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RachelWatch: Going nuclear on the Filibuster

Today: Quentin Tarantino, Howard Dean, and Detective Greg Semendinger

Bill Clinton Hospitalized

Rachel started us off with some breaking news about former President Bill Clinton, who was hospitalized Thursday. While Clinton did not have a heart attack, he had been experiencing chest pressure and ended up having two stents put in his heart.

Clinton’s doctors said that he’s doing well and should be going home on Monday.

Dr. Fred Feit, director of the cardiac catheterization lab at NYU Medical Center, joined Rachel to talk about Clinton’s procedure and show some cool stent graphics.

Heart stent graphics: All the Valentine a true geek needs.

Let’s Go Nuclear

If you’re like me, you may be having a little trouble playing with your Limited Edition Congressional Democrat Action Figures lately.

No matter which exciting adventures I plan, they don’t work out. Whether it’s fighting Cobra, scaling the bookshelf, or just passing a resolution to discuss entering hearings on making a motion to fund a possible fact-finding expedition to the Uninterested Cat Monster, my Special Collectors Edition Lifelike Congressional Republican Figurines threaten to filibuster and I just end up standing over them screaming, “Do something!”

My Democrat Action Figures don’t even stand up by themselves. Sometimes I think I might as well have left them in the packaging.

Oh, and you might have noticed a few problems with the real Congressional Democrats as well. It looks like they’re finally getting frustrated enough with the standing filibuster threat to form an exploratory committee on getting mad. And maybe even fixing — or ditching — the filibuster.

Rachel and former Governor of Vermont Howard Dean (D) chatted about getting the Democrats fired up enough to actually make the government work again.

The TRMS Interview

Rachel chatted with an ebullient Quentin Tarantino about cinematic violence, “chickvision,” and the themes running through his Oscar-nominated Inglourious Basterds.

Plus if you play this clip backwards, he totally gives away what was in Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase.

Ms. Information

I actually had to watch this segment three times to make my brain fully absorb it. It’s that whackadoo.

Congressman Paul Ryan (R — Wisconsin) is the guy the GOP shove out in front when they need a Serious Brainy Republican. He is so serious and so brainy, so very levelheaded, that the Republicans had him write up their version of the budget.

Ryan’s budget gradually privatizes Social Security because, really, if Great Aunt Ida got to 78 without being able to pick a better stockbroker than that, she really doesn’t deserve the name-brand ramen noodles, and certainly not twice a day.

His budget would do the same thing to a program called “Medicare,” which must be some sort of nickname or code. Because this “Medicare” the Republicans want to eliminate cannot possibly be the same Medicare program they were so vigorously defending all summer.

If there is one thing I’ve learned about Republicans, it’s that they would rather slit their own throats — maybe even scratch their own Beemers — than alter one comma of Medicare.

Anyway, this levelheaded dude has some serious fiscal conservative street cred. He is no demon sheep.

When The Daily Beast asked this certified non-FCINO why, then, he voted for the bank bailout, Ryan calmly explained that Jonah Goldberg‘s nutball book Liberal Fascism showed him he had to or Barack Obama would sweep in and plunge the nation into Commie Liberal Naziness.

Liberal Fascism asserts that fascists were secretly lefties and lefties are really fascists, and holy buckets, those people carrying the signs accusing President Obama of being a Nazi and a Socialist at the same time really have been told that they’re the same thing.

And they decided to drop everything they learned in their seventh-grade Social Studies classes and believe it.

And they’re in the levelheaded mainstream of Republican thought.

“Republicans are never wrong” led to “The Right is never wrong,” which inevitably means that “nothing on the Right can ever have been wrong” which must mean that fascism is secretly progressive and P.S. Obama’s the one who’s a racist.

Fascinating. Right is now Left. I’m concerned about the next phase, though. “Up is Down” is going to make airplane travel tricky.

September 11, 2001

Rachel welcomed retired NYPD detective Greg Semendinger, who took the astonishing aerial photos of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks.

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