BarbinMD Boehner Admits He Is Widely Mocked
Asked to respond to President Obama's jokes at Saturday's White House Correspondents Dinner about John Boehner's perpetual tan, where Obama called Boehner "a person of color ... not found in the natural world," Boehner's spokesman said:
"I can see no reason to discuss it."
Pressed further, Steel eventually e-mailed this riposte:
"If Leader Boehner had a nickel for every time he’s heard a joke like that, he could make a serious dent in Washington Democrats’ record-setting deficit."
While the "serious dent" isn't defined, at a minimum we're talking millions of nickels ... you'd think that at some point Boehner would buy a clue instead of his tan-in-a-bottle.
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Are we really going to have a hissy fit about Wanda Sykes making crude jokes about the fatuous gasbag now? Really? It's inappropriate now for someone to joke about Limbaugh being the 20th highjacker? The guy who called the majority leader "Mullah Daschle?" Who called Obama, "Osama" about 7,320 times? Even Keith Olbermann is wagging his finger over this --- the guy who names Limbaugh the worst person in the world virtually every night.
According to Keith, the problem isn't so much what she said, it's that she said it at the White House Correspondents dinner which is an inappropriate venue. These are very sensitive, important people, you know, and it's rude to be rude in front of them. It embarrasses the poor souls to have someone make crude jokes about the crudest, most despicable man in politics. Why that should be, I do not know.
But Pat Buchanan gets to the heart of it: it was mean to the Republican Party. Attacking Limbaugh was attacking Republicans everywhere according to him. He wasn't even there but he is the head of the GOP and And no matter what swill he puts out on his radio show to millions of people every single day, that just isn't done.
They should just get rid of these stupid events. Every year the press corps demonstrates what idiots they are. They get huffy when the joke's aimed at them, they think it's hilarious when it is crudely personal and aimed directly at the first lady, they laugh uproariously when the president jokes about not finding weapons of mass destruction but get the vapors when somebody takes aim at Rush Limbaugh. Really, it's just too ridiculous.
- Adam Serwer: WANDA SYKES' OFFENSIVE ROUTINE.
Wanda Sykes' comedy routine at the White House Correspondent's Dinner was really offensive. In it, Sykes suggested that conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh is supported by Hamas, and that Islamists are "constantly issuing Limbaugh talking points." She joked about terrorists supporting conservatives in general, suggesting that recent violent events in Iraq are attempts by terrorists to swing the upcoming midterm elections in favor of Republicans.
Then she got really personal. She joked that Limbaugh was a racist who doesn't want black people to "escap[e] the underclass." She accused him of being responsible for killing "a million babies a year," and aired her friend's theory that Limbaugh himself was a terrorist attack," a followup to 9/11. She also, most disgustingly, said that if conservatives kept apologizing to Limbaugh, they'd eventually contract "anal poisoning." She wondered when Republicans would finally stop "bending over and grabbing their ankles" for Limbaugh, and finally concluded that Limbaugh was just a "bad guy."
Oh wait. Wanda Sykes didn't say any of these things. These are things Rush Limbaugh has said about Obama or other Democrats in the past year, the kind of statements few reporters found offensive enough to write about, despite the fact that most of them were said with the utmost seriousness. And while Sykes is a mere comedian whose influence on the Democratic Party is negligible, Limbaugh's influence in the party is so great that Republican leaders can't even criticize him without having to issue apologies after the fact.
- Benen on 'REPARATIONS'....
Over the weekend, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, launched into a nutty tirade. Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh managed to make it even more offensive.
Sessions insisted that President Obama is deliberately trying to increase unemployment and weaken Wall Street as part of a "divide and conquer" strategy to consolidate power. Sessions, who recently said he'd like to see the GOP emulate the insurgency tactics of the Taliban, added that the president intends to "inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it."
As truly nutty as this is, Limbaugh's version is actually more nauseating.
"The [economic] deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps. But in the Oval Office of the White House none of this is a problem. This is the objective. The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation's wealth and return to it to the nation's quote, 'rightful owners.' Think reparations. Think forced reparations here if you want to understand what actually is going on."
Kevin Drum replied, "Limbaugh's message could hardly have been more obvious if he'd donned blackface and performed a soft-shoe in his studio." Andrew Sullivan added, "I guess no one ever accused Limbaugh of keeping his racism under wraps."
