Romney Shaking That Etch a Sketch Just As Hard As He Can, To No Avail

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Last week, conservatives of all stripes were handed a great big steaming pile of disappointment when the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") was constitutional. In particular, the Supremes upheld the "individual mandate," which requires most people to buy insurance or pay a penalty.

The reaction was pretty much what you'd expect from the unhinged right, for whom Obama Derangement Syndrome is the new normal. There were calls for the impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts. Someone briefly changed Roberts' Wikipedia page to brand him "Chief Traitor of the United States."

Former Michigan GOP spokesperson Matt Davis went even further: "[H]as the Republic all but ceased to exist?" he wrote on the Michigan Capitol blog. "If so, then is armed rebellion today justified?" When pressed for clarification, he refused to back down: "You can't have people walking with lattes and signs and think the object of your opposition is going to take you seriously. Armed rebellion is the end point of that physical confrontation."

Later, however, he did amend his remarks to say he'd "take out the part about armed rebellion." Whew. Good thing. Else someone might think the right wing was made up of, you know, radical traitors.

Some conservatives did paw through the wreckage of their hopes for a black eye for the president, trying to salvage something. They found it, or so they thought, in Chief Justice Roberts' opinion that, while the mandate could not be upheld as an exercise of the Constitution's Commerce Clause, it did fall within their power to levy and collect taxes, because of the penalty provision. They seized upon the idea of a "tax" and began waving it about with glee.

"The biggest tax increase in the history of the world!" trumpeted Rush Limbaugh. (Wrong, as usual. As noted by numerous sources, even if you accept it as a tax, it comes in 10th in U.S. history, behind Bush the Elder's 1990 tax increase and far behind that of Saint Ronnie Reagan in 1992.)

But calling the mandate a tax increase, while it handed the Republicans in Congress a new talking point, handed their presidential candidate a ticking time bomb. Mitt Romney's health care plan in Massachusetts, which he's on video touting as a model for the country, contained a nearly identical health insurance mandate. But Romney's insisting he didn't raise taxes in Massachusetts.

So, when campaign spokesman Eric Fehnstrom (who gave us the notorious "Etch A Sketch" quote) told NBC that Mitt "disagreed with the ruling of the court. He agreed with the dissent written by Justice Scalia, which very clearly stated that the mandate was not a tax," he really didn't have any choice.

Or did he? If you're Mitt Romney, you always have a choice, if you regard directly contradicting what you just said as a choice. Wednesday, Mitt raised that Etch A Sketch above his head and shook with all his might to try to wipe out his campaign's stated position of the day before.

"While I agreed with the dissent," Romney said, "that's taken over by the fact that the majority of the court said it is a tax, and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There is no way around that."

Now, one could view this not as a contradiction, but as a nuanced statement that Romney still doesn't think it's a tax, but that it's legally one now, so we have to live with that. But that hands Romney another set of problems:

First, Republicans don't do nuance. Nuance is what they beat John Kerry to death with in 2004. The second problem is similar: The rubes, racists and rageaholics of the Republican base hate the president so much, they will completely disregard anything Romney says or does and pull the lever for him anyway.

Romney could kill a kitten with a hammer at the podium during a campaign stop and by nightfall, right-wing bloggers, Republican talk radio and Fox News would be flooded with pundits insisting the kitten had it coming, and it'd be an article of faith among the Rabid Right by the weekend.

But to independents and undecideds, saying, as Romney did in a CBS interview, "It wasn't a tax when I did it, but it is when it's in Obamacare," makes you look like a weasel. Romney is just that, of course, but this particular act of weaseltude may be the one he can't wiggle away from.

NRO Columnist Takes Issue With the President's Reading Choices, Makes Self Look Like Complete Idiot

National Review Online apparently needed to fill some column space and was running out of things to complain about in regard to Barack Obama. So they applied a scraper to the bottom of the barrel and came up with some dripping clump of ooze by the name of Tevi Troy, who's got his right wing panties in a bunch over--get this-- the books the President brought with him on vacation.

First, five of the six are novels, and the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality.

And:

Beyond the issue of fiction vs. nonfiction, there is also the question of genre. The Bayou Trilogy [by Daniel Woodrell of Winter's Bone fame]  has received excellent reviews, but it is a mystery series. While there is nothing wrong with that per se, not every presidential reading selection is worth revealing to the public....Room is another well-received novel, but it is about a mother and child trapped in an 11-by-11-foot room. This claustrophobic adventure does not strike me as the right choice for someone trying to escape the perception that he is trapped in a White House bubble....

