After the president underwent a 90-minute physical exam at the National Naval Medical Center Sunday morning, Navy Capt. Jeffery Kuhlman, the chief White House physician, declared him to be in “excellent health.”
But Kuhlman still had some healthy recommendations for the president. First and foremost: “Continue smoking cessation efforts.”
Dr. Nieca Goldberg, a New York City-based cardiologist, said that despite the president’s clean bill of health, he may still be at risk for heart disease, because he is a smoker in a high-stress job.
“It’s great that he is physically fit, but it won’t counteract the fact that he still smokes,” Goldberg said. “To reduce his risk of cardiac disease, you can count his exercising as a benefit, but he needs to quit smoking.”
Screw that goody-two-shoes crap, Mr. President. Your health-care plan is doomed, you’re obviously under a lot of stress, and the last thing America needs is a Commander-in-Chief in the throes of a nicotine fit.
BRUSSELS — In a desperate bid to end the Cleavage Wars that have devastated the blogging community for the past week, representatives of the European Union dispatched “Matrix Reloaded” star Monica Bellucci as a special peace envoy.
“This senseless waste of cleavage cannot be allowed to continue,” said the 45-year-old Italian actress. “In the name of humanity, I call on the combatants to end their breast belligerence.”
Bellucci’s cease-fire plea followed a failed peace conference at the Hague, in which Bob Belvedere denounced as “propaganda” the claims of other bloggers that this ongoing conflict began with the aggressive display of flesh at Belvedere’s Camp of the Saints site.
John McCain lost the election Sept. 24 and Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. Nothing that is likely to happen between now and Nov. 4 can change this outcome. . . .
[B]y siding with the president on an issue that voters identified as favoritism toward WallStreet, the Republican cemented in the public mind a message that Team Obama had been promoting for months: A vote for McCain would mean a third term for George W. Bush. . . .
It was McCain’s outspoken support for the unpopular bailout — abig-government intervention incompatible with conservative economic philosophy — that handed the election to Obama. The bailout failed as politics and, as evidenced by Monday’s selloff on Wall Street, it also failed as policy.
McCain has no one but himself to blame for his own failure of judgment, and his attempt to scapegoat others is pure political cowardice. If Bernanke and Paulson were liars, wasn’t it McCain’s responsibility as a statesman to inform himself of their untrustworthy character and to question their advice? It’s time to rid the U.S. Senate of the one man most responsible for the Obama presidency.
by SmittyDay By Day makes a great historical allusion that merits mention. As a part of the Battle of the Bulge, the Siege of Bastogne had the fascists pinning down the 101st Airborne for a week. “When confronted with a written request from German General Luttwitz for surrender of Bastogne, [Brigadier General McAuliffe] replied ‘NUTS!'”
According to an article in the Daily Mail the reply was not “Nuts” but a four letter expletive that was changed for propaganda purposes for domestic consumption. But that was not the case, according to Vincent Vicari, McAuliffe’s personal aide who was there at the time. As quoted by Richard Pyle of the Associated Press December 12, 2004, Vicari said, “General Mac was the only general I ever knew who did not use profane language. ‘Nuts’ was part of his normal vocabulary.”
So, both the allusion to fascism and the polite response more or less map to the current situation, where the Tea Parties have left to Rahm Emmanuel the bulk of the “dirty” work.
Accusing opponents of dangerous insanity has become so commonplace in the Age of Obama that such discourse is now taken for granted. Frank Rich devoted the entirety of his Sunday New York Times column to insinuating that the Tea Party movement is a paranoid aggregation motivated by “frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage,” and thereby complicit in the Feb. 18 crime of Andrew Joseph Stack III, who piloted his Piper airplane into an Internal Revenue Service office in Texas.
This rhetorical conflation of political protests and Stack’s kamikaze crash required Rich to overlook the quite specific grievances described by Stack in his profanity-strewn suicide note. Stack alluded to a “$10,000 helping of justice” — apparently a penalty for failure to file a tax return several years ago — and blamed his accountant and the IRS for a more recent audit involving $12,700 of his wife’s unreported income.
Along with his strictly personal ax-grinding against the IRS-CPA axis, Stack also ranted about “the vulgar, corrupt Catholic church,” “the monsters of organized religion,” “presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies,” the “rich” and “wealthy.” None of that bears meaningful resemblance to the politics of Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Glenn Beck or any of the other name-brand figures swept up in Frank Rich’s all-encompassing indictment of what he calls the “anti-government right.” . . .
NewsBusters points to a WaPo correction where the WaPo had hammered Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) for “posturing” by bringing a copy of the subject matter at hand to the health care summit.
That makes about as much sense as Yale’s craven refusal to publish the controversial Danish cartoon depictions of Muhammad in a book on the topic of the controversial Danish cartoon depictions of Muhammad.
Only in Lefty la-la land can bringing a copy of the subject of the meeting to the meeting, when the motive is clearly to speak intelligently to crucial points therein, be miscast in negative light somehow.
I call on Young 4 Eyes to help those of us still bound in chains of common sense grasp the intricate logic involved. Honest, fair minded people propounding a sound idea typically engage in critical discussions in welcoming tones. If you’re right, you argue your point. If you’re mistaken, you welcome correction. We all educate each other. Or am I mistaken in thinking it was supposed to be a dialogue?
One symptom of being whacked upside the head with the Crazy Stick is that victims talk in deranged run-on sentences:
“I’ve been looking at this phenomenon of the so-called ‘stalled’ Barack Obama presidency and, of course, we all have our own different views about it, but one thing I’m not hearing enough about, especially from white people — uh, people like me, 57-year-old white guy who used to be a Republican — is to admit and honestly address the fact that racism is a huge factor.”
Got that? Now, in order to save you the trouble of decoding this Crazy Stick gibberish, I’ll slightly edit the following excerpt of Schaeffer’s rant:
“The people running around saying [Obama is] not even American, that he’s the anti-Christ . . . some of them are not stupid, they don’t believe this stuff. . . . [W]hat they really want to be saying is, ‘We don’t want a black guy in the White House . . . We’d rather see the economy go down in flames than work with a black man.’ And since they can’t say that, they spout all this other B.S. But their own audience knows perfectly well what they’re saying, which is what Dick Cheney said at CPAC: ‘We want to make this guy a one-term president.’ He didn’t actually use the N-word, but you look between the lines and it’s there: ‘We don’t want this N in the White House’ . . .”
Dick Cheney is a Republican. Barack Obama is a Democrat. Maybe you don’t understand the nuanced complexities of politics, Frank, but as a general rule, Republicans want to defeat Democrats and vice-versa, without regard to the ethnicity of the partisan contestants.
It’s really that simple, Frank. The novelty of this particular Democratic president’s race may excite the delusions of Crazy Stick victims like yourself, but your paranoid telepathic “between the lines” psychobabble is unnecessary and harmful.
Don’t forget to take your meds, Frank. People are worried about you.
