HONK ! HONK ! CLOWN CAR ! !

WhO's iN ThE cLoWn CaR ?!
Who : Soon To Be Ex- Gov. Sarah Palin aka 'WINKY'
What : Dingbat Alaskan, Human Train Wreck
Where : In The Trunk
Why : Self Implosion

Republican right wing nut darling Sarah Palin the party's last celebrity , failed to shore up her already weak political resume by resigning as Governor of Alaska midway through her first term for whatever incoherent reasons as she rambled through them at another ridiculous press conference while publicly and politically shooting herself in the foot.
Maybe she just wants to get high and watch ESPN while eating Taco Bell and bidding for some Shrek Beanie Babies on eBay.

Cheney and the Goat Devil

By MAUREEN DOWD
OP-ED COLUMNIST

I was dubious about Will Ferrell doing his Bush impersonation one more time on Broadway.

As we lurch through the disasters bequeathed by W. — the economy tanking, 17,000 more troops going to Afghanistan, Chrysler pleading for a total of $9 billion — would audiences still laugh at Ferrell’s lovable fool of a president?

I was wrong. The audience for the Sunday matinee of “You’re Welcome America. A Final Night with George W Bush” howled in delight.

I asked Adam McKay, the former head writer of “Saturday Night Live” who directed and co-wrote the show with Ferrell, why people respond this way to one of the worst presidents ever.

“He’s so clearly a neglected 13-year-old that there’s something really kind of heartbreaking about him,” McKay said, calling him “a good-time Charlie” who was “just used his whole life to front questionable business endeavors, and in a way that’s what his presidency was.

“He doesn’t have Cheney’s cartoonish need for power and greed that’s so off the charts you don’t even understand how Cheney got that way. W. may have some awareness, deep down inside, sort of like a petulant teenager who just flunked the trig quiz and knows he screwed up. I think Cheney not only knows but is delighted with everything he did, as is Rumsfeld.”

In the show, the former president dismisses waterboarding as a spa treatment at Bliss, and reveals that he did walk in on Cheney once in the basement of the White House locked in the amorous arms of a giant goat devil in a room full of pentagrams.

“He looked at me with solid silver glowing orb-like eyes, and his breath had a strong ammonia scent to it,” Ferrell’s W. said. “And he told me in a language that I knew in my heart hadn’t been spoken in a thousand years ‘Pariff Go Lanerff!’ And I just ran.”

One of the great mysteries of the Bush presidency is whether W. ever had an epiphany when he realized that he had been manipulated by Dick Cheney, whether it ever hit him that he had trusted the wrong father figure.

There were clues in the last couple of years that W. and Condi were trying to sidle away from Cheney by using the forbidden strategy of diplomacy in dealing with Iran and North Korea, and by cutting loose Rummy.

As one official who worked closely with both W. and Cheney told The New York Daily News’s Tom DeFrank the last week of the administration: “It’s been a long, long time since I’ve heard the president say, ‘Run that by the vice president’s office.’ You used to hear that all the time.”

The clearest sign of disaffection we have is Bush’s refusal to pardon Scooter Libby, the man known as “Cheney’s Cheney,” despite Vice’s tense and emotional pleading. It was his final, too little, too late “You are not the boss of me” spurning of Dick Cheney.

It may seem pointless for W. to worry about his legacy at this juncture, but he clearly did not want to add a Marc Rich blot to all the other gigantic blots on the copybook.

As DeFrank reported in The Daily News, Cheney conducted a full-bore, last-ditch campaign to persuade W. to pardon Libby, peppering the reluctant president with visits and phone calls, and was furious when W. would not relent.

After so many years of getting W. to do so much of what he wanted, by giving the insecure president the illusion of deference and a lack of personal ambition, it must have been infuriating to Cheney to have W. turn a deaf ear.

Cheney, uncharacteristically critical of W., told The Weekly Standard last month: “I disagree with President Bush’s decision.” Other Libby sympathizers put it more bluntly in the conservative magazine, calling Bush “dishonorable” and saying that his action was akin to leaving a soldier on the battlefield.

Alan Simpson, the former conservative Wyoming senator who is close to Cheney, told Jo Becker and Jim Rutenberg of The Times that the decision had left the former vice president “hurt and deeply disappointed,” but he is not the type to stay bitter. (With Cheney contemplating writing a book, publishers and historians can only hope otherwise.)

By not pardoning Cheney’s alter ego, who plied his dark arts trying to discredit Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson and then lied to protect his boss, W. was clearly saying he thought that Libby, and by extension Cheney, did something wrong.

