News Roundup for 3/24/10

You, to former president Bush

-Headline of the day-
"Bush wipes his hand on Clinton’s shirt after shaking hands with Haitian residents"

What a jerk.

There's just so much that's wrong with this; it's disrepectful to Clinton, it's disrespectful to the Haitians whose hands he shook, and it's just a dick move in general. Of course, it's not the first time Bush has been caught using other peoples' clothing as his personal washroom.

Damn, do I ever not miss this guy... (Think Progress)


-Full steam reverse!-
Now that the Democrats have passed their godless, communist, nazi healthcare bill into law, it's time to repeal it. Repeal, repeal, repeal!

After all, that was the battlecry on the right -- even before the bill was passed. As they said all along, it was time to scrap the whole thing and start over from a tabula rasa -- for you teabaggers, that's fancy-talk for a blank slate. Ditch it all, none of it was worth the somewhere around twenty billion pages it was written on. Boo for the healthcare bill! Boo!

But now that repealing it has become something more than a reactionary, theoretical non-thought experiment, things are a little different. Republican Senatorial Committee chairman John Cornyn, for one, says that maybe repealing everything isn't such a hot idea. "There is non-controversial stuff here like the preexisting conditions exclusion and those sorts of things," John says. "Now we are not interested in repealing that. And that is frankly a distraction."

Going further is stream-of-consciousness twitter poet Sen. Charles Grassley. Grassley -- whose bad faith efforts to kill the bill in committee are not forgotten -- is now trying to actually take credit for reforms. "The provisions enacted in the new health care law are the result of Grassley's leadership on tax-exempt organizations' accountability and transparency, including hospitals," his office said in a statement today. Hell, you'd almost believe he didn't vote against it -- which he did.

So teabaggers, if you thought the GOP was actually going to repeal this, then you're dreaming. All that repeal talk was just ad captandum vulgus -- which is fancy-talk for "you're shit outta luck." (Think Progress, Talking Points Memo)


-Bonus HotD-
"Wiley Drake Pretty Much Wants Everyone To Die"

Rightwing nutjob Wiley Drake has become known for his calls for "imprecatory prayer" against his political adversaries. For those of you who aren't versed in the particulars of imprecatory prayer, it's basically begging god to play hitman and kill off the people you don't like.

Anyway, Drake says that he's praying for god to kill off all 219 Democratic House members who voted for the bill. On Alan Colmes radio show, he went further. According to the report, "Colmes logically asked if that meant that Drake was therefore praying that everyone who supports this bill or these legislators should also die, to which Drake stated that since he didn't know all the names of those millions of people he couldn't offer such a prayer, but asserted that if he did know their names, he most certainly would pray for them to die as well."

So he would pray for the deaths of millions, but he doesn't know their names and god's too dumb to figure out who he'd be talking about. Yeah, he's a wonderful man.

But here's the thing; Drake has a habit of praying for people to die and the people he prays to die have a habit of not actually dying. So wouldn't it logically follow that god, in his infinite wisdom, is actually cool with healthcare reform and that Drake is just a lunatic -- on the side of the argument opposite the almighty?

Clearly, god is a commie Obama-lover. There's no other explanation. (Right Wing Watch)