Drinking Liberally Louisville Chapter Blog

Whoops! Faux Newz gets caught campaigning for an Ohio Republican. Is anybody really surprised?

Democrats allege in a legal filing that, by plugging an Ohio gubernatorial candidate's website in a chyron, Fox News illegally contributed to the Republican's campaign.

A seven-page complaint filed Thursday by the Democratic Governors Association with the Ohio Elections Commission accuses Fox News of making an illegal in-kind contributions to gubernatorial candidate John Kasich (R-OH), reports Sam Stein.

Fox can make this go away by just admitting they aren't really a news org. Just state the obvious and own up to being a political entity for the GOP.

I share her fury.

So, where are the neoCONS these days? Shooting off their mouths about how Omama and the country need to thank Bu$h for the heckuvajob he did handling the Cheneyed-up invasion of Iraq, that's where. I am not making this UP! Have a look:

Flash forward to today, and the answer to our original question of the Iraq war architects — “where are they now?” — can be answered quite simply: They’re on your TV screens, in your radio, and in your newspapers — shamelessly demanding credit for the work they’ve done.

For example, consider former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith. According to the Pentagon Inspector General’s office, Feith delivered a briefing to the White House in 2002 that “undercut the Intelligence Community” and “did draw conclusions that were not fully supported by the available intelligence.” What is he doing now? In an interview with NPR yesterday, he blasted Obama for not properly crediting the “success” of Iraq. . .

And there’s also former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who conceded the case for invading Iraq was determined based on what could be easily sold to the public. “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said. In an op-ed in the New York Times this Monday, Wolfowitz was more magnanimous about sharing “credit” with U.S. soldiers, Iraqi forces, and the Iraqi people. Wolfowitz, who incorrectly predicted Iraq’s reconstruction would be paid for with Iraq’s oil, urged Obama to maintain “a long-term commitment, albeit at greatly reduced cost and risk.”

These jackasses were wrong about virtually EVERYTHING, yet the MSM gives them a mic to spew more neocon garbage and continue their unreality tour. Amazing!

Afternoon, Liberals!

Did you catch Obama's lame speech last night? OMG! He stopped just short of thanking GW Bu$h for all his hard work. Obama also told us to just move on from the Iraq "war" and all that came with it. I'm sorry, but with no justice for the 8 year assault Bu$h heaped on the country--war based on a mountain of lies, torture, black ops, Blackwater, spying on U.S. citizens--I'm having a hard time doing that. From where I stand, the single most infuriating thing about Obama is inability to grasp just how important it is to bring a sense of justice for at least SOME of the many crimes Bu$hCo committed. It's enough to make you start Drinking Liberally.

I plan to do just that this (and every) Thursday night at Drinking 7:00 at the BBC. See you there, peeps! And see you on the internets here

Your Dear Leaders in Peace,
Vicki, Ron, Maria and Hank

Your

Get ready to have your blood boil

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) released its annual report on executive compensation today — “CEO Pay and the Great Recession.” “I’m afraid that this year’s report will raise just about everybody’s blood pressure,” lead author Sarah Anderson said. Indeed, the report found that “CEOs of the 50 firms that have laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis took home nearly $12 million on average in 2009.” Those CEOs’ combined compensation totaled $598 million, while at the same time, their companies eliminated 531,363 jobs despite reporting a 44 percent average profit increase for 2009.

How do these people sleep at night? The average CEO makes 263 times what their average worker makes.

John Boehner has been soliciting ideas from from the right as the GOP is preparing to unleash its "manifesto" on the public. Teabaggers responded with their voter guide. Here are the top 5:

If Boehner “walked among” Tea Party members in Erie County, OH, they may provide interesting insight for his new “manifesto.” As the Guardian’s Leo Hickman reports, a local Ohio newspaper the Sandusky Register obtained an email sent out last week by a local Tea party group called The Freedom Institute of Erie County. According to the email, the Tea Party group is creating a “Conservative voter guide” on the positions of candidates seeking office in upcoming elections in order to “rate, recommend, and endorse candidates” based on how they answer 15 questions. While such surveys may be fairly “mundane,” it’s the questions outlining the group’s priorities that provide, as Hickman puts it, “a hearty serving of insight with a side order of jaw drop”:

Now let’s hear those 15 questions. (The document states that the respondents should give one of the following answers: A = Agree; D = Disagree; U = Undecided; A* = Pro-life with exceptions of Rape or Incest, * = Added comments; NR = No Response; CR = Incumbents Conservative Rating.)