But it’s not clear whether W. is simply pouting because Cheney’s machinations blackened his legacy, or if, at long last, he fathoms the morality of it, that Cheney did hideous things to the Constitution — not to mention that goat devil.

President Obama Is Driving Republicans Insane

By BOB CESCA
Political Author, Blogger,
and New Media Producer

The historical record of far-right ridiculousness has been well-documented here and throughout the blogosphere.

Who can forget Michelle Malkin's inspired cheerleader skit? Or when Rush Limbaugh mocked a guy's Parkinson's Disease tremors. What about John Boehner's public sobbing jags? Pat Robertson insisting he could leg-press 2,000 pounds. Sarah Palin's turkey geeker photo op. George W. Bush telling us that Iraq is a "peeance freeance." Remember when Bill O'Reilly shouted down the son of a 9/11 victim? Already, we're talking about a mélange of weirdness and upside-down logic suitable for the ages, and that's all prior to January 20, 2009.

But I don't think we ever anticipated that the presidency of Barack Obama would, among other things, send the far-right into a freakazoid display of shockingly deranged conniptions and outright crazy talk -- their manic hyperdrive engines, fueled by Rush Limbaugh's gesticulating arm flab, blasting them out of their political Mos Eisley cantina scene and expelling them a thousand parsecs beyond the zero barrier of insanity.

Too much?

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about the lies or distortions or their utter lack of credibility (zero cred) on broad-ranging issues like, you know, foreign policy and the economy. What we have here is the equivalent level of chaos as, say, the first group therapy scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In other words: a total berserker meltdown.

Seriously, have you ever seen the Republicans more twisted and kerfuffled than they are today? Movie metaphors aside, I've been hard pressed to find greater examples of insanity from the far-right than have been exhibited in the past week alone. Here we have a Republican Party that's been discredited and bloodied, and yet in the face of an enormously popular president who is confounding conventional wisdom while building a working consensus among American voters, the Republicans appear to be reflexively coughing up the most intellectually violent chunks of hooey on record.

They're screaming about fear-mongering, even though we had eight years of this.

They're screaming about fiscal responsibility, even though we had eight years of this.

They're screaming about free speech, even though we had eight years of this and this and this.

They're honest to God screaming about fascism, even though we had eight years of this and this and this.

Yes, the Republicans have claimed to have "found their voice." If this is true, then their "voice" sounds exactly like Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and Michelle Malkin, depending on the day.

So what are these voices saying exactly?

For starters, Rush Limbaugh -- the de facto leader of the Republican Party -- said on his show Tuesday that the entire economic meltdown was actually precipitated by a conspiracy between George Soros and a cabal of billionaire liberals who deliberately sought to sabotage the world economy in order to get Barack Obama elected.

He, of course, has no real evidence for this, other than what the shadow people told him while he was tweaking his TV remotes.

Okay, so I made up the part about the shadow people, but the rest is seriously what Limbaugh was telling his audience of dittoheads yesterday. What Limbaugh doesn't know, however, is that Soros is actually a hobbit who's conspiring with Elvis to fake another Moon landing. (Shh!)

Confined to its own phantom zone of crazy, there's only so much harm this can do. After all, Limbaugh's puffy melon has been bombarded with a mountain of hillbilly heroin large enough to crush God. But I wish I could report that this was wholly the product of Limbaugh's condition. It's also a theory that was also repeated by Donald Luskin: a seriously wrongheaded economist and, go figure, former economic adviser to Senator John McCain.

Speaking of John McCain, he was pilfering extra helpings of rich, creamery crazy from Michelle Malkin this week. Senator Coburn and Congressman Boehner were doing it, too. Last month, Malkin nicknamed the president's recovery bill the "generational theft" bill, arguing that the debt it would create will serve to rob future generations. This, naturally, disregards the nearly doubled national debt and record-breaking deficits created by George W. Bush with programs that, when taken individually, were enthusiastically endorsed by Malkin (Iraq, tax cuts and so on). But there was Senator McCain on Face the Nation on Sunday talking about "generational theft." Whatever, senator, the fundamentals are strong so what's does it matter, right?

Meanwhile, Michael Steele, the newly elected head of the RNC and preemptive excuse for the next time a Republican talk radio host blurts out a racist remark, tried to tell a national television viewing audience that the government has never in the history of the United States created a job -- only "work." Yep. Do I really need to outline why this is crazy?

