We love Elizabeth Warren. There. We said it. WE LOVE ELIZABETH WARREN! So much, in fact, that sometimes we wish we could marry her. Or, if that’s not possible, we wish we could someday cast a vote for her, but we do not live in Massachusetts so alas, this dream will not be a reality until the day she decides to run on a presidential ticket. (Warren/Sanders 2016 because we are flaming liberals! Or for the centrists out there, Clinton/Warren 2016! Or just for the hell of it, Booker/Warren 2016!)
Anyway, even though we don’t live in Massachusetts we can still fire up the old YouTube to watch her hand Ben Bernanke his own ass or try desperately to give us all the moneys or warn us about the corporate capture of the courts, like she did last week while talking to the liberal lawyers at the American Constitution Society. The entire speech is here [pdf], but here are some of the highlights:
Georgia Rep. and wannabe-senator Phil Gingrey (R-Naturally) is one of those people, as so many Republicans are, who should not speak words. Like that time, when his party was busy insisting that no, Republicans do not hate browns and chicks and gays (well, okay, yeah, they still hate gays), and he opened his dumb yap to say that actually, Todd Akin was basically right about magic ladyparts — which was plenty stupid — but then he opened his yap again to say that he realized Todd Akin was basically completely fucking wrong, which he understands now thanks to “more recent data.”
The best part, of course, is that Gingrey is a doctor. A ladyparts doctor. As in, some medical school (we assume it is Acme) gave this moron a medical degree, and women apparently spread their legs for him and let him look inside and tell them medical things. (And we feel very sorry for those women because, Jesus H. Christ MD, we cannot begin to imagine what sorts of medical things he yanked from his ass to offer his patients.)
Aw, cute! Ann Romney, the unintentionally comedic wife of uber-loser Mitt, took a break from watching her classier-than-thou horse do ballet to eggsplain to the San Diego City Council why it can kiss her pampered ass because it did not approve the permit for her bazillion dollar beachfront mansion expansion in a way befitting Her Royal Highness, according to Her Royal Highness:
My name is Ann Romney. I am here today to express concern with the city of San Diego’s noticing procedure for development projects. The hearing officer’s decision on the coastal development and site development permit for my home was appealed due to potential defects with the public notice. Notice defects can be problematic for transparent government and public participation, two things that Mitt and I strongly support.
You are probably deeply and profoundly concerned about the potential defects with the public notice for Ann’s home, right? You’re probably losing sleep over it, tossing and turning and fretting about whether that $12 million house Ann and Mitt are rebuilding on the beach will be properly and quickly permitted, and nothing — not those doctor bills you can’t afford to pay, not global warming, not the outright persecution of the teabaggers by the IRS — concerns you more. That’s why Ann is talking to the City Council, you know. For the public. For you people. READ MORE »
Nothing can improve your dining experience like having a sick waitstaff, except possibly knowing that the cook who prepared your food is also stricken with the flu. That also will improve your dining experience, because it will expose you to germs and build your resistance to them. Unless it gets you really sick, in which case, tough breaks but that is not Rick Scott’s problem:
Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill Friday that would block local governments from enacting mandatory paid-sick-time measures, such as the one pending in Orange County
The Republican governor sided with Walt Disney World, Darden Restaurants, the Florida Chamber of Commerce and a broad array of powerful business interests that argued the ban was needed to avoid a patchwork of local employment rules for companies.
Well THANK GOD someone is out there standing up for a broad array of powerful business interests — you just don’t see that sort of principled stand much these days. Florida would just be a craphole otherwise. READ MORE »
Here’s a video of Michael Hastings, the reporter for Buzzfeed and Rolling Stone, who died in a car crash Tuesday, giving Piers Morgan the sort of dressing down that Piers Morgan so richly deserves on a daily basis. People who knew Hastings are mourning him, and people who didn’t are mostly wishing they had.
Wonkette readers may recall Hastings from a story we covered last fall,* when Hastings got into a fine email shoving match with Hillary Clinton’s spokesman, the mellifluously named Philippe Reines. Frustrated by what he saw as stonewalling, Hastings asked Reines to please, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, “give answers that aren’t bullshit for a change,” and Reines offered some suggestions on just how deeply he valued Hastings’ contribution to the discourse: “have a good day. And by good day, I mean Fuck Off.” We sort of fell in love with Hastings for his sign-off in the exchange: “I’ll take that as a non-denial denial.” READ MORE »
Texas drug-eater Rick Perry denies that he is gay, but Texas? Gay as the dickens — FOR YOUR BUSINESS! That is the message of the “Texas Wide Open for Business” campaign that Gov. Perry is flogging in New York, California, and various other places where it is not torturously hot, humid, and buggy all the goddamn time like it is in Texas, and where people do not have an unearned sense of accomplishment just because they live in a certain place. Wait, scratch that last one, because we just said New York and California (we are New Yorkers and we love California, but srsly.)
Another goal is to entice Connecticut gun manufacturers to skirt new state regulations by relocating to Texas. Good, maybe once that happens, Texas can finally secede and then we can legally embargo all their bullshit. Problem solved! READ MORE »
Hooray! It is time to announce a Nice Thing that happened, which we don’t get to do very often because Republicans have a War on Nice Things, but every now and then, they let something slip through. And today, that something is Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is sometimes a Republican (like when she votes with her party to war on ladyparts), and sometimes is disgusted by Republicans (like when they vote to war on ladyparts, which she also voted for but then felt super bad about), and sometimes she is a Ralph Naderesque spoiler write-in candidate when Republican primary voters are all, like, “Nah, lady, we’re going with the crazy dude.”