This year’s list suggests that Obama needs to consider the messages sent by his reading more carefully. According to Mickey Kaus, the Obama list is “heavy on the wrenching stories of immigrant experiences, something the President already knows quite a bit about.” For this reason, Kaus feels that the list reveals an intellectually incurious president. Either that, or it is “a bit of politicized PR BS designed to help the President out.” In that case, he notes, “it’s sending the wrong message.” Either way, the annual book list should be a relatively easy way to make the president appear to be on top of things and in control. This year’s list, alas, reveals a president who appears to be neither.

Words fail me.

Oh, wait, no they don't.

Are you KIDDING ME?  Is there literally nothing these people  will not bitch about? JFK read James Bond novels and helped launch Ian Fleming from a writer with  middling sales to an icon. St Ronnie Reagan read The Hunt for Red October and did the same for Tom Clancy. But Barack Obama reads Daniel Woodrell and this somehow shows he's not "on top of things or in control?"

Maybe somebody should remind this  "Tevi Troy" person that the founder of the print version of National Review, William F. Buckley, also wrote genre fiction, namely eleven spy novels. Pretty good ones, too, at least judging from the couple I've read. But then, this so-called "senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former senior White House aide" probably never actually read Buckley, a true conservative whose shoes the current Klown Kollege at the NRO is not worthy to shine. Buckley's  probably spinning like a dynamo in his grave with the way these morons have defiled the name of conservatism. It used to be a political philosophy;  now it's nothing more than a reflex, an immediate rush to yell "foul" about anything the Democratic President does, no matter how trivial. The people at the NRO specialize in this sort of smallness, silliness and pettiness, and they make the entire movement look even more  ridiculous than Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin combined could do, and brother, that is saying something.

Minnesota Republican Hates Neil Gaiman, Capitalism (UPDATED)

Here's the story in a nutshell:

Neil Gaiman is a writer. He's a very good writer.

He's also a very entertaining speaker. He's so good that groups pay him to come speak.

He is, he freely admits, expensive.

A group who receives an arts subsidy from the State of Minnesota had access to some state arts money.

They offered to pay Neil Gaiman his market rate to come speak at a small library. He accepted. He did the job he agreed to do, was paid the agreed-upon price and, as it happens, donated the money to a couple of worthy charities. Everyone was, it seems, quite pleased (see "very entertaining speaker," above).

A particular Republican state legislator, however, was apparently offended by a talented and successful person getting paid the price he'd bargained for, for work he agreed to do, and accused Gaiman, whom "he hates", of being a "pencil-necked weasel" and "stealing" from the State of Minnesota.

Neil Gaiman delivered an epic, yet gentle smackdown: The Opinions of a Pencil-necked Weasel-thief.

Check it out.

Update: Said legislator has now "apologized for the name calling" because his Mama told him to. But he still has a problem with Gaiman getting paid his usual rate because, and I quote, "he's extremely financially successful."

Wouldn't Dean be calling this "Class Warfare" if a Democrat said someone rich should be working for free just because he was rich?

So Government CAN Create Jobs?

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Hey, remember when it was an article of faith for Republicans that government couldn’t create jobs?

Remember how back in those days, the speaker of the House, Bawlin’ John Boehner, said in the weekly Republican address to the nation, “Small businesses are the engine of job creation in America; they actually create jobs, the government doesn’t”?

Wow, I remember that like it was just last week. Well, actually, it was two weeks ago, but who’s counting?

Boehner was just following the party line set by former GOP Chairman Michael Steele, who stated unequivocally back during the heated debate over the stimulus bill that “not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.”

Well, apparently, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham didn’t get that memo. Graham pitched a hissy fit last week over the fact that the recent budget deal that prevented a government shutdown left out a project dear to his heart: a $50,000 study on deepening the port of Charleston.

Now, 50K may not seem like a whole lot of money in a trillion-plus-dollar budget. But the lack of that money sent Graham so ballistic that he threatened to “tie the Senate in knots” and block every one of President Obama’s pending nominations if he didn’t get it back. Reports that he would hold his breath till he turned blue could not be confirmed at press time.

Of course, the actual deepening of the port and the channel would cost a heck of a lot more than 50,000 smackers; in fact, the estimate at this point is $350 million. The $50,000 would just be for the study on whether the port should be deepened to accommodate bigger cargo ships. In my ongoing campaign that I call “I’ll Do It For Half That,” I will answer that question “Yes,” but only if the government sends me $25,000. Cash or cashier’s check preferred.

