Due to a momentary lapse of judgment, I have managed to squash my thumb between a wrought-iron bench and the back wall of my house trying to move the damn thing away from the wall! I'm an idiot!

The upside is that I couldn't work today so I had some spare time to look up other idiots and get the following "moran" tales from various sites on "the internets". I feel better knowing that there are some real idiots out there. The frightening thing is that these people walk among us. They reproduce. And they vote - undoubtedly Republican. Enjoy a bit of humor.

My wife an I decided to have lunch at a favorite Tex-Mex restaurant.  It was crowded, so we were seated in the bar area, right under a monitor with horse race coverage on ESPN (an actual horse race, not the election).  During a break, the monitor burst forth with a men's choir singing in German and my wife dropped her inauthentic, but yummy, Buffalo Chicken taco and began cursing in Yiddish.

This just in.  Sky is blue on nice days.  Thanks Wolf and Campbell.  What would the media do without you?  Your nascent abilities to point out the obvious gets you both a shiny Bill Engvall sign.

We hear them again and again, not always from the same people, not always in the same era, but they continually return and effortlessly roll off the tongue. An appreciable number of Americans have grown to love or at least to be cajoled those magical slogans. In fact, they have become such a staple of politicians and power brokers that they can take on a life of their own. They are slippery little things that spread like a virus when people are backed up against the wall of immanent failure or are streaking toward a defeat and have nothing substantial to say.

So, here is a list of my favorites. After them there will be translations from "Captain Subtext." He’s a demented soul who has a bizarre view of reality; that means that he knows the Bush-Cheney-Republican-Neocon mind. (I have resurrected Captain Subtext from the British comedy "Coupling.")

This is the email I sent to Maureen Dowd this morning in response to her OpEd column in today's NYT ...

Like porn I may not be able to precisely define a vacuous puff of air disguised as informed opinion except to know it when I read it.

To that point you said in your OpEd column in today's NYT ...

Obama is acting the diffident debutante, pretending not to care that he was given a raspberry by a state he will need in the fall. He was dismissed not only by the voters Hillary usually gets, but was also edged out in blocs that usually prefer him — the under-30 set, college graduates and affluent voters.

... with a brio that suggests you actually know what you're talking about.

cross-posted to jack and jill politics

It's a simple question. All these old, white millionaires on TV are saying Obama made a big mistake. That he chose poor words. That he offended small-town Pennsylvania.

How do they know?

They all live in Los Angeles and Manhattan. They eat sushi and drink mad lattes. They read the NY Times. None of these commentators owns a gun. I bet most don't go to church. I bet most don't know financial hardship because their town wasn't decimated by the end of the industrial era in this country.

It's all bullshit. Almost everything you see on TV is just bullshit. These idiots have big ass microphones and cameras and soapboxes. They are in the top percentile of wage-earners.
Yet somehow they know the hearts and minds of a rural voter?

It's a complete farce.

If you are even CONSIDERING  voting for St. John the Asleep, let alone threatening to, you are a either a mentally deficient jackass or the victim of a drive by lobotomy so effective you don't even remember you had it. That is how excruciatingly badly your brain is working right now. Except....it's not. Clods of dirt have more acuity than you. Rock formations are brighter. Boulders pity your bad brain.

I could care less how much you hate Hillary or how bummed by Barack you are. You are an idiot, plain and simple, case closed, end of story, over and out. Apparently on the planet you are from, spite is like a form of Kryptonite that robs you of all your mental powers. Bitterness and self-righteous anger has burned up all your braincells and all you have left is the ability to screech threats at the other children on the play-ground to show them how tough and outraged you are.

I won't even go into how breathtakingly imbecilic and heart-stoppingly stupid it is to cast your precious vote out of what amounts to spite.

I will remind you that you are one of only 100 million or so out of 7 BILLION people on the face of the planet who are charged with DECIDING THE FUTURE OF THE WHOLE WORLD.

For those of you interested in seeing what a good victim complex can get you to, check out MyDD today.

First, there's an update on Dailykos writer's strike we're all so broken up about.

Next, we have someone named Mike Pridmore's diary outlining Donna Brazil's continuing subterfuge over the Wright "scandal."  Apparently he and his whole church are anti-semetic, leninist, America haters.  

After that there's this work of genius which has actually been recommended.  

When George W. Bush became president, either by his orders, Darth Cheney's (the man who put "vice" in Vice President) or several of their most reprehensible aides and co-conspirators, someone approved an illegal, warrantless, unsupervised, and totally uncontrolled and unfettered DOMESTIC SPYING PROGRAM by the National Security Administration targeting you and me.

They tried to expand that program by immunizing the lawbreakers today.

The talking heads (and writers) in the financial world are starting to admit Ben got punked. The melt down wasn't the US economy, it was the unwinding of a $7 billion fraud. oops - but the press is great to read.

