A 360 Smackdown!

Please Hammer Anderson Cooper; don't hurt 'em.

Why Joe Scarborough Isn't On Fox News

Because they wouldn't allow him to be honest enough to Republicans to tell them that they need to drop Sarah Palin like a bad habit.

No Main Topic

1. For most jobs, this is known as "and other duties as required."
2. Terrorists in Disguise.
3. Creating a new generation of working poor.
4. R.I.P., Leslie Nielsen.
5. Shorter Rep. King: Because Wikileaks is exposing the dark underbelly of American government (you know, the thing the Tea Party claims to hate) we should just label them a terrorist organization.
6. This explains why I couldn't get a connection yesterday. Can't wait for that Comcast/NBC merger!
7. Say what you will about Kim Kardashian, the lady can pick some causes.
   

Around The Internets

1. Flight Attendants were prefer you to act like a mature adult when flying.
2. Judging by all the pastries, Ms. Cyrus might not be able to wear that outfit again.
3. Better than stripping, I guess.
   
4. Eva Longoria isn't exactly innocent.
5. Ex-NFL wife doesn't buy Steve Harvey's relationship philosophy.
6. Uncanny Valley, here we come.
   

"Close To Eating His Own Poop"

No other way to describe it, really.

Remember When Bush Was President, The Patriot Act Was In Full Swing, and People/the Media Were Screaming Bloody Murder Over TSA Search Policies?

Me neither.

The Michael Who Mentored Kobe Bryant

It's not who you think.

Kwame Kilpatrick & The $1,000 Stripper

What makes this story special is that drugs and Kilpatrick's wife were involved. Sheesh.

About Presidential Approval Ratings

After his first two years, Ronald Reagan was at 35%. As seen here, here, and here.

Around The Internets

(pic via)

1. Superhero Action Twitter Role Playing.
2. No, that's not Jamie Kennedy's blond twin sister.
3. Disney Princess + Star Wars Sith Lord = This.
4. There's hope for me yet.
   
5. What is read cannot be unread.
6. DC is bringing back Doomsday.
7. The best and worst Mega Man weapons (although Top Spin is up for debate; serious debate).
8. P. Diddy won't always help your career.
   

Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal Bare All To Promote New Movie

He's totally spooning her. I don't care what anyone says.

Rachel Maddow: The Nuclear Weapons Story You Probably Didn't Know About

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Political Soup

1. Karl Rove really doesn't want the GOP to embrace Sarah Palin as a candidate, but Fox News likes her sooo much. What's gonna happen when more Bush Administration people start to chime in?
2. Ann Coulter is not a conservative; she's a thin-skinned pundit who says crazy stuff to stay relevant, as evidenced by her confrontation with an actual conservative.
3. Shorter Tony Perkins: If gay soldiers are allowed to admit that they're gay, we'll need to re-institute the draft.
   

It's Just TV, Dude

I know people are unset on the way DWTS is playing out, but no need to grab the firearms.

The R.L. Checklist

Totally awesome at first glance? CHECK!!

But upon multiple viewings, you notice some odd things like:

1. The guns don't look real; as in, "The guns look like Deadpool and Lady Deadpool bought them at Toys 'R Us." CHECK
2. The tips of the arrows in Deadpool's back should be protruding out of front of his body a little bit. CHECK
3. Or, how about the fact that even though these two are both deadly assassins known for using guns and swords with relative efficiency, they still choose to use bows and arrows? CHECK
4. Considering where they are currently aiming, neither will shoot/cut the other. CHECK
5. If those are supposed to be "handguns," they're a tad long. CHECK
6. Deadpool is drawn like he's standing over Lady Deadpool, while Lady Deadpool is drawn like she's falling? CHECK
7. Lady Deadpool's right arm is slightly more toned than her left? CHECK

Now by no means is this Liefeld's worst. It's just that he has this knack for wowing on the initial take-in, if you like that sort of thing (and during the 1990's a whole bunch of people did).

Health Insurance Companies Wanted To Take Care of Michael Moore...

...but not in a good way, more like a "push off a cliff" way. I don't know what's crazier: that these people actually plotted this or that they thought that a filmmaker was more dangerous to their bottom line than, say, a politician.

"Personal Foul on Tony Parker"

Dude; what the fuck?

Text messages? TEXT MESSAGES? Do these sports cats learn anything? Why are y'all still using cell phone for your jump-offs? They record everything.

