A face only a Rottweiler could love.
-- Lassie
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WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia lashed out at the cable network A&E today, calling its decision to suspend Phil Robertson, the star of the TV series "Duck Dynasty," unconstitutional, and demanding that it be overturned at once.
Speaking at a press conference with fellow Justice Clarence Thomas, a visibly angry Scalia told reporters that Robertson was "exercising his First Amendment right to express an opinion—an opinion, I might add, that many other great Americans agree with."
He warned that the suspension of the "Duck" star would have a "chilling effect" on freedom of speech in America: "If Phil Robertson can be muzzled for expressing this perfectly legitimate view, what's to prevent the same thing from happening to, say, a Justice of the Supreme Court?"
He added that, while he was a huge "Duck Dynasty" fan who never misses an episode, his objection to Mr. Robertson's suspension was "purely on Constitutional grounds."
Declaring that A&E's decision "will not stand," Justice Scalia said he would ask the Supreme Court to meet in an emergency session to overturn it: "This offensive decision by A&E is a clear violation of the Constitution, and I'm not the only one on the Court who feels that way. Right, Clarence?"
Justice Thomas had no comment.
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Rush Limbaugh calls the Pope's latest statement "pure Marxism." December 2nd, 2013 11:29 AM ET Rush Limbaugh: Pope is preaching 'pure Marxism' By Daniel Burke, CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor (CNN) – Pope Francis: Successor to St. Peter ... the people's pontiff ... Marxist? That's what conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh suggests, calling the Pope's latest document "pure Marxism." Limbaugh blasted the pontiff on Wednesday, a day after Francis released "Evangelii Gaudium" (The Joy of the Gospel), a 50,000-word statement that calls for church reform and castigates elements of modern capitalism. Limbaugh's segment, now online and entitled "It's Sad How Wrong Pope Francis Is (Unless It's a Deliberate Mistranslation By Leftists)," takes direct aim at the pope's economic views, calling them "dramatically, embarrassingly, puzzlingly wrong." The Vatican issued the English translation of "Evangelii," which is known officially as an apostolic exhortation and unofficially as a pep talk to the worlds 1.5 billion Catholics. Francis – the first pope ever to hail from Latin America, where he worked on behalf of the poor in his native Argentina – warned in "Evangelii" that the "idolatry of money" would lead to a "new tyranny." The Pope also blasted "trickle-down economics," saying the theory "expresses a crude and naĆÆve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power." READ MORE: Pope Francis: No more business as usual The Pope's critique of capitalism thrilled many liberal Catholics, who have long called on church leaders to spend more time and energy on protecting the poor from economic inequalities. But Limbaugh, whose program is estimated to reach 15 million listeners, called the Pope's comments "sad" and "unbelievable." "It's sad because this pope makes it very clear he doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to capitalism and socialism and so forth." In fact, Argentina was a battlefield between leftist socialists and right-wing security forces during much of Francis' early career in the country, where he was a Jesuit priest and later archbishop of Buenos Aires. Limbaugh, who is not Catholic, said he admires the faith "profoundly." He admired Pope Francis as well, "up until this," Limbaugh said. The talk show host also said that he has made numerous visits to the Vatican, which he said "wouldn't exist without tons of money." "But regardless, what this is, somebody has either written this for him or gotten to him," Limbaugh added. "This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope." Limbaugh took particular issue with the Pope's criticism of the "culture of prosperity," which the pontiff called a "mere spectacle" for the many people who can't afford to participate. "This is almost a statement about who should control financial markets," Limbaugh said. "He says that the global economy needs government control." "I'm not Catholic, but I know enough to know that this would have been unthinkable for a pope to believe or say just a few years ago," Limbaugh continued. In fact, Francis' predecessor, Benedict XVI, now pope emeritus, could be just as strong a critic of capitalism. In 2009, Benedict, in an official church document called an encyclical, said there was an urgent need for "a political, juridical and economic order" that would "manage the global economy." As Limbaugh notes, Benedict's predecessor, the late Pope John Paul II, was a noted foe of communism, after living under its oppressions in his native Poland. But evenJohn Paul thought that unregulated capitalism could have negative consequences. In "Evangelii," Francis called for more of a spiritual and ethical revolution than a regulatory one. "I encourage financial experts and political leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: `Not to share one's wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs,'" said Francis, quoting the fifth-century St. John Chrysostom. Liberal Catholics defended Pope Francis on Monday, calling on Limbaugh to apologize and retract his remarks. "To call the Holy Father a proponent 'pure Marxism' is both mean-spirited and naive," said Christopher Hale of the Washington-based Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. "Francis's critique of unrestrained capitalism is in line with the Church's social teaching." Limbaugh is not the only conservative commentator to take issue with the Pope's views on capitalism. READ MORE: Sarah Palin 'taken aback' by Pope Francis's 'liberal' statements "I go to church to save my soul," said Fox News' Stuart Varney, who is an Episcopalian. "It's got nothing to do with my vote. Pope Francis has linked the two. He has offered direct criticism of a specific political system. He has characterized negatively that system. I think he wants to influence my politics." It doesn't sound like the criticism is slowing Francis down, however. He's started ending a Vatican contingent, including the Papal Swiss Guards, into Rome to deliver food and charity. |
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Republican critics of Obamacare rose up in anger today, claiming that, after two months of fixes, the healthcare.gov Web site is now "unacceptably fast."
