Really Screwed Up

1:07 am EST November 3rd, 2011 | News | 34 Comments

30 MAJOR CORPORATIONS PAID NO TAXES FROM 2008-2010

A new bombshell report reveals that 30 major US corporations effectively paid no taxes between 2008 and 2010 as they raked in giant profits.

Quadrennial: Chapter 1 (A NaNoWrimo Novel)

12:43 am EST November 2nd, 2011 | Humor | 2 Comments

Chapter 1

“It’s great to see you all here,” Mitch Ronlade lied. Mitch looked back and forth across the room, surveying the faces in front of him. He hated these crowds, and they weren’t wild about him either. Iowa, in December, with the snow up to his knees was not Mitch’s idea of a fun way to spend his time.

Even worse, these people would not be voting for him for President. The question wasn’t whether he would lose the Iowa caucuses or not, but by how much. Mitch was a Republican, just not their type of Republican.

His father had told him, when he was alive and Governor, that “these people might be Republican, but they had no business making any decisions within the party.” They were “mouth-breathers, troglodytes, and nincompoops” in the words of Geoff Ronlade, about as harsh language as Mitch had ever heard his teetotaling father ever use.

The Ronlades were old-money Rockefeller Republicans, wealthy elites groomed from birth to run the world. They never expected for the “mouth breathers” to ever have influence, let alone the outsized sway they held over the party.

Yet here was Geogg Ronlade’s eldest son, with his Ivy League business school degree explaining to a man in a faded Iowa Hawkeyes trucker hat just how many miles of fence he would erect to keep “them Mexicans” out of America. It was all Mitch could do to not roll his eyes.

Times like this, Mitch went to his happy place. Mentally he went back to his year as a missionary. He was nineteen and life was simpler. He had few cares in the world. He wasn’t forced to compromise himself. He said what he believed.

“I heard some of ‘em got Sharia,” the man said, breaking Mitch’s concentration.

“Excuse me?”

“Some of them illegals. They got the Sharia law. Like Al Qaeda.”

“Well I haven’t heard that, but we’ll build the darn fence.”

Mitch flashed his disingenous smile, displaying all of his perfectly sculpted teeth. He gripped the podium as a bit more of his integrity circled down the drain. He couldn’t wait for this farce to be over so he could get to New Hampshire and be around somewhat more reasonable people.

He visualized the Oval Office, as his therapist had recommended. This was all going to be worth it, he told himself as he looked for another moron in the audience to call on.

* * *

The basketball arced perfectly in the air, giving a satisfying “swish” as it sailed through the net. The President smiled. He still had it. He stretched for the ball as it bounced against the exquistely polished parquet floor of the executive basketball court. The climate controlled room was perfect sixty-eight degrees, just like The President liked it.

Just on the periphery of the court was Dennis Hammerroot, his chief political adviser. Hammerroot was perpetually rumpled, even with a suit straight from the dry cleaners. The President often joked that Hammerroot was the fashion yin to his yang, perpetually behind the times while The President created trends.

The President bounced the ball from hand to hand, never actually turning in Hammeroot’s direction as he spoke.

“Am I gonna have to talk about ethanol subsidies?”

“It could come up.”

“Christ. Iowa.”

“You have to go, boss. At the very least so we can get the base a little revved up for the general.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Swish. In went the ball again. The President thought to himself, “still got it.” He had long given up his thoughts of playing in the NBA, but was sure his skill was enough to get him on the starting five somewhere.

“Iowa. We had a good time there last time, didn’t we?”

“You bet boss.”

* * *

Tonight was Frank O’Shane’s night. He had dreamed about this, ever since Randy Ainge, the president of Max News Channel, had first approached him for a job. He’d had to pay his dues for a few years, acting as the conservative half of the duo O’Shane and Cong, having to sit there as Cong went on about some socialist thing or another as the years crept on. Sure, O’Shane got top billing and he bullied Cong around the office for offenses real and perceived, but he longed to have his own show at the top of the Max News primetime lineup. He’d even lobbied Maximillian, the billionaire New Zealander who owned the network, for the spot. Ainge had resented him going over his head, and had forced O’Shane to co-host with Cong for most of the first three years of The President’s term.

But now O’Shane was free. Cong was gone, a firing marked by a tart “we wish him well” memo from Max News’ infamously prickly PR shop. O’Shane had divested himself of Cong, and The O’Shane Cause would take the lead on the network’s campaign coverage every night.

O’Shane hated Mitch Rondale. Hated the blue bloods and what they stood for. O’Shane’s people were the working class, the people who found their God under attack by the east coast liberal establishment, who saw their government silent on the spread of Sharia law, and who wanted to open the borders to just anyone huddled together with unwashed relatives in order to rape and pillage the country.

But O’Shane was a good Republican, and the polls the party chairman had showed him during their last teleconference were clear: the only candidate with a snowball’s chance against The President was Rondale.

