Politico Caves In To The Race-Baiters At Breitbart

WARNING: Salty Language ahead.

But the insanity and blind hatred lives on

Joe Williams to leave POLITICO
By DYLAN BYERS | 6/30/12 10:00 AM EDT

Joe Williams, the POLITICO reporter who was suspended last week for controversial remarks he had made on television and Twitter, will leave his job.

The great crapfest known as Politico, felchers of the GOP, catamites to the howling monkeys of the right, have sacrificed another body to the Dead God Breitbart, as his followers demand blood sacrifice on a continuing basis to appease their Dark Lord:

In an MSNBC interview on June 21, Williams suggested that Mitt Romney was only comfortable around white people, prompting the conservative website Breitbart.com to flag a number of negative remarks Williams had made about Romney on Twitter. That night, Harris and executive editor Jim VandeHei sent a memo to staff announcing that Williams’ remarks “fell short of our standards for fairness and judgment,” and that he would be suspended pending review…

Oh mah ghod! Dat n***r done say bad things about a white mens. Hang dat n***r up by his thumbs!

Did I mention that Joe Williams is Black? I almost forgot, except that the ENTIRE basis of his firing is BECAUSE he’s black. And got UPPITY. (Uppitiness below.)

John Roberts – Too Clever by Half (conclusion)

If you haven’t read the much shorter part i. John Roberts – Too Clever by Half, I suggest you do so now. I’ll wait.

Roberts at “Red Mass” – a rite to bless
judges and jurists that’s held right before
SCOTUS’ term each year , and has
its roots in the Middle Ages. 

We pick up with Ruth Bader Ginzburg, from yesterday [emphasis added]:

Instead, her opinion concurred with Roberts when he said that the individual mandate was within Congress’s power to tax—this was the Constitutional loophole he found—but rejected his view that it wasn’t valid under the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate commerce. Ginsburg wasn’t gentle. She wrote that Roberts’s analysis was “rigid,” “crabbed,” and “stunningly retrogressive,” that it “finds no home in the text of the Constitution or our decisions” and made “scant sense.” There was also a mesmerizing dissection of the broccoli question.  [The New Yorker]

ii. The Commerce Clause today and the Supreme Court yesterday morning …

And here is what I wrote on March 26th of this year:

… Clarence Thomas is on record as wanting to seriously modify the Commerce Clause, the Federal Government’s authority to regulate interstate commerce, the reason that Washington and Madison and Mason sat on Washington’s porch and contacted those who would eventually call for, get, write, campaign for and ratify a constitution. [...]

And I fear that the Affordable Health Care Decision will be the Dred Scott of our age, and that tragedy will ensue. I don’t know what kind of tragedy, but it is in the air. To tinker with the interpretation of the Sacred Words of the “objective” Constitution, Clarence Thomas’ view might well push us off a cliff. There is no question that at least four Justices were chomping at the bit to hear this case, and I can make an educated guess as to which four.

In this case, the baby may literally be thrown out with the bathwater. Actual human lives will be irrevocably affected by whatever decision is effected. Things is bad.

[...]

And as the Learned Nine emerge,

robed in black and primly trussed;

we’ll hear their wisdom on display

and measure if they’re truly Just.

John Roberts – Too Clever by Half

Faux Nooz­™  screws the pooch

“It is possible to twist the fine print into a pretzel and make it look like a tax, and that’s enough for Justice Roberts on Page 41, who is apparently a different person than Justice Roberts on Page 20. …”

Faux Nooz and CNN got it wrong this morning, of course. The most significant Supreme Court case (excepting Bush v. Gore, of course, which permanently stained the members of that 5-4 majority) in decades, perhaps in a century, and CNN got it wrong.*

[* Faux Nooz doesn't count, of course, since they're merely a propaganda arm of the GOP at Rupert's behest, putting his piracies in the eternal protection of the GOP, just as he had done in England until his sleazebags hacked a dead girl's phone.]

We all laugh. And yet, in laughing and mocking these national “news” organizations for screwing the pooch THAT badly, we must not shut off our brains, but ask, instead, HOW did they manage to get it so wrong so quickly?

Ron Paul and the Invisible Empire Redux

A strange interlude on FaceBook today. A commenter in a thread about Ambrose Bierce mentioned that he lived just minutes from the Civil War Antietam battlefield. And then came this bizarre interlude from the Political Twilight Zone (names changed to shield the guilty, emphasis added):

