Olbermann to Hannity: "You Are Now Unnecessary"

Keith Olbermann has pronounced Sean Hannity a superfluous piece of shit:

Last night on Countdown, Olbermann announced that he was rescinding the offer to Hannity, and instead giving $10,000 to charity following radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller’s waterboarding attempt. Olbermann promised to donate to the charity Veterans of Valor, founded by Sgt. Klay South, who administered the waterboarding to Muller. Olbermann revealed that Mancow’s publicist had contacted Olbermann’s show yesterday to see whether Olbermann would make a similar offer to Mancow as he did for Hannity:

OLBERMANN: Mancow Muller had the guts to put his mouth where his mouth was, and the guts to admit he was dead wrong. As you saw, he not only said it is torture, but that he had nearly drowned as a boy, and it is drowning, and that he would have admitted to anything to make it stop.

So the offer to the coward Hannity — a thousand dollars a second he lasted on the waterboard — is withdrawn.

And to Mr. Muller, whose station’s publicity person contacted us yesterday saying she’d heard I’d offered ten thousand dollars to anybody who would do what he did –

You got it. Ten thousand dollars to the military-families charity of the man who did the waterboarding, Veterans Of Valor. […]

As to Hannity, you are now unnecessary.

Not that he was necessary to begin with, o’ course.

And so ends this chapter of the Waterboard Hannity chronicles. Skeptic Kitteh was right:


Bookie Kitteh’s now taking bets on how long it is before Hannity feels brave enough to spout off about waterboarding again.

Olbermann to Hannity: "You Are Now Unnecessary"
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Frank PWNS Beck

Poor Glenn Beck. He’s had an awful week. First, the ladies on the View spanked his ass, which led to a bad case of the View Flu (which he tried to pass off, and I’m not kidding, as “the 24-hour swine flu”). Now he’s having another health crisis, because his little roving producer Griff Jenkins ended up with his ass in a sling:

The Glenn Beck show tried to sandbag Barney Frank with one of their roving reporters or producers or whatever they are, but they messed with the wrong guy. ACORN is Beck’s villain of the hour and Biff Jenkins asked Frank if he’d hold hearings on ACORN because the right hates them. He got an answer he didn’t expect.

Frank: As you know, the Bush administration, every year of the eight years of the Bush administration gave them well over a million dollars for housing counseling, and nobody has shown me any sign that any of that federal money was misspent. You know, I think people are being somewhat unfair to President Bush and his secretaries of HUD who consistently funded ACORN for, as I said, for a total of about 14 million dollars during the Bush years. If someone has evidence that the money that President Bush made available was misspent — that’s what I have jurisdiction over, I don’t have jurisdiction over election activities by another ACORN organization — but if anyone has any evidence, and no one has sent it to me yet, that the Bush administration ignored the misspending of that $14 million, I’ll look into it.

Biff: Yes, sir, but would you hold hearings or an investigation …?

Frank: I think you’re being very unfair to President Bush.

OK, his name is not Biff, it’s Griff. Frank used this against Michelle Bachmann and when you hit them with facts like this, they really have no response other than to ignore what Barney Frank said and continue with their smears.

Have I told you lately how much I love Barney Frank?

Frank PWNS Beck

Harry Reid, Craven Dumbfuck

Can we please, please primary this son of a bitch? We’d be better off with Bozo the Clown as Senate Majority Leader:

Oh, and Harry Reid? Try showing some courage. Try leadership. You never know; it just might suit you. This certainly doesn’t:

“QUESTION: If the United States — if the United States thinks that these people should be held, why shouldn’t they be held in the United States? Why shouldn’t the U.S. take those risks, the attendant risk of holding them, since it’s the one that says they should be held?

REID: I think there’s a general feeling, as I’ve already said, that the American people, and certainly the Senate, overwhelmingly doesn’t want terrorists to be released in the United States. And I think we’re going to stick with that.

QUESTION: What about in imprisoned in the United States?

