breakdown, go ahead and give it to me

Ellen Willis rip.

ive only seen three of the new senators on the news and thus far ive been most impressed by webb. tweety loved johnny unitas john tester (he couldnt stop humping testers leg. that crewcut really turns him on.) but i was disappointed that he couldnt come up with a decent response to that outdated chestnut that democrats were not good at balancing the books. first i would have countered that i dont see much fiscal responsibility from the republicans, and, second, i remember some guy named clinton was pretty fair at that. apparently that anti-clinton shock collar the republicans gave matthews for xmas in 1994 still works because his mind gets cloudy whenever that name gets mentioned. he couldnt even remember al gores name the other day. he referred to him as that guy who was vice president before cheney. i kid you not. and then there was claire mccaskill who with a befuddled look on her face said she would support a bolton nomination for the un. um, claire, that is not a question you want to answer off the cuff on no sleep, to say nothing it being exceptionally stupid.

so webb came across the best. with a son in harms way in iraq and a distinguished military career, he is virtually patton standing next to the chicken hawk brigade. id like to see him accused of cutting and running by shrub. also he articulated that his reasons for becoming a democrat moved beyond iraq to issues of social justice. so while he may be conservative, he is no conservative, and that is a good thing.

still waiting to hear from the new senators from rhode island, ohio and pennsylvania. and when does bernie saunders get some face time?

everybody's saying "thumpin'" now. it's like half the Salon headlines, about Bush or not.
that folksy word that was so carefully chosen for damage control becomes a press mantra--just like "16 words"

Hilarious Craig Ferguson video: Rumsfeld Remembrance

allen expected to concede contest without recount. why not? on white house instructions?

At the bottom of this requiem for Santorum, Dan Savage links to a video in which Santorum unequivocally comes out against the "pursuit of happiness". The actual phrase is used by Santorum at the very end of this frothy clip, but the intent is mixed throughout.

We can only hope Mr. Santorum gets the full measure of his much deserved unhappiness.

free maureen (times select freebie)

Borat Film Banned in Russia as `Offensive'

ed bradley, rip.

rummy mix from here

more rumballs?

how come admitting to a pattern of lying comes so easily now? how do you face your people with those admissions?

i am so happy i am in tear's

http://www.nytimes.com/

(skinny)

just read on crooked timber that cnn says rummy is gone.

Blogs of all political stripes spent most of yesterday detailing reports of voting machine malfunctions and ballot shortages, effectively becoming an online national clearinghouse of the polling problems that still face the election system.

im going back some day
come what may to
blue(d) by you

election thread, anyone?

whats up with mark halperin? couldnt come up with one instance of liberal bias while shilling his wares on colbert.

rbt williams

the popsicle twins

Such self-loathing is, of course, nothing new. “Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?” Henry Miller once asked. But Mamet has a ready answer for Miller: everyone else. The world hates the Jews, he writes, always has, always will. Liberal Jews who read The New York Times or listen to National Public Radio may not think so, but they are naïve; when the pogrom comes, he predicts, even lapsed Jews will search frantically for doorways with mezuzas. In fact, apart from various Internet wackos, anti-Semitism, at least the American strain, has waned; how else to explain the very assimilation Mamet so detests? But he writes as if Father Coughlin is still on the radio, Henry Ford still hawks The Dearborn Independent and Fritz Kuhn’s German American Bundists still march through Yorkville.

With equal fervor, Mamet depicts lapsed Jews as figures from Dante, full of pain and guilt and “anomie,” languishing in an ethnic limbo, scorned by Jew and gentile alike. Pathetic, self-lacerating losers, he calls them (sort of like gay Republicans). Naturally, no one’s fooled: to both themselves and those who hate them, they’ll always be Jews. Mamet subscribes to what an old Jew from Chicago — one a generation older than he — once told me: “You can change your noses, but not your Moses.”

But as near as I can tell, few wayward Jews feel such angst. We are no longer in the age of “The Jazz Singer,” where children steeped in Jewish learning break their poor pious fathers’ hearts by trading pulpits for prosceniums. They may feel a pang or two around their Christmas trees, but as assimilated children of assimilated parents, their Jewish ties were pretty attenuated already. Here, too, Mamet seems a generation or two too late. Given his prodigious talent and insight, one wonders why. Maybe it’s a bizarre form of nostalgia, for a time when, thanks largely to their enemies, Jews felt more fraternal, and many were shtarkers — tough guys — rather than the deracinated wimps he thinks we’ve become, people whose favorite Jew, as he puts it, is Anne Frank.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Bush, the ur-"freedom agenda" sentimentalist, ended up (in words Woodward attributes to Cheney) "a big fan" of Kissinger. And, in the passages Woodward attributes to Kissinger in State of Denial, you can see how he insinuated himself: with a masterful understanding of Bush's psychology. The passages that leap out are the ones that serve to salve an imperiled sense of presidential masculinity in the face of failure: "For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out"; "Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory"; "Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of weakened resolve"--the weakened resolve of others.

At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all his officials are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself “pleased with the progress we’re making” in Iraq.

In other words, he’s the sort of man who should never have been put in a position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power, free from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was, alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the news media.

Neo Culpa:

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists."

another powerful keith olbermann screed. im just glad hes not wasting his rhetorical skills on bobby bonds and terrell owens anymore.