Last Call

Yeah I know.  It's a chunk of Meet The Press, and it has Rachel Maddow.  But it's actually a good argument, and Maddow drops the gloves here on a roundtable on the War on Women when GOP strategist Alex Castellanos goes all "now listen here young lady..." and she basically slaughters him and hangs him on a meathook.  Hilary Rosen and GOP Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers go at it too.



Rachel brings up the excellent point that yes, women make less than men do.  Rosen brings up that "when men have health issues, they're health issues.  When women have health issues, they're political issues".  And Castellanos couldn't be any more condescending to the both of them.  Meanwhile, Rodgers goes on about how it's a "myth created by the Democrat party."

It's everything wrong with the GOP right there in 10 minutes.  Rachel Maddow, Doctor Rachel Maddow, Rhodes Scholar, by the way, was purposely being dismissed by Castellanos here for letting her silly girly emotions taking over, her "passion":

It’s policy. And I love how passionate you are. I wish you are as right about what you’re saying as you are passionate about it. I really do.

As if Rachel is too stupid to know the difference between policy and passion and needs to be put in her place by a big strong man.   She can't possibly be right, because she has a vagina.  I don't agree with everything she says at times on issues of opinion, but I know better than to say she's wrong because she's too dumb to get her facts right because she's a woman.

And Rachel proceeds to rip Congresswoman McMorris Rodgers apart too:

The first law passed by this administration is the Fair Pay Act. To remedy that court ruling. The Mitt Romney campaign put you out as a surrogate to shore up people’s feelings about this issue after they could not say whether or not Mitt Romney would have signed that bill. You’re supposed to make us feel better about it. You voted against the Fair Pay Act. It’s not about–whether or not you have a female surrogate. It’s about policy and whether or not you want to fix some of the structural discrimination that women really do face that Republicans don’t believe is happening.

Let's not forget that it's Republican woman enabling this stuff to happen.  Gender issues, much like racism and poverty, only exist in the minds of lunatic liberals, apparently.  In Republican America, we're all equal.

As long as, you know, unlike Rachel Maddow, we shut up when the GOP men are talking, because they're always right.

As if you needed another reason to check out my friend ABL's new major political venture:  POWRpac, People Organizing for Women's Rights.



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Out Of The Park

And for yet another year, the funniest guy in the room at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner?  President Obama.  Mediaite:

Obama joked about the colloquial term for the WCDA dinner, “nerd prom,” – “a term coined by political reporters who clearly never had the chance to go to an actual prom.”

Obama also took a jab at Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post. “Plenty of journalists are here tonight,” said Obama. “I’d be remise if I did not congratulate the Huffington Post on their Pulitzer Prize. You deserve it Arianna. There is no one else out there linking to the kinds of hard hitting journalism that HufPo is linking to every single day.” He continued, “and you don’t pay them. It’s a great business model.”

Obama also mocked himself over recent jokes in conservative circles that he had consumed dog meat as a child in Indonesia. Invoking Sarah Palin’s famous 2008 Republican National Convention speech, Obama joked “what is the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? A pit bull is delicious.”

Obama addressed his likely Republican rival, Mitt Romney, once again. “We both have degrees from Harvard,” said Obama. “I have one. He has two… What a snob.”

Obama closed by mocking his opponents who say the president harbors a radical agenda for a second term. “In my second term, I will win the war on Christmas,” said Obama. “In my first term we repealed the law known as Don’t Ask, Don’t tell. In my second term, we will replace it with a policy known as ‘It’s Raining Men.”

Do watch the whole thing,  it's POTUS at his best.

It's About Time

Two Democrats introduced a bill on Friday that would ban employers from asking for their workers' Facebook passwords.

The Social Networking Online Protection Act, introduced by Democratic Reps. Eliot Engel (N.Y.) and Jan Schakowsky (Ill.), would prohibit current or potential employers from demanding a username or password to a social networking account.

The restriction would also apply to colleges, universities and schools. 

