Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Political rants
Let’s give Congressman Weldon some love mail, hmm?
I agree with Steve Gilliard: just when you thought the Republicans couldn’t stoop lower, one finds the basement door. This week, Congressman Curt Weldon attacked his Democratic challenger (Admiral Joe Sestak) for taking his daughter to a Washington D.C. hospital for treatment of her brain tumor. You’re right, it doesn’t make any sense, does it?
Who’s smiling now?
From this morning’s NY Times:
WASHINGTON, April 3 — Representative Tom DeLay, the relentless Texan who helped lead House Republicans to power but became ensnared in a corruption scandal, has decided to leave Congress, House officials said Monday night.
What are the bright people saying? Here’s Digby:
They claimed that Delay was the personification of conservatism and by God he is. He’s a crook and a coward. All these pontificating rightwing “moral majority” gasbags backed him to the hilt.
That’s your modern Republican Party for you.
And here’s Kos:
And Republicans will pretend that all of DeLay’s sins will wash away and no longer affect congressional Republicans. And the media bots will dutifully repeat that spin.
Except that every Republican in Congress enabled DeLay. They all fed from his trough. They even tried to change House rules to allow him to continue serving as House leader while under indictment. And DeLay’s cowardly resignation is further proof of just how corrupt and corrosive he really was.
This early, I don’t have the stomach to see what the wingnuts are saying.
D.
Technorati tag: Tom Delay
Support Lara Logan
Phoenix Woman has a diary up at Daily Kos regarding journalist Lara Logan, whom I blogged about the other day (scroll down a bit). Seems the wingnuts are after her. Why? Because she spoke the truth. Yeah, yeah, I sound melodramatic, but damn it, reserve judgment until you have watched the video.
I encourage you to read Phoenix Woman’s brief post and do what you can to support Ms. Logan. It’s easy — a phone call, an email. That’s all it takes. It’ll be your mitzvah for the day.
D.
Lara Logan ROCKS
I apologize for the nonstop political posts . . . but hey, that’s what I do on the weekends, catch up on the news.
Crooks and Liars has video of CNN’s Iraq Correspondent Lara Logan responding to the Bush Administration’s lying meme that the press is too negative in their coverage of the war. Logan is righteously pissed, yet her eloquence never slips.
KURTZ: But critics would say, well, no wonder people back home think things are falling apart because we get this steady drumbeat of negativity from the correspondents there.
LOGAN: Well, who says things aren’t falling apart in Iraq? I mean, what you didn’t see on your screens this week was all the unidentified bodies that have been turning up, all the allegations here of militias that are really controlling the security forces.
Logan’s defense of journalists’ reportage strikes me as unassailable. See for yourself. Watch it to the very end, and you’ll catch Logan’s look of raw disdain regarding Laura Ingraham’s eight-day visit to Iraq. Oh, it’s sweet.
Journalists are my heroes — not the ones who act as conduits for the Administration Propaganda Sewer, but the ones like Logan who risk their butts to report the truth.
D.
PS: Also at Crooks and Liars, a link to a Peace Takes Courage slideshow reviewing our “progress” over the last three years in Iraq.
I’m speechless. Watching that video, all I can think about is the fact that Mister Bush wants this to go on, and on, and on.
A Domenech quickie
I hope Blue Gal is listening, cuz Steve Gilliard deserves her no-sugarcoating award:
Our widdle whiny-ass titty baby friends at RedState don’t like the way that widdle Ben has bween tweated by the mean old Netroots
My ass bleeds for them
Yeah, I ought to be working on my damn book, but I’m too busy catching up on Steve’s posts re Ben Domenech. This made me chortle with glee — a snip from a Julie Bosman NY Times story . . .
He [Domenech] explained the passage that appeared to be copied from Mr. O’Rourke’s book by saying that Mr. O’Rourke gave him permission.
Contacted at his home in New Hampshire, Mr. O’Rourke said that he had never heard of Mr. Domenech and did not recall meeting him.
“I wouldn’t want to swear in a court of law that I never met the guy, Mr. O’Rourke said of Mr. Domenech, “but I didn’t give him permission to use my words under his byline, no.”
Equal time: Mal Merkin provides a spirited defense for the racist plagiarizing SOB.
Update: via Crooks and Liars, the National Review Online ends any further speculation (first here, then here) as to whether Domenech’s NRO contributions provide ample evidence of serial plagiarization.
D.
PS: Rising Hegemon is too damn funny. Coffee spew warning.
. . . and some breakfast links.
