39 Things Obama Could Do To Get My Vote

One year from today, Americans and Mormons alike will line up at the polls to cast their votes for who will be the next king of the playground. I didn’t vote for Obama last time because I am a racist who only votes for Arab-Americans like Ralph Nader (besides, to be totally honest, I prefer the Trial By Stone method of appointing political leaders as portrayed by the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal). And I don’t plan on voting for Obama again next year. But this could change.

 John McCain (right), shortly before his banishment

Since I know the President reads all of our posts and commits them to memory like most other people on Earth, I will now inform him of 39 things he can do over the course of the next year in the interests of both earning my vote and of general awesomeness.

1. Start wearing a cape.
2. Grow an Afro.
3. Make The Avengers real.
4. Replace hands with hand-shaped chainsaws.
5. Sign an executive order mandating that one night a week, Bill O’Reilly’s TV show must only air footage of O’Reilly trying to fit his fist in his mouth.
6. Stop the war on drugs.
7. Follow @BfloBEAST on Twitter.
8. And then re-tweet ALL the things!
9. Start every sentence with “In accordance with The Prophecy…”
10. Angrily refuse to answer any questions about The Prophecy.
11. Tell my boss to fuck off during the State of the Union address, at the end in between the now obligatory reassuring lies “The state of our union is strong” and “Thank you, and may God continue to bless America.”
12. Wipe all the snow off my car right before I get out of work all winter.
13. New appointment: Attorney General Glenn Greenwald.
14. Go BASE-jumping in secret just to try to piss in Nancy Grace’s mouth.
15. Dress up as a pirate on a random Tuesday and when people ask about it, act like you don’t know what they’re talking about.
16. Cut the military budget in half.
17. Split the money saved from #16 between NASA and the NSF.
18. Answer the next “Why” question at a press conference with “Because FUCK YOU, that’s why.”
19. Order the National Guard to follow Nickelback on tour, just to freak them out. Both of them.
20. Murder Andrew Breitbart with a predator drone.
21. Then outlaw drone assassination of US citizens.
22. Stop doing that sideways pointing thing he does.
23. Punch Jay Leno in his stupid prick face.
24. Get the birther thing started again by pushing for an amendment to the Constitution which nullifies the requirement that the President must be a natural-born citizen. It’s an idiotic rule anyway, and the conspiracy nuts are too much fun.
25. Strap a camera to your head and livestream everything you do for a day.
26. Sexually harass Herman Cain using a stick of pepperoni and at least 3 types of cheese.
27. Order Mike Tyson to train his pigeons to pick the pockets of hedge fund managers on Wall Street.
28. Release the invisibility cloaks along with all other technology the government received from the aliens and has since been hiding away in a vault to the public.
29. Make the Pentagon invisible.
30. Presidents can too make things invisible. It’s in the CONSTITUTION.
31. Change the National Anthem to either What Is Hip? or any song from the Black Dynamite soundtrack.
32. Find my car keys.
33. Abolish the death penalty for all crimes except for driving 5 or more miles per hour under the speed limit in the passing lane.
34. Sell Idaho to the Canadians.
35. Forget that, trade it for Vancouver.
36. Sell Arizona to the Mexicans.
37. Challenge Rick Perry to a duel. At dawn. At “Niggerhead.” Call him ‘yellow’ when he declines.
38. Stop pestering us about your boyfriend Jesus.
39. Use the find/replace function on your speeches to change “Republicans” to “jive turkeys.”

Let’s beat up on Ron Paul

Ron Paul fans should be careful about what they wish for.

Last week on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did a segment on how the media’s been conspicuously avoiding coverage of the Quixotic Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. His supporters loved it, probably hoping that more coverage of Paul would mean more people getting on board with his campaign. But more coverage means more coverage of his crazier positions too, and there are a lot of them. During the 2008 Republican candidates’ “debates” (they’re kind of like debates in that people in suits stand at lecterns), the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they believed in evolution. Most of the candidates did so, including Ron Paul. Then John McCain said something goofy about how he helped Jesus dig the Grand Canyon, or something like that. Shortly afterwards, a video showed up on the internet of Paul telling a much smaller, conservative Christian audience that he doesn’t believe in evolution.

“I, um, I think there, that it’s a theory. The theory of evolution. And I don’t accept it. You know, as a theory. I think the creator that, that I know, uh, you know, created us, every one of us, created the Universe. And the precise time and manner and uh, and all. I just don’t think we’re at the point where anybody has absolute truth on either side.” -Ron Paul

So we’ve got two possible ways of reconciling these contradictory positions: Either Paul is an evolution denying creationist and he lies to the much larger national audience, or he accepts what we know about how we came to exist and lies to smaller groups of ideologically skewered constituents when he thinks nobody will notice. Neither of those possibilities make him look good, especially since he’s been trying to earn this label of consistency in his campaigns. And that’s not even the extent of Paul’s weird Christianity. In 2003, he wrote a pretty terrible essay called The War on Religion for his friend Lew Rockwell. Rockwell’s another supposed “libertarian” who’s worked closely with Paul for decades. But anyway, this essay just reiterates Bill O’Reilly’s War on Christmas screeds, but with even less literary skill. Check this out:

As we celebrate another Yuletide season, it’s hard not to notice that Christmas in America simply doesn’t feel the same anymore.