REID: If you’re…

(CROSSTALK)

REID: If people are — if terrorists are released in the United States, part of what we don’t want is them be put in prisons in the United States. We don’t want them around the United States.”

Um, Harry? Some Americans do want them around the United States:

A frequent attack on the closure of Guantanamo is the claim that no one in the U.S. wants detainees housed in their backyard. Last Sunday, Dick Cheney remarked, “I don’t know a single congressional district in this country that is going to say, gee, great, they’re sending us 20 Al Qaida terrorists.” But Al Jazeera’s Rob Reynolds reports that the town of Hardin, MT requesting that 100 detainees be sent to its empty prison:

Earlier this month, Hardin’s town council voted unanimously to offer the US government a deal: Send Hardin the detainees that most foreign countries and other cities the US are afraid to take.

“Why not us?” [Greg Smith, Hardin’s economic development director] asks. “They’ve got to go somewhere.” He dismisses security concerns over housing inmates former Bush administration officials famously described as “the worst of the worst”. “We have some very hardened criminals in our own country that have committed some heinous crimes, and they are in communities all across this country,” Smith argues. […]

[snip]

Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) has said that detainees could be tried in his Alexandria, VA district.

There are plenty of Americans who aren’t the craven cowards that you and your Yellow Elephant friends are, Sen. Reid. Grow a fucking backbone already.

Harry Reid, Craven Dumbfuck

Torture Apologists on Parade: WWF Smackdown Edition

I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t have much respect for Jesse Ventura. Mind you, I rooted for him when he won the Minnesota elections and became a governor – mostly because the media et al had been such dismissive fucks, and it was fun to see them shocked that a lowly wrestler from a third party was now chief executive of a state. But still, didn’t really consider him to be anything more than a showman.

Opinions can change in the face of evidence (unless you’re a Con or creationist, o’ course). And there is something glorious about watching a former pro-wrestler and Navy SEAL who survived Vietnam slam pro-torture wingnuts into the mat:

Jesse Ventura’s been making the rounds lately by taking on all comers on the issue of torture, which has left little quivering wingnuts like Joe Scarborough having to resort to attacking him out of his immediate presence.

Because as Brian Kilmeade of Fox and Friends found out this morning, doing so in person can be extremely unpleasant. Especially if you try pulling the lamestain right-wing crap we’ve gotten accustomed to, namely, accusing their interlocutors of not wanting to keep us safe, you’re not patriotic enough, blah blah blah.

That’s what Kilmeade tries pulling right off the bat, and it makes for possibly the best of the Ventura smackdowns yet:

Ventura: I have been waterboarded. It is torture. I can speak from experience. It was part of SERE training that I went through as a Navy SEAL.

Kilmeade: And are you OK now?

Ventura: I’m fine.

Kilmeade: So is Khalid Sheik Mohammed. He’s about 60 pounds overweight, having a great time —

Ventura: It doesn’t matter. If it was OK, then why don’t we do it to criminals? Like, if we’ve got gang members in L.A., OK? We know that their gangs are gonna do bad things. When we arrest them, why don’t we waterboard them so we can get information out of them? Because it’s against the law.

Kilmeade: Do you want us not to be safe from attack?

Ventura: Don’t come after me with that nonsense.

[Debate over its efficacy — “ticking time bomb”]

Ventura: OK, why didn’t we waterboard McVeigh and Nichols, then? There were more people that they thought involved at Oklahoma City. Why weren’t they waterboarded to get more information? Because it’s against the law.

Wait — and if we’re not going to be a country that goes by the rule of law when it’s convenient or not convenient, then what do we stand for?

But what about the difference — you bring up Timothy McVeigh and maybe gang members, and maybe those threats weren’t as imminent as the threats —

Ventura: I don’t think these threats are imminent.

You didn’t think after 9/11, that America felt threats were imminent, that more could be coming?

Ventura: Maybe. But I think our behavior has caused us to be in more trouble. Now they won’t release these photos. Why? Because they know the Muslim world will go irate. They’re all after Nancy Pelosi — when did she know? When dah dah dah — Well, if we hadn’t of tortured, it would be a dead issue, wouldn’t it?