When questioned as to why this little chunk of pork was worth tying the Senate in knots over, Graham apparently forgot the doctrine that government spending is useless for job creation. Federal spending on the port of Charleston, he asserted, would create jobs.

“If you’re a Republican and you want to create jobs, then you need to invest in infrastructure that will allow us to create jobs,” he said. “How can you create jobs by shutting a port down that 260,000 people depend on?”

It’s just another example of the cognitive dissonance that allowed 114 politicians, almost all of them Republicans, to bitterly oppose the stimulus package, vote against it, wail after it passed that it was the Death of the Republic — then not only to accept stimulus funds for projects in their districts, but to take credit for bringing those projects home and, in some cases, actually attend the ribbon-cutting for those projects.

Because remember, to a tea partier, it’s not “government spending” if money or services flow to them. To a politician, it’s only “pork” or “earmarks” if it goes to someone else’s district. And to all Republicans, it’s “job-killing” if it’s something President Obama wants; it’s “job-creating” if it’s something they want, and never mind the reality.

This may be why, according to a recent poll by the organization Public Policy Polling, “after a little more than three months in charge, House Republicans have fallen so far out of favor with the American public that it’s entirely possible Democrats could take back control of the House next year.”

According to the most recent PPP survey, “43 percent of voters think that House Republicans are doing a worse job now than the Democrats did, compared to only 36 percent who think the GOP has brought an improvement,” and that “46 percent of voters say that if there was an election for Congress today they would vote Democratic, compared to only 41 percent who would vote Republican.”

So, new bosses who look just the same as the old boss, let me ask you the question I heard ad nauseum during the first two years of the Obama Presidency: How’s that change thing workin’ for ya?

State of the Union

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In President Obama’s State of the Union speech this past week, he continued some of the same themes of unity and bipartisanship from his speech in Tucson a couple of weeks ago.

“We are part of the American family,” he said. “We will move forward together, or not at all.”

But the greater challenge may be not just creating a unity of purpose between Republicans and Democrats but getting members of the two parties to get along with the people who are allegedly on their own side.

Rep. Paul Ryan was picked to give the traditional response from the loyal opposition. Ryan’s speech was, like all Republican rhetoric on the deficit, long on exhortations to cut ­spending but awfully vague on exactly which spending to cut. This may be because Ryan’s own plan, dubbed the “roadmap,” calls for severe cuts in Social Security and the dismantling of Medicare, two huge benefits paid to the GOP’s most loyal constituency: senior citizens.

It’s quite a balancing act the Republicans do. If they really tried to make the cuts that would be required to balance the budget without tax increases, their elderly supporters would storm the Capitol (albeit very slowly) and drag their congressman down the street by the heels behind their little Medicare-funded Rascal scooters.

But then, after Ryan’s response, something unusual happened. CNN broadcast another response from another Republican, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who claimed to be giving the “tea party” reaction.

You can always depend on Bachmann to bring the crazy, and she didn’t disappoint. She delivered the whole speech staring off camera, as if she couldn’t bear to look the American people in the eye.

As it turns out, she was looking into another camera, the one broadcasting to the tea party faithful via the Internet, which was also the camera with the teleprompter. It seems that teleprompters, like everything else the right claims to despise, are just fine if you’re a Republican.

And what would a speech from Rep. Crazy-Eyes be without a heaping helping of paranoid fantasies and outright fabrications?

Fresh from her interview in which she asserted that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly to eradicate slavery,” Bachmann doubled down on the misinformation, repeating ­frequently debunked claims that “Obamacare” would result in “16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing” the bill and bizarre warnings about “government bureaucrats telling you what light bulbs to buy.”

CNN’s decision to air the speech drew criticism from some Republicans. One aide sent out an e-mail calling it “irresponsible journalism” for CNN to aid Bachmann in her quest to become the GOP’s loosest cannon.

The most surprising criticism, however, came from a tea party group in Bachmann’s home state.

“Please call Michele Bachmann’s office and tell her that she does not speak for the tea party,” the group said in a mass e-mail. “The Tea Party Patriots Organization is a grassroots organization. One person has no right to speak for the whole organization.”

Wow. Too crazy for the tea party. That’s pretty impressive.

On the other side of the aisle, the president got some ­immediate pushback from his own party. In response to his promise to veto any legislation that arrived on his desk with so-called “earmarks,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sniffed that it was a “great applause line” but that Obama “should back off and let us do what we do.” Which is, apparently, diverting as much ­government money as possible to their states or districts to keep the voters happy.