Former White House chief of staff Andy Card, meanwhile, attacked President Obama for violating a totally nonexistent Oval Office dress code. Republican columnist Fred Barnes cited a former Limbaugh producer named Marc Morano as his "scientific" source on global warming. FOX News is reading Republican talking points verbatim and passing them off as news copy -- typos and all. And after eight years of the smirking frat boy named George W. Bush, Malkin went so far as to accuse President Obama of being "snippy" during his prime time press conference.

Elsewhere, another far-right blogger is vowing to never again fist-bump with her friends at her tennis club. And when she's at the grocery store and is confronted by magazines with the president's face in the checkout line, she turns the magazines backwards. All of them. I'm not making this up.

They have indeed totally lost their shpadoinkle and despite purely involuntary spikes in my blood pressure, it's so much fun to watch. By successfully debunking their lies, rising above their bait and merely presenting a contrast of character, President Obama is making the Republican A-listers appear small, petty and absolutely befuddled. They're frantically struggling to figure out how to counterpunch, so they're grabbing, borrowing or downright plagiarizing ideas from anywhere, irrespective of the general quality of the idea. And if the Republicans are at all interested in continued survival, someone they respect should probably smack their hands and scold: Drop that filthy Limbaugh quote! You don't know where it's been!

But if this is their "voice" and they're satisfied with it, I for one welcome the new Republican "voice" and wish them a hearty and very sincere: Good luck with that.

A lousy week does not a presidency make

By Ruth Marcus

Washington Post

---

WASHINGTON — To everyone out there despairing — or rejoicing — about the Obama administration's supposedly rocky start: Settle down. It's actually going rather well.

Sure, President Obama had a lousy week. A week is not a presidency. He blundered with the selection, and withdrawal, of Tom Daschle to spearhead his health care reform effort. Indeed, the self-inflicted Daschle damage is twofold: In the short term, to Obama's claim to signal change from Washington business as usual; in the longer term, to steering health reform through Congress.

And certainly, there were problems with the rollout of his stimulus package. The administration ceded too much control over the contents to House Democrats, although it was nowhere near as hands-off as has been portrayed. It was entirely foreseeable that Republicans would cherry-pick individual elements for ridicule; the administration excised some of them but failed to do enough to anticipate the outsized problems that remaining items would cause. The president, until rebooting this week with travel and a prime-time news conference, lost control of the message to Republicans.

But it is difficult to assemble a measure of this magnitude — this audacity, even — once you've settled into office. It's nearly impossible to do it from the outside or on the way in the door, without functioning e-mail or phones. Expecting the Obama team to operate perfectly under these conditions is like expecting a first-year med student to perform surgery — before they've handed out the stethoscopes.

Consider, also, what the administration has accomplished so far. Before he took office, Obama played a key role in obtaining congressional approval for the second round of bank bailout funding, clearing from his plate a major problem that would otherwise have awaited his arrival.

By the end of his first two weeks in office, the president signed into law two major pieces of legislation — on pay discrimination and children's health care.

By the end of his first month, he will, in all likelihood, have overseen enactment of a stimulus bill that will be about the size, with about the mix of new spending and tax cuts, of what he originally proposed.

Remember, at this point in Bill Clinton's presidency, he was still more than two months away from losing his effort to pass a stimulus measure. Its price tag? $16 billion.

At this point in George W. Bush's presidency, he was being lauded for his bipartisan outreach. Although "it is too early to say whether the charm will be successful," the Washington Post editorial page observed, "the tone of President Bush's first fortnight deserves a warm welcome."

Both snapshots offer a set of useful reminders. First, the shape of a presidency cannot be discerned from its first few weeks. Clinton's was more successful, if not that much more disciplined, than its wobbly beginning would suggest; Bush's was more disastrous and divisive than could have been imagined from that warm and fuzzy start.

Second, every president discovers anew that achieving results in Washington is a lot harder than promising them on the campaign trail. Only if you expected to wake up the day after the inauguration and see unicorns prancing across the National Mall should you be surprised at the current state of play.

Being slapped in the face by House Republicans, and most of their Senate colleagues as well, may be unpleasant, but it does not signal the failure of bipartisanship. As a political matter, Obama is better off having Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist by his side, as he did in Fort Myers, than House Republicans.

Third, the conventional wisdom tends to exaggerate both failure and success. The Obama campaign was flailing before it was brilliant. In fact, both these assessments were overstated. So, too, with the start of the Obama presidency. As Obama adviser David Axelrod said Monday, "If I had listened to the conversation in Washington during the campaign for president, I would have jumped off a building about a year and a half ago."

So if you're feeling jittery about Obama's start, ask yourself this: Is there another president in recent memory who would have done better?

