Sarahmentum

This sounds like a person who has no idea how to govern. She's fixated on rebutting every single charge that anyone makes, but can't even set up an office efficient enough to return phone calls. And this person almost became Vice President.

open mic night at the RNC

From NY Daily News:

Commenting on a report posted to Facebook about a gorilla escape at a zoo in Columbia, S.C., Friday, longtime GOP activist Rusty DePass wrote, "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless."

Busted by South Carolina political blogger Will Folks on his FITNEWS blog, DePass told WIS-TV in Columbia, "I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest."

Then he added, "The comment was hers, not mine," claiming Michelle Obama made a recent remark about humans descending from apes. The Daily News could find no such comment.

Yeah, I know, that's really ugly even for southern fried Republicans. And yeah, that's a pretty terrible apology.

Here's what I want to talk about, though: who was it that thought it was a good idea to get every GOP politician and stooge their own Twitter account? Seriously, am I wrong or is this perhaps the worst idea in electoral politics since McCain put Sarah Palin on his ticket?

Racism is a problem for the Republican party. A big problem. Racism is what gives them their stranglehold on the South, but it kills them everywhere else. Because of this, Republican speechwriters and campaign strategists have cooked up all manner of ingenious ways to give dog-whistle signals to the former segregationists and Dixiecrats that make up the party's southern base: "affirmative action," "welfare queens," sexual innuendo, speeches in Philadelphia, Mississippi on states' rights, etc. It's a subtle art, though; if people outside the privileged group catch your underlying meanings, you're in deep doodoo, so you don't want every Confederate cracker with a chip on his shoulder and a hood in his closet taking a turn at the GOP's microphone to do his best Jesse Helms impersonation, and you sure as s**t don't want to give them the opportunity to send unerasable, impromptu, unsupervised messages accessible to anyone with an internet connection!

Unless, apparently, you're the dumbass who thought Twitter would be the secret weapon in the great Republican electoral juggernaut of 2010. Macacas for everyone!

UPDATE: Already another one here.

UPDATE 2: And now an email. Maybe low-level southern Republicans should just stay away from writing.

The Republican Party: just not serious on economics since 1996

From The Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON - The federal agency that insures bank deposits, which is asking for emergency powers to borrow up to $500 billion to take over failed banks, is facing a potential major shortfall in part because it collected no insurance premiums from most banks from 1996 to 2006.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures deposits up to $250,000, tried for years to get congressional authority to collect the premiums in case of a looming crisis. But Congress believed that the fund was so well-capitalized - and that bank failures were so infrequent - that there was no need to collect the premiums for a decade, according to banking officials and analysts.

Wow, Congress looks pretty dumb now, eh? I mean, what kind of a moron would stop funding bank depositors' only insurance body on the assumption that the economy will never tank again?

Well, let's think about it: who ran Congress from 1996 to 2006?

Bobby Jindal: Screw Obama, trust us! After all, remember Katrina?

The relevant passage:

Today in Washington, some are promising that government will rescue us from the economic storms raging all around us.

Those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina, we have our doubts.

Let me tell you a story.

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

There is a lesson in this experience: The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and enterprising spirit of our citizens.

Maddow nails this one: Republicans should never, ever bring up Katrina. Ever. But for a Republican to bring up Katrina to argue against government interventionism is absolute cock-eyed, deranged, cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs madness. It almost forces me to consider the possibility that Bobby Jindal is a Democratic saboteur.

And that was before he mocked disaster planning explicitly.

David Brooks:

Combined with his laughably hypocritical grandstanding on the bailout money (as Matthews points out), Jindal is in for a deeply unpleasant week or two, and a couple of big dents in his presidential hopes. This was ugly.

...though, as an aside, I would also like to note that, when discussing the speech of an Indian American governor, I think it's deeply inappropriate to invoke the term "outsourcing." Just sayin'.

now it's official

The biggest drag on the McCain campaign: not Bush, not Iraq, not taxes. From TPM, on the new NBC/Wall St. Journal poll:

Respondents were read a list of things and were asked to pick the two that most concern them about McCain. Thirty-four percent named Palin, versus only 23% for the runner-up, which was that it seems likely he'd continue Bush's policies.

That would seem to suggest that Palin may have become a greater liability for McCain than Bush.

Separately, the poll's toplines show Obama with an expanded lead of 10 points over McCain among registered voters, 52%-42%.

I believe this is the part where the media starts referring to her as "polarizing."

I've been saying it for a while now: by the time this thing is over, John McCain will seriously regret this decision.

the Couric interview: yes, there's more. And then, no more.

I have to agree with Josh: it's pretty clear that she has no idea what the right to privacy is as it relates to Roe v. Wade and abortion rights. Not being able to name any Supreme Court she disagrees with is the best part of this clip, of course (really? couldn't even pull out the ol' tried and true Dred Scott decision?), but both of those botches reveal the same ignorance. She just doesn't know anything about American judicial history other than "Roe v. Wade granted a constitutional right to abortion." Once she muffed the second question, there was no point in Couric asking her what she thinks of the decisions that would tell us more about Palin's ideology, like Griswold v. Connecticut or, for that matter, the Hamdi or Hamdan decisions. Palin is so helpless on this topic that it would've looked like Couric was bullying her.