It’s another one of those dirty secrets closely held by ­lawmakers of both parties. Everyone pretends to deplore “pork” or “earmarks” or whatever they’re calling it this year, but every legislator knows their voters won’t keep loving them if they don’t bring some of that federal money home to them. It’s the one thing both parties have always seemed to agree on.

Even Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was resisting a proposed earmark ban until someone from the tea party put a severed horse’s head in his bed or something and caused him to reverse himself, at least in public.

It remains to be seen if this will continue, or if GOP lawmakers will revert to their traditional stance that it’s not “government spending” if the money’s going to their district or their big campaign contributors.

Meanwhile, the two parties continue to squabble, not just with each other, but also among themselves. Maybe what we really need is not just bipartisanship, but multi-partisanship.

It's Not Government Money If It Goes To Me

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One of the most famous quotes from the Days of Rage over health care reform was spoken by an elderly gentleman who got all fired up on a steady diet of tea party hysteria and Sarah Palin Tweets and loudly demanded that the "government keep its hands off my Medicare."

At first I saw it as an amusing example of just how misinformed some people could be. Then I began to notice more and more that a lot of the people who were complaining the loudest about the dangers of a single-payer, publicly funded government health insurance program were themselves recipients under just such a program (the aforementioned Medicare).

A recent Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi noted the number of people at a tea party event who were riding those little scooters - you know, the ones you see on TV commercials that promise that Medicare will pay 100 percent of the cost. He rather unkindly suggested that "[t]he average tea partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them."

There's an alternate explanation, to wit: Tea partiers suffer from a strange form of cognitive dissonance that causes them to think that, if the money's spent on them or folks like them, it's not really government spending at all. It's the kindest explanation I can think of for the tea party's love of certain candidates whose public stances are wildly out of sync with their behavior when they're not campaigning.

Take, for example, Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul. Paul is no fan of Medicare; he's called it "socialized medicine" and is on record proposing that seniors be subject to at least a $2,000 deductible.

"But try selling that during an election," Paul admitted in a 2009 video.

Now it's 2010, and Paul is very, very unhappy that his opponent is using that statement. Quoting him accurately, according to Paul, is "politics in its lowest form." Well, he'll probably scream like a murdered bunny if his rival starts pointing out that the supposedly tight-fisted Paul also opposed a government proposal to cut some Medicare payments to doctors like himself.

He justified this by protesting that he and his fellow physicians "should be able to make a comfortable living." That's the Paul solution: Grandma pays more, Rand Paul keeps his comfortable living. Anyone who'd buy into this must not really think that Paul's getting that Medicare money from the government.

This curious blind spot regarding government money applies to other types of spending as well. Arizona congressional candidate Jesse Kelly, a TP favorite, really hates government spending in general and the federal stimulus in particular.

"It must stop now," Kelly says of the stimulus. "This is bribery with taxpayer money, and it's a disgrace." He also scoffs at the idea that government spending on infrastructure can create jobs. "Government is not a job creator, it's a job crusher," he claims.

Yet, according to an article in The Tucson Weekly, Kelly's company, Don Kelly Construction, gets a whopping 90 percent of its business from federal contracts, including some projects being paid for with that bad old stimulus money. Guess he doesn't realize that government contracts (and therefore the workers he hires to fulfill them) are paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Another TP-backed candidate is Florida gubernatorial hopeful Rick Scott, who also hates, hates, hates the stimulus. According to The Tampa Bay Times, Scott said back on June 2 that he "would fight all the stimulus money" and that Florida "should not have accepted that money."

Perhaps Florida shouldn't have, but when Xfone Inc., a company which lists Scott as a "controlling shareholder," was offered 60 million of those precious taxpayer dollars "to develop high speed Internet infrastructure," Scott put up less of a fight for his virtue than a drunken cheerleader on prom night.

So I have to think that these tea party candidates and the cranky old folks who love them are just suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance brought on by mental illness or possibly a dietary deficiency.

Otherwise, I'd have to believe that they were just unprincipled demagoguing hypocrites who just pretend to care about government spending and only really care that the money's not lining their pockets or being spent by their own people. And that would be terrible, wouldn't it?

Another Loyal American

TPMDC:

Tennessee Congressman and gubenatorial candidate Zack Wamp talks secession if the next two votes don't go the Republicans' way:

"I hope that the American people will go to the ballot box in 2010 and 2012 so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government," said Wamp, who has also promised to refuse to implement the[health care reform] law at the state level if he is elected, in an interview with the Hotline.

Wamp also praised Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) -- who has also floated the idea of secession -- for leading the fight against the health care bill. "Patriots like Rick Perry have talked about these issues because the federal government is putting us in an untenable position at the state level," said Wamp.

