That funny, because for the past few years it’s felt a lot more like an explanation point.

Did you know Hitler was a Republican?

A national black Republican group is running a radio advertisement accusing Democrats of starting the Ku Klux Klan and saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, a claim challenged by civil-rights researchers.
. . .
The spot begins with one woman telling another, “Dr. King was a real man. You know he was a Republican.”
. . .
In the ad, the woman goes on to say, “Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan.” Her companion replies, “The Klan? White hoods and sheets?”
. . .
The first woman also says, “Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks.”

The ad asserts that “Democrats want to keep us poor while voting only Democrat” and, “Democrats want us to accept same-sex marriages, teen abortions without a parent’s consent and suing the Boy Scouts for saying ‘God’ in their pledge.”

About the GOP, the ad says: “Republicans freed us from slavery and put our right to vote in the Constitution.”

Interesting timeline there. “Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s.” I wonder what happened after that? Oh yeah…the Southern Strategy.

Seriously, if the Republicans can constantly bring up the MoveOn Hitler ad (that MoveOn didn’t even make), then this deplorable ad needs to be thrown in the Republican party’s face at every opportunity. That and the Max Cleland / Osama Bin Laden ad. And the “Democrats want to ban the Bible” direct mail ads. The Republican party should be ashamed of themselves for using this kind of rhetoric.

My friend Brian just opened my eyes to one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. Right now in the comics pages of your local newspaper is a storyline that will shake you to your very core. Mary Worth is being stalked by Captain Kangaroo :

The best part of all this though is that, as Brian pointed out, the resemblance between Mary’s stalker Aldo and the Captain is no accident :

The story lines have sizzled with mystery and suspense since early July when a bizarre new character was introduced. Aldo Kelrast, who bears a striking resemblance to the late TV host Captain Kangaroo, wants Mary. Bad.

At first, good ol’ Mary was in denial. She thought it was “flattering” that Aldo wanted to hook up, even while the gossip-mongering chatterboxes at Charterstone Condominium Compex in Santa Royale, Calif., where Mary lives, had all but branded Aldo a psycho wife-killer stalker guy.

Will Aldo snap? Will Mary be harmed? Will her lover return from his medical mission of mercy in Cambodia to save the day?
. . .
But why does Aldo look like a clone of Captain Kangaroo, the affable character played by Bob Keeshan who hosted a popular TV show for kids from 1955 to ‘91?

Because that’s how writer Moy wanted him drawn.

“She said, ‘I see something like Captain Kangaroo,’ ” Giella says. “I said, ‘No problem.’ “

I haven’t encountered such a bizarre “the joke tells itself” sort of situation since Cheney shot that dude. So there you have it. Mary Worth is being stalked by Captain Kangaroo.

I could have sworn I posted this video already, but I can’t find it. This whole clip is amazing, but the bit that starts at 1:15 is my favorite part by far. The War on Christmas™ is getting more dangerous :

Here’s an idea : Go find a copy of the ten commandments (assuming you live near a courthouse or public school) and skip ahead to number six. You’d be shocked at some of the stuff God doesn’t want us to do.

From the comments of my HuffPo post “Don’t Vote Democratic” :

“That is absurd. It is posts like yours that may keep the Democrats from uniting this coming November.
Do not make the mistake of being complicit in another Republican scam election.
Shame shame shame.”

Sorry guys. If the Dems lose, it’ll be my fault.

Seriously though, this hasn’t been a good week to be enthusiastic about supporting the lesser of two evils. Hop over to HuffPo and check out “Don’t Vote Democratic” and its followup “Throwing the Bums Out”. Its sad to think that appeals to emotion and reason don’t seem to work on our leaders. I guess the only thing left for us to do is to threaten their job security.

Surprise, surprise. The “rebel” Republicans weren’t so rebellious after all. They’ve spent the last week or two grandstanding and insisting on their opposition to the President’s torture and mock trials, but when it came time to choose between their (supposed) principles and helping their party present a united front in an election year, they sold out. Of course the ever-compliant media will bless this compromise since St. McCain can do no wrong. Even when he’s acting like a partisan ass, he’s somehow a non-partisan maverick. As usual, Digby’s got the right take on all this :

Can anyone in the know explain to me how letting McCain run with this torture debate benefitted the Democrats in any way?

Here’s how the optics look to me:

McCain, the Republican rebel maverick, showed that Republicans are moral and look out for their troops.

Bush, the Republican statesman and leader, showed that he is committed to protecting Americans but that he is willing to listen and compromise when people of good faith express reservations about tactics.

The Democrats showed they are ciphers who don’t have the stones to even say a word when the most important moral issue confronting the government is being debated.

Unless the Dems ready to threaten to filibuster a national security bill a month before an election — which I doubt — I expect that the Republicans are going to rush this through the conference and force through this piece of shit bill in a hurry, just like they forced the AUMF through in October 2002 and give the republicans a big honking “victory” in the GWOT.

The Dems are all going to be twisted into pretzels and look like they have no backbones as they struggle with a united GOP saying that McCain and Huckleberry Graham made sure “the program” is moral and necessary. Vote for it for for the terrorists. So they’ll end up voting for it without getting any benefit from it.

Digby’s not the only one ready to call this one a defeat for Democrats but it shouldn’t be too hard for them to regain control on this issue (provided that a couple of them grow a spine). A decent rebuttal would go something like this :

“Senators McCain and Graham may have sold out on this issue, but the Democratic party still believes that torture is torture, no matter what the President may choose to call it. We in the Democratic party aren’t willing to sacrifice our humanity in order to protect our way of life, because to do so would destroy the moral foundation upon which this great nation was founded. The inhuman treatment of suspects by this administration is deplorable and if Senator McCain is no longer opposed to torture, then we’ll have to continue this fight without him.”

Don’t let the conventional wisdom coalesce around the notion that rubber stamping the President’s bill is a compromise. The GOP “rebels” are cowards for buckling under the pressure of their President and their party. The only compromise was the one made when those Senators sold their souls.

Weird. Though I hadn’t even given it a second thought since I wrote it, for some reason I just recalled a review of the Superman DVD collection that I wrote for the defunct comic book fandom site Spinner Rack five years ago. Out of curiosity, I tracked it down at archive.org and - here’s the most surprising part - it doesn’t suck as much as I thought it would. In fact, I even like some of it. It’s cheesy in parts (the last paragraph makes me cringe), but what the hell. If you’re interested, the full review is in the extended entry.
(more…)

It’s hardly surprising that the GOP Senators who have been standing up to the President on torture would end up selling out (it’s an election year, after all), but does this AP headline strike you as a little odd?

Bush, GOP Rebels Said to Be Near Accord

Rebels? Accord? Opposing the President is hardly an act of rebellion. Is it normal to equate a political compromise with words normally used to describe a cease-fire. I’m not implying there’s anything sinister here, just that somebody at the Associated Press picked some strange words for this headline.

I can’t stand when religious groups co-opt patriotic imagery as if to imply that our country was founded on Christianity (it wasn’t) and you have to be a good Christian to be a good American (you don’t). Even though this has probably already made its rounds through the blogosphere, I probably don’t even need to bother telling you what I think of this monstrosity :

And if the sight of the Statue of Liberty holding a giant cross isn’t strange enough for you, check out the symbolism page of the statue’s website :



Just so you don’t get your teardrop kitsch confused, lemme make clear that the Statue of Liberation Through Christ’s teardrop is because of our rapidly declining Judeo-Christian values. The mighty eagle’s tear, on the other hand, is for those we lost on 9/11.



…and Little Miss No Name cries because she’s a poor orphan who just wants to be loved.



Does anyone have any Kleenex? I’m starting to get a little choked up here.

I like Al Gore, but something about this idea rubs me the wrong way :

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore on Monday suggested taxing carbon dioxide emissions instead of employees’ pay in a bid to stem global warming.

“Penalizing pollution instead of penalizing employment will work to reduce that pollution,” Gore said in a speech at New York University School of Law.

The pollution tax would replace all payroll taxes, including those for Social Security and unemployment compensation, Gore said. He said the overall level of taxation, would remain the same.

“Instead of discouraging businesses from hiring more employees it would discourage business from producing more pollution,” Gore said.

First of all, any time I hear about a plan to radically change the way we collect or spend taxes that promises to be revenue neutral, my bullshit meter starts going off. Nothing personal, Al, but the endless conservative talk about flat taxes, consumption taxes, and the hollow promises that have accompanied all of the President’s tax cuts have convinced me that this shit usually looks good on paper, but when Congress gets their hands on it, people get screwed.

But that’s not my only gripe with Gore’s proposal. I don’t like the proposition that our taxes serve as a form of punishment, which is what Gore implies when he accuses payroll taxes of “penalizing employment”. The problem with payroll taxes is that they’re a regressive tax that unfairly burdens the poor and lower middle class. It’s the way payroll taxes are calculated that’s punitive, not the existence of those taxes themselves. While pollution taxes would make a fine addition to other “sin taxes”, not all taxes are created equal.

While I applaud Gore ability to “think outside the bun” and try to kill two birds with one stone by helping the poor and middle class while sticking it to corporate polluters, what would the long-term consequences of this change be? By changing the revenue stream for social security, wouldn’t that make it easier for the SS bamboozlers to revisit the “crisis”? Let’s say a business-friendly (eg. paid-off) Congress were to subtly adjust the way pollution taxes were levied (change pollution limits, make pollution credits transferable, exempt certain industries from regulation), the affects on what was originally a revenue neutral tax could be dramatic. Even worse, what would happen if we started taxing pollution and industries responded by dumping fewer toxins into our environment? Less money flowing into that SS surplus could reignite the debate over whether or not our country should join Argentina in diving off a fiscal cliff.