A Blog Version Of The Inside Of My Head. The place where politics, film, the media, music, pop culture, and random topics collide in an orgy of neo-philisophical randomness that would make your mother scream.
Considering that there is a great deal of research showing that it is a positive health benefit for a man to drink 1 or 2 beers a day, I would think that a 6 foot 1 1/2 inch man like Obama could easily drink 3 or 4 beers a day without there being an actual negative effect of concern to a doctor.
How much is Obama drinking?
Naturally, this was a headline over at Drudge, but is nothing more than a very typical response from any physician when writing out a health screening report. If you drink or smoke, EVERY doctor is going to insist on moderation.
But since this is the President, this little innocuous piece of medical information can easily be wedged into a narrative that this man "plays fast and lose" with his job and his life - therefor he can't be trusted.
Once again, style over substance is shown to be the only way conservatives can discuss anything. They're like a Micheal Bay film, all explosions and no plotline.
While Dick Morris made the laughable and easily debunked statement that there has never been a criticism against Obama - by conservatives - predicated on race, he must have forgotten the man that essentially sets the message for the conservative movement.
While there is a heavy doseage of snark mixed in with Limbaugh's racially charged rant, it should be pointed out that this is exactly what president Carter was talking about when he spoke of racism that boils within certain cross-sections of the American public.
And while the likes of Drudge and Malkin* are willing to do as much as they can to gin up racial animosity in this country, the message is often set by the likes of Rush Limbaugh.
So, for someone like Dick Morris to state as fact that conservatives have not used racially motivated speech to express their displeasure with Obama is patently and utter false. I feel like a need a Congressman Joe Wilson soundbite for this.
* While Malkin initially, in all her reactionary fury, dove headlong into her writing up the story from the "white victim" perspective, she has apparently realized that the police do not see this as motivated by race. However, her response to that was that it must have been due to what happens when people allege a racial component to an incident. In other words, she still thinks the same way.
One of the conservative-right's latest claims, though they have little to no verifiable information which this is based on, is that the Obama administration are "threatening" corporations. This talking-point has its origins within the resignation of GM CEO Rick Wagoner and the simple fact that Obama is from Chicago - you know, gangsters and what-not.
Since the Right is, by all accounts, out of power on multiple fronts, the only option they have left is to embellish what the Obama administration is doing or outright fabricate their paranoid ramblings from whole cloth.
The latest is their telling of how Obama is using the White House press corp as a weapon against Chrysler.
I'll let some of the lunatic-fringe best tell their side of it first.
An attorney representing several Chrysler bondholders accused the Obama administration of intimidating his clients by issuing threats of public humiliation if they opposed their brokered deal to resolve the automaker’s debts. Speaking to WJR, Thomas Lauria said that the White House called the bondholders “vultures” for insisting on their rights as senior creditors and told them that the Obama administration would use the White House press corps to attack them in the media.
Over the weekend, news broke about the Obama administration’s reported threats against an investment firm that opposed its union-friendly Chrysler bankruptcy plan.
Tom Lauria represents a few of the non-TARP Chrysler creditors. He reported the threats on WJR radio host , radio show in Detroit
The Chrysler reorganization is shaping up as another milestone in the decline of the rule of law under Barack Obama. We've said for quite a while that bankruptcy is the only viable option for Chrysler and General Motors, not--as Obama claims--because they don't know how to make the right kinds of vehicles, but because their unsustainable union contracts make it impossible for them to be profitable. That reality has now been turned on its head, as the administration has tried to bully Chrysler's secured creditors into going away, while the United Auto Workers Union, solely on the basis of political clout, would be paid at an implied rate of 50 percent and would emerge owning 55 percent of the company, with the government also holding a stake.
The hedge-funders wanted a quarter-of-a-billion more than what the treasury was willing to offer and decided to see who would finch first. The Obama adminstration declined their deal and this is where the "thuggery" claim of the Right comes in.
Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post writes of the Hedge Funds and their desire to drain as much out of this deal as they can.
Since when did any of these guys ever worry about fairness?
Certainly fairness was not an overriding concern of hedge-fund managers when they threatened to move even more of their operations to the Cayman Islands if forced to pay a regular tax rate on their exorbitant management fees.
But now that these hedgies are looking at the butt end of a government-imposed cramdown that would give them only 30 cents of each dollar owed by Chrysler, suddenly they're all about fairness and the rule of law.
What you need to know about these vultures is that their idea of fairness is throwing 100,000 people out of work and denying retirees their pensions and their health benefits just so they can liquidate the company and maybe squeeze an extra 15 cents on the dollar from their Chrysler debt.
A corporate lawyer who is representing the hedge funds - under the name "Committee of Chrysler Non-Tarp Lenders", because the words "non-TARP" is quite appealing to Republicans - first laid out the claim that the Obama administration had "threatened" one of their investment firms investment firm Perella Weinberg.
Interestingly enough, Weinberg was a former investment partner of Rahm Emanuel.
*note the blatant right-wing spin in the accompanying video*
The Rahm / Weiinberg connection provides covering fire for the hedge fundies in nothing more than a thinly veiled accusation. But, lives have been distroyed and companies reduced to nothing on less than this. Such is the operation of the lunatic-fringe Right.
But, they don't stop there.
After Frank Beckmann interviewed Tom Lauria, it was time to peddle the story to the WH Press Corp. You know, that entity that is so often ridiculed by the Right and now - all of a sudden - they are afraid of.
Of course, this just may be a coincidence, but Jake Tapper works for ABC - just like Mark Levin.
A leading bankruptcy attorney representing hedge funds and money managers told ABC News Saturday that Steve Rattner, the leader of the Obama administration's Auto Industry Task Force, threatened one of the firms, an investment bank, that if it continued to oppose the administration's Chrysler bankruptcy plan, the White House would use the White House press corps to destroy its reputation
And just like clockwork, Drudge picks it up.
And once everything came to a boil, Weinberg and The White House have told ABC that Lauria's and the lunatic-fringe Right are wrong.
...representatives for the Obama administration and Perella Weinberg challenged the accuracy of the account by Thomas E. Lauria, the White & Case lawyer representing the handful of hedge funds calling themselves the Committee of Chrysler Non-Tarp Lenders.
“The charge is of course false as both parties who would know the facts have pointed out,” Bill Burton, a White House spokesman, told DealBook. “It is neither substantiated by people involved in the conversations nor by what has transpired over the course of the last couple of days
But will it matter to the fringe conservative bloggers, pundits, Fox"News", and their base? Not at all. The metaphorical mmixture has been stirred into a frenzy and the desired reaction has already started.
From the alchemist's perspective, you have your individual components that you have manipulated and have - in some cases - meshed together. Others, you have filtered and split into their base elements and then taken pieces of each compound and attempted to create a whole new chemical. In this case, that new chemical is a lie.
You almost have to give the wingers credit for actually using the "socialist" label in a somewhat rational format. To bad they still don't understand what they are talking about.
The right wing has discovered that Carol Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s new White House energy and environment adviser, was briefly a member of the Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society. The commission first convened in November 2007 to “articulate from the world of progressive politics a way forward to address global environmental concerns, climate change and the issues of governance required to deal with these common challenges” at 10 Downing Street, hosted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Leader of the British Labour Party.
One of the more interesting points that comes from these reacitonary voices is that this group is guilty only of having the word "Social" in its name. It's a group that not only attempt to address climate change, but promote democracy in developing countries.
The whole theatrical approach toward attacking people serves the right-wing prattle-heads little good. Since they have no reasonable means to discuss issues such as climate change, environmental awareness, diplomacy, or any array of social-political topics that don't include the phrases "drill-baby-drill" or "surge", they have to structure their entire argument around redefining words such as "socialism" and "fascism" so they now seem equal to Democratic practices.
You can start to see Drudge's propaganda showing more and more when he chooses the Nickelodeon "Kids Poll" in order to show that McCain just might still have a chance.
Drudge and National Review's Campaign Spot -- with a measure of conscious self-parody -- link the Nickelodeon Kids poll, which has Obama up only two points.
It's an online poll. Of kids.
"The Nickelodeon Kids' Poll is one of those polls that is always interesting to keep an eye on," writes NR's Geraghty.
If you really wanted to stretch for some rationalization, for all the "realiability" you can get from this poll, this just might reflect something positive that mommy or daddy had to say about McCain or Obama at dinner one night.
Be sure to keep an eye out for Drudge and NRO's new poll of likely Marvel Superhero voters.
