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Archive for the 'Politicos' Category



18
Sep

Brad Pitt Likes (Approved) Gays

Variety reports — or, to use Varietyspeak, “Vari reps”:

Brad Pitt has donated $100,000 to fight California’s November ballot initiative that would overturn the state Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage…

“Because no one has the right to deny another their life, even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn’t harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8,” Pitt said Wednesday.

Let’s hear it for our Homosexual-American brothers and brothers and sisters and sisters! Such is Pitt’s dedication to the idea of gay marriage that he and Angelina have vowed not to marry until everybody else can. (They’re not married, right? Or are they? It’s tough to keep up.)

But hold on a sec. What’s this?

YouTube Preview Image

That’s from some sort of tribute to Julia Roberts last year. Because obviously she hasn’t received enough accolades for movies like Runaway Bride, I Love Trouble, and Mary Riley.

Now, we here at Deceiver are hardly fans of Larry Craig. His public, um, stance on homosexuality is obviously at odds with his private, er, stance. But it hardly seems sporting to mock the guy for struggling with his deepest urges, when you’re throwing so much weight into, um, backing up gays everywhere. How about trying to understand what he’s going through and, in a manner of speaking, seduce him to seeing your side of things? If Larry Craig would pay attention to anybody, it’d have to be Brad Pitt. (A check for one hundred grand probably couldn’t hurt either.) Or are gay people worthy of respect only when they do exactly what you want them to do?

Still, that was pretty funny. Brad really can act when he puts his mind to it. Save something for your movies, Brad!

(Hat tip: Anonymiss)

18
Sep

Thank You, Jon Stewart, for These Priceless Moments We Are About to Receive

… and thank you, TiVo, for letting me catch up on The Daily Show at my own pace.

Priceless.

Karl Rove? Bill O’Reilly? Dick Morris?

What do they know?

And kudos to Stewart for giving Sarah Palin the last word. She made more sense than the lot of ‘em.

17
Sep

McCain Reaches Across Aisle to Deliver B****slap

TMZ is reporting:

John McCain has weighed in over Barack Obama’s reported slap in the face to Lindsay Lohan. The Chicago Sun-Times quotes an unnamed high-level Barack source who says they rejected Lohan’s offer to host an event because she “is not exactly the kind of high-profile star who would be a positive for us.”

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign tells TMZ, “So let me get this straight — they turned away Lindsay Lohan, but Barack Obama has friends like unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers and convicted felon Tony Rezko? Maybe LiLo is just too upstanding for Barack Obama.”

I don’t know much about what’s wrong with the economy right now, but I do know that it doesn’t have a lot to do with Obama’s opinion of Lindsay Lohan. Think maybe you could get back to talking about the issues, Maverick?

On the other hand, it’s nice to see Lohan butting into yet another matter that she knows absolutely nothing about. Why shouldn’t she give politics a try, after failing at acting, music, fashion, romance, substance abuse counseling, being a human…

Hey, I wonder what Scarlett Johansson thinks about all this?

Update: The Lohan campaign responds.

17
Sep

Barack Obama is an elitist out-of-touch snob, says the billionaire socialite…

Lady Lynn Forester De Rothschild, formerly a gigantic Hillary Clinton fundraiser and currently an incredibly well-connected snob, made news today by switching her allegiance from the Democratic Party and endorsing John McCain for President.

Why?

The landed-gentry Lady Rothschild told CNN: “This is a hard decision for me personally because frankly I don’t like him. I feel like he is an elitist.

First of all, I’m picturing her giving that “elitist” comment from the back of a stretch Rolls-Royce while looking in vain for some Grey Poupon to slather on her white truffle and foie gras sandwich (washed down with the tears of orphans).

And second, if I were Obama’s campaign people, I would be sending Rothschild platinum-wrapped candy, a loinclothed virgin male from Togo, or whatever it is rich people get as gifts. And then I would issue a press release saying “Thank you, Scrooge McRichLady, for demonstrating that Barack Obama is too salt-of-the earth for your whiny-ass jet set mind to embrace. Now go home and yell at the hired help for not stomping on the autumn grapes fast enough, and get busy figuring out how to help the guy with seven homes — instead of the ‘elitist’ — win the White House.”

I also like Gawker’s take, which cites the Yiddish translation of Tevye’s “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof — which is rendered as “ven ikh bin a rotshild” (”If I Were a Rothschild”).