Leading the howls of protest was the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who accused President Obama of designing a Web site that operates at a "blistering, breakneck speed."
"With pages loading in milliseconds, this Web site is insuring people before they know what hit them," Rep. Issa charged. "Clearly, this is what the President and his team had in mind."
Additionally, Rep. Issa said, at such high speeds "it is questionable whether this Web site is even safe for consumers to use, particularly the elderly."
The California Republican said he would call for hearings this week to investigate the dangerous new velocity of healthcare.gov, telling reporters, "If anyone can slow this thing down, it's me."
In liberty,
Tea Party Patriots National Support Team
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Faced with a barrage of new questions about the Affordable Care Act, President Obama cut short a White House press conference today, telling the stunned press corps, "You know what? Everybody can keep their damn insurance."
Glaring at the reporters, the President continued, "You heard me. If your insurance is crappy, then you just go ahead and keep it—the crappier, the better. Let's pretend this whole thing never happened."
A vein in his forehead visibly throbbing, the President added, "You know, I really wish I hadn't spent the last three years of my life on this thing. I should've just gone around invading countries for no reason. That would've made everybody happy. Well, live and learn."
As the reporters averted their eyes from the President, many of them looking awkwardly at their shoes, he concluded his remarks: "All those people out there who want to repeal Obamacare? Well, guess what: I'll make their day and repeal it myself. Really, it's my pleasure. But I swear that this is the last time I try to do something nice for anybody."
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Moments after President Obama said he would allow insurers to continue health plans that were to be cancelled under the Affordable Care Act, leading Republicans blasted the President for agreeing with an idea that they had supported.
"It's true that we've been strongly in favor of Americans being allowed to keep their existing plans," said House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). "But now that the President is for it, we're convinced that it's a horrible idea."
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) went further in ripping the President, calling Mr. Obama's tactic of adopting ideas proposed by him and fellow Republicans "beneath contempt."
"The President should be aware that any future agreeing with us will be seen for what it is: a hostile act," he said.
Minutes later, White House spokesman Jay Carney helmed a hastily called press conference, hoping to stem the quickly escalating coƶperation scandal.
"The President understands that he has offended some Republicans in Congress by agreeing with them," Mr. Carney said. "He wants to apologize for that."
But far from putting an end to the controversy, the President's apology drew a swift rebuke from another congressional Republican, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who called it a "blatant provocation."
"If the President is going to continue agreeing with us and apologizing to us, he is playing with fire," he warned.
"I didn't even have to go into the room to see who it was," a man calling himself Morgan Jones told Lara Logan, of "60 Minutes," on October 27th, remembering how he had glimpsed a body through the glass in a door. It was September 11, 2012, the night four American diplomats were killed in Benghazi.
JONES: I knew who it was immediately.
LOGAN: Who was it?
JONES: It was the Ambassador, dead. Yeah, shocking.
Logan looks shocked. And then, a few minutes later, when Jones—"a pseudonym he's using for his own safety," Logan says—reminisces about scaling a twelve-foot wall in a compound being overrun by members of Al Qaeda, she looks impressed. He encountered a terrorist, but, he says, "As I got closer, I just hit him with the butt of the rifle in the face."
JONES: Oh, he went down, yeah.
LOGAN: He dropped?
JONES: Yeah, like … like a stone.
LOGAN: With his face smashed in?
JONES: Yeah.
LOGAN: And no one saw you do it?
JONES: No.
Morgan Jones, the man who doesn't need to go into a room to know what he'll see, and is, somehow, seen by no one when he does what he has to do. Watching the exchange now, it seems almost doomed to lead where it has.
"We end our broadcast tonight with a correction," Logan said this Sunday. She used Jones's real name, Dylan Davies. After the broadcast, she said, "questions arose about whether his account was true when an incident report surfaced. It told a different story about what he did the night of the attack." Davies, she said, "insisted the story he told us was not only accurate, it was the same story he told the F.B.I. when they interviewed him." When "60 Minutes" learned on Thursday that, in fact, the F.B.I. report "was different from what he told us, we realized we had been misled, and it was a mistake to include him in our report. For that we are very sorry. The most important thing to every person at '60 Minutes' is the truth. And the truth is, we made a mistake."
This is an odd statement and an understatement. To say that the incident report "surfaced" and told "a different story" isn't quite adequate: Karen DeYoung, of the Washington Post, obtained it, and it was apparently already among the papers turned over to Congress. The discrepancies extended to Davies's location that night: he was not in the compound at all but, rather, in his "beach side villa." ("We could not get anywhere near," the report read.)
