Dangerous Liasons with Arianna Huffington

Hey @KeithOlbermann, can you explain why Arianna is palling around with terrorists?

Via Jim Newell (who will forever be Wonkette to me no matter what) at Gawker, h/t Driftglass:

Arianna Huffington is in Amalfi, Italy, apparently, mixing it up with Newt and Callista Gingrich, mega-entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman and his wife Deborah, and Barbara Walters.


Unfortunately, we have no soundtrack to figure out how this photo came about.  If I wanted to be generous with Arianna, I might infer that to get back at him for DESTROYING AMERICA, Ms. Huffington had walked up to his gathering and suggested that she and the Gingster use their armpits as fuck toys in front of Barbara Walters and Blow Job Queen Wife Number 3 (tm Tengrain).  

Watch this, Barbara!  I'm going to give Newt here a woody using nothing but our armpits!   Betcha that  Elisabeth Hasselbeck can't do this!  What's it like on The View to sit next to that right wing bag of scented tampons?    Whoopi must be in a constant state of upchuck.  Speaking of upchuck, isn't Callista late for the vomitorium?  Uh, I gotta go now!

But I'm not generous with Arianna.  Not a bit.

You'll make me the next Sally Quinn?   Of course you will, Dahlink!
But I must know who does Andrea Mitchell's botox.  

This is not a post about how her blog sucks.  We all get that.  And it's not about her being rich, though she should pay her damn writers.  This is about there being two parties in this world, the haves and the have-nots.  And to these two selfish haves, politics is a show and a game and something to do to 'make your mark' between vacations in sunny Italy.  Fuckwads.


For cavorting with the nation's enemy in the name of celebrity, while pretending to be a progressive, Arianna Antoinette should never be paraded as our spokeswoman.  She should be dragged in a hay cart though the public square and pelted with recalled eggs, the end. 


PS I love how due to this post, Google Ads thinks it would be a good idea to post Newt Gingrich ads on this blog.   Since I've never seen a dime from them, they and he can suck it.

Welcome to Blue Gal's Bank and Trust!

If you don't think there's a blogging angel looking out for me, may I present Johnny and the Panty Raiders singing "Money". Now, let me refinance your home with no hidden fees!

Seriously, it's not just that we citizens apparently have to become a bank to get any help from this Congress...

...it's that big corporations actually figured this out in the '90s.



At the end of this commercial it says Ditech is a GMAC company. GM? Like the car company bailed out by us taxpayers?

GMAC (Ditech) used to be a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors (GM) . However, the carmaker sold 51% of the business to a group of investors including private-equity firm Cerberus, Citigroup Inc. (C) , Japan's Aozora Bank Ltd. (JP:8304) and a unit of PNC Financial Services (PNC) in 2006.

Soon after, GMAC was hit hard by the housing meltdown, partly because it was a leading subprime mortgage lender.

Does anyone think it's a coincidence that the deregulation of the banking industry was spearheaded by Mister "Freedom Works" himself, Dick Armey?

I know I'm way behind the times on this...everybody knows corporate America went into the financial business because there was big money to be made and no one was watching. But it got personal with me due to a bill I received and contested last month.

I have one store credit card that I got because with the credit card you can get big discounts at said store. I have had this card almost two years and I pay off the small balance, if any, every single month. (This, by the way, is known in the credit card industry as being a "deadbeat." They make no additional money off of me or my account.)

There was a problem, that I admit might have been my fault, with my online bill pay, where two bills were scheduled to be paid in November rather than October. That meant store credit card was being paid a month late. I noticed the error and changed it... but not in time.

You know where this is going....

In addition to charging me 24% interest for my outstanding balance, they slapped on a $39.00 late payment fee.

I wrote them a letter. At the time of my writing I had already corrected my error and paid off the balance on the card completely. There was ZERO due on the bill, they could see that when they investigated my account.

I explained that yes, it might have been my error, and I understand they did not receive payment on time so the interest would be due, but that as a good customer I expected them to refund me the exorbitant late fee, that fee being outrageous and completely arbitrary. If they wanted me to continue to use the card and shop in their store they could render good-will by not screwing me.

They replied:

"After reviewing your account, we are unable to comply with your request to remove the requested fee(s). ...We appreciate you as a valued cardmember and hope you will continue to enjoy shoppping in our stores, catalog, blag blah blah..."