And your teammate wife? What. The. Hell? You're supposed to share the ball, not the wife.

And certainly the most important thing: how could you do this to your wife? Have you seen her fucking show? It's all about older MILFs banging their poolboys and their daughter's boyfriends. She's sees young meat everyday, and she's an attractive female, so you know there's at least been some mild flirtation..but she wasn't sending them booty-call requests, was she? She kept her shit under control. But you? You? You go ahead and hook-up with a teammate's wife?

Again: What the fuck?

Alvin Greene Won't Give Up

Now this loser claims he was born to be president.

Look, until you start winning elections, you shouldn't be talking about how great you are politically and what you think you'll accomplish. Especially when you can barely muster any support from your own political party.

New Green Lantern Trailer

via Comics Alliance.

UPDATE: Cracked.com's Daniel O'Brien is not impressed.

Dr. D'oh

As Oliver and TPM both note, MD has a new representative who is complaining about not getting his job-related government health care. The irony/hypocrisy of this story is that he ran against "Obamacare," which he once called "entitlement."

I'm longing for the day when a majority of our representatives actually practice what they preach (or preach against).

It's Sarah Palin's World, We Just Live In It.

She has her own reality show/infomercial.

Her daughter my be the next winner of Dancing With The Stars (even though she hasn't been the best dancer).

And for Pete's Sake: a word she made up will no probably be part of the Dictionary.

To be honest, running for president is the last thing she should do. Why be president when you can be the next Oprah?

No Main Topic

1. Privacy is perceptive.
2. Don't eat Gorgonzola cheese.
3. UMCP, NASA and a professor named Sunshine.
4. For Afghanistan: baby steps.
   

Around the Internets

(pic via)

1. Don't collect any of these.
2. Time for understanding.
3. So...it's possible to be your boss' boss?
4. Comic artist John Bryne (and others): the new Cassandra?
5. Turn Miami Heat's Big Three into a Big Two?
   
6. Odd are if an ex-athlete is running for office, they're Republican.
7. Pretty interesting re-imaginings.
8. Death By Burger.
9. The porn priest.
10. Joe Jackson: Yeah, I beat my kids to keep them out of jail.
    

Go Terps!

It's dumb that I can't watch my alma mater play on TV (despite the fact I live 20 minutes away) but at least we seem to be beating on teams again.

Just Couldn't Wait Until His Term Ended, Could He?

WTF, Jack Johnson?

WashPost has more.

Kiss This

Who knew kissing could be physically and financially beneficial?

I May Never Fly Again...

...especially after hearing some of the things coming out of the mouths of pilots, such as:

“The truth is, we’re exhausted. Our work rules allow us to be on duty 16 hours without a break. That’s many more hours than a truck driver. And unlike a truck driver, who can pull over at the next rest stop, we can’t pull over at the next cloud.”

“At some airports with really short runways, you’re not going to have a smooth landing no matter how good we are: John Wayne Airport; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Chicago Midway; and Reagan National.”

“There’s no such thing as a water landing. It’s called crashing into the ocean.”

“I’ve been struck by lightning twice. Most pilots have. Airplanes are built to take it. You hear a big boom and see a big flash and that’s it. You’re not going to fall out of the sky.”

“There is no safest place to sit. In one accident, the people in the back are dead; in the next, it’s the people up front.”

“Please don’t complain to me about your lost bags or the rotten service or that the airline did this or that. My retirement was taken to help subsidize your $39 airfare.”

“People don’t understand why they can’t use their cell phones. Well, what can happen is 12 people will decide to call someone just before landing, and I can get a false reading on my instruments saying that we are higher than we really are.”

“When you get on that airplane at 7 a.m., you want your pilot to be rested and ready. But the hotels they put us in now are so bad that there are many nights when I toss and turn. They’re in bad neighborhoods, they’re loud, they’ve got bedbugs, and there have been stabbings in the parking lot.”

New Proposed Logos For NFL Teams

By way of ESPN's Kurt Snibbe: Part 1 & Part 2.

Capitalism In All It's Glory

Some guy has a self-publicized book called, "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure."

Amazon.com is selling it, and defending the fact that they sell it.

Why do I call this "capitalism?" Because the Amazon story represents the core of this economic philosophy: as long as you can make some money doing it, go for it. There is no moral imperative when you take capitalism at its purest form, which is why you need laws and policies to regulate it. Otherwise, some company would be selling candy-flavored cigarettes to five-year-olds.