If you want a sense of just how upper-crust this name-calling twit is, read Lloyd Grove’s October 2007 profile  of Rothschild in Condé Nast Portfolio. My favorite question posed to the good Lady: “How did you make your first hundred million?”

16
Sep

Senate Records: Obama Talks “Pay Equity” But Walks Somethin’ Else

Update: I heard an Obama radio ad this morning that targeted this very issue, and voila! There’s a YouTube version with video. This takes balls. I’ll give him that.

YouTube Preview Image

I could probably write a page and a half here about why the National Organization for Women endorsed Barack Obama and Joe Biden this morning, instead of the ticket that includes … I don’t know … a woman …?

Can you imagine the NAACP not endorsing Obama? Or the Veterans of Foreign Wars not endorsing McCain? Or the Global Association of Political-Speech Plagiarists not … well, you get the picture.

Oh, right. I forgot. A University of Chicago religion professor decided (in Newsweek, no less) that Sarah Palin isn’t actually a woman — but merely offers the “pretense that she is a woman.” You can look it up. So I guess that makes all the identity-politics wrangling moot. Gosh, I feel better now.

But back to why I put this issue in play. Here’s Barack Obama’s website on the issue of Pay Equity:

“Despite decades of progress, women still make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Throughout his career, Barack Obama has championed the right of women to receive equal pay for equal work.”

Here’s Obama, talking two weeks ago in Toledo about GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin:

“[She] seems like a very engaging person, nice person. But I’ve got to say, she’s opposed, like John McCain is, to equal pay for equal work. That doesn’t make much sense to me.”

And now, here’s the interesting part. Scripps-Howard columnist Deroy Murdock took a look at the Senate staff salaries of both Barack Obama and John McCain, thanks to LegiStorm, a nonpartisan watchdog service that offers the raw data to anyone who wants to dig through it. Guess what Murdock found?

Obama’s 28 male staffers divided among themselves total payroll expenditures of $1,523,120. Thus, Obama’s average male employee earned $54,397. Obama’s 30 female employees split $1,354,580 among themselves, or $45,152, on average … on average, Obama’s female staffers earn just 83 cents for every dollar his male staffers make …

McCain’s payment patterns are the stuff of feminist dreams. McCain’s 17 male staffers split $916,914, thus averaging $53,936. His 25 female employees divided $1,396,958 and averaged $55,878. On average, according to these data, women in McCain’s office make $1.04 for every dollar a man makes.

Can anyone think of a living American feminist icon who’s not openly supporting Barack Obama? Just wondering.

16
Sep

McCain: Mac Moron or Microprocessor Maven?

Detente is over! We did it: one whole week without mentioning all that dumb political stuff. And now, back to boring you with tedious details about the people who want to run our country. Not to mention the politicians they hate.

Hey, you know how John McCain is a clueless old fart who doesn’t know Steve Jobs from Steve Austin? Jacob Weisberg at Slate.com sure does. On Aug. 23, he said:

McCain represents a Cold War style of nationalism that doesn’t get the shift from geopolitics to geoeconomics, the centrality of soft power in a multipolar world, or the transformative nature of digital technology. This is a matter of attitude as much as age. A lot of 71-year-olds are still learning and evolving. But in 2008, being flummoxed by that newfangled doodad, the personal computer, seems like a deal-breaker.

What a throwback that McCain is, huh? “Kids these days, with their dungarees and their social networking!” Which totally backs up what Weisberg himself said at Slate on Feb. 11, 2000:

In the first “Net Election” column back in September, I made the prediction that the Internet probably would not have a decisive impact on the 2000 presidential race. The best shot at proving me wrong now belongs to John McCain. If McCain survives South Carolina and goes on to defeat George W. Bush for the Republican nomination — still a very big if — the Internet may eventually be judged not just a contributing factor, but an essential, enabling condition of his victory.

Six months ago, no one would have pegged McCain as the most cybersavvy of this year’s crop of candidates. At 63, he is the oldest of the bunch and because of his war injuries, he is limited in his ability to wield a keyboard. But McCain’s job as chairman of the Senate commerce committee forced him to learn about the Internet early on, and young Web entrepreneurs such as Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos fascinate him.

What a fuddy-duddy. Nice try, old man!

And remember Rielle Hunter? Seems like ages. Well, here are a few tidbits on that story that have fallen through the cracks here at Deceiver:

  • John & Rielle literally saw each other across a crowded room. And when they met:

    Face to face, their connection was instant. They spoke briefly, and could have left it at that. But they didn’t.

