StupidiNews! Fun Fun Fun Edition

Nintendo has confirmed they will be releasing a new console.  They hype is pretty good, and Nintendo has a reputation for taking a while but producing a good product.  I can't wait to see what it is!

Scream 4.  I'm there, and not ashamed to admit it.  I grew up at just the right age for the horror film boom, and I'm a big fan of the creativity and not-too-serious attitude.  The reviews have so far been good, I hope that $6 bag of Milk Duds isn't bought in vain.

Taco Bell is about to grace the world with a Dorito taco shell.  To give credit where it's due, it can't be hard to spice up (haha) their menu and do it well, but this is a great idea.  Right now it's in test markets.  This might actually make me break my "only once a year or so" rule about Taco Bell.  I love Doritos.

Not So Great Scott

GOP Gov. Rick Scott of Florida has a bit of a problem.  It's just three months into his job and the people of the Sunshine State already want to throw his ass out on the curb.

Only three months removed from Governor Rick Scott's (R) inauguration, a majority of Florida voters now say the state is headed in the wrong direction and that, if they could do it all over again, they wouldn't have elected Scott in the first place, according to a new Suffolk University poll.

In the poll, 54% of voters said the state was headed in the wrong direction, compared to 30% who said it was going the right way. Further, just under half (49%) of all voters said they disapproved of Scott's job performance, versus only 28% who said they approved.

Scott's approval rating is so bad that the poll found him losing a hypothetical do-over election to Democrat Alex Sink by a ten-point margin, 41% to 31%.

Previous polls have also found Scott's job approval deep underwater, including a Quinnipiac poll released earlier this month that pegged his approval to disapproval split at 35% to 48%. A March PPP poll showed Scott with an even worse 32%-55% split, and found him losing a do-over election -- by a 20-point margin.

Poll after poll finds that Scott and the state's GOP super-majority in the state legislature are pretty much already despised at this point.   They have unrestrained power because Florida Dems stayed home in 2010, and independents went for Republicans, blaming Charlie Crist and Barack Obama for the dismal Florida economy.

And then they got a major dose of perspective:  Rick Scott destroying tens of thousands of jobs to scrap high speed rail and then pushing to line his own pockets by sending state employees and those who receive state aid to his own chain of clinics for drug testing and privatizing the state's schools and hospitals as the state's wingers plan one-party rule through disenfranchising as many Democratic Party voters as possible, eliminating corporate taxes for Florida's fat cats and basically legalizing bribery for state lawmakers.

Yeah, no wonder Floridians are pissed off at the guy.  He's Lex Luthor in a bad suit.  But you're stuck with him Florida, because "There's no difference between the parties so why bother."  Keep Rick Scott in mind heading into 2012.  One party Republican rule at the federal level means Scott's Galtian utopia for everyone!

This Week In GOP Pants On Fire

I've been ignoring former Godfather's Pizza CEO and Republican presidential quasi-candidate Herman Cain up until this point, as his normal lunatic "Democrats are the ones putting African-Americans on the plantation" self-hating stupidity just wasn't worth addressing.

He seems to have crossed a big, thick red line on Planned Parenthood...

...and that brings us to Politifact and this week's GOP Pants On Fire Lie.

This presidential election season, Georgia’s homegrown prospect Herman Cain is talking about race.

Cain, a black, conservative Republican, recently said the media is "scared that a real black man may run against Barack Obama."

And there’s this one about pro-abortion rights group Planned Parenthood:

"When Margaret Sanger - check my history - started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world," Cain said during a talk in Washington, D.C., at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group.

"It's planned genocide," Cain added. He wants the U.S. Congress to yank funding for Planned Parenthood, which receives about $75 million a year to provide non-abortion health services.

Was Planned Parenthood founded to help kill unborn black babies?

Cain asked his audience to check his history. So, we did.

Republicans have been using the "Liberals are trying to secretly kill you guys, vote for us!" ploy for years.  Sadly, Herman Cain's only point of being on Earth is to roll with this series of cynical, nasty, downright evil lies that assume that black folk like me would choose to vote Republican if we were just little bit smarter and could see the truth of his words, like how Planned Parenthood exists solely to exterminate us.