Comics, Video Games...Well, Pretty Much Everything Gets Mega-Manned.

Kewl.

What Do Republicans & Democrats Have In Common?

Their mutual love for "Desperate Housewives," for starters.

Did The Republicans Change Course When They Lost In 2006 & 2008?

C'mon; you know the answer.

WTF: Jessica Alba

For be for me to disagree with someone who been in more movies than I have, but I don't think, "Good actors...never us the script unless it's amazing writing" is a true statement.

More here.

Perfect Timing

From The Boston Globe:

Cities and towns across the state are diverting large sums of money to “rainy day’’ accounts even as they lay off employees and make deep cuts to schools and services, girding for what many believe will be a long period of austerity.

Municipal leaders give a variety of reasons — cuts in state aid, anticipated increases in health care costs, dwindling federal stimulus funds — but the financial stockpiling is also a signal they fear the funding enjoyed before the financial collapse will not return anytime soon.

“This is the new normal,’’ said Mayor Dean J. Mazzarella of Leominster, which set aside $3 million this year while it also made sharp cuts that included layoffs. “And we need to adjust.’’

The increase in savings is significant — even surprising. Municipalities saved, on average, more than 6 percent of their fiscal 2009 budgets, the highest rate since at least 1994.

Meanwhile, over in The New York Times...

Republicans who have taken over state capitols across the country are promising to respond to crippling budget deficits with an array of cuts, among them proposals to reduce public workers’ benefits in Wisconsin, scale back social services in Maine and sell off state liquor stores in Pennsylvania, endangering the jobs of thousands of state workers.

States face huge deficits, even after several grueling years of them, and just as billions of dollars in stimulus money from Washington is drying up.

With some of these new Republican state leaders having taken the possibility of tax increases off the table in their campaigns, deep cuts in state spending will be needed. These leaders, committed to smaller government, say that is the idea.

“We’re going to do what families and businesses all over this country have already had to do, and that is live within their means,” said Brian Bosma, a Republican who will soon become the speaker of the Indiana House, alongside a Republican governor, Mitch Daniels, and a supermajority of Republicans in the State Senate.

Of course if what Bosma said was true, they would have been cracking down on the credit card companies who've been flooding college campuses for the past two decades. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how eliminating all these state jobs plays in to the machinations of the Republicans in US House of Representatives, who were ushered in (partially) on the premise that they could address the high level of unemployment.

So Much For "Staying On For The Season"

Dallas Cowboys fire Wade Phillips.

Quote Of The Day

Did you ever watch G.I. Joe when you were a kid, Uzi?

No, actually. I know, I led a deprived existence.

There's an episode called "Cobra's Candidate" where Cobra is interfering in a mayoral election. Because, you know, local government is the prime target for international terrorist groups.

Chris Sims and David Uzumeri, managing to tie Smallville, G.I. Joe, and our current political discourse into one exchange.

"You Didn't Get Mad When..."

Best take down of the "Tea Party Anger" I've read since they were "created."

It's Your Politics, Charlie Brown!

Heh.

Around The Internets

1. What The Tea Party wants.
2. Holy expansion, Batman!
3. Not made in the U.S.A. (anymore).
   
4. Is Spider-Man really the hero we think he is?
   

Slow Bleeding

What better way to fool the American people into thinking that Health Care Reform didn't work than to defund it before any significant pieces go into effect?

Once again, Republicans attempt to prove that government doesn't work by actively working to dismantle it. Sooner or later Americans are going to have to realize that a corporation can be just as corrupt and ineffectual as government, and you have to have the right people in place to make either work properly.

Howard Kurtz: Hypocritical Jerk

I'm sure his conflict-of-interest stories are different than Keith Olbermann's.

"More Jobs, Lower Taxes"...and Voter Fraud?

Goes to show that even MD politics can get dirty.

October Saw More Jobs, But That Didn't Change the Unemployment %

Of course the GOP will claim credit for this.

WASHINGTON — U.S. employers added a better-than-expected 151,000 jobs in October the Labor Department reported Friday, but the number was less than the 200,000 needed to start returning the 15 million unemployed Americans to work.

Private-sector hiring was up 159,000, a number that also beat Wall Street’s expectations, while the nation’s unemployment rate remained at 9.6 percent for a third straight month.

The jobs report illustrates why the Federal Reserve felt it needed to announce Wednesday a plan to buy $600 billion in Treasury bonds. Those purchases are intended to lower interest rates on mortgages and other loans and help boost the economy.

