and he was too pointing at me

via Alas, a Blog < The Sideshow < Media Whores Online < gomemphis.com (I love it when this stuff disseminates):

"The Republicans campaign on ideology and resentment," he told about 400 people at the West Memphis Civic Auditorium. "They're good and the rest of us are bad. They spent $70 million of your money to prove I was a sinner, and you could have told 'em that for free."

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly...

Oh, all right, you creaking pedants, but if Alan Simpson can mourn our departing congressional "screwballs, lightweights and boobs" in the Times, I can mourn Clinton.

Penis and all.

Great Grandpa (and Grandpa and Daddy) would be so damn proud

If we must engage, let's at least make out on it

Didn't know William H. Taft IV was working for the State Department. The Taft family, for anyone who's not familiar with them, are sort of the hereditary kleagles of Republican ruling class isolationism. Rotten apples don't go far from the tree, I find. They don't roll so good.

Legal counsel William H. Taft IV asked U.S. District Judge Louis Oberdorfer to dismiss a lawsuit accusing Exxon Mobil of terrorizing Indonesian villagers who somehow thwart the world's biggest oil company. The suit, brought by the International Labor Rights Fund, cited murder, torture and rape.

Taft didn't mince words or priorities. If Exxon Mobil was driven away from the wells by protesting peasants, the Chinese might move in and make the millions. And, Taft warned, the lawsuit could impede the war against terrorism. Indonesia and its bloodthirsty military are our allies in that struggle. Sensitive souls in the central government in Jakarta, some of them engineers of the copiously documented savageries of the war against East Timor, would be upset, and their efforts against al Qaeda could be curtailed "in response to perceived disrespect for its sovereign interests."

Unocal, which is undergoing legal unpleasantness over their use of forced labor in Burma, is asking State to bigfoot that case as well.

How awkward for the pro-human rights and anti-corporate crime administration in the White House.

I don't know how Mary McGrory keeps her job at White House spokespaper the Washington Post, but I'm awfully glad she does.

Oh brother, where art thou?

Family togetherness. It's a beautiful thing.

Bill Simon. Not a very smart man.

During the primaries, he would have committed to bringing back the stocks and stoning if it would have gotten him the endorsement of conservative Republicans. He did in fact sign a pledge to support the definition of partnership benefits as exclusively the province of married couples.

Now, after having lost every other possible constituency, he took the strategically suicidal step of attempting to ingratiate himself with the Log Cabin Republicans (a group who by their very existence give notice that they won't disaffiliate even if you campaign directly against them) by writing in a questionnaire they sent him that he would support domestic partnership benefits if they are given to any two people who happen to live together.

Boy, are people who have far too much invested in what other consenting adults do with their genitals upset.

Now social conservatives in California are up in arms, and more Republicans than Democrats polled don't like anyone who's running.

Simon says (I really wanted to squeeze that in) that he meant elderly brothers living together.

No word on dogs and cats.

via MWO