Thursday, November 3, 2011
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Hey, Alabama! Stephen Colbert TOLD YOU SO (about your B.S. Immigration Law)!!!
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
And yes, here's Colbert's complete actual Testimony in front of Congress:
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Why Sen. Marco Rubio is finished (as a potential Vice Presidential Candidate)
Remember, Marco Rubio did not lie. He took advantage of a lie to promote his Political biography. And when caught, he has waffled between doubling-down on the lie he took advantage of, and well...waffling even more.
As Chris Matthews explains in the clip below, in Politics you are either attacking or explaining.
Rubio is now into week two of explaining.
This here's coming out an inch at a time...and there's at least a few more feet to go.
From the St. Petersburg Times:
From Politico (and mind you, these are the stories from today):
And the Washington Post:
As Chris Matthews explains in the clip below, in Politics you are either attacking or explaining.
Rubio is now into week two of explaining.
This here's coming out an inch at a time...and there's at least a few more feet to go.
From the St. Petersburg Times:
On May 18, 1956, Mario and Oriales Rubio walked into the American Consulate in Havana and applied for immigrant visas. The form asked how long they intended to stay in the United States.
"Permanently," Mr. Rubio answered.
Nine days later, the couple boarded a National Airlines flight to Miami, where a relative awaited.
So began a journey that seems as ordinary as any immigrant story, but decades later served as the foundation of an extraordinary and moving narrative told repeatedly by their third child as he became one of the most powerful politicians in Florida and then a national figure.
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has come under fire for incorrectly linking his parents to the Cubans who fled Fidel Castro beginning in 1959. He insists they are exiles nonetheless and angrily denounced the suggestion he misled for political gain.
"My upbringing taught me that America was special and different from the rest of the world, and also a real sense that you can lose your country," Rubio said in an interview this week.
But the visa documents cast clearer divisions between his parents, who came for economic reasons, and the Cubans who scrambled to leave their homeland but thought they could soon return. And the documents come to light amid new discrepancies since Rubio's time line came under scrutiny last week.
From Politico (and mind you, these are the stories from today):
In Miami’s Little Havana, the Cuban exile community has rallied to the defense of its favorite son, Sen. Marco Rubio, as he fights off allegations he embellished his family history to boost his meteoric political career.
But well beyond Calle Ocho, the freshman Florida Republican still faces a bigger challenge selling himself to the broader Hispanic electorate. Rubio is expected to encounter tough questions from voters and activists over his hard-line stance on immigration as he heads to Texas and possibly Arizona next week to court Hispanic voters and high-dollar donors. As his personal history morphs into a national political story, it’s clear Rubio still has plenty of skeptics in the Latino political community.
“He is a laughing stock in the Southwest … because people discovered he wasn’t telling the truth about his political Cuban exile history,” said DeeDee Garcia Blase, founder of Somos Republicans, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based GOP group that backs a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. “They are saying, at the end of the day, ‘He is just like us. His mom and dad came here; they migrated because of economic reasons, just like the rest of us.’”
The controversy about when — and under what circumstances — his family arrived in the U.S. has proved to be the first major test for the rising GOP star as he transitions from Sunshine State politics to the national stage, where the exile experience that he’s embraced doesn’t resonate among non-Cuban Hispanics as much as it does in the quaint cafes and bustling streets of Little Havana.
That cultural divide between his home crowd and the larger Latino electorate could pose a problem for Republicans who have billed Rubio, a favorite for the vice presidential spot in 2012, as their party’s great Hispanic hope.
And the Washington Post:
Republicans who are eager to repair the party’s battered image among Hispanic voters and unseat President Obama next year have long promoted a single-barrel solution to their two-pronged problem: putting Sen. Marco Rubio on the national ticket.
The charismatic Cuban American lawmaker from Florida, the theory goes, could prompt Hispanics to consider supporting the GOP ticket — even after a primary contest in which dust-ups over illegal immigration have left some conservative Hispanics uneasy.
But Rubio’s role in recent controversies, including a dispute with the country’s biggest Spanish-language television network and new revelations that he had mischaracterized his family’s immigrant story, shows that any GOP bet on his national appeal could be risky.
Democrats had already questioned whether a Cuban American who has voiced conservative views on immigration and opposed the historic Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina justice, could appeal to a national Hispanic electorate of which Cubans are just a tiny fraction but have special immigration status. And Rubio’s support in Florida among non-Cuban Hispanics has been far less pronounced than among his fellow Cubans.
That ethnic calculus was further complicated by records, reported by The Washington Post last week, showing that Rubio had incorrectly portrayed his parents as exiles who fled Cuba after the rise of Fidel Castro. In fact, their experience more closely resembles that of millions of non-Cuban immigrants: They entered the United States 2 1 / 2 years before Castro’s ascent for apparent economic reasons.
Rubio made the exile story a central theme of his political biography, telling one audience during his Senate campaign, “Nothing against immigrants, but my parents are exiles.” A video, apparently produced for the conservative site RedState.com, shows black-and-white footage of Castro as Rubio speaks.
Even after the new reports of his parents’ entry, Rubio has said he remains the “son of exiles,” saying his parents had hoped to return to the island but did not because of the rise of a Communist state.
But in elevating exile roots over the apparent reality of his parents’ more conventional exodus, Rubio risks setting up a tension point with the country’s Hispanic voters — most of whom are Mexican American and have immigrant friends or ancestors who did not have access to the virtually instant legal status now granted to Cubans who make it into the United States.
“If he does take that mantle, there’ll be a lot of clarification that he’ll have to make on a whole lot of issues,” said Lionel Sosa, a longtime GOP strategist.
The President's appearance on the Tonight Show (VIDEO)
Which I forgot to DVR last night, so here we go. (And be prepared for a lot of commericals)...
Here's the cold open, which was funny in a...ehhh, Jay Leno way (but made its point):
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Here's the cold open, which was funny in a...ehhh, Jay Leno way (but made its point):
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
The President's Speech launching Project Rebuild (VIDEO)
And he met with a Las Vegas family who was able to buy a home with help from the Administration's housing policies.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Friday, October 21, 2011
Why I disagree with Jonathan Bernstein, and Marco Rubio is in for a looong year...
First off, Jonathan Bernstein, at his own blog A Plain Blog About Politics, made this point about the recent revelations about Marco Rubio's past:
Well, I'm not so sure about that. Courtesy Chris Cilliza:
The oddity of the Rubio situation is that I don't recall such an obvious VP frontrunner in any previous cycle. Now, preseason Veepstakes is notoriously silly; after all, guessing the pick even when there's just a few weeks to go and we know who is doing the picking rarely works out well. And the usual caveat applies: the bottom of the ticket doesn't really matter very much in November. So I'm not speculating about whether Rubio will actually get the nod. But it is, I think, worth pointing out that near as I can tell there's been a pretty solid consensus that Rubio is the obvious selection, and that such a consensus is unusual. My guess is that this story doesn't really shake the current consensus -- although whether everyone's expectations now have anything to do with who actually gets the pick is unknown and unknowable.
Well, I'm not so sure about that. Courtesy Chris Cilliza:
Say what you will about the birthers, but don’t call them partisan.
The people who brought you the Barack Obama birth-certificate hullabaloo now have a new target: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a man often speculated to be the next Republican vice presidential nominee. While they’re at it, they also have Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana and perhaps a future presidential candidate, in their sights.
Each man, the birthers say, is ineligible to be president because he runs afoul of the constitutional requirement that a president must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States. Rubio’s parents were Cuban nationals at the time of his birth, and Jindal’s parents were citizens of India.
The good news for the birthers is that this suggests they were going after Obama, whose father was a Kenyan national, not because of the president’s political party. The bad news is that this supports the suspicion that they were going after Obama because of his race.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
The quick video of Hillary learning of Gaddafi's capture (which eventually led to his death) (VIDEO)
I never though I'd say it, and it cannot be said enough: Hillary Clinton is going down as one of the great Secretaries of State in our history.
The Democrats may now have a candidate to run against Scott Walker in a recall (maybe)...
And he's a good one, should he choose to do it:
Former longtime Congressman Dave Obey (D-WI) is joining the call among Democrats to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2012. He would also consider running as a candidate himself in such a recall -- but would prefer to see candidacies by either Sen. Herb Kohl, who is retiring in 2012, or Milwaukee Mayor and unsuccessful 2010 Democratic nominee Tom Barrett.
However, Obey also said that when he has talked to the other two men about running for governor, they politely told him to stop "pestering" them about it.
Obey told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board that "there is so much anger out there" against Walker, predicting that Democrats would successfully collect enough signatures for the effort. (The Dems need to collect over 540,000 signatures, plus a significant buffer that campaigns routinely collect in order to protect against signatures being disqualified over one imperfection or another.)
The Initial BBC Timeline of Gaddafi's death...
This is the kind of reporting I like: raw. It still hasn't been filtered or formed.. The Editors and Producers haven't gotten ahold of it to shape it and change it (usually for the worse). It's basically as close to reporters notes as you can get.
Thus, I present to you this from the BBC:
A fairly graphic video of Gaddafi being drug out of that sewer can be found here.
Thus, I present to you this from the BBC:
In the last fortnight, National Transitional Council (NTC) forces mounted a major offensive against the city and succeeded in pushing Gaddafi loyalists back towards the sea.
The last significant pocket of resistance was reported to be in District 2, in the north-west of the city.
In the early hours of Thursday it appears that some pro-Gaddafi forces attempted to break out.
An armoured convoy of vehicles, which according to some reports contained key Gaddafi loyalists and his son, Mutassim Gaddafi, attempted to fight their way through NTC lines.
It is not clear whether Col Gaddafi himself was part of this convoy or whether the convoy itself formed part of a wider diversionary plan to allow him to slip away.
Air strike
At around 0630 GMT Nato aircraft are reported to have attacked the convoy, according to Daily Telegraph reporter Ben Farmer approximately 3-4 km west of the city.
There are some reports that Col Gaddafi was then initially captured, with serious injuries, at around noon on Thursday.
Pictures circulated by Agence France-Presse showed a large concrete pipe in which the deposed leader apparently took refuge.
Arabic graffiti above the pipe reads: "This is the place of Gaddafi, the rat... God is the greatest."
A fighter loyal to Libya's interim authorities told the BBC he found Gaddafi hiding in a hole and the former leader begged him not to shoot. The fighter brandished a golden pistol he said he took from Col Gaddafi.
A man claiming to be an eyewitness told the BBC that he saw Col Gaddafi being shot with a 9mm gun in the abdomen at around 1230 local time.
A fairly graphic video of Gaddafi being drug out of that sewer can be found here.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
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