It's Time for Obama to Potty Train Congressional Republicans

By MILES MOGULESCU

Attorney, Filmmaker
Writer, Activist

When my daughter was about 7 years old, she went to a birthday party where each child got to pick one wrapped gift out of a grab bag. Another child (ironically, or not so ironically, the son of a wealthy businessman with a $40 million trust fund) liked my daughter's gift better than the one he had picked. He asked my daughter if he could hold her gift for a minute. My daughter politely let him. When she asked for it back, his face turned red, he yelled "no tradebacks," and ran away screaming.

This boy's childish and boorish behavior reminds me of Congressional Republicans in their response to Obama's attempts at "bipartisanship" on the Economic Stimulus Bill. As with a spoiled child, Obama has two choices: he can let Congressional Republicans get away with their childish behavior, or he can try to teach them how to behave in civilized company.

Obama attempted to treat Congressional Republicans like responsible grown-ups. In an effort to gain Republican support in this national emergency, he put forth a pre-compromised stimulus bill with about 40% Republican-oriented tax cuts to 60% Democratic-oriented spending (without ever asking first if Congressional Republicans would go along.)

In return, Congressional Republicans yelled "no tradebacks" over and over in front of the TV cameras; House Republicans gave the already-compromised Stimulus Bill exactly 0 votes; and Senate Republicans threatened to not even allow the majority of the Senate to vote on the Bill by filibustering. Finally one Republican child, Susan Collins of Maine, came forward and, acting like she had been elected President, agreed she would allow a vote on the Bill if Democrats would cut out about $80 billion dollars in stimulative spending and add about $64 billion in minimally-stimulative tax cuts mostly to the wealthiest 20%, which by Paul Krugman's estimates, would eliminate about 600,000 jobs. Two other Republican friends from Collins' little so-called "centrist" clique, Olympia Snow and Arlen Specter, said they'd go along too.

So Obama has two choices. He can reward these spoiled Republicans children for their irresponsible behavior by pressuring House Democrats to accept Collins' harmful changes in Conference, in which case he will probably get 61 Senate votes for cloture, the bare minimum necessary to allow the majority to vote on the Bill. If he does, he will get a Bill that's certainly far better than nothing, even if it creates hundreds of thousands less jobs than it should.

But Congressional Republicans will have learned that they can roll Obama. If, at the height of Obama's popularity, with economists from right to left warning that the country faces economic catastrophe without a Stimulus Bill, and after Obama makes major concessions to Republicans, all Obama can only muster is 3 Republican votes to end a filibuster, Republicans will smell blood in the water. When Obama later wants to pass a budget, cut a wasteful weapons program, increase aid to education, or reform the health care system, Republicans will filibuster again and demand even bigger concessions before they will allow a Senate vote, if ever.

So it may seem as though the easier course is to give into the demands of the rump Republican caucus led by Susan Collins and get a flawed Stimulus Bill passed a few days more quickly. The result, however, may be to doom Obama's chances of passing other vital parts of Obama's Change agenda over the repeated filibusters of the Republican "Dr. Nos".

There is another choice: Obama can act like Community-Organizer-In-Chief and, along with grassroots movements from around the country, force Senate Republicans to allow the majority to vote on, and pass, an improved Stimulus Bill.

Obama can allow House and Senate Democrats on the Conference Committee to restore many of the spending provisions (like aid to the states and computerization of medical records) and eliminate some of the tax cuts from the Senate version, saving 600,000 jobs (while making a few other modifications to fix some of the handful of examples of overreaching by House Democrats.)

He can then politely ask Republican Senators, even if they oppose the Stimulus Bill, to at least allow it to come to a vote, while making it clear that he won't permit a "gentleman's filibuster" in which all Republicans have to do to block a vote is say they intend to filibuster and the Majority Leader cancels the scheduled roll call.

Instead, if Republican Senators still try to thwart the will of the majority, Majority Leader Reid must make them stage an old-fashioned filibuster in which, in order to prevent a vote, Republicans have to give speeches from the floor of the Senate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, through the Presidents Day weekend if necessary. It used to be called "going to the diaper" as Senators prepared to hold the floor without a bathroom break. Give the Senate Republicans a little potty training, if that's what it takes.

While the television cameras capture cots and Porta-Potties being carted onto the Senate floor and diaper-wearing Republicans read the phone book from the podium round-the-clock to prevent a majority vote on the Stimulus Bill, I predict with a high degree of probability that the stock market will be crashing by hundreds of points a day. (Don't worry; it will recover when the Bill passes).