Quite right. The "substance" of Limbaugh's argument is obviously insane, but the racism of his attack is hardly subtle. It's almost hard to believe -- the nation's leading conservative argued, in all seriousness, that the president of the United States is trying to destroy the economy, on purpose, as part of a "forced reparations" campaign.
I realize several far-right voices get angry over what they consider "cheap liberal accusations of 'racism,'" which they consider common. But if conservatives would express at least a modicum of disgust for tirades like Limbaugh's, instead of ignoring his frequent race-driven tirades, it'd do wonders for the discourse.
- JedL: Liz Cheney accuses Obama of siding “with the terrorists”
Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz tells Fox that she believes the Obama administration is only “interested in releasing things that really paint America in a negative light.”
Cheney says the White House has decided “to side with the terrorists” by putting “information out that hurts American soldiers” and questions whether the President really cares about American troops.
Watch:
The fine folks at Salon have a fun new feature called "Ask a Wingnut," in which reasonable people, curious what a real-live conservative thinks about a given issue, get to pose a substantive question to a former Bush administration official. We don't know who the official is -- he/she writes pseudonymously -- but the "wingnut" goes by the name of "Glenallen Walken."In this week's edition, readers asked why the Republican Party, and conservatives in general, are hostile to science. Glenallen Walken responded:
To me, the question is almost laughable on its face. Conservatives are pro-science and, as a general rule, pro-cost-benefit analysis and pro-thinking.
As evidence to support the argument that the right loves science, Salon's resident wingnut pointed to some specific examples: Reagan supported the creation of a missile-defense system (SDI) a few decades ago; George W. Bush once said something about going to Mars; Gingrich supported expanding NIH funding 15 years ago; and Bush "was the first president to propose federal funding for stem cell research."
While I'm delighted that "Glenallen Walken" is willing to respond to questions like these, his/her response isn't exactly persuasive.
Right off the bat, the provided examples are pretty weak. Most notably, Bush may have been the first to make federal funds available for stem-cell research, but that's a silly argument. For one thing, it's a new scientific field. I'm sure FDR and Abe Lincoln would have been happy to invest in such research if it were available before the 21st century. For another, Bush's approach to stem-cell science was utterly ridiculous, and the restrictions he imposed were incoherent. This isn't evidence of Republicans embracing science; it's evidence of the opposite.
But just as important is the fact that "Glenallen Walken" takes an incredibly narrow view of the question. Right now, the Republican mainstream rejects scientific evidence on everything from global warming to stem-cell research to evolutionary biology to sex-ed. Recently, the very idea of credible scientific inquiry -- "something called 'volcano monitoring'" -- became the subject of Republican mockery.
Under Bush/Cheney, there was an effective "war on science," in which scientific research was either rejected or manipulated to suit political ends. The integrity of the scientific process itself came under attack, to the delight of the party and its base.
If "Glenallen Walken" thinks the question is "almost laughable on its face," it only helps reinforce why this is a problem for the party.
THE DREADED 'E' WORD....
When Justice David Souter announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, President Obama described his ideal justice as a person of intelligence, excellence, integrity, and empathy. "I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or a footnote in a casebook," the president said. "It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives."Almost immediately, "empathy" became a terribly scary word to conservatives, who said it was "code" for "judicial activism." (The irony is, phrases like "judicial activism" and "strict constructionist" are themselves code words for the right.) It led the erudite chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, to tell a national radio audience last week, "Crazy nonsense empathetic! I'll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind!"
Dahlia Lithwick argued last night that the "Republican war on empathy has started to border on the deranged." The problem, it seems, is that the right simply doesn't understand the meaning of the word, at least as it's applied in this context.
Empathy in a judge does not mean stopping midtrial to tenderly clutch the defendant to your heart and weep. It doesn't mean reflexively giving one class of people an advantage over another because their lives are sad or difficult. When the president talks about empathy, he talks not of legal outcomes but of an intellectual and ethical process: the ability to think about the law from more than one perspective. [...]