Hart Williams Bloodiest day of our bloodiest war. The Civil War STILL accounts for more casualties than all other American wars put together.
Iago T. Legree if lee hadnt suffered from so much desertion on that first invasion, he would have undoubtedly kicked little macs army of agreesion into the potomac!
Hart Williams Agreesion? Well, you spell like a secessionist, at least. Don’t defend slavery. It makes you look like a moron.
Iago T. Legree it was a typo dikweed, fuck u anyway
Hart Williams You’re not doing a good job of NOT looking like a moron.
Iago T. Legree states should have the right to determine their own destiny, look what the feds are doing to arizona right now!
Hart Williams Tuck tail, Reb. Back to the dark ages with you.
Iago T. Legree what age do you live in? not exactly the age of enlightenmet that is certain, are you just another bleeder?
Hart Williams My great-great grandfather fought under George Thomas at Chickamauga. Then at Missionary Ridge and then at Nashville. We have a long history of wiping the floor with barbarians. (And it’s “enlightenment.”)
Iago T. Legree sic semper tyrannis!
Iago T. Legree check the inner city these days, you really think the civil war made life better for the slaves? should have left the south alone to free them,it would have come without the hate and blood that war monger lincoln created with his invasion of SOVEREIGN STATES!
Hart Williams Thank you Mr. Booth. Glad to see you’re still stuck on 1860. And, alas, still stuck on stupid. Mater tua caligas gerit!*
Iago T. Legree thats what im talkin bout ! abe linky vampire killer!
Iago T. Legree yer pretty brave when hiding behind a keyboard esel!
Hart Williams And you’re very lucky that you’re not in the same room with me. False macho, fake “intelleckshual” pretensions and now physical threats? You are a loser and a lout. Take your treason somewhere else.

[* Latin for "Your mother wears army boots."]

I wondered if he was off his meds or normally acts this way. So I went to his page, to see what sort of person this Iago T. Legree was. His motto: “sic semper tyrannis” (the Virginia state motto, but, more importantly, what John Wilkes Booth yelled after assassinating Abraham Lincoln and just before breaking his leg). And this lovely recent conversation:

The News That Is Not Fact; The Fact That Is Not News

“OMEN, n. A sign that something will happen if nothing happens.” ~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Tea Partiers protesting CNN’s news, as it followed the astroturf “Tea Party Express” phony grass-roots circus act in 2010. 

We begin with the news about the news [emphasis added]:

CNN’s Primetime Ratings Sink to 20-Year Low 10:56 AM PDT 6/26/2012 by Michael O’Connell The primetime lineup of Anderson Cooper 360 and Piers Morgan, specifically, saw big drops during the prime 8-10 p.m. hours that have averages down to 446,000 total viewers and a mere 129,000 with adults 25-54. Those numbers mark 35 and 41 percent drops from the second quarter in 2011. Daily ratings stumbled to their lowest in more than a decade (2001), with 319,000 the average total viewers and 129,000 adults 25-54 — 35 and 45 percent drops, respectively….

How very sad. And while we’re talking about “news”, here are some factual Corrections:

The Roots of Humor

The Proprietor

I said they’d stolen the 2000 election in the Supreme Court and Florida.
They laughed.

I said invading Iraq was an unconscionable mistake.
They laughed.

I said the Koch Brothers were trying to push stealth initiatives in dozens of states.
They laughed.

I warned what might happen with five conservative male Catholic Supreme Court Justices.
They laughed.

I’m a funny guy.

Courage.

June Drawings Semi-Concluded

The past two weeks.

Outside Gerlach, Nev.

Click on the pictures for full size.

Envious Peasants and Dancing Horses

Kathleen “I don’t get it” Parker defends the everywomanness of Anne Romney, her soul sister from another trust fund:

Kathleen Parker / Washington Post: Ann Romney has a horse.  So what?  —  The punch line is at least as old as the eldest baby boomer: “I didn’t get a pony.”  —  Here’s Jerry Seinfeld: “I hated those kids [who had ponies].  In fact, I hate anyone that ever had a pony when they were growing up.”  —  Why is this funny?

I don’t know. Pull that silver spoon out of your … er, mouth and pay attention.

Inductive Reasoning

I do know something about a couple of things, after all.

Yesterday, this issue came up on Facebook:

 Facebook screencap @8:10 PM PDT 22 June 2012

I only say this because, when the Jerry Sandusky defense attorney came out and spoke half an hour ago, he said precisely that. Sandusky wanted to testify, they told him it would be disastrous, since the Prosecutor could have then brought Matt out as a “rebuttal witness” and they decided NOT to have Sandusky take the stand in his own defense.

Mitt Romney: In Favor of Higher Minimum Assuage

The Etch-a-Sketch strikes again.

 From The Hill:

… [Romney] also reversed course on a key part of the DREAM Act, pledging to provide permanent residency for illegal immigrants who came to the United States and children and graduate from college. [sic] This is a major shift from Romney’s message in the GOP primaries, when he only pledged to provide that path for illegal immigrants who serve in the military.

So Mitt’s Etch-a-Sketch machine has kicked into hyper-drive.

The Day in Politics

Madness.  Secessionist madness.

Nancy Pelosi Slams Contempt Vote: ‘I Could Have Arrested Karl Rove … But We Didn’t’ …

That particular headline covers such a raft of insanity as to threaten to capsize the entire ark.