To the complete surprise of no Wonketeers anywhere, the House of Representatives yesterday passed their bill aimed at alienating women everywhere outlawing abortions after 20 weeks. The effort, nothing more than an empty gesture to throw red meat to anti-choice whackadoos, has been a calamitous clusterfuck of epic proportions from start to finish. But before we review just how awful the Republicans have been, let’s see the final score, via TPM:
House Republicans passed legislation to ban abortions nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
The final vote was 228-196; six Democrats and six Republicans crossed party lines.
The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act carves out exemptions to protect the life of the mother, and for cases of rape and incest as long as the crimes have been reported. It won’t go any further because Democrats control the Senate and White House. But it is invigorating both sides of a culture war that has deeply divided the country for generations.
War on Women part 532, here we come! Because fucking with women’s rights worked out so well for the GOP in 2012, eh, President Romney? READ MORE »
ATTENTION CHERISHED CORPORATE SPONSORS: The above disgusting manipulation of First Lady Michelle Obama is disgusting, and we endorse its use for two purposes only: Art, and to show everybody what despicable bilge passes for appropriate advertising at WorldNetDaily, a U.S. top-500 website that employs a former Senator and also takes monies from many private companies, at least a few of which/whom may find this ad to be disgusting… because it is! READ MORE »
We understand that the hard-working hard workers of the Transportation Security Administration are just trying to keep us safe from Muslims and stuff, and that is why they make us take off our shoes and strip down until we are practically nekkid and get X-rayed and put our laptops in their own special little boxes and buy those little itty bitty tubes of toothpaste and why they decided not to permit pocket knives on planes after all, but we did not realize that we also needed to be protected from teen-aged girls in, like, clothes.
Here’s what happened, as my daughter described it in text messages to us: she was at the station where the TSA checks IDs. She said the officer was “glaring” at her and mumbling. She said, “Excuse me?” and he said, “You’re only 15, COVER YOURSELF!” in a hostile tone. She said she was shaken up by his abusive manner.
Golly, it’s been, what, a whole bunch of hours since someone on the right said something incredibly stupid about abortion, so we guess this is right on schedule: Texas Congressman Michael Burgess (R-Like We Had To Say “R”) has a whole new reason to ban abortion at 20 weeks, and maybe earlier: masturbating fetuses. Specifically, the former OB/GYN said,
Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful … They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?
Great question, idiot! Burgess’s comments immediately vaulted him to the top of the “Saying Dumb Things With Your Mouth Hole Open” division in Wonkette’s coveted Legislative Shitmuffin of the Year Awards, and launched the twitter hashtag #MasturbatingFetuses, which was played out about as quickly as you’d expect. READ MORE »
So you see, Texas has this thing called a Public Integrity Unit, which is supposed to ride herd on public officials’ ethics and spending and stuff. Except now it doesn’t do anything, because Gov. Rick Perry used his line-item veto to eliminate funding for the Unit after the “some lady” in our headline, Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg, who runs the Public Integrity Unit, went and got a DWI citation. Lehmberg is a Democrat, but of course her party affiliation has nothing to do with this, what a vile notion! So Perry isn’t exactly saying “Someone, somewhere is a drunk driver, therefore impeach.” But it’s almost that bad, because in announcing his veto of the Public Integrity Unit’s $7.5 million appropriation (less than .01% of Texas’s FY2012-13 budget), Perry had this to say (emphasis ours):
“Despite the otherwise good work the Public Integrity Unit’s employees, I cannot in good conscience support continued State funding for an office with statewide jurisdiction at a time when the person charged with ultimate responsibility of that unit has lost the public’s confidence. This unit is in no other way held accountable to state taxpayers, except through the State budgetary process. I therefore object to and disapprove of this appropriation.”
“Good work, all other employees of the Public Integrity Unit, please enjoy being fired!” READ MORE »
Attention Wonklahomans! The 2013 Wonk Your Brains Out Midwest-Southwest Orgy and World Tour is on its exciting “Homeward Bound: The Quickening” leg (also known as the “Hey, does this Prius smell funny to you?” leg), and is swinging back through the Sooner State tonight! As part of an exclusive two-day side tour of cities whose names sound like boys who get picked on in 8th grade, Wonk Your Brains Out follows its trip to Lawrence, Kansas with a stop in Norman, Oklahoma. TONIGHT! Tues., June 18, 6 p.m. at The Mont, 1300 Classen Blvd Norman, OK 73071, (405) 329-3330. We’ll be in the Tiki Hut! (It’s Doktor Zoom’s birthday, but he won’t be there, so maybe you could email him some beer!) READ MORE »
You know, we really can’t figure out anymore if right-wingers are playing some four-dimensional meta chess sorta thing these days or have really become untethered from reality or why even choose. Exhibit eleventy: the weird tendency of wingnuts to cry foul when people have the temerity to quote them. Witness Bradlee Dean, who wanted to sue yr Wonkette SO BAD because we pointed out that by saying he wanted to use the rod of correction on kids he actually wanted to use the rod of correction on kids. Late to the game but no less weird is superstar E.W. Jackson, running for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, who would like to explain that it is NOT FAIR NOT FAIR to quote his previous political statements because Jesus and the Constitution: READ MORE »
Unless you have been living under a rock over the last few years, you know that the GOP has a not-so-new idea to try to win elections: prevent those who would vote against them from being able to vote, in the name of stopping voter fraud, which doesn’t really exist in any meaningful way, but is good for scaring wingnuts. Because why bother changing your core beliefs when you can just keep folks you don’t like (read: minorities) from voting? Yay democracy!
Well, the Supreme Court (we say SCOTUS for our nerd cred, of course) has now weighed in, and decided to put the brakes on some states’ efforts to make it harder to vote. Since this is kinda a BFD, let’s Wonksplain, shall we? READ MORE »
