Harry's Place

At the 2014 White House Correspondents Dinner:

Home of the “Fighting Chomskys,” indeed.
Some good cracks about the conservatives who swoon over Vladimir Putin.

Last fall I posted about how Vladimir Putin (with his unapologetic anti-gay policies and his supposed defense of “Christian values”) was making some American conservatives weak at the knees.
Paleocon Pat Buchanan especially was in full swoon:

While much of American and Western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing [...]

For awhile now, I’ve been running an informal contest to determine the most cringe-inducing Republican member of the House of Representatives from Texas.
So far the contestants include:
• Louie “Terror Babies” Gohmert, 1st District
• Steve “If Babies Had Guns” Stockman, 36th District
• Randy “You Should Be Ashamed for Doing Your Job” Neugebauer, 19th District
• Blake “Sometimes [...]

President and Mrs. Obama hosted the annual Hanukkah reception at the White House Thursday night.

Although most of the recent craziness and detachment from reality in Washington has been concentrated among Congressional Republicans, it isn’t limited to them.
The “antiwar” Code Pink people demonstrated in front of the White House to protest a meeting between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, whom they apparently believe were plotting to start a [...]

If you missed President Obama’s speech last night, here it is:

Obama recognized that public opinion in the US opposed a military strike against the Assad regime; he tried to respond to some of the concerns in his speech. All indications are that a vote in Congress on whether to approve a strike would have gone [...]

Jim Messina, who managed Barack Obama’s successful 2012 reelection campaign and previously served as his deputy chief of staff, has been hired by the UK’s Conservative party as a campaign strategy adviser.
The Tories are hoping to emulate Mr Obama’s re-election against a backdrop of economic problems. Many other governments that have sought re-election during economic [...]

The neocons of the Syrian town of Kafranbel express their bitterness at the Obama administration’s pathetic calls for Iran and Hezbollah to withdraw their fighters from Syria.
Well, they’ve tried everything else.
(I’d love to see counter-demonstrators show up at the next Stopper protest with pictures from Kafranbel.)
Hezbollah isn’t winning popularity contests among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon [...]

After reading this article in Le Monde about the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria, I can conclude only one of two things:
–Syrian rebels are engaged in one of history’s most massive and cunningly successful propaganda exercises; or
–President Obama’s famous red line has not only been crossed, it has been abjured, breached, [...]

Venezuela’s leader Nicolas Maduro is following in the footsteps of his predecessor Hugo Chavez by referring to the president of the United States in satanic terms.
It was Chavez, after all, who stood at the podium of the UN General Assembly in 2006 and, referring to then-President Bush, said: “The devil came here yesterday. And it [...]