Tic Tax

Apropos this post.

For God’s Sake, Don’t Backfire…..

The Daily Mail is calling it a stunt that backfired. We'd prefer it didn't, thank you.

Goin’ To The Candidate’s Debate

Apropos this post.

Barack Attack!

Jay at Stop the ACLU notes the rapid reaction to Barack Obama's remarks about raising Social Security taxes by the nutroots.

One had better walk the thin line drawn by the nutroots or they will turn on you like a rabid dog. After all, they think they made you so they’ll do their best to unmake you if you don’t stay in line. In today’s political world where the left have let the nutroots gain so much control of their party, Obama could have just made a fatal flaw. Things can turn on a dime, but when the big lefty blogs speak, most moonbat bots obey. It will be interesting to see if Obama can recover from this one. This could be the nail in his coffin.

Step out of line, and a pack of ravening HuffnPuffers, Koz Kidz or other nutroot organizations will MoveIn™ to the attack like a pack of rabid wolverines!

With the television and movie writers on strike, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard, always on the lookout for a new way to turn a buck, have decided to step in and fill the void! The way in which the nutroots can turn on a former darling in the blink of an eye provides us with the fodder for the first offering from our new television network, Blue Crab Television or BCTV™. Our first daytime drama will be a soap opera that tracks the day-to-day fun and games As The Nutroots Turn! Can't Miss TV! Daytime Emmy, here we come!

UPDATE: New, improved photo!

Democratic Election Strategy 2008

UPDATE: This story is generating a serious tizzy on the left wing of the blogosphere.

WASHINGTON - Democrat Barack Obama said Sunday that if elected he will push to increase the amount of income that is taxed to provide monthly Social Security benefits.

Obama and other Democratic presidential candidates previously have signaled support for this idea.

But during an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," Obama said subjecting more of a person's income to the payroll tax is the option he would push for if elected president.

He objected to benefit cuts or a higher retirement age.

"I think the best way to approach this is to adjust the cap on the payroll tax so that people like myself are paying a little bit more and people who are in need are protected," the Illinois senator said.

"That is the option that I will be pushing forward."

Paul Krugman is whining mightily, The HuffnPuff Post has not one but two people weighing in, Taylor Marsh and Dave Johnson. To say both are unhappy is an understatement.

Fife Symington: UFOlogist

Ex-Arizona governor Fife Symington says he saw a UFO in Phoenix one night in 1997.

I witnessed a massive delta-shaped, craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak, a mountain range in Phoenix, Arizona. It was truly breathtaking. I was absolutely stunned because I was turning to the west looking for the distant Phoenix Lights.

To my astonishment this apparition appeared; this dramatically large, very distinctive leading edge with some enormous lights was traveling through the Arizona sky.

As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I'd ever seen. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don't fly in formation.

But wait! There's more!

We want the government to stop putting out stories that perpetuate the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth conventional terms. Investigations need to be re-opened, documents need to be unsealed and the idea of an open dialogue can no longer be shunned.

Fortunately, we know exactly who can help you Barney - er - sorry - Fife. We now have a matched pair to run for office!

At The Clinton Q&A Session

(Apropos this post) UPDATE: Second photo honoring the second charge of sockpuppetry by the Clinton campaign. Life is beautiful.

UPDATE: Oh my, there is no love for Hillary on this one. Even the few left-leaning blogs commenting are not at all happy with this one.

Captain's Quarters, Michelle Malkin, BitsBlog, Say Anything, Taylor Marsh, Don Surber, Political Machine, Macsmind, Blogs for Bush, Redstate, Fausta's blog, TigerHawk, Patterico's Pontifications, ScrappleFace, Spin Cycle, Riehl World View, Gina Cobb, QandO, Lonewacko, PoliPundit.com, Brilliant at Breakfast, Flopping Aces,  Booman Tribune,

When The Circus Comes To Town

The clowns are out in force. Today is the day that Dennis Kucinich - D(ingbat) Ohio, will introduce his "privileged resolution" to impeach Dick Cheney. Michelle Malkin has the wording of the resolution up over at her site, along with the list of co-sponsors. Which is pretty much a roll of the lunatic wing of the Democratic party. The Republicans learned - the hard way - that running an vehemently partisan impeachment proceeding was a great way to alienate voters. Some folks either are incapable of learning or are under mind control. We're guessing the latter.

Directions

Dennis Kucinich (D(ingbat) - Ohio) will introduce a privileged resolution onto the floor of the House of Representatives calling for the impeachment of Dick Cheney.

“The momentum is building for impeachment,” Kucinich said. “Millions of citizens across the nation are demanding Congress rein in the Vice President’s abuse of power.

“Despite this groundswell of opposition to the unconstitutional conduct of office, Vice President Cheney continues to violate the U.S. Constitution by insisting the power of the executive branch is supreme.

Of course, Kucinich is recently famous because of his friend Shirley MacLaine revealed his close encounter with a UFO. According to MacLaine, Kucinich received "direction" from the UFO. We haven't the heart to tell him who was sending the transmission……

UPDATE: Others: Michelle Malkin: "Strike up the nutroots band!"

The Influence Peddler: "Reasonable people might ask themselves 'gee, if it was this easy to force a vote on impeachment, how come it's never happened before?'" (Then he goes on to explain some of the arcane rules of the House n play here - good primer.)

