bustardblog

Michelle Praises Obama, Tortures McCain

Ms Malkin, aka the Queen of Hearts, lets her obsession with ill-attended tea-parties rest for a moment, in order to express her amazement at the all-powerful Obama.

One might think that when she refers to him as the "Obamessiah" she is mocking him. One would be wrong. For it is Obama who is responsible for gossip columnist Perez Hilton getting into a spat with a contestant for Miss USA. (Of course Mr Hilton bills himself as the "Queen of all Media" while poor Michelle is only the Queen of Hearts - unable to cut off nearly as many heads as she would like. Maybe she's jealous?) President Obama also controls the mouth of Janeane Garafalo.

And of course, he, and he alone,  turned "the nightly airwaves ... into a soft-porn cesspool last week as liberal journalists derided and slimed hundreds of thousands of Tea Party protesters."

You see it is Obama who is to blame for the incivility and the coarseness. She is aghast at "sophomoric sexual slang" when the media uses words  like "nuts"  and "full-throated."

Which is why we can expect another outraged rant from Michelle tomorrow - one in which she roasts Rupert Murdoch and the NY Post for today's headlining of an article about a mother putting her children out of the car "MOTHERCHUCKER." 

Even though she was powerless to decapitate the Mad Hatter, Michelle can at least voice her support for torture.  She'd have no problem justifying the torture of John McCain by the Vietnamese.

(h/t memeorandum)

Tea Parties

I hadn't watched Gregory on Meet The Press since Russert's death.  That was smart.

  Today Mr Gregory, in questioning Gov Crist, quoted "analysts at Amherst Securities" who denounced Obama's housing plan for giving  the most aid to those who had stretched the limits and "lied the most" about their income. He quotes "analysts at Amherst Securities," so this must be a fact.  What is a fact is that Amherst Securites is a "leading dealer and market maker in mortgage backed securities" - the bastards that got us into this mess.

And the new folk hero, Rick Santelli, who Maureen Dowd said "struck a populist nerve with his screed about the unfairness of responsible homeowners picking up the tab for irresponsible homeowners" was galvanizing the masses - of traders at the Chicago Board of Trade. Prior to rousing the rabble, Mr Santelli "was a vice president handling institutional trading and hedge accounts for a variety of futures related products. He also served as managing director at the Derivative Products Group of Geldermann, Inc., and was Vice President in charge of Interest Rate Futures and Options at the Chicago Board of Trade for Drexel, Burnham, Lambert.(An illustrious firm,some of whose principals did jail time, after the firm's bankruptcy.)

Frankly, I've never heard of a populist leader coming out of Drexel, Burnham.  But now, according to Michelle Malkin, quoting the populist Investors Business Daily, we can look forward to Tea Parties in Chicago.  Not like the Boston Tea Party, more like the Mad Hatter's.

Ponnuru Overboard

Ponnuru whines in Time about how over the top he finds the excitement about Barack Obama:

"But historical precedent can justify only so much...Naming your newborn Barack is, at best, right on the line. Renaming your kids' elementary school after him, as people in Hempstead, N.Y., did? Wait until he's got a presidential library."

I fooled around at the Google and could not find any similar please asking Texas A&M to slodown when they created the "George W.Bush School of Government and Public Service." There's no record of a note of caution to Midland, when it named it's elementary school after George W. Bush.  The town of Stockton in California managed to build the "George Bush Elementary School" without a single warning from Ramesh,...

I think you get the idea. In fact, I'm sure you too are very surprised that there are not more, many more, institutions of higher learning named after George W. Bush.

Writers on the right are generally lazy and rarely interested in facts. But what is really galling is to see the ads next to Ponuru's article. In them, Time tries to pawn off  the Obama memorabilia it's trying to sell. The income of course will go not to Obama, but to Time, helping it pay the salary of one Ramesh Ponnuru.

Remember Bush selling pictures of himself looking concerned on Air Force I on 9/11?  The income from those pictures went to the Republican Party.

(h/t meme)

Who's In Charge?

Sadly No! is one of the greatest blogs out there. So it surprised me to see that the Esteemed Gavin seems a bit behind:

What I’m trying to understand — and help me out here if I’m missing something — is that Wurzelbacher doesn’t seem to be totally on top of the fact that the US and Israeli military are different things, because Israel and the US are actually not the same country…

To a Republican, be it the genus Wolfowitz, or the sub-species Wurzelbacher, U.S. Foreign policy is set in Jerusalem, not Foggy Bottom.

