The Brad Blog: Discredited wingnuts lawyer up with GOP attorneys, blame 'liberal media'

Whiskey Fire: Muck

Brain Rage: How To Report The News

Balkinization: John Yoo's explanation of the purpose of the Torture Memos, and their actual purpose

Justice Watch: Republican obstructionism delays justice

They gave us a republic: Nightowl Newswrap

Many thanks to Blue Gal and Batocchio for their stellar roundup work during my absence

OMG Shatner is everywhere. Via Monkey Muck. Open thread below...

Pashmina fight! From the dear departed "Smack The Pony" Channel 4 British sketch comedy show.

h/t Monkey Muck

Open thread below...

First I want to say that I had an incredible time at Netroots Nation. What a treat to see so many in the liberal blogosphere gather to discuss health care and virtually every other issue we face. Kudos to all the politicians who showed up to represent their positions as well.

Anyway, a huge topic that was raging through the weekend was the state of the 'public option.' Since the Baucus Dogs haven't finished their bill we still don't have the goods to really make any sense of what the House of Lords is going to put forth. We do have the Senate HELP committee bill, but the Baucus Dogs are trying to muck up the works by stalling the process and trying to empower the teabaggers. Any member of Congress that is affected by the lunatic fringe appearing at these events should resign immediately.

I was talking to Digby at length about it over the weekend and she said she had a meeting with Mike Lux and he laid out a possible scenario to her that could come to pass even if Grassley, Bayh, Conrad, Baucus, Nelson and the rest of the paid off shills of the health insurance industry come out with a bill that doesn't have a 'public option.'

He later wrote about it in his piece: The News of Its Death Is Greatly Exaggerated

Here are a couple of possibilities for getting a bill passed:

A. The first is that conservative Senators are given a fig leaf compromise on the public option, so that they can say to people they forced a compromise, and then are brought over with all kinds of other incentives that make them more comfortable with the bigger bill.

B. The second is that the conference committee simply breaks the bill in half, one half being the less controversial part that everyone agrees upon, the other being the public option and the financing, both of which can go through the reconciliation process. Then Obama and Reid muscle the 50 votes they need for support.

Continue reading »

Faithful Progressive: Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sarah Palin: What a real champion of the intellectually challenged looks like.

Open Left: It's not 1994 anymore (or 1984 for that matter)

The Econocataclysm: Town Hall Meeting Defense -Video Game!

The Atlantic: The Final Days of Merrill Lynch

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: The Red Hot Jazz Archive, Workplace Bullying Institute, True/Slant, Monkey Muck

You stay classy, GOP: (h/t Oliver Willis)

This was not widely reported in the "MSM," but last month the delightful Michelle Malkin ran a very important "Obamacare poster contest" on her blog, which soars o'er the muck of the internet like a million eagles screeching into the sunset.

The submissions Michelle received were just as insightful, nuanced and discerning as you might imagine, and obviously this is an excellent way to advance the health care debate in the United States, some fun Photoshopping. It beats a lame sketch about Hitler, right? [..]

And then this morning someone forwarded me this email, which as far as I know is unrelated to the Malkin contest BUT follows a similar vein AND has been "making the rounds," as the kids say, under the subject line Obamacare Healthcare is coming soon!

Today's Conservatives: Just when you think they can't sink any lower, they dredge yet another layer of slime out of the swamp.

DOWNLOADS: (2982)

PLAYS: (5698)

It's obvious that the marching orders have been given for Bushies to come forward and justify torture ever since we saw Dick Cheney do just that. This time it was Condi's turn, and she sounds just as wacky. Every time she opens her mouth she digs herself deeper in the muck. Here's her latest incoherent explanation over her remarks about the president's power to make waterboarding legal or not:

Rice: I said at one point that it was ahhh, given, right that if the president authorized it, it was legal. This was not a "Nixon/Frost" moment. What I ontended to say or what I meant to say about this is: The president said I won't authorize anything that is illegal. It's not that because he authorized it, it was legal...

And she has to even justify her position to a fourth-grader:

Days after telling students at Stanford University that waterboarding was legal "by definition if it was authorized by the president," former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was pressed again on the subject yesterday by a fourth-grader at a Washington school.

... Then Misha Lerner, a student from Bethesda, asked: What did Rice think about the things President Obama's administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?

"Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country," she said. "But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country."

Waterboarding is and always has been torture, so it was not legal. The above clip includes video of her talk at Stanford, which started this whole incident:

“[President Bush] was also very clear that we would do nothing – nothing – that was against the law or against our obligations internationally,” Rice said May 3rd at a Washington school.

And ended with her saying, again, that she didn't make a "Nixon/Frost" type gaffe.

Well, what should we call it then?

Andrea Mitchell said that she may have been bitten by an insect playing golf and was having a allergic reaction in her eye, so that's why her face looks swollen. But her words are just gibberish, and you can't help wondering if those words and their strangled reasoning are causing Condi's discomfort. Is their endgame to just try and move polling a few more points in their favor against torture investigations?

Hi, it's Actor212 again, of Simply Left Behind

It's Monday. I know, sucks doesn't it? As many Republican politicians have said to themselves while drunk, "I wish I could unsuck it." I'll do my best.

- First off, a bit of nasty business from, of all people, Joel Stein at Time Magazine and the LA Times. Our intrepid reporter, Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo tips us off that "joel stein, big mucky muck columnist has obviously taken media bloodhound's hilarious idea for "ann coulter mad libs" and actually had the audacity to not only use it, but to claim that he invented it himself." You can see for yourself: stein's nov. 2 column and here is media bloodhound's piece from two weeks earlier. No jokes are directly taken, but the entire premise is nearly identical in each piece. I have an email into Stein. I'll update in comments should he or the LA Times respond.

- From Les Enrages: your primer on waterboarding. - Right wingers have had a field day with this story, as noted by Betsy Angert at My Left Wing. But she makes several good points in her rebuttal, and we might even begin to wean some kids off Ritalin, so that they don't end up hooked on OxyContin later in life.

- Did the US nuke Syria? Gun-Totin' Liberal thinks so, and was the first place I saw the actual evidence (albeit in Arabic). Personally, I doubt it. The Jerusalem Post pulled the story on Saturday (at least the links I saw) and Al Jazeera made no mention of it on their English language website. But you decide.

- As Mad In The Middle shows us, if you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic.

- From First-Draft.com, Texas has paid federal hurricane aid to just 13 families....Governor Perry blames Mississippi and Louisiana????

My blog, Simply Left Behind, is locked in a tight battle for a 2007 Weblog Award. Your vote could make the difference. If you like what I've posted here today, please vote for Simply Left Behind. Two clicks, ten seconds, and you've voted. Thank you, for your time and your vote.

...In a ruined city -- still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 20 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers -- isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?...read on (reg req. The Star Telegram)

Dowd makes a good point in her latest. Which Bush will be remembered as the true conservative?