Here's the deal: this store sends me coupons totaling the same amount as the late fee at least every two weeks. I'm sitting here with three coupons totaling $40.00 off anything in the store right now, which I have no intention of "enjoying". They can kiss my ass.

But let's face it, this store is not in the business of selling stuff. They are in the 'screwing the consumer with a credit card addiction' business. And here's the fine print punchline, printed right at the bottom of their letter to me:

Account is owned by GE MONEY BANK - Member FDIC

GE? As in, General Electric? General Electric owns the credit card accounts of JC Penney?

Yes. Yes they do.

Wanna really turn your stomach? GE also owns credit card accounts for HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS.

Dear JCPenney: You fucked with the wrong muckraker.

cc: Senators Bernie Sanders and Al Franken

Let me explain "rationing" to the teabaggers.

[Photoshopped their sign just a lil' bit. Original here.]

Last night I attended an open house for the grade 6-8 magnet school for my children's school district. This is a terrific school. Every single kid in the school gets their own MacBook with their textbooks embedded to take home. The kids, as evidenced by the "student ambassadors" hosting the open house, are well-spoken, confident, learning dynamos.

There were about 250 parents and kids there in the crowded auditorium, being sold on the idea of applying to this magnet school. It's like selling water in the desert. Five hundred fifth-graders are expected to apply for approximately 100 available spots in this school. The sales pitch was completely unnecessary except to provide some eighth-graders with some public speaking "enrichment".

And we all sat there like sheep. No one shouted out in rage that the other option, one many of us fear and four out of five of us will be forced to consider, is sending our kids to the assigned residential school for our address. You know, the MIDDLE school that gets occasional good reviews because the SHERIFF'S DEPUTIES that roam the hall are really nice people.

That access to decent public education, right here in our own community, is rationed by a completely arbitrary lottery.

The children in my school district, a district I expect is typical, are poor and getting poorer by the year:

Crooks and Liars posted a story this week that half of all kids in America are, not will be, on food stamps sometime in their lives (full disclosure: my kids are, and free lunch too), and for black kids the statistic is 90%. This is not based on projections, but on historical evidence collected for a pediatric organization. Pediatricians know that children on food stamps are more likely to be malnourished. It's a national health concern and, memo to John Kyl, should be a homeland security concern as well.

And what comes to my mind as I take the long route home, my hands shaking on the steering wheel, is all this talk about rationing and "hands off my healthcare" from a generation of people who are going to receive a check from Barack Obama for $250.00 in the next year. Am I to assume the teabaggers will be tearing up the check and returning it to the US Treasury with their own stamp, out of concern for the deficits they protested in DC yesterday? Or will they apply that money to their hotel bill from last night, might as well stay an extra day so we can see the Air and Space Museum, seeing as Dick Armey gave us free bus fare into town.

Dick Armey, who considers healthcare reform, but not the Bush tax cuts, "generational theft."

Theft for WHOM, Dick?

As I was saying...

I usually don't link to the big boys but Glenn Greenwald pulls everybody in on his post so I don't have to:

What makes this particularly appalling and inexcusable is that Senate Democrats had long vehemently opposed the use of the "state secrets" privilege in exactly the way that the Bush administration used it in this case, even sponsoring legislation to limits its use and scope. Yet here is Obama, the very first chance he gets, invoking exactly this doctrine in its most expansive and abusive form to prevent torture victims even from having their day in court, on the ground that national security will be jeopardized if courts examine the Bush administration's rendition and torture programs -- even though (a) the rendition and torture programs have been written about extensively in the public record; (b) numerous other countries have investigated exactly these allegations; and (c) other countries have provided judicial forums in which these same victims could obtain relief.

The only thing I have to add is, this is why we bloggers still say


The least Eric Holder can do is tell us who he's protecting. As if we don't already know.

What we're talking about when we talk about fuck...

No, ma hunnies, we're not talking about this, which for some odd reason is called "the Foreman Grill position". Wev:

No. I'm talking about "fuck." The word. We bloggers use it. A lot. Why?

Fuck is the word that works when writing about Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rove, Iraq, Fox, Chris Matthews, Chris Wallace, McCain, Rumsfeld, Lieberman, Corporations, Health Care, Congress, and the music industry. Not to mention Republican Evangelicals.

Did I leave a few out? Fuck.