If you read it, you’ll find Paul loves him some passive tense. It makes attacking your perceived enemies so much easier when you don’t have to actually identify them. Literacy problems aside, Paul doesn’t even seem to have a basic grasp of the Constitution he claims to hold in such esteem. He moans and bitches about the “anti-religious elites” who want to “transform America into a completely secular nation,” as if America wasn’t a secular nation from the very beginning. Apparently Paul believes America’s founders just forgot to mention that America is a Christian nation anywhere in the Constitution, which is weird since he claims to respect them so much. But here’s my favorite part of his whinefest:

Most noticeably, however, the once commonplace refrain of “Merry Christmas” has been replaced by the vague, ubiquitous “Happy Holidays.” But what holiday? Is Christmas some kind of secret, a word that cannot be uttered in public?

This is the kind of lack of self-awareness you get in true religious zealots. I doubt it even needs to be said, but if not saying Christmas means that it’s a secret which can’t be uttered in public, then the same must be true of all other religious holidays at that time of year. A Jew could just as easily claim that saying either Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays is driving Hanukkah underground. But Paul is incapable of looking at this “War on Christmas” nonsense from any perspective (let alone a Jewish one) other than his own narrow one.

Paul’s often described as Liberterian. There’s a tiny bit of truth to that, since his policies certainly lean that way. But Paul has been a Republican since at least 1992. He ran for President on the Liberterian ticket in 1988, and since then he’s been working in politics as a Republican. In ’92, Paul endorsed and advised the campaign of the racist Nazi sympathizer Pat Buchanan, who went on to lose the nomination for the Republican Party to George H. W. Bush.

Besides being “liberterian,” the other sales pitch for Ron Paul For President, Inc. has been that although he’s extremely conservative on fiscal issues, he’s socially liberal. He wants to legalize pot, for instance. But when it comes down to it, he sticks to the (Republican) party line on culture war issues. If you check out his voting record, you’ll see his votes against allowing adoption for gay couples in Washington, DC, against same-sex marriage, against taxpayer funding for abortions, and for displaying the Ten Commandments in government offices and courthouses. So much for his being “not a typical Republican.”

Some of those votes go back a few years, so it’s probably also worth noting that Paul’s still hammering away at culture war issues on behalf of his fellow Republicans. He’s even just recently tried to portray his advocacy of government restrictions on abortion as if it were on liberterian grounds:

“There is something that precedes liberty, and that is life,” Paul said. “If we are to defend liberty … you have to understand where that liberty, and where that life comes from. It does not come from the government, it comes from our creator.”
Paul recalled somewhat graphic stories from his time as an obstetrics-gynecology resident to explain his opposition to abortion rights.

There he goes again with all this “creator” talk, while at the same time saying that abortion should be illegal. And for some reason his supporters will keep on claiming that he’s not like those other Republicans, oh no, not at all.

There are some ways in which Ron Paul is different from the rest, but those are mostly issues where he out-flanks his colleagues on the right. So while your Republican neighbor next door wants to reduce regulations and “cut some red tape,” Paul wants to just eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, and many more. While your average Republican might agree with Rick Perry’s crazy idea to just stop the printing of paper currency, Ron Paul would like to go back to the Gold Standard.

Speaking of the Gold Standard, it’s possibly revealing to go back and look at the arguments made for it when it was an issue – back when Dr. Paul was 728 years young. It turns out that there was a heavy emphasis on what they called “natural law.” That doesn’t mean the laws of physics. They had some strange ideas back then about natural hierarchies of elements, and it turns out that people with a lot of gold discovered that gold was at the top of that hierarchy. Nice coincidence, huh? They drew an analogy to a supposed natural hierarchy among humans with (surprise, surprise!) white males on top.

Ron Paul, seen here forced by the government to work with a black guy to save the Federal Reserve.

So in this way they argued that changing to paper money would be a horrible tragedy which would upset both this hierarchy of elements as well as the patriarchy, both of which were backed up by this “natural law.” It’s the worst of the worst of hippy nonsense – all the mindless worship of nature and the naturalistic fallacy without any of the socially enlightened impulses against sexism and racism.

Paul also had some race issues when someone working on one of his newsletters wrote some terribly racist stuff on his behalf. To be fair, that staffer was eventually fired. And if it were just a matter of just that instance, or if it were just his weird views on gold and “natural law,” or if it were just an early 90s gig with Pat Buchanan, or if it were just the fact that his supporters are overwhelmingly white, any one of those could be overlooked. But when you consider each of them, you start to get a very different picture of who Ron Paul is and what he’s all about. That should make most of his supporters uncomfortable, but that’s what they asked for when they wanted more coverage of him.

