Random thoughts, dubious rants, curiosities and worthy citations on the media, politics, marketing, music, inanity, and animals, among other things. Words and pictures and stuff, mostly from south central Wisconsin USA
Michigan is looking more and more like it won't be in the swing state column this fall. PPP's newest poll there finds Barack Obama leading the entire Republican field by double digits.
The biggest surprise in the numbers might be how badly Obama is beating Mitt Romney- he leads him by 16 points at 54-38. That's a major departure from PPP's previous 3 Michigan President polls, which found Obama ahead by only 4-7 points. Romney's seen a major decline in his personal favorability in the state over the last 6 months from 39/43 to now 29/58. His numbers have dropped across the board but the most striking shift is with independents. He's gone from a +14 spread with them at 48/34 to a -20 one at 32/52.
For the past three years, Republicans have mostly worked to defeat anything and everything the President touched. That's their choice. And it's their strategy... a very cynical strategy. Rather than work together with Democrats for the good of the nation, they set aside things (a lot of them) they used to support purely for a cold, calculated push to regain power so as to reward the top one percent. Seems like working class Americans are starting to get it, especially as the economy continues to improve.
Reminds me of something Albert Einstein once said: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Brilliant man, that Albert.
And the quick apologies at the end apparently speak for Marcie Wheeler, who had this (and more) to say on her blog afterwords...
At some point, though, we as a country have to be willing and able
to weigh what the Village did in the late 90s against the massive
illegality of the Bush White House and, finally, realize there are more
important things than a blow job, and we need to take those more
important things at least as seriously as that magic blow job that
captivated the press for so long under Clinton.
I don't know whether my efforts today helped or hurt those efforts.
Next time I'll just repeat, endlessly, torture torture torture. It'll
probably cause the same kind of outrage.
Offensive? The phrase "blow job?" Gimme a fuckin' break. DOJ maneuvers leading to illegal torture... orchestrated by Darth Cheney in the shadows... now that's offensive.
Uh oh. More fall-out from the failed foreign policy of the Cheney/Bush administration.
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea, facing international sanction for
this week's nuclear test, threatened on Wednesday to attack the South
after Seoul joined a U.S.-led initiative to check vessels suspected of
carrying equipment for weapons of mass destruction.
A North Korean army spokesman also said the country was no longer
bound by the armistice signed at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War
because Washington had ignored its responsibility as a signatory by
drawing South Korea into its naval initiative.
Before George W. Bush got his mitts on things, North Korea was more or less a contained, though fucked up, dictatorship. Now, they're an unstable, got-nothing-to-lose, fucked up dictatorship with an ailing yet trigger-happy dictator. Yet another flaming bag of diplomatic poop left at the White House front door by the worst president ever as he left town.
I'm sure Darth Cheney will find a way to tag the Obama administration for whatever happens... unless it's a peaceful and legal resolution. Then, of course it will be god's will or some crap like that.
I recall not too long ago, people who said anything -- anything -- negative about President Bush (or any of his policies, pronouncements, signing statements etc.) were traitors, cowards, or terrorist-lovers. That was back when the cowboy/idiot president was more or less a puppet with Dick Cheney pulling the strings from the secret, undisclosed, secure location.
Now that he's a "private citizen," Cheney is getting more airtime than that guy who won American Idol. And he is using that time to go offensively on the offensive to rip on President Obama for trying to undo the colossal mess that he and W pooped onto America. Today's snarl-fest at the American Enterprise Institute was typical [full text here]. I think Laurence O'Donnel put it best when he described the speech... "as sleazy a presentation from a vice president as we've had since Spiro Agnew. It was a complete abomination." Ouch. Of course, the truth hurts. Cheney is a first-class asshole who is pretty much out to save his hide and perhaps that of a henchman or two.
What an asshole. Unlike how he and his cronies blasted naysayers of the Bush/Cheney cabal, I appreciate his dissent . Why? Because he only reinforces how wrong, how arrogant, and how misguided the previous Republican administration really was.
Dick Cheney: the new old face of the Republican Party.
In their quest to move further into irrelevancy, our Republican friends are going to their A Game: trying to scare people, ridiculing diplomacy, and advocating torture.
Wow. Someone needs a new branding consultant. Although, in terms of being helpful in further marginalizing their party, I hope they stick with this strategy.
I have to hand it to Markos at the Daily Kos. In addition to his blogging skills, he also is pretty adept at visual branding. And he's a helper. Today he offers an updated logo for the Republican Party that, like any good branding effort, captures the essence of the brand in a simple graphic representation. But it also builds the existing but outdated logo.
