;)
The Commentariat -- March 9, 2014
Martin Pengelly of the Guardian: "President Barack Obama on Saturday spoke to world leaders including David Cameron of Great Britain and François Hollande of France about the continuing crisis in Ukraine. Also on Saturday, secretary of state John Kerry warned his Russian counterpart that any steps to annex the Crimea region would 'close any available space for diplomacy'." ...
... In a Washington Post op-ed, Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attributes the Ukraine crisis to the Obama administration's "reset" of relations with Russia. ...
... CW: What you see here is the shaping of the 2016 presidential campaign. If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, we are going to hear again & again that she weakened the U.S.'s standing in the world, from emboldening the Russians to letting terrorists get away with murder (see Rand Paul/Benghaaaazi below). ...
... Historian Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books on Putin's takeover of the Crimea: "... propaganda is all that unites the tactics and the dream, and that unity turns out to be wishful. There is no actual policy, no strategy, just a talented and tortured tyrant oscillating between mental worlds that are connected only by a tissue of lies." ...
... David Remnick of the New Yorker on "Putin's pique."
Maureen Dowd sets up one her Diss-Obama columns, but she ends up criticizing everybody: Republicans, Democrats, pundits & Obama. Seems fair. ...
... Here's Obama, misspelling "RESPECT." CW: Sorry, I'm not shocked & horrified:
Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post: "One day after riveting a packed convention ballroom, tea party darling Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) topped the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll, his second consecutive victory in the conservative confab's contest. Paul won 31 percent of the vote (compared with the 25 percent he won last year), beating a crowded field of more than two dozen names, including a number of potential 2016 GOP presidential contenders. He crushed second-place finisher Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who came in with 11 percent." ...
Oh, just listen:
... Here's proof of Bachmann's claim to an "intellectual movement":
... Missed this one: Aqua Buddha Despatches the Clintons. Alexandra Jaffe of the Hill: "Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Friday knocked former President Clinton as a 'throwback to a sort of troglodyte time,' where men took advantage of women in the workplace.... He said, however, he doesn't believe Clinton's indiscretions should disqualify his wife from the presidency. However, 'not sending reinforcements into Benghazi should disqualify her,' he said."
Hillary Stout, et al., of the New York Times: "Federal safety regulators received more than 260 complaints over the last 11 years about General Motors vehicles that suddenly turned off while being driven, but they declined to investigate the problem, which G.M. now says is linked to 13 deaths and requires the recall of more than 1.6 million cars worldwide."
The First Amendment Meets the Second Amendment. Andrew Wolfson of the Louisville Courier-Journal: "In an effort its spokesman has described as 'outreach to rednecks,' the Kentucky Baptist Convention is leading 'Second Amendment Celebrations,' where churches around the state give away guns as door prizes to lure in nonbelievers in hopes of converting them to Christ." Via Steve Benen. ...
... Glenn Blain & Rich Schapiro of the New York Daily News: "An upstate [New York] pastor is planning to give away an unholy raffle prize at an upcoming service: an AR-15 assault rifle. 'We're honoring gun owners and hunters,' the Rev. John Koletas, pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Troy, told the Daily News. 'And we're being a blessing and a help to people who have been attacked, viciously attacked, by socialists and anti-Christian people -- the politicians and the media.'" Also via Benen.
Congressional Race
Lizette Alvarez of the New York Times on the special election -- to be held Tuesday -- to replace long-time Florida GOP Rep. Bill Young.
News Ledes
Guardian: "Vice-President Joe Biden has given a stark assessment of the ongoing unrest in Venezuela, accusing President Nicolás Maduro of widespread human rights violations and saying the situation reminded him of Latin America's troubled and violent past. In a written interview with El Mercurio of Chile, where Biden arrived on Sunday at the start of his seventh official visit to the region, he called the unstable situation in Venezuela 'alarming' and said the Caracas government lacked even basic respect for human rights."
Los Angeles Times: "At least a dozen Greek Orthodox nuns kidnapped by Syrian rebels near Damascus in December were released on Sunday, according to Syria's official news agency and Lebanese media reports."
Guardian: "... John Kerry on Sunday released a statement marking the seventh anniversary of the disappearance of Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent who went missing on an Iranian island and was last year reported to have been working for the CIA at the time."
Washington Post: "Vietnamese aircraft located possible debris from the vanished Malaysia Airlines plane late Sunday, including a rectangular object that could have been a door, but officials said it was too dark to confirm if they came from the airliner. Experts had been puzzled by the failure to find debris from the airliner nearly two days after it disappeared from radar screens in the Gulf of Thailand and was presumed to have crashed with 239 people on board."
New York Times: "... the discovery that two of the passengers [aboard the Malaysian airliner that disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand] were carrying stolen passports also raised the unsettling possibility of foul play." ...
... The Guardian is liveblogging developments.
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Reader Comments (10)
Re: Once a great nation; I've got one take on the crisis in the Ukraine. No matter which American says what; we've lost our creed. The events of the last two decades and how our policy has played out concerning those events makes us unable to judge damn near any action taken by others. "You do it too" is the new slogan of international diplomacy. Putin could work with a national news service such as produced by Fox. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts the Russian national news studies Fox broadcasts for the latest in distorting and delivering the "truth".
Business is pretty bad when churches need to have raffles to stay afloat. If it is ok to raffle a killing machine, should I assume that raffling vibrators and blow up dolls is unacceptable because they will impel their owners to debase themselves with animalistic behaviors of an un-Christian kind?
I managed to get through the video of Michell's Bachmannese without going off on a tangent although she left a distinct taste of distaste in that mouth of mine. But Palin? couldn't finish. I hate watching her snarky self being so pleased that she can get the crowds to rally round her with cheers and wet pants (I imagine). The pity here is how poor Ted Geisel is being used by the Wingers when he, himself, (except for the poor judgement re: the internment of the Japanese which he later regretted) was a liberal and a progressive. If he knew the likes of Cruz and Palin were turning his words around, he just might slap a sue on the likes of those two.
"The line "A person's a person, no matter how small!!" from Horton Hears a Who! has been used widely as a slogan by the anti-abortion movement in the U.S., despite the objections of Geisel's widow. While Geisel preferred to let his work speak for itself, he did occasionally speak out to protect his characters from exploitation. In 1986, when the line was first used by the pro-life movement, he demanded a retraction and received one." (Wiki)
Well, how appropriate: Guns and God–––one fires, the other fans the flames. Yep, nothin like gettin a gun as a raffle or door prize fer praisen Jezus in the House of the Lord. Fair exchange, I'd say. Makes me want to get my old dog, get me an old red pickup, a double-breasted shotgun, put on my old pink cotton print dress, the one with the side pockets, and go up to that Baptist Church in Troy and get me one of them prizes. I surely do need two guns to keep them anti-Christians at bay––believe me! Or not.
@PD Pepe: i'm with you on Palin. I couldn't get all the eay through her screed, either. Sarah never got out of junior high and behaves accordingly.
Why shouldn't certain churches give away guns since guns are what they really worship.?
The Malaysian airliner mystery raises an interesting question: Can you have a terrorist attack when nobody owns up to it as a terrorist attack?
Condoleeza Rice has a lot of n erve lecturing about how to conduct an effective foreign policy. A person who did what she did and had any sense of shame would just slip into the darkness never to be heard from again. But then, that's not the Republican way. (See Cheney, Dick; on CBS this morning).
The Shoot a Liberal for Jesus weapon giveaways are more evidence that it's hatred, fear, and power that command the Christian right, not love, kindness, charity, or humility.
Instead of "convert them with acts of love" it's "stand your ground and waste the bastards". I must have missed that part in the Sermon on the Mount that declared that "the most well armed murderous creeps will inherit the Earth".
And seriously folks, if you have to resort to handing out deadly weapons to unstable knuckleheads to boost your thinning ranks and offer, as a not so subtle excuse, the dire neccesity of murdering those who disagree with you (in self defense, of course, like that nice Zimmerman boy), then you've already lost.
And you've lost BIG.
Now who's the anti-Christ, you hypocritical assholes??
Re Mrs. Palin, Charles Pierce has one of the best takedowns I've read in a while (sorry, I don't know how to embed the link). http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/sarah-palin-cpac-2014-030814?click=feed
He absolutely nails it, describing her as an "ignorant, two-wheeled bilewagon, "an "ambulatiory bag of rank resentment," and a "living representation of the infantilization of American politics, a poisonous Grimm Sister telling toxic fairy tales to audiences drunk on fear, and hate and nonsense."
Priceless.
Victoria,
Had Condi Rice the meanest acquaintance with the concept of shame, she would have resigned in 2003 in a paroxysm of self-loathing and hied herself hence, with all speed, to the nearest nunnery, there to flog herself in pennance with the tattered remnants of the Constitution for her part in encouraging and abetting mass murder on a grand scale.
But, as you say, the word "shame" has been extirpated, with prejudice, along with words like "responsibility" and "law", from the conservative lexicon, never to annoy or disturb the unethical or immoral reveries of the most criminally inclined wingnuts allowing them carte blanche to exercise their most base hypocrisies and smirking cynicisms.
In other words, dream on.
Rockygirl,
Charlie, as always, conjures up the right combination of moral outrage and lexical kick-boxing moves in putting non compos mentis prevaricators like Palin on the canvas.
Palin's wild popularity with the pablum pukers is proof positive, not just of the infantilization, as Pierce puts it, of contemporary conservatives, but of the frightening and unapolagetic stupidity and cartoonishness of their core values.
It's like a major political party with a malicious and venal Howdy Doody as it's leader. I mean, WTF?
And like most of you, I couldn't make it through either video. The conjunction of the name "Bachmann" and the word "intellectual" induces either gut busting guffaws or a psychotic break. Actually, both.
And the sight of Palin, smirking, snarling, and winking like a deranged, twinkly 12 year old defiling Dr. Seuss
is better than ipecac.