Mitt Romney's "Mormon Song"

Taking a hint from Adam Sandler's "Chanukah Song," Andrew Reff helps Mitt Romney sing his own song about all the famous Mormons in our society. Perhaps this will convince a few Republican primary voters who hate the Tabernacle.

Laura Ingraham Makes A Fool Of Herself On CNN

Right-wing gas bags like Laura Ingraham can be quite amusing when they aren't trying to rip a person they disagree with to shreds. Yesterday morning she was on CNN talking about immigration. Laura attacked John Roberts by saying that CNN was part of the 'liberal media.' At first I thought he was going to laugh this off, but John defended his network and made her look like a nutcase.

From Crooks and Liars:

INGRAHAM: …But to insult his base, I mean, I hope he thinks he's going to be saved by the liberal elites at CNN, John, because if he is, then I'll be wrong about this. But I think it's kind of silly.

ROBERTS: Excuse me, what was that last comment?

INGRAHAM: By the way, John, how did you introduce me for this segment before the break. The outspoken Laura Ingraham. Do you guys introduce liberal commentators that way? I'm going to check.

ROBERTS: Yeah, we do actually.

She tried to pull a condescending laugh to save face, but it didn't work. That whole liberal media thing is a myth. If anything the press skews to the right but in this instance CNN calls activists outspoken regardless of party. It's strange she used this tiny little detail, probably because she would have to tell an even bigger lie to use a larger theme to prove her point.

1(900) RUN-GORE

I saw this on DailyKos last night and couldn't stop laughing. Maybe its my sick humor that finds a cross between a phone sex call and asking Al Gore to run for President, but I have a feeling there are a lot of other sick people out there. I would love to post this in its entirety, but I'll just provide a few choice excerpts.

From Zackpunk at DailyKos:

Gore: You've reached 1-900-RUN-GORE, where all your political fantasies come true.

Me: Hi. I... I've never really called one of these things before.

Gore: But you've wanted to for a long time, right?

Me: Yeah. I've been thinking about you. A lot. Is this really Al Gore?

Gore: (Pause.) Yes. Yes, it is.

(snip)

Gore: What kind of party affiliation are you wearing?

Me: Progressive moderate.

Gore: I want you to take off your moderation. I want you to remove it completely.

Me: You want me to be totally progressive?

Gore: Yes, I want you to be stark liberal.

(snip)

Me: I am. I'm going to be soooo progressive. But... I want to be progressive for you. I want you to run for president. Will you run for president for me?

Gore: I don't know if I should...

Me: Oh please, do it for me.

Gore: Okay. I'm going to do it.

Me: Yes! I knew you would!

Gore: I'm running for president. I'm doing it right now.

It might not be the way Gore should officially announce....but it's pretty damn funny.

Cindy Sheehan Talks With PBS

PBS interviews Cindy Sheehan after she announced she quit the anti-war movement.

From PBS:

In a NOW on the News Web-exclusive audio interview from May 31, Cindy Sheehan tells NOW on PBS Host and Senior Editor David Brancaccio that she plans to rest up, spend time with her family, and then continue her struggle against the Iraqi war.

"We're going to pull back and regroup and figure out a better way to come at this," Sheehan told NOW.

Sheehan - whose son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, died in Iraq in 2004 - announced on Memorial Day that she was done being the public face of the movement. "I think my mission, my activism has reached a brick wall," she tells Brancaccio. Sheehan gained national attention when she camped outside President Bush's Texas ranch in August 2005 demanding to talk with the President.

Learn more at http://www.pbs.org/now/news/322.html

A Cold, Callous And Clueless President

I've been harping on George Bush all day, but the stories just keep coming fast and furious and this one can't escape mentioning it. Several mothers of fallen soldiers went on NPR to talk about their experiences and one of them, Elaine Johnson, had quite the one-on-one with the President. It is another example of how truly, dare I say evil George Bush really is. Elaine was mostly neutral on the war until she met the President face to face. She asked him why we were there but couldn't get a straight answer.

From The Chicago Tribune:

"President Bush, he just didn’t see that, and he told me I was kind of, seemed like I was kind of hostile. I said, ‘yes I am hostile, because you sent my son over there.’ So my thing is -- all the questions that I asked him, he didn’t know nothing then, and he definitely don’t know nothing now, because the United States is in worser shape now that it was in 2003 that my son died.''

Martin asked: "So when you left that meeting did you leave with determination to do something or did that happen over time?''

Johnson said: "When he told me -- I said what’s, what’s the mission? He couldn’t give me an answer. I says, well I’m going to tell you what: I’m on my mission now. My mission had just begun. And my mission is to fight to bring these troops home, to take care of these troops when they get home.

"Then he gave us a presidential coin,'' she said. "Now you check this out: He gave six of us a presidential coin, tell us not to tell the rest of the people that was there, and then after that he told us don’t go sell it on eBay. Now you tell me how insensitive that can be? What kind of caring person is that?''

Who wouldn't be hostile after that? If I were a parent that lost a child in Iraq, only God would know what I'd do to him. Elaine is right, he does not care. There is no empathy for the troops, their grieving families or anything else that our nation holds dear. Cold, callous and clueless; and the worst President our country has ever seen.

Bush Goes Beserk, Thinks He's An Ape

It looks like all of that coke and booze over the years is finally taking its toll on the President. Despite his self-proclaimed sobriety, the President is starting to lose his marbles in private meetings with his friends. He is very determined to let people know he's the President (really?) and that he will do his best to make Iraq a huge mess for his successors. I know Gore said it is a waste of time to impeach him, but he really needs to go...now.

From The Dallas Morning News:

But by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated “I am the president!” He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of “our country’s destiny.”

Wow, this man shouldn't be running a war, he should be locked up in a psych ward. Our country's destiny is to be stuck in Iraq for decades while our soldiers are picked off every damn day? Screw that and screw you.

Lessons In Lunacy: Hillary Fundraiser Delayed By A Coffin

Protester Steven Pierce made a big impact in the lives of Hillary and her supporters in Sacramento the other day. He placed an empty coffin on the side of the street near a private fundraiser, prompting the bomb squad to come out and investigate. After two hours of waiting in the street people paying to see Mrs. Clinton had to walk through brush to enter the house from the back. The event finally took place, but not before the local media got this footage:

McCain Campaign Scorns The Religious Right

In public John McCain has repeatedly tried to earn the respect of religious right leaders and their flocks. He ditched the 'maverick' status and went religious, attending ceremonies at Liberty University and wavered on his more moderate social policies such as abortion. Many independents distanced themselves from the Senator while the fundies didn't really move much closer to him.

Now it turns out that all of that posturing was for show. The nuts and bolts of the campaign tells a story that paints McCain as a politician that simply uses the religious right (like George Bush) for votes while not doing much at all for their core issues.

From U.S. News and World Report:

Two former aides hired to spearhead religious outreach for presidential candidate John McCain say that they were virtually ignored by the campaign and that McCain's top campaign strategists are intent on winning votes of religious voters without having to develop serious ties to faith communities. The aides, who were fired in early April after roughly three months on the job, said the campaign staff declined to return scores of their phone calls and E-mail messages, denied them access to leaders of the McCain campaign, and pressed them to collect church directories—a controversial tactic—as the centerpiece of a strategy to woo "values" voters.

"In the end, you came away with the strong sense that they had contempt for the faith-based community," says Marlene Elwell, one of those fired staffers. Elwell, a prominent Christian-right activist, was hired by McCain in December 2005 to be national director of his "Americans of Faith" coalition. "The way we were being treated it was as if we had leprosy."

McCain expected great results without doing any hard work for the conservative Christian vote. Now he is paying the price for that. George Bush got away with it for the most part but the religious right is getting tired of being used by candidates that talk a lot without doing much action.

The whole story pieced together is actually quite amusing. McCain panders to the right with meaningless political stunts, including hiring the religious outreach staffers. The right is still skeptical and rightly so, as the new staffers are treated as lepers. A series of mistakes due to McCain's image problems results in a drop in the polls, followed by a drop in donations and ultimately the need to cut back staff led to the religious outreach people's dismissal.

Now the story comes full circle when the staffers broke their anonymity and went to the press with what went down inside the McCain campaign. The result? McCain gets more bad news and continues to lose hope for a comeback in the Presidential primary.

RNC Fires The Wrong People For Their Fundraising Problem

Sixty five-people were abruptly fired from their jobs as phone-bankers at the Republican National Committee last week. Anne Hathaway oversaw the project at the RNC and confirmed the event after the former workers went to the press. The RNC maintains that the program was canceled due to outdated phone-banking technology but the staffers don't believe it.

The real problem was the precipitous drop in small-donor donations. Staffers estimate donations are down 40 percent this year and is primarily due to the President's controversial stance on the immigration debate. Many conservative donors want their President to back up their xenophobic tendencies with actions, while George wants to keep his friends supplied with cheap labor. The difference in opinions is hurting George's party where it hurts, in the wallet.

From The (sometimes credible) Washington Times:

Fired employees acknowledged that the committee's phone equipment was outdated, but said a sharp drop-off in donations "probably" hastened the end of the RNC's in-house phone-bank operation.

"Last year, my solicitations totaled $164,000, and this year the way they were running for the first four months, they would total $100,000 by the end of 2007," said one fired phone bank solicitor who asked not to be identified.

There has been a sharp decline in contributions from RNC phone solicitations, another fired staffer said, reporting that many former donors flatly refuse to give more money to the national party if Mr. Bush and the Senate Republicans insist on supporting what these angry contributors call "amnesty" for illegal aliens.

"Everyone donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue," said the former employee.

The RNC denies all of this of course but it does not matter. The story shows that there is a lot of discord within the party and all over the conservative landscape. The fact that the highly dubious Washington Times would publish this shows their discontent with the President.

Reverend Moon's publication takes substantial losses every year in order to keep conservative propaganda alive and well within the District of Columbia. So when they are going against Bush, you know there is trouble in the ranks.

George Bush Hears The Voices

Here's a great little spoof from YouTube land that makes the President sound like more of an idiot than he already does. It doesn't take much work to show the President to be a bumbling fool, but this is worth a couple minutes of your time.

Environmental Bushshit

George W. Bush has to be one of the worst Presidents and current world leader when it comes to being a steward of the environment. From the very beginning of his term he failed to sign the Kyoto Protocol, then went on to allow the oil industry and other polluters free range to take huge profits at the expense of our planet. Recently he scoffed at a European plan to tackle climate change, opting to have his own plan to deal with the problem. Of course in typical Bush style, what he advocates for is utter crap that does nothing to help save our environment.

From Yahoo News:

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -

President George W. Bush's plan to tackle climate change merely restates U.S. policy which has been ineffective in the past in cutting emissions blamed for global warming, the EU's environment chief said on Friday.

"The declaration by President Bush basically restates the U.S. classic line on climate change -- no mandatory reductions, no carbon trading and vaguely expressed objectives," EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said, according to his spokeswoman.

"The U.S. approach has proven to be ineffective in reducing emissions," Dimas added of Bush's call on Thursday for 15 major countries to agree by 2008 on a long-term goal for cutting emissions.

The European has been onto Bush's empty promises for quite a while now and it was easy to pick apart this latest attempt to look good on the international stage. The reality is that Europe is cutting their emissions while the United States increases at alarming rates.

We are well aware of our problem in the White House as well. Along with some die-hard deniers like Senator Inhofe, these Republicans will continue to deny the effects of climate change and man's contribution to it so long as the money keeps coming in from oil lobbyist and similar ilk.

Conservatives Gear Up To Fight Giuliani

The conservative backlash to Rudy Giuliani's campaign was inevitable and now it is upon us. The forces that helped bring the demise of Harriet Miers and the oh-so honorable Swift-boaters are back to take on the presumed front-runner for the Republican nomination. These groups are angered by his socially moderate stances on abortion, support of regulating handguns and favoring rights for homosexuals. All of these things are terrible to conservatives such as Paul Nagy, who is a leader in the fight to have someone of his ilk run as the Republican nominee.

From The Huffington Post:

The early success of Rudy Giuliani's presidential bid has provoked a groundswell of opposition from disparate forces including conservative Catholics, remnants of Pat Buchanan's presidential campaigns and regional political operatives seeking to break into the Republican firmament.

The opposition is united in its determination to block Giuliani, a supporter of abortion rights and gay rights, from becoming the GOP's standard bearer. But lurking just beneath the surface is another motive for these anti-Giuliani conservatives: cash. The groups hope to benefit from a large constituency of donors willing to write big checks to bring down the former New York Mayor City mayor. The donors include backers of Giuliani's competitors as well as ideologues of the right.

The new organizations are relying on two fundraising models, both of which were highly successful in previous attacks. One is the drive in 2005 to force White House counsel Harriet Miers to withdraw her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. That campaign, spearheaded by conservatives opposed to Miers, raised an estimated $2 million. The other is the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign in 2004, which began with a modest budget but ended up raising millions in an effort to destroy Kerry's reputation as a war hero.

So the goal for these guys is to enrich themselves while supporting their extreme causes (or what goes for mainstream in today's Republican party). The Swiftboaters did an excellent job of that three years ago while attacking John Kerry with lies and distortion. Paul Nagy and company must have figured they can get their piece of the pie almost a year and a half away from the Presidential election.

They should be able to find a large loyal audience and pool of support amongst their ranks. Plenty of conservatives want to see their dreams of a Christian theocracy realized as they hoped for under Bush. If the Republicans hold onto the Presidency, the religious right wants someone who is socially conservative, not just fiscally.