He’s this month’s flavor du jour of the week, anyway.
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My heart bleeds for him.
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At 83, he’s giving me hope that I will live to see him flat line.
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Don’t hold your breath. Cockroaches like that live forever.
I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.
- Donald Rumsfeld, November 14, 2002
And it is not knowable if force will be used, but if it is to be used, it is not knowable how long that conflict would last. It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.
- Donald Rumsfeld, February 7, 2003
[Endless shaking of pom-poms for an Iraq invasion later, and well into the occupation…]
I didn’t advocate invasion…I wasn’t asked.
- Donald Rumsfeld, November 20, 2005
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Oh, Rummy, someone’s playing a song for you:
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(not that Peter King is exactly palatable himself)
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No, he’s definitely not. However, the take away from all this inner-beltway hate of Ted Cruz is that it confirms what we all suspect, i.e., he must be an insufferable sociopathic prick who doesn’t work well with others. 
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If Ted Cruz wins the nom. can we hold King to his promise that he’ll take cyanide?
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I keep getting emails from MoveOn/Elizabeth Warren about Merrick Garland and GOP obstructionism on his nomination ending.
I am going to be sorely disappointed if he does end up getting confirmed.
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Yeah - thanks Obama, you damn softcock.
Should’ve trolled the cunts with the most liberal nominee possible, instead of labouring the point that the GOP are obstructionist… Really? You don’t say!
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Despite the shit going on in the primary election, you have to keep in mind that the main reason Obama barely got anything done is because the congress/senate refused to budge an inch; especially when they’re pandering to corporate lobbyists.
So the best way is to get things done is to replace the shills in congress/senate with representatives that caters to civil rights activists and environmentalists; instead of focusing on trade deals and military might, they should be concern about the well being of their people. We should also get them to regulate lobbyists so that it focus on actual issues as opposed to corporate interest.
The federal reserve is a scam, the military is over budgeted, and the justice system is broken; and I highly doubt the president themselves can change any of it.
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We need to regularly vote out the people in office, to remind them that they serve at our pleasure. Unfortunately, too many congresscritters get entrenched in their positions and have little challenging their positions. The biggest wave of challenges recently came from the tea party, sadly. it’s too bad the left (whatever that means anymore) hasn’t done the same and brought challenges to entrenched politicians. The same can be said for the state and local level.
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There are some promising candidates to support
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Awesome! I hope they all win… none in GA, though.
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Speaking of which, Maryland needs your help.
From the article:
[quote]“I like the idea of saying, ‘We can do much more,’ because we can,” Biden said…
“I don’t think any Democrat’s ever won saying, ‘We can’t think that big — we ought to really downsize here because it’s not realistic,’” Biden said. “C’mon man, this is the Democratic Party! I’m not part of the party that says, ‘Well, we can’t do it.’”[/quote]
Well put!
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I wonder how close Cow is to this ballot measure. Sounds like his kind of thing in his state…
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Not US politics, but what do you think of this, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36124256 @zathras?
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Not liking it at all so far. But the world won’t be ending any time soon, and neither will democracy in Austria.
What’s at stake? The presidency in Austria is largely ceremonial - comparable to the Governor General in Canada, not to US, French or Russian presidents.
Basically, the worst a hypothetical president Hofer might be able to do is to trigger parliamentary elections just at the time when it suits his own party the most. Or to use that as a threat to extract some minor concessions from the actual government.
How right-wing is the “Freedom Party” FPÖ? Depends. Mostly to the left of Le Pen and Wilders, last time I checked. Not worse than Fidesz in Hungary or PiS in Poland (though a lot less religious than the latter). Definitely opposed to immigration, especially from islamic nations. Compared to other parties that exist in Europe, I would think that the label “far-right” that the BBC gives them is wrong. They are right-wing populists, not “far right”. Like many European “right-wing” parties, they’d qualify as left-wing In some respects on the American political spectrum.
Supporters of the welfare state; in fact, they are using the welfare state as a major argument against immigration.
Not very religious, but tends to view Christianity as an integral part of Austrian culture; i.e. atheists are fine, as long as its the Christian God they disbelieve.
Slightly homophobic on average, opposed to marriage equality and adoption by homosexual couples, with some party members referring to homosexuality as a sickness. Also has openly homosexual politicians in its ranks, on the other hand.
Male-dominated party; does not approve of “feminist activism”. They do support equality of the sexes in theory, though. Have recently discovered “women’s rights” as a reason why excessive immigration from Islamic countries is a problem.
The only party with a significant number of people who own a handgun.
Anti-TTIP. Anti-EU, though ostensibly not to the point of threatening to leave the union.
Avoiding the FPÖ is usually my top priority in voting, but I think I would still prefer them to most, if not all, republicans.
What happened the last time they were in power? In 2001, the FPÖ won 27% in the parliamentary elections, and became part of a coalition government until 2006. By the end of it, they had split into two parties totalling 15% at the 2006 elections and cost the Austrian state an estimated 10-20 billion Euros through corruption and incompetence.
Who’s the other guy? Alexander van der Bellen, head of the Green party 1997-2008. Officially stood as an independent candidate but was supported financially by the Green party.
Who will win the run-off vote? Unclear. Van der Bellen happens to be my favourite candidate, but he’s the wrong person for the run-off. If the third candidate, Irmgard Griss (truly independent, harmless moderate conservative), had made it to the run-off, she would have definitely won. The Green party, that van der Bellen is still associated with, usually represents the leftmost ~15% of the political spectrum, and thus might be unelectable for most conservatives. Van der Bellen is probably the only candidate (besides Richard Lugner, the slightly senile 2%-candidate that no one ever took seriously) that Hofer is likely to win against.
Voting systems Hofer is definitely not the Condorcet winner. Having a single run-off election ended up pitting the very extremes of the candidate spectrum against each other. On the other hand, I’m really glad that we don’t use the American system; Hofer is the strongest candidate in allmost all districts except for the cities of Vienna, Graz and Innsbruck.
Why are they so strong? I blame the refugees. In late summer/fall of 2015, Austria basically lost control over its borders. About 200,000 people entered the country in September alone, most of them headed for Germany. something between 500,000 and a million people transited through Austria in 2015; 95,000 stayed to apply for asylum (slightly more than 1% of the population). Government and police looked a bit out of their depth. Border police were literally shoved aside and ignored by groups of young male refugees at the border with Slovenia.
Add to that the terrorist attacks in Paris and France; several of the terrorists are said to have entered Europe (re-entered, I think) hidden among the stream of refugees. The “cologne” attacks weren’t a good advertisement for immigration from islamic countries, either. And the FPÖ was the traditional anti-immigration party.
What now?
Run-off elections are on May 22nd. Then, we’ll either have the most progressive president in the history of the country, or an asshole elected into an almost but not quite powerless office.
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