The Hollywood Liberal

Because so few words rhyme with Nepotism
Well, at least Bill Kristol didn’t advocated invading the North Pole.

There are a lot of Holiday traditions that people know and love. Being kind at least occasionally, spending time with family, music and cookies and liquor and trees.

But I’m going to guess, one of those holiday traditions is not Bill Kristol writing bad parodies of bad poems?

But that is apparently just the tradition Kristol, who you must admit did bring back the tradition of invading countries for stupid reasons, wants to aim for.

And what better than re-writing ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas‘ a poem already so trite it seemed beyond making worse, but this is Bill Kristol we’re talking about.

Obamacare’s reeling, there’s progress in ’Stan,

It’s important next year that we stick with the plan.

By then we’ll have entered the era of Boehner:

Our pocketbooks fuller, our politics saner.

Is that a re-write of Clement Clarke Moore or a line from The Joker in The Dark Knight?

The ‘Era of Boehner’? I don’t think my tear ducts could take it.

Here’s the fuller “pocket book” that Bill Kristol considers “saner”.

Well, Kristol’s pocket-book is fuller — and he’s as just as “sane” as ever.

?

Santa Assange

By Cam Cardow, Cagle Cartoons, The Ottawa Citizen

Related Entries

• December 19, 2010 Dead Excuses
• December 19, 2010 ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Repeal

Dead Excuses

By Cam Cardow, Cagle Cartoons, The Ottawa Citizen

Related Entries

• December 19, 2010 Dead Excuses
• December 19, 2010 ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Repeal

U.S. Using Local Government Agencies To Monitor Citizens
Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the…

Michele Bachmann For Senate In 2012? ‘Nothing’s Off The Table’
It remains a possibility that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) could mount a campaign for U.S. Senate in 2012, the Hill reports. Amid buzz swirling around…

Rachel Farris: Enemy of the Valley: Aaron Peña’s South Texas Party Switch Stings Constituents
Tony Martinez, who works in marketing for a produce company in a small town in the Rio Grande Valley called Edinburg, Texas, understands the significance…

House GOP To Hold Hearings On ‘Radicalization’ Of American Muslims
Rep. Peter King (R-NY) is planning to hold hearings on the “radicalization” of American Muslims when he takes over the chair of the Homeland Security Committee next year, the New York Times reports.

Unmanned Mexican Drone Crashes Near El Paso, Texas
A remote-control drone operated by the Mexican government crashed in the United States near El Paso, Texas, this week, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency confirms to TPM.

Birther Army Doctor Gets Six Months For Refusing To Deploy
Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, who refused orders to deploy to Afghanistan because he believes President Obama may not have been born in the United States, was sentenced to six months in military prison today.

A Visit With Santa 2010

Preventing a January Primary
Politico: “As 2012 nears, the political class is united with one holiday wish: Please don’t make us spend New Year’s Eve in Iowa like we did in 2008. The leadership in both parties is listening. In the hopes of stopping the madness of ever-earlier presidential primaries, Democrats and Republicans have tried to set forth a primary that doesn’t get under way until February 2012, remains competitive through March and finishes cleanly. But while they are optimistic, it remains to be seen whether they’ve truly succeeded in preventing rogue states from pushing the primary calendar into January or even earlier.”

Amendment Would Allow States to Repeal Federal Law
“The same people driving the lawsuits that seek to dismantle the Obama administration’s health care overhaul have set their sights on an even bigger target: a constitutional amendment that would allow a vote of the states to overturn any act of Congress,” the New York Times reports.

“Under the proposed ‘repeal amendment,’ any federal law or regulation could be repealed if the legislatures of two-thirds of the states voted to do so.”

Hillary Clinton, Madame X & Rajiv Shah Release QDDR
I will be writing more soon about the just released Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, the first ever — but wanted to post this video of the event and the transcript of an exchange that I had with Secretary of…

How Jerry Brown Saved the World
I had a bad case of the blues. My woman up and left me, my daughter is a juvenile delinquent, my cat does nothing but complain. I needed to be taken to another place. Sitting under a tree in the…

Sunday Show Guests Assail Republicans For Blocking The DREAM Act
Yesterday, Senate Republicans blocked the DREAM Act from securing 60 votes to pass cloture, denying hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants a path to legal status if they enrolled in college or joined the military. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) even said yesterday on the Senate floor that young people lobbying his office had wasted […]

Yesterday, Senate Republicans blocked the DREAM Act from securing 60 votes to pass cloture, denying hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants a path to legal status if they enrolled in college or joined the military. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) even said yesterday on the Senate floor that young people lobbying his office had wasted their time.

Today on the Sunday political talk shows, guests from a wide array of the ideological spectrum assailed the GOP for blocking the measure:

NBC’s ANDREA MITCHELL: The dumbest thing that the Republicans did was the DREAM Act. … that is going to turn out to be a real setback for Republicans because these are people who wanted to serve in the military and get educated and contribute to the society.

NEWARK, NJ MAYOR CORY BOOKER: To tell people who’ve been through high school, high school presidents going on to college some of the best brains who have no relation to their home country. This is crazy. It’s hurting America.

GOP STRATEGIST MARK MCKINNON: The Republican Party has got to recognize Hispanics are the huge growing demographic in this country. … We gotta send the right signal to Hispanics in this country in addition to the fact that it’s the right policy.

FOX NEWS’ JUAN WILLIAMS: The one thing that I regret…is the defeat of the DREAM Act for the immigrants and the immigrant kids. I just think, again, Republicans play politics with real lives, real people, real aspirations and they leave the immigration issue on the table when that’s the real business of the American people.

Bill Kristol complained to Williams that the real reason the GOP opposed the measure is because he claimed they didn’t know anything about it. “Do you know how many hearings there were in either house, in the House or the Senate on the DREAM Act over the past two years? Zero,” he said. “You know it’s almost anti-American, Bill,” Williams said in response, adding, “and the reason they couldn’t discuss it was because the talk show hosts in America the right-wing talk show hosts would beat up any Republican who supported a realistic effort.” Watch the compilation:

As usual, Kristol is wrong. As CAP’s Marshall Fitz noted, “this is not a new or complicated bill”:

The basic elements of the DREAM Act are straightforward, well understood, and have been considered numerous times over the last nine years. It has been introduced every Congress since 2001. It passed the Senate Judiciary Committee by a 16-3 vote in October 2003. And it passed the Senate Judiciary Committee again in 2006 by voice vote as part of the McCain-Kennedy comprehensive bill, which passed the full Senate by a 62-36 margin.

So it seems that Republicans like to blame process when they’re just simply on the wrong side of history.

Sen. Kay Hagan?s Office, Government Buildings Vandalized In North Carolina
Early Thursday morning, in the midst of a busy week in Congress where the DREAM Act, a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the Obama-McConnell tax cut package were all considered, a vandal struck the offices of Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC) in Greenville, North Carolina. Police say a “white male with a thin build,” […]

Early Thursday morning, in the midst of a busy week in Congress where the DREAM Act, a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the Obama-McConnell tax cut package were all considered, a vandal struck the offices of Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC) in Greenville, North Carolina. Police say a “white male with a thin build,” wearing a long coat and a backpack, approached her office and several other government buildings around 2 a.m. and spray-painted phrases like “Criminal Government,” “blind follow blind” and “what good is justice if the scales are bent.” (Some of these slogans appear to be lyrics to a song by the artist Mason Jennings). Swastikas, lightning bolts, and other symbols were also painted on several of the buildings. Unfortunately for the vandal, however, surveillance cameras in Hagan’s office were running and caught him in the act. Police are soliciting leads based on the video.

Watch video of the criminal mastermind in action, via WNCT:

Local news outlets interviewed several Greenville residents “outraged” by the vandalism. “Just the symbol alone, just what it represents, that just somebody would go to that level, it’s very upsetting,” said one man. “When you have these kinds of things go on, hatred symbols put up, it can be depressing, it can be demoralizing for the community,” said another. Earlier this year, five Democratic Congressional office were vandalized during the health care reform debate, and last year swastikas were also painted on the office of Rep. David Scott (D-GA). Just before the recent midterm election, Rep. Tom Periello’s (D-VA) campaign office was broken into and vandalized.

Dems’ New Pork: Trains to Nowhere
Debra Saunders, San Fran Chronicle

Ousted Politicians Reflect on What Went Wrong
Eleanor Clift, Newsweek
This is the time of year when Congress is in transition and defeated politicians get together to reflect on what went wrong, and to share their pain across party lines. “There's a new definition of bipartisanship in Washington. It's called former member,” said Texas Rep. Chet Edwards, who, together with three other defeated lawmakers, shared the stage at the Bipartisan Policy Center on Thursday morning to assess their collective 80 years of experience and to find solace in the group catharsis.

Chinese Chess
Irwin Stelzer, Weekly Standard
The Chinese are playing grandmaster chess against an amateur America that can’t see beyond the second move. In a bipartisan display of geopolitical obtuseness, America continues its historic trade policy: It’s free trade, except occasional lapses into protectionism when a whinging constituent must be placated, with a reliance on the World Trade Organization to settle disputes (and believing it has won something of significance when the WTO sides with it in a dispute over such a key product as cheap tires). Occasional public complaints about …