<spinn> I’m pretty sure if obama made them all magically shit money they’d complain it itches

In case you missed the recent MSNBC appearance of Orly Taitz, the de facto queen of the Birther movement, I’ve put together a summary:

Three bits of commentary on Palin’s resignation.

(1, 2, 3)

Also, she put out another statement today to expand on her statement yesterday, which in addition to being some of the most tetchy, self-centered sort of thing I’ve seen from a politician, includes this: “I’ve never thought I needed a title before one’s name to forge progress in America.” If I was an Alaskan resident who’d voted for her, I’d be thinking “well thanks a fuckin’ lot for wasting my time, then.”

Obama and Biden go to a local burger place and get burgers. Obama gets a burger with Dijon mustard. I learn this from a “oh-christ-what-is-the-Right-complaining-about-now”-style post on C&L. This leads me to a Media Matters post about Hannity, Ingraham, and Mark Steyn going on about his choice of condiment. I mean, given, it’s generally tongue in cheek, but in some sense you get the impression it’s actually a problem for them. (Like the standard tough guy real man Republican thing, illustrated with Ingraham’s comment: “What kind of man orders a cheeseburger without ketchup but Dijon mustard?” Obama’s just a faggy arugula-loving liberal, clearly.)

It further leads me to a blog called Legal Insurrection by William A. Jacobson, with a post called MSNBC Hides Obama’s Dijon Mustard (aka Dijongate). (incidentally, this page drags down my firefox something awful, for some reason.) The dude goes on with several breathless updates about the Dijongate situation. I start going about the business of writing my own chirst-are-you-kidding-me blog post in my head, but then further reading reveals he was joking. His point was that MSNBC had dutifully reported it as a character piece exactly how the White House wanted them to cover it:
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Crooks and Liars has a recurring bit called Mike’s Blog Roundup, with quick links to various blogs in which Mike was interested, presumably. That itself has an occasionally recurring bit called HOLY CRAP, an even quicker list of links to various things about religion or by religious people, generally with the point of showing how fucked up they are. I am always fascinated by this and usually wind up with 20+ tabs in my browser when it’s over, following the long and winding branches of the astonishing human ability to happily hold entirely opposite views in its head and passionately defend each of them, in the same sentence if necessary.

It was through today’s Holy Crap that I came to read Beware of copying the Left by Bruce W. Green, founding dean of the Liberty University School of Law. In style, it reads like it’s written by a pastor. In content, it reads like it’s written by a drunk bully on a corner yelling at “the fags”, but with a better proofreader. Shorter Green: We can’t torture, because torturing would only play into the hands of liberals. So torture is evil and wrong — but torture anyway.

That burnt hair smell you’re getting is because of the sparks my brain is throwing off trying to understand that summary enough to make my point. Seriously, I can feel the mental resistance in typing it. Due to some internal hangups I have about looking foolish in public, I constantly re-evaluate any logic statements I make for correctness, lest someone point out some obvious flaw in my argument. Part of my brain refuses to sign off on my summary of his article, as it simply seems impossible to me that someone can put that forth as a logical argument. But it’s really what he’s saying.
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The whole Tea Party thing. It’s bonus funny because the Boston Tea Party was actually about protesting less taxes.

But whatever. I’ve had this open on my desktop for a while, forget how I got to it, but I’d been wanting to post about it. I love it, it’s such a contemporary American view of social protest. “Wake up, people! They’re taking your money, your homes, your jobs, your life itself! It’s time for you to TAKE ACTION and go stand in a park with a proper demonstration permit for 45 minutes and grouse about it with other people wearing beer hats!”

Started reading more of the comments and it’s just chock fulla angry stupid.

One thing I forgot to post about last month. Debb and I watch The Daily Show pretty regularly. We just got cable a few weeks ago, so until then I’d download torrents of the shows at the end of every week. Worked fine, but we’d be behind the current shows by a week or two. So around January 21, we were watching the previous week’s show, and Stewart was talking about Bush saying something to some reporters, blah blah. And I had a sudden burst of happiness and exclaimed (yeah, I actually exclaimed): “He’s not our president anymore!”

Oh geez, I remember what it was, too. It was the press conference where reporters were asking if he’d made any mistakes, how he felt about things that went wrong, et cetera. And he did that “well I could just sit around and whine about it, wah wah why did this happen to me,” something something. I have to see if that video exists online. I mean really goddamn if that’s not a guy who deserves to take a shoe in the face.

I was reminded of this by Obama’s speech last night. I didn’t watch the speech, but it was on TV, and I walked past it in the middle of it. It’s the first time I’d seen Obama giving a speech in front of Congress, and it was the typical camera shot I’ve seen plenty of times before: president in front, vice president on left, House speaker on right. But…well, as I’ve said before, Bush’s long-running hot streak of suck is what caused my interest in politics, so really for as long as I’ve been paying attention, it’s always been Bush and Cheney up there.

This time it wasn’t. I had another rush of happiness at the image, but it wasn’t Obama that really grabbed my attention — I guess I’m jaded by his speechifying already. What actually got me was Biden. I exclaimed, again: “It is so good to see Biden there!” God, all those years of seeing Cheney’s scowl hovering in the darkness, mentally filling in the thought bubble of the little old ladies he’d rather be evicting or the damsels he’d rather be tying to train tracks, and now finally it’s Joe from Delaware sitting back there, just being a guy. Ahhh.