Let’s go to the real issue: It’s called torture.

I think I’m in love.

No wonder Joe Scarborough was too shit-scared to have Jesse in the studio when he launched this ridiculous rant (h/t):

This is unbelievable. Joe Scarborough, who publicly lectured/tattled on me for not engaging in civilized debate, talking about Jesse Ventura:

“Perhaps Jesse should stop smoking whatever Jesse’s been smoking and keep his mouth shut about things he knows absolutely nothing about. This is a guy who, by the way — I must continue to say this — that got paid two million dollars by this network, did one show and sucked so bad that they sent him back to Minnesota and said “we never want to see you again.”

I wish I was that bad. Perhaps I am. Maybe they’ll fire me and I’ll take my money and go to Florida. […] Seriously, that’s the sort of stupidity — it’s just — it should seriously be a crime to be that dumb and on TV. [mocking Jesse’s voice] We only waterboard Muslims. Oh God.

Let’s bring in Rudy Giuliani. Former Republican mayor of New York City, former presidential candidate, Rudy Giuliani. This seems like a great place to start. [begin douchey sarcastic voice] Why is it that people like Jesse Ventura are so concerned about how we treat people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Why is that?”

Jesse Ventura was a Navy Seal who survived the SERE program and served in Vietnam. He “knows nothing” about torture and war, Joe? And you do? That’s rich.

Isn’t it awesome how all these Yellow Elephants think they’re more expert than veterans? I notice Sean Hannity still hasn’t set a date for his waterboarding-for-charity. We’ll have to add a Scarborough-dissing-Ventura-to-his-face watch to our calendars.

Speaking of smackdowns, Marcy Wheeler’s compiled a handy little guide to the CIA’s briefing list errors. Cons keep whining about that awful Nancy Pelosi being soooo mean to the CIA. This list gives them a choice: either the CIA’s a bunch of lying asshats, or the CIA’s a bunch of bumbling buffoons who can’t even compile a simple list. My question for the Cons is, which explanation do they prefer?

And when will they demand Pete Hoekstra apologize for impugning the CIA’s integrity?

Hoekstra’s repeated objections to Pelosi accusing the CIA of having lied to Congress is quite odd given the fact that he’s made nearly identical claims on multiple occasions. As Marcy Wheeler first noted, Hoekstra wrote a letter to President Bush in 2006 accusing the intelligence community of withholding information on their activities from Congress. “I have learned of some alleged Intelligence Community activities about which our committee has not been briefed,” Hoekstra wrote. He said that he believed the Bush administration’s failure to fully brief his committee could constitute “a violation of law“:

hoekstra_letter

Similarly, in 2007, Hoekstra described a closed-door briefing by representatives from the intelligence community (including CIA) on the National Intelligence Estima
te of Iran’s nuclear capability, saying that the members “
didn’t find [the briefers] forthcoming.” More recently, in November 2008, Hoekstra concluded that the CIA “may have been lying or concealing part of the truth” in testimony to Congress regarding a 2001 incident in which the CIA mistakenly killed an American citizen in Peru. “We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress,” Hoekstra said of the incident.

My goodness, Pete. Who would have ever guessed you’re a ginormous fucking hypocrite? What a shock.

Why, it’s almost as shocking as learning the CIA would lie to cover their asses, and that torture apologists can get totally pwnd by a former SEAL. If you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go to the hospital. I believe I’m having a heart attack from not surprised.

Torture Apologists on Parade: WWF Smackdown Edition

Why Do Cons Hate Our Troops?

Remember the old days, when every time Democrats attempted to place limits on the firehose of money for Bush’s endless war, they got painted as troop-hating cowards? Well, sez I, turnabout’s fair play. If playing games with Iraq War supplementals is the height of irresponsible troop-hating, well, Cons are irresponsible troop-haters:

Rumblings up on Capitol Hill: Democratic leadership is worried they might not have the votes to pass the war supplemental. The House is due to vote on the emergency $96.7 billion dollar supplemental, which would fund the war in Afghanistan and Iraq through the next year, later this week. But opposition is possible from an unlikely place, House Republicans:

Republicans might attempt to provoke a partisan fight during floor debate over the future of the 241 detainees held at the military’s detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. However, Democratic leaders could thwart GOP efforts to thrust Guantanamo into the spotlight by opting for a closed rule.

