Michael Moore Eats Maria Bartiromo’s Lunch

This is just too beautiful for words. The well publicized bit about Moore not being allowed in to the stock exchange is just for openers. Moore speaks truth to power and Bartiromo just can’t handle it.

Watching Bartiromo reminded me of Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Cramden, “Hammeneh, hammeneh, hammeneh…”. She keeps pitching out those tired old talking points and Michael just swats them back at her one after another.

(h/t C&L)

Republican Obstructionism

Trent Lott (R-MS): “The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail… so far it’s working for us.”

Think Progress:

Senate conservatives in the 110th Congress are obstructing and blocking legislation at a rate more than double that of the past two Congresses combined.

During the first six months of the current Congress, there have been 13 cloture votes on motions to proceed — “each one wasting days of Senate time.” In comparison, there were just four cloture votes on motions to proceed during the the first sessions of the 108th and 109th Congresses combined.

The result: The House of Representatives has passed 239 pieces of legislation during the 110th Congress yet few have made it through the Senate, with conservatives “objecting to just about every major piece of legislation” that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has tried to bring up.

[...]

– Conservatives blocked debate on raising the minimum wage (54-43, Roll Call Vote #23)
– Conservatives blocked debate ethics reforms (Rejected 51-46, Roll Call Vote #16)
– Conservatives blocked debate on funding for renewable energy (Rejected 57-36, Roll Call Vote #223)
– Conservatives blocked a vote on funding for the intelligence community (Rejected 41-40, Roll Call Vote #130)
– Conservatives delayed legislation fulfilling the 9/11 Commission recommendations (Passed 97-0, Roll Call Vote #53)

What hypocrites! It just boggles the mind. But you know what, they’re just doing themselves in. They are shouting a big “FUCK YOU!” at We The People, but We The People see this for what it is, an infantile temper tantrum, and I believe that these assholes will pay dearly for this behavior in the 2008 election.

(h/t BlondeSense Liz)

Meddling With The Primal Forces Of Nature

After finally finding time to read the complete four part series in the Washington Post on the vice presidency of Dick Cheney I could only think of one of my all-time favorite moments in motion picture history. The scene is from the motion picture “Network”, written by Paddy Cheyefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet. The characters in the scene are Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), CEO of the network’s parent conglomerate, and Howard Beale (Peter Finch) the network’s deranged anchorman. The scene takes place in a darkened corporate conference room, beautifully appointed with a long mahogony conference room table surrounded by large leather chairs each with a green-glass shaded desk lamp sitting in front of it. On one end of the table stands Jensen, on the other end sits Beale.

Skirting the R-Word

by Stephen Fleischman

The US economy is walking a tight-rope.

The sharp drop-off in growth in the first quarter of 2007, and the expected weak second and third quarters of less than 2% growth, caused the widely watched UCLA Anderson Forecast, a leading national economic forecaster, to conclude that although we may not actually be in a recession “it is certainly close.”

Only days later, the New York Times reported a $3.2 billion move by Bear Stearns, the investment bank, to bail out one of its hedge funds that was collapsing because of bad debts on sub-prime mortgages.

The Anderson Forecast saw the slowed economy as lasting longer than previously expected. Weakness in the housing market and higher gasoline prices are starting to affect consumer spending. California, hit by a “double-whammy” from construction and mortgage finance, foreshadows a drag on the rest of the economy.

A recession is usually defined as a decline in a country’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more successive quarters. Market-oriented, or capitalist, economies are characterized by economic cycles. The business cycle represents swings between periods of relatively rapid growth and periods of relative stagnation. Capitalism is noted for its cycles. Its nature is to boom and bust.

Saturday Cartoons

This week’s favorite.

Geiger has them.

Yes, That Digby

I’ve been reading Hullabaloo By Digby since I first became aware of the blogosphere. Digby’s posts have been so insightful, so right on, and so well written that I check several times a day, every day, to see if there is something new up there. Now Digby has revealed herself in a speech given at the Take Back America Gala Dinner surrounded by all the heroes of the progressive blogosphere.

Yes, it’s really Digby, and what a wonderful rousing speech she gives.

“In the blogosphere nobody cares if you’re a 70 year-old Chinese immigrant, or a 22 year-old Harvard student, or a stay-at-home blogger Dad. If you have something to say you can say it, and if it touches a chord people will return time and again to read what you’ve written and discuss the issues of the day with others who are reading the same thing.”

[...]

“I’m a ‘blogger/pundit’, a role for which I am eminently qualified since, exactly like pundits on television and in newspapers, I have opinions. I write them down. And a lot of people read them. Yes, that’s all there is to it. Sorry Mr Broder.”

It’s perfect.

Update: There’s a revealing interview with Digby on the TBA site here.

