Tucker Carlson shows off his dance moves

Tucker and Willie show off their before show prep which involves some dance moves that should be outlawed in a few states.

Actually, I think this is fun and entirely for reasons that I think future readers looking back on this commentary won’t understand. At the time of this writing, this isnt something that exists anywhere in news related commentary broadcasts. It’s a depiction of levity that the culture and ubiquity of such broadcasting from podcasts to internet shows and more and more shows on cable is making more common. But at this time it is unique to see a host goof it up at the end of their segment on cable news. I like it. and I find it historically worthy of note.

Bush administration is royally screwing up Iraq…

Well I’ll tehll yu whut – G. Dubya is gonna turn me into a stinking hippie real quick if he can’t (read: won’t) find a better team of managers to make his bumbling in Iraq not be a stain on his legacy that essentially reads “everything they said about him being a dumbass war loving tool was correct”…

Democrats lied about the “Bush lied” sloganeering for months to try and defeat him in an election just to replace him with an exactly-as-aggressive foreign policy platform (just under a goofier, impossibly less-charismatic candidate with a somehow even more scummier slippery politician as VP than Darth Cheney) – but that doesn’t mean Bush and his administration ever had this thing under control or would do a good job.

At this point, 2 years after invading, an objective analysis can only read that he’s doing a bad job. and he’s not showing any sign of changing strategy…

WTF tho? (in this case, “Why” the fkk?)

Just because Democrats were dishonest and wrong in their talking points against the war (after they were for it at first, and then slowly started to be for it again after the election in all the key pockets that actually matter like spending and voting on troop deployment) doesn’t mean Dubya knows what he’s doing. Deciphering what the administrations plan is exactly is getting more and more shady.

Bush’s argument for why we can’t leave Iraq is that that would invite more of our enemies to flood in and take over. Well… yea, that’s likely true, but… well take this quote from CNN about it:

During a speech billed by the White House as a major policy address, Bush said if U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq, insurgents would “use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against nonradical Muslim governments.”

Critics have charged that the Iraq war has become a breeding ground for terror, while opinion polls suggest that U.S. public support for the war has been waning since spring.

It’s not just “critics charging” that the Iraq war has become a breeding ground for terror… it is verifiably doing exactly that… and that’s what makes it a tough issue to decode. Because on the one hand, the Democrats are just incoherent liars in claiming that the war in Iraq that the overwhelming majority of them supported for years before 9/11, then after 9/11, then when Congress voted on it, then afterward, –then not anymore but in words only while continuing to give it all their political support. But on the other hand – the initial success in the invasion that a coalition of nations agreed was a necessary action to take is being quickly overshadowed by what appears to just be a lack of competency. Idk if that is Bush’s fault or just Governments fault in being bad at basically any and every big undertaking it uses force to implement whether it is confiscatory tax policies, government expansion of power domestically, or the removal and attempted replacement of a dictatorial regime in the middle east. But something is not right and if the administration doesn’t get it right soon then they will just validate all the hippies who claimed there was no plan and no exit strategy.

Those hippies will still be liars about the other claims, but all it takes is to be right about the main aspect of a thing for the public and for history to review it as having been right about the whole thing all together.

So we will see if things improve and whose policies get the credit for it, but if American troops keep coming home in body bags just to “stabilize and rebuild this hornets nest we knocked down” over in the sands of a country most people couldn’t find on a map – Bush’s second term and entire legacy will be one of the worst in modern history. The “try him for war crimes” bumper sticker started out as nonsense, but through doubling down on something that isn’t going well at the cost of American blood and treasure every day, he is making that nonsense a reality.

Get your sh**t together Dubya & Co…

Zell Miller vs Alan Keyes

Good: (D) Zell Miller

For anyone who doesn’t know who Zell Miller is – he’s a Democratic senator from Georgia who’s the head of “Democrats for Bush”. He’s the first guy in history to deliver the keynote speech at both a democratic and republican convention. In 92 he made quite a powerful speech for Bill Clinton and against Bush the elder and the Republicans with the theme that “they just don’t get it” and why America needed Bill in office. In August 04 he delivered an equally rousing speech for Dubya (must have been an awkward moment seeing the first Bush at the convention) with pretty much the theme of “they just don’t get it”, only this time he’s criticizing his own party. Miller says he was born a democrat and will die a democrat and will not switch his registration just because he’s voting for and supports president Bush & his policies on the war on terror.

Zell: “Media are trying to paint me as an angry nut”…

He wasn’t an angry nut. He was firm and just wore kindov a scowl through his delivery. Wutcha’ll think? I think it was one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard, ever.


Part 2:

> BAD: (R) Alan Keyes

Posted in the hawt-links below – Alan Keyes. The Republican nominee for senate in Illinois is quite the wacko.


Future Vice President and then President, Barack Obama said this amusing slam to/about Keyes:

I don’t think it’s unfair to base who a religious figure like Jesus might favor in a political election, but Keye’s answer her is not even close to the right way of going about it.

Update: Figured I’d post this too cuz it’s interesting. I wanted to add an example of him being crazy-bananas over something so naturally I searched for his positions on homosexuality. This clip isn’t crazy-bananas. I disagree with the opinion and think the non-opinion claim is probably factually wrong, but its not as nuttyfruitcakes as I expected so whatever. I’m including it. Don’t take that as me walking back anything about his sanity.

More info about the Columbine Losers / murderers

Via CNN:

School shooters tend to act impulsively and attack the targets of their rage: students and faculty. But Harris and Klebold planned for a year and dreamed much bigger. The school served as means to a grander end, to terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life. Their slaughter was aimed at students and teachers, but it was not motivated by resentment of them in particular. Students and teachers were just convenient quarry, what Timothy McVeigh described as “collateral damage.”

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting “the most deaths in U.S. history.” Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn’t been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn’t just “fame” they were after—Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term—they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the “worst school shooting in American history.” They set their sights on eclipsing the world’s greatest mass murderers, but the media never saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in precisely the wrong direction.

Fuselier and Ochberg say that if you want to understand “the killers,” quit asking what drove them. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were radically different individuals, with vastly different motives and opposite mental conditions. Klebold is easier to comprehend, a more familiar type. He was hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. He blamed himself for his problems.

Harris is the challenge. He was sweet-faced and well-spoken. Adults, and even some other kids, described him as “nice.” But Harris was cold, calculating, and homicidal. “Klebold was hurting inside while Harris wanted to hurt people,” Fuselier says. Harris was not merely a troubled kid, the psychiatrists say, he was a psychopath.

Triumph on NPR, channels O’Reilly on NPR

From November 2003:

O’REILLY: We’ve spent now, all right, 50 minutes of me defending defamation against me in every possible way, while you gave Al Franken a complete pass on his defamatory book. And if you think that’s fair, Terry, then you need to get in another business. I’ll tell you that right now. And I’ll tell your listeners, if you have the courage to put this on the air, this is basically an unfair interview, designed to try to trap me into saying something that Harper’s can use. And you know it and you should be ashamed of yourself. And that is the end of this interview.

Some time later, Robert Smigel appeared in-character as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on the same show and blasted the host. “Did you treat Kermit the Frog like this when he was on your show?” Triumph the Insult Comic Dog asked NPR’s Terry Gross last on “Fresh Air.”

After Gross suggested that his use of the word “bitch” was controversial, Triumph went off on an extended spoof of Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s smackdown of Gross’s selectively combative style (mainly when she gave Al Franken a 100% pass while giving O’Reilly a 100% grilling) on the show.

Al Gore on Bush’s 9/11 lies

Former Vice President Gore gives accusatory speech riddled with spin & dishonesty.

If you need a reason why liberals hate Fox News or why the channel rules in the eye of conservatives – this video is it. This is a particularly damming report from FNC on the inconsistencies, mischaracterizations and inaccuracies in Al Gore’s recent speech about the supposed lies of the Bush administration concerning Iraq.

The only public response to this report has been a post on the far left media watch dog site Media Matters, with a charge that the FOX report erroneously stated that Gore mischaracterized the reports from the 9/11 commission. They respond to the FOX reports general indictment with a specific citation from the commission. They do not respond to the video clip of a commission member stating flatly that they do NOT disagree with the administrations ties to Al-Qaeda and they do not address Gores condemnation of the Bush administration that conflicts with his 1992 condemnation of the first Bush administration.

Did Study Confirm 2nd Hand Smoke Harmless?

“My friends, there’s now a second medical study which confirms that secondhand smoke doesn’t kill. Not only does it not kill, it doesn’t do much damage.” -Rush Limbaugh

And then you woke up Rushie. Staunch conservatives like Limbaugh are pleased as peanut pie at a new study that (as seen above) they say proves that secondhand smoke is pretty much harmless.

Any logical thinker knows this is impossible.

Philip Morris Tobacco company itself says the following about second hand smoke on it’s website (philipmorrisusa.com): “Public health officials have concluded that secondhand smoke from cigarettes causes disease, including lung cancer and heart disease, in non-smoking adults, as well as causes conditions in children such as asthma, respiratory infections, cough, wheeze, otitis media (middle ear infection) and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In addition, public health officials have concluded that secondhand smoke can exacerbate adult asthma and cause eye, throat and nasal irritation.”

So the tobacco makers admit the harmful effects of smoking…but the tobacco smokers say they’re lying? I don’t get it.

Of course, not all Tobacco distributors feel the same way, and the industry in general defends smoking and second hand smoke whenever possible, so this thing from Philip Morris might be an advisory requirement or court ordered thing or who knows.

Still Philip Morris doesn’t back out of it’s statement or spin their position at all. They consistantly conclude that “Philip Morris USA believes that the conclusions of public health officials concerning environmental tobacco smoke are sufficient to warrant measures that regulate smoking in public places. We also believe that where smoking is permitted, the government should require the posting of warning notices that communicate public health officials’ conclusions that secondhand smoke causes disease in non-smokers.”

It’s like saying that licking someone else’s bacon grease is harmless to your health. Technically, it is. And if that is the conclusion you want to come to, it is not difficult to spin some research into making such a deduction.

For instance, it is quite possible to eat greasy oily foods and not suffer any immediate health problem. You could have a targeted diet that allows the intake of such foods, or you could just be lucky and have a working system that doesn’t noticeably debilitate until a certain point. – But not everyone is so lucky. So is it thus fair to force everyone around you either lick your bacon grease or leave your area???

Of course not. Yet this is exactly the argument being made by indignant conservatives who think smoking wherever they want is their ‘right.’

These are the same conservatives that wag their fingers at the equally stupid liberal cries over so called civil liberties that can include anything from the ‘right’ to transvestites getting a special bathroom to the ‘right’ to halt traffic for the rest of the world while you protest in the streets, depending on how nutty you are.

These judgments need an injection of common sense and critical thinking instead of the current “what I feel like doing is my right” emotion driven logic.

Sucking smoke filled chemical sticks is your right. Bringing it to other people by polluting the shared air supply is not. Second hand smoke is bothersome to most non-smokers, but more importantly affects their health. The chemicals within can sting the eyes, personally give me a headache and are an asthmatics nightmare.

Whether it can be without a doubt scientifically proven or not that second hand smoke will cause cancer and lung disease, just bringing the discomfort to everyone around you is not anyone’s right.

The fact that this new study was funded by the Tobacco industry may or may not have anything to do with the conclusion, but is a noteworthy point to mention.