The bill does not contain the $80 million needed to close Guantanamo Bay, but Republicans are disconcerted because they tried several times without success to insert language into the bill which would keep detainees from being transferred to US soil.

Maybe I should call Rep. Dave Reichert (R – Parts of King County Dumb Enough to Vote for a Con) and ask him why he hates the troops. That would be fun.

For those of you going “Supplemental? What fucking supplemental?”, David Waldman has an explanation for that:

Oh yeah, another thing. I’m sure many of you are wondering what ever happened to the whole, “we’re not gonna do supplementals for the war anymore” thing. The wheels turn slowly in Washington. This is a supplemental for fiscal year 2009 (FY09), the regular appropriations bills for which were passed last year in the 110th Congress and under George W. Bush. The FY10 Defense Appropriations (and others which might include other bits of war-related funding) haven’t been passed yet. So technically, we’re still kind of operating under Bush budgeting until October 1, 2009, when the new fiscal year begins.

I know, I know.

And finally, for those of you looking for some sport: Remember that $870 million in flu pandemic preparedness the Senate “moderates” were so intent on cutting out of the stimulus (right before we confronted… a flu pandemic)?

This supplemental has $2 billion for it. Ha ha!

Gives you ideas, doesn’t it? Every time the Cons cut funding for important stuff, include nearly three times that amount in an emergency war supplemental. Then distract them by trying to include money for closing Guantanamo. Brilliant. Especially since, if they try to cut this one, we now have a ready-made retort, inspired by their own bullshit: “Why do you want our troops to die of pandemic flu?”

I shall enjoy this entirely too much.

Why Do Cons Hate Our Troops?

Mother Nature Bitchslaps Cons

Global warming sucks, dunnit? But it does seem to have a poetic sense of timing this week.

In California, wildfires are demonstrating to Cons that fucking over California’s budget may not have been a wise thing to do:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger started the week promoting Wildfire Awareness Week in events with fire officials, during which he suggested he might have to cut 1,700 firefighting jobs if voters reject the May 19 ballot measures.

He had another such event scheduled Thursday in Riverside. But an actual fire broke out midweek in Santa Barbara, forcing a change of plans.

Schwarzenegger appeared Thursday at the Jesusita fire in Santa Barbara instead. Instead of warning about firefighting cuts, he began reassuring Californians that the state would find the money to protect people.

Guess where they’re going to find that money. Go on, guess.

The governor said that because he declared a state of emergency this week for the Jesusita fire, the federal government would reimburse 75 percent of the state’s costs.

That federal government sure comes in handy when the piper demands his pay, doesn’t it just?

But that isn’t the most poetic of justice dealt this week. Mother Nature has a special place in her heart for Sarah Palin:

Because of a climate disaster, global warming skeptic Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) has been forced to cancel her attendance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The Wall Street Journal reports that an “unusually warm spring thaw in Alaska is causing some of the state’s worst flooding in decades, with rising rivers wiping out an entire village and bombarding another town with ice chunks as big as houses”:

Gov. Sarah Palin on Thursday was scheduled to fly over the stricken areas after canceling a planned trip to the East Coast for primarily state business. The governor on Wednesday had declared a disaster for the flooded areas, including the Susitna River, which runs through her hometown of Wasilla near Anchorage.

The floods resulted from “a rare combination of unusually heavy winter snow and a spring warm-up over the past week that saw temperatures soar into the 70s — a good 20 degrees higher than normal for this time of year.”

Smell that schadenfreude. Mmm-mmm.

