When Michael Steele was the head of the Republican National Committee, he ran a scandal-plagued operation and his attempts to put a good face on his party’s politics made him look like a buffoon.

Now that he is free of the institutional constraint of having to defend everything his party does, he turns out to be an astute, interesting, and engaging observer of the current political scene, as this interview on The Daily Show reveals, where he speaks quite frankly about the divisions within the party that have emerged as a result of the loss of control by establishment Republicans.

Stephen Colbert gets advice from Republican media consultant Frank Luntz.

Political cartoonist Ted Rall warns us what expects on September 11 as the tenth anniversary of the collapse of the World Trade Center comes around.

I have written before about this weird obsession with public grief in which the media and politicians try to suggest that all of us are, or should be, overcome with grief and emotion by simply remembering a past event. This may be true for those who actually lost loved ones but I suspect that for the rest of us it is just another day that would have passed normally if it were not thrust in our faces by a massive media blitz that wallows in cheesy sentiment.

I myself will ignore all coverage of this staged event.

The avenger who gives banks a taste of their own medicine.

The Daily Show brutally captures Obama’s familiar trajectory. He dangles some feature that is popular with his base as an important, even essential, part of a deal that also gives huge benefits to the oligarchs, and then at the last moment gives it up in return for some window dressing. We saw that before with the single payer and public options in the health care reform debate.

Yes, nobody could have seen it coming.

Keith Olbermann also weighs in on the deal, in his usual shrill way, essentially calling on people to revolt. (Thanks to Chris.)

From Tom the Dancing Bug.

I know everyone has been curious about what Orly Taitz, our favorite lawyer/dentist/performance artist, whose obsession with Obama’s birth certificate has provided many hours of hilarity, has been up to recently.

First up, for some bizarre reason, she now refers to herself as “Dr. Orly Taitz Esquire” everywhere. Maybe she is unaware of the origins and meanings of the word ‘esquire’ and thinks it gives her a certain cachet.

You would have thought that the release of Obama’s long form birth certificate would have ended her quest. You would be wrong. She is nothing if not dogged. She is now demanding the right to personally examine the certificate, no doubt to use her sharp forensic skills to figure out how it was forged.

She also now claims that Obama is using a fake social security number and she is suing the Social Security Administration for, well, something, that will help her prove it.
[Read more…]