    Good point. More on this timeless love story at the LA Times. That’s right, I said the LA Times!

  • The WSJ Law Blog reports on givethemoneyback.com, which is saying that everybody who’s received money from Fred Baron should… take a guess.
  • Gob Bluth lookalike Andrew Young, who at last report had not withdrawn his claim to be the father of Rielle’s baby, is building a nice new house at the end of a private drive in North Carolina. Presumably he and his wife Cheri can afford it! Maybe he saved up all the money he hasn’t been paying Rielle for child support. Allegedly.

And I suppose now I’m obliged to cover the latest Palin scandal. Tell you what: Why don’t you pick whichever earthshattering contretemps they’re talking about at the time you’re reading this, assuming it hasn’t been debunked already, and discuss it amongst yourselves. I can’t keep them all straight. (Today it’s something about a tanning bed, right? That’s what took down Nixon, ya know.)

09
Sep

A Deceiver (political) “Time Out”

Is it just me, or is all the huffing and puffing about Sarah Palin’s alleged connections to Scientology and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto getting a little bit over the top?

(See? I just created two whole unsubstantiated rumors. I bet they both go viral on Daily Kos by tonight.)

My point, though, is this: Between the John Edwards babydaddy vigil, the anti-Palin buffoonery, and the continuing complaints about major media’s failure to cover connections between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers of “Weather Underground” terrorism fame, the U.S. presidential election cycle makes it really easy for a pop-culture blog about celebrity hypocrites to death-spiral into an all purpose political game of Whack-a-Mole.

And I’m just not down with that.

So I hereby declare — or I would do so properly if Firefox let me type in Olde English script — that Deceiver will observe a one-week moratorium on new posts about 2008 U.S. presidential candidates, beginning immediately.

You’re encouraged to keep stoking the fires by commenting in our most recent posts (I recommend this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one — in addition to this one). But the election is eight weeks away, and we’re taking at least one of them “off” to get back to our roots.

So dash away all: On Britney, on Paris, on K-Fed and LiLo! On Posh Spice, on Pammy, on Hayden and MiLo!

But before we set aside the whole “campaign ‘08″ thing until next Tuesday, I just have to share something that’s apparently gone viral (judged by the fact that I’ve gotten it from three people already): perhaps a better “McCain/Palin” button. This ticket would actually get my vote in an instant. Especially if the rest of the cast from “A Fish Called Wanda” were offered cabinet appointments in 2009.

09
Sep

A Sincere Request Regarding Discussions of Sarah Palin

Well, apparently Deceiver is run by neocon hypocrites because we’re afraid to reveal the truth about Sarah Palin’s plan to throw Eskimos onto piles of burning books, bought with the money she stole from the Bridge to Nowhere and orphanages for the disabled, with help from her inbred family and secessionist, anti-Semitic friends. I’m sure I left something out there. Since August 29 there have been so many uninformed accusations and outright lies leveled at her, I’m reluctant to believe anything else people say about her until everybody calms down. This is crying wolf to the Nth degree.

We may or may not discuss further developments in this story, and we’re under no obligation one way or the other. Unlike the Rielle Hunter story, Deceiver is hardly the only place talking about this. As I have to keep repeating, apparently, the main reason I dug into that story so hard was because I wanted to know more, but the news completely ignored it for weeks on end. Whereas with the Palin story, you can’t avoid hearing about it, and it’s been that way from the start. They are fundamentally different stories, and if you still don’t understand why I reject the comparison, I don’t know what to tell you.

How about this: In both cases I want to know the truth. With Hunter, that was tough because there was no information. With Palin, it’s tough because there’s too much disinformation.

But if you simply must discuss the latest Palin smear in the comments, adding to the search-engine numbers for things like “You-Know-Who was a community organizer,” first please go to Factcheck.org’s list of Palin rumors and misleading claims. From what little I know of Factcheck, it’s a non-partisan site that’s respected on both the left and right. Here’s their summary so far:

  • Palin did not cut funding for special needs education in Alaska by 62 percent. She didn’t cut it at all. In fact, she tripled per-pupil funding over just three years.
  • She did not demand that books be banned from the Wasilla library. Some of the books on a widely circulated list were not even in print at the time. The librarian has said Palin asked a “What if?” question, but the librarian continued in her job through most of Palin’s first term.
  • She was never a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, a group that wants Alaskans to vote on whether they wish to secede from the United States. She’s been registered as a Republican since May 1982.
  • Palin never endorsed or supported Pat Buchanan for president. She once wore a Buchanan button as a “courtesty” when he visited Wasilla, but shortly afterward she was appointed to co-chair of the campaign of Steve Forbes in the state.
  • Palin has not pushed for teaching creationism in Alaska’s schools. She has said that students should be allowed to “debate both sides” of the evolution question, but she also said creationism “doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.”