Melissa Harris-Perry would like more irrationality, please

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
-Voltaire

Melissa Harris-Perry, seen here being incredibly full of shit.

I like Rachel Maddow’s show. It’s one of the few I can stand on MSNBC. Sure, she slips into the “Defend the President and Party At All Costs” mode from time to time, but it’s nowhere near as egregious as some of her fellow hosts on the network. Also, her head is not a ginormous wonder to all surviving phrenologists, which is another plus.

Last week Maddow was on “vacation.” This might be true, or it might be that she was preparing her legal defense against a bullshit defamation lawsuit against her from heavy metal rock star / Christian minister Bradlee Dean. Melissa Harris-Perry filled in for Maddow.

Last Friday, she recorded an un-aired segment about the proper role of faith in politics. Harris-Perry believes that such a thing exists. It’s one of those editorials which tries to get at a ‘big picture’ perspective but somehow still fails to say anything useful about anything, making us all stupider in the process.

She introduces the segment with a fair enough, albeit obvious point: That while we’re all learning about this right-wing Christian terrorist in Oslo who just killed nearly 100 innocent people, the US Congress is holding these hearings on the radicalization of Muslims taken straight out of The Crucible. She claims that the demonization of Muslims here in the States is “as much guided by prejudice as it is by evidence.” That sounds about right. Seems obvious enough. What else is obvious to most of us would be that it’s a bad thing to let policy be guided equally by evidence and whatever fills the void left by the lack thereof – in this case, prejudice.

“I saw Goody Proctor with the Prophet Mohammed!”

But then things take a turn. Suddenly, Harris-Perry orders the audience to ignore any kind of faith-inspired political violence:

“Let’s not talk about fanaticism. Let’s not talk about violence. Let’s just talk about religion in the political world and the ways it’s been divisive.”

And we’re not talking about fanaticism and violence because… why exactly? Fanaticism and violence are ways in which religion’s impact on the political world have been divisive, to put it extremely mildly. So why not talk about it? In whose interests does it serve to just ignore violent religious fanatics? Definitely not those of us who’s rather they not be inspired by their stupid beliefs to do stupid things, like fly planes into buildings or shoot up a camp full of teenagers. She continues:

“In this moment, it often seems that the connection between religion and politics happens exclusively on the right.”

She then lists some examples of conservatives “using religion” in order to advance their agenda: the anti-gay, anti-woman, and anti-science policies so popular with the right these days (n.b. apparently all of those positions are “not fanatical,” according to the host here, since she earlier decreed that we shouldn’t talk about fanaticism). This should be a PR bonanza for us progressives. We could be using this perception of faith-based politics being a mostly conservative phenomenon to point out that it’s the right who are the ones disconnected from reality and with their heads in the clouds.

I’m pretty sure he wasn’t the first to say that.

But Harris-Perry makes it clear that she doesn’t have much of a problem with that disconnect. Her only problem with it is that the conservatives have their heads in the wrong clouds. Instead of just laughing at those religious conservatives who base their politics on goofy beliefs which aren’t supported by evidence, Harris-Perry tries to convince us that the real problem is that most people don’t recognize that believing in nonsense is something liberals should be adamant and proud about as well:

“We do not need to give up faith… The faith ‘tool’ I want us to retain is the one that gives us strength in the face of daunting circumstances. I understand the appeal of reason. But if we look exclusively at the evidence in the world, it’s a pretty bleak place.”

Harris-Perry then goes on to relate some sad facts about the world, but she forgot the part where she demonstrates that we can’t be inspired by the real world and the empirical evidence in order to change those sad facts. Looking at what’s called the cold hard truth can actually get people off their asses, but having faith just pacifies us and makes us comfortable waiting around for someone else to fix our problems.

And though I obviously agree with her in that the disparity between rich and poor is a bad thing, others might not see it that way. Others might look at the advances made by civil rights and science and become depressed, thinking the world is a “bleak place” because of them. Using Harris-Perry logic, they’d be perfectly justified in ignoring the empirical evidence (for example, that there can be more genetic differences between two people of the same race than between two people of different races) and rely on their faith.

Or we could go back to Bradlee Dean and his bullshit defamation suit against Rachel Maddow and MSNBC. If Dean only looks at the empirical evidence, it looks like his lawsuit is transparently ridiculous and doesn’t have a chance at succeeding in an American court. This makes Bradlee Dean sad. The world looks like a bleak place to him. His circumstances are daunting. So he should apparently rely on his faith to give him the strength he needs to carry on with his frivolous lawsuit.

That’s the big problem with having a place for faith in politics. It’s all way too subjective since there’s no epistemological basis we can all agree upon. And since we can’t even agree on the difference between what we believe because it’s true and what we believe because it feels good, any distinction between what is and is not “fanatical” is going to end up being totally arbitrary. Harris-Perry already proved this earlier in the segment by supposedly suspending discussion of the fanatical and then proceeding to immediately talk about conservative religious fanaticism.

Harris-Perry’s brought up this sort of thing before, and for some reason she’s being praised to high Mormon heaven for it (that’s a cheap jab by me, since her mother’s side of her family was Mormon). So it’s important for rational people to fight back against this glorification of faith, because if we don’t then the only opposition will be coming from other faith positions and our political discourse will degrade to the point where the idea of basing our arguments on reality instead of what makes us feel good will just be a distant memory.

Let Us All Compare the President to a Human Penis

So Megan Fox Mark Halperin got suspended from Transformers 3 MSNBC for calling Michael Bay President Obama Hitler “kind of a dick.” But the only thing I could find unprofessional about his saying that was that it’s a comment which is way overdue.

There’s nothing wrong with calling the President a dick, especially when he is one. And there are plenty of reasons to call this President a dick. Here is an unfortunately all-to-abbreviated list of reasons why.

The war in Libya is illegal and the administration doesn’t give a fuck

Does anyone else remember liberals angrily protesting the war in Iraq on the grounds that it was (and still is) illegal? What about how we all said that imposing democracy via military force doesn’t make sense and wouldn’t work? And there used to be those signs at demonstrations that read: “Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity.” Turns out that those signs neither clever, nor anti-war. They were just a vulgar display of anti-republican partisanship.

At least when Bush got us involved in pointless wars, he actually went to Congress, so we have a record of which members of Congress were for them and which were against them. Obama’s excuse for not doing this, even after the ninety day emergency period which allows a president to basically go to war without consulting Congress under the 1973 War Powers Act, is that the war in Libya is…not a war.

Seriously, they call it “kinetic military action,” which is even more cringe-inducing than Bush’s rebranding torture as “enhanced interrogation.” It sounds like the kind of argument a lawyer would make. But as it turns out, the President’s lawyers have been trying to persuade him against using it because it’s too damn stupid.

All of this might not be so egregious if the military’s mission in Libya really worked out the way Obama’s supporters imagined it would. But obviously, there was never any guarantee that we’d be in and out in days instead of months (years?), and Libya would immediately become a peaceful democracy full of smiling people because wars are really fucking complicated and lots of shit can go wrong. And that’s why we have these precautions against a president declaring war by fiat. It’s not something which should be taken lightly, as if it were just “kinetic military action,” or “free-form jazz explosions.”

Obama is worse on whistle-blower protection than Bush

Here is what President-elect Obama had to say about whistleblower protection on his transition website back in late 2008:

“We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistle-blower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.”

Bradley Manning has just recently been moved from solitary confinement. Of course he still hasn’t been tried yet, having been denied full access to courts and due process. But this hasn’t stopped the President from simply declaring him guilty. Here’s what he had to say about Manning last April:

We’re a nation of laws! We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.

Usually, when someone’s accused of a crime, we put that person on trial and that judicial process is how we find out whether or not the defendant is guilty. That’s how justice is supposed to work. It’s kind of amazing that the President – who I hear is supposed to be a constitutional law scholar – can scold someone for making individual decisions about how laws operate, and then make an individual decision about how the law operates.

Manning’s not the only whistle-blower that the administration’s gone after. Thomas Drake, a senior NSA official who leaked information about the NSA’s illegal activities during the Bush years, just recently ended his legal battle with the DoJ. They recently dropped all charges (charges for doing exactly what the President had said federal employees should be doing), but only after he agreed to a plea deal. I was under the impression that plea deals were for people who had actually done something wrong.

According to the New York Times, Obama had already surpassed every previous administration in pursuing whistle-blowers by mid-2010. Obama’s Justice Department subpoenaed Times reporter and author James Risen in order to get at his CIA source. The administration was actually renewing an old subpoena which had expired under Bush. In a surreal move, the administration prosecuted Risen’s alleged source under the Espionage Act, as if whistle-blowing to an American reporter were the same as conspiring with a foreign spy.

Guantanamo is still a thing; due process of law, like whatever

On the night of Obama’s inauguration, he signed an executive order to close the straight-out-of-a-dystopian-comic-book extralegal prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But then some right-wing talking heads got real mad about it, so Obama caved.

It was a tough choice for the administration. Should the President restore due process and demonstrate the efficacy of the American justice system, or should we keep indiscriminately locking people in cages, so Sean Hannity can’t accuse the President of abetting terrorists? The answer soon became clear.

4 out of 5 Gitmo residents prefer unlawful detention under Obama!