Jesus Christ, all I did was question the wisdom of the Iraq War and people like Wamp called me a traitor. They're talking about starting another Civil War, and no one on the right bats an eyelash.

You Know Who Else Talked a Lot About Nazis? HITLER!!!!!

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I’m old enough to remember a time long, long ago when it was absolutely the worst thing you could do to compare the president of the United States to Adolf Hitler. And by “long, long ago,” I mean 2004.

That’s the year that the liberal website Moveon.org sponsored a contest for homemade political campaign ads. One of the contest entries featured quotes from George Dubbya Bush to the effect that God had toldhim to strike the country’s enemies and that he was “taking steps to protect the homeland.”

These were superimposed over stock footage of Hitler speaking to cheering, swastika-waving crowds. It was crude, it was heavy-handed, it was over the top and unfair. It also was taken down off the website, and it didn’t make the cut for the first round of the competition.

Another ad said, “What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003.” The final two frames of that proposed ad included Hitler with his hand raised and then a shot of Bush with his hand up taking the oath of office. That one got pulled, too.

But that didn’t stop Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie from calling the ads “the worst and most vile form of political hate speech” and demanding that the Democratic candidates, none of whom had anything to do with the ads, “repudiate this pollution of our political process” by denouncing them.

It looks like the Republicans are still ultra-super-sensitive, in a “Princess and the Pea” kinda way, about being in any way even ­vaguely associated with Hitler or the Nazis.

When Vice President Joe Biden recently sent out a fundraising

­message saying there was going to be a “GOP blitzkrieg” of dirty ­campaign tactics, Republican ­lawmakers went verruckt (crazy). Despite the fact that “blitzkrieg” and its shortened form “blitz” have long since passed into common usage as an expression for any fast, overwhelming attack, the GOP claimed they were being compared to the invaders of Poland.

“Invoking the Nazis’ crimes against humanity in a political debate is simply inappropriate,” a spokesman for Minority Leader John Boehner said. But apparently it’s only “inappropriate” or “vile” if you’re a Democrat. As you know, the only principle the GOP has left is IOKIYAR (It’s OK If You’re a Republican), and comparing their political rivals to Nazis is, it seems, A-OK with them:

* Posters and placards of President Obama dressed as Hitler abound at tea party rallies.

* National Review Editor Jonah Goldberg wrote a notorious book entitled “Liberal Fascism.”

* Conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, writing about the $20 billion dollar relief fund paid by BP for the Gulf oil spill, directly compared the fund to laws passed by Germany’s Reichstag that gave Hitler “dictatorial powers.” (A Republican congressman read the column out loud on the floor of the house. )

* On May 16 of this year, Republican elder statesman Newt Gingrich went on Fox News and asserted that “the secular socialist machine” (his buzzword for the currently elected government) “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever did.”

Backed into a corner by host Chris Wallace, Gingrich said that he wasn’t really calling the administration Nazis, he was just saying they were as big a threat as the Nazis. You know, sort of like saying, “I’m not saying your sister’s a prostitute, I’m just saying she sleeps with a lot of guys for money.”

The biggest proponent of associating President Obama and ill-defined “liberals” as Nazis, however, is Glenn Beck. Pretty much any spokesman for the administration or its policies can expect at some point to be compared by Beck to Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels. He’s responded to critics of Fox News by invoking a famous poem about the Holocaust and directly comparing Fox to the Jews. (“When they’re done with Fox, and you decide to speak out on something. The old, ‘first they came for the Jews, and I wasn’t Jewish.”)

And the list goes on, with not a peep from the Republican leadership.

In the responses to this column, both in e-mail and in the online ­comments section, I tend to get some negative feedback for using terms like “wingnut.” Maybe I should become a Republican again. Then I can call people anything, up to and including Nazis, and no one will say a mumblin’ word.

NV Senate Candidate: You Can't Be Mean to Me! I'm a Girl!

The Washington Monthly:

Nevada Republican Senate Candidate Sharron Angle:

"...dirty tricks Harry [Reid] is up to his dirty tricks one more time and he's just trying to hit the girl," Angle said on the Alan Stock Show.

"You know, isolate that Sharron Angle, marginalize her and then demonize her," she said in a separate appearance on the Heidi Harris Show. "And he has been doing that to me and what we need to do is say, 'you know Harry, it's not going to do you any good to hit the girl.'"

It's the same bullshit we've seen in regards to Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. Any time they're criticized, one of their supporters is bound to come out with some faux-feminist claptrap like "Sexist! You're just afraid of a successful and powerful conservative woman!"