Is it any wonder Cain is lying through his teeth?

Sanger’s first birth control clinic opened in 1916 in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., which was mostly Irish and Jewish.

When she did open a Harlem clinic in the early 1930s, about half of its patients were white. Members of the black establishment, including DuBois and black newspaper the Amsterdam News, supported it. This was hardly the pro-genocide camp.

None of these centers performed abortions.

Black leaders at the time understood that contraception and women's health care were vital in order for any community to be successful, something the white community knew for a very, very long time.

Planned Parenthood’s early objective was not to "help kill black babies before they came into the world."

Sanger failed to rise above the ethnic and racial paternalism of her time, but that’s a far cry from being genocidal.

Cain’s claim is a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card. We rate it Pants on Fire.

Shocker, huh.  But Cain will continue to be taken seriously by Republicans.

The Badger Awakens, Part 6

GOP Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin's failure on his controversial "emergency budget fix" bill is now complete, as even Walker admits that the measure will not save the state money.  The man who grilled Walker in front of Congress and the country?  Go figure.  Dennis Kucinich.

KUCINICH: Let me ask you about some of the specific provisions in your proposals to strip collective bargaining rights. First, your proposal would require unions to hold annual votes to continue representing their own members. Can you please explain to me and members of this committee how much money this provision saves for your state budget?

WALKER: That and a number of other provisions we put in because if you’re going to ask, if you’re going to put in place a change like that, we wanted to make sure we protected the workers of our state, so they got value out of that. [...]

KUCINICH: Would you answer the question? How much money does it save, Governor?

WALKER: It doesn’t save any. [...]

KUCINICH: I want to ask about another one of your proposals. Under your plan you would prohibit paying union member dues from their paychecks. How much money would this provision save your state budget?

WALKER: It would save employees a thousand dollars a year they could use to pay for their pensions and health care contributions.

KUCINICH: Governor, it wouldn’t save anything. [Goes on to present letter from LRF and is denied unanimous request for it to be placed in the public record by Issa]

But...but...conservatives like Col. Mustard told us that this measure was necessary, absolutely vital, in order to save Wisconsin taxpayers from the predation of greedy union thugs and their immoral bosses!

There will be no groundswell of support for public sector unions, even as people feel a connection to public sector employees.  The reason is that not much really has changed for public sector employees or the public, other than putting Wisconsin's ship of state on a proper fiscal course.

Wisconsin has been a devastating blow to public sector union power and pocketbooks, but it was not a blow to public sector employees whose jobs now are more secure because layoffs will not be needed to balance the budget.

But gosh, you mean the whole thing was just a plan to reduce the power of Democrats and unions in the state, and had nothing to do whatsoever with saving taxpayers money?  It was just a cynical ploy to manipulate people into once again supporting Republicans destroying the middle class?

Perish the thought.  Republicans full of crap, lying to voters, only interested in maintaining their own power.  It doesn't save taxpayers a dime.  That of course was never the point.

So, what do you plan to do about it, Wisconsin?

StupidiNews!

• Japan has ordered TEPCO to pay each family evacuated due to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster one million yen, or about $12,000.
• After a number of air traffic controllers fell asleep on the job this month and last, America's chief air traffic safety official has resigned.
• Neither the Ryan budget nor the Obama plan are long of specifics to close corporate tax loopholes, the kind GE used to pay zero taxes last year.
• Moody's has cut Irish debt to the lowest grade above junk status as analysts fear weak growth and the prospect of spending billions of euro to bail the country's banks out.
• Reports indicate Nintendo plans to announce a new console system to replace the flagging Wii, but with Sony and Microsoft firmly in control, it will be a long road.

Last Call

Two questions for Tea Party conservatives:

1) How's that "We're going to cut $100 billion from this year's budget!" hopey changey thing working out for you guys?

2)  Based on your answer to #1 there, do you actually believe Jim DeMint is going to filibuster the debt ceiling?

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said on the conservative Laura Ingraham Show he is considering filibustering an upcoming vote to raise the nation's $14.3 trillion debt limit if it doesn't contain other fiscal reforms.

