Well, he’s getting on my last nerve, but I feel so much better knowing he’s pissing off his own herd, too. I assume this is his mavericky thingie, co-opted from John McCain.

5% don’t know? Guess the jedi mind trick works on some people. Can the Sith do that?

Did you catch that Cheney’s giving a torture speech at AEI on May 21?

Any time he gives a speech it tortures me.

Webb’s being a total asshole on Steph. Reversing his stand as rapidly as Obama.

I just wish Dick didn’t have so much to work with. . . .

Ain’t it the truth. Starting to get that “we’ve been had” feeling.

Actually, that is the question that I have been asking, not so eloquently, of course. obama has turned into w’s third term very easily. obama has been tinkering around the edges, but I’m not sure that w wouldn’t have done much the same as obama has so far. All of the obama defenders are saying that he is doing these various things so the courts or some other saviour will “force” him to do the right thing. If that were really what he wanted, he could keep his mouth shut and not say things like “we need to look ahead, not behind.” You can make your own list.

I’m counting the days until Obama removes the Dawn Johnson nomination.

Any way you circumsize it ’Republicans have too much DICK’!

Nice. The Rs are all supporting Obama on Steph.

I turned in to watch Webb totally undermine any position he previously had about military tribunals, said he should relax the date for closing the prison in Cuba, and says Obama is doing the right thing in delaying.

Uffta. What a disappointment. WHAT HAPPENS to people in D.C.? Are they so afraid of being yelled at by the opposition or of being accused of harming America they have no spine left?

Webb is a military guy with a republican history. All his angry words said up to this time are pointless if he does not follow through. He and Obama have the same disease.

Perhaps there’s something we can do to help frame the occasion?

that will definitely be next in line for obama. He is supposedly doing all this flip-flopping so he retains political capital to do health care et al., but the republicans are busily undermining that too, so they get their Obama cake to enjoy and eat their republican pie, all at the same time.

Now that is political gamemanship.

I thought Webb was disgusting, and he looked weak and speechless also, i.e., he couldn’t even articulate why he changed. I had to turn it off.

What makes you think Obama wants to do health care reform? Because he said so? That should be a indication of what he doesn’t want to do. Why should he jeopardize all the campaign donations from medical insurers in 2012?

You are right about obama and Health care. Silly me. I listened to what Obama said. Oops.

you make a great point today eli and I will make a point on top of yours;

Now, if Dick really wanted to help the GOP, he would stop attacking and instead enfold Obama in his clammy embrace.

dick doesn’t give a flying crap about the gop, he is on his torture tour as a pre-emptive attack in an effort to defend his depravity

the gop means nothing to him but the barrier of protection it gives him, that’s it

Did you hear Obama’s A to the woman who asked why he took single-payer off the table? He said that he would consider it if he were starting from scratch, but not under circumstances where many people were happy with their current plan. But that would not preclude giving people a choice of a govt plan, which also appears to be off the table because private insurers couldn’t compete. Gotta protect those campaign donations.

Put me in with those who’ve kept thinking that O is caving on some stuff but has his eye on the bigger prize. That’s what I’ve been telling myself. But doubt is creeping in to the point where I’m losing faith. Where is the bill to re-establish Glass-Steagal? Why are we still dismissing gays from the military? Why are we still authorizing mountain top removal? Where is a plan to turn the country green? Where the fuck is the stimulus money going(I haven’t seen any of those stimulus signs)?
Well, you get the point.

‘torture’ someone.

I think you are correct. Just like the Dick in 2004-”The Campaign rhetoric is no longer operative”

btw, Lizard Cheney is dominating the roundtable, she just called Obama “UnAmerican”.

So one of the ways Rummy manipulated W was by putting creepy militaristic biblical passages on cover sheets of war memos.

i keep reminding myself that obama has been in office 4 months.

i can’t think of many major things at issue that i could finish planning and present in 4 months.

i’ll wait a few more and see if what he has been working on comes out.
cuz the things i wanted him to do? it appears he hasn’t been working on them..yet.

i’m waiting to see if he intends to.

4 months.

The pattern is building, all in the same direction. My model for predicting human behavior is that they tend to do the same thing today that they did yesterday.

isn’t that how it’s always done?

I saw those. They played Bush like a fiddle.

Progressives and Republican insiders agree that Cheney is toxic for the Republican Party, and yet the MSM continues to portray Dick Cheney as the big winner. I think a lot of progressives would have thought that the media generally takes the perspective of the Republican Party, but this whole episode suggests that’s not quite right. They seem to take the perspective of the national security wing of the Republican Party, the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis.

