Political Bloviation

GOP rivals back tax, spending cuts in SC - Yahoo! News
I don’t watch the debates, I don’t have a high enough threshold for nausea. Between the inane stupidity from the moderators and the genuinely stoopid answer, I just can’t take it. In the latest dolt-fest that passes for a GOP debate, all candidates [...]

Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis
Compared to other industrial nations the good old US of A ranks 19, out of 19, in preventable deaths. Way to show all those nasty socialist countries that we don’t need their stinking commie health care delivery systems!!!

Why were the polls so wrong about the primary results? To be fair they were mostly right in other respects but totally screwed the pooch on the Clinton vs Obama results. Here’s a quick round-up from a few of my regular stops in no particular order:
When a funny thing happens on the way to [...]

From Ezra Klein at The American Prospect:
When it comes to racism, I’ve been somewhat surprised to find that I was wrong. Very little of the narrative around Obama’s run has touched on race; very few of the attacks on him have been coded racism, and those that have — the occasional mention of his drug [...]

George McGovern lays out a powerful argument for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney:
Why I Believe Bush Must Go - washingtonpost.com
Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their [...]

Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2007
The US (not surprisingly)  receives the worst rating. We’re right up there with Russia and China.

Wow, it’s like evil vs evil:
When the RIAA loses its mind - The Carpetbagger Report
Matt Yglesias noted that, given this RIAA position, Hillary Clinton might be vulnerable to an expensive lawsuit, but I’d set my sights a little higher:

In the video linked below, we see that President Bush’s iPod contains songs [...]

Jon Stewart contradicts himself in classic Daily Show style:
Firedoglake - Tell Comedy Central to Stop With the Truthiness
Comedy Central is forcing The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report back onto the air on January 7 without their writing staffs. Both hosts are unhappy about this turn of events and have released the [...]

The New York Times reports:
One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure [...]

Way to go Chris!!
Dodd’s Filibuster Threat Stalls Wiretap Bill - Politics on The Huffington Post
Senator Chris Dodd won a temporary victory today after his threats of a filibuster forced Democratic leadership to push back consideration of a measure that would grant immunity to telecom companies that were complicit in warrantless surveillance.

This nails the conservative approach to health care reform perfectly:
THE NEW REPUBLIC | Blogs
The conservative health care strategy works like this: endorse subsidies in theory, since it would seem unacceptably heartless to simply say that people who can’t afford medical care shouldn’t get it. Then, whenever anybody proposes a plan to actually implement subsidies, vehemently [...]

In two recent post Glenn nails it. The first What “winning” in Iraq looks like hits on what’s happened in Basra since the British abandoned it:
The article details that Shiite militias — which British troops “unintentionally” armed for years by failing to realize that the “security forces” had no allegiance to the central government [...]

So what was the excuse for destroying these tapes again?
CIA Told Not to Destroy Interrogation Tapes | Newsweek Periscope | Newsweek.com
In the summer of 2005, then CIA director Porter Goss met with then national intelligence director John Negroponte to discuss a highly sensitive matter: what to do about the existence of videotapes documenting the use [...]

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
The country needs the Daily Show. Dig Reagan up and have him break the Writer’s Guild Strike and nationalize the Daily Show now!!!

White House hints, but won’t say, that waterboarding is legal - The Carpetbagger Report

A CIA employee says they used waterboarding on a prisoner.
The US uses only legal methods of interrogation.
Therefore waterboarding is legal.

Seems pretty straight forward, but the White House spokesperson Dana Perino refuses to say if it’s legal or not. Why might that [...]

Bush tax changes wreck budget
All true believers in in the tax fairey (GOP candidates I’m talking to you) should be forced to view the graphs in this EPI story like Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” until they’re eyes bleed. It’s not Medicare, Social  Security or Medicaid that truly threatens our national fiscal future. It’s the [...]

Coming soon, to a shredder near you - The Carpetbagger Report
Exactly why is there so much paper they never want anyone to see? “The Wonkette says You better get crackin’, Dick — that evidence won’t destroy itself!”

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 12/13/2007 | House votes to outlaw waterboarding by CIA
The GOP has taken obstruction and raised it to a high art. If something as basic and simple as “we shouldn’t torture” dooms a bill to failure something has gone horribly wrong. When the republicans held the majority they threatened changes to senate [...]

CIA still peddling the lie that low-level crazy man proves waterboarding is a good thing - AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth
So we tortured the al-Qaeda village idiot, then claimed a great victory against a high level operative. Despite being briefed about the real value of the poor fool by the CIA, Bush went [...]

Some Guy With a Website by August J. Pollak - 12/10/2007 - Michael Hayden is a terrible liar
Too bad the CIA didn’t have some way to remove or obscure the identity of CIA interrogators, you know like edit a video?