Asked if that would serve as the GOP's "Waterloo" in the 2012 elections, the senator replied, "If it is, then let it be."

Granted, Demint has no choice but to say things like this.  But will he follow through?

Grand Old Misogyny, Still

So the FY 2011 budget deal passed both the House and the Senate, and even though the Republicans tried to sneak in measures that would defund Planned Parenthood and the Affordable Care Act., those measures were defeated in the Senate.

Both measures were defeated along strict party lines, meaning that yes, once again all Senate Republicans went on record to defund health care for women, including "moderates" like Scott Brown and both the ladies from Maine, Collins and Snowe, as well as Texas's Kay Bailey Hutchinson.  Independent Lisa Murkowski came out in favor of Planned Parenthood.

But it goes to show you that Republicans, even Republican women, are quite the misogynists.  Somebody explain again to me how the GOP is the party of feminism and women's rights, I could use a good laugh.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

I was listening to POTUS radio on Sirius/XM this afternoon, only to hear CNN's Gloria Borger complain that the President had gone "Clark Kent" by staying out of the budget fight, then proceeded to "undermine his own message" by being a "partisan flamethrower", and that Real America wanted to hear what he had in common with the Republicans by saying which provisions of the Ryan Unicorn Plan he was going to adopt, and really this was nothing more than a 2012 campaign speech yesterday.

Can we elect a better media?

Barry The Lead

The best a jury could come up with against Barry Bonds was an obstruction of justice charge...and that's it.

The decision from the eight women and four men who listened to testimony during the 12-day trial turned out to be a mixed and muddled verdict on the slugger that left more questions than answers.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston declared a mistrial on the three charges that Bonds made false statements when he told a grand jury in December 2003 that he never knowingly received steroids and human growth hormone from trainer Greg Anderson and that he allowed only doctors to inject him.

Defense lawyers will try to persuade Illston or the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to toss out the lone conviction. Federal prosecutors must decide whether it is worth the time and expense to try Bonds for a second time on the deadlocked charges.

Less than two miles from the ballpark where he broke Hank Aaron's career home run record in August 2007, Bonds walked out of the Phillip Burton Federal Building on a sunny, windy afternoon and looked on as his lead lawyer, Allen Ruby, held a sidewalk news conference. Ruby instructed Bonds not to comment because the case wasn't over.

Impeccably dressed in black suit and purple necktie, with a few days of stubble on his chin, Bonds flashed a victory sign to a few fans.

"Are you celebrating tonight?" one asked.

"There's nothing to celebrate," he replied.

I doubt Bonds will spend any time in prison, frankly.  Federal prosecutors went after America's Home Run King, it's true.  If only prosecutors had, I don't know, spent that $55 million dollars trying to go after yet another black athlete on, I don't know, trying to nail Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, I'd have a bit more sympathy for them.   There's also the question of whether or not if Bonds was a white athlete, would we even be having this trial in the first place.

The government has spent far more prosecuting Barry here than anyone in the financial crisis, which cost America $13 trillion in wealth.  Which one do you think federal prosecutors should be spending time on?

That's Huffed Up

A blogger and union activist has filed a lawsuit against AOL and the Huffington Post for not paying freelance bloggers.

The suit claims the company unfairly pocketed more than $100 million from its unpaid bloggers when AOL Inc. bought the influential news website in February, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The suit, filed in a Manhattan federal court, comes two months after Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the website, sold it to AOL for $315 million.

Of that price, at least $105 million was the estimated value of the website's unpaid writings, which should now be given to the bloggers, the lawsuit says.

With the growth of the Internet and online publishing, it's natural for skirmishes like this to occur while we redefine rights and rates.  They don't stand a chance, but they wouldn't even if they were completely in the right.

Towel Thieves Beware

In another display of how technology is changing our lives, hotels are now experimenting with washable RFID scanners in linens and robes.  Customers who pay by credit card and walk out with the stolen merchandise can be billed for it.  Eventually, this is going to be how all shopping will take place.  No more lines at Wal-Mart, no more old-fashioned cash transactions.  What I'd like to know is how they are going to protect the public from hackers and thieves (not the robe-stealing kind).  Also, what will be done for mistakes, for they are sure to happen.

