His only success in his one-year term as president is taking America apart, piece by piece. Could it be he has had 20 years of subconscious programming by Rev. Wright to damn America?

Don’t blame Voight, though, for the nonsense he emits. We have it on good authority that one day, many years ago, while Voight had his head lodged deep in his ass, he accidentally passed his peanut-sized brain.

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With this post, we also introduce two new categories: “The Dick Army” and “Full of Sound and Fury”.

“The Dick Army” is a collective noun for tea-baggers, birthers, tenthers, and their ilk; in short, all the Indians whose chiefs are Beck and Limbaugh and Palin and Bachmann. And Dick Armey. The term was coined, of course, by MSNBC’s David Schuster back in April, when he was subbing for Keith Olbermann one night. Watch as he goes “… if you are planning simultaneous tea bagging all around the country, you’re going to need a dick army” on national TV.

“Full of Sound and Fury” is a bipartisan category. (The operative part being the next two words in the quote which, since brevity is the soul of wit, we left out: “signifying nothing”.) It automatically applies to any pronouncements by footsoldiers in The Dick Army, or by any of its many generals (Q: What do you call a general in The Dick Army? A: Dick-head.). It will also often apply to pronouncements of the Obama administration (e.g., when they keep making promises to the LGBT community). Or the pronouncements of political transvestites (”Ladies and Gentlemen, we give you Joe Lieberman!”)

New York City health officials scrambled to explain themselves on Thursday following outraged media reports about bankers who got scarce H1N1 flu vaccines through their employers.

Members of Congress fired off letters demanding immediate explanations and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminded state and city health officers of the need to make sure the most vulnerable people get shots first.
[...]
The shortage of H1N1 vaccines has frayed nerves, and public health departments across the country say they will not be able to meet the bulk of the demand until December or January.

But, hey, it makes perfect sense in the time of Obama (and Larry Summers and Tim Geithner), for bankers to come first. Before children, and pregnant women, and those with respiratory illnesses like asthma.

Because bankers are just more equal then others, corporate recipients of the vaccine included Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. The Federal Reserve Bank, too.

And don’t let anyone tell you this is wrong, either. How else are the fittest going to survive if the vaccines all go to the weak and the infirm? You do want them to go on teaching evolution in our schools, don’t you?

Congress can just pass legislation that allows homeowners who default to remain in their house as renters, as long as they pay the fair market rent (as determined by an independent appraisal) for their home.

Well, of course it wasn’t Congress, but two-plus years later, someone listened:

Thousands of borrowers on the verge of foreclosure will soon have the option of renting their homes from Fannie Mae, under a policy announced Thursday.

The government-controlled company, through its new “Deed for Lease” program, will allow borrowers to transfer ownership to Fannie Mae and sign a one-year lease, with month-to-month extensions after that.

The program will “eliminate some of the uncertainty of foreclosure, keeps families and tenants in their homes during a transitional period, and helps to stabilize neighborhoods and communities,” Jay Ryan, a Fannie Mae vice president, said in a statement.

Happy to have, not to have not
Big business is very wise
I’m crossing over into
E-enter-prize
Public Image Ltd. – “This is Not a Love Song” (1984)

Making fun of the weak ass public option with a brilliant Public Image Ltd. callback from 25 years ago? Wow. Well done, Mr. Stewart.

As Johnny Rotten used to say at the end of his shows, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?“

President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager says the conventional wisdom on Obama that he’s governing as an incrementalist rather than a visionary leader is “ridiculous” and won’t hold up if Congress passes health care and energy-saving legislation.” There’s nothing incremental about that,” says David Plouffe, one of the masterminds behind Obama’s improbable election. “This story line will go away.”

First of all, that headline is garbage. As USA Today points out, he’s not just a writer, he’s Obama’s former campaign manager. On the substance, Plouffe is simply wrong, and pegging the “story line” turnaround on health care is ludicrous. The weak ass framework that is on the table now is bad policy and bad politics and the most revolutionary part – the public option – will be available to less than 10% of Americans. WTF is “visionary” about that?

Unbelievable that something like this can even get printed. I challenge even the most hardcore Obama sycophants to put him even left of halfway on the visionary/incrementalist continuum. It doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

And speaking of laugh tests, Plouffe was on The Daily Show last night. Jon Stewart did a pretty good job with the questions, and Plouffe did his best to prove that he’s just as big a douche as his former boss. This is epic:

The Democratic victory in NY-23 provides an interesting bookend to what was unquestionably a disappointing night for Democrats. As I noted a few days ago, for the right-wingers behind the Hoffman candidacy, knocking out Scozzafava was the big prize. Actually winning the race outright would have been icing on the cake, but hardly necessary.

They have shown they can topple any moderate Republicans who don’t defer to right-wing dominance of the party.

If this is what the extreme right wing of the Republican party considers a great victory, then good luck to them, and victories galore.

Yes, they have shown that they can knock out moderate Republicans. But they have also shown what the consequence of putting up extreme-right-wing candidates turns out to be, namely that you start losing seats that have been in Republican hands since the ruddy 19th century.

Granted, their real agenda may not be to replace every moderate Republican by an extreme right-wing candidate. It may be to force moderate Republicans to move to the right. But these guys are rabid extremists. They’re not going to be content with marginal, incremental shifts (that may not discommode voters too much). They are going to insist on significant movements to the right, the kind that they can thump their chests about, and celebrate as clear and unquestionable victories. And what the New York special election shows is that there is a huge cost to be paid in terms of lost votes, lost elections.

So Bill Owens‘ victory over Doug Hoffman seems to prove that if the extreme wing of the Republican party continues to wage war against moderate Republican candidates, the Republican party can look forward to winning fewer and fewer seats. And finding fewer and fewer Americans willing to identify themselves as Republicans.

If that’s the victory they want, then more power to them.

(This may also help keep things in perspective: both Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell won their gubernatorial elections by running to the center.)

Reuters pitches it a test of Obama’s influence:

Republicans seeking a comeback from recent losses may pick up the governor’s seats in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday in campaigns that tested the limits of President Barack Obama’s influence.

Democrats were bracing for the unhappy possibility they could go down to defeat not just in those two states but in a congressional district in upstate New York where a conservative candidate was leading.

The election outcome could give some clues as to the national mood a year after Obama was elected president and a year before 2010 congressional elections that will represent the first clear referendum on Obama’s time in office.

The AP hews closely to this line:

Just a year after President Barack Obama’s historic election victory, his Democrats face the possibility of significant symbolic setbacks in Tuesday’s election: the potential loss of governors’ mansions in the states of New Jersey and Virginia.

In a different story, the AP focuses on the New Jersey gubernatorial election:

Obama has endorsed Gov. Jon Corzine as a partner in five campaign appearances, and a win by the Republican former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie would sting the president ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

The facts on the ground, of course, are that Corzine has been a deeply unpopular governor, and the only reason that he might still pull off a win today is that voters decided they weren’t exactly impressed by the fact that Christie’s entire campaign consisted of: “You really don’t like Corzine, do you?”

It seems extremely misguided to start reading national implications into such a contest. But, hey, that’s what news organizations have to do. Those are, simply, the rules of the game. Midterm elections can only be analyzed in terms of what they portend about the popularity of the recently elected president. It is axiomatic for “the nation’s political class” to read the entrails and look “for clues about the future direction of the country” (that’s still the AP talking).

CNN thinks it’s all about voters’ anger:

As voters across the country head to the polls Tuesday, one thing appears certain: Many of them are angry.

And that anger could shape the results of three of the most high-profile elections this year — gubernatorial battles in New Jersey and Virginia and the fight for an open seat in New York’s 23rd Congressional District.

National polls indicate that many voters are in a foul mood. The big question is whether that mood will continue into 2010, when the entire House of Representatives, more than a third of the Senate and more than a third of the governorships are up for grabs.

And that, apparently, is what tonight’s results will tell us: whether anger will continue into 2010.

The Guardian, U.K.: Blow to US and Britain as Abdullah withdraws from Afghan poll runoff

The White House: What, Me Worry?

Stephanopoulos asked (White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett) if Abdullah’s withdrawal will cast a cloud over Afghan President Hamid Karzai and make it more difficult for President Barack Obama to implement his strategy.

“We don’t think that’s it’s going to add a complication to the strategy,” she said. “It’s up to the Afghan people and their authorities to decide how to proceed going forward. We watch the election very carefully. And we’re going to work with the leader of the Afghan government, and hopefully that’s going to improve the state of conditions for the people in Afghanistan and also help us as we try to bring this war to a close.”

Stephanopoulos pressed: “So this is not a complication, as far as you see it?”

“No, we don’t see it as a complication,” Jarrett replied.

This almost matches the stuff we used to routinely see from the Bush White House. And Valerie Jarrett wasn’t out there in left-field by herself either. Hillary Clinton was singing the same song:

Even before Abdullah’s emotional announcement in front of thousands of supporters, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, insisted a withdrawal would not undermine Saturday’s election runoff.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with the legitimacy of the election,” Clinton told reporters in Abu Dhabi on Saturday. “It’s a personal choice… We see that happen in our own country where, for whatever combination of reasons, one of the candidates decides not to go forward.”

Ah yes, for whatever combination of reasons. So what if the reasons include the legitimacy of the election you’re withdrawing from? So what if these fears of legitimacy are grounded in internationally-certified widespread fraud in the previous round of elections?

Why should Abdullah Abdullah’s decision to withdraw from the runoff for the Afghan presidency be any reflection on the legitimacy of the election any more than Dede Scozzafava’s decison to withdraw from the special election in the 23rd congressional district of New York undermines that contest?

In the time of Bush, going to a Baghdad market in bulletproof vests and under heavily armed escort was “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.” In the time of Obama, the Afghan presidential election (where one-third of the votes Karzai got in the first round were declared to be fraudulent) is as unquestionably legitimate as the elections we see in our own country.

It’s true that after tossing out the fraudulent votes in the first round, Karzai was adjudged to have beaten Abdullah by 49.67% to 31%. It’s true that “Karzai … was widely favored to win the runoff anyway.” But does the Obama White House really want to argue that it doesn’t matter if an election is obviously tainted by fraud as long as the tainting candidate was expected to win anyway? (I’m thinking, of course, of a time in the not so distant past when Obama was not really expected to win the Democratic primary.)

Today, after successfully winning a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, under court order, CREW received documents related to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview with the FBI in the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity. The transcript reveals that Mr. Cheney – generally credited with razor sharp intellect and recall – demonstrated an astonishing inability to recollect even simple facts much less the numerous conversations others have testified to regarding his involvement in the administration’s efforts to discredit former Ambassador Joe Wilson.Mr. Cheney’s memory frequently failed to improve, even when confronted with his own hand-written notes.