Say Anything: "Dennis “I See UFO’s” Kucinich To Introduce Resolution To Impeach Cheney Next Week"

Jules Crittenden: "Yes, hold him accountable! But where’s Pelosi, Murtha?  This is a job for the leadership.  Seeing as they have been unable to accomplish anything else, it’s only right that they should be the ones to unaccomplish this."

Weasel Zippers: "His alien overlords insist…."

The Green Waldo

Well, I see he still is having a hissy fit. Today Greenwald is going off on the right wing blogosphere after Dread Pundit Bluto highlighted what got left out of Greenwald's original rant.

In fact, I'd say that Greenwald exceeds mere exaggeration and mischaracterization and flirts with outright lies in that section of his post. Colonel Boylan has not confirmed the authenticity of the letter, and the possibility remains that Greenwald, who has been alleged to use sock puppets in the past, might have faked it.

I hope the Colonel did write it, and, if he did, that he gets a commendation for it.

So what the hey, I'll just pile on, too.

At Last

Something I can actually agree with Bill Clinton about. A 9/11 troofer yelled out that 9/11 was an "inside job" at a speech Clinton was giving. UPDATE: You'll have to click the link, LiveLeak's embed code is seriously hosed up. Second update: Got a YouTube embed.

And just a quick reminder of the sort of inside jobs the troofers can expect in their future employment endeavors.

The Soul Of A New Machine

Christopher Hayes, writing at The Nation, alleges that he has discovered a "new right-wing smear machine."

Such is the power of the right-wing smear forward, a vehicle for the dissemination of character assassination that has escaped the scrutiny directed at the Limbaughs and Coulters and O'Reillys but one that is as potent as it is invisible. In 2004 putative firsthand accounts of Kerry's performance in Vietnam traveled through e-mail in right-wing circles, presaging the Swift Boat attacks. Last winter a forward began circulating accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim schooled in a radical madrassa (about which more later). While the story was later fed through familiar right-wing megaphones, even making it onto Fox, it has continued to circulate via e-mail long after being definitively debunked by CNN. In other words, the few weeks the smear spent in the glare of the mainstream media was just a tiny portion of a long life cycle, most of which has been spent darting from inbox to inbox.

In that respect, the e-mail forward doesn't fit into our existing model of the right-wing noise machine's structure (hierarchical) or its approach (broadcast). It is, instead, organic and peer-to-peer. If the manufactured outrage over Kerry's botched joke about George Bush's study habits was the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster, the Gold Star Mother smear was like one of those goofy viral videos of a dog on a skateboard on YouTube. Of course, some of those videos end up with 25 million page views. And now that large media companies understand their potential, they've begun trying to create their own. Which prompts the obvious question: if a handful of millionaires and disgruntled Swift Boat Veterans were able to sabotage Kerry's campaign in 2004, what kind of havoc could be wreaked in 2008 by a few political operatives armed with little more than Outlook and a talent for gossip?

The smear forward has its roots in two distinct forms of Internet-age communication. First, there's the electronically disseminated urban legend ("Help find this missing child!"; "Bill Gates is going to pay people for every e-mail they send!"), which has been a staple of the Internet since the mid- '90s. Then there's the surreal genre of right-wing e-mail forwards. These range from creepy rage-filled quasi-fascist invocations ("The next time you see an adult talking…during the playing of the National Anthem–kick their ass") to treacly aphorisms of patriotic/religious uplift ("remember only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ…and the American Soldier").

For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with talk-radio, are an informational staple, a means of getting the real stories that the mainstream media ignore. "I get a million of them!" says Gerald DeSimone, a 74-year-old veteran from Ridgewood, New Jersey, who describes his politics as "to the right of Attila the Hun." "If I forwarded every one on, everyone would hate me…. I'm trying to cut back. I try to send no more than two or three a day. I must get thirty or forty a day."

Hey! Catchy name for a movie: Smear it Forward! Well, all I can say is that I never got any of the memos from the first VRWC, so I doubt I'll get any from the new one. But if Hayes had just asked us, we could have sent him pictures. First the old VRWC Smear Central:

And the new Double-Secret Smear It Forward Chief:

Which is up against the Hillary Mobile Cash Vacuum and Character Assassination Express (this is the smallest one in the fleet):

Close Encounters Of The Kookoo Kind

According to longtime friend Shirley MacLaine, Dennis Kucinich Had an encounter with a UFO and received directions from the craft.

"Dennis found his encounter extremely moving," MacLaine writes. "The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him.

"It hovered, soundless, for 10 minutes or so, and sped away with a speed he couldn't comprehend. He said he felt a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind."

Poor Dennis. With friends like Shirley, he isn't exactly a shoo-in for the presidency, is he? We haven't the heart to tell him that what he encountered was not a UFO. It was actually Uncle Guido with his home built hovercraft. And Dennis misunderstood. He wasn't being given direction from the craft. Guido was asking for directions. Here's Guido on a test flight.

Speed Kills

Original here.

Gore: Clinton Unstoppable

CNN is reporting that a source close to Al Gore says that Gore would be interested in running for president, but that he believes that Hillary Clinton's machine is unstoppable at this point.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A source involved in Gore's past political runs told CNN that he definitely has the ambition to use the peace prize as a springboard to run for president.

But he will not run, because he won't take on the political machine assembled by Sen. Hillary Clinton, said the source. If the senator from New York had faltered at all, Gore would take a serious look at entering the race, the source said. But Gore has calculated that Clinton is unstoppable, according to the source.

However, our sources over at Magic 8-Ball Telepathic Photography and Overnight Express, Ltd. (motto: We know where your package is going before you do) inform us that Al has different plans: