Thom: The Citizens United showdown in Montana.
Stephen: The Left’s pro-safety agenda.
Obama in Everett, WA: Promoting American manufacturing and exports:
Thom with some Good, Bad, and Very, Very Ugly.
Newsy: MSNBC and Pat Buchanan part ways.
The Republican War on Women:
- Alyona: Republicans waging “vajihad”
- Sam Seder: Sorry…but the data on contraception don’t lie.
- Jennifer Granholm: Virginia’s “vaginally invasive” law.
- Stephen: Obama’s Contraceptiageddon.
- Alyona’s Tool Time Award: Santorum defends buddy’s aspirin RX.
- Young Turks: Rush was caught with a bucketful of Viagra but still preaches on birth control.
- Ed and Pap: Republicans hope culture wars will energize base.
- Sam Seder: The Republican war on women.
- Olbermann with Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.): We will not be sent back to the dark ages.
- Jennifer Granholm: Why Dems walked out.
- Ann Telnaes: No women testifying?!?
- Sam Seder: GOP Virginia is for “unwanted vaginal penetration.”
- Young Turks: Sen. Hatch lies about Planned Parenthood.
- Alyona’s Tool Time Award: Sen. Grassley fights domestic abuse protections.
- Mark Fiore: The Gospel according to Bishops.
- Sam Seder: Darrell Issa’s all male contraception “expert” panel.
- Young Turks: Virginia’s war on women.
- Jon on the war for women’s baby makers
Thom with John Nichols: Uprising in Wisconsin.
White House: West Wing Week.
Alyona: Three signs you might be a terrorist.
Young Turks: Asian actress from Hoekstra commercial apologizes.
Roy Zimerman: Another “Vote Republican” verse.
Focus on FAUX:
- Thom: Is FAUX News moving left?
- Liberal Viewer: FAUX News racist crack comment just a joke?.
Newsy: Colbert Report goes off the air.
Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.
Right-wing nut case Andrew Breitbart crazies his way to Worst Person in the World.
Jon: What. Congress did something wrong? (Via TalkingPointsMemo.)
Controversial racist Pete Hoekstra alternative advertisement.
Young Turks: Shit Erin Says’ about Iran—We’re not going to let you drive us into another.
Thom with The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.
The G.O.P. Comedy Show:
- Mitt Romney’s Olympic bailout
- Jon on MI, Mitt, and Santorum (via TalkingPointsMemo):
- Lesson for Mitt: Don’t bet against America!
- Ed and Pap: Republican buyer’s remorse with presidential candidates.
- Susie Sampson’s Tea Party Support: focus on Santorum.
- Young Turks: Rick Santorum is the 1%
- Bill Maher: Romney ad.
- WTF?!? Santorum backer Friess suggests “aspirin between their knees” as contraception (via TalkingPointsMemo).
- Young Turks: Romney’s “Son of Detroit” Op-Ed.
- Thom: Dogs against Romney.
- NBC: Dogs against Romney.
- Ann Telnaes: Mitt aims to win the hearts of the GOP.
- Acutal Audio: Rick Santorum on women in the military.
- Alyona: Santorum…working class millionaire.
- The Guardian gives us nine quirkies questions in the GOP debate..
- Ann Telnaes: Romney and Santorum Rev up for the Republican race.
Again! Right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart falsifies, exaggerates, and distorts his way to Worst Person in the World.
Thom: When will the Grover Norquist bubble end?
Alyona: The voter fraud myth.
ONN week in review: Obama urges citizens to hide evidence of formerly prosperous lives from nation’s young children.
Roy Zimmerman: And another “Vote Republican” verse.
Jon: The conservative resonse to women soldiers.
Thom: Five Million people wiped off of voter rolls.
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
You forgot one. Why authoritarians are so adamant about wearing their compassion on their sleeves.
re 1 — interesting link
From article linked to in 1.
Wow! This guy has nailed – the maximus asshat troll!