Digby had amassed a large following and deep respect in the progressive blogosphere for insightful, passionate writing on political issues, but before Tuesday no one knew the person behind Digby. That night, Digby revealed herself to the world and gave a rousing speech about what progressive bloggers have contributed to the movement as she accepted, on behalf of progressive bloggers, the Paul Wellstone Citizen Leadership Award. Earlier in the day, I was able to spend a few moments chatting with Digby. Here are excerpts.

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Read More —>

Blog Quote Of The Week: The Rudeness at Bonnaroo

Once again the Rude Pundit takes the limelight here in our Quote Of The Week. Now some may say that the Rudeness is crude and vulgar, and that may sometimes be true, but his blog is packed with truth and when I want an unvarnished opinion on something that interests me I often turn to the Rude One to see if he has hit his keyboard on the subject.

So what does all this have to do with the Blog Quote of the week? Well it’s no secret that the Rude Pundit was at the Bonnaroo Music Festival last weekend where he was running a guerilla theatre workshop. He has now returned and has blogged about it. The entire blog is worth a complete read but it contained this gem:

Sex With a Zombie: One young female zombie, attractive and painted with flowers and hearts, approached me to talk about what I wanted to see that night. Cautiously, I told her, wondering what cauldron of doom she wanted to drag me to. But her eyes were hypnotizing, her skin not yet discolored, her underarms shaved. She talked about dancing, about how she, herself, wanted to do interpretive dance, which she did for me, hiking up her dress to reveal her long legs and dancing lithe shadows against a tent. It was impossible to resist the siren-like draw of her gyrations. I went with her, able to secret myself into a zombie crowd writhing to to trance music. After, half mad from the spiked opium we smoked, we sweatily balled behind a tent that was there to promote zombie recycling. When we were finished, she told me that she wasn’t going to school for dance, but she did it herself and how she wanted an organic burrito and how cool Woody Harrelson is for his crusade for hemp and…then, in the strobe-lit chaos, I ran, screaming to escape before I was zombified.

Their likes/dislikes: The zombies like songs that last for an hour without ending, with one note seeming to repeat over and over. Political humor involving sodomy and blow-up dolls? Not so much.

Late Night Music: Ray Lamontagne

On my way home from month-long business trip I stopped off in Santa Fe to see my daughter on Father’s Day.

She played me this song, and it was an instant favorite.

If only more men in this country felt this way.

De-Authorize The Iraq Occupation

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico has put forth a proposal to de-authorize the Iraq occupation thereby sidestepping the sticky question of “funding the troops” and at the same time reclaiming the Congressional authority delcare war.

Article 1 of the US Constitution gives the Congress, not the President, the right to declare war. And the War Powers Act specifies that the President may not continue a war without Congressional authorization. In 2002 Congress passed a resolution authorizing the Iraq war because the administration claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda.

Saddam is dead. There never were any WMDs or ties to Al Qaeda. The basis for the 2002 war authorization is gone.

If Congress passes a resolution de-authorizing the war, the President has no legal authority to continue. De-authorization cannot be vetoed, and it would legally require Bush to begin bringing the troops home. If the President stalled on redeployment, Congress could pass funding legislation requiring him to withdraw. If Congress de-authorizes the war before the summer recess, our troops could be home in six months.

The time for waiting is over. People are dying every day. We cannot wait until this fall to start bringing our troops home. If Congress doesn’t act before they leave for the summer, the only thing that will change between now and the end of the year is the body count.

Congress has a public mandate and the Constitutional authority to end this war. If you de-authorize, we could have our ALL troops home in six months.

You can sign a petition to Congress here on Richardson’s website, and I’d also suggest making three phone calls tomorrow, one to each of your senators and one to your congressman. Urge them to support Richardson’s plan. You can find addresses and phone numbers for your three (3) federal congressional representatives here.

(h/t Siun@FDL)

Little Boy and Fat Man

by Stephen Fleischman

“Little Boy” and “Fat Man” were the names given to the first two nuclear weapons ever dropped on civilian populations. Japan was the target. It happened toward the end of World War II.

Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima from a B-29 bomber, piloted by US Army Air Force Col. Paul W. Tibbets, who named his plane “Enola Gay” in honor of his mother, the night before the atomic attack.

Fat Man, was a more complicated and powerful plutonium weapon with a force equal to 20 kilotons of TNT devastating more that two square miles of Nagasaki and caused approximately 45,000 immediate deaths..

The wallop that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and August 9th, 1945, ended the war that was already about to end and left a metallic taste in everybody’s mouth. These unnecessary and militarily useless acts, falsely postulating it would end the war sooner, has caused the United States a legacy of shame.

History has a way of reincarnating itself as well as repeating itself.

Do we have, today, a reincarnation of Little Boy, a small nation in the Middle East, alleged to have an arsenal of 200 or more nuclear weapons, threatening and attacking its neighbors?