hell

There has been so much news lately of how much of a "valuable news source" Matt Drudge is. Let's look at this "valuable" information. Here's two headlines appearing at the top of his page right now:

The original story from Esquire is here. Interesting enough, when you read it you will notice how it is tagged:

Notice that last tag? It says 'humor'. In other words, this piece was a satire piece. Now this story has been up on Drudge for less than 2 hours (3:30pm est), but look at what was added to the article 3 hours before that:

As we get ready to roll into 2011 the fringe wingnuts have decided it’s time to come up with some brand new conspiracy theories about the President:

The good news is that the right-wing isn't talking about President Obama being a secret Muslim right now. The bad news is that they're now concerned that he's going to use his honorary status as a Crow Tribe Indian to return the United States to Native Americans.

The outrage began after the President announcedon December 16 that the U.S. would reverse course and support the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. The Declaration was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 2007, but the U.S., under President Bush, opposed it.

I really think the wingnuts would embrace this idea. They always seems so hell bent on taking the U.S. back to the days of the wild west, so why not?

Yesterday BP saw a huge decline in it's value as their stocks lost 15% of their value:

As BP hacked away at a pipe gushing oil at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, investors sawed off 15 percent, or $21.1 billion, of the company's market value Tuesday.

Some are pointing to the announcement by Eric Holder of the criminal investigation into BP, but the big sell off started before that in the U.K. markets, leaving it to point to BP's failure to contain the spill.

This sudden decline in value for the oil giant begs the question of rather BP will survive or not. In this clip from Rachael Maddow last night, Rachael explains how the EPA could actually nail BP for billions in court.

I believe this would be the best outcome to the situation. Sure it will play hell with oil prices for awhile, but it will also send a loud message to the oil industry that they can lose everything if they play by their own rules. It would also provide a very interesting case to watch.

It amazes me every time I hear Boehner decry federal money as being a failure. He tried to do it on the stimulus by saying there were no stimulus projects happening in Ohio, despite one going on a couple of miles from his own house. Now we have this issue:

Nearly a year and a half after federal lawmakers gave Butler County $4.2 million to deal with the housing crisis, county leaders are still trying to figure out what to do with it.

With only six months to go before the federal government takes unused money back, commissioners heard a list of options today, Feb. 25, from county Community Development Director Donna Everson.

This money is from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, a program created in 2008 to help combat high foreclosures. You know, 2008, a time when Bush was President.

Now for some facts:

• Butler County is the home of John Boehner (and me)
• Butler County is 100% Republican run.

Enough facts. Now see the problem? It’s not that the programs don’t work – it’s that Republicans don’t know what the hell to do with them. People have been losing their houses around here and there’s money sitting there to help, yet the corrupt Republicans that run this county just sit there doing nothing. These are all friends of Boehner and as our representative, he should be working to remedy this problem instead of playing politician all the time.

I’m going with Andrew Sullivan on this one:

Her latest interview on the Today show again reveals a total obtuseness. Yes, as was obvious from the original clip, it was clear she was referring to what happened after the incident occurred and the system does seem to have worked from then on. But before that? This was a massive failure by DHS, and you will notice she takes not a smidgen of personal responsibility for it.

Does she not realize how sick we are of government officials responding to obvious mistakes, errors and failures by bragging about what they did get right?

She is responsible for homeland security and scores of human beings nearly died because of her failure and survived solely because of luck and courage and the incompetence of the religious extremist.

This attitude was what enraged people about the Bush administration. If Obama wants to show he is not like that, he needs to fire Napolitano now, and explain why there are no excuses in his administration for failing to perform a core government function like ensuring that airline security is as fool-proof as possible. The rest of us have had to go through hell for years in airports only to see this happen.

If she won't resign, fire her.

Yesterday Napolitano said the system worked. Today she says it ‘failed’. This is the exact same lack of responsibility we saw during Katrina and our nation can not use another Brown leading a department that can directly affect rather people live or die. This was her first big test and she failed miserably, in a position where failure is synonymous with death. She either needs to resign or Obama needs to shit can her. Anything else is unacceptable.

McJoan over at DailyKos has put together one hell of a post highlighting the good and bad of the Senate health care bill. Bottom line – if we can get rid of the mandates I think we have something we can all stomach and then work on. In all honesty the mandates should be removed and used as a bargaining tool with the insurance companies at a later date. Of course that would mean that Democrats actually knew how to negotiate and we know that isn’t true.

A serious question to the bill supporters out there. Do you think if public options are brought up again that the very strong lobbying arm of the health insurance industry won’t work as hard to defeat them then as they are now? Short of having some serious reform on lobbying happen in the interim, I don’t see any real hope at a public option later.

Andrew Breitbart has obtained a leaked memo stating that the detainees at Guantanamo will be moved to Illinois. Senator Dick Durbin and Governor Pat Quinn are applauding the move, but government officials are saying that no final decision has been made yet and the memo is only a “draft”.

This brings me to another issue – the leaked memo. We are dealing with a leaked government document that deals with national security. Should the Obama administration take the Bush approach and investigate the leak? Hell why not put Breitbart under oath and force him to reveal how he got it? This practice was championed by people like Breitbart when it was done under Bush’s regime, so he should welcome it again, shouldn’t he?

Spending the day yesterday on the Veterans Day Project, I missed out on a lot of great stories (though I believe the cause was worth it). One of the big stories was how Jon Stewart totally eviscerated Sean Hannity for using fake footage to inflate the numbers of last week’s Tea Party protest outside of Capital Hill. Here is the clip from The Daily Show:

And then here is the point in time when the four horsemen road in, signaling that the apocalypse has already started

I am waiting for tonight when Hannity will probably apologize for apologizing.