The Christian Science Monitor continues to post daily updates on kidnaped journalist Jill Carroll. She has not been forgotten.
Screw the New York Times firewall. You can find your morning Dowdage at Jurassic Pork’s blog (Happiness is a Warm Gun). My favorite bit from the always scintillating Ms. Dowd:
As Carey Goldberg wrote in The Boston Globe, the most popular Harvard course is one taught by Tal Ben-Shahar about how to shed pathologies.
You’d think just being lucky enough to get that Harvard edge would cause elation. But Ms. Goldberg reported that more than 800 students left smiling and cheering after hearing Dr. Ben-Shahar offer self-help formulas like these: “Learn to fail or fail to learn”; don’t think, “It happened for the best,” but rather, “How can I make the best of what happened?”
He meditated with the students, telling them to “give yourself permission to just be.”
Learn to fail or fail to learn? Is that the sound of one ass-cheek farting, or what?
Although I might sigh over this, it also gives me a feeling of warmth and superiority. I retain a great deal of empathy for Berkeley freshmen, kids who have outshined their high school classmates but now find themselves in a hive populated by nothing but the best and the brightest. While they are working their butts raw to ace Chem 1, or English Composition, or Calculus, their Ivy League colleagues are busy trying to giving themselves permission to just be.
As we used to say in college, you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.
Karen and I have had first-hand experience with both a public university (Berkeley) and a private university (Stanford), and we’re on agreement on this: One of the main differences between the two is their attitude towards failure. Public schools realize some kids won’t make the grade. Private schools don’t accept failure as an option. Public schools understand that without the possibility of failure, success is meaningless. Private schools see dropouts as a loss of donors (not only the student, but his parents).
But the Ivy Leaguers take care of their own, even Yale dropouts like Dick Cheney. We don’t live in a meritocracy. I dare you to consider our current administration as an example of this, and not say, No duh. Sorry for the double negative.
***
I’m going to our county’s Democratic Party fundraising dinner tonight. I predict: dry chicken breast, mushy peas, and lots of pissed-off libruls like me. I’ll let you know how it goes.
D.
Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, Dick Cheney, Harvard, Ivy League, Jill Carroll
Evening linkage
Call it end of the week exhaustion, but this is all I’ve got.
sxKitten reports on, if not the best googlebomb ever, one of the best. Freedom Fries, anyone?
Dave Munger has long maintained that the anti-abortion movement is, in reality, anti-sex. This week, he provides a provocative link to Alas, A Blog, wherein Ampersand takes a close look at the policies supported by the anti-abortion movement, and asks: do these positions truly indicate a belief that abortion is the same as child murder, or do they merely indicate a desire to punish women for having sex?
Current top o’ the blog at Falafel Sex: a fine political cartoon, followed by a very naughty dog picture (which Bare Rump admirers will surely remember).
This post today from author Jay Lake gave my SiteMeter palpitations. Still cracks me up. Thank God I said some nice things about Jay’s story . . . I think some of these people really would like to bust me up. (Just kidding.) But now I’m wondering (cue whine): when do I get peon minions? Paul, you’re never going to live this one down.
Post script to the Ben Domenech plagiarism story, from Media Matters:
Summary: Ben Domenech, defending himself from charges of plagiarism, falsely claimed that one of the articles that apparently included plagiarized material “ran as inspired by [author P.J.] O’Rourke’s original.” There is, in fact, no mention of O’Rourke at all.
When is this idiot going to learn to stop lying about stuff which exists in the public record? You don’t win friends and influence people by lying your ass off after the fact. What. A. Dick.
From the Media Matters link, here’s a portion of Domenech’s defense:
In one instance, I have been accused me of passing off P.J. O’Rourke’s writing as my own in a column for the paper. But the truth is that I had met P.J. at a Republican event and asked his permission to do a college-specific version of his classic piece on partying. He granted permission, the piece was cleared with my editors at the paper, and it ran as inspired by O’Rourke’s original. [Emphasis added]
Even if it were true (which it isn’t; see above), “inspired by” does not allow you to lift sentences word-for-word from the parent work. Jeez.
***
Coming this weekend: the joys of hardboiled fiction. Have a good one, everybody.
D.
Ambien, Drug of Darkness
Egalia at Tennessee Guerilla Woman has posted full text of Maureen Dowd’s Saturday column, Valley of the Rolls. (JP has it, too — and don’t miss his contest, either!) I have my own Ambien story to share, but first . . .
New York Times Sunday: the goods
Balls and Walnuts reads the New York Times so you don’t have to. (more…)