Bloomberg Refudiates Palin

In a welcome display of Republican sanity, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has told Sarah Palin to piss off.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg "could not disagree more" with Sarah Palin's criticisms of the Ground Zero mosque, he said Monday.

Bloomberg said the $100 million mosque and community center is " a great message for the world that, unlike in other places where they might actually ban people from wearing burquas or building a building, that's not what America was founded on nor is it what America should become."

It’s alright Sarah, even Shakespeare in his prime had detractors. If those slings and arrows ever bug you and you’re wondering whether to be or not to be, please come down on the side of the latter.

Mark Williams chimed in with bits of insanity which can only be interpreted as attempts to make Palin look reasonable.

In other Ground Zero mosque news, Mark Williams, a Tea Party leader who called Borough President Stringer a "Jewish Uncle Tom" for supporting the project, has been kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation for making separate racially charged comments.

The Tea Party Federation also booted Williams’ Tea Party Express group after Williams wrote a mock letter from "the Colored People" to President Lincoln saying emancipation was a mistake.

Williams wrote an anti-mosque blog post in May saying that Muslims worship a "monkey god."

More Bloombergs, Fewer Palins!

Happy 4th to the Left from Johnny Pod

No, I’m just kidding! BTW,  the column is called “Patriotic Opposition.” Just trying to remember if John would have called any dissent against George Bush, “patriotic opposition.”

How are those of us who stand in opposition to the domestic agenda and foreign-policy views of President Obama and his administration to think about this country in 2010 as we approach the nation's birthday on Sunday?

Or, to put it another way: How should a self-described patriot think, act and talk about the United States if that self-described patriot believes the elected leadership of the United States has led the country into a ditch that threatens to expand into a bottomless chasm?

You could just STFU. I believe that was the message to all who disagreed with the marvelous adventure in Mesopotamia.

Does the fault lie with the president and his party, or does it reside in the electorate that installed them? If it resides in the electorate, what does that say about the condition of the United States?

The third option, of course, is that it lies within you and the other idiots whom the GOP has yet to see fit to send to a desert island somewhere.

Conveniently, this kind of focus on Obama personally exempts the rest of the country from any blame, except for being so foolish as to fall for Obama's patter: The fault lies not in ourselves but in our leaders.

But for those who are unsatisfied with this, the blame attaches not to Obama himself -- after all, he really did tell us what he intended to do, by telling Joe the Plumber he wanted to redistribute wealth.

Rather, the blame attaches to the electorate for its foolishness in believing the hype, or for falling for the siren song of the European social democracy that Obama is eager to impose. So the root question here is: Have the American people changed?

So, we the American people are to blame for Obama? Even if his premise is correct and we are suffering buyer’s remorse, he never mentions John McCain in this column. Obama wasn’t elected in a vacuum. Maybe Pod thinks we should have all written in Joe the Plumber.

The body politic is not panicking, even though the news is dire -- because it knows, somehow, that this too shall pass. America has faced worse times and weathered them. Even within our memory, it has had other leaders who also misunderstood their mandates and offered solutions to the nation's problems that only exacerbated them.

The body politic learns from its mistakes and uses its power to correct them. Taken as a whole, this bunch of rubes and dupes and boobs shows a remarkably commonsensical approach to these things by saying, in essence:

Nothing is irreversible. Change is possible.

Once again, this requires that the right actually put up a candidate that a majority of the United States citizenry will vote for. Don’t see that right now.

Thank You, Mr. President

The Tea Party folks aren’t going to do it, so I will. Thank you Barack Obama for cutting my taxes. I could afford to pay more, but who really wants to if they don’t have to. The Tea Party folks think they are paying more, but they are quite possibly cretin idiots.

"In all, we passed 25 different tax cuts last year. And one thing we haven't done is raise income taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year -- another promise that we kept," he told supporters at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. "So I've been a little amused over the last couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes. You would think they would be saying thank you."

The president argued that America is on the road to recovery and headed in the right direction -- something an overwhelming number of Tea Partiers disagree with.

The Tea Partiers don’t want to see us on the road to recovery. Fuck them and their willful ignorance.

Seeking a Fat, Boring, Albino Adulterer

The Republican Party having decided they hate everything about Barack Obama has gone in search of his antithesis.

Southern Republicans wrapped up a three-day meeting in New Orleans on Saturday unified in fervent opposition to President Barack Obama, but wide open at this early stage about whom they want to challenge him in 2012.

They have yet to find a candidate who combines all the qualities they feel will be needed to successfully challenge his Obamaship in 2012.

But they also readily volunteered objections to the same names: Gingrich has personal baggage, Palin's too inexperienced, Romney pushed Obama-like health care while governor of Massachusetts and Pawlenty lacks charisma.

If only they could find someone who combines the serial adultery of Gingrich with the tedium of Pawlenty and the pasty whiteness of Romney along with that deer in the headlights vacuousness of Sarah Palin.

I’m going to go out on a limb and give a big thumb up and Hometown boost to Haley Barbour. He’s white enough, he’s sleazy enough, he’s boring enough and with the endorsement of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s incredibly tone deaf proclamation: he’s proved he’s stupid enough to be the Republican nominee.

This is not Haley Barbour:

Accept no imitations!

 

And yes, carrying the concept out, I realize they would be looking for a fat, boring, albino, adulterous, woman since Obama is a man. But, this is not a serious blog. Please see LGM, Balloon Juice, Duck of Minerva or elsewhere for serious discussions. It’s seat of the pants all the way here.

Happy Days Are Here Again…

Well we can hope anyway. And it’s hard to write that as I sit looking at the rain come down. Recessions make us pessimistic and always doubtful that the end will come. And of course are particularly hard on those who are out of work. But, they do end.

The American economy appears to be in a cyclical recovery that is gaining strength. Firms have begun to hire and consumer spending seems to be accelerating.

That is what usually happens after particularly sharp recessions, so it is surprising that many commentators, whether economists or politicians, seem to doubt that such a thing could possibly be happening.

If I had the time to waste I’d go over to AmPow and see how the polymath from Long Beach College is applying his great knowledge of economics to this to determine that it is bad news for Obama.

it is normal for recessions to make people pessimistic. “Go back and read what people were saying in 1982 or 1975,” said Robert Barbera, the chief economist of ITG. “Nobody was saying, ‘Deep recession, big recovery.’ It is quite normal to expect an abnormally weak recovery. It is also normal for that expectation to be wrong.”

I’m perfectly happy to hear the wingers keep saying we’re on the road to ruin. They can keep saying it right through the next few elections and look even more foolish.

In 1982, Democrats scoffed at a surging stock market and thought a severe recession would last for a very long time. They were confident that the economy would doom Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984. All they had to do was make clear they offered a stark alternative to the failing policies of the incumbent

Change a few words (Reagan to Obama, Democrats to Republicans, 1984 to 2012) and you have an accurate description of the current political climate. Could the Republicans be as wrong now as the Democrats were then?

That’s the secret, get the recession out of the way early in your presidency. Dubya fucked up. He had one early and one at the end.

But Can They See Russia From Their Porch?

President Hussein goes with the opinion of a couple of unseasoned rookies over the firsthand experience of a woman who has been on the front lines of the post-Cold War.

President Barack Obama on Thursday made clear he was not going to take advice from Republican Sarah Palin when it comes to decisions about the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

"What I would say to them is, is that if the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff are comfortable with it, I'm probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin."

Mmmm, authentic frontier gibberish!

Mel Brooks, Prophet?

What did you expect? "Welcome sonny," "Make yourself at home," "Marry my daughter." You've got to remember, that these are just simple farmers, these are people of the land, the common clay of the new west. You know . . . morons.

The only way Obama is going to win over these people is if Mongo comes to town. And I hope that doesn’t metaphorically happen.

President Barack Obama says he believes the Tea Party is built around a "core group" of people who question whether he is a U.S. citizen and believe he is a socialist.

 

Apparently he feels there are some in the Tea Party who are sane. We can only hope.

But beyond that, Obama tells NBC he recognizes the movement involves "folks who have legitimate concerns" about the national debt and whether the government is taking on too many difficult issues simultaneously.

 

Please excuse all the verboten cut and paste.

Where Have All the GOP Leaders Gone?

Frank Rich in the NYT recaps some of the descent into chaos of our fellow citizens on the right end of the spectrum:

But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.

He notes the reaction to the passage of this bill as compared to the passage of Medicare, Social Security and the Civil Rights Bill:

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

And of course, the gutlessness of those in the Republican party to do anything to tamp down emotions, in particular the most recent candidate for the Oval Office:

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

Go. Read.

And if you want to, and I wouldn’t recommend it, go from the sublime to the stupid head on over to powerline. They haven’t quite claimed that John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat, but give it time.