And..
Yep, that’s the typical right winger.
3 & 4: They have everything they need to be good little Nazis except a Hitler to follow.
RICKY SANITARIUM IS INSANE!!!
A sampling of MSNBC headlines:
Santorum: Obama believes in ‘phony theology’ not based on Bible
“The president says he’s a Christian, he’s a Christian,” Santorum maintained, but added, “The president has reached a new low in this country’s history of oppressing religious freedom.”
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com.....d-on-bible
Santorum says Obama looks down on disabled
“Rick Santorum accused President Obama of requiring free prenatal testing in the health care plan he signed in 2010 because it would detect if children were disabled” so parents could get abortions to “cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com.....-abortions
Santorum: Obama makes US ‘less safe’
“Anybody that he treats well is our enemy, and anybody he treats poorly is our friend. That’s how the president deals with our allies,” Santorum said.
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com.....-less-safe
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Man, the GOPers are getting shrill — first Mittens, now Rickster. They must be scared shitless. Apparently they’ve read the polls.
In other news, apart from Rickster’s rhetorical meltdown:
1. The climate change that isn’t occurring is killing valuable trees in Alaska.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46.....vironment/
2. Ron Paul has gained on Mitt Romney in Maine’s caucus tally.
http://nbcpolitics.msnbc.msn.c.....ine-caucus
3. Mittster’s Arizona campaign co-chair, a county sheriff, quit after a newspaper reported he threatened his ex-boyfriend with deportation.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/.....tions.html
And the crazy just keeps on coming…
Can we please stop pretending that Santorum is a credible, legitimate, candidate.
@8 Actually, he has a point: Our culture is banal, the rich and powerful are venal, and ordinary middle class citizens who work unbelievably hard and put up with incredible bullshit while quietly raising their families are being left in the dust. But none of this makes Ricky a credible or legitimate candidate — he’s just another rightwing demagogue who stirs up the riff-raff with “us versus them” rhetoric.
Yep, but I doubt that rock concerts or the NBA are the problem.
Decline to sign! Now this is the kind of thing I like to see. From what I understand, this was put together by a gent in Aberdeen.
http://referendum74.org/
@1 “Right wingers … behavior in the Republican debates has caused even jaded observers to react like an Oxford don stumbling upon a tribe of headhunting cannibals.”
Priceless!!
In the latest in “guns don’t kill people, people do” action a gunman has shot and killed a woman and critically injured two others and then shot and critically injured (damn, how can you miss the center of your head at point blank range?) himself.
I’m not an advocate for such things, but you can beat someone into a bloody pulp with a length of rebar or two-by-four. It’s pretty damn hard to kill someone and beat two other folks until their critical and then turn the rebar on yourself and beat yourself critical with it. But, with a gun it’s easy. It’s too easy.
News reporting of a possible Israeli strike against Iran, and diplomatic activity aimed at preventing it, have both ramped up this weekend — which suggests such a strike may be imminent. Israel’s prime minister and defense minister are both known to be hawks on this issue, and a recent bump-up in Iran’s nuclear processing capabilities may have pushed the Israelis into crisis mode.
Texas: St. Rick Santorm beats Obama in a landslide? http://www.texastribune.org/te.....eld-texas/
What Should Our Iran Policy Be?
This is merely an academic question because the powerful Israel Lobby will push us into a war with Iran. The most likely scenario is that Israel will start something they can’t finish and then we’ll be compelled to step in.
I say this because sanctions have never worked in the past and won’t work this time, either. I’m not saying sanctions shouldn’t be applied to Iran; they should for several reasons: (1) to extract a price from Iran for its nuclear activities, (2) to weaken Iran militarily and economically, and (3) to undercut the already unpopular regime. But don’t expect sanctions to deter Iran’s mullahs from acquiring nuclear weaponry — they won’t.
