Weiner Cleaner

Looks like House Dem leadership is getting as sick and tired of Weinergate as I am, and want Anthony Weiner to put an end to this stupidity.  If Weiner doesn't have the PR chops to clean up his mess (and let's face it folks, he doesn't), it looks like his hand is going to be forced for him.

 Members of the House Democratic leadership have talked repeatedly to Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-New York, to try to get him to end what several Democrats call an unwelcome political distraction, a member of the party's leadership tells CNN.


"It's frustrating because we'll talk to him, and say clean it up, and then he goes out and does stuff," said the member of the House Democratic leadership, who declined to speak for the record about private discussions with Weiner.

"He's got to put the period at the end of the sentence," said the Democratic source, "it's painful."

On Thursday, Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the number two Democrat in the House, was less blunt, but told CNN he had spoken to Weiner.

"I told him that he needs to handle this and he needed to give the facts accurately to the public," Hoyer said. 

I've said time and time again his refusal to answer the question of if the picture is indeed him or not doesn't past the smell test in any way.   He's stalled three times now on the question, and once in front of Rachel Maddow, who was doing everything she could to give him an out in this clip from Wednesday night's show:



Weiner didn't take it.  Rachel Maddow gave him a free pass on this and Weiner still wouldn't deny the picture was him, even when Rachel explained that by not denying it, it made him look worse.  She then offered up a theory that maybe it was somebody else's picture and Weiner wouldn't confirm or deny that either.  He could have ended this Wednesday.  He didn't.  That was a foolish, rookie move.

More than anything else, that tells me three things:  the people advising Weiner on how to proceed are nowhere near competent, Weiner himself is not ready for the big time yet, and whatever he is hiding, Weiner's lame attempts to cover it up are worse than the actual truth at this point.

So at this point, the Dems' damage control team is taking over and I foresee some sort of statement from the Congressman very, very soon.  Weiner needs to axe his PR people, make a gut check, and come clean on whatever he's hiding and lance the boil already.  He's making stupid mistakes here and he needs to knock it off.

How about it, Tony?

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

No Col. Mustard, nobody's apologizing to you or Sarah Palin for your painfully weak pretzel logic defense of her "Paul Revere warned the British" flub.  She's still painfully dense and has little regard for facts or history.  And yet she has you performing ludicrously laughable acrobatic feats of rhetorical derring-do that somehow prove that Sarah Palin is the smartest person in the room?  I don't buy it.  Bon doesn't buy it.  Nobody does.

In fact, as pointed out at Conservatives4Palin, Revere did in fact tell the British that the colonial militias, who had been alerted, were waiting for them.  Here is the original historical text written by Revere (spelling in original, bold added):

I observed a Wood at a Small distance, & made for that. When I got there, out Started Six officers, on Horse back,and orderd me to dismount;-one of them, who appeared to have the command, examined me, where I came from,& what my Name Was? I told him. it was Revere, he asked if it was Paul? I told him yes He asked me if I was an express? I answered in the afirmative. He demanded what time I left Boston? I told him; and aded, that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the Country all the way up. He imediately rode towards those who stoppd us, when all five of them came down upon a full gallop; one of them, whom I afterwards found to be Major Mitchel, of the 5th Regiment, Clapped his pistol to my head, called me by name, & told me he was going to ask me some questions, & if I did not give him true answers, he would blow my brains out. He then asked me similar questions to those above. He then orderd me to mount my Horse, after searching me for arms

Palin's short statement on the video was less than clear; that sometimes happens but the part of the statement which has people screaming -- that Revere warned the British that the colonial militias were waiting -- appears to be true.

Please.  Palin screwed up, and she does it all the time.  Giving her a hard time about may not be completely fair, but attributing it to her advanced mastery of Revolutionary War history on an obscure point that even true scholars of the subject would be very hard pressed to agree with is begging the question at best, and complete bullshit at worst.  If you want to officially go on the position that Revere warned the British and that Palin is secretly a super genius of the highest intellectual order, be my guest. 

Or maybe we apply Occam's Razor and come up with Palin screwing up her history.

Points for creativity for your tortured defense of her position.  Maybe for your next trick you can prove black is white, just make sure not to get run over at the next zebra crossing.

WTH: Double Dose

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Identical twins Julian and Adrian Riester were born seconds apart 92 years ago. They died hours apart this week.

The Buffalo-born brothers were also brothers in the Roman Catholic Order of Friars Minor. Professed friars for 65 years, they spent much of that time working together at St. Bonaventure University, doing carpentry work, gardening and driving visitors to and from the airport and around town.

"It was fun to see them, just quiet, gentle souls," Yvonne Peace, who worked at the St. Bonaventure Friary for nearly 21 years, said Friday.

They died Wednesday at St. Anthony Hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., Brother Julian in the morning and Brother Adrian in the evening.

In a weird string of coincidence that followed the brothers their whole lives, the two men were born together, lived together, and died together. The story is very cool, and unfortunately also very sad.

This Week's WTH: What The Moose Was She Thinking?

I'm used to reading stupid Sarah Palin statements, but seriously, this one takes the cake:

Palin said, “He who warned uh, the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”

That is Palin's take on Paul Revere's ride.  She got the setting wrong.  She got the facts wrong.  She got the whole freaking reason wrong.  But gosh and by golly, she's just trying to save this country like any mama grizzly would.


Perhaps madam grizzly would like to crack a book once in a while.  Jesus. 

Bachmanniac Ups The Ante

At Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Conference yesterday, Michele Bachmann made some pretty serious criminal accusations against Planned Parenthood.  Her evidence?  The repeatedly debunked James O' Keefe video from February.

"We are giving money to corrupt organizations like Planned Parenthood that are committing crimes and enabling young minor girls and covering up issues I don't even want to talk about it because it is so disgusting," Bachmann fulminated.

"This organization has by their own records performed 324,008 abortions in 2008 and 2009," she insisted, "and that’s in addition to the trafficking of underage girls that has gone on under Planned Parenthood’s nose.”

Asked what evidence there was to support Bachmann's claims about involvement in sex trafficking, a spokesperson pointed to a heavily-edited video released last February by an associate of James O'Keefe, whose videos of ACORN employees allegedly fostering underage prostitution led to the Congressional defunding of that organization. Lisa Rose's video similarly appeared to show a Planned Parenthood clinic manager advising a pimp on how to run his operation.

At the time, Planned Parenthood noted that it had previously the FBI of suspicious visits to a number of its clinics, suggesting the possibility of a hoax. It also fired the employee shown in the video. However, Rose has demanded that Congress defund Planned Parenthood, and Bachmann has now joined in that call.

So despite the video being proven to be another O'Keefe-style hoax special months ago, Bachmann is treating the nonsense as truth and making public statements as a Member of Congress that Planned Parenthood is a criminal organization involved in trafficking of underage girls.   She has no independent evidence of this.  It doesn't matter to her.  Only her agenda to publish "bad women" does.

As Bon and I have repeatedly pointed out, Planned Parenthood provides a number of low-cost reproductive health services to women  and does so in a responsible manner so that women can be educated and given contraception to keep them from having children they cannot afford to raise.  Bachmann herself has literally dozens of adopted children that she is a mother to, and as an adopted child I certainly can testify there are other options for poor women besides abortions, and there are loving people out there who would love to care for a child.

But having the government force women to have children is wrong, period.  And all indications are that Bachmann will soon announce her bid for the Presidency.  Can you guess what President Bachmann's first executive order would be?

I can.  Won't it be great to have a President making decisions for the country based off of right wing hoax videos?

Turning Into A Disaster

The whole "Eric Cantor holds Joplin, Missouri Hostage" story has been spiked pretty hard, but it hasn't stopped other GOP governors from crying foul.  The latest:  Boss Hogg!

In a rebuke to House GOP leaders, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour told reporters on Friday that Congress should authorize disaster relief funds even if they are not offset with spending cuts. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has said that the emergency funds to help Missouri residents affected by deadly tornadoes should be paid for with cuts elsewhere, a break from precedent.

"No, " Barbour said when asked if he agreed with Cantor. "I think disaster relief is not predictable. Emergencies caused by tornadoes, hurricanes are not predictable. Even if Congress, which as far as I know they never have, set aside a pot of money, as some have proposed, and said, 'Okay, here's this money we're going to use to pay for disaster relief' -- if they were to do that and we had a gigantic disaster that cost much more than that, surely Congress would go back and appropriate the extra money. And if they didn't have a place to offset it, they should still go in and do it."

That's because even guys like Barbour here realize that politicizing federal disaster relief like this will only assure it is used as a weapon against governors by Congress...and they're even more aware of the fact that red states like Mississippi take in a hell of a lot more money from Washington than they pay in as far as federal taxes go.  Mississippi is second only to New Mexico in that they get $2.02 for every $1.00 of federal tax money (and NM gets $2.03.)

So yes, Boss Hogg wants to put a stop to this noise as soon as possible.  Somebody might say "Well why stop at disaster relief?"  Imagine that...