Hoffmania!

Big Fat Surprise

A poll states that Massachusetts voters voted against health care policies. when they elected Scott Brown yesterday.

Duh.

What's so hard to understand about this? (ahem) Massachusetts HAS STATEWIDE HEALTH CARE. Health care is something they're not that concerned about because THEY HAVE IT. The braying about it fell on absolute deaf ears - especially those of independent voters.

The Dems who showed up for the primary put up a candidate who ultimately totally and thoroughly misread the room. It was a complete marketing meltdown. They ran (if they ran at all) on passing national health care. That was about it.

Her campaign team utterly forgot what Ted Kennedy was all about on health care anyway. He simply wanted for the rest of the country what Massachusetts had. These bozos turned it into a "We need the 60th vote" contest. As I said...there was no 60 votes to begin with. It was all on paper. It was never reality. And the bottom line in this election was Who Cares About 60 Votes?

Take the voters for granted and keep the blinders on. A recipe for disaster, and the Democrats perfected it.

Racism in the Obama Era: The All-White Basketball League

This was bound to happen...not the basketball part, but the "all-white" part in which guarantees of good behavior fly like the racism.

You may think you've seen it all. Still, you're not gonna believe this.

The All-American Basketball Alliance announced in a news release Sunday evening that it intends to start its inaugural season in June and hopes Augusta will be one of 12 cities with a team.

"Only players that are natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the league," the statement said.

Augusta Mayor Deke Copenhaver, who has publicly expressed his support for minor league teams in the past, said he would not do the same for this team.

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Don "Moose" Lewis, the commissioner of the AABA, said the reasoning behind the league's roster restrictions is not racism.

"There's nothing hatred about what we're doing," he said. "I don't hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here's a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like."

Lewis said he wants to emphasize fundamental basketball instead of "street-ball" played by "people of color." He pointed out recent incidents in the NBA, including Gilbert Arenas' indefinite suspension after bringing guns into the Washington Wizards locker room, as examples of fans' dissatisfaction with the way current professional sports are run.

"Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?" he said. "That's the culture today, and in a free country we should have the right to move ourselves in a better direction."

And in a free country, we have the right to call you a racist douchebag, Moose. Nice way to instill values into non-white children nationwide.

Reality Check

Seriously...between Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor and Blanch Lincoln, did the Democrats really have a 60-vote majority in the senate before tonight?

Let me save you some time. NO, they didn't.

Let's knock off the 60-vote fantasy. We obviously never had it even when we thought we had it.

And, as Jon Stewart said, Bush had less of a GOP majority in the senate when he did whatever the fuck he wanted to do. Time to push stuff through and forget this charade. You're not going to get bipartisan support as long as you have these five knuckleheads among the ranks.

Get real already.

Feelin' Your Pain, Jon

He always knows how to crystallize my sheer frustration over writing about politics these days. If we don't know how to fight stupid, we really should pack it in.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mass Backwards
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

If you're a Massachusetts voter, vote today. It just might work. It has before.

Limbaugh Throws Himself Into Backpedal Mode

He now says he wasn't discouraging listeners from making donations to Haiti when he said, "We've already donated to Haiti. It's called the income tax."

Um. Okay. So you were encouraging them, Rush? We're sure the words "out of context" will come out of his yap today.

James Dobson's "Non-Profit" Radio Show

Why not? It'll match the income of most of his followers.

Seriously...anyone who asks for donations under the guise of a specially-minted "ministry" - when all he'll do with the cash is to spout political views on the radio - should be banned from even attempting non-profit status.

And don't give me the NPR bullshit. At least they interview the likes of Gingrich and McConnell. I can guarantee Dobson will never give anyone left of James Dobson himself a scintilla of airtime.

Frank Rich Looks at the GOP's Two Biggest Cashpigs

Michael Steele and Sarah Palin love those poor forlorn teapartiers...and the money they're willing to fork over for their bullshit.

