the distinction between the two was lost, and still is?
Yet, Reich gleefully and disingenuously, ignores the fact that the people he’s defending his ObaMaster against are the people who funded his campaign. Not only that, the central figure in Reich’s little morality play, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat, (TTTG,tc) has a family history of sorts with Barry Sutoro, and is currently employed as the Blameless One’s lapdog and whipping boy. To point out that he may have colluded with the banksters against the public in ripping off the country on the other team’s watch is…well…stupid.
Why would anyone purporting to defend the Obama administration draw attention to the man quickly becoming the public face of its incompetence? Especially when the author can’t even make it through to the end of his own piece without acknowledging at least some of the complicity of the Obama Drama Troupe?
The Wall Street and Republican media attack machine doesn’t know exactly what to make of this. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, along with CNBC, alternates between attacking Obama for bailing out Wall Street and excusing Wall Street’s excesses. But then again, Obama doesn’t seem to know exactly what to make of it either. He seems to vacillate as well — one moment scorning Wall Street, the next moment justifying further bailouts. I do hope he takes a firmer hand, drawing a clearer distinction and making a clearer connection between clearing up these financial balance sheets and helping average people. Otherwise, the next populist uprising will be born in this moneyed quagmire. It is here — within the muck that was created by AIG, Citigroup, Fannie and Freddie, other giant financial institutions, now in combination with the U.S. Treasury and Fed — that the public is most confused, bears its most serious scars, and is potentially most burdened in future years, by decisions still made in secret.
Though I make no claims of being a financial wizard, or a political maven, even I can see that all is not right on Wall Street, D.C. where the heart and soul of our country is on life support, currently being administered to by second graders who want to be doctors when they grow up. And, I’m sophisticated enough to recognize that a lot of what I read about our dire 
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