So for the first night of The O’Shane Cause, he’d talk to Rondale via satellite from Iowa.

O’Shane pulled open his office door and yelled out into the hallway, “Where the fuck is my apple pie? Where the fuck is it?”

As he settled back in at his computer, he heard the familiar sound of people scrambling out in the hallway. It gave him a power trip, something he rarely had at home. Moments later he heard a faint knocking on the door.

“Come in.”

In walked Frida, one of the new batch of Fall interns. She had on her custom made O’Shane Cause t-shirt, which she had proudly shown off to her friends at the Georgetown Universty College Republican’s most recent meeting.

“Apple pie, sir.”

He grunted in response as she put the plate of pie on his desk and walked out of the room.

He didn’t know for sure, but O’Shane was positive that the pies had been smaller when he had to share airtime with Cong.

Prime time was his, and The President was going to feel the pain. O’Shane couldn’t wait to hear back from the private investigator he’d sent to Hawaii.

TO BE CONTINUED

America’s Real Fifth Column

1:00 pm EST October 29th, 2011 | Economy | 124 Comments

NY Times columnist Joe Nocera has revealed pictures from last year’s Halloween party for the Steven J. Baum law firm, a law firm that has been a key ally of the big banks in foreclosing on homes and evicting people. They represent Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Nocera explains the costumes:

Let me describe a few of the photos. In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

Here are some of the pictures:

When people attack the Occupy protesters or President Obama or Democrats or Liberals for “waging class warfare” that’s because we’ve only just now joined the war. We’ve been under attack, from the inside, for a long time. We’ve only begun now to fight back.

I Think You Know The Answer

2:54 pm EST October 27th, 2011 | Media | 24 Comments

Fox Hyped Steve Jobs’ Critique Of Obama, Will They Cover His Slam Of Fox News?

Numerous Fox News hosts have highlighted negative comments about President Obama from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of recently deceased Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Despite his comments about Obama, the book also notes that Jobs offered to help create advertising for the president’s re-election campaign.

What Fox has failed to report or comment on so far are Steve Jobs’ thoughts about Fox News, which he described as “an incredibly destructive force in our society,”

Condi Rice Throws Bush Under The Bus

3:03 pm EST October 24th, 2011 | Foreign Policy | 9 Comments

In the hopes of cleaning up history’s view of her and I guess selling more books.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that the Bush administration was dismissive toward her concerns over security in a post-war Iraq, according to excerpts from her autobiography that Rice tweeted about Sunday.

“When I finally arranged a briefing on the issue before the President in early February 2002, he started the meeting in a way that completely destroyed any chance of getting an answer,” Rice wrote in an excerpt that appears in Newsweek.

Rice was Bush’s national security adviser, then later Secretary of State. She (like Colin Powell) wasn’t a sidelined party in these affairs, she was an active conspirator in the formulation and execution of these policies.

There are no takebacks.

Topic: Iraq

New NY Times Executive Editor: Conservatives Rule Our World

5:20 pm EST October 23rd, 2011 | Media | 61 Comments

There’s a very telling quote from new NY Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson in the lengthy profile of her in the New Yorker. The quote in question helps put to bed the notion that the most important media outlet in the world (arguably) is some sort of bastion of the “liberal media.”

Abramson, asked whether the Times has a liberal bias, says, “I think we try hard not to” be biased, but she adds that the Times, as its public editor argued in a column seven years ago, has an insular urban bias that is sometimes apparent in social stories. She fervently believes that the Times is an equal-opportunity prober of Democrats as well as of Republicans. Asked about her own upbringing, she responds, “I’m often the one who raises the point in page-one meetings that our mix of stories is too urban in outlook, too parochial. All my years in Washington, and in some ways being attacked by conservatives, made me more conscious of how a story might be seen in the rest of America.”

Here, Abramson tells us that she has in fact internalized the decades of conservative attacks on the media – led by Washington-based institutions that quite frankly have a very poor idea of how stories are really seen “in the rest of America.”

You’ll remember Nancy Pfotenhauer, a DC-based Republican who, while working for the McCain campaign, lectured on what regions of Virginia were “real” (the more conservative, rural areas) versus unreal (the more liberal, urban areas), an argument echoed nationally by Sarah Palin. These artificial, false distinctions are part of the conservative’s false construct of our world.

This is the kind of internalized criticism that led Abramson to be part of the team at the Times that put Judith Miller’s false WMD misinformation on the front page of the paper. As an institution, it’s also the brand of internalized criticism that caused the Times to be in front of the crowd demanding investigations of President Clinton for Whitewater, suspicions of guilt the independent counsel later dismissed after millions of taxpayer dollars had been spent.

The press should, above all, be fair. The Times believes as an institution that this means they should be unbiased in their approach (I would personally argue a news outlet can have a point of view while still reporting honestly, but that’s another discussion), but all the way at the top of the masthead, they overcompensate for what often turns out to be false allegations of bias (the MRC and its tentacles have a less than honest relationship with the truth).