Looking back on the historically awful decision to let Palin go to bat in the majors, the Crazy Train is, ahem, shifting its strategy. From CNN:

SEDONA, Arizona (CNN) – Sarah Palin's interview Tuesday with conservative talker Hugh Hewitt gave the vice presidential candidate a chance to showcase elements of her life story and demonstrate some of the folksiness that's been central to her political success.

It's exactly the kind of interview that voters can expect to see from the governor in the coming weeks, according to a Palin adviser, who recognized that there is hunger in Republican circles and among the public at large to see a less-scripted, more authentic candidate. That means more comfortable settings like conservative talk radio, and fewer opportunities for Palin to stumble, as was the case with a pair of high-profile network interviews with ABC and CBS.

As an email I got today joked, she's a turtle on a fencepost: "You know she didn't get up there by herself, she doesn't belong up there, and she doesn't know what to do while she's up there, and you just wonder what kind of dummy put her up there to begin with".

Conservatives have finally gotten their wish: a candidate who really is just an average Joe, someone they can have a beer with. Be careful what you wish for.

Sarah Palin reads EVERY NEWS SOURCE IN THE WORLD

This Couric interview is like a goldmine of epic fail. A bottomless abyss of stupid. I keep plumbing the depths, digging down further than I'm comfortable with, only to find... more fail.

If it were a movie, I'm pretty sure it would be Plan 9 from Outer Space: so jaw-droppingly terrible, such a spectacular failure, that watching it first evokes surprise, then derisive laughter, then a feeling of pity and embarrassment for all those involved (Katie herself aside, of course, who will benefit immeasurably from this trainwreck).

the Couric interview makes SNL

That can't be good for the McCain campaign.

On Saturday, Sarah Palin also became the latest public figure to agree with Obama's position on attacking terrorist camps in Pakistan. Woopsy!

the benefits of competition

Josh Marshall has an interesting point. Certainly, there's no denying the evidence.

Worst President Ever

61% of historians agree. Seriously:

In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.

Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history. Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations.
...
“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

Ouch. Can't be good for his BFF John "Crazy Train" McCain.

"Wasn't that, like, the Bay of Pigs thing?"

This woman has a high profile job in the Executive Office explaining presidential decisions and opinions to the press and voting public.

Suffice to say it has not gone well.

I guess that's what you get when you hire Olive Snook to be your press secretary.

outed and offed

Oh my God! From Larry Johnson, former CIA agent and classmate of Plame:

In 2004 the FBI received intelligence that Al Qaeda hit teams were enroute to the United States to kill Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Valerie Plame. The FBI informed Valerie of this threat... As the mother of two pre-school children, her first thoughts were about protecting her kids. She took the threat seriously and asked for help.

When the White House learned of these threats they sprung into action. They beefed up Secret Service protection for Vice President Cheney and provided security protection to Karl Rove. But they declined to do anything for Valerie. That was a CIA problem.

Valerie contacted the office of Security at CIA and requested assistance. They told her too fucking bad and to go pound sand. They did not use those exact words, but they told her she was on her own.
...
So if you have wondered why Joe and Val are a little pissed off, this might help shed some additional light on the matter. Not only did the Bush Administration out a covert intelligence officer working on the most sensitive national security issues in a time of war, but when that officer faced a direct threat to her life and her family’s safety because of that public exposure, they did not do a goddamn thing to help.

Apparently Plame recounts this story in her new book, Fair Game. I heard Terry Gross interviewing her yesterday, and when conversation turned to the Bush Administration and the exposure of her identity to the Prince of Darkness, Plame actually dropped the T-bomb ("treason"). That's a pretty serious charge to be throwing around,* and I don't know that I've ever actually heard someone in a non-elected, non-appointed government office use that word before.

My guess at the time was that someone she knew and had been working closely with had died because of that exposure. She was mad as hell.

*-- Not that Plame's characterization of the outing of a covert CIA operative is necessarily wrong or right, mind you; it's just that it's much stronger than the language I think most people are accustomed to hearing.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

From the BBC:

US Army snipers in Iraq are ordered to "bait" areas with explosives and ammunition and then kill whoever picks them up, according to court documents.
...
"Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it," he said.

"If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against US Forces."
...
Within months of the "baiting" programme being introduced, three snipers from Capt Didier's platoon, which was attached 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, were charged with premeditated murder after using "drop items" to make shootings appear legitimate, according to the Post.

What is this, Operation Elmer Fudd?

I'm sure it's been asked already, but if you were walking down the street and saw a cartridge of bullets on the ground, what are the chances you would pick it up?

Giuliani's ineptitude screwed firefighters on 9/11

Wow. And the GOP wants this guy to be president?

Haven't we had enough of Republican incompetence for a couple of years?

resemblance?

I'm just sayin'.

Stewart and Oliver on Gonzales' testimony

Via Crooks and Liars. It's so freakin' funny because it's absolutely true. I'm not sure it's even caricature, and Oliver's depiction of Gonzales' "options" in how to handle the testimony is precisely what many have been saying.