Green Eagle

A cheering message from Daily Kos today: "Obama's crazy good polling day I'd hate to be Mitt Romney, because I'd hate to be that kind of dick. But I'd also hate to be him because of today's numbers in key battleground states...This is it, the stretch run, and Romney is losing ground almost everywhere...Romney has given back a huge chunk of his post-first debate gains. Florida, New Hampshire and Virginia, in particular, show massive movement back to the president..." And why is that, do you think? I am going to steal a page from the sort of election analysis that we expect from Republicans:  I would say that God has decided who he would rather have in the White House. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

You've got to love this story from Buzzfeed: "Ryan 'Packs' Hurricane Relief Donations In During Wisconsin Photo-Op Campaign operatives slowed down the packing to leave some for Republican Vice Presidential candidate to pose with... "Start Packing." The order was given by a campaign staffer about 20 minutes before PaulRyan entered the GOP victory office here. Two dozen campaign staffers and volunteers pulled boxes from under six tables laden canned food and dry goods to be shipped to New Jersey for storm relief. Just across the tables were an equal number of reporters, videographers and photographers. ...the packing was proceeding too quickly, and the supporters wearing red "Team Wisconsin" t-shirts were given the order to slow down and then to stop to be sure there were still goods to be packed when Ryan entered.  One by one the boxes were filled and loaded into a waiting U-Haul, and then they stopped to wait for the candidate." Not is th...

Jumping a sinking ship? Chris Christie in New Jersey yesterday: "I spoke to the president three times yesterday. He called me for the last time at midnight last night asking what he could do. I said, if you can expedite designating New Jersey as a major disaster area that that would help us to get federal money and resources in here as quickly as possible to help clean up the damage here. The president was great last night.  He said he would get it done. At 2 a.m., I got a call from FEMA to answer a couple of final questions and then he signed the declaration this morning. So I have to give the president great credit. He's been on the phone with me three times in the last 24 hours. He's been very attentive, and anything that I've asked for, he's gotten to me. So, I thank the president publicly for that. He's done -- as far as I'm concerned -- a great job for New Jersey." And on Fox News, responding to Steve Doocy: "Over the last couple...

From CNN today: "DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: In 2011, during the Republican primary, Mitt Romney said flat out that he thinks that FEMA should abolished, and should be privatized. Really?  At this moment in time, I think that’s the kind of thing, that’s the kind of comment, that could come back to haunt somebody like Mitt Romney. GOP STRATEGIST RON BONJEAN: I have to say that I don’t think anyone, most people don’t have a positive impression of FEMA, and I think Mitt Romney is right on the button.  I don’t think anybody cares about that right now." Of course, why do a lot of people have a negative impression of FEMA?  Because under George W. Bush, the upper echelons of FEMA were deliberatedly packed with incompetents and cronies, who totally muffed the response to Hurricane Katrina.  This is the standard Republican strategy: see to it that government does a terrible job and then use the incompetent response to make people hate government.  They hav...

Here are a couple of images, the first one almost unbelievable, of Hurricane Sandy striking Cuba.  Sandy is now officially the biggest Atlantic hurricane ever seen: That first picture looks like something out of a disaster film, but it is apparently real.  And we're next. Well, needless to say, Green Eagle doesn't bring something like this up without having it in mind to take a hit at Republicans.  In this case, I think it is a good idea to review some of what Mitt Romney has had to say about Federal disaster relief. Here's Mitt, in the primaries: "We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing, because we’re borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we’re taking in. We cannot… KING: Including disaster relief, though? ROMNEY: We cannot—we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is s...

I feel almost apologetic at bringing this article from the English publication The Progressive to your attention, but of every political thing I have seen in the last few months, it may be the most important, and most sad: "NSA Analyst Proves GOP Is Stealing Elections Why is Mitt Romney so confident? In states where the winner will be decided by less than 10%, of the vote he already knows he will win. This is no tinfoil hat conspiracy. It’s a maths problem. And mathematics showed changes in actual raw voting data that had no statistical correlation other than programmable computer fraud. This computer fraud resulted in votes being flipped from Democrat to Republican in every federal, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial election since 2008 (thus far) and in the 2012 primary contests from other Republicans to Mitt Romney." The article goes on at some length to demonstrate the truth of these claims, and is enough to send any decent person into a state of profound d...

I couldn't resist stealing this screen shot from Daily Kos. It says so much about the mainstream press' collaboration with the Repubicans in pushing their narrative: I have insisted for years that the press' endless adoption of the Republican position was not, as most other left-of-center commenters insist, some sort of psychological phenomenon, or the result of right wing intimidation, but was the logical result of Ronald Reagan's deregulation of the industry, which allowed the great majority of press outlets to be owned by the very wealthy.  Here, by the way, is how CNN justifies their claim:  The true uncertainty of both figures, they argue, is about two percent, so if Romney got the absolute maximum possible and Obama got the absolute minimum, they would be just barely tied.  Of course, what CNN and others fail to tell you is that it is not equally likely for, say, Romney to get 44% or 46% or 48%; the farther from the centerpoint you get the less likely it i...

All anyone wants to talk about are the debates.  To listen to people from one end of the political spectrum to the other, the debates are the only thing affecting people's opinions.  Here's a sample, from Daily Kos, which I normally think is as good as it gets when you want the truth: "On one level, that is potentially problematic news for the Obama camp. That is another day of post-debate interviews being fed into these polls (with the notable exception of the AP poll, which was almost entirely conducted pre-debate), and the movement thus far seems to be comprised primarily of float and noise within the margins of error. While that is not devastating news for the president, it is an (early) sign that another decisive debate win has come and gone without any apparent "bounce" in the head-to-head polling." But is that really true?  Here's some data of polling results: It's a little hard to see the months marked at the bottom of this graph, b...

Here is an interesting chart of total U.S. debt load, from Felix Salmon at Reuters, which I found via the ever-pertinent Digby .  This is all debt, not just government debt: As you can see, since the Republican destruction of the economy, debt has been falling fast- for the first time in a half century. Salmon comments: "There are lots of serious threats out there to the economic well-being and security of the United States, and the national debt is simply not one of them. Nor is it growing....total US debt to GDP was rising alarmingly until the crisis, but it has been falling impressively since then... Money is cheaper now than it has been in living memory: the markets are telling corporate America that they are more than willing to fund investments at unbelievably low rates. And yet the CEOs are saying no. That’s a serious threat to the economic well-being of the United States: it’s companies are refusing to invest for the future, even when the markets are b...

I saw this little chart at Media Matters today: I thought I would do some tampering with it, just to make a point: I don't think this needs much comment.  Boy oh boy, aren't you thrilled to death at the prospect of a Bush II redux Romney Presidency?

Well...finally those damned debates are over.  I thought I might get a whole Wingnut Wrapup from the debates, but when I went trolling around the slime pools of the right, there was so much idiocy today, that I had to, as they say, abandon all hope of that.  Here's the result, pulled from the endless cesspool of right wing cant: Thomas Sowell, Town Hall:  "It was a little much when President Barack Obama said that he was "offended" by the suggestion that his administration would try to deceive the public about what happened in Benghazi." What right does he have to be offended by Republican lies about him, spoken right in his face?  He hasn't complained about it for the last four years, so that proves he's okay with being lied about.  Besides, how else can Romney win- I mean, fair's fair, right? Chuck Norris, Town Hall:  "Have you noticed how the Obama campaign has stepped up its class warfare rhetoric as we draw closer to Election Day?" N...

Most of us have been pretty stunned by the unapologetic lying which has been the main characteristic of the Republican Presidential campaign this year.  We've seen it written large in the three debates, where Romney, confident that the remaining undecided voters know nothing about the positions he has taken for the last year and a half, could be fooled by a completely different, centrist, bipartisan (and, of course, nonexistent) Romney- a character that the other 90% of us, on both sides of the political divide, know doesn't exist. I want to take a stab at explaining this phenomenon, which I think very few people on the left understand.  As some of my readers may know, I have spent a long time following the right.  I can remember the birth of right wing talk radio, back in the sixties, as the main voice of American Conservatism, and I want to say something about that now. There has been a lot of talk about the connection between Republican politics and the Christian right...