The West faces an either-or proposition: Either destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, or let Iran get the bomb. Israel knows this. And the longer we wait, the harder it will be to get at those facilities, because Iran is hardening and undergrounding them at a furious pace. Iran also is stepping up its uranium separation activities to produce weapons-grade material faster. These are the reasons why Israel is champing at the bit and becoming increasingly prone to act unilaterally.
But should Israel and/or the U.S. go to war to stop the Iranian bomb? Is that a rational decision, or a rash one?
Israel is emotionally involved and can’t make a detached judgment, not only because of their proximity to Iran, but also because of their history rooted in the Holocaust. That’s why our government needs to exert pressure on Israel’s leaders to do the sensible thing.
The question that needs to be considered is this: If Iran gets the bomb, so what?
Nuclear weapons are militarily useless. The only time they’ve ever been used was when one country had a monopoly on them — a monopoly that will never again exist. Today, no country can use them. Russia has had the bomb for 60 years and never used it. China has had the bomb for nearly 40 years and hasn’t used it. India and Pakistan are both nuclear-armed, and even though they are neighbors in conflict, they haven’t used it. South Africa’s apartheid regime had the bomb and didn’t use it even to preserve itself. North Korea has the bomb and hasn’t used it.
Iran getting the bomb, in and of itself, wouldn’t be the end of the world. No matter what incendiary rhetoric Iran’s hyperactive president spews, Iran won’t use the bomb either, for the same reasons other governments haven’t used it. For one thing, Ahmadinejad isn’t that crazy, but even if he is, he would be overruled — he’s an employee, not a supreme leader, and he doesn’t make that decision.
But just to make doubly sure that no one in the Iranian regime is ever tempted to use the bomb, we should do the same thing we’ve done in other parts of the world: Put Israel under our “nuclear umbrella,” do what Kennedy did in 1962, i.e., tell Iran and the world that a nuclear attack by Iran against Israel or any other country will be treated as an attack on the United States and will draw a U.S. retaliation. In other words, if they ever use the bomb against anyone, they’ll be annihilated. That policy has kept the peace ever since the dawn of the Nuclear Age, and it’ll work in the future, too.
If Iran gets the bomb, it’ll probably spur other Gulf countries to acquire nuclear arms, too — including Saudi Arabia, which has specifically signaled that it would seek to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan. Egypt would go nuclear, too. Probably so, too, would Turkey and maybe even some former Soviet republics. This would raise the discomfort level in that part of the world, but it wouldn’t necessarily kill anyone. And it wouldn’t necessarily last forever; Iran’s regime is highly unpopular, likely will fall someday, and there’s already precedent for a nuclear nation returning to non-nuclear status after regime change — South Africa.
Against those prospects, we must weigh the certain costs and consequences of a war with Iran. An unknown number of people. In addition to military casualties, there would be Iranian civilian casualties — and also Israeli civilian casualties if the Iran regime makes good its threats to respond to a military attack against it by bombarding Israel with its long-range missiles. And it might require a bloody ground invasion to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities and keep them from being rebuilt. All in all, it’s really questionable whether it’s worth a war to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons. We should, of course, continue to hinder them with all other means at our disposal.
But this isn’t the popular course of action, and isn’t the course our policymakers will follow, because no one can get elected by arguing we should let Iran get the bomb. The American public will be rah-rah for “taking it out” by military means, or at least letting the Israelis do so. And Israel has a very powerful lobbying presence in D.C. It’s simply not plausible that reason will prevail in that environment.
This will be an emotional decision, and because Iran won’t back off, there’s going to be a war in the Persian Gulf, and probably very soon. When it happens, gas prices will go through the roof, the entire world will fall back into recession, the stock market will tank, and Roger Rabbit will become a war profiteer by scooping up cheap stocks. Wtf, I tried to talk our government out of it (see above), so don’t blame it on me. If you humans insist on acting like fools, I’ll take your money and run with it. I’d be a fool not to.
Erratum @16: Should read: “An unknown number of people would die.”