We say fuck because we can, because like fucking itself it feels good when you do it right (and there's really no wrong way to do it), and most importantly, because it is the right word at the right time and we bloggers are all about the writing. As Whiskyfire points out in what I think will be one of the top five posts in the entire blogosphere for 2008,

None of this [blogospherian success] would have been possible if we weren't willing to say "fuck" a lot, though -- an important point which is often glossed over. Somebody had to say that the war was a stupid fucking idea, for instance. Because, you know, it was a stupid fucking idea (as was the bankruptcy bill and telecom immunity), and yet the media (including, shamefully, the NYT) just sort of forgot to point this out.

So we say fuck in part to distinguish ourselves from the mainstream media. Corrente's very useful glossary of liberal invective makes the point very succinctly:

Fuck - Our guarantee to you that the post containing this term is not Corporate or Government propaganda.

So sometimes fuck is just used as invective and sometimes, well, we actually are talking about fucking, the actual sexual act. Usually when we're talking about actually fucking, though, we're talking about Republicans/conservatives fucking and we're laughing at them. Because one of the really fun things about fucking is that we liberals know that conservatives are fucking and they can't talk about it like we can. It takes enlightenment to distinguish morality from humanity and decide that fucking is something humans do and that fucking is not necessarily a bad thing in and of its own self. But conservatives are all repressed about fucking so we can have a lot of fun with them. When a blogger can TAG A POST

"Gay Republican sex in a shithouse with falafels diapers and loofahs,"

and not break a writers' block sweat, have the post make total sense, AND most importantly be factually accurate, we know we're having something called fun. Notice the blogger here is talking about at least four specific conservatives and you don't need a map or guidebook to know exactly who they are. That's fucking brilliant.

Some bloggers might argue that we don't HAVE to use the word fuck, either stooping to talk about Republican fucking, or using fuck as an invective, in order to blog. That's true. But where's the fun in that? To paraphrase something I wrote (okay, stole from The Onion, but still) at The Aristocrats:

I know a lot of fuckwads, you know, "integrity bloggers," who wouldn't do fuck-all about this predicament, just fuck off for a while and wait for the whole thing to blow over. But you see, that's just not this bloggerfucker's style. What the fuck ever happened to accountability? The blogosphere can be a real fuck, sure, but we fucking finish what we start, and not just when we're blogging, if you get my fucking drift. Any fuckhead integrity blogger who thinks I should fucking walk away from the fuckface issues and ditch the potty mouth is a fucking fucktard and I'll say it to his fucking face, the fuckface.

The great thing about blogging is, we don't really give a fuck. The MSM can fuck us around, but they know not to take it too fucking far. You know why? Because you don't fuck with fuckers, that's why. And if you fuck with the fucking blogosphere, you'll end up being the fuck that gets fucked.

So I'm sitting here and fuck, how do I end this post? Fucking Matt Damon is too recent. The classic lexicon youtube on fuck everybody's seen, and if you've read to the end of this post you don't need it. Most of you have probably seen this, too, but it makes my point rather well. You see, Quentin Tarantino is a fucking good writer, and Pulp Fiction is his masterpiece, in my fucking opinion. Enjoy:

Today is....

...wear orange day. In solidarity with those who have been held by our country for six years without charge and without trial.

The ACLU has kindly provided us all with a sample blog post but frankly I don't think anyone around here needs that either for writing or reading.

Some of you know that when The Bastille was stormed, there were very few prisoners inside, and that The Bastille was kind of the country club prison of Paris. Most of the seven prisoners freed that day were of a higher social class than their liberators. But the Bastille was symbolic of everything, absolutely everything, that was wrong with the government of France in 1789.

Guantanamo is not a country club prison, and the prisoners there are unnumbered and unnamed to the public. For our safety.

But it is a symbol. And it needs to be stormed, electronically and politically but we revolutionaries use what we've got. Shut down Guantanamo means live up to the Consitution of the United States as you swore to when you were inaugurated...aw fuck it. He won't. But we will continue to fight him and use the symbols at our disposal to show the wider world how wrong this whole country is right now.

Played "Bastille Day" by Rush while writing this and it's a good soundtrack for outrage.

They're all yours, babycakes.

and thanks to Logan for posting the vid. Now that I'm closer to it, I can tell you, that is work.

Love him. Love this.

Billy Bragg singing his theme song with updates. Watch the interview snippet at the end, too.

Happy Birthday Bob Dylan

What with Keith Olbermann last night and all the betrayals and the war and the blogs and YOU, dearest readers. I just thrust my fist in the air, sang it as loud as I could, and CRIED.