News Roundup for 4/23/09

Pictured, l. to r.; Sean Hannity, Winky the Pony

-Headline of the day-
"Hannity Offers To Be Waterboarded For Charity (By Charles Grodin!)."

FOX News blowhard Sean Hannity had actor Charles Grodin on his show last night. It didn't go well for Hannity, since Grodin treated him with all the seriousness that he deserves -- i.e., none. At one point, Grodin asked Sean "if he was wearing mascara and if he had any plans to marry Ann Coulter." I can answer both of those questions; yes he wears mascara and no he's not planning to marry Coulter, since that marriage would only be legal in four states.

But the real fun came when the subject of torture was raised:


GRODIN: You're for torture.

HANNITY: I am for enhanced interrogation.

GRODIN: You don't believe it's torture. Have you ever been waterboarded?

HANNITY: No, but Ollie North has.

GRODIN: Would you consent to be waterboarded? We can waterboard you?

HANNITY: Sure.

GRODIN: Are you busy on Sunday?

HANNITY: I'll do it for charity. I'll let you do it. I'll do it for the troops' families.


I'd pay to see that. For a good cause, of course. We ought to raise a shitload of money and offer it to him, just to watch Hannity beg off -- then we give it to some group supporting same sex marriage.

He know's it's torture and he's a big wuss, so there's no way he'd ever go through with it. On the off-chance that he does, I say he should be waterboarded until he swears he hates George W. Bush, admits he's a twelve-year-old girl who loves her pony, and says there's no God but Allah and Mohammed is His prophet. Then we remind him that, since waterboarding works so well, it must all be true.

Trust me, he'd cave. You wouldn't go broke betting on it. (Huffington Post)


-Honeymoon's over-
Next Wednesday will be President Barack Obama's 100th day in office, marking the end of an arbitrary "honeymoon" period that the press likes to talk about a lot, but doesn't actually mean squat. Obama's "honeymoon" has seen nationwide "tea party" protests blaming Obama for the tax rates in Bush's last budget, lunatics talking about seceding from the union, and comparisons of the president to Hitler and Stalin.

So how do the non-sanity-challenged view the president? Turns out we're all pretty happy with him. According to the report, "In a sign that Barack Obama has inspired hopes for a brighter future in the first 100 days of his presidency, an Associated Press-GfK poll shows that 48 percent of Americans believe the United States is headed in the right direction -- compared with 44 percent who disagree."

How good is this? It's "up 8 points since February and a remarkable 31 points since October, the month before Obama's election." A separate Pew poll finds Americans positive about all things Obama, from personal favorability (73%) to handling of the economy (60%).

You know what you call that? You call that hope. Suck it, you crazy teabag whiners. (Associated Press)


-It's torture!-
So sayeth House minority leader John Boehner. In celebrating the Obama honeymoon by running the president down, Boehner told reports, "They’ve decided to close the detainee base in Cuba without having any plan for what they are going to do with those terrorists who are hellbent on killing Americans, and then last week they released these memos outlining the torture techniques, and that is clearly a political decision, and ignored the advice of their director of national intelligence and their CIA director. The bigger question is, what is the administration’s overarching plan to take on the terrorist threat and to keep America safe? The world didn’t suddenly become safer in January of 2009."

That's 86 words of BS and "they released these memos outlining the torture techniques." That's a truth to bullshit ratio of about 1:8. And, if this actually gets any traction, he'll say that all that stuff about "torture techniques" was just a matter of misspeaking.

On those rare occasions that Boehner actually says something that's not crap, he doesn't actually mean it. Says The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, "The English language can fight back in the unlikeliest of places."

Next time you hold a press conference, don't forget to bring your Newspeak phrasebook, John. Big Brother says you've got to call it "enhanced interrogation techniques," because torture is double-plus ungood. (Raw Story)