hit list

if diabolical political mastermind bill clinton couldn't keep all the victims of his skullduggery buried, how could manchurian mujahideen barack obama keep the bright klieg lights from spilling onto his own dastardly trail of tears ... ?

the obama death list the following is a partial list of deaths of persons connected to barack hussein obama during his time inside the united states. read the list and judge for yourself ... sarah berkley — author of "the jihad at the ballot box" — a book examining obama's relationship with radical islam. died in a mysterious car crash in 2003. russell mcdougal — former fbi operative, january 23rd, 2007. mcdougal was known to hold sensitive information about meetings barack obama had with arms smugglers. his wife was murdered march 2006 after he went public with his initial reports. his father died july 8, 2006 four hours after mcdougal presented his findings on the savage nation. suffered administrative retaliation after reporting discussions by jihadist groups concerning obama to his superiors. rodrigo villalopez — a television news camera man who shot the footage of obama describing small town voters as "bitter" and "clinging to their guns during the primary season. brian goring — a defense attorney ... [etc., etc. ...]

fortunately, i think we can safely add to the list one more tragic victim of obama's insatiable bloodlust:

the mccain campaign — reportedly "stumbled and fell," incurring multiple "self-inflicted" wounds during a supposed "run for the white house." never recovered. "barack" hussein obama conveniently "out of the country" at the time.

a modest proposal

for a modest president of a modest nation, offered to firedoglake's jane hamsher by constitutional lawyer bruce fein:

jane:	... so, ah, george bush pardons everybody on the way out the door, there's a new president: what would you like to see happen in a new administration, in order to be able to look back, and i'm assuming that you're not one of the people who says "let bygones be bygones, let's all look forward" ... ?
bruce:	the first thing the president ought to do is announce that we don't have any war against international terrorism, that these are criminals, and we will treat them as criminals, we'll capture them as criminals, and try them, prosecute them, and punish them as criminals. second thing he should do is say "i don't have any power to detain americans as enemy combatants, ah, we either charge you with [a] crime or let you alone." third thing he'd say "i do not have any power to violate federal laws in gathering foreign intelligence. i can't commit torture, i can't violate fisa, i can't open your mail, except in accordance with what congress has prescribed." fourth thing he should say is "i'm not gonna invoke execute privilege and use secrecy to prevent you from knowing what i'm doing. absent weapons systems, my government will be transparent, and i'll make certain all my officials come and testify before congress. there may be need for executive sessions, if there's sensitive information, but i will not claim executive privilege and hide from congress anything." another thing that he should say is "i do not have authority to engage in extraordinary rendition. i can't go abroad and simply kidnap people, stick them in an interrogation chamber, torture them, dump them out without any political or legal recourses. and i won't do that. that is a formula for returning the world to a hobbesian state of nature, and authorizing other foreign governments to kidnap americans who might be sympathetic to some indigenous force, chechens in russia for instance, or tibetans in china. and the fifth thing he should say is "i'm shutting down the military commissions in guantanamo. all those people charged will be moved to civilian, ah, sector for trial consistent with due process, and all the guantanamo bay detainees will have a right to habeas corpus and i'm not detaining even non-citizens as enemy combatants. if i think i have evidence they've committed a crime, i prosecute them, otherwise, y'know, they can go back." and perhaps the most important thing — i don't have enough time to fully amplify on this idea — is to say "the united states of america chief, really cardinal mission, is to protect america and make it a more perfect union. we don't need and it doesn't make us safer to have a military footprint all over the globe. and i will work to eliminate all of our foreign troops abroad. defense will mean we'll have a defense against anyone who wants to attack us. if anyone attacks us, we'll incinerate them, but other than that, we, um, wish other people in the world happiness and freedom but we're not gonna sacrifice our men and women to protect the lives of people who have no loyalty, no taxes that pay to the united states, they're not u.s. citizens or who aren't involved in any way. we don't go abroad in search of dragons, as john quincy adams said in 1826, to project our power abroad. it's that, that craving for international stature and prestige that's caused disaster to the constitution of the united states," and i'd want to see a president of the united states say "that era is over." "now i'm a president of modesty. i don't want to leave my footprints in the sands of time based upon fighting wars and attempting to transform the world in our own image. we've got enough problems making ourselves a more perfect union, and i'm not gonna do something that i don't know how to do, and in any event, it's not up to me to risk men and women's lives for a people who owe no loyalty to the united states." that is what i'd like to see. now regards to the people who are outgoing? i'd want to say the president should announce that he certainly will open criminal investigations if there was wrongdoing in the prior administration, ah, and he's gonna make certain that and pledge that he would expect a succeeding administration after his to do the same, if his administration committed any wrongdoing. um, and so he's not gonna hold this administration up to any more immunity than he would grant a predecessor administration.
jane:	i hope we get that president.

mccain's weekend

msnbc's domenico montanaro sums it up fairly accurately: (links mine)

mccain's rough weekend: you know you had a problematic weekend when: one of your top economic advisers/surrogates finally steps down from the campaign after his “nation of whiners” remark; you get panned for breaking codel [congressional delegation] protocol/etiquette by announcing (incorrectly) at a fundraiser that your opponent is headed to iraq on friday or saturday; the prime minister of iraq tells a german magazine that he backs your opponent's plan for withdrawing troops from that country; and when the iraqi government tries to walk back that support, it does so unconvincingly.

meanwhile the gods of cable snafus swooped in for the cruel kill:

alex witt: ok, peter, i want you to take a listen to what john mccain said this weekend in his radio address, get you to react. peter, listen up ... [cut to video of the joker from "the dark knight"] ... uhh well, actually that was, uhh ... the joker. so we’re not gonna go there. there’s no parallel there that we want to, uh, make any sort of, uhh ... you know where i’m going with that. that was bad.

krollateral damage

i offer two neologisms in honor of the now-infamous chuck kroll, an overzealous right wing troll who thought sending pz meyers @ pharyngula a death threat using his wife melanie kroll's corporate email account was teh righteous pwn.

she was fired.

1) krollateral damage: noun — a loved one who becomes the inadvertent victim of thoughtless and/or venial and/or petty actions aimed at someone else. usage — "suzie's mom became the krollateral damage after suzie's ex forwarded mom the photos that suzie sent him of her balling her new dude." update: synonym — trollateral damage (so obvious i missed it!) 2) chuckroll: (also: chuckkroll, chuckkkroll) verb — to inadvertently cause harm to a loved one through thoughtless and/or venial and/or petty actions aimed at someone else. (not to be confused with "rickroll", to which it has no relation.) usage — "suzie's mom got chuckrolled when suzie's ex forwarded mom the photos that suzie sent him of her balling her new dude." origin — july 17, 2008 (you heard 'em both here first, folks!)

try harder next time

the blogosphere asks: is this satire?

hmmm ... maybe not so much:

it represents the basic stuff that you get from the right about obama, but it neither mocks nor exaggerates them. it's a sad state of affairs that conservatives are hard to satirize or parody because they're so insane, but that's where we are.

ok, so the new yorker obviously didn't try hard enough. they fell victim to the political version of "poe's law".

they didn't take the non-stop paranoia the right wing smear machine force feeds its minions all the way to its (il)logical conclusion:

the real limbaugh-hannity dittohead fantasy nightmare: THE DATE: january 21, 2009 THE SCENE: a large outdoor prison labor camp, manned on its perimeters by doberman-walking, heavily-armed, aviator-shaded, afro-&-sideburn-sporting, toothpick-chewing, purple revolution-jumpsuited soul-brothers. behind barbed-wire, under the hot sun, bent over rows of cotton, wretched white slaves toil in close chains as strains of parliament funkadelic waft out of the guard towers. one slave curses himself for having been a brainwashed libtard dumbocrat tricked into voting for president barack obama. enraged at the confession, another slave — sporting a "mom loves mccain" tattoo on a bicep swollen and glistening from servitude — throttles him with his own chains. the guards fire into the air and bark for order as the slaves scatter and the victim's last spasms subside ...

quote of the day

on creationism, intelligent design and the wedge strategy, from daily kos:

fortunately creationists don't realize that their wedge strategy is a two-edged sword. once they decided to adopt intelligent design and don a cloak of empiricism, attempting to wage war in the same evidentiary arena as reputable career scientists required their ceding to naturalism larger and larger swaths of territory — such as the acknowledgment "micro-evolution" — if they hope to be taken seriously on the battleground of ideas. the only question left is how much of their theology they're willing to give up in order to win the standing and prestige from the scientific community they so desperately crave. they may not realize it now, or perhaps are still merely too stubborn to admit it, even to themselves, but their own vanity is methodically boxing them into irrelevance.

silly scientists

it's always so quaint to hear how they waste their time, with their so-called "experiments" and their toys, when they really needn't ever bother ...

... then someone in florence, italy tried to pump water from a deep well, but couldn't do it. they discovered that no suction pump could raise water higher than 32 feet. galileo noticed this and suggested that his pupil, torricelli, investigate it. well, the young scientist thought a long time about it and finally decided to use mercury for his experiment. since it was 13 times heavier than water, he calculated that if atmospheric pressure really existed, the mercury would rise about 30 inches in a glass tube from which the air had been expelled. well, filling a 4 foot glass tube of mercury, then inverting it in a half-filled flask, torricelli removed his thumb from the tube. with mounting excitement he watches the mercury fell from the tube, then after a few oscillations caused by momentum, the column settled at a height between ... guess how much ... ? 29 and 30 inches. yet, if men had only noticed carefully a passage from job, they would've already known that air has weight. you mean the bible talks about it? of course! [chuckling] job, the 28th chapter, beginning with verse 23: 23god understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof. 24for he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven; 25to make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth the waters by measure. there it is! what a mighty creator god we have, friend. — h.m.s. richards, jr., the voice of prophecy

lessons unlearned

haven't we seen this movie before?

democratic presidential nominee barack obama on the supreme court's heller decision, june 26:

"sen. obama has always believed that the second amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms and will uphold the constitutional rights of law-abiding gun owners, hunters and sportsmen as president," said spokesman tommy vietor. "sen. obama also believes that we can work together to enact common-sense laws, like closing the gun show loophole and improving our background check system, so that guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals."

ohio democratic representative tim ryan, june 30:

one pro-gun democrat in the house said the decision would actually help obama by clarifying that gun ownership is an individual right and further dissuading democrats from pursuing what has proved to be a political loser at the national level. "it's a nonissue," said democratic rep. tim ryan, who represents a blue-collar youngstown, ohio-area district and has won the backing of the nra. "democrats have learned a lesson to not campaign on it."

the national rifle association, june 30:

the national rifle association plans to spend about $40 million on this year’s campaign, with $15 million of that devoted to portraying barack obama as a threat to the second amendment rights upheld last week by the supreme court. ... "we look forward to showing him 'bitter,'" [chris cox, head of the nra's political arm] said, referring to obama's statement this spring that some in rural america "cling" to guns and religion out of bitterness.

it's official: summer sequelitis is upon us. obama may be in an election even john kerry could win, but i'd rather not have to watch a rerun.