Wednesday’s Mini-Report

February 21, 2007

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* In 2004, John McCain said Dick Cheney was one of the best Vice Presidents in American history. Last month, McCain reversed course, saying Bush has been “badly served by…the Vice President.” According to Cheney, McCain reversed course again, and apologized to the VP directly.

* Reuters: “U.S. spending on prescription drugs, hospital care and other health services is expected to double to $4.1 trillion over the next decade, up from $2.1 trillion in 2006, a government report released on Wednesday found.” Want to bet this is going to come up during the presidential campaign? (thanks to S.W. for the tip)

* House Republican Conference Committee Chairman Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) took the lead in pushing the bogus story about Speaker Pelosi and the military plane she never asked for. Yesterday, Putnam acknowledged that he didn’t know if his charges were true, and doesn’t care if he was lying.

* I have to say, it was kind of sad hearing Tony Snow and several White House press corps members complaining about blogs yesterday. Snow described the “wonderful, imaginative hateful stuff that comes flying out” of the blogs he reads. NBC News’ David Gregory bemoaned how political coverage has “become so polarized in this country…because it’s the internet and the blogs that have really used this White House press conferences to somehow support positions out in America, political views.” I have no idea why using comments at a press conference to support a political position is a bad thing.

* When the White House press corps returns to a spiffed-up, rewired briefing room this summer, Helen Thomas will no longer have a front-row seat.

* The NYT had an interesting report today about the White House being staffed with Bush’s old buddies from Texas, who’ve known him for years. Clay Johnson, a prep school friend of Bush who is now a deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, says “the most painful accusation is hearing Mr. Bush called a liar.” Tell you what, Clay, when he stops lying, we’ll stop pointing it out.

* In light of retired basketball player Tim Hardaway’s anti-gay bigotry, far-right talk-show host Michael Medved came to Hardaway’s defense today with a bizarre analogy between gay men and fat women. Fortunately, Shakespeare’s Sister eviscerated the nonsense.

* There’s been a Jeff Gannon sighting.

* It wasn’t one of his special extended comments, but Olbermann had a good segment last night on the awful treatment of recovering veterans at Walter Reed.

* Rumsfeld was a tragedy as a Defense Secretary, but blaming him for Iraq while giving Bush a pass is absurd.

* Frank Gaffney may now be known as the guy who ran the bogus Lincoln quote as part of a vague threat against war critics, but as Jonathan Schwarz explained in a terrific post, Gaffney is a troubled character. “In a healthy country, Gaffney would spend his days arguing with his enormous collection of Star Wars action figures. Here in America, we constantly put him on TV as an ‘expert’ on foreign policy and give him an organization with a $2 million budget.”

* Thanks to being humiliated in a Washington Post piece last week, the Defense Department is once again permitting Department of Veterans Affairs doctors to get full medical records they say they need to treat severely injured troops arriving at VA hospitals from Iraq and Afghanistan. Good.

* The president asked retired Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, to focus on finding more recruits with the language skills to collect information on Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Could this mean employment for all the military linguists Bush fired for being gay?

* And, finally, be sure to check out this brutal cartoon from Mike Luckovich, which ran in yesterday’s Atlanta Journal Constitution. The best political cartoonists can say a lot with a little, and this is one of those instances.

If none of these particular items are of interest, consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.

I bet St. John loves Dick’s condescending tone:

I just fundamentally disagree with John. John said some nasty things about me the other day and then next time he saw me ran over to me and apologized. Maybe he’ll apologize to Rumsfeld.

“he ran over to me”, “nasty things”. That John, so like a naughty little schoolboy. Also, contrast “John” and “Rumsfeld”.

  • to focus on finding more recruits with the language skills to collect information on Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

    They’ve had more than five years to develop a program to train enough linguists to do the job, and still their solution after all this time is to recruit people who already have the skills. Hello, you’ve been trying that for more than five years and you’re still seriously short-staffed, isn’t it about time we change the plan to something that might work?

  • I guess the Sith Lord Cheney used the force on Walnuts McCain

    As for the MSM complaining about blogs yet again… my toejam feels for them. Maybe if they did their fucking jobs instead of setting social calendars with the people they question.

    Schwarz is insulting all those folks who have enormous collections of Star Wars Figures (not me I swear!) Gaffney strikes me as someone who would be spanking it to stuff like this:

    http://www.talkingpresidents.com/products-af-coulter.shtml

  • I guess the obvious joke is that Cheney offered to take McCain on a hunting trip.

  • I have no idea why using comments at a press conference to support a political position is a bad thing.

    Also, since when did reality and accountability become a political position?

    I’m surprised Snow didn’t stand up and drop trou and turn the figurative circle jerk into a literal one.

  • Based on the number and quality of posts that appear here on a daily basis, it’s obvious that CB takes his Reality-Based Commentary, Analysis, and Tirades on Politics in America quite seriously.

    Hopefully, he won’t find it embarrassing if I direct his readers’ attention to the URL of this post and the fact that CB just reached a major milestone in blogging — his 10,000th post on this site.

    Congrats and a big thank you for keeping us all so well-informed, even if some of what you bring to my attention gets my intestines in a knot.

  • Yeah, I don’t think right wingers have a lot of Star Wars toys lying around. I have two brothers, and we all shared toys, so we had access to my older brother’s, although I never had any. I don’t think right wingers are into Star Wars or science fiction too much. I think right wingers are probably raised watching Nazi Germany documentaries nonstop.

  • *flip*flop*flip*…that McCain character is starting to sound like a timing device. Anyone check him to see if he’s wearing a suicide vest? He did promise to kill himself, y’know.

    Undermining the projected profits of Big Pharma will be deemed an overt act of supporting terrorism—so you can call me “Osama” from now on. I cannot even begin to fathom how this will affect the country. We’ll start seeing hospitals and doctors turning away “gratis” services, just to stave off bankrupty—because most Americans are not going to be able to manage this increase. The GOP trough-hogs in the Semate will block discussion on this, just as they’re trying to unilaterally stop progress in other areas—so maybe we can just line up all the ReThug Senators who hail from states with Democratic governors, and throw them collectively under a locomotive.

    And I seriously doubt that Gaffney would contemplate arguing with his Star Wars toys—they possess a larger vocabulary, a higher IQ, and a much more positive grasp on reality. Rumor has it that one of the plastic Ewoks thoroughly kicked his ass in a mano-e-mano cage-match a while back….

  • Hopefully, he won’t find it embarrassing if I direct his readers’ attention to the URL of this post and the fact that CB just reached a major milestone in blogging — his 10,000th post on this site.

    Shoot. I had hoped I was the first to notice. Congrats, CB! To many more!

  • …a bizarre analogy between gay men and fat women.

    I confess, I’ve been noodling with the exact same analogy — one-way attraction, and so forth — but I couldn’t make it work. Fortunately, unlike Michael Medved, I’m not on a deadline to write a column, so I can keep my half-formed opinions to myself.

    Or I can dump them here.

  • A brother who’s four years older can equal a pretty nice Star Wars collection, though.

    I wish I had gotten more toys as a kid. It’s all relative to what neighborhood you were in and what your friends had. I had two brothers, and people in my family tend to keep a lot of stuff, so we always had a lot of toys- mostly broken or that we’d outgrown- around. So we would share. Out of my two best friends in elementary school, one was an only child, and the other had just a sister (girls’ toys aren’t boys toys, after all). But they always seemed to be better off than I was individually, pretty complete collections. I remember this one guy’s parents would basically give him everything he wanted- that was pretty vexing because he was a jerk. No one in my family would ever buy me five toys at a time or anything like that (even more than one, actually). Not counting Christmas, that is. I didn’t get much all year long- I was dying to save my money to get the stuff I wanted. We had a lot of comics, though.

    I wonder what a study on this and political ideology would be like. I remember my dad would always tell us how he had nothing when he was a child, a ball was his only toy or something like that. Or a study on what professions people go into if they had a lot of toys or not.

  • Michael Medved is hardly a person to be putting down fat people, unless he is now a “self-hating fat boy.” I mean, he’s even more pear-shaped than Lucianne Goldberg’s favorite spawn.

    And there is no more excuse for “hating” fat people than there is for hating gay people. Both types should be taken out and strung up by their thumbs (of course, I’m not sure this species of hairless biped actually has thumbs, so that will have to be investigated further).

    Michael Medved – another failed Hollywood wannabee who’s a legend in his own mind.

  • Hopefully, he won’t find it embarrassing if I direct his readers’ attention to the URL of this post and the fact that CB just reached a major milestone in blogging — his 10,000th post on this site.

    It doesn’t seem like that many Friedmans ago that I started reading this blog. I can even remember when we didn’t have comments here.

    Anyhow. I’ll add my congrats for what is IMO one of the best blogs/bloggers around.

  • “Tell you what, Clay, when he stops lying, we’ll stop pointing it out.” – CB

    You know, that’s exactly what Snow and his press corps buddies were bitching about in their little whine session. Snow and his MSM buddies have an understanding. It’s like professional wrestling: you put on a show for the people, but later on the wrestlers pack up their faux animosities and all have a drink together at the bar. What Gregory, Wolffe and Snow were complaining about is that while they want to give the impression they are playing a full-contact sport, the reality is they have no intention of really going after the other because the goal is for everyone to play another day and keep collecting the paychecks.

    Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe even goes so far as to set up the stenography game, “Our role is to ask questions and get information. … It’s not a chance for the opposition to take on the government and grill them to a point where they throw their hands up and surrender.”

    No Richard, your role is to get to the facts and report them, not to ask questions and dutifully copy White House spin as if its the god’s honest truth. Hence why the blogosphere can get, in the WH press corps’ perspective, angry. We the people are outraged at the game you guys play in the Wh press room. And when we (well, actually folks like the Carpetbagger) point it out, you characterize that as anger and uncivility. So don’t get mad at us when what’s going on in the blogospere is us calling you guys on your BS. If you want it to stop, just listen to CB when he says ” when he stops lying, we’ll stop pointing it out.” And that’s the Word.

  • I don’t think right wingers are into Star Wars or science fiction too much. I think right wingers are probably raised watching Nazi Germany documentaries nonstop.

    Actually, not true. Much of s-f is very right wing. There is a whole way of defining oneself in s-f as being either a fan of Robert Heinlein (righty) or Isaac Asimov (lefty). “Starship Troopers” is out and out fascist.

    There was a huge outcry by a good half of the audience this past season of BattleStar Galactica with the “Iraqi resistance” opening episodes, with the Humans as suicide-bombing “Iraqi” insurgents against the “American” Cylon conquerors/occupiers.

    A good half of the audience for Star Wars is cheering on Darth Vader, trust me.

    You should see the out and out nazis at too many sciffy conventions – one reason why I no longer go to them.

  • “Putnam acknowledged that he didn’t know if his charges were true, and doesn’t care if he was lying.”

    Adam Putnam fucks goats.

  • On the other hand, I *did* hear this from, well, Adam Putnam, so god knows what the truth *really* is…

  • Michael Medved – another failed Hollywood wannabee who’s a legend in his own mind.

    It’s too bad there isn’t a bunch of annoying Republican commenters, middle-class-wannabe-rich guys, to weigh in on the upbringing and toys stuff I mentioned in my comment at #12. The reason stories about how po’ someone was and how tough their childhood was never impress me (and I just wait for the person talking to finish without commenting) is because I’ve heard it so many times before, including from my own family. My cousin worked as a night shift stock-person at a super-market for years into hs adult life. My mom’s dad used to send her out to buy him a pack of cigarettes all the time when she was young. She wasn’t sitting on a velvet couch with a poodle and a pearl necklace. Her dad met her mom at the factory where he worked on the line, and where her mom also worked on the line, until he became a foreman. My Godmother’s father discovered her mother on her hands and knees scrubbing a floor at the building where she worked as a cleaning lady.

    A lot of the white idiots who are in the Republican base around here would doubtless be whipping out the one story about how one time their dad hit them or their sibling or how they didn’t get the toy they wanted one time. I hate guys like that and I hate that pissing contest. The only people who tend to still have it bad often nowadays are African Americans. For the rest of us, it was people in my parents’ generation and older who had it rough, and less so for kids raised later. Tons of guys have told me about how tough their upbringings were and they were almost always the types who think they are the toughest thing that ever happened, but really just are wimpy cowardly guys who make up stories about their lives.

  • Wow! 10,000 posts, yet you don’t look a day over 1000. Keep up the great work, CB. Your blog is a tremendous resource. I’d be lost without it.

  • Congrats to CB on his 10,000 post. Excellent work for a long time.

    And congrats to me for posting the 186,668th comment. 🙂

  • Do yourselves a favor and stay focused on the Walter Reed thing. It’s the crack. Don’t devote space to anything else.

  • Speaking of cartoons, this is just classic wingnut idiocy from Little Green F*ckwits-

    http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24526_Egyptian_Two-Fer-_Racism_and_Misogyny_in_One_Cartoon#comments

    The cartoon is a brilliant, light-touch mocking of Islamist misconceptions about the West. It’s the kind of enlightenment in the Arab-Muslim world that we should really be pleased to see. But for wingers, it’s an outrage, because, well, they have only one gear in their head.

    Still I’d be interested to find out how rapidly this “outrage” bounces through the intertubes. Will any wingers stand up and point out that some of their brethren are moronic beyond belief?

    • Comments are closed.