My heart goes out to the disaster victims. Here’s hoping it won’t take too much more of this before Cons start realizing that action to get global warming under control and programs in place to mitigate disasters are vitally necessary. What science, reason and general human decency couldn’t accomplish, perhaps embarrassment and personal impact will.

Mother Nature Bitchslaps Cons

Scalia Tastes His Own Medicine

Jane Harmon became a crusader against wiretapping after she got wiretapped. Will Justice Scalia become a privacy watchdog after this?

Last week, we wrote about the Fordham law professor who assigned his information privacy law class to compile a dossier on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

The professor had chosen Scalia as the target for privacy invasion because of the Justice’s remarks at a January conference organized by the Institute of American and Talmudic Law. Scalia’s views on the privacy of personal information online are summed up nicely by this quote:

“Every single datum about my life is private? That’s silly,” Scalia [said].

Silly, that is, until a group of students compiles a 15-page dossier containing such juicy bits as his favorite foods, movies, and adorable grandchildren. Somebody wasn’t happy:

Here is Justice Scalia’s response, in all its scathing glory:

I stand by my remark at the Institute of American and Talmudic Law conference that it is silly to think that every single datum about my life is private. I was referring, of course, to whether every single datum about my life deserves privacy protection in law.

It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any.

The sarcasm seems a little over-the-top, doesn’t it just? I wonder what dear old Anton’s upset about.

He doesn’t have a diaper fetish like dear old David, does he? What’s he afraid of – that they’ll find receipts for Pampers and prostitutes? Privacy protection wouldn’t seem so silly should something like that prove to be the case.

I do hope Professor Reidenberg and his students continue their data mining. This should get fun.

Scalia Tastes His Own Medicine

Bashing Bill

It’s Friday. It’s time to have some fun. And Bill O’Reilly’s just begging for a beating.

I mean, check out what his producer’s been up to lately:

It’s no secret that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly can’t stand MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. In fact, when a caller into his radio show had the gall to mention Olbermann’s name on air in March 2006, O’Reilly threatened to turn his personal information over to “Fox security.”

Yesterday, O’Reilly took his rivalry a step further. He sent his top henchman, producer Jesse Watters, to infiltrate the GE shareholders meeting and press executives on why MSNBC has a “leftward political slant”:

But one of those questions came from Jesse Waters [sic], a producer on “The O’Reilly Factor” whose criticisms were cut short when his microphone was cut off, according to several attendees. Waters apparently did not publicly identify himself as a Fox employee. […]

GE pointed out that Waters had Fox News cameras waiting outside the Orlando meeting.

Attendees who spoke to THR said shareholders asked about 10 politically charged questions concerning MSNBC as well as one about CNBC. […]

Thoroughly unhinged? Behavior unbecoming to a purported news station? I should bloody well think so. Remind me to keep a dart gun loaded with horse tranquilizers handy just in case I can bull-bait the bastard into stalking me.

Hm. Wonder what happens when you mix horse tranqs with capsaicin and hit a douchebag producer in a major vein? But I digress…

Bill O’s a complete prick. We all knew that. We also know he runs his show like his own little totalitarian state and usually only has on guests who are slavering sycophants or easily intimidated. It’s nice to see a dissenter with a backbone of steel slip through sometimes:

Newsday columnist Ellis Henican took on Bill O’Reilly last night to talk about President Obama’s decision to leave the door open for prosecutions of Bush administration officials for creating its now-defunct torture regime.

And frankly, he did as well I’ve ever seen anyone do in the canned, no-win setup that is The O’Reilly Factor. He went toe-to-toe with O’Reilly on the factual points — and in fact started scoring so well that O’Reilly was reduced to blurting out increasingly outrageous pronouncements.

Crooks and Liars has the video and the transcript. It’ll warm your heart.

Bashing Bill

Poetic Justice

I love it when misfortune bites those responsible for the misfortune:

Now we find out that Congresscritter Joe Barton (R-Texas) thought that the stock market was better than a bank when it came to being a place to park one’s campaign cash. That thought wound up costing him $700,000 last year.

What was that again about Republicans being good with money?

Heh.

Poetic Justice