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Not content to delegate the task of murdering Stephen Hawking to a death panel, and furious at Hawking for speaking out, Obama personally strangles him with a “presidential” garotte: First they came for the theoretical astrophysicists…

A fascist, communist, and religious zealot, all rolled into a single cynical package whose arrival prefigures the country’s descent into civil war? Obama:America::Laibach:Slovenia See?

Racial fantasists at the Economist (27 Jun 09) and National Review (20 Jul 09) offer penetrating analyses of Obama’s efforts to unfubar healthcare: See also: “Size matters.

NYT (Labaton, “Millions Face Blank Screens in TV Switch,” 5 Jun ’09) quotes another Obamatron suggesting that Shrub’s administration had other priorities than, say, doing what government is supposed to do: Michael J. Copps, the acting head of the Federal Communications Commission, said that the people most likely to lose reception are society’s most vulnerable [...]

Jeremy Scahill: According to new statistics released by the Pentagon, with Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan, which “correlates to the build [...]

BHO sits down to negotiate with a pirate—without preconditions: No options are on the table because there is no table.

Doug Henwood: (By the way, the buzz is that some banks may participate in the bailout scheme, borrowing money from the gov to buy their own bad assets at ridiculously inflated prices. That renders them technically solvent, with Washington holding the bag. Nice.) Gangster.

Time magazine’s Joe Klein (“Shocking,” 2 Mar ’09): In truth, class warfare is what the Reagan Era gave us: thirty years of tax breaks for the wealthy at the expense of the common weal, thirty years of lax regulations which enabled the bankers to strip-mine the savings of average Americans while reaping huge rewards in [...]

The Onion, moribund for so long, rises from the dead again: “Sasha Obama Keeps Seeing Creepy Bush Twins While Riding Tricycle Through White House.” Question for Latinists: the gender of allium? (df)

NYT: “The time to say ‘no bonuses’ has come and gone,” said Brian Foley, an executive compensation consultant in White Plains. “The horse is out of the barn and over the horizon.” Feh. If the administration says OK, then, no more TARP funds for you, the offending institutions will quickly find ways to claw those [...]

Dan Froomkin, “Return to the Moral High Ground,” White House Watch, WP (23 Jan ’09): Dana Priest writes in The Washington Post: “President Obama yesterday eliminated the most controversial tools employed by his predecessor against terrorism suspects. With the stroke of his pen, he effectively declared an end to the ‘war on terror,’ as President [...]

It’s starting to seem like Obama understands very well how to disassemble the GOP’s famously disciplined “noise machine,” which amounted to little—maybe nothing—more than an ad-hoc monopoly on a speaking like a sovereign. Exhibit A: the Murdoch-owned NY Post (Hurt, “Prez Zings GOP Foe in a $timulating Talk,” 23 Jan ’09) tries to find its [...]

On GWB’s last day, the whitehouse.gov robots.txt file lists 2376 lines of disallows, including: Disallow: /911/911day/text Disallow: /911/heroes/text Disallow: /911/messages/text Disallow: /911/patriotism/text Disallow: /911/patriotism2/text Disallow: /911/progress/text Disallow: /911/remembrance/text Disallow: /911/response/text Disallow: /911/sept112002/text Disallow: /911/text Disallow: /homeland/progress/text Disallow: /homeland/stateandlocal/text Disallow: /homeland/states/text Disallow: /homeland/text Disallow: /judicial/text Disallow: /katrina/text Disallow: /liberation/text Disallow: /media/text Disallow: /messages/text Disallow: /national-anthem/text Disallow: [...]

[Rev. ed. 09-05-21: Seeqpod went bust; you can manually reconstruct this post yourself by finding a recording of Parliament’s “Chocolate City.”] See also: “Away from lands so battered and torn,” “Size matters.”

Twenty years later, The Lancet informs us that: “Shock therapy”, or rapid mass privatisation, in the former Soviet bloc in the first half of the 1990s was responsible for the early deaths of 1m people. [...] An analysis of the 3m working-age men who died across the former communist countries of eastern Europe suggests at [...]

The US as parliamentary democracy meme insight is catching on (WaMo, Hullabaloo). But whatever happened to this (8 Aug ’08)? SUMMARY: The National Park Service (NPS) is proposing to amend regulations governing viewing of the Inaugural parade by the public, demonstrators, and the Presidential Inaugural Committee. The proposed rule would extend the duration and extent [...]

AP, “Obama Has More Threats Than Other Presidents-Elect” (15 Nov ’08): [I]n a Maine convenience store, an Associated Press reporter saw a sign inviting customers to join a betting pool on when Obama might fall victim to an assassin. The sign solicited $1 entries into “The Osama Obama Shotgun Pool,” saying the money would go [...]

Next up: Switzerland. AFP (“Swiss Fear More Pressure on Bank Secrecy after Obama Victory,” 10 Nov ’08): Switzerland is likely to come under further pressure from the United States over its prized system of banking secrecy after the election last week of Barack Obama, key sector players predicted. The newly-elected US president, who formally takes [...]

Krugman, “The Obama Agenda,” NYT (7 Nov ’08): This year, however, Mr. Obama ran on a platform of guaranteed health care and tax breaks for the middle class, paid for with higher taxes on the affluent. John McCain denounced his opponent as a socialist and a “redistributor,” but America voted for him anyway. That’s a [...]

Cognitive dissonance. At Wikipedia, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: Does. Not. Compute.

So says an A-list blogger: Pretty funny.

Chris Matthews (at 0:35) on the appearance of the Obama children onstage at the DNC: They’ve not, uh, fully exploited those kids at all, and they shouldn’t, but it’s nice to see them all together once in a while.

[Update 09-07-06: Ew, incoming link from Stormfront. A message to you rudies: (source) You can find more here. Now back to the original post...] Barack Obama (b. 1961) Limbaugh stands on the shoulders of midgets when he samples a favorite technique of American racism, by countering the legitimate African American assertion of authority with cartoonish [...]