If you are not smart enough to use discretion on your social networking pages, then you reap what you sow.  I know people who have their Facebooks set to public and they are littered with pictures of bongs and anti-government wit.  That's their right, but they can't be surprised if someone legally goes there and reads, and then reacts, to what they willing made public.

However, protecting passwords and right to speech is critical and this sets an important precedent for all personal digital privacy wars to come.  If you are smart enough to keep your thoughts scrubbed for public and only rant to the people you love and trust, then no business should be able to pry into that.  Or your private correspondence, relationships (messy Facebook breakups are the norm nowadays) and other information that was walled off from the world for good reason.

I hope it passes, because we need as much protection as we can get.

A Swing And A Miss: Ted Nugent Style

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ted Nugent said he was insulted by the cancellation of his planned concert at an Army post over his comments about President Barack Obama.

Commanders at the Fort Knox, Ky., post nixed Nugent's segment of a June concert after the rocker and conservative activist said at a recent National Rifle Association meeting that he would be "dead or in jail by this time next year" if Obama is re-elected.

Nugent shows his inability to reason by focusing solely on whether what he said was a threat against Obama.  Of course it wasn't, you simpleton.  It was an outlandish accusation, a false statement at his expense meant to make him look bad and bring attention to Nugent.  It was a misrepresentation of reality that only a rabid anti-Obama nitwit could cough up.

But a threat?  No.

As for being insulted that his concert was canceled, it makes good sense to me.  If Nugent was set to play for the Trump company picnic and he publicly and loudly accused The Donald of something so outrageous it defied logic, you could expect that concert to be canceled.

I guess in Ted Nugent's world, freedom of speech means the ability to lie and not have to answer for it.  It means being able to hurl insults but cry like a little girl when the bill comes due.  All the freedom belongs to him, anyone who opposes him has no rights.  Yeah, sounds like a hypocritical GOP dipshit grabbed the mic again.  Can we shut him up so the big kids can try to fix the country?

Blind Man's Bluff

Chinese dissident and activist Cheng Guangcheng, who is blind, has escaped from government house arrest in Shandong province and is reportedly now in US hands in what is sure to be another chapter in the "interesting times" between Washington and Beijing.


The United States has not confirmed publicly reports that Chen, who slipped away from under the noses of guards and eyes and ears of surveillance equipment around his village home in eastern Shandong province, fled into the U.S. embassy.

China has also declined direct public comment on Chen's reported escape, which threatens to overshadow a two-day meeting with top Obama administration officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in Beijing from Thursday.

But Texas-based ChinaAid said it "learned from a source close to the Chen Guangcheng situation that Chen is under U.S. protection and high level talks are currently under way between U.S. and Chinese officials regarding Chen's status."

"Because of Chen's wide popularity, the Obama Administration must stand firmly with him or risk losing credibility as a defender of freedom and the rule of law," Bob Fu, president of the religious and political rights advocacy group that has long campaigned for Chen's freedom, said in an email.

The standoff carries political risk for President Barack Obama, whose presumptive Republican challenger in November's election, Mitt Romney, has painted Obama as weak on China.

"The Obama Administration will be inviting attack from the Romney campaign ... if the right course is not decided immediately," said Michael Pillsbury, a former senior official in the previous three Republican administrations.

Cheng has put the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton in kind of a tough spot right now.  Republicans will light into the President no matter what he does, but the right thing to do here is to get Cheng out of there.  The question is how.

The problem is doing so with Hillary Clinton meeting the Chinese make it look like all this was set up beforehand, and the Chinese don't like to be so openly insulted without a way out.  On the other hand, finessing this too much looks like dithering. Still, it looks like diplomacy is already underway and something positive will come from it.


We'll see what transpires.  What I do know is that Mittens would have found a way to screw this pooch already if he were running this show.  The fact that this is being handled low-key and without the words "major diplomatic disaster" splashed all over the international press is probably a good start here.