It seems a little strange to me that everyone, from Fox News to Daily Kos , has bought into the narrative that Romney's surge in the polls was due to his performance in the first Presidential debate. It's like everyone has forgotten about Citizens United, and the avalanche of dirty campaigning that is now engulfing large parts of the country.  I know it is easy for people in New York or Los Angeles, say, who are only seeing a tiny share of this disgusting phenomenon, to lose track of it, but it is important to remember that debates have never had the kind of effect on polls that this one seems to have produced. I suggested long ago that, following historical precedent, the bulk of the Republican smears and lies would be unleashed on the American people only in the last few weeks of the campaign, when it would be impossible for Democrats to counteract them.  And I believe (though admittedly I don't have clear proof) that this is what is happening now.  Endless repetiti...

So, Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative religious authority, frequent Fox guest, and person behind one of the right wing's current smear movies about Barack Obama,  has lost his job as "president" of some miserable place called "King's College," for which he was paid the handsome renumeration of one million dollars a year, because he seems to have had a wife and a "fiancee" at the same time, while passing himself off as a paragon of Christian virtue. Suspecting strongly that the "King's College" they were talking about here was not King's College Cambridge, founded in 1441 by Henry VI, and just down the street from Green Eagle's former school, Corpus Christi College, I thought I would find out what this particular "King's College" really amounted to.  Above- the real King's College.  Unfortunately, I was able to find not a single  picture of the "King's College" we are talking about her...

From our darling little Katie Pavlich over there at Town Hall, who is the only one I've seen to uncover this abominable outrage: Katie Pavlich, Town Hall:  "Michelle Obama Breaks Debate Rules, Claps Loudly For Husband" The horror!!!!  This was actually going to be the start of a Wingnut Wrapup, but the comments to Katie's historic revelation were so great that I am going to focus on them for the rest of this post. Among them, was this all-time great: "I gather Marie Antoinette was equally indifferent to the plight of the peasants. However, this is closer to the murder of General Gordon at Khartoum, or perhaps the Archduke Ferdinand? Either way, I hope they're out even if we can't send them in a tumbril." Yes, Michelle Obama's clapping for her husband is the equivalent of the massacre of British troops by religious fanatics, or the assassination that started World War I.  As an aside, let's not forget that General Gordon would have not been...

Well, everyone on MSNBC, etc, is so excited about Obama's debate performance tonight. I don't believe that this is going to turn around the surge for Romney, and here's why: This is a guess on my part, but remember that, never in history, has a Presidential debate had the effect on polls that this one is alleged to have had.  I think something else is happening, and I predicted this some time ago.  We are now in the month before the election, when there is not enough time for Democrats to refute Republican lies and smears.  Now, the avalanche of corporate financed sludge in favor of Romney is pouring forth.  On the coasts, we don't see it so much, but now is their chance to buy the Presidency, and as far as I can tell, they are having pretty good luck at it.  Will it work in the end? I don't know, but they are sure in the process of giving it the billion dollar try. I hope I'm wrong, but I never am when it comes to overestimating the Republicans' evil ...

Here is the latest disgusting smear of Obama circulating on the Right today:  "Obama wears a ring that says in Arabic, "There is no God but Allah." According to Glenn Beck's TheBlaze.com, he has confirmed through a Duke professor that the Arabic on Obama's ring says the first part of "Shahada": "There is only one God, Allah." This is the same president who will not salute the flag, and says our "Star-Spangled Banner" is too violent for him." That, from Laurie Roth, one of the lunatic commentators at Renew America.   The story seems (surprise, surprise) to have started with the ever-nauseating Jerome Corsi at World Net Daily , who publishes the following picture: Here's another photo showing an alleged view of the ring, which is circulating among the wingnuts: Of course, within a day, this story has spread to numerous other right wing websites; Prison Planet, Free Republic, Conservativebyte, and on and o...

It is now beginning to seem like Paul Ryan is a pathological liar.  We've seen his miserable lies about his marathon and mountain climbing "feats."  Now, here is something that really shows what a hollow, empty man he is. Many of you may have seen some of the pictures of Ryan supposedly washing dishes at a soup kitchen in Ohio a few days ago: We've already discovered that these dishes weren't even dirty- meal service and cleanup had ended before Ryan even got there.  But the miserable disingenuousness of this photo op doesn't, apparently end there.  We now learn, from the Washington Post, that: "The head of a northeast Ohio charity says that the Romney campaign last week “ramrodded their way” into the group’s Youngstown soup kitchen so that GOP vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan could get his picture taken washing dishes in the dining hall. Brian J. Antal, president of the Mahoning County St. Vincent De Paul Society, said that he ...

Man, it didn't take the wingnuts (i.e. the Republican party, now clearly certifiable as a group) long to start pouring out the garbage about last night's debate, in an attempt to utterly distract people from the substance of the discussion, where Joe Biden's reality-based approach crushed Ryan's standard mix of lies and talking points.  No, we have endless attacks on Biden for having reacted to Ryan with the mix of derision and contempt that Ryan totally deserved. Before I get to the lunacy, let's start out with a comment from the editors of the New York Times, to give a little perspective to what follows: "Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. would not sit still for a parade of misleading and often blatantly untruthful descriptions of the state of the economy and the Republican prescriptions for it...Mr. Ryan, as always, refused to acknowledge the improvement in the economy...Mr. Ryan’s performance on foreign affairs and military issues was at best disingenu...

I am very distressed to announce the untimely death of  Guy Garner, aka Mastercynic. Guy was a frequent commenter on Green Eagle, and had been a true friend to my wife and myself for almost thirty years. Well, I don't want to spend too long subjecting you to my sadness, but I thought I should say something.  We'll really miss him.

There is only one thing that I have asked of Democrats, as the years and administrations pass by, and it is apparently far too much to ask.  It is simply to tell the truth to the American people.  The Republican party, of course, has not a shred of instance in the truth.  Today's case in point and poster child for Republican dishonesty: "WASHINGTON -- A pro-life, family-values congressman who worked as a doctor before winning election as a Tea Party-backed Republican had an affair with a patient and later pressured her to get an abortion, according to a phone call transcript obtained by The Huffington Post. The congressman, Rep. Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee, was trying to save his marriage at the time, according to his remarks on the call, made in September of 2000. And, according to three independent sources familiar with the call and the recording, he made the tape himself." So, here is the truth that I am talking about:  The leaders of the Republican party do n...

Where would we be without my hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, to keep us abreast on world news? "JERUSALEM — If the Messiah descends from the Mount of Olives as foretold in the Bible, America's two biggest Christian broadcasters are well-positioned to cover it live thanks to recent acquisitions of adjacent Jerusalem studios on a hill overlooking the Old City. Texas-based Daystar Television Network already beams a 24-hour-a-day live webcam from its terrace. Not to be outdone, Costa Mesa-based Trinity Broadcasting Network last month bought the building next door." Live coverage of the second coming.  Well, I just hope no one is stupid enough to prepay for advertising on the special broadcast.

While we were fixated on our idiotic Presidential debate, Turkey and Syria moved closer to all out war.  Here's a picture of a Turkish city being shelled by Syria, from the Christian Science Monitor: You might also like to read  this, from the Guardian. Oy Vay.

Well, Obama totally wasted a chance to put Romney away tonight. I didn't want to join the endless people pontificating about what Obama needed to do in the debate, but if I could have said something to him, it was this:  Romney is going to lie in your face, over and over again.  If you hadn't figured that out already, he gave it away when he spent the last couple of weeks talking about how you were going to lie to him.  The sole thing you need to figure out is how to call him on his endless lies and dodges without seeming angry or belligerent. Instead, Obama let Romney walk all over him and the pathetic moderator.  He's damned lucky that Romney is such a worthless candidate, or the election would have been over tonight. Now, here is what disturbs me and makes me a little angry too.  What I saw there was not a weak debate performance.  It was the old Obama- a man who, after enduring savage attacks by Republicans for four years, refuses to let himself a...