Locking up “suspected terrorists” without any charges, or hope for trial, isn’t the only way the administration’s been trying to undercut the rule of law. In the Mohamed v Jeppesen Dataplan case, the courts granted the executive branch the right to basically overrule any court’s decision, on any case, by invoking state-secrets privilege. In this particular case, a victim of Bush’s extraordinary renditions was trying to sue over being sent overseas to be tortured. Sure, that might have been illegal, but when it comes to Americans sending suspects overseas to be tortured, we need to look forward, not backwards.

It doesn’t appear that the administration invoked state secrets in another torture case, Saleh v. Titan. That’s the case brought to the Supreme Court by some Iraqi victims of torture at a prison called Abu Ghraib. The administration is instead just urging the Supreme Court not to hear the case, which they probably don’t want to do anyway.

Net Neutrality fail

While campaigning, Obama told us all that the full and free exchange of information starts with an open internet, which meant net neutrality. But then he started reading some conspiracy theory internet forums and learned that many of the people there believed net neutrality was a plot by the government to shut down their shadowgovernment.net domain by any means necessary.

Essential for a functioning democracy

Of course, that’s ridiculous on its face, but that didn’t stop the administration from caving to their demands and giving up on net neutrality. Apparently it’s more important to be nice to a fringe group of angry, mouth-breathing imbeciles than to have a full and free exchange of information. That’s overrated anyway.

The ‘global war on terror’ more global than ever

Two years ago, a US drone strike in Pakistan killed some sixty people. They were attending a funeral. If that’s all you know about this story, you may presume this was done in error. Obviously the drone had the wrong coordinates, or the firing mechanism was screwed up, and we accidentally and tragically blew up a funeral, like that time Clinton accidentally blew up an pharmaceutical factory in Sudan with cruise missiles.

But the drone attack wasn’t a mistake. Someone at the Pentagon decided that it would be a good idea to blow up a funeral. It was a “terrorist funeral.” And since, obviously, the US military would only kill terrorists at this terrorist funeral, now we’d have sixty more terrorist funerals to bomb. Then we can have more terrorist friends and terrorist family members attend those terrorist funerals, and we’d have another set of terrorist funerals to attack, and so on, ad infinitum. Genius!

Obama’s been spreading Bush’s idiotic war on terror to lots of other exciting places besides Pakistan, too. I’ve already dealt with Libya. The CIA is building bases for air strikes in Yemen, even though we’ve been launching strikes in Yemen since at least as far back as late 2009. And an unnamed “partner country” is reported to have carried out an attack in Somalia just a few days ago.

On top of the wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the administration is reserving the right to carry out targeted assassinations in any country, on any person, just as long as some Washington bureaucrat says they might be a terrorist. This must be the “death panel” Sarah Palin was talking about. Unsurprisingly, advocates for civil liberties and the rule of law have a problem with this, but you can bet the administration will fight them every step of the way.

He’s a Jesus freak. Jesus freak. He’s Jesus freaky. Yow!

Before serving even six months of his term in office, Obama had already mentioned his imaginary friend Jesus more times than George W. Bush did during his entire eight years as president. If he had mentioned Santa Claus as often, the press would be trying to unlock the mystery of Obama’s obsession with bearded pedophiles. But, for some reason, very few people seem worried that the most powerful person on the planet takes his cues from a long-dead apocalypse-cult nut-job.

Obama’s also against gay marriage on religious grounds. He explained his opposition during his 2004 Senate campaign and hasn’t revised it since:

“I’m a Christian….And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.”

One of Obama’s first acts in office was to expand Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. This is a way for religious organizations, which double as charities, to receive federal funding without the normal restrictions. A private charity can legally choose to help only their fellow believers; they can even discriminate in hiring based on their religious beliefs; but once a charity accepts federal funds, it forfeits the right to discriminate, based on First Amendment church/state separation. The faith-based initiative is a loophole for those kinds of restrictions and, apparently, Obama has no problem with that.

Santa Claus, above, suffering from wicked heartburn

The guy he appointed to head up the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is Joshua DuBois. DuBois is a Pentecostal minister. Pentecostals are the ones who are known for snake handling. In doing this, they emphasize Mark 16:17-18 and Luke 10:19, where Christians are told they can survive poisonous snake bites with faith in Jesus. That’s the guy who’s sending “inspirational” Bible quotes to the President on his BlackBerry every morning.

***

And I haven’t even gotten into how the Affordable Care Act is essentially a giveaway to private health insurance companies, or how the alleged Wall Street “reform” doesn’t actually rein in the rampant fraud that led to the ’08 crash, or Obama’s “negotiation failures” on tax issues and the budget, or continued warrantless wiretapping, or the renewal of the Patriot Act, or how more undocumented immigrants are being deported under Obama than under Bush, or… damn.

You probably wouldn’t vote for a Republican with a record like this. You wouldn’ t send him money or defend him publicly, or privately, for that matter. So why would you do the same for a Democrat? You only would if you were, to take Mark Halperin’s words out of context, “kind of a dick.” Maybe we should stop seeing the President as an ally who’s lost his way because of corporate influence and start seeing him as an obstacle to overcome.

And that’s worth hoping for.

// [adsense]

Ain’t no party like the Korean Worker’s Party cuz the Korean Worker’s Party don’t stop till all the students are shoved into forced labor camps

Best Korea had an amazing week. Someone – possibly a student – put up some anti-government graffiti at a wall near a university in Pyongyang. The state’s response was to shut down the city to interrogate passersby so they could find the perpetrator and lock them up in a forced labor camp. Ha, just kidding! The traitor to the Glorious People’s Republic and Our Dear Leader will definitely be executed if caught.

But since whoever wrote the graffiti hasn’t been caught yet, it’s going to be collective punishment for the college students. Anyone who’s going to university and isn’t graduating this year is going to be conscripted for forced labor for the upcomming 100th anniversary of Kim il-Sung’s birth. He’s still officially the head of state in North Korea, despite having died in 1994.

And for the next week or so, North Korea is going to head up the UN conference on disarmament. The conference has a rotating leadership, and now it’s their turn, apparently. Spencer Ackerman pointed out that the conference is already largely an ineffectual joke, so although it’s ridiculous for a country constantly threatening war with its neighbors to the south to be in charge of disarmament, it’s also pretty harmless.

Egypt v. Mississippi

Today is apparently Beating Up On Mississippi Day. I just found these two recent polls, one from Egypt on peace with Israel and another of Mississippi Republicans on whether or not interracial marriage should be legal. The anti-miscegenation law in Mississippi has been repealed since 1967 by the Supreme Court (Loving v. Virginia).

It’s not a controlled experiment, obviously, but this could be a pretty good test on which region is more modern and progressive and open to embracing people who are different from them.

The good news is that 60% of Egyptians supporting maintaining peace with Israel and 50% support the secular Wafd Party. And the bad news?

Remember that’s only the Republicans in Mississippi, so it’s not necessarily representative of the entire state.

So far I haven’t seen any quotes from someone who votes for “illegal” justify it by saying that people can do what they want as long as it doesn’t go against the Bible, but would you really put it past them?

A truly inspiring story of bipartisanship

Jeremy Scahill on Ed Schultz

Hey, let’s all watch this video from 2003 last week where  Fox News MSNBC blowhard Ed Schultz scolds Jeremy Scahill for not blindly trusting President Bush Obama over the war in Iraq Libya.

It’s really pretty amazing to see how blatantly Schultz copies the defense for war used so recently by his political adversaries while Bush was in power. But then he pretends it’s totally different because of how Obama went through the UN to get authorization for the use of force. So apparently the only problem Schultz can really say he had with the Iraq war was that no such authorization was sought, and not that it was a pointless waste of lives and money to try to force democracy on a country externally.

WI updates

1. Capitol building’s closed, Capitol building’s open. Never a miscommunication.
2. According to the right-leaning polling company Rasmussen, Gov. Walker’s approval rating is down to 43% amongst likely WI voters.
3. Even Forbes magazine is saying that Walker has lost the collective bargaining battle.
4. Murphy went to Madison.
5. So did Michael Moore. Here is the speech he gave at the Capitol.
6. Anonymous can haz boycott of Koch Industries products.
7. The Wisconsin AFL-CIO is using excerpts of the Walker/Koch call in an ad.
8. Voters are starting a campaign to recall 8 Republican state senators. If you live in WI, consider helping by collecting signatures.
9. Mary Lazich is one of those 8, and she is a co-sponsor to a bill which would make it illegal to impersonate someone else over the phone if it hurts someone’s feelings.
10. The 14 out of state Democratic WI state senators are again appealing to Gov. Walker for a meeting to negotiate.
11. Robert Jauch (D-Poplar) says they will be returning soon anyway in order to give up and let the Republicans win, hoping that it will result in a backlash. Not too surprising since capitulation is just what Democrats do when the public is on their side.
12. But the 14 senators themselves are denying the above report, saying they have no intention of returning anytime soon.
13. The WI state Democratic Party is going to file a complaint to the state Government Accountability Board calling for an investigation into things Walker said to fake Koch of questionable legality.
14. Scott Walker will speak at an annual tourism conference today. Hopefully he will take advantage of this opportunity to claim that the whole thing was a big ploy to get people to visit Wisconsin in the winter.
15. Another poll, this one by a right-wing think tank, shows that the teachers’ union has a higher approval rating than the Governor.
16. Democrats in Wisconsin are exceeding their signature-collecting goals for the recall campaign.
17. And in totally unrelated news, the state senate’s GOP leader is trying to make the case for the illegitimacy of the recall statutes.
18. Walker uses government power to enforce new rules of behavior at the Capitol, probably because he’s a socialist. Now visitors will not be allowed to talk, have signs, read books, smoke, eat, drink, carry backpacks, bring chairs, take pictures, record audio, have cell phones on, or pretty much do anything else at all.
19. Sen Jauch says 6 of 7 Republican state senators don’t want to strip public unions of their collective bargaining rights. Don’t know if that’s for real or another political trick though.

Wisconsin

The Republican governor of Wisconsin is trying to push through legislation which would strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights. You’ve probably heard about this by now.

In response, thousands of protesters have filled the streets of Madison. Here are some of them:

Good times. Anyway, Glenn Beck weighed in on the subject and did that random association thing he does. According to Beck, the Wisconsin public unions are collaborating with the Muslim Brotherhood because Midwest teachers, police officers, and other public servants have a lot in common with the Muslim Brotherhood, a group which (unfortunately for Beck’s conspiracy mongering) has only 15% public approval in Egypt.

Here’s how it works: See, in Egypt, they had demonstrations protesting against what the government is doing. And now in Wisconsin, you’ve got demonstrators  protesting against what the government is doing. Obviously the two groups must be in cahoots! For some reason, Beck doesn’t use this kind of brilliant analysis to compare protesting teabaggers with protesting Muslim extremists, even though they share much of the same ideology.

At this point, the only thing stopping Glenn Beck from being as much of a loon as Alex Jones is his refusal to get involved with 9/11 troofer bullshit.

Governor Walker claimed he needed to try to bust up public unions because of budget problems. We’re broke and the sky is falling so we need to cut benefits from skilled workers. It’s just how it’s got to be, because of the BUDGET. Ah, if only if weren’t for that budget, everyone who works for a living would get a retirement and decent health care and stuff like that. In fact there’s even a number associated with the budget problem. They are $137 million in debt. But then some people started investigating why there’s so much of a budget problem in Wisconsin. From One Wisconsin Now:

Republican Gov. Scott Walker plans to pay for $140 million in new special interest spending signed into law in January by extending the state’s long term debt in a “scoop and toss” refinancing scheme that will cost untold tens of millions of dollars in additional debt for Wisconsin.

In other words, the only reason they’re in so much debt is because now Walker has to pay off the corporations which helped him get elected. In order to do that, he has to redistribute the wealth from the working poor and the middle class to his extremely rich contributors. Apparently you only get to call it socialism or communism when you’re redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. When it’s the other way around – as it is in this case- it’s an “emergency budget measure” or some other such nonsense. Got that? Giving money to the poor = communism. Giving money to the rich = tough-minded pragmatism. That’s how conservatives think. Seriously.

Yesterday, in an attempt to delay or kill the proposed bill, Democratic state senators fled the state so that less than the necessary 3/5 wouldn’t be in attendance. Reporters tracked some of them down to a Best Western in Rockford, IL. Wonkette points out that that hotel has an awesome water park and a pub, so that makes it a win-win for the state senators who made it there.

Probably will have more on this later as it develops.

Only 12 Senators voted against extending the USA-PATRIOT Act

Here are their names (source):

1. Max Baucus (D-MT)
2. Mark Begich (D-AK)
3. Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
4. Tom Harkin (D-IA)
5. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)
6. Mike Lee (R-UT)
7. Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
8. Patty Murray (D-WA)
9. Rand Paul (R-KY)
10. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
11. Jon Tester (D-MT)
12. Tom Udall (D-NM)

If you see your Senator listed here, maybe it’d be a good idea to contact them and let them know that you appreciate their support for civil liberties. And it’d probably be even better to contact the ones you don’t see listed here to let them know that they lost your support.

John Boehner is standing up for the stupid guy

The President of Republicans John Boehner went on the teevee this weekend to tell David Gregory that although he’s definitely not a birther, he doesn’t want to interfere with the right of Americans to believe stupid things by telling his supporters that they’re wrong about Obama’s place of birth and religion. From Politico:

When the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” asked Boehner whether he, as speaker of the House, had a responsibility to “stand up to that kind of ignorance,” Boehner told David Gregory: “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think. Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people.”

OK, got that? John Boehner is not interested in telling the American people what to think! He would never do such a thing. Right? Well, I decided to ask the Wikipedia to find out if that is actually true. Here are some things I found:

On May 25, 2006, Boehner issued a statement defending his agenda and attacking his “Democrat friends” such as Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Boehner said regarding national security that voters “have a choice between a Republican Party that understands the stakes and is dedicated to victory, and a Democrat Party with a non-existent national security policy that sheepishly dismisses the challenges of a post-9/11 world and is all too willing to concede defeat on the battlefield in Iraq.”

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Each and every day, Israel’s very existence is at stake.

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We need to look at the American people and explain to them that we’re broke,” Boehner said. “If you have substantial non-Social Security income while you’re retired, why are we paying you at a time when we’re broke? We just need to be honest with people.

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A ban on taxpayer funding of abortion is the will of the people and ought to be the law of the land.  But current law – particularly as enforced by this Administration – does not reflect the will of the people.

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Those are all quotes from the House Majority Leader literally telling the American people what they should think. And not only that, but he’s also told the American people what to think in regards to how to pronounce his own name. If I think his name is pronounced ‘boner,’ isn’t it my right to call him that? Apparently he’s not as against telling people what to think as it seems he is when it comes to birtherism. But why the special exception in that case? Let’s go back to Politico to find out:

Boehner denied that he is willing to let those misperceptions remain because they weaken and delegitimize Obama.

Oh no, of course not.

65 House Democrats voted to extend the USA-PATRIOT Act

Here are their names (source):

1. Gary Ackerman (NY-5)
2. Jason Altmire (PA-4)
3. Joe Baca (CA-43)
4. John Barrow (GA-12)
5. Sanford Bishop (GA-2)
6. Tim Bishop (NY-1)
7. Dan Boren (OK-2)
8. Leonard Boswell (IA-3)
9. Corrine Brown (FL-3)
10. George Butterfield (NC-1)
11. Dennis Cardoza (CA-18)
12. Russ Carnahan (MO-3)
13. John Carney (DE-1)
14. Kathy Castor (FL-11)
15. Ben Chandler (KY-6)
16. Gerry Connolly (VA-11)
17. Jim Cooper (TN-5)
18. Jim Costa (CA-20)
19. Joe Courtney (CT-2)
20. Mark Critz (PA-12)
21. Henry Cuellar (TX-28)
22. Susan Davis (CA-53)
23. Ted Deutch (FL-19)
24. Norman Dicks (WA-6)
25. Joe Donnelly (IN-2)
26. Martin Heinrich (NM-1)
27. Brian Higgins (NY-27)
28. Ruben Hinojosa (TX-15)
29. Tim Holden (PA-17)
30. Steny Hoyer (MD-5)
31. Jay Inslee (WA-1)
32. Steve Israel (NY-2)
33. William Keating (MA-10)
34. Ron Kind (WI-3)
35. Larry Kissell (NC-8)
36. Jim Langevin (RI-2)
37. Sander Levin (MI-12)
38. Daniel Lipinski (IL-3)
39. Nita Lowey (NY-18)
40. Stephen Lynch (MA-9)
41. Jim Matheson (UT-2)
42. Carolyn McCarthy (NY-4)
43. Mike McIntyre (NC-7)
44. Jerry McNerney (CA-11)
45. Brad Miller (NC-13)
46. Chris Murphy (CT-5)
47. Bill Pascrell (NJ-8)
48. Ed Perlmutter (CO-7)
49. Gary Peters (MI-9)
50. Collin Peterson (MN-7)
51. Mike Quigley (IL-5)
52. Nick Rahall (WV-3)
53. Silvestre Reyes (TX-16)
54. Mike Ross (AR-4)
55. Steve Rothman (NJ-9)
56. Dutch Ruppersberger (MD-2)
57. Adam Schiff (CA-29)
58. Allyson Schwartz (PA-13)
59. David Scott (GA-13)
60. Terri Sewell (AL-7)
61. Heath Shuler (NC-11)
62. Albio Sires (NJ-13)
63. Niki Tsongas (MA-5)
64. Chris Van Hollen (MD-8)
65. John Yarmuth (KY-3)

Contact your Representative if you see them on this list to tell them that they lost your support due to their position on civil liberties.

Nobody who reads this should be allowed to vote

Let’s all listen to this nice young man explain why only “virtuous” people should be allowed to vote, if we’re even going to bother with that old voting thing anymore. If we keep letting just anybody vote, we’re all going to die of cancer. Or something.

Obama pals around with William Daley

Obama's Chief of Staff's friends pal around with terrorists

Last week Barack Obama announced that William M. Daley would be replacing Rahm Emmanuel as the White House Chief of Staff. And yeah, that would be the brother of current Chciago mayor Richard M Daley. Their father was Richard J Daley, who was also a mayor of Chicago.

The older (dead, actually) Richard Daley was mayor of Chicago from 1955 until 1976. Right in the middle of his tenure in office was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which attracted lots and lots of anti-war protesters, whom in turn attracted lots and lots of police officers who then proceeded to beat up and throw tear gas at the demonstrators. Punching Dan Rather in the stomach was also a popular pastime at the convention.

A year later, also in Chicago, was the Days of Rage direct action demonstrations led by the Weatherman Organization where young people smashed windows, trashed fancy cars, and crippled one of Daley’s corporation counsels. And one of the people who led the riots in Chicago was BILL AYERS.

ATTENTION REPUBLCIANS: This is yet another connection between the Obama White House and Bill Ayers! I mean, sure, maybe it just shows that Obama is on the opposite side of 1960s radicals since he’s now appointing one of their main targets to a high government position. But whatever! It’s another name to add to the blackboard, right?