Perhaps it might stop if Democrats would realize that you don’t need to be scared of a guy with 19% approval ratings who has all the warmth and personality of ….seriously, any comparison I come up with seems weak by comparison to Cheney. Then again, they couldn’t stand up to Bush at 30% either. I suppose if Obama goes back on one more campaign promise in order to appear “tough on terrorism,” thereby cementing the Bush=Obama media meme, Cheney and the rest of the party will back off and we’ll get our health care ponies.

What I wouldn’t give for just one Democrat to go out there and spend as much time ripping Cheney as he spends defending himself and torture-to-justify-war-on-false-premises.

Yeah Dick Cheney!

Seriously, he’s not hurting us and he is hurting them.

It’s like Rove saying the other day that Pelosi was a conspirator to torture. Ok, so you’re admitting that it is torture and that the author of the crime was Bush/Cheney.

Tie the weight of Cheney/Steele/Limbaugh to the neck of the GOP and watch it sink.

All hail GOP leaders Cheney, Steele, and Limbaugh!

btw, Lizard Cheney is dominating the roundtable, she just called Obama “UnAmerican”.

fuck Liz and the broom she rode in on.

has Katrina V. torn her to shreds yet? (I’m recording it for later)

Cheney is the best thing to ever happen to the Democratic Party (including Sarah Palin too!)! Let them both keep talking.

When will Dick Cheney & Sarah Palin come out in support of our soldiers who are still abusing & torturing prisoners down in GITMO:

http://www.alternet.org/story/140022/?page=entire

I want to hear both of them saying, “Gouging eyeballs, pouring chemicals on their bodies, and breaking their arms and legs is keeping our nation safe!”.

They played Bush like a fiddle.

big deal – a class of reasonably intelligent first-graders could do that.

Katrina doesn’t have any amunition to work with since Obama has become such an asshole. I had to flip to FTN, I couldn’t stand MTP anymore.

If Nancy Pelosi was truly a conspirator of torture and the right wing is exclaiming today that torture is needed and it’s the only way to make us safe, then that means the right wingers see Pelosi as a hero to their cause!

Oh wait. Okay, I’m confused. Anyone know where the right wingers really stand on torture? Anyone?

uh-oh

colin powell to be on face the nation next week.

If Sarah Palin was the president today and the Pentagon needed to manipulate her, not only would they have put bible versus on the front page, but they also would have included Neiman Marcus sales inserts!

good morning to all.

completely ot to perris: i recently listened to a few public lectures by Ha-Joon Chang, and thought of you (his book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, which i have not yet read, sounded like it might be of interest to you based on our previous discussions re protectionism)

Must mean he’s bent over & allowed his betters to do it to him again. That’s the only circumstance in which he ever speaks out.

colin powell to be on face the nation next week.

cool. Is he kicking off his “Lemme tell you how many times I saw Dick Cheney piss his pants” tour?

It’s a must read. He’s also been on book-tv and is a fun speaker.

LOL.

OT – anybody seen TeddySF lately?

very entertaining speaker. hilarious at times.

what was the most important reason you call it a must read? i haven’t decided if i’m going to read it or not yet.

The evidence that all countries that developed did it via protectionism.

book salon yesterday

Meaning protectionism as an important element, not as the sole policy on which economic development relied.

good – thanks.

thanks but i’ve already got that from reading other stuff and at this moment more evidence doesn’t seem critical to me. right now looking more for ideas i have yet to be exposed to.

Maureen Dowd has been calling Cheney out on his schtick. She calls him dastardly, so I came up with a photoshop of him as Dick Dastardly, cartoon villain.

Heh!

sorry for the continued ot, but here the Ha-Joon Chang lectures (and an interview) i listened to if perris or anyone else is interested

http://www.lse.ac.uk/collectio…..04z001.htm
http://www.newamerica.net/even….._isnt_flat
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/…..and-poets/
http://www.electricpolitics.co…..nanza.html

I’m now watching G-Steph. Is this our future? To be subjected to Liz Cheney for the next 8yrs?

Did you watch Webb? Made me vomit.

I’m starting to wonder whether our sclerotic political system has made change in WDC nigh impossible… that this isn’t so
much a lack of Dem spine but rather a structural problem – like a disease, or a symptom of the corruption and stasis that inevitably comes with an era of imperial decline. Politicians structurally incapacle of acting independently of the corporations that bought and paid for them and state security apparatus so powerful that it dictates basic policy to legislators instead of the other way around. Change in such a system can occur only within narrowly prescribed bounds, through a carefully orchestrated ritual dance… something like a Renaissance pavane, danced between the legislators, the bureaucracy and it’s captive president, the corporations and the militarists, and the less-than-free press.

Missed him. But I just saw LC asked about torturing for al-qaeda link and she didn’t really answer the question.

C-SPAN is rerunning the hearing from last week on the Bush torture program in case anyone is interested.

i so hope……

maybe it’s the ‘make cheney piss his pants’ tour.