Obama should then make a major address to the nation, turning the Republican filibuster of the Stimulus Bill into a major teaching moment. As with his address after the Rev. Wright controversy, he needs to treat the American people like adults and explain the complexity of the economic crisis. Expanding on his Press Conference, he must explain how 30 years of free market fundamentalism and deregulation--mostly under Republican leadership but also under Democrats--led to the biggest market bubble since the 1920's and the biggest economic collapse since the great depression. He must teach basic Keynesian economics--Why, when private economic demand collapses, only the government has the economic resources to spend enough money to restart the economy and create jobs. I believe that Obama's intelligence and eloquence, if he lays all this out for the American people in a way in which they can understand, can reclaim the leadership of the economic debate from the Congressional Republicans and rally 75% of the country behind his Stimulus Bill.

Simultaneously, grassroots organizations, community groups, labor unions and the netroots must mobilize the country behind the Stimulus Bill and against the obstructionist Republicans. Take to the airways and the internet. Run ads against key Republican senators. Mobilize Governors and Mayors (including Republicans like Charlie Christ of Florida and Arnold Schwarzenegger) to lobby their recalcitrant Senators. Use the Obama campaign machine, the unions, the netroots, and the progressive infrastructure to mobilize a massive email and phone-in campaign. Organize tens of thousands of teachers, firefighters, cops and nurses to overrun the local offices of Republican "moderates" like Susan Collins and Olympia Snow in Maine, Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, George Voinovich in Ohio, and Mel Martinez in Florida demanding the Senators save their jobs by allowing the majority to vote on the Stimulus Bill. Organize tens or hundreds of thousands of other citizens to flood Senate offices in Washington.

With President Obama showing his extraordinary leadership skills, tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens mobilizing, and the stock market tanking, I'm confident that the pressure on at least two Republican Senators will overwhelm their resistance within a day or two, if not sooner. Obama can then offer a couple of face-saving concessions--say $10-$15 billion in cuts to the least stimulative spending provisions of the Bill in exchange for their ending the filibuster.

The nation will get a better Stimulus Bill than the compromised package now emerging from the Senate and hundreds of thousands more Americans will find jobs. But almost as important, Obama and a mobilized popular movement will have potty trained "moderate" Republicans to act like responsible citizens. When it comes time to pass a budget, organize a responsible financial rescue package, or reform the health care system, they won't be so fast to back a monolithic Republican filibuster to thwart the will of the majority. Obama will have greatly increased his odds of passing his Change agenda and achieving a great and transformative Presidency.

Leahy Talks To White House About Investigating Bush

Feb 11, 2009

By SAM STEIN
Political Blogger
Huffington Post

WASHINGTON,D.C.-Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and White House Chief Counsel Greg Craig discussed on Tuesday the Senator's proposal to set up a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate potential crimes of the Bush administration.

"I went over some of the parameters of it and they were well aware at the White House of what I'm talking about," Leahy told the Huffington Post. "And we just agreed to talk further."

The dialogue between the Vermont Democrat and the president's office is a new phase in a delicate process concerning how best to handle potential crimes in the previous White House. Leahy proposed an investigatory commission on Monday, after which the president -- speaking at his first news conference -- said he did not currently have an opinion on the plan. Obama went on to say that he would rather look forward than backward, but he promised to prosecute any crime -- whether committed was a former White House official or everyday citizen.

Asked about the President's response, Leahy said that he believed the White House was right to maintain its focus on economic matters at this moment. "But I do intend to follow up and talk with him about this," he said. "I'm not wedded to any part of the plan so long as we get all the facts out. I would hate to see us take the attitude that that was then and this is now, let's not worry about any of the mistakes or the abuse of the law and give it a pass ... because it is my experience that you continue to make mistakes until somebody calls you on it."

Leahy did add an important ripple to the story in the interview with the Huffington Post: Congress will likely proceed with investigations regardless of whether Obama is on board.

"Oh yeah," Leahy said when asked if he would go forward without Obama's endorsement. "I think the Senate and the Congress as whole has an oversight responsibility that has to be carried out here anyway. Now it is much easier with the cooperation of the administration. A lot of things with the subpoenas I issued the past few years, we got a lot of information but a lot of it was held back."

This path could create a curious situation for the Obama team, in which the president has committed his administration to prosecuting illegality and the Congress provides the evidence of such.

"What I would much rather see is to see us working together," said Leahy. "We have a common interest, both the Congress and the administration to get this thing worked out ... In this instance, this is so important that our common interest is to get the truth out."