it's catchy, don't you think
Bonus! Friends don't let Wookies drive drunk. Or something like that.
Best Headline Ever
Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein:
What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.Fast forward 50 years for the best Swiss pub reminiscence of all time: "Günter, remember that time we accidentally invaded Liechtenstein…?"
According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.
A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion. ''We've spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it's not a problem,'' Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.
Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident. Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. ''It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something,'' he said.
Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn't have an army.
Hat tip to Shaker EF via email and SAP in comments.
Quote of the Day
"I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I—so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” — Ann Coulter, at the at the Conservative Political Action Conference today. Think Progress has the video. Via Atrios.
[Heads-Up: It would be a pity to read misogynistic or transphobic comments in response to this. Be better than her.]
Hi-Keeba!
Ho! Ha-ha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
You've heard of tuna melts, and patty melts... well how about... squirrel melts?
(Probably not for the squeamish, or if you're like me and just plain 'ol like our little skwerl friends.)
Hi-YAH!
Spudsy, I see your Christian Clown Training Videos and I raise you one 1984 Public Service Announcement starring Henry "The Fonz" Winkler, John Ritter, and an assorted collection of weirdos. It's about a very serious and unfunny topic, but I dare you to get through it without laughing and/or recoiling in horror.
Our anus is a useful thing indeed.
The anus gives relief in time of need.
Via Recon.
Caption This Photo
Video Fu
(With advance apologies to SAP)
Well, I can't just let that Mr. T video go by with no response, can I? May I present, your Friday Taste of Unimaginable Horror: Christian Clown Training Videos! Aiiiiiiieeee!!
"Clowns can look rather intimidating when you see a lot of them in one place."
Part the Second:
Bad touch! Bad Touch!
Call me nuts, but I think sending a pack of clowns into a nursing home to sneak around silently, creeping up behind people and popping out from behind pillars is a good way to clear out that place in a hurry. Lots of free beds, if you know what I mean and I think ya do.
"Don't mess with the bull young man, you'll get the horns."
We have an ordinary kitchen in what appears to be a middle class home. The time on the stove and microwave read 3:00, so it is afternoon. A woman, mid-thirties, sits on a stool at the kitchen island sipping tea and flipping through a magazine. A radio is playing in the background and we clearly hear that it is a Pennsylvania suburb.
Door opens. Boy or girl, age approximately twelve, enters. Child walks in, takes off coat, puts backpack on floor.
Mom: Hello, honey. How was school today?
Child: (noncommittal) Fine. (Child opens what appears to be a pantry and looks for something to eat)
Mom: Anything interesting happen today? (takes sip of tea)
Child: (turns, smirks) Oh, the principal was arrested for dealing meth and he was naked and watching porn in his office when it happened.
Mom chokes on tea.
And it's not just a fictional scenario!
As authorities stormed into a middle school office to arrest an alleged meth-dealing principal inside, they found an even more surprising scene inside.Yikes.
Sources said 50-year-old John Acerra, of Allentown, was naked and watching gay pornography when they arrived at Nitschmann Middle School in Bethlehem to arrest him on Tuesday.
Acerra also had sex toys, drugs, cash and a pipe in his school office when authorities stormed his office, the sources added.
(title from The Breakfast Club)
Rudy McRomney
Conservatives not happy with GOP candidates leading the field:
Leading conservatives yesterday attacked the Republican party as big-government, free-spending coddlers of illegal immigrants and said the country's conservatives should withhold support from the GOP's current slate of presidential nominees to force them to the right.Rudy McRomney. I wonder what he would look like?
…"We should withhold support from all major Republican [presidential] candidates today. Not one of them deserves our support today," [Richard Viguerie , chairman of Conservative-HQ.com] told a ballroom full of activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference's annual meeting yesterday.
…At least one conference participant sported a sticker that featured a circle with a line drawn through the words "Rudy McRomney"—broadcasting the wearer's opposition to the early leaders in polls for the GOP nomination, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani , Senator John McCain of Arizona, and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
Eugh.
Steve Benen's got an interesting post on former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore, the possible Republican candidate that just may be "the proverbial bomb-thrower who’s prepared to burn the house down." He's not shy about agreeing that Rudy McRomney is far too liberal for good conservatives.
Friday Cat Blogging
Tildy sitting in the tub, playing one of her
favorite games: Catch the Drip with My Paw!
How much is that Livy in the mirror?
The one with the cutesy pink nose!
Cue Insane, Spittle-Flecked Rants in 5, 4, 3, 2....
As I'm sure you're all aware, Michael Savage isn't exactly known for his progressive attitude towards the gays. Well, he's not known for his progressive attitude towards anything. But his history of homophobic hysteria is truly extreme. Remember this gem?SAVAGE: So you're one of those sodomists. Are you a sodomite?
What a guy! ("Sodomists" still makes me chuckle.)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, I am.
SAVAGE: Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it. Get trichinosis.
OK, do we have another nice caller here who's busy because he didn't have a nice night in the bathhouse who's angry at me today? Get me another one, put another sodomite on. No more calls out of--let's go to the next scene. I don't care about these bums. They mean nothing to me. They're all sausages. Next scene; onto the next scene on the Savage Nation.
Well, Melissa Etheridge's Academy Award win didn't sit too well with him, either.
"I don't like a woman married to a woman. It makes me want to puke. How's that? I want to vomit when I hear it...I want to puke when I hear about a woman married to a woman raising children because, frankly, I think that it's child abuse to do that to children without their permission. What does a child know? Ask them when they're 16 whether they want to be raised by two lesbians or two men. What are the two men doing behind the other wall? You think the children don't hear it?"Given that Savage really hates homosexuals, and given that he's, shall we say, a little unhinged, I'm sure that the rants about this little episode will be truly epic.
When a caller phoned in to Savage's show asking what he should tell his children, who saw Etheridge give Michaels a kiss on national television, Savage responded:
"I will tell you how you answer it: You say there are people who are sexually confused, who think that they're men when they're women. They're not normal. Normal people are not like that. Normal people are like Mommy and Daddy. Mommy and Daddy are normal. There are people who are not normal, who have a confusion in their head, and they think they're a man even though they look like a woman. That's what you have to say to them otherwise the child will grow up confused."
Melissa Etheridge doesn't have to worry about running into one of radio's most antigay personalities when she's visiting her powerhouse agency, Creative Artists Agency (CAA).So that's twice that Savage has lost a job due to the meddling of teh gays omg!
TMZ reported earlier today that CAA recently signed Michael Savage, who hosts the conservative radio program Savage Nation.
Savage has a history of spewing homophobic rhetoric. Savage was fired from MSNBC in 2003 for referring to an unidentified caller to his weekend show on the cable channel as a "sodomite" who should "get AIDS and die." And just this week, he reportedly went off on Etheridge's Oscar win, because she had thanked her wife, Tammy Lynn Michaels, during her acceptance speech. "I don't like a woman married to a woman," he said, according to TMZ. "It makes me want to puke. I want to vomit when I hear it. I think it's child abuse."
It looks like Savage's life at CAA was short-lived. I just got word from CAA's rep, who said in an email, "No longer rep him."
Kudos to CAA, even though it's a little beyond me that they signed him up in the first place. At least it only took them three days to wise up and realize that Savage is poison.
(Energy Dome tip to Towelroad.)
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!
29%
His approval on Iraq is even lower: 23%. And his approval rating among Republicans has fallen 13 points since October, from 78% to 65%. Ouch.
Barack Obama: Person of Faith
On the February 28 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, during a segment discussing the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, the church to which Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) belongs, co-host Sean Hannity stated that "many" call Trinity "separatist," adding that "in some cases, even drawing comparisons to a cult." Guest Erik Rush, a columnist for the conservative website WorldNetDaily, said that the church's "scary doctrine" is "something that you'd see in more like a cult or an Aryan Brethren Church or something like that."
…Referring to "The Black Value System," which is advocated by Trinity, Rush stated: "I would go beyond saying that they're Afrocentric. They're African-centric. They refer to themselves as an African people, and that somewhat disturbs me from the viewpoint of, well, do they consider themselves Americans? Do they consider themselves Christians? Are they worshipping Christ? Are they worshipping African things black? Well, I mean, what is it?" Later in the segment, when co-host Alan Colmes asked: "Are you questioning Barack Obama's Christianity?" Rush responded simply: "Yeah."
Could Sean Hannity have said "black" more times during that clip?
This is why the Democrats can't win the faith game and shouldn't even try. I've read over and over how Obama speaks about his faith more naturally than any other modern Dem, and yet not just his Christianity, but his patriotism and loyalty, are nonetheless being openly questioned on national television. And it has nothing to do with his church or their value system—they're just a handy tool by which to remind people that he's black and scary and probably a traitor like every other liberal.
