Dear John McCain,

Thank you, thank you, thank you. If it wasn’t for you selling out and throwing the religious right a bone then I would have never known who Sarah Palin was and I would have never seen this amazing clip. So again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Love,

Phuck

How else would you explain this:

At a time of increasing debate over the optimal relationship between government and business in the U.S., new Gallup polling shows that 57% of Americans are worried that there will be too much government regulation of business, while 37% worry that there will not be enough. Half of Americans believe the government should become less involved in regulating and controlling business, with 24% saying the government should become more involved and 23% saying things are about right.

This is like a bizzaro French Revolution where Americans take to the streets to support the Corporations that are stealing their money and fucking their daughters.

Why aren’t the Republicans/Tea Partiers bitching about this:

One thing you can say about the defense budget presented as part of President Barack Obama’s $3.8 trillion federal budget is that it is marginally more honest than some previous budgets. In years past Defense secretaries have pretended that the costs of waging active wars are separate from the “baseline” military budget and have not included those costs in annual budget figures, leaving them to supplemental appropriations.

However, the figure for the projected 2011 military budget is forthrightly estimated at $708.2 billion, which consists of $548.9 billion in the “baseline” budget and $159.3 billion for “overseas contingency operations,” e.g., the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Almost as an afterthought, however, there’s an additional $33 billion to pay for the 30,000 extra troops President Obama is sending to Afghanistan, bringing the grand total to $741.2 billion.

The Center for a New American Security calculates that, when adjusted for inflation, this military budget is 13 percent higher than at the peak of the Korean War, 33 percent higher than at the peak of the Vietnam War, 12 percent higher than at the peak of the Cold War and 64 percent higher than the Cold War average. To be sure, military pay is higher in the all-volunteer military than during the era of conscription, but the military is also considerably smaller.

Emmanuel Goldstein…er, I mean, Osama bin Laden is/was a smart motherfucker. He knew that crashing two planes into two towers filled with white collar workers would get us to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on making more guns and bombs to kill poor, innocent brown people.

Now if only he could plan some kind of attack that would get our government to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into health care and education….

I love how the Justice Department is releasing this report without any media attention because the media is too busy talking about Obama’s State of the Union address, or Obama’s Republican beat down, or Obama’s college basketball play-by-play, or Obama’s budget proposal:

Bush administration lawyers who paved the way for sleep deprivation and waterboarding of terrorism suspects exercised poor judgment but will not be referred to authorities for possible sanctions, according to a forthcoming ethics report, a legal source confirmed.

The work of John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, officials in the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, provided the basis for controversial interrogation strategies that critics likened to torture in the years after al-Qaeda’s 2001 terrorist strikes on American soil. The men and their OLC colleague, Steven G. Bradbury, became focal points of anger from Senate Democrats and civil liberties groups because their memos essentially insulated CIA interrogators and contractors from legal consequences for their roles in harsh questioning.

The reasoning, set out in a series of secret memos only months after Sept. 11, 2001, prompted a multi-year investigation by the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which reviews the ethics of Justice lawyers. The legal source was not authorized to discuss the report’s conclusions and described them on the condition of anonymity.

This is a fucking amazing political move from a department that’s supposed to be apolitical. And this means that not only has the Bush administration legalized torture, but they’ve politicized the Department of Justice.

Which means justice is blind only when your party is in power.

And I thought it was because they hated our freedom:

Afghanistan-based US predators carried out a record number of 12 deadly missile strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan in January 2010, of which 10 went wrong and failed to hit their targets, killing 123 innocent Pakistanis. The remaining two successful drone strikes killed three al-Qaeda leaders, wanted by the Americans.

The rapid increase in the US drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan can be gauged from the fact that only two such strikes were carried out in January 2009, which killed 36 people. The highest number of drone attacks carried out in a single month in 2009 was six, which were conducted in December last year. But the dawn of the New Year has already seen a dozen such attacks.

[...]

The consequent increase in US strikes, first in North Waziristan and then South Waziristan, specifically targeting the fugitive TTP chief Hakimullah Mehsud clearly shows that revenge is the major motive for these attacks.

That’s right folks. Our government killed 123 innocent civilians because one guy killed 7 CIA members; 2 of which were mercenaries. This begs the question: Why is a suicide bomber a terrorist but a guy controlling a drone  a hero?

I know everybody is discussing last night’s State of the Circle Jerk, but I’m hungover from playing this drinking game. And I’m really upset that Howard Zinn died. So enjoy this clip. Or don’t. I don’t care.

I’ll talk about Obama’s congressional campaign speech tomorrow.

Jesus Christ, I haven’t felt this bad since the time I walked in on my parents fucking on the dinner table. Oh god, now I have that image in my head...sprints to the bathroom.

Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.

[...]

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.

“What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.”

But never mind, he says now.

“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

So what, now you’re going to tell me the CIA lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and that Nancy Pelosi was right when she said the CIA lied to her?

Oh goddamn it..

This picture made me piss myself a little bit, and I don't know why.

This should make Conservatives’ dicks hard.

President Obama plans to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary, “non-security” spending in the lead-up to Wednesday’s State of the Union address, Hill Democratic sources familiar with the plan tell POLITICO.

The move, intended to blunt the populist backlash against Obama’s $787 billion stimulus and an era of trillion-dollar deficits — and to quell Democratic anxiety over last Tuesday’s Massachusetts Senate election — is projected to save $250 billion, the Democrats said.

The freeze would not apply to defense or foreign aid or spending on intelligence, homeland security or veterans.

I know how we can save $370 billion dollars without cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, housing assistance programs, education, and other important social programs. Cut the $741 billion dollar defense bill in half.

Of course Obama won’t do that because it’s political suicide to cut military spending. And he wants to get elected for a second term. So he’ll do what every other president since Ronald Reagan has done; fuck the poor while jerking-off the rich.

Well then I have some great news for you! You will be denied medical coverage when the government passes the new health care bill:

Even as Speaker Nancy Pelosi affirmed her commitment to pass far-reaching health care legislation this year, members of Congress and health policy experts began Thursday to deal with the reality that a smaller bill would have a better chance.

Passage of a comprehensive bill looked impossible after the Democrats’ loss of a Senate seat in Massachusetts. As an alternative, lawmakers in both parties said, some pieces of the bills already passed by the House and the Senate could be pulled out and packaged together in a measure that would command broad support.

The consensus measure would be less ambitious than the bills approved last year. It would extend insurance coverage to perhaps 12 million to 15 million people — and provide political cover to Democrats, who said they could not simply drop the issue after spending so much time and effort on it.

[...]

Lawmakers, Congressional aides and health policy experts said the package might plausibly include these elements:

¶Insurers could not deny coverage to children under the age of 19 on account of pre-existing medical conditions.

This bill is the health insurance companies’ wet dream. It will force us to buy health insurance from them, use our tax dollars to pay for the coverage, and allow them to deny people 20-years-old and older with pre-existing conditions while not allowing the government to buy cheaper drugs from Canada.

I wish I had some extra money so I could invest it in Aetna and become Warren Buffett rich.

I would blow Rush Limbaugh for one night with Christina Hendricks.

Looks like Haiti’s finally on top. [In Case You Missed It]

A message from God. [The Middle of Nowhere]

So which side has the activist judges? [The Political Carnival]

Corporations have more rights than Gitmo detainees. [Glenn Greenwald]

I’ll have whatever she’s smoking. [Crooks and Liars]

Could we please get rid of Geithner? [Firedog Lake]