"I’m a tea partier, I’m a town-haller, I’m a grass-roots-er” is how Steele put it in a recent radio interview, wet-kissing a market he hopes will buy his book. Palin has far more grandiose ambitions. She recently signed on as a speaker for the first Tea Party Convention, scheduled next month in Nashville — even though she had turned down a speaking invitation from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the traditional meet-and-greet for the right. The conservative conference doesn’t pay. The Tea Party Convention does. A blogger at Nashville Scene reported that Palin’s price for the event was $120,000.

The entire Tea Party Convention is a profit-seeking affair charging $560 a ticket — plus the cost of a room at the Opryland Hotel...

Last week a prominent right-wing blogger, Erick Erickson of RedState.com, finally figured out that the Tea Party Convention “smells scammy,” likening it to one of those Nigerian e-mails promising untold millions. Such rumbling about the movement’s being co-opted by hucksters may explain why Palin used her first paid appearance at Fox last Tuesday to tell Bill O’Reilly that she would recycle her own tea party profits in political contributions. But Erickson had it right: the tea party movement is being exploited — and not just by marketers, lobbyists, political consultants and corporate interests but by the Republican Party, as exemplified by Palin and Steele, its most prominent leaders.

Tea partiers hate the G.O.P. establishment and its Wall Street allies, starting with the Bushies who created TARP, almost as much as they do Obama and his Wall Street pals. When Steele and Palin pay lip service to the movement, they are happy to glom on to its anti-tax, anti-Obama, anti-government, anti-big-bank vitriol. But they don’t call for any actual action against the bailed-out perpetrators of the financial crisis. They’d never ask for investments to put ordinary Americans back to work. They have no policies to forestall foreclosures or protect health insurance for the tea partiers who’ve been shafted by hard times. Their only economic principle beside tax cuts is vilification of the stimulus that did save countless jobs for firefighters, police officers and teachers at the state and local level.

The Democrats’ efforts to counter the deprivation and bitterness spawned by the Great Recession are indeed timid and imperfect. The right has a point when it says that the Senate health care votes of Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana were bought with pork. But at least their constituents can share the pigout. Hustlers like Steele and Palin take the money and run. All their followers get in exchange is a lousy tea party T-shirt. Or a ghost-written self-promotional book. Or a tepid racial sideshow far beneath the incendiary standards of the party whose history from Strom to “macaca” has driven away nearly every black American except Steele for the past 40 years.

Gather 'Round! It's Forehead Slappin' Time!

Hey, look at the great idea the Heritage Foundation has.

The U.S. government response should be bold and decisive. It must mobilize U.S. civilian and military capabilities for short-term rescue and relief and long-term recovery and reform. President Obama should tap high-level, bipartisan leadership. Clearly former President Clinton, who was already named as the U.N. envoy on Haiti, is a logical choice. President Obama should also reach out to a senior Republican figure, perhaps former President George W. Bush, to lead the bipartisan effort for the Republicans.

(SLAP!) Yup. Mr. Katrina himself. (SLAP!) That'd be a bi-intelligent effort, you dipshits.

This is a three-slapper. (SLAP!)

Banner Ad. Dumped.

Some of them were just getting ridiculous, and above all, they were causing the site to load like it had a backpack full of concrete. They're gone. No one was clicking them anyway.

And again we regain our non-profit status. And again, we're sick about it.

On a side note, thank you all for your messages of condolences. As you may imagine, it's been pretty busy over here, so my triumphant return has again been stalled. Thanks for hanging in there.

Here's the Damned DIfference

Harry Reid was offhandedly making an observation.

Trent Lott was wholeheartedly making an endorsement.

Simplify, people. Lott loudly and proudly wished for an America under Thurmond's segregationist beliefs in front of a national audience at a televised event (Thurmond's 100th birthday). Reid had absolutely no such desire in his quote, which was said in private.

I swear to God, the back-and-forth on this is more clumsy than the comment itself.

Really?

I turn on the news for the first time since Friday, and was shocked...SHOCKED to find that the GOP has changed their minds on political correctness.