[A]s used by the president, the word empathy does not strike me as "code" for anything.... Empathy means knowing what you don't know and questioning why you think you know what you do.... Empathy means being impartial toward all litigants without being blind to the consequences of your decisions. You can send up such concerns as gooey judicial sentimentalism, unmoored from any fixed legal principle. Or you can admit that judging requires acts of judgment beyond the mechanical application of law to facts and that it's best for judges to know when the mechanical act of deciding cases gives way to ideology and personal preference. Empathy isn't sloppy sentiment. It's not ideology. It's just a check against the smug certainty that everyone else is sloppy and sentimental while you yourself are a flawless constitutional microcomputer.
Well said.
I'd just add that the discussion surrounding this high court vacancy went from zero to annoying with surprising speed. From the right, which hasn't launched a meaningful campaign against a Supreme Court nominee in more than a generation, we've heard a series of increasingly useless talking points about filibusters, the horror of "policy" being "made" at the appellate level, and the nightmare of "empathy."
I can't wait to see how much worse this gets once there's an actual nominee.
- Benen COLUMNIST YOO.....
In November 2006, 84% of Philadelphia voters rejected Rick Santorum as their senator. Soon after, the Philadelphia Inquirer hired him as a columnist.
The paper's decision to hire John Yoo, however, seems even worse. Yoo is, after all, the former Bush administration official who not only authored torture memos, but also took a comically expansive view of presidential power, including the notion that a chief executive could ignore laws in pursuit of national security interests. Will Bunch has a great item explaining why the Inquirer has made a terrible mistake giving Yoo this platform, and why the paper's defense of the move is unpersuasive.
But I also went ahead and read Yoo's most recent piece for the paper, which was the first to feature his byline as an Inquirer columnist. While it's offensive to see the paper add Yoo to its roster in light of his background and alleged crimes, it's also worth noting that Yoo isn't a good columnist, either.
In his 2005 confirmation hearings, Roberts compared judges to neutral umpires in a baseball game. Sen. Obama did not vote to confirm Roberts or Alito, but now proposes to appoint a Great Empathizer who will call balls and strikes with a strike zone that depends on the sex, race, and social and economic background of the players. Nothing could be more damaging to the fairness of the game, or to the idea of a rule of law that is blind to the identity of the parties before it.
Like so many of his cohorts, Yoo, apparently, doesn't understand what "empathy" means.
He went on to clumsily attack affirmative action, denounce "judicial activism," and insist that FDR's New Deal "never really worked" during the Great Depression.
John Yoo, in other words, seems to write columns that are about as compelling as his legal theories. It's hard to imagine what the Philadelphia Inquirer was thinking.
Yes, because that whole "conservative" thing has been working so well for the Republicans. The religious right won't give up without a fight, and so far they're taking the GOP down with them. God speed.Sudbay: Florida's hard core GOPers take aim at Charlie Crist's Senate runIn an interview with the California newspaper The Visalia Times-Delta, Huckabee said the GOP would only further decline in influence should it alienate social conservatives — largely considered the most energetic and loyal faction of the party.
"Throw the social conservatives the pro-life, pro-family people overboard and the Republican party will be as irrelevant as the Whigs," he said in reference to the American political party that largely disbanded in the mid 1800s. "They'll basically be a party of gray-haired old men sitting around the country club puffing cigars, sipping brandy and wondering whatever happened to the country. That will be the end of the party," he said in the interview published Thursday.
UPDATE @ 9:49 a.m.: Crist made an announcement on Twitter a short time ago:atrios: Deep Thought I didn't care what Ross Douthat thought about anything before he had a New York Times column, and I still don't care.After thoughtful consideration with my wife Carole, I have decided to run for the U.S. Senate.I think some of the D.C. pundit types are under-estimating just how ugly this could become for Crist -- and the ugliness will be coming from Crist's fellow Republicans.
_________________________
You knew this was going to happen.
Florida's photogenic (and newly wed -- to a woman) Governor, Charlie Crist, is going to run for the U.S. Senate. He's not quite the neanderthal that most Republicans are. So, Crist is getting a primary -- and the real right wingers are lining up behind his GOP opponent, Macro Rubio. This primary could get really ugly:[Crist] will be facing a vigorous fight from former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, a young, outspoken Hispanic conservative who is capturing the attention of activists in Florida and across the country.GOP fratricide. They just can't help themselves.