That’s why your news is screwed up.

Obama Orders USA Out Of Iraq, Promise Kept

1:15 pm EST October 21st, 2011 | Foreign Policy | 71 Comments

President Obama just announced that all US troops will be out of Iraq come 12/31/11. This would not have been the case if John McCain had been elected President, and we would probably still be pursuing the failed Iraq war strategy.

Furthermore, we should have never been in Iraq in the first place. Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda, was not an immediate threat to US interests, nor did they possess weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq War was a costly distraction from the war against Al Qaeda, and helped Osama Bin Laden escape capture/kill until President Obama redoubled our efforts to get him.

Most importantly, thousands of American lives were lost in this war. First, because the initially foolish, stupid invasion, and then from the mismanagement inflicted by President Bush and his leadership team. These poor decisions also led to the loss of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives.

The invasion of Iraq and the subsequent mismanagement of the occupation of Iraq will go down in history as one of the darkest, most horrible moments in American history.

Thank God it is over.

Topic: Iraq

Heck Of A Job, GOP

11:23 am EST October 19th, 2011 | Republicans | 22 Comments

In all the acrimony between Obama and Clinton in 2007-8 (and God knows I was in the thick of it), there wasn’t any instance where one of them physically touched the other in this fashion. It is amazing that the Republican frontrunner grabbed someone in the middle of a debate. What???

Topic: Mitt Romney

Rush Limbaugh Is Really A Sick Person

1:04 pm EST October 18th, 2011 | Conservative | 34 Comments

VIDEO: LRA Survivor Responds To Limbaugh: “My Heart Breaks”

Evelyn Apoko, a survivor of atrocities committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army, has recorded a video appeal to Limbaugh.

Conservatives Try To Work The Refs, Even For Herman Cain

12:22 am EST October 17th, 2011 | Media, Politics | 40 Comments

Herman Cain is neither going to be the Republican nominee for President or the next President of the United States. His is a bubble campaign of the Donald Trump variety, someone who can wave away conservative guilt for their racial past, but not a serious contender in any way.

That said, they’re still going to try and work the media refs in his favor. Case in point: Conservative blogger/writer (and Confederate apologist) Robert Stacy McCain reaching for the fainting couch because David Gregory asked Cain a few basic questions that he flubbed (in the post-Palin lexicon this is described as some sort of grilling).

Specifically McCain whines “When Democrats go on Meet the Press, it’s like Justin Bieber sitting down for a hard-hitting interview with Tiger Beat.”

So I decided to do what conservatives hope liberals never do, and they doubly hope the mainstream media doesnt: I checked.

I went back to May of 2008, and then-candidate Barack Obama’s appearance on Meet The Press with the late Tim Russert. What did I find? Did Russert annoint Obama the next President? Did he crown him? Did he ask him about puppies, or even kittens?

No, Russert did what Russert often did: He asked Obama a bunch of questions that sounded as if they were hot off the presses from the RNC. Specifically, Russert asked Obama about that most relevant of issues, Jeremiah Wright. A sampling:

* What has the controversy over Reverend Jeremiah Wright done to your campaign?

* You’re still a member of the church?

* Why do you think he re-emerged?

* What happened in those five weeks? Because you already knew, prior to the March speech, that he had suggested the U.S. government created the AIDS virus; you knew he went to Libya with Louis Farrakhan; you knew about his hate speech on September 11th, about the chickens coming home to roost and other things. What did you learn in those five weeks that you didn’t know in March?

* The critics have said he can attack the United States of America, he can do all sorts of things that divide the country, but only when he made it politically uncomfortable for you did you finally separate himself from him.

* Why didn’t you just say then, “You know, Reverend, we’re going on different paths because this country does not believe in white supremacy and black inferiority.”

* He said in a letter to The New York Times, he suggested that you apologized for not letting him do the invocation. Is that true?

* Is it fair for people to raise questions about your judgment for misjudging Reverend Wright?

* You’re done with him? If you’re elected president, you won’t seek his counsel?

* Could you have handled this better, differently, by severing your ties earlier? And what’s the most important thing you’ve learned from this?

These were the first questions Russert asked Obama on the supposedly softball Meet The Press: A litany of right-wing fed scarebait directly out of the school of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glen Beck. It doesn’t matter how far to the right the questions tilt, conservatives will be wailing about liberal media bias until the sun swallows the entire solar system.

Now, look, Herman Cain is a joke. He can’t answer basic 101 level questions, his economic plan is dumb — even for a conservative. But even for a Trivial Pursuit-bound candidate like Cain, conservatives are willing to pervert, twist, and distort history and act under the pretense that the big bad mean liberal media beat up on their poor widdle candidate.

It’s what they do, it’s how they operate. It’s dishonest, pathetic, moronic, and sadly it works.