Remember Kinsley’s rule: In Washington, a gaffe is when someone accidentally tells the truth:
Republican House Budget Committee Chairman PAUL RYAN: “This to us is something that we’re not going to give up on, because we’re not going to give up on destroying the health care system for the American people.”
The “new” Republican budget released by Ryan, the infamous zombie-eyed granny starver, is the same as the old budget he drafted — it voucherizes Medicare, repeals Obamacare and the rest. Why would Republicans phone in a new budget that’s the same as the budget that is unpopular in the polls and was rejected by Congress?
“I once shot an elephant in my pajamas,” the old Groucho Marx joke goes, “how he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”
Speaking of shooting elephants, last week GoDaddy CEO Bob “Dumbo” Parsons posted a video from his African safari vacation showing him stalking and gunning down a perfectly healthy elephant. On the video, Parsons is heard saying, “Of everything that I do this is the most rewarding.” Unlike Groucho, he was not joking.
This caused blowback for Parsons and GoDaddy, the massive domain registrar and web services company he founded, mainly because it’s been decades since hunting animals as huge and non-threatening as elephants was considered “sport.” (You can weigh in here by signing a petition titled “Real Men Don’t Kill Elephants.”)
Instead of killing a real elephant, it’s too bad Parsons can’t act out his Great White Hunter fantasies in a virtual world by grabbing his gun and elephant pajamas and heading to Sacramento, where a figurative old bull elephant called the California GOP is on its last legs and needs to be put out of its misery.
Someone just turned the lights on in the bar, and the sexiest state doesn’t look so pretty anymore.
– California Treasurer Bill Lockyear, a Democrat, reacting to news that Texas had been hiding a $27 billion deficit for over a year while both Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry and California GOP candidate for governor Meg Whitman lambasted California’s deficit and touted Texas as a “miracle” of fiscal responsibility.
Eight years ago this month, George W. Bush’s first secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, was asked to resign. O’Neill, the former CEO of Alcoa, had made a couple of gaffes, including one that temporarily caused a run on the dollar. But it was his opposition to the administration’s plan to give tax cuts to the wealthy — O’Neill worried the cuts might cause the federal deficit to balloon out of control — that got him canned.
Not long after O’Neill left office, author Ron Suskind wrote a book about O’Neill’s tenure as Treasury secretary titled, “The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill.” The book made headlines when it was published in late 2003, because, in it, O’Neill became the first high-ranking official from the administration to say publicly that war with Iraq had been a top objective of the Bush administration from the outset, and that the Sept. 11 attacks had merely provided a pretext for the invasion.
“Haven’t we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut’s gonna do it again. Shouldn’t we be giving money to the middle?” – Bush in 2002
(It was also around this time that Ron Suskind reported on a conversation he’d had with an anonymous senior White House aide — now universally thought to have been Karl Rove. “The aide said that guys like me,” Suskind wrote, “were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which [Rove] defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”)
But the other controversial revelation in Suskind’s book was about the Bush administration’s reckless decision after the 2002 midterms to go for a second round of tax cuts for the rich. In a January 2004 article about the book, Julian Borger wrote in the Guardian:
To hear Trump talk, he’s the only one
Who’s ever stood trial for crimes he’s done.
But instead of courtroom drama,
We get Trump in his pajamas,
That’s how he earned his new nickname: Don Snoreleone.
“Some of the 49 migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard by the state of Florida are now able to legally work in the United States and have temporary protections from deportation — because they are considered victims of a potential crime. … The migrants are eligible for these protections because they applied for a special kind of visa meant for crime victims who are helping law enforcement, after they said they were tricked into taking charter flights from San Antonio to Massachusetts with false promises of jobs and other aid.”
“We care more about the safety of our staff than a name attached to an article.”
In its panning of Taylor Swift’s new album (3.6/10 rating), Paste Magazine chose to put “Paste Staff” as the piece’s author instead of the individual who wrote it. That’s because following Paste’s negative review of Swift’s Lover album in 2019, the reviewer received threats of violence from fans who disagreed. As for its critique of The Tortured Poets Department, Paste Staff said its “mid-ness” was the result of “when the artist making it no longer feels challenged, where she strikes out looking.”
“The House is a rough and rowdy place, but Mike Johnson is gonna be just fine. I served 20 years in the military, it’s my absolute honor to be in Congress. But I serve with some real scumbags. Matt Gaetz, he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties. Bob Good endorsed my opponent, a known neo-Nazi. These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime.”
“This week has been a howling vortex of suck for the MAGA movement and Donald Trump. Imagine a black hole in the profound interstellar vacuum in the cold emptiness of space, drawing all matter and energy into its brutal singularity, an ineluctable and final journey into nothingness. … That’s the GOP this week. It’s been bad and will get worse.”
A new Siena poll finds that by a 54% to 30% margin, New Yorkers say Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial is “legitimate” — the view of 77% of Democrats and 44% of independents — rather than a “witch hunt,” the view of 66% of Republicans.
A new Marist poll finds Joe Biden leading Donald Trump nationally among registered voters, 51% to 48%. In a multi-candidate field, Biden is up by five percentage points against Trump, 43% to 38% among registered voters, followed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 14%, Cornel West at 2%, and Jill Stein at 2%.Among those who definitely plan to vote, Biden leads Trump 46% to 39% in this same multi-candidate field.
NBC News poll: “‘Protecting democracy’ is a salient issue for voters. There’s a difference between what voters identify as the ‘most important issue facing the country’ (on that, “inflation and the cost of living’ registers 23%, followed by immigration/the border, at 22%) and what they identify as the issue most important in determining their own vote (on that, ‘protecting democracy or constitutional rights’ was on top with 28%, followed by immigration/the border at 20% and abortion at 19%).”
NBC poll: “RFK Jr.’s support draws more from Trump than Biden. Though the CW is that Kennedy is a bigger threat to Biden than to Trump, the numbers here tell a different story: 15% of Trump supporters and 7% of Biden supporters in the head-to-head matchup break for RFK Jr. when the field expands to include third-party candidates.”