Posts Tagged ‘Karl Rove’
Three for Wednesday
* And every freshman composition essay ever: Since The Beginning Of Time, Mankind Has Discussed What It Did On Summer Vacation.
Republicans in Disarray
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together! Karl Rove and Sean Hannity arguing! Mass hysteria!
Saturday Night Fever
* Fredrick Pohl has been blogging about his friendship with the young Isaac Asimov: 1 2 3 4 5. Via io9.
* Not only are young people stealing all our jobs, they’re criminals! Wake up, sheeple!
* David Neiwert links to Justine Sharrock’s Mother Jones piece about the Oath Keepers, a right-wing fringe movement focused on recruiting disaffected personnel in the military and law enforcement. It’s not good.
* Well, that’s unexpected: Texas Judge Rules Death Penalty Unconstitutional.
* Gawker salutes the time Karl Rove got beat up by a little girl.
* Judging from my treatment on Twitter I’m apparently the second-to-last person in America to remember Morgan Freeman was on The Electric Company. Only my old friend @drbluman is less informed…
NJ-Gov Part Deux
I really won’t be doing a lot of NJ-GOV blogging, but in light of my earlier post on the This American Life episode I find it interesting that Jon Corzine may have caught a break today in unsealed U.S. Attorney scandal emails that link Chris Christie to the Bush White House and Karl Rove.
Monday News Roundup
Monday!
* Almost as if they all receive their talking points from a single, central location, the entire right-wing spin machine has spontaneously decided to start talking about how the New Deal didn’t actually work. Uh, sure.
* The first link doesn’t make the absurdity clear, but Karl Rove is Twittering.
* Also in alternate-universe news: George Bush: Greatest President.
To prove his point, Barnes points to Bush’s “ten great achievements”:
1. Bush stood up to “global warming hysteria,” and helped undermine the agenda of “alarmists.”
2. He endorsed “enhanced interrogation,” “secret prisons,” and “wireless eavesdropping.”
3. He seized unprecedented executive authority, and ignored congressional attempts at oversight.
4. He offered “unswerving support for Israel.”
5. He signed the No Child Left Behind initiative.
6. He delivered his second inaugural address.
7. He signed the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
8. He pushed the Supreme Court even further to the right.
9. He improved U.S. relations with Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
10. He created a “fragile but functioning democracy” in Iraq.
You’ll note Barnes is padding his list just a bit—delivering a second inaugural address is sort of light for a “top ten accomplishments” list, as is “improved relations with Australia.”
* Also via Washington Monthly, Jon Swift has your retort.
* Not capturing Osama bin Laden isn’t on Barnes’s list, but Cheney tells us that doesn’t matter.
Today on CNN’s Late Edition, host Wolf Blitzer asked Vice President Cheney, “How frustrating is this to you personally, knowing he’s [bin Laden] still at large?” Cheney hesitated, then simply replied that he would “obviously…like to solve that problem.” He added that it’s more “important” to “keep…this country safe,” indicating that bin Laden is inconsequential.
* North Carolina in the news! The Brunswick school district wants to teach creationism to kids. In 2008.
“I wasn’t here 2 million years ago,” Fanti said. “If evolution is so slow, why don’t we see anything evolving now?”
There’s your evidence.
* Eight reasons why we are in a depression.
* Half of world’s population could face climate-driven food crisis by 2100.
* After ten days of not sleeping, Randy Gardner was able to hold a press conference and beat a journalist at pinball. Note: this happened forty-four years ago, but I just found out about it yesterday.
Whatever Happened to Sarah Palin?
‘Whatever happened to Sarah Palin?’ Look for stories with that headline over the next few years—with polling like this Sarah Palin will likely never be a serious candidate for national office ever again. And that’s good news for all of us, in Real and Fake America alike.
The New Yorker has an interesting first-crack in the “Whatever happened to Sarah Palin?” genre this week, actually, with a post-mortem on how McCain ever came to make such a damaging choice.
With just days to go before the Convention, the choices were slim. Karl Rove favored McCain’s former rival Mitt Romney, but enough animus lingered from the primaries that McCain rejected the pairing. “I told Romney not to wait by the phone, because ‘he doesn’t like you,’ ” Keene, who favored the choice, said. “With John McCain, all politics is personal.” Other possible choices—such as former Representative Rob Portman, of Ohio, or Governor Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota—seemed too conventional. They did not transmit McCain’s core message that he was a “maverick.” Finally, McCain’s top aides, including Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, converged on Palin. Ed Rogers, the chairman of B.G.R., a well-connected, largely Republican lobbying firm, said, “Her criteria kept popping out. She was a governor—that’s good. The shorter the Washington résumé the better. A female is better still. And then there was her story.” He admitted, “There was concern that she was a novice.” In addition to Schmidt and Davis, Charles R. Black, Jr., the lobbyist and political operative who is McCain’s chief campaign adviser, reportedly favored Palin. Keene said, “I’m told that Charlie Black told McCain, ‘If you pick anyone else, you’re going to lose. But if you pick Palin you may win.’ ” (Black did not return calls for comment.) Meanwhile, McCain’s longtime friend said, “Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms.”
McCain had met Palin once, but their conversation—at a reception during a meeting of the National Governors Association, six months earlier—had lasted only fifteen minutes. “It wasn’t a real conversation,” said the longtime friend, who called the choice of Palin “the fucking most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Aides arranged a phone call between McCain and Palin, and scrutinized her answers to some seventy items on a questionnaire that she had filled out. But McCain didn’t talk with Palin in person again until the morning of Thursday, August 28th. Palin was flown down to his retreat in Sedona, Arizona, and they spoke for an hour or two. By the time he announced her as his choice, the next day, he had spent less than three hours in her company.
Meanwhile, Palin is back in the news today with a revealing flub demonstrating that she either (still) has no idea what the vice president does or has a vision of expanded powers for the VP that rivals even Cheney’s.
What?
Colorado U.S. attorney Troy Eid, a Bush appointee, chose not to charge three meth addicts with high-powered rifles and a self-confessed plan with conspiracy to assassinate Barack Obama, against the suggestion of the FBI.
When police searched the hotel rooms and cars the men were using, they confiscated meth, needles, laptops, cell phones, a black mask, books indicating check fraud and forgery, bags of new clothes, tactical pants and bar coupons.
Based on the evidence, FBI special agent Robert Sawyer believed there was probable cause to charge the men with conspiracy to kill Senator Obama. However, US Attorney Troy Eid last week said there is insufficient evidence to indicate a true threat, plot or conspiracy against the senator.
The men were charged with various weapons and/or drug charges.
9Wants to Know has learned three men in Denver discussed assassinating U.S. Sen. Barack Obama during the Democratic National Convention in Denver by sneaking into one of his events and shooting him with a gun hidden inside of a camera.
…
Johnson, Shawn Adolf and Tharin Gartrell all thought that Obama had a suite in the third floor of the Hyatt hotel, where they were staying. In fact, Obama was staying in another Denver hotel.
The men were doing methamphetamine inside the hotel with two women on Aug. 23 discussing the plot to kill Obama, according to federal records.
Adolf said, “It would not matter if he killed Senator Obama because police would simply add a murder charge to his pending charges,” according to the records.
There were seven outstanding warrants for Adolf’s arrest.
The underage woman told law enforcement that Adolf also talked about using “a high-powered rifle 22-250 from a high vantage point” to shoot Obama during his acceptance speech at INVESCO Field at Mile High.
Friday, Friday
Friday, Friday.
* Massachusetts has repealed the 95-year-old law that has been used to block out-of-state gay marriages, removing the last major barrier to nationwide legal challenges of marriage discrimination.
* There’s water on Mars (but don’t try to drink it). And there’s a liquid lake on Titan, too.
* Also in legal news: Bush’s claims of absolute executive privilege have been smacked down in the courts. Score another small victory for the rule of law, and start writing up that Karl Rove indictment.
* Garfield without Garfield book announced.
* The Los Angeles City Council has passed a year-long moratorium on new fast food restaurants in South L.A. (More at MeFi.) Food in this country, as we’ve talked about many times, is in crisis—but this is a symbolic gesture, not an actual policy.
* Also in food news: How Sysco came to monopolize most of what you eat. Also via MeFi.
* And now you can watch the growth of Wal-Mart across America. Locusts. Zombies. Plague.