UPDATE: As someone reminded me, the die hard Hillary Clintonites (aka PUMAs) did the same thing. And they were idiots, too.

You can't have it both ways. You can't claim to be a feminist and then try to use your gender as a shield from criticism of your actual record.

And isn't calling a woman a "girl" supposed to be a no-no? Guess IOKIYAR!

Please, Brer Rush, Don't Throw Us In That Briar Patch

Limbaugh: I'll Leave US If Health Care Reform Passes (VIDEO)

Responding to a caller who asked him where he would go for health care if Congress enacts reform, Limbaugh replied,

I don't know. I'll just tell you this, if this passes and it's five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented -- I am leaving the country. I'll go to Costa Rica.

First: Costa Rica has a socialized, single payer health care system.

Second: It's ranked higher than ours.

Third: Remember when Alec Baldwin was called a traitor for saying he'd leave the country if Bush was re-elected?

hat tip: Balloon Juice

GOP: No Matter What Happens, America's Losing

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First off, it seems that we need to start with a correction.

Last week, we discussed the silliness, hypocrisy and downright dishonesty of the wingnut tantrums over the fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a.k.a. the Undiebomber, was read his Miranda rights immediately upon being taken into custody. As it turns out, he wasn't "Mirandized," as they say, for almost nine hours.

According to a timeline released by administration officials, and reported in The Washington Post, Abdulmutallab was taken into custody and then taken to a hospital for treatment of the burns he suffered in his botched attempt to detonate the explosives in his undershorts.

He was interrogated about three hours later by a specially picked pair of questioners (one a bomb specialist), with the questions -centering on immediate emergency concerns, like whether there were other bombs about to go off. During this session, the report asserts, the agents got "some useful intelligence."

Then Abdulmutallab went back into surgery. When he came out, a second FBI team questioned him again. At that point, the report says, he stopped talking, and only then was he Mirandized.

This report clearly shows that assertions by Republicans like Kit Bond, Pat Buchanan and Lindsey Graham that the Undiebomber was "read his rights within 50 minutes" were dead wrong. I await their retraction. And wait, and wait, and wait...

Of course, wingnuts being wingnuts, whatever the truth of the matter may be, they'll probably find some way to spin it as being some colossal failure by the Obama administration in the War on Terror.

Nowhere was this more clear than in a recent editorial in the journal Foreign Affairs, where former Bush speechwriter turned regular Washington Post columnist Marc Theissen complained that the Obama administration was killing too many terrorists.

"With every drone strike that vaporizes a senior al-Qaeda leader," Theissen groused after such a strike killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, "actionable -intelligence is vaporized along with him. Dead terrorists can't tell you their plans to strike America."

But wait. Didn't Dick Cheney just tell us that Obama wasn't treating the fight against terrorists enough like a war? And now the problem is that he's killing too many of them?

Wait, it gets better. A recent joint operation between U.S. and Pakistani forces captured the military leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. This mook was the highest-value target captured in the Afghan War since 2001. But that, according to supposed "terrorism expert" and perennial Fox News commentator Michael Scheuer, was "no big deal," because "you win wars by killing people, not capturing them."

To the casual observer, this might seem a tad confusing. Are the Republicans saying we're killing too many terrorists, or not enough? Do they contend that killing top al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists in Afghanistan is a good thing or a bad thing? What's the overriding principle here? Or is it that they have no real principles at all?

Well, there is one principle operating here, of a sort. I've noted here frequently that the Republican Party during the Bush years abandoned every principle it once claimed to stand for - fiscal responsibility, limited government, the rule of law - in favor of a single belief, that everything's permissible if you're a Republican.

And the principle here, if you can call it that, is the flip side of that: Everything a Democrat does or proposes doing is wrong. It's the same double-think/double-speak that lets the congressional Republican caucus scream about how deficits are destroying our future while voting, purely along party lines, against the same "pay as you go" rules that cut deficits in the '90s and left George W. Bush a surplus to squander.

Back during the height of the controversy over the Iraq War, one of the most infuriating slanders by the Right was that liberals "wanted us to lose." Now an increasingly hysterical right wing seems unconcerned whether we're actually winning or losing against terrorists, because they're so determined to call everything a loss.

"Lawyering Up" Doesn't Always Mean Clamming Up

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When I heard about the attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, I immediately thought two things.

The first was, "Thank God everyone's all right." (Except, it seems for the hapless Abdulmutallab, whose attempt to set off a liquid explosive in his underwear succeeded only in causing severe burns to his intimate areas. I confess I'm a bad person, because I laughed hard.)

The second thought I had was, "Hey, what's that giant whirring sound?"

That sound was, it turns out, the Right Wing Spin Machine firing up, ready to politicize this near-tragedy for all it was worth. President Obama, it seems, had done nothing right. He had stayed on his Christmas vacation in (gasp!) Hawaii rather than go on TV immediately, pat us on the head and "reassure" us that we were safe from Scary Dark-Skinned People with bombs in their underwear.

His Justice Department had chosen to indict Abdulmutallab and prosecute him in the civilian justice system rather than send him to Gitmo and put him in front of a Super Secret Military Tribunal. My God, Pat Buchanan sputtered on the Sunday after the attempt, he hasn't even been tortured yet!

But the thing that apparently put the worst twist in the wingnuts' knickers was that Abdulmutallab was - I can hardly bear to even say it - read his Miranda rights upon his capture!

If you've watched any television cop shows in the last 40 years, you know the Miranda warning by heart: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney, etc. It's called the Miranda warning after the name of the case, Miranda vs. Arizona, which established the principle that a defendant had to be informed of these rights before being interrogated by the police.

Despite the outcry at the time (and ever since), it wasn't all that new or radical a principle: Both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the FBI's procedures required that a suspect be informed of his right to remain silent and of his right to counsel. But, as everyone knows, the FBI and the military were, then as now, well-known hotbeds of liberalism.

Now, it might seem strange that all this fuss was being made over the Undiebomber being charged in civilian court, while the same people never complained when the so-called "Shoe Bomber," Richard Reid, got the same treatment. Reid committed almost exactly the same acts during the Bush administration, and Dubbya didn't interrupt his vacation or make a statement about the attempt for six days.

The reaction from the Right? (Cue sound of crickets chirping.)

Both Republican Sen. Kit Bond and wingnut emeritus Newt Gingrich have struggled and failed in public to make some distinction, with Gingrich finally falling back on a time-honored tactic: making stuff up. Reid got the benefits of civilian law and the Undiebomber shouldn't, Gingrich said, because Reid's an American citizen. (Not true. Reid is actually British.)

But, the objection goes, if you let a suspect lawyer up, he'll clam up. You won't get any good intelligence from him! More Scary Dark-Skinned People might be coming to kill us! Aaaaaaaah!

Real life and real lawyering, however, are a good bit different from an episode of "Law & Order." The last instructions a terrorist gets from his commanders may be "resist until death," but any halfway decent lawyer, given a client like the Undiebomber who was caught in the act, is not, I guarantee you, giving that advice.

He's very likely telling his client, "Look here, Slim, your chances of walking out of here whistling are exactly zero. Maybe you need to start trying to save as much of your own behind as you can, with the only thing you've got that they want: names, places and methods."

And, it appears, that's exactly what's happening with Abdulmutallab. There've been some fits and starts; he was originally quite forthcoming with the intel, then did clam up for a while. But after his family was allowed to see him, Abdulmutallab has reportedly been "cooperating on a daily basis" and providing "actionable intelligence that could help prevent terror attempts on U.S. soil."

OK, so it's not as much fun for wingnuts as torturing him might be. But it's undoubtedly working better. And we don't have to abandon real American principles like the Rule of Law to do it.

Sarah Palin Better Get Busy

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Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, in a private meeting last August, referred to liberal opponents of President Obama's health-care plan as "[bad word] retarded."

Well, Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor, failed vice-presidential candidate and soon-to-be Fox News commentator, wasn't going to take that lying down, you betcha. Palin (who, you might remember, has a son with Down syndrome), quickly leapt to her recent political forum of choice, i.e., her Facebook page, to call for Emanuel's resignation immediately, if not sooner.

"I would ask the president to show decency in this process by -eliminating one member of that inner circle, Mr. Rahm Emanuel, and not allow Rahm's continued indecent tactics to cloud efforts," Palin wrote.

Emanuel apologized for his comment, but that wasn't enough for Palin, who wrote: "Just as we'd be appalled if any public figure of Rahm's stature ever used the 'N-word' or other such inappropriate language, Rahm's slur on all God's children with cognitive and developmental disabilities - and the people who love them - is unacceptable, and it's heartbreaking."

Doggone right. I'm glad to see that Gov. Palin is taking a stand against the use of the word "retarded" to describe liberals. I look forward to her demand for the immediate firing of conservative radio host Michael Savage, who is constantly referring on his show to "liberal retards."