You remember. They hated political correctness. Hated it. Hated it. HATED it. REALLY hated it. We could die from it. They sing about how it's killing us. It's too gay. It's sacrilegious. It's death. It killed soldiers. It's Marxism. It's torture.

They will NEVER embrace political correctness.

Unless it means screwing a high-ranking Democrat.

Any of their own would be hailed as a hero for their honesty if they said the same dumb thing. But Harry Reid must resign.

Really? Really.

Mom

Shortly after my last posts, we got word that our Mom had passed on after a blessedly short battle with pneumonia. She was a total character, and wonderful mother and an extraordinarily generous woman. Our home was always buzzing with the neighborhood kids because she had an open (refrigerator) door policy. At night, the neighborhood grownups would take over. Seriously, it took me years to realize that "family time" didn't include the entire block.

She was among the last of the classy dames. We hope you'll join our family in celebrating this wonderful lady's life.

Here she is with my Dad at Rogers Corner across from the old Madison Square Garden in 1946. We always loved this photo for the couple in the foreground - and also for the girls behind them who obviously weren't supposed to be there. They also obviously didn't know my folks.

These two kids are together again. We love you, Mom and Dad.

As Our Ancestors Used to Say...

It sucks to be NBC.

The Memory is Always the First Thing to Go When You're Dyin'

The fading GOP seems to have this lapse soooo conveeeeniently. America's pest mayor chimes in on how Bush didn't have to deal with a domestic terror attack. This is really strange.

There is a strange amnesia permeating through the Republican ranks lately. On November 24, George W. Bush's former press secretary, Dana Perino, told Fox News's Sean Hannity, "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term." Spit take! This was followed about a month later by GOP strategist Mary Matalin, who said of the Bush administration, "I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history." Guffaw! Now Rudy Giuliani, surprisingly, seems to be jumping on the "9/11 never happened or at least not on Bush's watch" bandwagon. Speaking to Good Morning America's height-challenged George Stephanopoulos this morning, Giuliani weighed in on Obama's response to terrorism:

What he should be doing is following the right things that Bush did. One of the right things he did is treat this as a war on terror — we had no domestic attacks under Bush, we've had one under Obama.

Look Who's Indoctrinating Kids: Bill Bennett

Obama can't urge kids to excel or make Christmas ornaments for the White House tree. THAT would be brainwashing.

But wingnuts can write textbooks. Cripes. Don't expect nary a hue nor a cry over this from the bleating teabaggers.

Salem Radio Network host and former U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett's three-volume textbook series, America: The Last Best Hope, is available now for grades 8-12 through an exclusive deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The series also includes an interactive website, "The Roadmap," covering U.S. history. The books are available in text and e-reader editions, and curriculum applications have been developed by educators and history experts.

"History is our nation's schoolchildren's worst subject," Bennett said. "And yet the history of America is the greatest story of the modern era. It should not be boring, it should not be dumbed-down, and it should not be politicized. It is the story of a great experiment -- what Abraham Lincoln called a 'proposition.' It is the story of many noble efforts to live up to that proposition, sometimes failing, more often, succeeding. This great adventure is told the best way I know how, chronologically, excitingly, honestly. 'Once Upon A Time' can still be an invitation to our youth and there is no greater 'Once Upon A Time' than ours."

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt EVP Bethlam Forsa said, "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is excited to partner with Secretary Bennett and benefit from his unique experiences with education by distributing this ground-breaking new series."

The #Palin Conundrum

Seriously, I don 't know what pisses me off more about the post just south of this one.

Her inability to come up with an original thought that hasn't been hammered to death by Fox News' blabbermouths (and dare I ask: Is she really William Kristol's sock puppet now?)...

Or that she says "constitutional law professor" with the same contempt as "community organizer" during the campaign last year.

Either one proves what a douchebag she really is. Sorry for the bluntness, but she's one sick puppy and should just stop being so frigging disrespectful of this constitutionally elected president.

I'm no angel when it comes to respect...that's pretty obvious by now. But I don't claim to be a major political party's spokesmodel either.

