So THIS Is How Obama Is Going To Pay For Health Care! *Open Thread*

love the real penis + real vagina. That essentially what the arguement is, lol.

Rev. Amy, the Onion parody news-report on anti-LGBT marriage demonstrations is maybe the funniest thing I have ever seen; I particularly love the picket signs. An absolute classic. Thanks for posting this!

RRRA,

I love the Onion. Thanks for the laughs!

On a different note, Democracy Now yesterday had an excellent report on O an the GLBT community; it covered the issues of DOMA and DA/DT in the military very well. I wonder if you had a chance to watch given the personal distractions you’ve had recently.

RRA,

Thank you for posting these videos! I was laughing so hard, I sooo needed to laugh! I love the Onion.

A better set of questions are the following:

1) How are we going to deal with Kim Jong Il and
2) How are we going to deal with the Iranians?

I know it isn’t funny but it does present challenges which our frat-boy POTUS is not up to. I do give thanks that HRC is around to deal with these thorny issues (an opinion for which I was roundly criticized because she “sold out”, as it were).

Hillary sold out? Would it be better is she wasn’t Madame Secretary for USA? Answer after you read this text version of her speech just before she fell down.
http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/06/125044.htm
There’s a video of this too.
I sleep better at night knowing she’s there.

SECRETARY CLINTON:
The United States believes passionately and strongly in the basic principle of free expression. We believe that it is a fundamental human right for people to be able to communicate, to express their opinions, to take positions. And this is a view that goes back to the founding of our country, and we stand firmly behind it.

And therefore, we promote the right of free expression. And it is the case that one of the means of expression, the use of Twitter, is a very important one not only to the Iranian people, but now increasingly to people around the world, and most particularly young people. I wouldn’t know a Twitter from a tweeter – (laughter) – but apparently, it is very important. And I think keeping that line of communications open and enabling people to share information, particularly at a time when there was not many other sources of information, is an important expression of the right to speak out and to be able to organize that we value

Good morning, Ferd. I’m still half-asleep, so I’ve got lots of answers right now.

1) How are we going to deal with Kim Jong Il?

We’re going to send the USS John McCain to look him eyeball-to-eyeball and stare him down.

2) How are we going to deal with the Iranians?

After destroyer USS John McCain is done with the North Koreans, we’re going to dispatch it to the Persian Gulf, where it is going to put the fear of Allah into those Ayatollahs.

I LOVE THIS WOMAN.SHE SHOULD BE PRESIDENT…

Thanks for linking it.

I haven’t read the whole page yet but notice she still gets real questions instead of softballs.

And just reading the opening introduction must give Israel some relief.

omg roflmao that 2nd one had me in tears. Twist of that Penis WOMAN!…oh. Well, these kind of tears are much better than the others that come to frequently these days.

Yes, isn’t that amazing? It made me sad to hear that John McCain has to come to save the day, but thank goodness! It made me feel much better then I felt when I first head about North Korea threatening to attack Hawaii. In the end McCain will protect Hawaii and Palin will protect Alaska and Barrakula will vote present yet again!

Prez. Mamba will pay for health care the very same way he pays for everything else–with OUR money. I read that during the entire campaign Big Bad Barry spent only about $300.00 of his own money.
And when he was doing weed and a little blow–where did he get the money for his recreational drugs?? Grandparents were on foodstamps, right? I don’t think Barry ever even held a part-time job, did he?
Change we can believe in—what a pathetic joke–at our nation’s expense.

LOL! That bit of irony made me laugh today. I had to read the news articles a couple of times before I realized they were talking about the USS John McCain.

ROFL! The Onion is hilarious. We need a good laugh.

Since Obama is off loading IG’s, I thought I would look at U.S. Attorneys..

In early January, the Justice Department asked all of President Bush’s U.S. attorneys to remain in their posts until further notice. Not all of them chose to stay. There has been a steady exodus over the past several months, as is typical at the end of an administration.

