Sadly, No!

Marc Thiessen offers a new definition of torture: being interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show:

I can’t get my points out on the air. … You did most of the talking. … I didn’t get a chance. … That’s amazing.

The interview started 11 minutes into the show, and Thiessen launched his whine at 20:52, at which point he had spoken for 5:00 minutes, leaving 4:52 for the host (and some breaks for applause). Leaving aside that Thiessen’s only complaint is off the mark, how indifferent to reality do you have to be to complain about mistreatment on The Daily Show??? Has Thiessen ever watched any other show on the televisions, or just tried some clips from the internets?

ABOVE: Milton Scholar and Law Professor² Stanley Fish
tries to remember his name

Stanley Fish, The New York Fucking Times
Do You Miss Him Yet?

• One billboard outside a miniscule town (Pop. 3048) in Minnesota paid for by a couple of local merchants proves that I was right when I said in 2008 that within a year of Bush leaving office, the entire country would wish he were President again.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

¹Milton, Paradise Regained, Book IV, Line 327
²At a fourth-tier law school

Above: G0ld3n4rs3

John Hinderaker, Powerline:
Where do the Lobbyists End, and the Obama Administration Begin?

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has uncovered, via…

Uh, wow.

Like I’ve been predicting, it looks like the Senate’s proposed financial “reform” will be, in the words of the cranky old man in the Woodstock documentary, a shitty mess:

Financial reform tips toward bankers

As Congress this week inches toward a new set of rules to avert another global financial collapse, it is focused on two conflicting goals: reforming the banking system to protect consumers while still giving lenders the freedom to take risks.

So far the score looks like: Bankers 1, Consumers 0.

More than a year after a wave of risky mortgage bets brought Wall Street to its knees, banks and other financial institutions are still playing by the same rules that got them into the mess.

[…]

The banking industry initially lobbied hard to make sure that any new consumer protections were housed within existing bank regulators, such as the Office of the Controller of the Currency or the FDIC.

Analysts who have followed the turf war say the latest proposal gives bankers most of what they wanted.

“This is a bill the industry will love,” said Greg Valliere, chief policy strategist for Soleil Securities.

Wonderful! Hope and change are in the air, baby!

So, look. At this point I’d rather financial reform not pass. Because if the Senate passes a bill that “the industry will love,” then it means we’re heading for another crash no matter what we do. And I’d much rather have the post-crash narrative be, “The government didn’t do enough to rein in the banks” and not “It’s the government’s pesky regulations that caused the banks to fail!”

Just to point out, dudes, I’m not really hoping for another economic collapse. I’m saying that it’s coming no matter what and we’ve gotta position ourselves to win the narrative battle when it comes.

While governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney committed the cardinal sin of helping people get health care. Now the wingnut base wants his head:

Conservative Group Rips Romney For Declaring Romneycare “Conservative”

As you may have heard, Mitt Romney went on Fox News this past Sunday and described the universal health care plan he passed in Massachusetts four years ago as “the ultimate conservative plan.”

Romney made the eyebrow-raising claim because he aspires to the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, and thus wants to put as much distance as possible between Romneycare and Obamacare, which is loathed by conservative GOP primary voters — even though the two plans are very similar in various ways.

But guess who disagrees with Romney’s assessment? The Club for Growth, a powerhouse conservative group with a lot of sway in GOP primaries. A top Club official tore into Romney, telling us that if Romney believes this, then he’s “in the wrong party.”

“We can say unequivocally that that is not a conservative plan,” Andy Roth, Club for Growth’s vice president for government affairs, told our reporter Ryan Derousseau when asked for comment on Romney’s claim about Romneycare.

On Sunday, Romney elicited skepticism even from Fox’s Chris Wallace when he said: “There a big difference between what we did and what President Obama is doing. What we did I think is the ultimate conservative plan.”