From the Dow Jones Newswire:

One market professional who went on the record about the likelihood of
Chairman Bernanke's having been euchred into a rate cut by Societe Generale's
one-off fire sale told The Wall Street Journal:

 "I think Mr. Bernanke is clearly a very bright guy but he lacks the market
savvy" that former Fed head Paul Volcker had, said Jeff Saut, head of
investment strategy at Raymond James.

More below:

[Originally a response to John Kerry, this post speaks to the MSM sins of omission, and the concomitant damage to democracy. Only a liar or an idiot would say "both" when there are three or more in the set. Which is it? Lying or Idiocy?]

In the Democratic primary, Obama and Hillary are Goliath and John Edwards is David, Seabiscuit, the oppressed candidate, by virtue of his doing the right thing regarding financing, but even more so by virtue of his marginalization by The Corpulent Media, who always seems to get it wrong...at least when it comes to the typical American citizen.
They helped shoehorn Bush into office.
They helped shoehorn America into a tragic, horrible, and far from over war.
They are pill pushers.

Even before the war, I knew this much: We might decide when it begins, but it is the enemy who will decide when it is over. And we found this out with "Mission Accomplished". The same sad truth holds true today...unless we are in touch with the highest of truths, and can create a win-win situation whereby their win is clearly more generous than our own...for it is we who created this proverbial "goose in a bottle" to begin with.

There! It is out!

THE HEAVY UPLIFTING
Now can we finally get to the heavy uplifting? (By uplifting, I do not mean tugging.)

The reality is that the Fed has started taking the same proprietary position towards the financial markets that a bank takes towards its loan portfolio. They are reinforcing the old axiom "If you owe the bank $100, they own you. If you owe the bank a $1,000,000,000, you own them." Let's look at the behavior.

We can go back to the Chrysler bankruptcy, the bailout to save jobs. probably a good thing but a disastrous precedent. Because then we got the savings and loan debacle where the bailout was to protect the capital - not the jobs.

Let's continue below the fold.

My morning routine is to help get the kids to the school bus (down about 1/4 mile of dirt road - today was good, 24 degrees; Friday will be bad, -2). During the 15 minutes between getting back from the high schooler's walk down and before the middle school bus and then for about 15 minutes after getting back from the second walk I flip between The Weather Channel (the #1 indicator for energy futures' prices) and CNBC.

So far I have resisted throwing anything through the TV while watching CNBC. It keeps getting harder. Today was a low point.

Just before the opening bell, they had a talking head Chief Investment Officer from a fund manager on to get his take on the economy. Major news flash - "There is no and will be no recession". WTH? More below

Who knew that in my first Daily Kos diary, I would actually defend Hillary Clinton, the Senator who most disappoints me. But it's come to this. My fellow Democrats, I urge you to stop lying, fabricating, exaggerating, and furthering untruths. Our party is truth, not variations of truth. Before last week, I had NO IDEA that calling a position on Iraq "a fairy tale" was racist. I had no idea that saying, "presidents sign laws and make things happen" was racist. What are you doing? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

Discuss

For starters, I must give a hat tip to Brandon Friedman for coming up with that saying as we were going back and forth discussing sayings that we should be using this upcoming year.

 But at this time of year, especially on Christmas time - a holiday where religion is now intertwined and nearly synonymous with a front running Presidential candidacy - we should celebrate some deserving yet underappreciated people.  These battle tested, wounded and weary warriors whose crusade to engage, battle and fight with those "non-believers" and satan lovers (liberals too, no doubt) who are waging this War on Christmas.

 How can we not take a moment to stop and thank those who stand tall and use every weapon at their disposal in order to fight a cataclysmic fight to the death against the godless souls who want to purge the world from celebrating the birth of the one who represents all "true Americans".

One if by land,
Two if by sea,
Blow up New York if you see a black beard on me.

Oh god, when will the craziness end?

http://tinyurl.com/...

"First, is this his beard?" Republican Senator Norm Coleman asked the spy chief. "Do we expect that -- is it a signal?"

McConnell swiftly rejected any possibility that the hair in his chin was intended to send any signal to his Al-Qaeda members.

You may think the issue which Republicans will lose on is Iraq, and you might be right.  But psst... there's an elephant in the room: Afghanistan.

There were a few of us who clamored in the months after 2001 that a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan amounted to the type of feudal nation building in which Russia had already engaged and failed (to the point of creating the Taliban).  I personally believed that--to the administration--Afghanistan was simply a show of arms after 9/11, and boy was I right, because Bush quickly lost interest and moved on to Iraq.  The New York Times hits on this in an article today, How the ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad:

President Bush’s critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America’s effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied, but an examination of how the policy unfolded within the administration reveals a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions that at times seemed to relegate it to an afterthought as Iraq unraveled.