Tuesday Open Thread
Welcome to your back to work Tuesday open thread. I hope you all had a good Memorial Day weekend and are ready to work again! I know I’m not and I didn’t even go anywhere. Let’s get this thread rolling.
Digby describes how the GOP is going back to Clinton rules in “Smell Test.”
Here’s the best example I’ve seen of how the noise machine is framing this Sestak non-scandal:
This morning on Fox News Sunday, Liz Cheney offered her thoughts on why the White House tapped former president Bill Clinton to try and persuade Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) to drop out of the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary. After saying Clinton doesn’t have “an impeccable record of integrity,” Cheney argued: “You know, there’s a lot here that just smells funny. If the White House in fact thought that what they were doing was above board, why did they go to Bill Clinton? Why did they need a cut out for whatever they were doing?”
It’s all there, even down to the “it just smells funny” routine. Earlier this week on the Mclaughlin Report, the increasingly agitated Monica Crowley accused the administration of a cover-up and they were all shrieking for an “independent counsel.” (That’s right, they’re talking about bringing it back. I take that as a strong indication that they know they can’t win the presidency in 2012, so they simply hope to wreak destruction upon this one.)
Media Matters has the full explanation of the non-scandal here, if you haven’t ben following it. But none of that really matters. This has taken on a life of its own. Whether they can make anything of this specific charge is unknown. But what it signals is a return to the Clinton Rules and the scandal politics of the past. Regardless of whether or not any particular scandal takes hold, the way this works is by the cut of a thousand deaths.
*sigh* Admit it – how many of you blamed Clinton (at least partially) for the atmosphere of politics in the 1990s? Can we at least admit now that this is how the Republican party operates – at full out attack mode. They have an even bigger noise machine now and the rest of the media hasn’t lost its appetite for stories hand-fed to them from the Republican noise machine.
BP CEO Tony Hayward has a sad:
On Sunday, immediately after apologizing, Hayward then complained about the effect of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on his personal life, saying “I would like my life back“:
We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.
We’d like to have the Gulf back. I guess we don’t always get what we want.
Tags: Open Thread
Bob Herbert has a great column in today’s NYT, Our Epic Foolishness:
Bill Clinton is becoming an old pain in the ass.
“The future Pope Benedict XVI refused to defrock an American priest who confessed to molesting numerous children and even served prison time for it, simply because the cleric wouldn’t agree to the discipline.”
This is the institution that Obomba is trying to make immune from lawsuits filed by molested Amercian children. And just last week, Del Dem was insisting that the Vatican had no jurisdiction over the American dioceses. Here is a case where the American Bishop wanted the Priest defrocked, but Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger “following church law at the time” said no.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-rel-pope-church-abuse,0,518951.story
Quick quiz – how many currently serving Supreme Court justices can you name (no peaking).
A new survey finds that only 35% of Americans can name even one justice. Only 1% can name all 9.
Al and Tipper Gore to separate after 40 years of marriage.
UI, I didn’t hit the 1% group, but got 7 out of 9.
Got ’em all. Almost forgot Stevens. (He’s still on the Court, isn’t he?)
Speaking of Stevens, Elena Kagan hasn’t been in the news for more than a week. I think that means she’ll be confirmed easily. They couldn’t find any more non-scandals to hyperventilate about.
There are primary elections today in Mississippi, Alabama and New Mexico. I don’t know much about these elections but one I will be watching is AL-05. Party switcher Parker Griffith is in a primary with 2 other Republicans.
I’m interested in the AL GOP Ag Comish primary.
On the economic front, the right wing’s script is evaporating before their eyes, as laid out nicely in this post from the polling and statistics site fivethirtyeight.com:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/05/closer-look-at-first-quarter-gdp.html
D to R turncoat Parker Griffith (AL-05) lost his Republican primary.
It should be interesting to hear the pundits chew on this. D to R switcher Griffith and R to D switcher Specter both lose their primaries. Switching to Independent like Lieberman (an perhaps Crist???) means possible victory.
Dale Peterson, who had one of the most viewed political ads in the last few weeks (the GOP rifle-toting candidate for Ag Commish in AL) lost his primary.
I guess now Dale Peterson has to ride off into the sunset.
This should be on the Wed open thread, but the little town of Rehoboth Beach has made the Drudge Report because of transgender men going topless.
We’ll let Dan Gaffney run with the topless transgendered men.
LOL nemski.
I heard that Gaffney and Colley love trannies.
Apparently, if you want to know all about transexuals, WGMD’s website is the best place to go. Their website had one of its highest traffic days yesterday. Careful, I don’t know if WGMD’s site is still safe for work.
I thought Gaffney and Colley were trannies.
just don’t call them perverts… that will get you sent down the memory hole
I guess now Dale Peterson has to ride off into the sunset.