Skepticism might have set in around the point when Logan recited how Jones, alone and unseen, "scaled the twelve-foot wall of the compound," and not later. On Monday night, Stephen Colbert produced a parody about a thirty-foot wall in the CBS newsroom beset by Hillary Clinton, swinging dangerous weapons—but self-parody is already in the "60 Minutes" segment, and has certainly been present in the Congressional response to the deaths in Benghazi. When Logan's report aired, Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been fixated on the idea of a conspiratorial coverup, saw it as more dark proof. If we hadn't heard about Jones, and the warnings he said he passed on, what else didn't we know? Graham cited "60 Minutes" as a reason for holding up the nominations of various ambassadors, an odd penalty, given that the incident involved a diplomatic outpost that could have used some help. After the report's integrity disintegrated, he said that he wouldn't give up.
"Correction," the word "60 Minutes" used, is a tricky one in this context. The program did not correct its report, in the sense of putting out an accurate version. The entire segment was pulled from its Web site. If the mistake was putting Davies on air, one might, in theory, imagine a correct version in which his interview is simply excised; that's impossible here, though. There is no report without Davies. He is either speaking or providing the point of view for more than eight of its fifteen and a half minutes; we rely on him not only for the sight of Ambassador Chris Stevens's body but for a phone conversation the two supposedly had a few hours before Stevens died—a particularly low form of fabrication, if that's what it is—as well as calls he says he had with Sean Smith, another diplomat who was killed; Libyan guards; and another unnamed American at the compound. ("I said, 'Well, just keep fighting. I'm on my way.' ") And he provides Logan with her guiding logic: "The events of that night have been overshadowed by misinformation, confusion, and intense partisanship," Logan says,
But for those who lived through it, there's nothing confusing about what happened, and they share a sense of profound frustration because they say they saw it coming.
Then we're introduced to Jones, the man with the gun who had it all figured out, and whom no one seemed to hear.
There are really two charges against CBS: that they were duped, and that the segment itself was an example, to borrow Logan's terms, of misinformation, confusion, and intense partisanship. Journalists make mistakes; sources lie. DeYoung's story ran in the Post on October 31st, and was followed up with passion elsewhere. (Dave Weigel has written aboutMedia Matters's role.) CBS lost some sympathy by apparently accepting, for a number of days, Davies's explanation that the incident report, which was in his voice but didn't have his signature, was the byproduct of lies he told a supervisor out of his immense respect for the man whose orders he hadn't followed. Perhaps Logan thought that tracked; her apology-preview appearance on CBS's "This Morning" only partly clarified the thinking. She was still defending Davies days after DeYoung's report, telling the Times that the criticism was political. "We worked on this for a year. We killed ourselves not to allow politics into this report." Then came the F.B.I. report, and there went the clarity Logan claims to have finally found in Davies's story.
It's a sad aspect of this story that Logan claims the segment was more than a year in the making. Where did the time go? In the fairly long piece, Logan fails to offer any real statement about the Administration's perspective. Only two other people are interviewed on camera. One is a military man who doesn't understand why the diplomats didn't get out of Benghazi months earlier. Another is a diplomat who doesn't understand why, at the critical moment, significant military forces didn't move into Benghazi from across the border. Davies, who is somehow supposed to tie these threads together, doesn't understand why, on the first day he first arrived in the city, he found Libyan guards "inside, drinking tea, laughing and joking" rather than looking sharp, and why everyone didn't heed a private contractor, like him. Not that Davies is identified as such: he's a "security officer," Logan says. "A former British soldier, he's been helping to keep U.S. diplomats and military leaders safe for the last decade." (Nor does she mention that his book, promoted in the segment, was published by Simon & Schuster, a unit of CBS, something she has admitted was a mistake.) But who knows what Davies said before or during the attack. His account is about as good as a spilled cup of tea, making the rest unreadable.
Those military and diplomatic questions deserve better answers, ones about policy choices rather than half-discerned conspiracies. You wouldn't know from Logan's report that the United States was engaged at the time in a historic and violent transition in Libya, in which the Qaddafi regime was overthrown with the help of our forces, or about that revolution's disordered denouement, or about the Obama Administration's decision to ignore the War Powers Act. Libya is presented as nothing but a place with a diplomatic mission and Al Qaeda's black flags in the street. Brave men swinging rifle butts are thwarted by craven ones in Washington who won't move their "military assets" into the country.
This is Benghazi, the story that burns all sides, those who use it as a weapon as well as their targets. (It seems to hurt less if one has no shame or a serious primary challenger, as is the case with Lindsey Graham.) That is largely because of how they pick their battles: Sunday-morning talking points; what word the President used; demands for more documents without, it would seem, the willingness to actually read what they say. The image of a rampaging Hillary Clinton is not far from the actual rhetoric around the story, which will only be revved up if she runs in 2016. She has, in some impatient, tone-deaf testimony, already provided some footage for commercials. It is strange to remember, given what a drag it's been on Obama's agenda, but Romney was the one most hurt by Benghazi in the debates, when Candy Crowley, the moderator, said that he was wrong about the President not saying "terror" in the Rose Garden immediately after the attack. Benghazi the scandal is full of absurdities. Libya, the real country, is the scene of its own national tragedy, and an American one, the walls of which have barely been scaled.