Birthers Get A Trump Card, Part 6

...where the state legislature is working on a bill to basically throw Obama off the state ballot in 2012.

Legislation that requires presidential candidates to prove they are natural-born American citizens before their names can appear on the Arizona ballot was approved by the state Senate on Wednesday.

The bill, H.B. 2177, requires presidential candidates to submit a certified copy of their birth certificate that includes their date and place of birth, the names of their mother and father, and the name of the hospital they were born at. 

The Arizona Senate passed the bill in a party-line vote of 20 to 9, with Republicans backing the bill. It now heads to the state's House of Representatives for approval.

The bill was sponsored by State Rep. Carl Seel, who recently met with billionaire real estate mogul and potential Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to discuss the legislation.

Hey look, The Donald again.  So what's the long game here?   Dave Weigel explains:

That's for every candidate, so only Donald Trump can qualify for the ballot as of right now. This has been written so that Barack Obama's certificate of live birth, which does not include the name of the hospital and attending physician, does not count. 

In other words, if this becomes law in Arizona, President Obama cannot be on the ballot in 2012 in that state.  That would more or less become a Constitutional nightmare even if Obama won the general election and the electoral college, because he would not be eligible for the office of President according to Arizona law.  But hey, if enough states pass birther laws and Obama's unable to be on the ballot in those states, we're going to have a hell of a problem here.

That's what the GOP is trying to do, kick the President off the ballot over this birther idiocy and hand the Presidency to whatever GOP schlemiel gets the nomination.

So no, I'm no longer laughing at Donald Trump and the birther idiots anymore.  These guys are seriously trying to destroy the country here.

Obama's Speech: The Morning After

Best analysis (video) of the last 12 hours or so:  Lawrence O' Donnell.



Best analysis (print) I'll go with Will Bunch.

Let's look at the strategy, starting with the 2011 budget battle that nearly resulted in a government shutdown last Friday night. It certainly looked like Obama and the Democrats were had in that deal by giving up $39 billion in short term cuts when it had seemed like House Speaker John Boehner had been willing to settle for just $33 billion. But as the details leaked out, it appeared that the cuts in the final deal were relatively inconsequential, even as Obama gained some political credit a) for his role in averting an unpopular shutdown and b) establishing some cred with moderate voters (who aren't going to sweat the details) as a Democrat willing to make spending cuts. Now, increasingly, it's the right-wing pundits -- joined by presidential hopefuls like Tim Pawlenty -- who say that they were the ones who got duped in the deal. You know what?...they're probably right, for once. (Note: To those angry that the cuts include dollars that might never have been spent anyway, I call that common sense. When you have to balance your household budget, do you drop the cable channels you don't watch anyway, or do you stop buying food?)

Now, on the long-term spending that Obama addressed in his speech today, it clearly was wise to let the Republicans go first. Undoubtedly, the path that the president proposed is the common sense way to balance the budget: By ending the historically over-the-top tax cuts for the rich and addressing related loopholes, by looking for cuts in our bloated and inefficient defense budget, and in seeking to reform Medicare by reducing the actual health care costs rather than just shifting the bill to the poor and the elderly and making a bunch of insurance CEOs even richer (at Ryan's low. low tax rate, of course.) It sounds good on paper -- but it sounds even better when you compare it to the unseriousness of the Paul Ryan proposal, which isn't even really a debt reduction proposal as much as yet another cost-shifting scheme away from the rich and onto the backs of the middle class.

That contrast is what really gave Obama's speech its energy.

I couldn't agree more with both men.  O'Donnell is completely correct when he said the entire point of the Bush administration was dismantling the Clinton surplus in order to create a massive budget crisis.  Bush succeeded more than any Republican's wildest dreams.  He destroyed our economy, period.  We went from a surplus to a complete budgetary disaster followed by a near financial collapse and a recession that continues today for a vast, vast majority of America.   That was, as O'Donnell says, the plan all along.

