Michael Stickings (@mjwstickings) has shared a Tweet with you: "jaketapper: Cain email: 'It's no secret that the Democrat Party + their surrogates in the mainstream media are out to derail Herman Cain's candidacy...'"
Yes, I'll admit it. We all conspired to persuade Cain to harass, grope, and generally disrespect women, to have a long-term affair, and to wallow in shameless hypocrisy, not to mention to look like a fool throughout this entire campaign. We devised that whole 9-9-9 idiocy and held his tongue while he struggled to remember what Libya was all about.
Once more, we see that Cain refuses to take responsibility for anything and everything. It's always someone else's fault. And this will be his bullshit narrative when he quits the race.
I am well aware of the danger of getting totally sick of Christmas before we even get into December, but please indulge me on this one. I love that Bing Crosby-David Bowie duet that we have all seen so many times. For the record, this unusual performance was part of Bing Crosby's annual Christmas special in November of 1977 and, I'm sure you would agree, has become a classic.
I'll try to keep the Christmas music posts to a minimum -- or maybe I won't. I haven't decided.
(Ed. note: I'll do my best to keep things under control. -- MJWS)
In case you missed it, New Jersey Governor (and all-around bully and blowhard) Chris Christie slammed President Obama on Monday:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ripped President Obama for the failure of the debt supercommittee, calling the president "a bystander in the Oval Office" in comments Monday.
"I was angry this weekend, listening to the spin coming out of the administration, about the failure of the supercommittee, and that the president knew it was doomed for failure, so he didn't get involved. Well, then what the hell are we paying you for?" Christie said in Camden, N.J. "It's doomed for failure, so I'm not getting involved'? Well, what have you been doing, exactly?"
This is complete and utter bullshit, as Steve Benen explained yesterday:
The New Jersey governor added that he's "astonished" that the president "refuses" to just call people into a room and solve problems. This is the kind of criticism the media finds compelling, but which is nevertheless idiotic.
The president has tried every negotiating tactic that exists to get congressional Republicans to work on finding solutions. Obama has tried hands-on talks; he's tried keeping his distance. The president has tried hard sells and soft sells, directly and indirectly. He's made private appeals and public appeals. He's made arguments based on policy, polls, and principles. He's tried charm offensives, combativeness, and everything in between. He's made partisan, bipartisan, tripartisan, and nonpartisan arguments, all in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, GOP leaders will be open to good-faith compromise.
And yet, nothing has worked. Nothing.
Obama isn't blameless, to be sure, but he should be blamed for being so willing not just to compromise with Republicans but to agree to a deal that leans heavily Republican. He should not be blamed for not trying to reach a deal. If anything, he's gone out of his way, much to the ongoing chagrin of progressives, to get a deal done. (Actually, he hasn't really gone out of his way. It's more that his way isn't the progressive way.)
If there is blame to be assigned here, and there most certainly is, it is the Republicans who must be blamed. There hasn't been a deal only because, being anti-tax absolutists, they have been absolutely unwilling to budge on revenue increases even when the president, with Democratic support, has offered them massive spending cuts even to major entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
The president has been anything but a bystander throughout this whole mad exercise, from the debt ceiling talks through to the supercommittee (which was never going to reach a deal, let's be honest; it was just for show). And for Christie to call him that is just plain ignorant.
I realize that Siri, the much-ballyhooed AI "personal assistant" for the iPhone is a work-in-progress and, from what I understand, produces some, er, interesting results when you ask it something, but it would appear that, with respect to women's reproductive health at least, it has a decidedly right-wing bent:
Ask the Siri, the new iPhone 4 assistant, where to get an abortion, and, if you happen to be in Washington, D.C., she won't direct you to the Planned Parenthood on 16th St, NW. Instead, she'll suggest you pay a visit to the 1st Choice Women's Health Center, an anti-abortion Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) in Landsdowne, Virginia, or Human Life Services, a CPC in York, Pennsylvania. Ask Google the same question, and you'll get ads for no less than 7 metro-area abortion clinics, 2 CPCs and a nationwide abortion referral service.
Ask in New York City, and Siri will tell you "I didn't find any abortion clinics."
It's an experience that's being replicated by women around the country: despite plentiful online information about actual places to get an abortion, Siri doesn't seem to provide it. It's a similar experience for women seeking emergency contraception: in New York City, Siri doesn't know what Plan B is and, asked for emergency contraception, offers up a Google results page of definitions.
Was this intentional? It's hard to see how it could not be -- how could Planned Parenthood not be Siri's first answer? -- and it reminds me that I was probably right to get a new Android phone last week instead of an iPhone (though I do have an iPod and use iTunes).
It could be that Siri was programmed so as not to be seen to be an enabler of abortion (though of course this would also mean it was programmed to be extremely conservative on women's health and "opposed," if it can be understood that way, to abortion rights. I really don't know. Maybe there's some other reason for it. But it looks awfully suspicious.
Now, while Siri may be on the right on women's health, it is decidedly libertarian on other matters. Apparently it will direct you to find Viagra, pot, strippers, and a blow job. All you have to do is ask.
Good times.
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Yes, I realize that 2001's HAL 9000 is supposed to represent IBM, which is decidedly not Apple. But of course there wasn't Apple at the time and, well, the connection between HAL and Siri is just too obvious to ignore.