According to the Justice Department, by the time President Obama was inaugurated, only 54 of the 93 U.S. attorneys were Senate-confirmed appointees. The rest were a mix of acting officials and interim appointees.
—————————–
How Obama Will Handle U.S. Attorney Posts Still Unclear
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 13, 2009; Page A03
Obama has not made clear how he will build his own corps of prosecutors, a group that shapes an administration’s approach to law enforcement and is critical to its smooth operation. U.S. attorneys’ offices handled more than 100,000 criminal cases and recovered $1.3 billion in forfeited cash and property in the past fiscal year, according to a prosecutors’ trade group.

The White House is under pressure from several fronts, both to appoint new prosecutors favored by members of Congress and, in other cases, to keep some U.S. attorneys from the Bush administration.

Glad y’all are liking this. I swear, those are some mighty funny folks over there at The Onion. Thank HEAVENS for them, though – we need to be able to laugh, especially now…

Diana, no, I didn’t see that abt DOMA and DADT. I assume you know that Obama is now going to hold a pow-wow with some big GLBT groups to try and entice everyone back into the fold. Blech. What I don’t understand is, why would they still bite at that hook?? How many times do you have to get thrown under to realize that Obama’s words are lies?? Sheesh.

And Scranton, were you kidding abt Obama’s grandparents being on food stamps? Just in case you weren’t, you know his grandmother was the VP of the largest bank in Hawaii – hence how young Barry was able to go to the most prestigious school in HI. (I heard Dick Morris toss out that meme abt Obama growing up poor – hardly. Maybe when he was a veyr small toddler, but from the time his mom married the Indonesian man, no…)

I need to go back and watch the videos, and read the crawl underneath – those are almost as funny as the videos themselves!

why would they still bite at that hook?

BO has a catch and release program?

Reading the coverage of the press conference, I noticed that too. The press can do their best to cover for Obama, but they all clearly know who the adult in the room is — they are afraid to ask her nothing. They know she can handle it. It seems when they want real info, they’ll ask her.

The Democracy Now report with some very good interviews was not kind to O at all.

Is it just me or is anyone else a little creeped out to see Mousavi’s change poster that looks like Odrama’s change poster, except for the colors?

OMG politicalidentitycrisis. You’re right. I’ll bet that’s really scary through a set of green-red 3-D glasses.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fhashemi/3611830781/

In case you haven’t seen it:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2482/3611830781_6ae6108abb.jpg?v=0

I saw Iranian protesters holding them today while I was watching FOX news. Anyone smell Obama/Axelrod meddling like Raila Odinga? I mean really that made me feel ill when I saw it.

Here’s the companion “Hope” poster. Who is making these things? They are obviously intended for an American audience and not an Iranian audience–or are they? Yes–One World Hope Change: what the heck is going on?

http://pages.ebay.com/viewitem/viewitem_popup.html?domain=ebay.com

So they are in the streets in Iran. OMG!

I don’t like it one bit! It made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end!

Sorry. Link doesn’t work. Try googling Mousavi Hope Poster. It’s being sold on E-Bay and features a bloody red handprint in the green and red pattern.

Ick, ick, ick on the Mousavi poster!

I saw it! Maybe this link will work:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Mir-Hossein-Mousavi-mini-POSTER-HOPE-Iran-Election-lmtd_W0QQitemZ250447462869QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item3a4fd501d5&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65%3A12|66%3A2|39%3A1|72%3A1205|240%3A1318|301%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A50

If Mousavi is the Iranian equivalent of Obama, they better go with none of the above option for President!

For someone who didn’t want to “meddle”, Obama’s claw prints are all over that election and it’s just plain weird! Of course I always thought it was very weird that a little known Senator from IL had so many foreign connections. The world is all upside down right now. I just hope Hillary is running some sort of interference to whatever evils we are not aware of.

With my meager understanding of how the Iranian ex-pats think, I don’t care about the copying of the hope and change mantra by Mousavi’s followers. Follow the conflict closely. Mousavi is almost an accidental contender. Most of his followers in Iran claim they do not want to overthrow the Islamic rule–i.e., the “religious democracy.” They want more freedoms and a lightening of the fundamentalist control. Mousavi’s wife campaigned with him–a first–and he appealed in that regard to the many women voters, who outnumber men, but who have almost no legal rights.