The plan was simply to force a crisis that Republicans would say proved that the social safety net was unaffordable...unaffordable due to Republicans slashing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, robbing the country of the revenue needed to pay for the promises we made to the other 95% of us.  They have succeeded completely in manufacturing this crisis and yes, they did it with the help of some Democrats.  Not all, but a great many.

What matters now is how we choose to fix the problem.  We've known the Republican answer for a generation:  dismantle Medicare, dismantle Medicaid, and abandon our promise to America's elderly and the poor, to throw the least of us to the vagaries of "fend for yourself like the rest of us do."  The other option, actually look at the fact the only growth in this country has been in the net worth accounts of the richest Americans and adjust their share of the burden, instead of the Republican plan to reward those who need the least at the expense of those who need the most.

Obama laid out a path to fix that.  And yes, I understand the war between spending into a recession and making cuts in one has been lost by the Keynesian forces.  I understand the debate has shifted to how much and who will bear the burden of the last ten years financially.  I understand the Republicans have scored a huge victory in that alone.  I understand that we are still owned wholly by the corporations. Obama's speech changed nothing on that regard.

But what we can change we'd better goddamn fight for, or even that will be taken from us.

Circular Firebagger Squad

Today's Joy Reid piece on anti-Obama liberals is especially prescient in the wake of the President's speech yesterday, but the greater point is that the firebaggers are not Obama's base, which is what the more pernicious elements of the media want you to think.  Kudos to Reid for pointing out the truth:  the firebaggers are fringe.

Polls show that more than 80 percent of self-described liberals and more than two-thirds of Democrats consistently approve of President Barack Obama’s job performance. But ask the Beltway media, and you’ll find that Obama is losing his base.

Perhaps that depends on what the meaning of “base” is.

If it’s African Americans or Hispanics or young voters, Obama still polls quite well. It’s unlikely that those groups will flock in 2012 to a Republican nominee invariably saddled with the birther, “throw grandma (and her Medicare) from the train, sate the rich, bust the unions and make the women have babies” madness that has overtaken the GOP.

But when cable news outlets or political writers go looking for “Obamacans,” they invariably turn to a rather elite group of liberals and progressive libertarians who, to put it mildly, are not high on the president.

To be honest, some of them never have been.

The argument over what and who is the "base" of the Democratic Party is largely irrelevant if your meaning of "base" is "I think the Democrats should do what I want them to do and I won't accept anything else."  Yes, I get frustrated on Obama's record on civil liberties and failure to do much of anything about the financial crisis...and then I gain a measure of perspective by seeing what the Republicans want to do to the country if they are placed back in charge and given a one-party rule scenario.  Obama's screw-ups frustrate me.  The Republicans in charge frighten me to the core of my being.  I will support Obama, thank you.

And that brings me to Reid's salient point:  Americans down in the trenches, who are not on TV, who are not making big bank, who are not writing magazine and major newspaper op-eds, understand this.  Do we wish things were better?  Hell yes.  Do we say "Well the guy's not perfect, so let's not bother to care or to vote?"  Well you know some of us did in 2010, and look where that got us.  If we repeat that same pattern will we hand the Senate and White House to the GOP as well?

Exactly how does that help the progressive cause, or the middle class?  How does pretending that Obama has near mystical power over the political reality of Washington and the Village help?  It doesn't...but that was never the point, was it?

If your "valid criticism" of the President leads to a long-term campaign of finding common cause with the Republican fringe, then ladies and gentlemen, you are the problem.

StupidiNews!

• Japanese officials caution that the stored fuel rods at Fukushima Daiichi may be damaged and leaking radioactivity.
• Italy's parliament is set to vote on a justice reform bill that would put an end to the corruption trial of  PM Silvio Berlusconi.
• A Senate investigation finds fault with the financial ratings agencies for contributing to the financial crisis of 2008, trading faulty ratings for profit.
• Apple is finally ready to sell the white model of its iPhone 4, some ten months after the black model stormed the charts.
• A new survey shows tablet users are adapting the devices to replace laptops, desktops, and even TVs.