The Liberal Doomsayer My blog deals primarily with national politics in the U.S. as well as, on occasion, local politics in Pennsylvania. From time to time, I may have something to say about sports and entertainment as well. I try to interpret information that shapes the news and provide context to current events. I am definitely left of center politically, but as far as I'm concerned, neither major party is perfect. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 33 0 106 4211

Articles from The Liberal Doomsayer

I Thought You Were Already There, Mike 2007-11-29 11:31:00 It looks like the “aw, shucks” Repug presidential candidate is at it again, based on this other excerpt from the presidential debate last night.Sure, the notion of “sending Hillary Clinton to Mars” was a clever line to work wingnuttia all into a froth, and then of course, Huckabee got all serious…"Whether it's the medical technologies that saved many of our lives and the lives of our families, it's the direct result from the space program," he said. "We need to put more money into space and technology exploration."Um…OK, Governor “Razor Blades” (Huckabee does at least offer a smiling face to his lockstep right-wing orthodoxy, though, as Hendrik Hertzberg notes here in this week’s issue of The New Yorker).The problem, Mike, is that the head of your party refuses to properly fund the agency (as noted here), with Dem Senator Barbara Mikulski and Repug Senators Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Richard Shelby trying to secure supplemental funding.As the story tells us…"Based ...

Today's Boneheaded Fred Thompson Moment 2007-11-29 10:57:00 From here…The candidates were asked by YouTube user Leroy Brooks from Houston, Texas if "this flag right here (the Confederate rag flag) represents the symbol of racism, a symbol of political ideology, a symbol of Southern heritage — or, is it something completely different?""I know that everybody who hangs the flag up in their room like that is not racist," said Thompson, who has played up his southern roots while campaigning in South Carolina. "I also know that for a great many Americans it's a symbol of racism."Thompson added that, "as far as a public place is concerned, I am glad that people have made the decision not to display it as a prominent flag, symbolic of something, at a state capitol."But the Confederate flag in South Carolina's state capital is in a very public place — located on the Statehouse grounds along Gervais Street in Columbia, next to the Confederate Soldier Monument.Some posts just write themselves. ...

Thursday AM Videos 2007-11-29 07:39:00 Jim Hightower tells all holiday shoppers how to "vote with our dollars"......and more from Mike Papantonio of GoLeft TV and Air America's Ring of Fire talking about how the American media has failed the public and abandoned reality in order to sell Bush's troop escalation in Iraq as a "success" (we know a lot of this already, but it bears repeating). ...

Some More Damn Political Videos 2007-11-28 22:27:00 The newest campaign video from John Edwards, a message to the people of New Hampshire......and by the way, Representative Press over at Brave New Films (via HuffPo) has this interesting bit of information concerning the way CNN selects its candidate debate questions (just so you know). ...

Fantasy Politics In The Home Of Disneyland 2007-11-28 16:55:00 Having visited “The Sunshine State” earlier this year, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that there are just way too many damn people residing there who think Rudy! is “tough on terrorism.”Wonder how they feel about “America’s Mayor” engaging in fraud to hide his adultery while mayor of New York City (here)?Just asking…(Actually, though, someone from that state should ask a Repug presidential candidate what they would do about this.)Update 1 11/29/07: Here's the "money quote" from this update by Kagro X..."Think Clinton couldn't keep it in his pants? At least he never expensed a blowjob."Genius.Update 2 11/29/07: Even better than the earlier post here...Update 3 11/30/07: All Rudy, all the time... ...

Not Smirking Now, Are You? 2007-11-28 15:25:00 This Inquirer story (staying with them for now) tells us that Mark Everson is out as head of the Red Cross because, according to the report, he (a married father of two) was having a “personal relationship with a female subordinate.”Far be it for me to delight in someone else’s misfortune, and I don’t intend to do that here. Also, I realize that you can’t properly measure someone’s management skills after only six months on a job (not usually anyway).But Everson came from the IRS, where he froze more than 120,000 low-income taxpayers' refunds on suspicion of fraud without notifying the taxpayers or giving them a chance to respond (here), privatized tax collection and tried to allow third parties to have access to our tax information (here), and eliminated the highly-convenient and inexpensive (versus filling in paper forms and mailing them) TeleFile program for filing tax returns (here).I hope he is able to get his life back together with his family to some degree. Afterwa ...

Tell Dubya How The Choo Choo Goes 2007-11-28 14:33:00 (Possibly the most infantile blog post title I’ve ever come up with, but I’m trying to communicate in a way that could be easily understood by George W. Milhous Bush.)So our preznit is going to act now, thus “forestalling a possible strike by Amtrak workers on Saturday,” is he (as noted here)? Wow, talk about being proactive! I mean, this is only Wednesday; he could have waited two more days at the most…(Yes, that was snark.)The Inquirer story also notes…The labor dispute centers on health-care contributions, proposed changes in work rules, and back pay to Jan. 1, 2000, when the last contract ended.Amtrak has about 15,000 unionized workers in its workforce of 18,500. About half of the union workers are represented by the nine unions affected by the current impasse. They include train dispatchers, track repairmen, signal operators, machinists, electricians and coach cleaners.A strike, which would be the first by Amtrak workers, would also disrupt commuter railroads, includin ...