I also look forward to her calling for the immediate banning from the airwaves of conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who once wrote of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "Is no one going to remark on what a great country it is where a mentally retarded woman can become speaker of the House?"

Coulter is actually pretty fond of using the word; she referred to talk show host Bill Maher's audience as "MoveOn retards." And in an interview on Fox News' Sean Hannity program, she referred to former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan as "retarded." "It's not offensive, it's accurate," Coulter insisted when challenged on it by allegedly liberal co-host Alan Colmes.

Hannity, it should be noted, never said a mumblin' word. So maybe Ms. Palin should be calling for his resignation, too.

Then there's bowtied Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, who's referred to Canada as "America's retarded cousin" not once, but twice. There's also frequently utilized wingnut talking head Dick Morris, who, after he got fired from the Clinton administration for letting hookers listen in on his phone calls to the White House, became the go-to guy for anyone who wanted a sound bite bashing the Clintons, Barack Obama or any Democrat.

Morris, on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor," criticized Obama's stimulus package by saying: "What he didn't quite explain to me - and maybe I'm a little retarded about this - is how are you going to get banks to give people car loans when the government is elbowing them aside?"

I'm sure Gov. Palin missed that slur, but now that it's been called to her attention, I'm sure she'll be calling for Dick Morris to be banned from Fox. It's going to get pretty lonely on that channel, but it's a small price to pay to defend against those who slur "God's children with cognitive and developmental disabilities."

While we're at it, I look forward to Ms. Palin expressing her outrage at every conservative blogger who's ever used the word "libtard" (a combination of the words "liberal" and "retard") to describe anyone to the left of themselves. A quick Google search of the Republican Web site "Redstate" for the word "libtard", for example, turned up five long pages of hits.

And on Facebook, where the Resigning Woman is so fond of holding court, there are groups called "Al Gore is Retarded," "Liberals are Retarded," "Hollywood Is Full of Retarded Liberals," etc. Fortunately, since there's an easy way to ask for the administrators of Facebook to remove offensive groups, she can take a stand right away. There are only about 500 Facebook groups that use the word "retarded" in their names, so it shouldn't take more than a week or so.

If she's going to go after everyone who ever referred to liberals as "retarded," Ms. Palin had better get busy. But I know she will. Because if she's only upset by the use of the word "retarded" when a Democrat uses it, her outrage might seem, shall we say, a bit selective, even a bit hypocritical. And we know she's not a hypocrite, right?

Right?

Insurance Coverage For Abortion: IOKIYAR!

POLITICO.com:

Leading up to passage of the House health care reform bill last week, 176 House Republicans joined 64 Democrats in voting for the so-called Stupak amendment, a measure that prohibits federal funds from being used to buy health insurance that covers elective abortions.

But the Republican National Committee’s health insurance plan covers elective abortion – a procedure the party’s own platform calls “a fundamental assault on innocent human life."

Informed of the coverage, RNC spokeswoman Gail Gitcho told POLITICO that the policy pre-dates the tenure of current RNC Chairman Michael Steele.

The current policy has been in effect since 1991, and we are taking steps to address the issue,” Gitcho said.

Wonder if the Blue Dog Dems who voted for Stupak have coverage for elective abortions in their goverment sponsored health care policies as well?

The mantra of the opponents of Health Care Reform: "coverage for me, but not for thee."

But Don't Ever Forget, It's the Liberals Who Are Filled With Hate

ThePilot.com : Obama's Planned Speech Controversial

President Obama will make a live address to the nation's schoolchildren at noon Tuesday -- the first of its kind in American history. The speech will be broadcast through the White House's Web site and on C-SPAN. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the president will "challenge students to work hard, set education goals, and take responsibility for their learning."

But many parents are concerned that Obama will take the opportunity to indoctrinate children with his legislative agenda, and some are threatening to pull their kids out of school that day.

Superintendent Susan Purser said Moore County is no exception, and that she and Board of Education members have been receiving e-mails and phone calls from concerned parents expressing their displeasure with the speech. Purser said the school system is not mandating participation but is instead making it a "site-based" decision.

I'm sure you'll be shocked to know that I was never a big fan of George Dubbya Bush. But you know what? If he'd given a speech to the nation's schoolchildren, I wouldn't have kept my kids home from school that day for fear he'd pollute their brains with his scary "legislative agenda". And I know damn well if anyone had even suggested doing such a thing, the wingnuts would be all up in arms about "Bush Derangement Syndrome" and shrieking about how "hateful liberals" couldn't even give the President a respectful hearing. But once again, IOKIYAR!