When Footwear Attacks

The Hot Rod lives vicariously ...

Quote of the Day

The New York Times Bob Herbert today:

Does anyone think it’s just a little weird to be stampeded into a $700 billion solution to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression by the very people who brought us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?

I am not going to pretend like I completely understand the current financial crisis, its causes, and all of its implications. And that is why what is going on right now scares the shit out of me.

The one thing I do know: I am getting a very, very queasy feeling in my gut as the architects of the Bush's Iraq adventure, and the authors of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" put their point person, an ex-Wall Street insider, out in front of this mess:

(a) to ask for $700,000,000,000 from taxpayers ...
(b) to buy junk securities for well above market value, and also ...
(c) pay the crooks from Wall Street who got us into this clusterfuck to administer this ingenious plan.

And if that weren't enough ...
(d) to pay the ransom, -er, I mean, pass the law by Friday ...
(e) with no strings attached, and further ...
(f) to prevent regulatory oversight, and, capping it all off...
(g) giving the middle finger to the branch of the federal government set up under Article III of the US Constitution: preventing any review by the courts.

And why should we agree to this? "Trust." Just trust us.

Yeah, right. What was that cliche that Dubya Bush mangled about getting fooled once and so forth ???

Ah yes...



Trust??

One of my fave's, The Rude Pundit, draws some eerie Iraq parallels here.

Quote of the Day

Joe Biden, today in Michigan:

Eight years ago, a man ran for President who claimed he was different, not a typical Republican. He called himself a reformer. He admitted that his Party, the Republican Party, had been wrong about things from time to time. He promised to work with Democrats and said he'd been doing that for a long time.

That candidate was George W. Bush. Remember that? Remember the promise to reach across the aisle? To change the tone? To restore honor and dignity to the White House?

We saw how that story ends. A record number of home foreclosures. Home values, tumbling. And the disturbing news that the crisis you've been facing on Main Street is now hitting Wall Street, taking down Lehman Brothers and threatening other financial institutions.

We've seen eight straight months of job losses. Nearly 46 million Americans without health insurance. Average incomes down, while the price of everything -- from gas to groceries -- has skyrocketed. A military stretched thin from two wars and multiple deployments.

A nation more polarized than I've ever seen in my career. And a culture in Washington where the very few wealthy and powerful have a seat at the table and everybody else is on the menu.

Eight years later, we have another Republican nominee who's telling us the exact same thing:

This time it will be different, it really will. This time he's going to put country before party, to change the tone, reach across the aisle, change the Republican Party, change the way Washington works.

We've seen this movie before, folks. But as everyone knows, the sequel is always worse than the original.

Dubya Darko

see Sarah Palin pictures

The Sarah Palin Files, Pt. 19

Hardcore conservatives describe Sarah Palin as a "rising star."

A more sober assessment? Average.

McCain not only has thrown all sensible concerns about good governance aside merely to pander to a sliver of female and masses of conservative Christian voters, he has turned this period of American history into an episode of high-stakes reality television: Don't look now, but our cousin Sarah just became leader of the free world! Tune in next week and watch her get sassy with Pakistan!

Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves...

... Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages -- and loses -- both necessary and unnecessary wars.

Although, compared to Dubya Bush, being average would qualify you as a political rockstar in the modern Republican party....

More to the point, though, I agree with the last paragraph wholeheartedly. In 2004, the urban vote broke for Kerry, the suburbs were more even - taken as a whole - and rural votes went overwhelmingly Bush. When I looked and saw this, I decided to become Anti-Farm Aid.

Don't laugh, I'm serious.

If you are, say, a family farmer in the midwest or anywhere for that matter, and your concern for whether gays could get married in California or Massachusetts - two place you likely have never visited and likely will never visit - trumped your economic concerns, and your greatest economic fears became a reality, well, sorry. But, do not get on TV with Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Dave Matthews and ask me or anyone else to bail you out. Your inability to get your priorities straight is not my problem.

Staying With The Theme.....

... of baseball and cable news missing the best parts of the DNC...

Here's another thing that the MSM (other than Peggy Noonan) overlooked:

By the way, the best line of the convention so far? Ted Strickland of Ohio, when he echoed the 1988 Democratic convention joke about George H.W. Bush, that he was born on third and thought he hit a triple. Strickland said of George W. Bush that he was born on third and then stole second.

Quote of the Day

Via the Rude Pundit, lamenting the general lack of taking the war criminals in the Bush Administration to task for their sins:

Remember the days when, if a member of the Clinton administration was accused of farting in a church, it triggered ten congressional investigations, an independent counsel, and non-stop news coverage filled with witnesses attesting to how loud and noxious a fart it was and how Jesus cried tears of blood because of it? Good times.

McCain Strategist: "We're Fucked."

Attribution to the title of this post, here.

These Maliki comments are going to be a gamechanger on Iraq. McSame can't paint Obama as out of touch on Iraq when the democratically elected prime minister of Iraq endorses Obama's withdrawal plan and says that John "Maybe a Hundred Years" McStay's approach is only going to cause further troubles.

Another fine analysis here (also, I like how the Bush White House released Maliki's comments to the press, when they actually meant to circulate it internally; if that isn't representative of the ineptitude of the Bush presidency, nothing is).

Czechoslovakia??

Wait, wait, wait....

Let me try to wrap my brain around this: in 2000, George Dubya Fucking Bush, displayed a firmer grasp of foreign relations than 5'6" 2008 Republican Presidential Nominee, John McSame???

McCain: "D'oh!"

It's true. Apparently, McMoron either stubbornly refuses to accept the fact that Czechoslovakia became two nations in 1993, or (not to sound like a broken record, but ...) he really is the senile, and impotent 72-year-old we all know him to be.

But don't take my word for it. Let's listen to the "Rode Scholar" (misspelling intentional) himself, Dubya. Quoting from this article:

let’s not forget that in the 2000 campaign, when McCain also screwed up Czechoslovakia, it was none other than George W. Bush who said it deserved to be a campaign issue: “A guy gets up and quizzes me [on world leaders] … but John McCain says something about the ‘ambassador to Czechoslovakia.’ Well, I know there is no Czechoslovakia [there’s a Czech Republic and a Slovakia], but yet it didn’t make the nightly national news.”

Not to belabor the point (well, ok, I am trying to belabor it), but how stupid do you have to be to get corrected by Dubya Bush of all people?

Insomnia Reveals Hot Rod Lincoln's World View

Insomnia is a bitch. I blame John McCain, George Dubya Fucking Bush, the Republican Party, the Plastered Trollop, Mitch McConnell, and Rush Limbaugh. They are to blame for everything else, why not this?

The Hot Rod in happier, sleepier (read: drunker) times.

But I shouldn't be so negative. So before I get back to working my ass off to get to sleep, I offer an olive branch, and a kind thought to which you can wake in the morning:(I know what you're thinking, and no, that's not mine. Unfortunately.)

"Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

Comedian George Dubya Bush at the G8 Conference

I'm at a total loss. Not even I could make up a story like this.

Goodbye to you, Dubya. January cannot get here soon enough.

A Study in "What, Me Worry?"

The Damage of Dubya

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

UPDATE: Here's a real Bush Wreckage Report for today.

Policy Post: On Torture.....

I'm on a roll today...

But this post isn't going to have a punchline.

Today in the news, we learned that the "enhanced interrogation" techniques of our county at Guantanamo Bay and other like places derive from a 1957 memo outlining the then-current practices of the Communist Chinese government to coerce false confessions. The operative word there is, of course, "false," because the classic "ends-justify-the-means" morality of Republicans living in their own personal "24" fantasy world has been that we need to torture, -er, to use "enhanced interrogation" techniques, to get actionable intelligence to keep the United States safe from further terrorist attacks.

This blog post, sums it up well:

Is it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession ... are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks.

How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques, is true? In fact, McCain at least knew somewhere that his own government knew he existed, that there were procedures to eventually release him, that he was on someone's radar. The average prisoner at Gitmo or in the other parts of the detention program believes that no one will ever save him, that he could be disappeared for ever, that there are no procedures for his eventual release and no government to remember him. If McCain uttered lies on tape to stop the torture, why would an Islamist tell the truth?

Nothing more accurately exposes the classic moral error of the Bush administration and its enablers in war crimes. If the enemy tortures, it defines their moral evil and all intelligence gleaned from such coercion is self-evidently false propaganda. If we do it, it isn't wrong, and it leads to good intelligence.

Got that? And these people have the gall to describe their ideological opponents as moral relativists.

More Sure Signs of a Coming Apocalypse

Dubya not only engaging in, but also teaching, what those on the radical right call an "Obama terrorist fist-jab."

Kill me now.

Bush in Iowa

Hey Kanye - George doesn't care about white people either.

The Other Side of 1.20.09

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