But Club for Growth’s Roth dismissed this as bunk, citing Romneycare’s individual mandate as proof. “The individual mandate is diametrically against what free-market conservatives believe in,” he said, adding that if Romney thinks his plan amounts to a conservative policy “than I think he is in the wrong party.”

My state’s universal health care system is indeed more conservative than any other universal health care system in the world since it’s the only one that relies upon private for-profit insurers (the Swiss, French and German systems rely on private non-profit insurers, on the other hand).

But that doesn’t matter. To the economic royalists in the Club for Rich Kids, helping any person get health care is a direct affront on their Randroid ideology. And because he committed this wicked and dastardly act, Mittens will find his political career essentially over.

Yeah, I think it’s sad too that helping people get health care is politically poisonous. But that’s America, baby.

Pamalama-ding-dong is horrified to learn that nuts come in many shapes:

GLENN BECK, THINK BEFORE YOU PREACH

Something very disturbing happened today on FOX. Glenn Beck, who has, for the most part, steered clear of jihad, sharia and Islamic supremacism, put his toe in the water, and for the first time since I started fighting the long war, I got nervous.

Beck just called Wilders a fascist, and far-right.

He also mixed up Dominique de Villepin with Jean Marie Le Pen.

What is he doing?

Why would he stigmatize Wilders this way? Wilders is the embodiment of what our founding fathers extolled. Individual rights. Freedom of speech. Not sharia law.

What’s worse: ‘The green traitor is eating it up.’ Which reminds us of how this whole feud between Pam Atlas and Charles Johnson started — not to pat ourselves on the back, but S,N! was there to document the green traitor’s return to the land of the sane way back when.

… because you of all people will appreciate this. So I’m at a late-winter/early-spring house party in the outer outer Mission and my No. 1 son, Sandy, all of 10, is out in the tiny backyard scaring up frogs or whatnot, and a couple folks go out for a smoke, one of them being his godfather, and Sandy gets it in his head to pop out from a bush and scare him, the godfather, with the line: ‘I’m the ghost of Barry Bonds!’

A top 10 all-time quote from Sandy, and oddly ironic, because after all the fussing and fighting of two to three to four or so years ago, really, who and what and where is Barry Bonds?

He’s a ghost. I laughed and cried — but not really. I just had another beer and kind of processed the whole cosmic joke of it all.

PS Sammy Sosa is a white woman.

Mark Halperin, Time:
How Obama Is Making the Same Mistakes as Bush

• Last week’s charge that Obama is too much like Bush led me to consider the mistakes of the Bush administration. Sure enough, they needed to be rewritten.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Brad adds: This is classic Halperin political “analysis” in which all of a politician’s troubles are due more to inside baseball bureaucratic fights. The actually reason Obama is in trouble politically is that people are suffering during a recession and his policies have done far too little to help them. At the same time, he’s gone out of his way to kiss bankster ass all while unemployment has continuously hovered around 10%.

ABOVE: Michael Bresciani, The American Prophet*

Shorter Michael Bresciani, Ruhnoo Murku
The PC Wars of 2010

• Homophobic means afraid of gays. Christians aren’t homophobic because they aren’t afraid of gays. In fact, it’s the homos that are afraid of Christians. Oh,and another thing while I’m at it, homos and people that love them are worse than people who practice witchcraft.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

*Mr. Bresciani has written a book claiming that his technicolor dreams are visions from God and that he is a prophet. He also claims that his columns are read in “every country in the world,” which is, apparently, just another way of saying that he has posted them on the Internet.

Okay, I get that this John Patrick Bedell character is yet another example in a growing trend of white guy terrorism that the MSM won’t ever actually call terrorism.

But Dave Neiwert’s sensible commentary aside, I’m just finding it difficult to get all worked up about a guy whose manifesto went unnoticed because it’s the dullest thing ever written by any human being anywhere.

Then there’s this video, which criminal psychologists directly tasked with determining Bedell’s motives will no doubt spend the next few months making excuses for why they haven’t yet watched it all the way through, even though it’s less than six minutes long: