Newt wants to be your President

Yep, Newt, the paragon of virtue, is seriously thinking about running for President:

"If at that point there's still a vacuum . . . then we'll probably do something," Gingrich said, adding that his policy pronouncements have more weight if he is seen as a potential presidential candidate. "If you're interested in defining the idea context and the political context for the next generation of Americans, which I am, the most effective way to do that is to be seen as potentially available."

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Cliff's Corner

The Week That Was 6/09/06

Another week. More preposterousness to report.

So this week we were once again reminded of what principle really unites the GOP in (Aryan) brotherhood. Hate. It doesn’t matter if it’s gay people, 9/11 widows or women and children who were inconvenient enough to block the path of oncoming bullets in Haditha. In today’s GOP, hate is to the body politic what ipecac is to Anne Coulter’s fetid Olive Oil frame.

Speaking of Lord/Lady Douche Bag, as always the left seems to be bound by a code of civility that left politics before impeachment, when dealing with this sunken-eyed Sisyphus forever pushing a boulder the size of that goiter in his/her throat up the peak of cerebral instability. Luckily I feel bound by no such shackles when discussing the brain-sharts of a cocktail-dress clad, bleached exoskeleton who keeps appearing on my TV to hawk books written in crayon—for guys who don pencil protectors and extra-fortified V-neck sweaters to support sending your kids to war.

Should we just feel sorry for this loutish tart whose books scream out to anyone who will listen what a wretched, lonely existence he/she lives when he/she has to share wet dreams in his/her “tomes” about a long-dead Republican whose name has become synonymous with limp-dick persecution? How about someone whose closest intimate relationship at the age of 45 has been to a chardonnay drip, a cold copy of God and Man at Yale and a burning-hot Impulse Hypersonic Bunny? No, I’m all out of feeling sorry. If he/she kept his/her dismal subsistence to himself/herself and left the rest of us alone that would be one thing. But apparently my television and newspaper have to serve as one big sofa for the hybrid gendered one. So I’m all out of compassion.

And to think that this is what supposedly heterosexual Republican men find physically attractive. No wonder they have to pass amendments attacking homosexuals, because to be a man and be attracted to Ann Coulter, somewhere in the recesses of your mind you’ve got to have lost any idea what gender sexually excites you. So better to make it all illegal, lest other people go about their business in private while you waste your time doing monthly rehab stints at Exodus International.

That is why Coulter was the perfect poster-child for GOP-hate-the-gays week. For just as this perpetually single, post-meal-toilet gripping SHE-RA attacks Democrats for being “girly-men” and women for being the “dumber” sex, not so ironically, it is the fidelity-challenged, hetero-maybe Republican men who lead the way on “protecting traditional marriage,” which to them would be between man and woman…and human growth hormone if you’re Governor of California. I wrote a profile of one of these hypocritical jackasses about a year and a half ago. And he isn’t even the worst of them.

Very simply, as historian Richard Hofstadter chronicled in his famous piece The Paranoid Style in American Politics, “the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns.”

Coulter and today’s GOP are self-loathing and sexually bewildered. It makes you wish they’d all just fuck Jeff Gannon and get it over with, so they could leave the rest of us alone. Read the rest of this post...

HPV vaccine approved: Downfall of society reportedly imminent

As I watch an all-star cast discuss the issues of the day -- Kos, Jane Hamsher of FDL, John, and Atrios, with Hunter (DailyKos) moderating -- I'm going to veer from my usual Iraq/intel/foreign policy spiel to link to something which I'm sure will horrify all morally upstanding readers:

The U.S. has approved use of a vaccine for HPV, the most common sexually transmitted disease, which can cause cervical cancer. I have to admit I didn't know before reading this article that cervical cancer is the second-leading cause of death for women worldwide; this has the potential to save over 200,000 lives per year if it is made broadly available.

But HPV is an STD! And we all know that the proper punishment for having sex is slow, agonizing death decades later. Linda Klepacki of Focus on the Family, James Dobson's "let's steal religion for the right wing" outfit, says, "We can prevent it by the best public health method, and that's not having sex before marriage."

Seriously though, I'm not taking a position on sex, but it's my general understanding that many people have it, and since 80% of women have HPV by age 50 -- 80 percent!! -- it's stunning to me that anyone, especially those who call themselves "pro-life," would take any position other than whole-hearted support for the vaccine.

Regardless of a few insane reactions, though, this is great news 99% because of the medical impact and 1% because it exposes the true opinion and agenda of the radicals that have far, far too much influence in contemporary conservatism. Read the rest of this post...

Murtha wants to be Dem's Majority Leader

If the Democrats win the House back, John Murtha is preparing to run for Majority Leader. This marks a significant challenge to the status quo leadership of Steny Hoyer:

Until now, it was presumed Democratic House Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland would move up from his position when California Rep. Nancy Pelosi became the new speaker. But Murtha's interest in the majority leader seat could change that scenario.