Rubio began telegraphing his attacks against Crist even before the governor’s formal announcement. In an interview with POLITICO, he singled out Crist for abandoning conservative principles and compared the governor to moderate Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
“If we’re offering the same thing as the Democrats, but with different packaging, what’s the point in having a Republican Party?” Rubio said.“I’m going to offer Floridians a clear, consistent, authentic small-government choice in the primary.”
Indeed, Rubio expects the primary to receive national attention as a referendum between the party’s moderate and conservative wings. He just received a glowing profile in the Weekly Standard, which called him the “perfect recruit for statewide office.”
Benen: THE WAY FORWARD IS KRISTOL CLEAR....
For about a year, Bill Kristol was a columnist for Time magazine, where he would routinely write pieces explaining what he'd like to see the Republican Party do. The editors were unimpressed, so Time dropped him.From there, Kristol became a columnist for the New York Times, where he routinely wrote pieces explaining what he'd like to see the Republican Party do. The paper of record was also unimpressed, so it dropped him, too.
Fortunately for Kristol, conservative pundits are not part of a merit-based system, so he's been hired by the Washington Post, and is using his new position to write columns about what he'd like to see the Republican Party do.
The Republican Party's navel is a pretty unattractive thing.
So maybe Republicans should stop obsessively gazing at it. Instead, the GOP might focus on taking on the Obama administration, whose policies are surprisingly vulnerable to political and substantive attack. Battling Barack Obama is an enterprise that offers better grounds for Republican hope than indulging in spasms of introspection or bouts of petty recrimination.
And to think, I expected Kristol to write a column encouraging his beloved GOP to forge a more cooperative relationship with the popular Democratic president, while moving closer to the mainstream on major policy disputes. Imagine my surprise to see the Post run the same column Kristol's been writing since 1993, only with slightly different issue specifics.
As the Weekly Standard editor sees it, if Republicans go on the attack now, voters will know who to "blame next year" and the 2010 midterms "could be the winter of Obama's discontent."
Time and the New York Times let this guy go? What were they thinking letting a visionary like Kristol slip through their fingers?
I don't know what Kristol's newest piece is if not navel gazing.
Posted by: Danp on May 12, 2009 at 9:53 AM
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), known as “Smokey Joe” for his efforts on behalf of big polluters, is one of Congress’s most aggressive deniers of man-made climate change. For instance, in March, he said that the climate is changing “for natural variation reasons” and that to deal with it, humans should just “get shade.”In a new interview with Newsmax, Barton continued his nonsensical approach to the issue, claiming that the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide would potentially “close down the New York and Boston marathons“:
Barton says the average healthy adult exhales between four-tenths of a ton and seven-tenths of a ton of CO2 a year.
“So if you put 20,000 marathoners into a confined area, you could consider that a single source of pollution, and you could regulate it,” Barton says. “The key would be whether the EPA said that 20,000 people running the same route was one source or not.”
One indication that the EPA likely would consider 20,000 runners a single source of pollution is that the agency is trying to regulate waste-water runoff and emissions of drilling rigs in oil fields by attempting to define entire areas as a single source of pollution, Barton says.
A common conservative attack against addressing greenhouse gas emissions is to say that there are natural sources of CO2, so if we regulate industry we would have to regulate those sources as well. But this is straw man argument. As the the EPA notes, it is industrial sources of CO2, not natural sources, that “have increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere“:
Natural sources of CO2 occur within the carbon cycle where billions of tons of atmospheric CO2 are removed from the atmosphere by oceans and growing plants, also known as ‘sinks,’ and are emitted back into the atmosphere annually through natural processes also known as ‘sources.’ When in balance, the total carbon dioxide emissions and removals from the entire carbon cycle are roughly equal.
Since the Industrial Revolution in the 1700’s, human activities, such as the burning of oil, coal and gas, and deforestation, have increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. In 2005, global atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were 35% higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution.
In the interview, Barton mocked the EPA’s recent declaration that carbon dioxide was a pollutant that endangers public health and welfare. “There’s never been anybody who’s been treated in an emergency room for CO2 poisoning. It doesn’t cause asthma; it doesn’t cause your eyes to water; it doesn’t cause cancer.”
Of course, the EPA declared CO2 a threat to public health because of the catastrophic consequences of climate change, not because it is a carcinogen.
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