Speaking of the non-state-of-the-union, I heard Jindal really majorly sucked in his Republican response. I didn’t watch that either, but here’s a post on C&L with two reactions: one from MSNBC people, one from FOX people. They both thought Jindal did badly, but I was amused that MSNBC people said real things about the substance of his speech, and all the FOX people talked about was his delivery. It’s like they could’ve taken two minutes to agree with each other about how terribly the Republicans have failed in picking his striped tie.

Edit: found that video that I mentioned above. The specific part is 7:46 into an 8:36 clip, but it’s a pretty good look at someone who needs to spend more time looking at the dirt side of a Nike. And by “more time” I mean, the 1/4 second it takes it to traverse a 30-foot-long press room by air.

Patch notes for US Server, version 44.0. Glad to see they’re finally balancing some PVP and working towards making some of the de/buffs apply in ways that make more sense.

I haven’t even thought about Lieberman in, like, a month.

Pulled this off the front page of whitehouse.gov. Fairly standard photo op, though it’s given more significance because it’s one of the pictures they chose for the front page.

But even regardless of the photo-opness of this particular pic, one thing that’s been clear in the few years Obama’s been in the national spotlight is that he’s a good father and family man. Whenever you see his wife and children together with him, they just seem like a family. It’s kind of refreshing to see a politician who doesn’t use his family values as a club, but just has ‘em.

Here’s a somewhat flowery editorial quoted in Democratic Strategist about the change from Republican rule:

[W]e are taking leave not merely of a single Administration. For twelve years the Republican Party has been in power. During ten of those years it controlled the executive and legislative branches of the government. When, a few years hence, an attempt is made to minimize the disaster of this last quadrennium, and to point to a preceding eight year period of material development and growth, let it be noted that in a purely material sense the American people are much worse off today than they were twelve years ago. Far more than was gained has been swept away. Savings have been dissipated, lives have been blasted, families disintegrated. Misery and insecurity exist to a degree unprecedented in our national life. And spiritually the American people have been debauched by the materialism which made dollar-chasing the accepted way of life and accumulation of riches the goal of earthly existence.

Overly flowery, because that was the prevalent writing style when this was written about the outgoing Hoover administration.

It’s just a bad day to be paying attention.

Wildfires in California are, of course, because of teh gay. Wonder where these guys are when, for example, Hurricane Gustav hits at the same time as the Republican convention.

Lieberman’s everyone’s best chum again. It’s actually this chain of events that made me get irritated in the comments of my last post. The Democrat personality type tends to be more reasonable and accepting, but you have to have the fortitude to say when someone’s wrong. Lieberman should be kicked the hell off whatever he thinks is important, and I don’t know why they continue to coddle this buffoon. Well, I have a guess: it’s because the Senate Democrats think “play nice” is more important than “do what’s right”.

And I can’t even read Glenn Greenwald recently, it’s just too depressing.

I am pretty sure Obama is going to disappoint me. This is the best time we’ve had in decades to push for universal health care, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s going to happen. We’re just going to be further locked into depending on employers, which further deepens the leverage corporations have over their workers. And Lieberman saying that Obama’s support was crucial, that just further gives me an idea of how things are going to go. I was hoping that all the idiots saying “Obama must act from the center, not the left” would not have an effect on him, but given he’s probably inside the bubble now, it probably is.

Edit: though, on the other hand, here’s Greenwald today talking about the probable new attorney general, and there’s the news that Tom Daschle will be Secretary of Health and Human Services. And nice words from Rahm Emanuel on health care, though of course they’re just words. I dunno, tho, what Obama was saying during the debates — “we’ll make your premiums lower” — doesn’t sound like the scale of things Emanuel’s talking about. If it turns into the kind of thing where they said one thing during the election so as to not make waves, but actually have bigger plans — well, that’s kinda a typical politician underhanded move, but at least if it gets us an actual working health care system, I might not care so much.

So yeah, I’m fully with the argument that “he’s not even President yet, let’s see what happens.” But I’m not going to reflexively believe him just because he was elected, and I will admit I’m cynical on the activity of federal politicians. And the market forces involved, in the form of health care companies, drug companies, and the like — are massive and glacial.

Talk about brain damage causing selective perception:

John Hinderacker, arguably the most influential conservative blogger in the country …

Obama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not. In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn’t raise his standards, he will exceed Bush’s total before he is inaugurated.

At the feet of masters.

It’s times like this I wish I had a bigger platform, or I could talk to people in power directly in any meaningful fashion. If I could write an open letter to Reid, or Congressional Democrats in general, I’d say:

Cut Lieberman loose.

If you’re waiting to see the results of the outstanding Senate races, please do not bother. One, you Democrats don’t vote in a herd like Republicans, so if you get 59 seats, having Joe for 60 won’t really matter.

And two, it’s just not worth it. Your souls are not worth it. Our country is not worth it. Lieberman shat all over your party and now he needs to get what’s coming. Ah, that’s just my vindictive side talking, forget about the revenge angle. Basically, if he’s willing to question Obama’s loyalty to America while he’s running for President, what’s to stop him from doing it after he actually is?

And three, if the argument is “he frequently votes with us anyway”, then either he will follow his principles and continue to do so, or he has no principles, in which case it doesn’t matter if he’s in your caucus or not.

And just on a personal level, I cannot take that sanctimonious, self-satisfied face on my TV screen for the next four years. There’s quite a lot I would give to make him so irrelevant that he can’t get face time on CSPAN-3.

Cut Lieberman loose.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: What a Difference Four Years Makes

Yeah.

Update: Also yeah.