US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

he was p good yeah, better than i expected

myers was funny but obama was a fucking riot imo

btw fuckin lol

Palin praised Heroic Media's advertising against abortion, on billboards, online and in social media. She also presented an award to Lila Rose, the videographer and activist who did a video sting operation against Planned Parenthood and worked with James O'Keefe on his sting against ACORN.

what lengths do you have to go to in order to make doing this a heroic act to be commended on a public scale

My favorite bits from Myers were the Will.i.am and Gary Busey bird-cage jokes, and "bad news about the choo-choos." Trump looks awful, but even Obama had a few seconds of icy-stare pique when Myers started talking about Huckabee and Kenya (around 11:40 in the video clip above). Probably manufactured--he has to show he has feelings.

xp these people are Machiavellian in the extreme - anything you do that helps them makes you a hero, the end

Man, he's our good timing in chief.

obama was crakkin up at meyers joke about trump and "the blacks"

i tend to hate this shit, tho. at least obama didnt make jokes about predator drones.

"The pro-life cause or White House Correspondents' Dinner? I choose life"

http://www.mychemicaltoilet.com/george_michael_choose_life-thumb-430x408.jpg

xp these people are Machiavellian in the extreme - anything you do that helps them makes you a hero, the end

uh huh; my post seems daft now because yeah of course she should be lauded for opening the world's eyes to the evils of PP, etc, but: it's just weird that outside of making it a special categorised award, like, good job investigative reporting!, they're okay making something so sly and evidently dubious an award winner.

yes the joke about "the blacks" was great

obama kinda killed trump worse though, making fun of his credentials etc - even more than meyers' that had to cut deep

also the joke about miss usa and the VP search was awesome

and yeah like max given how bad for america these things are i was kinda mad at myself for loving the comedy stuff

as well you should be.

did he do another killing-pop-stars-with-drone-missiles joke? no cred otherwise.

i guess it was nice to see obama zinging trump. i have been feeling so bummed this week about the birth certificate stuff, and how humiliating and insulting it is for obama to have to... present his identifying papers, essentially. so, i dunno, there was something cathartic about getting to give a big fuck-you to trump.

on the other hand theres something off about the dynamics of the room--all these black-tie power broker types, none of whom (i hope!) are birthers, zinging the vulgar, wrong-thinking interloper.

BECAUSE IT'S ALL TRIVIA AND OBAMA IS JUST ANOTHER FUCKER, WITH POWER TRUMP WILL NEVER HAVE

Yes--he was elected president. It follows.

obama zinging trump, the excelsior thread of C-SPAN

on the other hand theres something off about the dynamics of the room--all these black-tie power broker types, none of whom (i hope!) are birthers, zinging the vulgar, wrong-thinking interloper.

this is righteous but it's like - complex relationship to vulgarity for me - people shouldn't be hated for not being of/understanding/being able to participate in the conventions of power at the same level as the entitled, but on the other hand, Trump's particular vulgarity is genuinely harmful to discourse - it's like - the type of vulgarity he's bringing to the game merits a smackdown, if it's gotta come from the corridors of power that's ok by me although I assume it'll give him a boost with the constituency he's courting, i.e., the hopelessly stupid

Trump is just a smaller power broker trying cynically to ride a wave of stupidity into a position of greater power. As Palin has proved, you need not be elected, or to serve in office, to ride this wave into prominence. It even helps your position if you are not distracted by actual political responsibilities.

there are a lot of people in this country, millions of whom are eager for the crap spewed by palin and trump and bachmann. the shameless bitch just compared taxes to the holocaust
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110430/ap_on_go_co/us_bachmann_holocaust
i'm not choosing a lesser evil here by saying i'm glad obama puts these people on the defensive. the gop has been ascendant since at least kennedy primary-challenged carter. i like the bullies getting stood up to occasionally, even if it is political theater by dems who aren't heralding the golden socialist utopia: better obama zinging trump for a few cycles than "job producing tax cuts" and "medicare prime supplements" and "unions initiated the financial crisis" dominating the news

Donald Trump really is just an overgrown spoiled rich man's son.

so are most of the successful "small business owners" who fund the chamber of commerce. it's refreshing to see them picked on by proxy

the shameless bitch just compared taxes to the holocaust

I hate Sarah Palin and support progressive policies but it'd be super-awesome if people who share my values would strike the misogynist term "bitch" from their politics-talking vocabularies

sorry I see it was Michelle Bachmann. Another person who when people haul out the misogynist epithets I think "great job there dude, that totally helps"

shameless asshole then. better?

you might not see the difference, but yes, better

Donald Trump possesses a kind of capitalist ur-power that eludes Obama, but Obama's power is oddly complementary. That is, Trump can get away with all sorts of crazy shit with no (or virtually no) repercussions that Obama could not get away with - publicly calling the Chinese "motherfuckers" and batshit stuff like that. Yet Obama can get away with things that Trump cannot do - like bomb countries and stuff. Which makes even the joke prospect of President Trump kind of scary - this is a guy that can literally have or do just about anything he wants except kill people. Ergo, one trembles in fear at the implicit drive behind his seeking higher office.

let's not forget, please, that Trump (like Palin before him) is admired as a prez candidate by a small percentage of the population.

shameless shithead is nicely alliterative

liberals like to wring their hands over them, in other words

Who the fuck really thinks Trump has a shot, liberal or conservative? No one, I thought. Has there really been hand-wringing? Me, I'm just scared of dudes like him in general, who have everything but want more.

Trump could not buy the sort of attention that a president commands. His reality show only gets a few million sets of eyeballs, I am guessing under 10 million at least. As president he would be the center of the world's attention. Even as a "serious" candidate he would up his media attention by a factor of 10.

Of course, if he got in the White House, he'd be irresponsible in ways we can only fathom in our darkest imagination.

btw this is the same glitzy, incestuous party where David Gregory and Karl Rove did this routine, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYZre8kEsuw

i'm only about a quarter through this thing but it is great

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/08/power-struggle-inside-the_n_530247.html?view=print

Power Struggle: Inside The Battle For The Soul Of The Democratic Party

a master class in all the dumb shit we argue about itt constantly

The most recognizable members of the progressive caucus, the ones who spend more time tending to their committees than organizing, were elected amid the collapse of trust in American institutions during the mid-1970s. Watergate Babies Henry Waxman, Charlie Rangel and George Miller took the House by its bull horns: They upended the seniority system in a historic revolt aimed at breaking the hold on power that Southern Democrats had in the House. But as the fall of Nixon gave way to the rise of Reagan, they were forced to spend more than a decade on the defensive. The most effective Democratic legislator during the period was, not coincidentally, Ted Kennedy, who was renowned for his fine-grained, dynamic understanding of the institution and, more importantly, the personal pressures facing each member. He was always on the offense, even with a Republican in the White House.

The battle to make policy on Capitol Hill changed in 1994, when Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took back control of the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades. Legislating was no longer a priority. Undoing legislation was. And that didn't require intellectual infrastructure. Gingrich attacked the institution itself, wiping out funding for caucus staff, the intellectual infrastructure around which liberals in Congress organized. "It was a big blow," Miller says.

i mean, how can you not love writing like that.

this is from like a month ago btw!

ryan grim is great, huffpo has some terrific writers working

btw if you wanna get infuriated

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/29/fallout_from_videos_of_labor_course_at_university_of_missouri

I'm generally a fan of Sullivan, but this is too clever by half:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/about-last-night.html

Paragraph 1: Above the fray, seeing through the whole charade.
Paragraph 2: Gushing unabashedly.

(And paragraph 3's just weird--I thought she made a very public show of not attending. Is there a joke I'm missing?)

Can someone please explain the disconnect here? I'm not kidding--I don't get it.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/54018.html
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/04/white-house-correspondents-dinner-party-photos-201104#slide=1

I mean, what I don't get is that Politico would print the former without even alluding to the latter.

journalism!

is dead!

I won't click on a Politico link, but I glanced, dispiritedly, at the VF one a few hours ago: the usual marriage of journalism and sycophancy.

That vanity fair piece is... just the worst thing.

that's why I'm tired of all my liberal friends in the last 12 hours posting Obama clips. The time to applaud him isn't when he takes aim at dead enders like Donald Trump with no chance of getting the nomination -- it's when he does something unapologetically liberal.

^^ this. Are we really going to go overboard cheerleading him for this? "You know, he expanded warrantless wiretapping." "Yeah, but did you see how he went after Trump?!"

I thought Obama was fully justified in saying whatever he said about Trump, for obvious reasons. I think him being part of last night is, as things stand today, as much a part of his job description as fundraising or anything else. He can't not attend--you just can't do that. I don't think he's at his best reading scripted jokes, so I've refrained from the cheerleading.

But it's not our job as liberals to applaud him for providing facile Sunday morning talk show fodder for Cokie and Chris.

Look, if last night raised anyone's spirits, may the Lord of Hosts bless him. But I'm sure I'm not the only one whose Facebook updates, like, ALL DAY, were by Dems who've been silent on the White House's capitulations for months yet suddenly applaud the evisceration of...Donald Trump?

It's 2010 all over again. You're scared of Palin yet don't give a fuck about indefinite detention and extending the Bush tax cuts? Really?

i like jokes.