(no subject)

Oh jeez, if this is the level of "teh stupid" being produced by my college now I'm going to have to stop telling people I graduated from there. Fortunately the wacky kids at Sadly, No! give you a shorter version so you don't have to expose yourself directly to the burning rays of dumb:

The blame will be yours, campus war protesters, if we conservatives spread a false Dolchstosslegende and tragically create another Third Reich.

Yeah, that is actually what she's saying in the article. I see big things ahead of her, I'm thinking a job at Townhall or the Wall Street Journal at the very least.

D'oh!

Whoops:

WASHINGTON - Presidential advisor Karl Rove and at least one other member of the White House political team were urged by the New Mexico Republican party chairman to fire the state’s U.S. attorney because of dissatisfaction with his job performance including his failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation in the battleground election state.

Uh-Oh:

By all accounts, that’s what happened to Washington D.C. attorney Wendell Belew in August 2004. And it happened at a time when no one outside a small group of high-ranking officials and workaday spooks knew the National Security Agency was listening in on Americans’ phone calls without warrants. Belew didn’t know what to make of the episode. But now, thanks to that government gaffe, he and a colleague have the distinction of being the only Americans who can prove they were specifically eavesdropped upon by the NSA’s surveillance program.

Oopsie:

An increasing number of U.S. citizens and residents have been targeted during that three-year period. About 39 percent of national security letters related to U.S. citizens and residents in 2003; two years later it had climbed to about 53 percent of requests.

Oh to hell with it, isn't this the very fucking definition of impeachment?:

Sources told Newsweek that the list of prosecutors to be fired was drawn up by Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, “with input from the White House.” And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove’s help — the first time via a liaison, the second time in person — in getting David Iglesias, the state’s U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats. “He’s gone,” he claims Mr. Rove said. […]

The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

via The Poorman

Update: Found some more...

The White House acknowledged on Sunday that presidential adviser Karl Rove served as a conduit for complaints to the Justice Department about federal prosecutors who were later fired for what critics charge were partisan political reasons.

House investigators on Sunday declared their intention to question Rove about any role he may have played in the firings.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Rove had relayed complaints from Republican officials and others to the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office. She said Rove, the chief White House political operative, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have mentioned the grumblings about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Iglesias says he believes he lost his job as the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico after rebuffing Republican pressure to speed his investigation of a Democratic state official.

Perino said Rove might have mentioned the complaints about Iglesias "in passing" to Gonzales.

"He doesn't exactly recall, but he may have had a casual conversation with the A.G. to say he had passed those complaints to Harriet Miers," Perino said, relaying Rove's hazy recollection.

Perino said such a conversation would be fairly routine at the White House.

"Lots of people at the White House gets lots of complaints about lots of different people on a multitude of subjects," she said. "The procedure is to listen and take the appropriate action to notify the relevant agency."

Digby adds:

Right. And it's perfectly normal for people to call up the political director of the White House to complain about Republican US Attorneys failing to prosecute Democrats and for the political director to casually chat back and forth with the Attorney general of the United States about it.

The minute I read that the Arkansas replacement was one of Rove's little minions and that Iglesias had been pressured before the election to indict a Democrat, it was clear that this was Rove deal all around.

The Dems want to question Rove ao I suspect we are going to see some executive privilege claims start flying. Rove seems to have developed a bad case of SMS (Scooter Memory Syndrome) in which he can't remember a damned thing whenever it becomes clear that he was playing politics in the lowest most obvious way possible. In his case, once the investigations start, the disease will render him braindead so he probably won't be much use to anyone from this point forward.

And have I menioned in the last few hours that we are paying this asshat's salary?

Under the heading of "It's a funny old world"...

Aelf pointed me at this story, which really reinforces my belief in karma immensely:

First, Michael Savage sent Media Matters a letter accusing them of "stalking," which would be funny if it weren't so predictable (a conservative shucking personal responsibility for his own public rantings…where have we seen this before?). Apparently, Mr. Weiner (uh, Savage) got on the air after the Oscars with a homophobic rant about Melissa Etheridge, in which he called her gay marriage "digusting" and "nauseating" and a form of "child abuse."

In his rabid lather, Savage apparently forgot that he and Ms. Etheridge are both represented by the same talent agency, CAA. Which, understandably, felt the need to take sides in this dispute -- especially after Media Matters dutifully recorded Savage's rantings and brought them to their attention. And which, also understandably, chose to respond by standing with its new Oscar winner and with its gay talent in general.

So Mr. Savage was unceremoniously dropped from his spot with the world's top agency. And he's blaming Media Matters for all this. After all, it couldn't be anything he said himself that caused all the ruckus; it's just those "scum-sucking vermin," those "left-wing rats," who insisted that he be held accountable for polluting the public airwaves -- and the public discourse -- with his hateful verbal sewage.

Heh. And then I read this:

In demagogic fashion, Coulter first presented the shocking view -- and then wink, wink -- said she didn't really mean it; but in doing so, still held fast to the argument that leaders of the underground Army of God have used for years to justify the murder of abortion providers -- which she calls "a procedure with a rifle…."

"…Those few abortionists were shot, or, depending on your point of view, had a procedure with a rifle performed on them. I'm not justifying it, but I do understand how it happened...."

Between that and her "faggot" line at CPAC she's been dropped by 3 papers so far, and with any luck more to come. But wait, the news gets even better:

Major corporations are pulling ads from her website, including Verizon, AT&T, and Sallie Mae.

As of writing, four newspapers have dropped her column, finding her vicious personal attacks and over-the-top rhetoric unsuitable, unsavory, and unacceptable. The editor of the Times of Shreveport, LA, said, "This isn't some liberal vendetta. If it was, we would have dropped her long ago....she's simply worn a hole in the welcome mat."

The HRC has launched a protest.

And a cadre of conservative bloggers, including a number of gay Republicans, has issued an open letter to CPAC organizers, asking that she never be invited back to the event, and basically kicking her out of the conservative movement (as far as they're concerned).

Reportedly she's losing fans at a rapid rate; people are rejecting and repudiating her hate-filled rantings. Her career seems to be on the verge of a meltdown. [Editor's note: Couldn't happen to a nicer gal, could it?]

To which I say: Too bad. You reap what you sow.

David Neiwert summarizes:

Shrill, dissonant, and increasingly playing false notes, the Mighty Wurlitzer -- which has belched out the right wing's gaseous chords day in and day out for a quarter of a century -- has finally begun to run out of hot air. Coulter and Savage are going down. O'Reilly's numbers are in free fall. Creating our own progressive media machine was the first phase of regaining control of the national conversation (and that work will be ongoing). But the second phase -- which is now beginning -- will see us using our power to re-draw the parameters of the national discourse, and re-define what is and is not acceptable political debate. Without the hatemongers and potty-mouths throwing tantrums that foreclose all adult conversation, we might finally get down to discussing the real obscenities -- poverty, global warming, Iraq, bad immigration policy, and all the other horrors this administration has left unaddressed.