On Balance, A Loss For Us (For Now) 2007-11-28 12:13:00 In these parts, the Bucks County Courier Times noted this morning that PA State Rep. Dave Steil (a Republican, I should note) has announced that he won’t seek re-election for his state House seat next year.Reporter Kori Walters tells us here that Steil was first sent to Harrisburg in 1992, where he emerged as a key figure on zoning and land planning issues as well as a voice for reform (and if there was ever a place where reform is needed, it is in Harrisburg). Steil is also owed a debt, as the story tells us, because he was “one of six Republican mavericks who helped oust former GOP speaker John Perzel earlier this year.”I have issues with Dennis O’Brien, the current Repug speaker who emerged over Perzel, when it comes to guns and the NRA in this state, but to be fair, O’Brien is actually an improvement over Perzel every way else (and only in Harrisburg would a Repug say that installing another part member as speaker would “(give) Democrats control of the House,” as Repu ...

This Is Where I Part Company 2007-11-28 11:00:00 OK, so the "A listers" have quite thoroughly laid waste to any pretense of journalistic objectivity or basic professionalism on the part of Joe Klein regarding the whole fiasco of his Repug-friendly stenography on the Democrats' RESTORE Act (noted here by Rush Holt, one of the bill's authors). And Glenn Greenwald has quite thoroughly posted about the moral bankruptcy of Time Magazine as a tool of our corporate media.Bravo, and well done.So what's next? Atrios (pictured) posts the following...Wikipedia says Rick Stengel (Time's managing editor) has multiple child rape convictions. While I have neither the time nor legal background to verify this allegation, it's well beyond stupid for Time to employ such a person.Yes, I get it that this uses some of Klein's copout language as to why he didn't know what he was talking about in his original post on the RESTORE Act. And yes, I get it that the point is that Time will apparently print anything without sourcing it if the right person o ...

Tuesday Videos 2007-11-27 22:27:00 The Cobbs ("Smile," a video by Jonas Odell)......and Jimi Hendrix would have been 65 today ("Hear My Train A Comin'" on a 12-string acoustic - I think Gary Weis, who was once associated with "Saturday Night Live," filmed this). ...

More Tuesday Campaign Videos 2007-11-27 22:23:00 Chris Dodd has a great question to ask the Republican presidential candidates (and I'm sure their answer is "Terra! Terra! 9/11! 9/11!")......and I have to set this one up (big hat tip to Cliff Schecter and Brave New Films); the National Republican Senatorial Committee held a web ad contest, with the goal of attacking Dems of course, and believe it or not, this is the leader in the contest - a pro-Dem ad; well, sort of. ...

More Freeper Angst On Iran 2007-11-27 17:26:00 Jonathan Last wrote about a new book by Penn State professor Philip Jenkins last Sunday in the Inquirer here in which Jenkins believes that Iran could turn into the “Denmark of tomorrow” (meaning that it could become less authoritarian and more liberal because the country is experiencing declining fertility rates and an aging population).Putting aside this absurd notion (appealing though it is) if only because of cultural differences between the two populations (laid bare by the incident described here), I found myself wondering how some of the arguments proposed by Jenkins and Last would stack up when compared to this country (and after all, wouldn't that comparison be more instructive anyway?).Here is some of Jenkins’ argument…Population decline, he believes, could "usher in a new era of stability," creating "an Iran that is bourgeois [and] secular." To support this thesis, Jenkins notes that high-fertility nations include hot spots such as Iraq, Somalia and Sudan, while low ...

Time To Round Up The Bloggers Again 2007-11-27 15:00:00 I got a bit of a laugh out of this Editor and Publisher story where Peter Osnos finds it so hard to understand how the news of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s book about his shilling for Bushco could have created such a media frenzy.Osnos describes in painstaking detail the decision making on the part of PublicAffairs (the book’s publisher) in choosing which excerpt to highlight to generate the maximum “buzz” for the book, and I would say that the excerpt chosen (in which McClellan admits that he now knows that the five highest-ranking individuals in Bushco were telling lies about Saddam Hussein’s WMD in Iraq) achieved the maximum impact in this regard (and for the moment, I'm giving McClellan the benefit of the doubt here which I'm sure he doesn't deserve).And I would have given Osnos a pass also here except for this criticism...Scott McClellan is writing a responsible book about his moment in history. Much of our popular media, including some leading ...

A "Nudge" With A Grudge 2007-11-27 11:08:00 While Glenn Greenwald continues to quite rightly beat up Joke Line for his unbelievably wretched FISA column (here), I suppose it falls upon your humble narrator to continue pillorying the New York Times.Yes, I know it’s repetitive, but some truly wretched “journalism” is oozing out of the vicinity of 620 8th Avenue in The Big Apple, and those responsible must be called to account.Here is today’s example from Steven Lee Meyers…WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — It might seem, after nearly seven years of deliberate detachment from Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, that President Bush has plunged into Middle Eastern diplomacy with Clintonesque energy.…In fact, Mr. Bush and his aides still deplore what they view as President Clinton’s disastrously hands-on involvement in the peace process in 2000. And they insist that Mr. Bush does not intend to negotiate personally the two-state peace he has pronounced as his vision, just as they insist that this is not an 11th-hour effort to forge a l ...

Monday Political Videos 2007-11-26 22:39:00 I'm going to try something a bit different tonight and bring you this from Mike Papantonio of GoLeft TV and Air America's Ring of Fire, talking about how the religious right has fractured over the current GOP presidential field; he wonders if true Christians are beginning to see the lies they've been fed by the Republicans......and the latest campaign ad from John Edwards (says it all as far as I'm concerned). ...