This is what happens when the nerd kid gets a new pair of jeans and thinks they make him cool. Kelsey Grammer is starting up a conservative TV network and he says it’s a “B-F-D” and will give Keith Olbermann a “case of the Mondays” and make Bill Maher shed a single tear. Right. When will conservatives learn that they can’t do cool and they can’t do funny? FishbowlLA offered a programming idea for the new network — Conservative Cheers: “Where everybody knows your name unless you’re gay, Mexican or believe in global warming.”
When you make an important decision in your life when you’re angry, there’s an 80 percent chance you’ll make a mistake. To have an election based on anger, apathy and amnesia is nuts. That’s exactly what’s going on all over America today.
Former Pres. Bill Clinton, speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in Atlanta.
What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.
— Racist adulterer Newt Gingrich, quoted in the National Review, arguing that President Obama “is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works.”
Is a person’s behavior determined by his or her race?
Take the case of a theoretical mixed-race American boy — let’s call him Barack Obama — whose mother is a Caucasian American and whose father is an African native of Kenya. Let’s say the father leaves the boy and his mother when the boy is two years old and moves back to Kenya, 10,000 miles away, never to be heard from again, except for one visit when the boy was 10 years old. How will the father influence the boy when he grows up?
A) Is the boy predestined by his genetic connection to his father to grow up and emulate his African-ness (whatever that is) — even going so far as to hold the same political beliefs rooted in Kenyan culture as his father?
Or B) is the boy more likely to identify with the culture and politics of the United States, the country where he spent most of his formative years and that he considers to be his home?
If you answered A, you are a racist, just like Newt Gingrich, the smartest guy in the Idiocracy — who is floating a possible run for president in 2012 — who made one of the most outrageously racist statements by a national politician since the Jim Crow era:
If there is going to be some big national announcement I’m going to do it where it’s most worthy. I’m going to do something big, even bigger then Glenn Beck. It’s going to happen on the Bob and Mark show.
— Sarah Palin, asserting that if she makes any announcement about 2012 presidential plans, she’ll do it on a KWHL drive-time talk radio show, the Anchorage Daily News reports.
Proclaiming, “A Watched Tea Party Never Boils,” teapartytracker.org has launched. Rumored to be backed by progressive hero George Soros, the site features instances of tea baggers doing what they do best: taking stands that don’t fit with reality and making weird, disjointed statements that make no sense, or as the site says, “Monitoring racism and other forms of extremism within the Tea Party movement.” Check out this video produced at the recent Million Moron March in Washington.
Net number of jobs created under Pres. George W. Bush after his tax cuts were enacted in 2001, according to the Wall St. Journal. Bush created the least jobs of any president since Hoover during the Great Depression. Pres. Bill Clinton created 22.4 million jobs, and left Bush with a $236 billion budget surplus. Historically, the economy tends to grow under Democrats, who traditionally do not cut taxes, and shrink under Republicans, who almost always do.
We welcome John Boehner’s change in position and support for the middle class tax cuts, but time will tell if his actions will be anything but continued support for the failed policies that got us into this mess.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, in a statement quoted on Politico.
Buoyed by polling and the media narrative that the GOP will win control of Congress in a wave election this November, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, the next putative speaker, and other Republicans in Congress have been caught in the act of measuring the drapes in the Capitol.
The fact that 39 percent have never heard of Boehner — who is known in the Capitol for boozing, schmoozing and playing golf with lobbyists — offers Democrats the opportunity to introduce him as what he is: the ultimate Washington insider.
If Boehner and his party win, it appears they won’t get much of a honeymoon with voters, however. A Wall St. Journal/NBC poll last month found that congressional Republicans had just a 24 percent approval rating, the lowest rating they had ever received.
Now a new CNN Opinion Research poll [PDF] finds that Boehner has a lower approval rating than Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who has been the object of unrelenting demonization on the GOP-Fox channel and right-wing radio for years.
Boehner received a 22 percent favorable rating, with 23 percent unfavorable. Thirty-nine percent had never heard of him and 16 percent had no opinion.
Speaker Pelosi’s favorables were 33/51, with just 9 percent saying they’d never heard of her and 7 percent having no opinion.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
“There are a lot of Ukrainian drones in the air. It would be dangerous.”
— Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, quoted by the Associated Press, when President Trump asked him if he would accept Moscow as a venue for peace talks.
“If you are committing fraud against the American people, all of us in public leadership should be trying to stop it and throw you in prison for enriching yourself off the American taxpayer.”
“The U.S. State Department announced on Monday that it has revoked more than 175,000 visas during President Donald Trump’s administration so far,” Fox News reports.
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office, Alternet reports. This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget.
A new Emerson College survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.
A new American Research Group poll finds just 30% of Americans say they approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president and 67% say they disapprove.
Wall Street Journal: “Around 40% of voters in the 2024 election said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other matter. And those voters favored Donald Trump by 60% to 38%. Many say they were moved by his pledges to tame inflation, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, cut red tape and trim government waste. … About a year and a half later, more voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy than approve, 61% to 35%, an average of polls by the Cook Political Report found this month.”
