Har har har....

Go ahead and try it, buster.

Jeb Bush on 2016 run: ‘I don’t think there is any Bush baggage at all’

update:



Update 3/11 from Talking Points Memo, a very insightful piece on the difficulties of the Republican party:

I mean, George Bush as “strong leader?” Really? I was there. I watched it happen. The guy was a potted plant who they imagined into faux greatness by sheer force of Noonanian gibberish and the D.C. establishment’s will to believe it. 

To my mind, that moral and intellectual bankruptcy has been obvious since at least 2005. The failure of the Social Security privatization push, the Schiavo debacle, the disintegration of Iraq into murderous chaos, and the hailing of a financial industry edging ever closer to outright criminality as the Miracle of Markets Creating Wealth and Prosperity for All. 

All of these disasters—political, social and economic—were the consequence of Bush Administration’sapplication of the Reagan realignment policy paradigm to social and economic circumstances that no longer remotely resemble those existing in 1980. Privatization, tax cutting, the embrace of politicized Christian fundamentalist as policy, militaristic interventionism, and deregulation—of course the Bush Administration’s zealous application of those policy principles led to serial disasters for the GOP and the nation. All of the problems—real or perceived—that these policies were implemented to fix had long since been as “fixed” as it was possible for those principles to fix them. And yet they were compelled to keep acting like top marginal rates were at 90%, the Evil Empire had to be rolled back and business was groaning under the weight of oppressive regulation and mired in strangling red tape because the constituencies that were the pillars of the party’s electoral constituencies.

Update: Rotating 360 on immigration.

Update:  What writing his 'book' about immigration actually means.

I'll say it now. If Romney becomes president, we will be at war with Iran within two years.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

You must remember this

A kiss is not always applied to the face but sometimes to the butt.

Media Matters explains:

Summary: In 2005, many Republican Senators went so far as to claim the filibuster of judicial nominees was unconstitutional. Now four years later, with President Obama's first Supreme Court appointment looming, will they remain consistent in their position or commit one of the most blatant acts of hypocrisy in the 220-year history of the United States Senate?

Quotes from eight years of Bush ass-kissing and goose-stepping follow. Try to wriggle off those quotes, Senators! We got you on YouTube, you bastards!

The No-Policy Pity Party

What to name the Republicans as they desperately try to rename Democrats.

The weirdness of Karl Rove

Attempting to smear Obama while Rove is still steaming from the shitpile of his own legacy in politics.

Why is anyone still listening to this man?

They would really like to hit and run

We want our money back!

Because Newt is thinking about running for prez

I thought I'd start running some of his wonderful old hits. This is a post right after the horror at Virginia Tech, where he thought he could scrape off the blame on to liberals:

Newt Gingrich explains why liberals caused the Virginia Tech massacre

By trying to say his bizarre statement after the Columbine school shooting still applied. Read (and hear) his intelligent and logical response as to why the liberals are at fault:

GINGRICH: Well, who has created a situation ethics, essentially, zone of not being willing to talk about any of these things. Let me carry another example. I strongly supported Imus being dismissed, but I also think the very thing he was dismissed for, which is the use of language which is stunningly degrading of women — the fact, for example, that one of the Halloween costumes this last year was being able to be either a prostitute or a pimp at 10, 11, 12 years of age, buying a costume, and we don’t have any discussion about what’s happened to our culture because while we’re restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold, we say it’s impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech. And I would argue that that’s a major component of what’s happened to our culture in the last 40 years.

Aren't we already getting eight years of this weird make-your-own-reality stuff? I think we've had enough.

Besides.

Who wants a president named Newt?


(Picture of Warty Newt from here.)

Update 4/23: Mustang Bobby of Bark Bark Woof Woof reminds us of another time Gingrich worked very hard to link society's ills and liberals together.... and it didn't work:

It is easy for Mr. Gingrich to blame society for the ills and tragedies of one demented man. He has done it before, with the tragedy of Susan Smith, the woman who drowned her two children in 1994. At first Mr. Gingrich implied that liberals were to blame and that it would be advantageous for the Republicans in the upcoming 1994 mid-term elections by reminding voters that liberals could be held accountable: "Slightly more moving our way. I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things." He dropped that when it came to light that Ms. Smith had been molested as a teen by her stepfather, a prominent South Carolina Republican and leader of the Christian Coalition. But obviously that smack-down in irony has not been enough to deter him, and onward he goes, doing what Republicans do best: finding a problem, making people afraid of it, and then finding someone else to blame for it. He doesn't offer solutions, nor does he bother to contemplate the fact that it was under the Reagan administration that federal assistance for mental health services for people like Mr. Cho was cut back and the Republicans have been very successful in defeating every effort by the Democrats to restore it, leaving it to the states, who have barely enough resources to pay for existing facilities, or the private sector.

Run, Newt, Run! I'm going to post more about your family values and three wives in a bit!

crossposted at SteveAudio

Because it's all the Republicans have left

They are attacking Obama's character.

Luckily people seem to be paying attention and aren't buying it:

According to the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the percentage of Americans who view the Republican Party positively is at an all-time low. Meanwhile, President Obama’s positive rating is at an all-time high, and the Democratic Party’s positive rating is near its high.

Why? Because the Republicans have dissolved into a querulous lot of nags and naysayers without a voice, a direction or a clue, and we are not amused.

And who has surfaced as their saviors? Bobby Jindal, Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh — the axis of drivel.

The axis of drivel. Can't say it better than that.

Republicans think your family doesn't 'need' health care coverage

Because it is apparently a 'want' not a 'need'.

Gee. Thanks. Let me just cough into your food as I prepare your order...

Yes, Rush really does want Obama to fail

Plain and simple. Nice that Limbaugh puts our country teetering on another great depression first ... before his bloated ego. Keep on talking, Rush, we need Democrats to get elected.

Reviews of Joe the Plumber's book

Priceless! The first reviewer is the inestimable Gen. JC Christian!

Now come the denials

It wasn't me, I wasn't there, it must have been somebody else...

In real life, Perle was the ideological architect of the Iraq war and of the Bush doctrine of preemptive attack. But at yesterday's forum of foreign policy intellectuals, he created a fantastic world in which:

1. Perle is not a neoconservative.

2. Neoconservatives do not exist.

3. Even if neoconservatives did exist, they certainly couldn't be blamed for the disasters of the past eight years.

"There is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy," Perle informed the gathering, hosted by National Interest magazine. "It is a left critique of what is believed by the commentator to be a right-wing policy."

So what about the 1996 report he co-authored that is widely seen as the cornerstone of neoconservative foreign policy? "My name was on it because I signed up for the study group," Perle explained. "I didn't approve it. I didn't read it."

The last eight years never happened....

Want an overview of the last two months?

EarlG's Top Ten is back! January 12th, January 19th, and February 2nd.

Burrowing

Under the skin, to continue to poison us with the neocon virus. What will it take to purge these people from the government?:

With only 44 days left in office, President Bush continues to “burrow” people into government positions that will continue long after President-elect Obama is sworn in. “All told, Mr. Bush has made roughly 30 personnel moves since the November election, some in nominations that will require Senate approval, and others in direct appointments that will last well into President-elect Barack Obama’s term and beyond.” The New York Times reports that on Tuesday of last week alone, Bush hired 18 people for administration jobs.

Forgetting Sarah Palin

Won't happen any time soon.

Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof:

I know we're all tired of hearing about Sarah Palin, but as Andrew Sullivan noted, she still matters because she is the icon for a Republican Party that thinks the most important thing is winning an election, not governing after. And they have a cynical view of the electorate: give 'em red meat and they'll follow you anywhere.

It's the same as the last eight years. Vote for someone who hates government and will not govern.

Then you have to ask... What are the Republicans THINKING when they let Palin have more air time? When she gets the spotlight at the governors conference? You guys didn't learn from Bush's two terms what horrific damage an uneducated, incoherent, neoconservative, fundamentalist, ideological, yet want-to-drink-a-beer-with whackjob can do to the country?

Oh, do go for it, Newt!

Being leader of the RNC, you would bring forth the deepest core values of the Republican party! Really!

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly:

I have to admit, I'm amazed at how short Republicans' memories are. We're talking about a failed former Speaker who made his mark more than a decade ago, before becoming widely loathed by the electorate, and ultimately forced from office by his own Republican colleagues. Gingrich, as Speaker, shut down the government (twice), he pursued presidential impeachment over an adulterous affair (while carrying on an affair of his own), and offered up such visionary ideas as barring women from combat roles because "males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes."

Worse, in 1994, after Susan Smith drowned her two young sons, Gingrich, just three days before the midterm elections, equated her crime with the values of the Democratic Party. In 1999, shortly after the Columbine massacre, Gingrich argued that American "elites" bear responsibility. After the shootings at Virginia Tech, Gingrich blamed liberals for supporting "situation ethics," before condemning Halloween costumes and the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law.

Put it this way: Democrats would be thrilled to see Gingrich as the RNC chair. That ought to tell Republicans something.

Maybe you could try for your fourth(?) wife at the same time, Newt, to show how much you support family values. That would be lovely.

You betcha!

Go for it! Please!:

In a new Rasmussen poll out today, Republicans overwhelmingly say that they want Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as their presidential nominee in 2012. Sixty-four percent of GOP respondents said that Palin would be their top choice in 2012..

Psst... Governor, you'll need this:



Update 11/16: The 'Africa as nation not continent' is apparently a hoax. I find it fascinating how iconic stories like these, even though fake, go to the heart of the matter: Governor Palin's ignorance and lack of depth illustrated in one joke about not knowing about Africa. Often not true (Ford was not a klutz, Quayle actually had some intelligence...), the stories take hold and are hard to eradicate. I have done my share of repeating false information, as with this one. It was too delightfully funny to be true.

Update 11/18: Dick Cavett writes a riff for the New York Times where he delightedly mocks Palin's style of speech:

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

Don't you get fired

When you refuse to do your job?



Josh Marshall:

As we and many others have chronicled, there's a surfeit of reasons to strip Sen. Lieberman of his committee chairmanship. But one, perhaps the most obvious and substantive, has gone little mentioned. Simply put, he was terrible at it. Lieberman's committee is the senate investigations and oversight committee, the senate's counterpart to Rep. Henry Waxman's committee in the House. And if you remember a lot about Waxman's investigations and hearings and nothing about Lieberman's, that's because Lieberman didn't hold any. Even in the face of endless scandals of the late Bush administration, Lieberman couldn't find anything worth poking into.

It's not center right, nor center center nor center left...

It's a liberal mandate.

David Neiwert of Orcinus:

I keep hearing from a lot of conservatives that McCain lost because he wasn't conservative enough -- that is, he was essentially a center-right candidate. And I think that's the consensus about where he sat on the political spectrum.

So if America is a "center-right country," then why didn't they elect the center-right candidate?

It's all bullshit, of course. As a CAF/Media Matters study found last year: "Media perceptions and past Republican electoral successes notwithstanding, Americans are progressive across a wide range of controversial issues, and they're growing more progressive all the time." In fact, as CAF's Robert Borosage points out, "Voters didn't just elect Democrats, they elected progressives." This is a liberal mandate.

Yet it's probably true that the election doesn't necessarily reflect an all-out embrace of all things liberal. Obama largely succeeded by making clear that he has a moderate temperament on a number of issues, and more importantly, in his style of governance. So a certain caution is probably wise.

No, this election was about one thing primarily: a sweeping repudiation of movement conservatism.

The breadth and depth of Democrats' victory was a loud shout from the American public: We have had enough of this crap.

Specifically, we've had enough of two things: conservative governance, and conservative politics.

The best sentence ever explaining why McCain lost.

August J. Pollak: (my bold)

There is going to be a lot of talk about why McCain lost, and I think that's really stupid, because just like the media spending ten hours going over a five-minute revelation, they are likewise going to spend weeks debating an answer that anyone with half a brain cell could tell you- because he pissed away everything he pretended he stood for to have a mentally imbalanced and intellectually defunct pseudo-Christian fundamentalist with a passion for petty grudges and murdering large mammals as his running mate as part of an escalating campaign of fear and racism.

I guarantee you, there will be a painfully large amount of opinions now that this is over using the phrase "I feel sorry for McCain." I don't. He deserves this and he knows it. The last few months of his campaign were evil, and tonight, by an overwhelming margin, we defeated it. We bashed evil in its skull and left it for dead.