All Hail #Palin, the Fucking National Security Expert

Thanks for the input, babe. Now STFU.

"President Obama’s meeting with his top national security advisers does nothing to change the fact that his fundamental approach to terrorism is fatally flawed...the real nature of the terrorist threat requires a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor."

And our national security policy requires advice from national security experts, not some goddamned GOP hillbilly fisherperson gun-toting quitter nutbag and her greasy husband whining from the tundra.

You fucking WISH you knew even the slightest thing about our Constitution, you ghastly undereducated excuse for a carbon-based lifeform.

But I mean that only in the nicest way.

GOP: The Party of "Cheneyism"

The more they embrace the old bastard, the more we like it. Joe Klein:

You also have to wonder whether there will be a Bush-Cheney foreign policy bifurcation among GOP presidential candidates in 2012. In any case, this is still more evidence that the wingers have the whip-hand in the Republican Party these days: it seems clear that the mid-ranking Bush intelligence officials whom Baker has talked to--people who'll be looking for jobs in the next Republican Administration--think that Cheneyism is the party's future.

Cheneyism. And Michele Bachmann thinks it's the teabaggers who are the future. MAGnificent.

Well, sure enough...still looking for SOME kind of acceptance in his party, RNC Chairdork Michael Steele is riding Cheneyism with both arms and both legs.

Steele said in a nationally broadcast interview Tuesday that the administration is wrong in putting terrorism suspects on trial in civil courts, saying "the public doesn't view them as having rights in the criminal system."

The GOP chairman defended former Vice President Dick Cheney's harsh criticism of President Barack Obama, saying that he, too, believes Obama tries to avoid directly acknowledging a war on terror. On NBC's "Today" show, Steele said the administration has an image problem on this issue.

Ahem. RICHARD REED. (Rachel was given another very easy gift last night - another GOP schnook who praised the criminal trial of Reed in 2002 while squealing at Obama for the same thing for the underpants bomber.)

Stewart and Colbert Finally Reach HD Status

I know, I know. The equipment's a lot more expensive, but the investment will be worth it. After attending TDS last year while in New York, I was struck at how gorgeous the set was, and how regular def really did it no service. Starting tonight (until they likely get into reruns next week), you can see the dazzling effluvia that is The Daily Show studio.

Colbert has been in modified HD (HD quality but not widescreen) for several months. He now has more room to run. That could be dangerous. Hope you have it.

Limbaugh Put His Life in Union Workers' Hands

How 'bout that. They all did their job to a "T" and none of them had horns and pitchforks.

What Limbaugh didn't realize, SEIU's blog points out, is that the Hawaiian health care system is one of America's most progressive. So progressive, in fact, that Hawaii has been exempted from some of the terms of the Senate health care bill because the current system's requirements go above and beyond the ones federal legislation would mandate.

Furthermore, Limbaugh's saviors at the Queen's Medical Center are represented by the Hawaii Nurse's Associations, which, according to SEIU, offers benefits and protections similar to those of a labor union. The anti-reform talk show host is working to deny more people the same type of "confidence-inspiring" medical attention that made him "thankful to be an American."

Imus, FBN Go Off the Reservation

So they DO have fact-checking ability in the Fox Compound. Imus and pals go after Brit Hume's idiotic assessment of Tiger Woods yesterday.

Statistically Speaking...

You mean I post some crap and my daily hit count doubles in size?

Seriously, that's what happened. You people have the magic. Thanks. Good to be back.

All You Need to Know About Rasmussen

Here's why the GOP loves them.

WaPo to Cheney, et al: Back Off the Obama Slams

Yeah. Tough to believe that headline, but it's true. Dick must be grabbing his pills right now.

Being a Journalist on Fox Means Trying to Talk a Buddhist Into Converting to Christianity

Oh. Sorry. This is analysis. As if Fox News viewers know the difference anymore.

Brit Hume to Tiger Woods this morning: Dump Buddhism, Accept Christianity. Yikes.