"Murtha has always been a darling of the more conservative members of the caucus, but his recent leadership of the anti-war movement has won him wide praise among more liberal members as well," someone close to the deliberations told ABC News.

While Murtha's gambit is a direct challenge to Hoyer, many Democrats believe the Pennsylvannia congressman would be a candidate for minority leader if the Democrats don't take over the House in midterm elections.

This will be very interesting. Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

Blogging from YearlyKos...great energy here....watching a session with John Aravosis, Naomi Seligman from CREW, Matt Stoller and Sam Seder. Read the rest of this post...

1,400+ civilians killed in Baghdad last month

It's a real surprise that Iraqi citizens aren't celebrating the US presence with these kinds of numbers. The 1,398 figure from the morgues does not even include those blown up in bombings.

All were killed in attacks; in most cases the bodies were found strewn across the Iraqi capital, shot execution-style, the official said.

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Anti-abortion terrorist plot foiled in Maryland

Maybe we can build a fence around the thumpers? Read the rest of this post...

Oppose the War, Support the Troops

It's not oxymoronic, it's where most Americans are according to AP's latest poll. Read the rest of this post...

Bush Speaks and Spins

CNN is covering live a press conference with Bush and the Danish Prime Minister. Every other word out of his mouth is "Al Qaeda." The Bush team is going back to their old strategy of scaring Americans, (since the gay marriage scare didn't seem to take.)

Plus, he's having a BIG meeting at Camp David on Monday and Tuesday to come up with an Iraq strategy. Yes, they've finally figured out they need a strategy. Read the rest of this post...

So is it now official policy to show war dead in Iraq?

Now that we are into day two of "let's plaster photos of al-Zarqawi dead" everywhere, does this mean that the military will start showing photos of all missions and the results or is this just cherry picking? Will we be seeing American dead? Iraqi dead? I'm just trying to get this straight because it seemed like only two days ago the military was against photos of the dead and the wingnuts and WH didn't like them because it didn't help their cause. Now that they think they will receive a bump in the polls, dead al-Zarqawi is everywhere.

Since we have hardly seen photos or video of the dead or killing in Iraq, often because of security reasons for the media, it is interesting to note this dramatic change. So how long will this new policy last? Read the rest of this post...

DeLay proud of himself, K Street project

Tom DeLay really likes Tom DeLay...a lot. He's not backing down. Wonder if he'll be such a tough guy when he's on the witness stand. Or when he's in jail:

Leaving Congress on Friday under indictment in Texas and under a cloud in Washington for his relationships with a lobbyist and two former senior aides who have pleaded guilty to felony corruption, Mr. DeLay, the combative former Republican majority leader, was not about to distance himself from himself.

"I did a good job," said Mr. DeLay, the linchpin of the House Republican majority for the last decade and the mastermind of a formidable political operation that melded legislating, fund-raising, conservatism and business advocacy as never before. "I helped build the largest political coalition in the last 50 years. The K Street project and the K Street strategy I am very proud of."

He also helped build one of the largest political corruption scandals in the history of the country. Read the rest of this post...

Friday Morning Open Thread

Start threading the news. Read the rest of this post...

More perspective on al-Zarqawi

The Independent has an interesting read about al-Zarqawi which is not as flashy as bloody photos of him dead or the video of the air raid but perhaps it has much more substance. As I said before, let's see what kind of an impact his death will have in the chaos in Iraq and let's seperate reality from myth and hype.

Zarqawi owed his rise to the US in two ways. His name was unknown until he was denounced on 5 February 2003 by Colin Powell, who was the US Secretary of State, before the UN Security Council as the link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida. There turned out to be no evidence for this connection and Zarqawi did not at this time belong to al-Qa'ida. But Mr Powell's denunciation made him a symbol of resistance to the US across the Muslim world. It also fitted with Washington's political agenda that attacking Iraq was part of the war on terror.

And later...

No sooner was Saddam captured than the US spokesmen began to mention Zarqawi's name in every sentence. "If the weather is bad they will blame it on Zarqawi," an Iraqi journalist once said to me. It emerged earlier this year that the US emphasis on Zarqawi as the prime leader of the Iraqi resistance was part of a carefully calculated propaganda programme. A dubious letter from Zarqawi was conveniently discovered. One internal briefing document quoted by The Washington Post records Brigadier General Kimmitt, the chief US military spokesman at the time, as saying: "The Zarqawi psy-op programme is the most successful information campaign to date." The US campaign was largely geared towards the American public and above all the American voter. It was geared to proving that the invasion of Iraq was a reasonable response to the 9/11 attacks. This meant it was necessary to show al-Qa'ida was strong in Iraq and play down the fact that this had only happened after the invasion.

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Daschle testing the waters in NH

Zzzzzzzzzzzz. I'll bet Democrats in NH are lining up to support a guy who lost his spine. Uh huh, that's what we're all demanding in 2006 and 2008. Read the rest of this post...