His "crack team of designers" took it from this...
We call it the Goposaur. It's looking back, to the past, refusing to
evolve with the times as it longingly dreams of the days when only
good, white, god-fearing dinosaurs roamed the earth and those
multi-hued and highly evolved mammals weren't taking over the place and
turning it into a socialist same-sex utopia with reeducation camps and
100% taxes. It's also ready to "go Galt", which apparently is a
euphemism for quitting work and starving to death, thus negating the
need for the giant asteroid. Their brains are the size of peanuts,
after all.
As a fan of branding, I love this. I hope the GOP adopts it, and enters it into all the branding and ad competitions. It's guaranteed to place well.
I've seen more of Dick Cheney's mug on TV in the past three months than I may have seen during the previous three years. He suddenly has the uncanny ability to detect a live camera and instantly get before it. Usually, his presence means he is once again badmouthing the President, telling us America is less safe, and that repeatedly simulating a slow drowning (a.k.a. water boarding) is totally cool because, you know, they don't actually die or anything.
This is, for lack of any solid leadership, the de facto face of the leadership of the Republican Party these days. I couldn't be more pleased. Who better to be in the media all the time to remind people how we got into the huge, multi-tiered mess we're in as a nation? And when Dick is not available, he sends his daughter Liz to lie out her ass on his behalf. Priceless.
Indeed, one party's blessing is another party's curse...
To Democrats, Mr. Cheney is the perfect person to remind the nation
of all the reasons Republicans were turned out of office. “I think the
country has rendered a pretty clear verdict last fall on Cheney and
Cheneyism,” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod.
Even some Republicans say they wish the former vice president would disappear. Among them is Meghan McCain, the daughter of the Republicans’ 2008 presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, who appeared Thursday on the ABC show “The View.”
“You had your eight years,” Ms. McCain declared. “Go away.” [The New York Times]
Ouch.
Meanwhile, in far-off Alaska, it looks like GOP Sweetheart and spokesmodel Sarah Palin is looking for help with all those legal bills. Seems lawyering up to answer the numerous charges of corruption and ethical failure doesn't come cheap at the rate she appears to transgress.
The 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate -- and possible 2012
White House aspirant -- has about $500,000 of legal debts, stemming in
part from investigations into efforts to fire an Alaska state trooper
who was her former brother-in-law. A legislative investigation found
that Gov. Palin abused her power in the matter, but a subsequent
investigation by the state Personnel Board concluded she could not be
held responsible. Additionally, supporters say, about a dozen new
ethics complaints have been filed against Ms. Palin in the past four
months, as the governor has come under increasing scrutiny from the
national media, Democrats and liberal activists. [The Wall Street Journal]
Round out the front line with Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove, and you have your "Yesterday's Team For Tomorrow" Republican leadership. Eisenhower, Goldwater, Reagan...even Nixon... must be all be spinning in their graves.
It should not come as a surprise, but it is still worth noting that the worst President of the United States EVER gave us the worst economic quarter since the 1930s on his way out the door.
In terms of the things that matter most -- output, income, wealth, profits, foreclosures and job growth -- the fourth quarter was a disaster.
If you look at each of those categories in isolation, we may have seen worse on rare occasions, but when you examine the big picture, it was the worst since the Depression. ::: The decline in real GDP wasn't due to just one factor. Every major sector of the economy contracted during the quarter, except the federal government. Consumer spending, business investment, residential investment and exports all fell at shocking pace.
Real gross domestic income fell even faster than GDP, sinking at a 7.6% annual pace in the quarter. That's the worst since 1980 and the second worst in the past 50 years.
Jeebus Kryst on a cracker! This clown broke our country!
Meanwhile, his Republican cronies presented their alternative to President Obama's budget. Novel approach, gentlemen. Love how you came up with a budget plan that has no fucking numbers in it. Going right to the chase: tax cuts. Brilliant FAIL, as expected.
UPDATE: The Republican "budget alternative" get's even more laughable now that the independent Citizens For Tax Justice organization crunched the numbers and found...
Comparing the income tax proposals in the House GOP plan to the income tax proposals in the President’s plan, we find that:
Over a fourth of taxpayers, mostly low-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the President’s plan.
The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $100,000 less, on average, under the House GOP plan than they would under the President’s plan.
Thanks for the oh-so-original and helpful "plan," GOPers.