Jeffrey Goldberg's op-ed in today's NYTimes finally comes to a reasonable conclusion even though most of the arguments he made to reach it are unsupportable - still,  the most reality-based sentence is: 

As the Gaza war moves to a cease-fire, a crucial question will inevitably arise, as it has before: Should Israel (and by extension, the United States) try to engage Hamas in a substantive and sustained manner?

Emphasis added - although probably not required.

Articles in recent days have argued whether or not Olmert's bragging of his power to issue instructions to our Secretary of State was a smart P.R. move - not whether he in fact excercised this power.

Dear Gavin, Sorry, but you did miss something.

(H/T memeorandum)

Ciao for Now

Elaine Chao. Hers is the missing name in all the reporting on the G.O.P's attempt to destroy organized labor. After all she is the secretary of labor. She also is Mrs. Mitch McConnell. Her husband is leading the pack to bring the country down to its lowest common denominator.

She is the head of the cabinet level department charged  "to foster, promote and develop the welfare of working people, to improve their working conditions, and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment."

All that we're actually missing is the quote: "Heck of a Job" -  Chowie!!!

(h/t memeorandum)

Can Sarah Learn?

The NY Times reports that Palin calls McCain aides "cruel and mean-spirited."  And of course, she's right.

"It’s immature, it’s unprofessional, and those guys are jerks” - she astutely observes. " Taking things out of context and then [trying] to spread something on national news. It is not fair and not right.” Randy Scheunemann spoke of McCain aides spreading lies.

Although accurate assessments, they will only matter when Palin realizes and admits that these were the people giving her her talking points about Obama; that those who are happy to smear her, are the same ones whose smears about Obama she so forcefully spread.

The Times reports that "Ms. Palin said that her experience made her realize how brutal national politics could be."  When she realizes how brutal, cowardly, and dishonest a campaign she was a part of - then she'll have learned something.

h/t memeorandum

They Shoot Wolves - Don't They?

Max Blumenthal's reporting, of late on Sarah Palin, has been invaluable.  As a pundit, he's awful.  He aspires to membership in that route of wolves we Democrats turn into whenever we win an election.

Today he led the pack in eating our own young - heavily criticizing Obama's selection of Rahm Emanuel. According to Blumenthal, the pick invalidates Barack's claim of post-partisanship. Yes, the problem with Emanuel is that he will fight too hard for Obama and that Republicans don't like him. David Corn  joins in circling the prey, faulting Emanuel for being a  "highly effective partisan,"and  "a guy who gets things done."  Another problem with Emanuel is that he is too much of a centrist. (except when he is being too much of a partisan)  Obama clearly should have picked a purer ideologue - someone along the lines, of say, Ralph Nader, perhaps?

This is not the time for an uncle Ralph. It is the time when we must support and trust President-elect Obama,  or at least give him the benefit of the doubt for 48 hours. It's not like he doesn't have enough challenges in front of him.

Maybe hunting out of helicopters is not such a bad idea?

P.S. Blumenthal likes the idea of Jon Corzine taking charge at Treasury - - every year the governor comes to the dinner held by the Nation Foundation (Blumenthal's employer.) Actually, you can shoot me instead.

h/t memeorandum

Progress

The wondrous watertiger has a photo of the line leading up to our polling place. Separately, she and I pulled the lever for an African-American in an antiquated voting booth at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center on 13th Street. That is where we actually voted. This country has come along way - as a kid, I carried protest signs when my mother took me to demonstrate against the Rialto Movie Theater's policy not to admit "negroes."

The white building in watertiger's photo is not the Center. It is the O'Toole building, and it's about to be torn down and replaced by a thirty story tower. This, and another huge tower to be built a block south, will be as knives in the heart of the Landmarked Greenwich Village Historic District.  Sometime Progress Sucks.  Good-Bye Village, Hello Condo Developers.

New York & John McCain

Admittedly, New York is a Democratic town - despite the eight years each of Bloomberg & Giuliani and the 12 years of Pataki.

But in 2000, and in 2004 - I saw plenty of people wearing Bush buttoins.

So far this year I have not seen a single McCain/Palin pin.

English First

Sarah Palin thinks Obama's criticism of McCain about our 'fundamentally strong economy' are unjust:

"an unfair attack on the verbage that Sen McCain chose to use."

Todd Palin doesn't seem overly fond of being called 'First Dude:

He prefers being called Todd - it "works good" for him.

Call me an elitist,  I don't mind.