Green Eagle

I don't give a damn who they pick as Pope.

I've always had mixed feelings about Maureen Dowd.  Sometimes her sarcasm is put to such good use, and sometimes she just seems like a nasty whiner having a bad day.  Well, with her column today about Dick Cheney, she hit one out of the park.  I want to give you a couple of quotes, but believe me, if there is a must read, this is it: "Cheney, who came from a family of Wyoming Democrats, says his conservative bent was strengthened watching the anti-Vietnam war protests at the University of Wisconsin, where he was pursuing a doctorate and dodging the draft."  Because let's be clear, like all right wing warmongers, he was nothing but a coward when it came to his own personal safety. "Did he change, after the shock to his body of so many heart procedures and the shock to his mind of 9/11? Or was he the same person, patiently playing the courtier, once code-named “Backseat” by the Secret Service, until he found the perfect oblivious frontman who would allow him...

As was becoming clearly inevitable, Hugo Chavez lost his battle with cancer today.  Chavez was an interesting character, and here is probably the best of the stories the American people are ever going to be told about him: "Chavez easily won a new six-year term at an election in October and his death will devastate millions of supporters who adored his charismatic style, anti-U.S. rhetoric and oil-financed policies that brought subsidized food and free health clinics to long-neglected slums. Detractors, however, saw his one-man style, gleeful nationalizations and often harsh treatment of opponents as traits of an egotistical dictator whose misplaced statist economics wasted a historic bonanza of oil revenues." It is not, of course, wasting a historic bonanza of oil revenues for a couple of thousand people who go around calling themselves princes and kings to spend the money on fifty million dollar yachts and hundred million dollar houses in Cap Ferrat.  No, nor is it w...

So Barack Obama is putting himself on the line for gay rights, immigration reform and gun regulation.  All very nice, but I am deeply afraid that he is doing it for a very malicious reason. Here is a statement that may make many people on the left angry:  All of these issues have a very minor effect on our lives, compared to what happens to the economy.  And what I fear is that Obama is championing these things solely to mollify the left while he sells out the American people on economic issues like utterly unnecessary cuts to Social Security, raising the Medicare age and abandoning any real attempt to hold the rich responsible for the damage that their greed has done.  Here, courtesy of Digby, is Dean Baker: "We will never know if President Obama could have garnered support for more stimulus and larger deficits if he had used his office to pound home basic principles of economics to the public and the media. But we do know the route he chose failed... it was Pr...

What do the following people have in common? Michelle Bachmann Cathy McMorris Rodgers Tim Griffin Steve King Vicki Hartzler Tim Walberg Well, they are all Republican members of Congress who voted against the Violence Against Women Act, who have now issued public statements claiming that they voted for it, utterly confident that not a single person with the power to point out their dishonesty to the American people is going to bother to do so. I guess that is what the Republicans mean when they talk about needing to change their "messaging."  Just go on doing the same old piggish things, but tell your constituents that you did the opposite.  God knows, among the people who still voted for Michelle Bachmann last November, it is highly likely to work.

Kathleen Parker on Meet the Press today, explaining Republican behavior: "DAVID GREGORY: What's striking to me is that these issues are still so hard and that the elections didn't seem to solve them completely enough. […] Is that true? I mean, why didn't it? PARKER: Why didn't it? Because, look, the Republicans cannot give on taxes. They simply can't. It would damage their brand permanently and the President is unwilling... he is insisting on raising revenue through taxes. There's no way for them to have a meeting of the minds when those differences exist and that's not going to change." The Democrats have been struggling for four years to right the economy that the Bush administration destroyed.  The Republicans are worried about "damaging their brand." And even that pathetic, self-serving rationale is not by any stretch of the imagination the truth.  What they are really up to is destroying the country if the alternative i...

An example from an Ezra Klein article at the Washington Post: "Mike Murphy is one of the top political consultants in the Republican Party. He’s been a top strategist for Mitt Romney, John McCain, Jeb Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger and many other Republicans... Murphy’s initial view was that to unlock GOP votes for a budget deal, Obama just needed to endorse chained CPI and more means-testing in Medicare. Then it was pointed out that Obama has endorsed means-testing in Medicare, so Murphy wondered why he didn’t endorse chained CPI as part of a deal. Then it was pointed out that Obama did endorse chained CPI, at which point Murphy called chained CPI “a gimmick,” and said Obama had to endorse raising the Medicare age, drop his demands for more revenue as part of a deal and earn back the GOP’s trust." In other words, no matter what Obama said or did, the Republicans were going to refuse any deal that cost the rich a single penny.  Everything they do is nothing but a dumb show ...