Month: August 2010

Pres. Obama turns 49 today. On this auspicious occasion,we’re mindful of an article published on the front page of the Los Angeles Times last week titled, “Obama the Velcro President,” that said, in part:

If Ronald Reagan was the classic Teflon president, Barack Obama is made of Velcro.

Through two terms, Reagan eluded much of the responsibility for recession and foreign policy scandal. In less than two years, Obama has become ensnared in blame…

But Obama remains the colossus of his administration — to a point where trouble anywhere in the world is often his to solve.

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This is great news. Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, my old home state, is without a doubt one of the biggest dumbasses in the Senate — a body that includes mental paramecia like Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Bob Corker of Tennessee.

A new poll shows N.C. Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, his Democratic opponent, has pulled up within range of Burr.

Public Policy Polling:

The North Carolina Senate race continues to look very competitive, with Richard Burr’s approval numbers hitting a record low and Elaine Marshall pulling within 2 points. Burr’s at 39 percent to 37 percent for Marshall and 7 percent for Libertarian Michael Beitler.

The main thing that’s changed since the last poll, when Burr led by 5, is that Marshall is shoring up her support from within the party. 65 percent of Democrats say they’ll vote for her, up from 57 percent a month ago. Burr continues to lead because of a 44-25 advantage with independents and because with 73 percent Republican support his party is more unified around him than Marshall’s is around her.

There’s not much doubt the closeness of this race is more an indictment of Burr than a reflection of Marshall’s popularity. The Democratic challenger continues to be largely an unknown to North Carolina voters with 58 percent saying they have no opinion of her. Among those who do 23 percent see her favorably and 19 percent unfavorably. But what’s really changed since February when Burr held a ten point lead is perceptions of the incumbent. At that time voters split evenly on his job performance with 35 percent approving of him and 35 percent disapproving. Now just 32 percent approve with 44 percent disapproving.

As I said last week, the Breitbart rules of war are simple: If you’re on defense, you are losing — and over the past few weeks, the GOP-tea party has found itself on defense time after time. The litany of abuses that has right wingers on defense includes the Mark Williams “Colored People” letter, which led to the expulsion from the National Tea Party Federation of his GOP-backed astroturf group Tea Party Express; the revelation that Breitbart published deceptively edited videos of Shirley Sherrod’s speech and the ACORN “undercover investigation”; Fox News’ race-baiting in its promotion of the New Black Panthers Party non-story and its coverage of ACORN and Shirley Sherrod, the latter of which elicited a rare admission by a Fox exec that mistakes were made.

Now, via Newshounds, comes another apology from Fox — this one from Greta Van Susteren, the network’s resident Scientologist host, who rushed to her blog to apologize because an obviously racist producer on her show couldn’t tell the difference between Shirley Sherrod and Maxine Waters, a 10-term congresswoman from Los Angeles:

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WeHo News:

District Court Judge Vaughn Walker issues his decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal challenge to the constitutionality of Prop 8, tomorrow morning, August 4, 2010.

There will be no court proceeding associated with the publication of the order.

As has happened at every important point in modern gay history, the City of West Hollywood will again act as a central Los Angeles area rallying point for the LGBT community.

Expect the West Hollywood rally – on San Vicente Boulevard south of Santa Monica Boulevard – to begin at 7pm, however commuter travel is expected to slow earlier.

Matt Taibbi:

At every Tea Party event I’ve gone to, the scene always devolves in one of two directions: either everybody trades stories about the corruption of Charlie Rangel or ACORN or Jeremiah Wright or some other notable nonwhite villain, or else a group therapy session breaks out in which everybody shares their harrowing experiences of being unjustly accused of racism. Once they reach one of those two destinations, they camp out there, conversationally, not just for minutes but hours.

I remember being in Nevada with one group of Tea Party folks: I had one guy in my ear for a full half an hour about how “the mainstream media” had reported that a white man with a gun attended an Obama speech, and how in the end it wasn’t a white guy at all but a black guy… or something along those lines. The guy was staring at me like he had just told me the greatest and most interesting story since the Gospel and expected that when he was done, I would get the whole world on the phone so that it could apologize to him personally for how that initial misreport had made him feel.

Your average person doesn’t spend hours a day pondering his racial victimhood like this – not unless he enjoys it, and if he enjoys it, he’s an asshole! (Especially if he’s white. If he’s white, the scale of his assholedom is almost incalculable).

Nevada G.O.-Tea Bagger U.S. Senate Candidate Sharron Angle famously refuses to do interviews with legitimate journalists, lest they ask her about her unpopular positions, like killing Social Security and Medicare.

She was happy to sit down with Carl Cameron, a “reporter” for Fox News, her party’s propaganda outlet, of course. But it’s doubtful Cameron was prepared for it when Angle blurted out the truth about her expectations from him and the rest of the right-wing media, instead of playing the game and pretending like he was conducting a real interview with her.

This part is too rich — you gotta love her use of the royal “we”:

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Washington Post:

Opposition to the landmark health care overhaul declined over the past month, to 35 percent from 41 percent, according to the latest results of a tracking poll, reported Thursday.

Fifty percent of the public held a favorable view of the law, up slightly from 48 percent a month ago, while 14 percent expressed no opinion about the measure, according to the poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Talk about clueless inside-the-Beltway thinking! The smoke has not yet cleared on Fox News’ complicity in race-baiting and deceptive reporting in the Shirley Sherrod scandal, its entirely fake New Black Panthers non-story and the network’s role in taking down the anti-poverty group ACORN by broadcasting yet more deceitfully edit footage when the supposedly nonpartisan White House Correspondents Association awards this Republican Party in-house organ a prime seat in the front row of the White House briefing room — a spot that was restricted, until now, to representatives of legitimate news organizations.

Here’s how WHCA’s blunder was reported in the Guardian in London:

Fox News has joined the three main TV networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, cable station CNN and news agencies AP and Reuters, in the coveted front row of the room, where daily press conferences are held. The seating arrangements are more than symbolic as it helps to determine who is called by Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s press secretary, to ask questions.

CONTACT INFO
Email the White House Correspondents Association

It marks something of a coming of age for the channel, which was formed in 1996 and has succeeded in shaking up the world of television news with its mix of highly partisan rightwing commentary and often heavily editorialised news. The channel has increasingly been making inroads against its competitors, notably the more politically moderate CNN.

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