Of Course They're Canadian

Those socialists!

A retired Canadian couple who won $11.3 million in the lottery in July have already given it (almost) all away.

"What you've never had, you never miss," 78-year-old Violet Large explained to a local reporter.

She was undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer when the couple realized they'd won the jackpot in July.

"That money that we won was nothing," her tearful husband, Allen, told Patricia Brooks Arenburg of the Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald. "We have each other."

Quote Of The Day

"So I'm drunk at the dinner table at Mother and Dad's house in Maine. And my brothers and sister are there, Laura's there. And I'm sitting next to a beautiful woman, friend of Mother and Dad's, and I said to her out loud, 'What is sex like after 50?'"

-- Take a Wild Guess.

No Main Topic

1. Don't worry; The GOP promised to help them.
2. They may be old, but the Celtics still got it.
3. Hate to say it, but we have our share of hit-and-runs in MD.
4. Now that's luck.
5. Let's see how long he enjoys his freedom.
   

Regarding The Elections Tonight

I've heard the GOP say pretty much the same thing: they plan on extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone (including rich people), repealing the (water-down) health care reform, sealing the border and cutting spending on things that make up less than 10% of the budget.

I noticed a trend here: these are all (for Republicans, anyway) domestic agendas.

As in, "they haven't really talked about foreign policy." Nothing about Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Iran. Or North Korea.

Nothing about Al-Qaida. Or the Taliban. Or Osama bin Laden.

That's probably because talking about "fighting them over there" has run its course. Fear of things outside America has been trumped by fear of things inside America (we can thank the Housing Crisis for getting that ball rolling).

Nevertheless, it's certainly shocking to see a political party who was all about military-based patriotism (read: they supported the wars but they'd be damned if they had to actually fight them, and even then they preferred to outsource normal military functions) suddenly turn to the "kitchen table" only after the President decided to address an issue that's been around for, well, 60 years. It's surprising to see a "grassroots" party arise not because of the spending that went into the Bush Administration's grand adventure in Iraq, but because of a Health Care Reform Plan that's pretty much paid for.

It'll be interesting to see if the GOP-controlled House of Representatives focus any attention on foreign issues like they did when Bush was in office, or if they just fart around trying to bog down the Senate with go-nowhere legislation or "investigating" the Obama Administration.

As for the Democrats: With Grayson and Feingold losing, progressives can't say, "If the Democrats embraced their base, they'll be rewarded accordingly." Obviously if that were the case, these two wouldn't be getting ready to pack their things (and sure, local issues are a factor, but isn't the liberal base supposed to be smart enough to navigate the nuances and relate that to potential voters)? At the same time, acting like Republicans didn't help a lot of "Blue Dog Democrats" keep their seats either. So don't be surprised to see some confused and/or timid Democrats over the next few months.

The Democrats in the House can now sit back and let the GOP fight amongst themselves to get something passed (and some may welcome the reversal).

The Democrats in the Senate, with a smaller majority, now has less pressure to embrace more progressive issues. But if they were smart, they would just allow the GOP to actually filibuster something.

The Obama White House isn't that impacted (Obama can still veto stuff, remember?) but maybe now he has a viable, tangible opponent: the GOP House. It wasn't really a far fight when your foes are radio hosts and ex-governors who can't really affect policy. Now he can face a group that has the power to put their money where their mouth is (and in some issues, they'll be forced to do this literally).

Does this mean that the Tea Party has replaced the progressive netroots? Hardly. The Congressional losses that the Democrats suffered weren't entirely unexpected, they were nowhere near the losses the Democrats suffered in 1994, and turnout for Tea Party-favored candidates came predominantly from older white males, while younger voters still seem to be trending Democratic. If anything, there's a lesson for progressives from both Howard Dean's Fifty-State Strategy (which partially resulted in getting Blue Dogs) and Tom Kaine's Traditional Strategy (which meant abandoning "loss cause" Democrats): it's not about getting "more Democrats" or "popular Democrats," but real Democrats. Being a Democrat with a Republican voting record isn't going to help anymore than being a nationally popular liberal who struggles in their home state. If you want to run under the Democrat Brand, you have to be real.

Overall, this may be good for both the Democrats and the Republicans. Can't say much for their respective bases, though. Things are more balanced, and when that happens the middle tends to trump the base.

I Should Post This Guy Before Every Election