Welcome Back to Pottersville: Twenty Bucks, Same as in Town

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Twenty Bucks, Same as in Town

Blogwhoring. You do it, I do it, we all do it. What have you been up to?

Personally, I'm kind of concerned that President-Elect Obama has been handing out and is about to hand out Cabinet-level positions to insiders after promising for 21 months "Change we deserve."

But former Secretary of Labor Dr. Robert Reich makes a pretty persuasive case as to why we ought to be happy that Obama is swiftly forming a coalition of young but talented people who seem suited to tackle the economic crisis that's ready to implode before he even takes over.

You have to admit, Obama's transition team is moving at a much faster clip than Bill Clinton's, whose own transition, as with his foreign policy, was sloppy, rushed and catch-as-catch-can.

One way in which Obama seems to be taking charge is the fact that he's giving us a weekly address on the Internet.

It's official: James Wolcott and Markos Moulitsas are the most masculine bloggers ever. It's true. The Gender Analyzer sez so!

An interesting aside is that Ann Coulter and Katie Couric, even though they're not bloggers, ain't as feminine as they'd like us to believe. In Coulter's case, that comes as a real shock.

Speaking of the Countess of Cuntitude, Orcinus asks a question that I've been asking myself all year long: What happened to Ann Coulter?

In this post, "How the Mighty Have Fallen", Dave perceptively notes, as did I last night, that the right wing is already lining up the gauntlet to blame Barack Obama for this mess even though it started brewing back when he was just an Illinois state senator.

As for Coulter's future, Neiwert has this prediction:

But I'm wondering when we'll see Coulter turn up in late-night infomercials for gold Liberty Dollars with her own image stamped on them. Because that's the road -- the one leading to ignominious obscurity and irrelevance -- she's headed down.

And I can't think of a more deserved fate.

Hullabaloo's Digby is always a treat to read. Yesterday she penned a post that nails the GOP's tattered carcass to the wall of shame. She starts off by quoting J. Taylor Rushing of The Hill:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Friday sent a message to Democrats that Republicans are not prepared to bend to a stronger majority.

In a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), McConnell urged Reid to adopt a more conciliatory tone and warned him that Republicans will unite against Democrats if he does not.

To which Digby replies,

This is the Senate GOP that obstructed practically every major bill that Democrats tried to bring up for the last two years. That's not going to stop, regardless of how many Republicans are planted in the Cabinet or throughout the federal bureaucracy. At this point, Republicans aren't interested in winning the next election, they're interested in stopping any popular policy and beating this country into the ground.

Even if the GOP shrunk to one senator and a handful of diehard Koolaid garglers in the House, they'd still think they're in charge. And, of course, McConnell's legacy isn't in authoring and sponsoring bills but in opposing progressive legislation advanced by Democrats.

Digby thinks McConnell's threat to Reid may actually have some teeth, as with Bill Frist's childish threat to use the "nuclear option" in the Senate Judiciary Committee. And the unsatisfactory denouement of the Lieberman drama kind of impels a thinking person to be cynical of the new Democratic-led 111th Congress.

Bob over at God is for Suckers gives us a story of censorship out of Southern California. Freedom From Religion, an atheist organization out of Madison, Wisconsin, put up a single billboard advancing their position. Well, some Bible-thumpers had a problem with that and had the billboard taken down.

This is what we see from the religious right on our nation's highways:

Yet they have a problem with a rare billboard advocating atheism. Now, I'm all for equal time and offering opposing viewpoints at close quarters. That way, we'll see ideological juxtapositions such as this: