No Day In Court For The Schloz
January 14, 2009 9:44 pm

by dday, hullabaloo

...There you have the latest from the culture of accountability.

If I follow this, a Bush appointee committed crimes by hiring ideological soulmates. The Inspector General reported the crimes to Bush's Justice Department, and they held the report. The Bush appointee at the US Attorneys office in DC recused himself, and let his staffers reject the findings. And those ideologues hired through criminal practices will REMAIN in the Justice Department, protected by civil service laws, well into the future....

...Did the fun ever stop?

So this is the inevitable result of an attitude of "looking forward" and making sure abuses "never happen again" instead of prosecuting clear crimes. There were civil service laws violated as well as, you know, lying to Congress. Republicans love to talk about deterrence in the criminal justice system unless they're the defendant. Likewise, the establishment Villagers love to punish the wicked with their knowing glances and poison pens and scorn, unless, you know, one of their own is in trouble.....

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Flat N All That
January 17, 2009 5:28 pm

Matt Taibbi

When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.

Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism......

.....Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a "Green Revolution"? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.

I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about - in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the "illustrative" figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? "It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel," he wrote, "as long as you remember you’re driving without one." Picture that for a minute......

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Eight Years in Eight Minutes: Olbermann Awesome
January 17, 2009 8:28 pm

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Ann Coulter on SNL Weekend Update
January 18, 2009 2:03 pm

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