1. The Right to Life is a Constitutional right, therefore innocent human beings should have legal protection from conception until natural death. If you hold any exceptions please state them.
2. The regulation of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere should be left to God and not government and I oppose all measures of Cap and Trade as well as the teaching of global warming theory in our schools.
3. Marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman, any other type of Union is not marriage.
4. Children should not be placed into foster homes where the parents are homosexual, bisexual, or transgender.
5. Parental consent should be required for sex education that teaches more than direct abstinence.

They also want to abolish the Fed and crush unions. Rock on!

Well, well, well, how about a little hypocrisy from the wingers?

Yesterday [Salon] we told you about the launch this Sunday of the $8 million "9-11 Christian Center at Ground Zero," created by a pastor who assails Muslims as pedophiles and gay people as perverts and who has a history of trying to profit from political controversies. The pastor, internet evangelist Bill Keller, is starting services this Sunday at a site just two blocks away from the former World Trade Center site.

So we reached out to several critics of the Park51 Muslim community center, many of whom have made the putative sanctity of the neighborhood around ground zero central to their argument against the mosque. Why should this anti-Muslim, anti-gay, and anti-Mormon pastor be allowed to deliver bigoted sermons -- and potentially profit off of the memory of Sept. 11 -- so close to the site?

How did Gingrich, Lazio and anti-mosque groups respond to Salon's question? *crickets*

For every GOP, Beck and Rushbo Muslim hater out there, (basically the entire GOP) the Muslim world has its set of fundamentalist haters. They both feed into hate and religious extremism and violence against "the other."

For months, conservatives have led a hateful campaign against the proposed Park 51 Islamic community center that is going to be built two blocks away from Ground Zero in New York City. High-ranking Republicans have spearheaded this campaign, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich even going as far as to claim that Park 51 will act as a launching pad for the introduction of “Sharia law” to America.

Now, Newsweek reveals the most concrete evidence yet that this campaign is serving to bolster support for Islamic radicalism abroad. In an interview with the magazine, a Taliban operative going by the name Zabihullah said that, by “preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor.” He goes on to explain that the anti-mosque campaign is providing the Taliban with “with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” Another Taliban official expects that the anti-mosque campaign will provoke a “new wave of terrorist trainees from the West,” similar to suspected Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad. Zabihullah concludes, the “more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get”:

The hateful positions the extreme fundamentalist Christians and Muslim religious sects take against each other is utterly destructive. Yes, the U.S. has suffered horrific attacks by al-Qaeda, (NOT Islam) but we've also needlessly incited the Muslim world by Bu$h's horrendously carried out response to those attacks. The wingnuts are making it all the more incendiary.

File this under: If you want to be attorney general, even in a crazy state you need to have a rudimentary grasp of the law and not be a moron

In what will no doubt be the first of many court decisions blocking Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s frivolous legal theories, a Virginia judge halted Cuccinelli’s witchhunt targeting a respected climate change scientist:

An Albemarle County Circuit Court judge has set aside a subpoena issued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to the University of Virginia seeking documents related to the work of climate scientist and former university professor Michael Mann.

Judge Paul M. Peatross Jr. ruled that Cuccinelli can investigate whether fraud has occurred in university grants, as the attorney general had contended, but ruled that Cuccinelli’s subpoena failed to state a “reason to believe” that Mann had committed fraud.

The ruling is a major blow for Cuccinelli, a global warming skeptic who had maintained that he was investigating whether Mann committed fraud in seeking government money for research that showed that the earth has experienced a rapid, recent warming. Mann, now at Penn State University, worked at U-Va. until 2005.

Judge Paul Peatross’ opinion highlights a number of amateur mistakes in Cuccinelli’s document request, including the fact that four of the five grants that Cuccinelli is investigating appear to involve federal funds — and thus are beyond the Virginia attorney general’s power to investigate. Most significantly, however, Peatross finds that Cuccinelli failed to provide even a very rudimentary explanation of just what Professor Mann did “that was misleading, false or fraudulent in obtaining funds from the Commonwealth of Virginia.

I thought the GOP was hating on filing frivolous law suits? Not when they repeatedly do it.

Bad things happen when good folks stay silent in the face of hatred. We need more people like these:

More than 40 Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and civic groups formed a coalition yesterday in support of the proposed Islamic center two blocks from the World Trade Center site. The newly-formed New York Neighbors for American Values said the debate over the center “was creating fear and division and that [the group] would fight for U.S. constitutional freedoms to be upheld.”