The students and the ex-pats around the world are more progressive, wanting to overthrow the religious control of their “democracy,” wanting the country to be secular again.

Ahmadinejad–this is the most frightening thing for me and the one that makes me feel he is more like Obama–came up from the ranks of the Basij, which, in my mind, resemble a group that ACORN could grow to be, or those eventual youth programs O seems to want. The Basij are the youth group trained in ideology, who have no uniforms but who do most of the violence or the confrontation with the people. They also remind me of the Hitler youth. Ahmadinejad’s obviously rigged election also reminds me of O’s.

I don’t think O’s statements recently admonishing Iran for the violence against its people are sincere, really. The one Iranian expert interviewed so far that I have seen who vehemently defended O’s less-than-strong interest in Iran’s situation seemed to be the only expert defending Ahmadinejad–who, whether we want to admit it or not, does have followers.

BUT…get this, they are mostly the poorer people of Iran, whom he lavished with financial gifts and promises during the election. Does that sound like someone you know?

The demonstrators are reacting to thirty years of a brutal regime. It doesn’t take U.S. meddling for that to happen. Iran was not like Iraq; it does have a semblance of democracy, so the conditions for protest were there, while in Iraq, there was nothing but total fear of the government.

There were previous protests in Iran after elections in recent history, but they subsided quickly after threats. The anger has been growing there and has just finally gotten to the real boiling point.

If there is some helping people who protest on the part of our government, I am for that. Mostly, we should help them maintain whatever means they have for speaking out so the rest of the world can hear.

I don’t twitter or use MySpace or Facebook, but thank heavens for these innovations.

Diana, the images of Iranian crowds in the streets during the Iran Hostage Crisis 1979-1981 are still vivid to me, as they are to most of us. I cannot draw comfort from these huge Iranian protests going on now because of their similarity to my memories of those years. Yes, they’re protesting against a tyrant and a jerk, but maybe the Shah was a tyrant and a jerk too. The mobs in the streets last time brought rule by the Ayatollahs and the Hostage Crisis. What will it bring this time? It seems this is a population that can be manipulated at a mob level by a charismatic leader.
These images styled after Obama’s campaign are, to me, a bad sign. We know what those images brought us.

Administrator, Almighty Spam Filter killed my response to Diana’s post. Rescue would be appreciated. Thanks.

ROTFLMAO…

I feel that the situation is frightening. Yes, I worry about another crazy leader in the area. But all analogies always break down. That is why my Iranian ex-pat friend is proud but frightened at the same time for the protestors. Most do not remember the Shah with good feelings, but they felt even more terribly frightened by the effects of the ’79 Revolution, which I am also old enough to remember well. My friend was twenty years old and living in Iran still.

We have many, many books by ex-pat Iranians available for reading. They all speak of a desire for more a more open, secular society. None speak highly of the current regime. None speak highly of any type of “charismatic” leader who would control their lives as they do now in Iran.

We have many feminists on this site. If you read and study, this may be as much a feminist revolt as anything. The lives of women and animals in Iran now under fundamentalist Islamic rule are miserable.

I have tried desperately to learn from the past but at the same time to know that, while it can repeat itself in some ways, it does not really repeat itself entirely. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s grasp has been weakened by this. Perhaps a more moderate religious leader will take over.

We could be hopeful that a new regime in Iran might change the dynamics in that region, where all of its neighbors fear them now.

I posted an open letter to the people of Iran from the woman singing in this video before, but I do not think anyone read it. I will just give the link now. This beautiful woman works to make clear to the world that the regime in Iran now is not what the people want. Listen to the lyrics, if you can get past how beautiful this woman is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqkSmpKkfdI

Does anyone have references to the UK Health Care Services denying open heart surgery? I haven’t heard of this but was asked by someone today…I can’t find any info…the only service I heard denied was for breast cancer medicines and that was on Fox…anyone?