Hitting back at Rove (Turdblossom)

Rove's continuing appearances on FAUX News and other slightly more rational media outlets is sickening. The man deserves nothing but our contempt and a trial for his high crimes and misdemeanors!

Thanks to Video Cafe.

David Shuster's Hypocrisy Watch: Karl Rove

Thanks to Video Cafe.

Cantor at concert and lies about it

[Image from Stupid Celebrities.net]

This is kinda silly, but maybe not. Think Progress had a minor piece on the fact that Eric Cantor, House Minority Whip went to a Britney Spears concert the other night at the Verizon Center.

The trouble with Cantor is that he doesn't think very clearly. He doesn't realize that often what goes around, comes around.

You'll recall he has been busily criticizing our president for wasting time on frivolous activities (like signing a bill removing the ban on funding for embryonic stem cell research). We are in a terrible crisis, said Mr. Cantor fiercely with a Repugnican scowl. How dare the president fool with such unnecessary things like stem cell research? He should be fixing the economy, said Cantor.

Heh. Heh.

It doth make one wonder then, doesn't it, how Mr. Cantor can take time off from dealing with the immense and immediate needs of our country to go to a Britney Spears concert? I mean, you can't even claim that is a cultural event!

Not only so, but Mr. Cantor went to the concert on the same night that the president gave a prime-time press conference!

Amanda Terkel, who wrote the article for Think Progress, relates that Cantor's office put out this statement:

"After attending the NRCC dinner, Eric, like President Obama has been known to do, enjoyed a night at the Verizon Center. It was a bipartisan night, as Eric was joined by Senator Landrieu and other Democrats."

'Tis interesting that the statement mentions no other Democrats by name. Maybe Cantor doesn't know or doesn't remember the names of any other Democrats.

Not only so, but the statement was a lie! Yup. Another member of the Family Values caucus creates a falsehood to make himself look better than usual.

"Think Progress spoke with a staffer in Landrieu's office, who said that the senator was indeed not at the concert."


Read Ms. Terkel's article here.

Bobby Jindal's lousy, lying speech

My dad used to opine that education and wisdom were two different things. You could take a fool and educate him but then you had a serious problem: a really smart fool.

I thought about that thinking about Bobby Jindal, the Repugnican nogoodnik governor of Louisiana. Jindal is highly educated, and supposedly very smart. He is also a fool.

Greg Palast notes just how big a fool in his commentary on Jindal's speech responding to President Obama's address to Congress.

Jindal said the the stimulus bill was "larded with wasteful spending." Palast asks, "Where's the lard? All week, Jindal has been screeching that Obama wants to require states such as Louisiana to extend unemployment insurance to -- get this -- the unemployed! (Technically, the federal government would pay 100% of the cost of reforming Louisiana's .... Scrooge-sized benefit requirements."

Palast does not truck with such crap. "Jindal, and some other Republican governors, notably Haley Barbour of Mississippi, are actually turning down millions in federal funds for their own state's unemployed out of fear that, four years from now, they may have to maintain full unemployment insurance like the rest of America."

He remarks that Jindal's loving concern for the people of Louisiana is displayed by the fact that Louisiana "solved its unemployment problem by sending its unemployed to Texas in FEMA trailers."

After rightfully excoriating Jindal for his continuation of Louisiana's "history of local Republican plantation-mentality cruelty, Palast notes that the "Republican Party, by making Jindal the party's official spokesman, is adopting the Barbourous refusal to reach out a saving hand to Americans drowning in this economy."


Jindal, as we noted, spoke of the stimulus bill as "larded with wasteful spending." Pork, in other words. Meg, writing at BuzzFlash, says this is not surprising. "Many have written about the lies that Jindal repeated about supposed stimulus pork, which ran the gamut from miserly mice to voracious volcanoes. But it turns out he was being disingenuous and hypocritical at the same time."

Jindal is a big-time pork supporter; a hog for pork, you might say. "In fiscal 2008, his last hurrah as a U.S. congressman representing Louisiana before taking over the governor's mansion, Jindal scored big in the pork contest. He, sometimes in concert with other lawmakers, ended up bringing home $97,913,200 in bacon. That put him at the number 14 spot in Taxpayers for Common Sense's annual tally of the most successful appropriators in the House."

Jindal's also a liar. He complained about stimulus money going to monitor volcanoes. Not true. "...the $140 billion Jindal was whining about will be spent on 'U.S. Geological Survey facilities and equipment, including stream gages, seismic and volcanic monitoring systems and national map activities.'" He also repeated the worn-out lie about the salt marsh harvest mouse, which first surfaced from the lips of another liar, Minority Leader John Boehner, "which he dubbed as Nancy Pelosi's pet mouse."

But the biggie was Jindal's story about the sheriff that he went to visit; Sheriff Harry Lee, who was so upset because he couldn't send boats to rescue people on rooftops during Hurricane Katrina because government bureaucrats demanded registration documents first.

It appears Jindal made the story up!

And this is a Republican front-runner for president in 2012? I guess Bush set a precedent. Now the Repugs figure any fool can be president!


Read Palast's entire article here. And the whole story about Jindal's tall tale is here.

Palin prevaricated to Repubs, partied elsewhere

The fact that Palin lied once again should not surprise anyone. (This is the woman who sold the plane on e-Bay, that reads all the newspapers, that sees Russia from her house, that didn't ban Harry Potter but did, that hated earmarks, etc.)

But it did.


Think Progress tells the tale they picked up from The Note.

When the House Republicans (they're the ones who can't be stimulated) planned for their annual retreat (which is held every year - I thought I needed to explain that in case any House Republicans should read this), they sent an invite to the Guv of Alaska, one Ms. Sarah Palin, prevaricator extraordinaire.

It is reported that these unstimulated House Repugs hoped Palin would give a rousing speech so all Repugnicans everywhere would jump up and down and clap their hands and cry out what a wonderful Party was the Repugnican Party.

T'was not to be. Palin pretended she had "pressing state business" and this "made it impossible for her to leave Alaska."

Heh, heh.

The hockey mom liar did it again. She didn't have to stay in Alaska. She had no "pressing business," except to make sure her gown was ironed.

So she snuck out of Alaska and flew off to Washington, D.C. where she attended the extra-special Alfalfa Dinner which is only for certain well-connected and very important people. (Word is she got an invitation from an anonymous donor.)

The Repug poohbahs were not happy. One of the Repugs that actually attended their annual retreat (which is held every year) cried: "She lied to us."

Duh!

That's what she does best!

Here she is, arriving at Alfalfa. More here.

Palin's propensity for lying continues

The "Christian" governor of Alaska, placed in that office with the help of prayers by an African pentecostal witch doctor, just cannot stop lying about her political opponent, Barack Obama.

In State College, Pennsylvania, she dropped the "palling around with terrorists" bit to take up a new lie. She told her adoring crowd that in 2001 Obama said that the Supreme Court's "failure to take up the redistribution of wealth" was "a great tragedy."

That is not true!


Here's the real story:

Between 1998 and 2002, Obama made three appearances on a talk show called Odyssey, produced by Chicago Public Radio. According to Kris Broughton at Open Salon, the producer of the show, Josh Andrews, said that "Obama participated in discussions on the evolution of the right to vote, the politics of electoral redistricting, and the uneasy relationship between slavery and the constitution in early America."

Palin's reference derives from excerpts of a discussion on January 18, 2001. Here's what Obama actually said:

"You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order - as long as I could pay for it I'd be okay.

"But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical.

"It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.

"And that hasn't shifted, and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused. I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that."

There is much more to this interview which you can read here.


What is immediately obvious and significant is that, in fact, Obama does NOT say that the Supreme Court's failure to consider the redistribution of wealth is a tragedy. In other words, to repeat myself, PALIN IS LYING!

Now, it's possible she read that interview and couldn't understand it. She's not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. The interview in question shows Obama to be a careful and nuanced thinker who has actually thought through some of the important questions of our time. It has become quite obvious that Palin doesn't even know what those questions are!

But I think she's just reading stuff the McCain nasties have written for her. She's the attack dog, remember. McCain uses her so he doesn't have to get his hands quite so dirty.

Palin the prevaricator

Sarah Palin, the Christian theocrat who believes God has ordained her to be not only the governor of Alaska, but the president of the United States in these "end-times," has, as we have noted numerous times before, no ethical core.

In other words, she knows not the truth, nor does she care about the truth. She is one of those so-called "Christians" for whom the end justifies the means. If her god fails to respond to the "prayer warriors" pleading for her victory, and is unable to put her a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, she will just have to help out her god.

Thus, on Sunday, she repeated for the third time the lie that Senator Barack Obama has rented a stadium in which to hold a victory celebration following the election.

"...the stadium that he's already rented out for what he would hope to be his victory party that he's planned," cried Palin to the crowd which responded with boos.


There's nothing wrong with renting out a stadium, of course. But that's not what Palin was about. When you have no program or proposals to attract voters, you're left with only one possible road to victory - the low road - which Palin walks with ease: You attack the character of your opponent.

Thus, Palin repeats this lie in an attempt to portray Obama, in the words of Scott Conroy of CBS News, as "arrogant and presumptuous."


Palin knows, however, that she is telling a lie. Obama never rented out a stadium. He intends to hold a post-election celebration in Chicago, at Hutchinson Field at the south end of Grant Park.

Palin is a prevaricator.

Bush memos, waterboarding, & defanging the Endangered Species Act

It was reported today that secret memos from the White House in 2003 and 2004, show clearly that Bush and his administration endorsed the water boarding of terrorist suspects.

The cynical among us do not find that surprising, of course, for we long ago made it policy to disbelieve any public statement made by the Bush team until that statement could be verified by sundry non-partisan sources. We've know from the beginning that George W. Bush, like his father, is a congenital liar.


Now, from the McClatchy Washington Bureau: "New legal memos by top Bush administration officials say that the Endangered Species Act can't be used to protect animals and their habitats from climate change by regulating specific sources of greenhouse gas emissions, the cause of global warming."

While all of this came to light some time ago and we wrote about it then, these new legal memos offer "the official legal justification for limiting protections under the Endangered Species Act."

What this means is that any federal agency can do whatever the hell they want to negatively impact endangered species sans consulting with the agencies involved in administering the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Act.

So, if the Defense Department purports to blow up the world in which the bald eagle lives...well, tough shit. Bye, bye, bald eagle!

The cynical among us find none of this surprising, either. The Bush administration has been an environmental disaster from Day One and every time the Bushites claimed they did something to protect the environment, all the species ran away to hide.

Even though Bush is just about out of office, he and his cronies continue to try to pave with road with pearls for his corporate benefactors and industry polluters.

This latest Bush attack on our environment does not require Congressional consent.


Please note: Senator Barack Obama has promised to "undo the rule change if he were elected." John McCain's campaign has no comment and is not returning calls."

Naturally.