They then explain in detail how they came to these conclusions, and they’re promising to add more information as they continue to research the unprecedented explosion of rumors over the past week and a half. So I encourage you to consult Factcheck before you go around spreading this stuff. If that’s somehow an unreasonable request, I’m sure I’ll hear about it.

And if that doesn’t quench your thirst for justice, Factcheck also has a page of stuff Palin messed up during her acceptance speech. They also “fact check” something that I thought was clearly a joke by Mike Huckabee. But then, it’s not called HumorAppreciate.org.

Okay? Okay.

Update: If you need a brand name before you’ll believe it, Newsweek is republishing Factcheck’s findings.

Update 2: Snopes has a Palin page. And she’s their #1 search result, which is heartening. That means a lot of people are trying to do the fact-checking that the n-e-w-s hasn’t.

05
Sep

John Edwards Publicly Admits He’s a Political Liability

Well, not in so many words. But he just dropped out of that speaking engagement at Hofstra University he’d planned for next week, and he’s not doing any other public appearances until after — can you guess? — November. And here’s the reason he’s giving:

“Nothing is more important than electing Barack Obama and Joe Biden,” Edwards said in a statement released Thursday by his booking agency, the Harry Walker Agency in Manhattan. “I don’t want my appearance at these events to be a distraction from the important issues of the election, or from the important purpose of these meetings.”

It’s only a half-truth, but for him that’s a 100% increase. (Or is it? I stink at math.) He could have said he’s going to “spend more time with his family,” but that would only invite the question: “Which one?”

Hey, wait a sec… I thought Edwards was a private citizen? I thought this scandal had absolutely nothing to do with Obama? But there it is in black and white gray and slightly lighter gray: Edwards just went out of his way to link himself to Obama. Otherwise, why would appearing in public be a distraction from Obama’s campaign?

Which only lends more credence to the theory that the entire news industry turned a blind eye to the Rielle Hunter story for so long because they were worried it might screw up the election.

John Edwards is dumb.

(Hat tip: Fortunate Son once again)

04
Sep

“We Did Well!!!”: A Legitimate Palin Criticism

So you guys REALLY let Simon have it for declining to rake the Bristol Palin muck the other day. Congratulations, you set a Deceiver commenting record.

Now can we talk about her policies?

As Radley Balko at Reason magazine points out, the McCain campaign might have done better in vetting their candidate before trotting her out as a hero against government waste.

The Washington Independent has unearthed a document that shows Sarah Palin boasting about $3.5-million in federal earmarks she secured as mayor of Wasilla, her little Alaskan town of 9,000. The millions were granted for airport repaving, water treatment, and sidewalks.

McCain has made fighting pork-barrel spending a campaign tenet, and there’s a certain irony that he once criticized earmarks requested by Palin herself: $500,000 for a public-transportation project in Wasilla in 2001. Even though if you live in rural Alaska, you definitely have a car.

But now that she is his running mate, he is recasting her pursuit of earmarks as something she was loathe to do:

Taylor Griffin, a McCain campaign spokesman, said that when Palin became mayor in 1996, “she faced a system that was broken. Small towns like Wasilla in Alaska depended on earmarks to take care of basic needs. . . . That was something that Gov. Palin was alarmed about and was one of the formative experiences that led her toward the reform-oriented stance that she has taken as her career has progressed.”

And what exactly did Palin write in the document I mentioned above?

Would someone who wasn’t zealously going after government money give themselves a pat on the back with three exclamation points?

Bonus: Jon Stewart did a related video Deceiver post. Have a watch:

<embed FlashVars=’videoId=184086′ src=’http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml’ quality=’high’ bgcolor=’#cccccc’ width=’332′ height=’316′ name=’comedy_central_player’ align=’middle’ allowScriptAccess=’always’ allownetworking=’external’ type=’application/x-shockwave-flash’ pluginspage=’http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer’></embed>




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