Obama has answered conservatives' criticisms of his church by pointing out the admittedly amusing irony of their issues with its value system: "Commitment to God, black community, commitment to the black family, the black work ethic, self-discipline and self-respect. Those are values that the conservative movement in particular has suggested are necessary for black advancement. So I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a document that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help."
Good point—and yet a better one might be: "My faith is no one's business but my own, because I have no interest in legislating it." Period.
Democrats continually fail to use every opportunity given to them to highlight the fundamental and mighty big difference between believers and theocrats. They seem chronically averse to stating the obvious: One's faith is fair game for criticism the moment it becomes the justification for one's policy positions. (Only then, and especially then.) It's an issue of private faith vs. public faith—and "talking about God" isn't public faith; exclusively using the Bible to defend one's position on same-sex marriage is.
Instead, the Dems try to out-faith the GOP, only to find that their faith is never strong enough, expressed authentically enough, or rooted in an accepted denomination, anyhow. Meanwhile, legitimate critiques of doctrine used to justify regressive and oppressive legislation is considered off-limits, called bigotry far and wide, because the institutional left resists saying, plainly, "If you have an interest in legislating it, it's fair game." Playing the faith game by GOP rules is futile; the Dems' time would be better spent acknowledging that we all believe different stuff and that's okay, because people of good will can arrive at the same positions and work together even if they don't believe the same things.
It's time to give up the ghost on this one. It's a pointless pursuit and has created, as a frustrating byproduct, a significant problem in our national discourse:
The alliance of "people of faith", both organizationally and rhetorically, has created an artificial distinction between "believers" and "nonbelievers," perpetuated the notion that what you believe is unimportant as long as you have faith in something, and reduced any public discussion of the genuine differences in belief that exist.And when there is any discussion about the difference in belief, it's pathetic, juvenile stuff: ZOMG Mitt Romney's ancestors were polygamists and WTF Barack Obama's church is a cult! Yeesh.
Nothing would make me happier than if, for the foreseeable future, Democrats had no other comments on the subject of faith than "My faith is no one's business but my own, because I have no interest in legislating it" and "If you have an interesting in legislating it, it's fair game."
Interesting
The story of the Bush administration's federal prosecutor purge—in which eight U.S. attorneys were fired in December, allegedly to make room for Bush loyalists, a charge the Justice Department denies—has just gotten even more interesting. And by interesting, I mean interesting.
Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico pressured the U.S. attorney in their state to speed up indictments in a federal corruption investigation that involved at least one former Democratic state senator, according to two people familiar with the contacts.Okay, that's just creepy.
The alleged involvement of the two Republican lawmakers raises questions about possible violations of House of Representatives and Senate ethics rules and could taint the criminal investigation into the award of an $82 million courthouse contract.
The two people with knowledge of the incident said Domenici and Wilson intervened in mid-October, when Wilson was in a competitive re-election campaign that she won by 875 votes out of nearly 211,000 cast.
David Iglesias, who stepped down as U.S. attorney in New Mexico on Wednesday, told McClatchy Newspapers that he believed the Bush administration fired him Dec. 7 because he resisted the pressure to rush an indictment.
According to the two individuals, Domenici and Wilson called to press Iglesias for details of the case.
Wilson was curt after Iglesias was "non-responsive" to her questions about whether an indictment would be unsealed, said the two individuals, who asked not to be identified because they feared possible political repercussions. Rumors had spread throughout the New Mexico legal community that an indictment of at least one Democrat was sealed.
Domenici, who wasn't up for re-election, called about a week and a half later and was more persistent than Wilson, the people said. When Iglesias said an indictment wouldn't be handed down until at least December, the line went dead.
No one has been charged yet. Yesterday, the indefatigable Rep. John Conyers, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, issued subpoenas to compel Iglesias, along with three more of the dismissed prosecutors, to testify before the judiciary subcommittee next week.
The judiciary subcommittee on administrative law authorized the subpoenas by a 7-0 vote. The five Republican members of the subcommittee didn't show up for the vote.Of course they didn't.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Patrick Leahy, is "sending letters to the same four asking them to testify voluntary" next week as well.
Memories…
…may be beautiful and yet, what's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget…
Via Arlen, who explains that "Kerry" is Kerry Healey, Mitt Romney's 2002 gubernatorial running-mate.
Question of the Day
What's your favorite political movie?
By which I mean, a movie specifically about politics, as opposed to a movie that generally makes a political statement.
