Thursday Mashup (4/19/12)

(Once more, don’t count on these posts on a regular basis anymore…about once in a while is the best I can do, unfortunately).

From the “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” category, I give you the following from Fix Noise here (with “Bush’s Brain” propagandizing about our chief executive and the veep)…

Mr. Biden offered other wild assertions that didn’t even get a mild pushback on Sunday morning. For example, Mr. Biden said Mitt Romney wanted to “let Detroit go bankrupt,” apparently referring to General Motors and Chrysler and not the city. But GM and Chrysler did go bankrupt: their bankruptcies were decided by the president -- not by a court -- and rather than going forward with an infusion of private capital, the two businesses received $85 billion from the taxpayers, with at least $24 billion of that unlikely to ever be returned.

How is that a “wild assertion” from Willard Mitt Romney given this (though, in true weaselly form, Rove doesn’t say that Biden was lying, because he wasn’t).

And in the matter of taxpayer money that supposedly will never be repaid, I give you this…

Earlier today, General Motors announced that the company paid $4.7 billion to the U.S. government and $1.1 billion to the Canadian government, fulfilling its obligation agreed to when it received its initial bailout funds. In total, GM received $52 billion from the U.S. government, but only $6.7 billion of this amount was considered a loan. The company already paid back $2 billion, so this $4.7 billion is the last payment.

This doesn’t mean that “Government Motors” is no more. Despite the payback, the government still owns a controlling portion of the restructured GM. The United States will eventually relinquish its ownership, but this will take some time. Even when the new GM completes its initial public offering, the U.S. government will still be an owner for some time.

Also, when it comes to presidents and automaker bailouts, I give you this (and in the matter of the auto industry in this country, this asks a great question).

Oh, and here’s another goody from the former Bushco political maven…

The vice president also plunged into health care, asserting, “there’s millions of people out there” already benefiting from provisions in the new law. But far fewer people with preexisting conditions have signed up than anticipated (just 49,000), a much-ballyhooed subsidy for small businesses has gone virtually unused, and thousands of companies have been forced to seek waivers to keep millions of workers covered by existing policies.

Gee, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear Karl had been reading the Bucks County Courier Times, since they did a more thorough job of trashing the Affordable Care Act than anyone else I’d seen when it was recently argued before the High Court of Hangin’ Judge JR (with nary a favorable point of view like this one in sight).

And as far as Rove’s “thousands” claim is concerned…well, try about 1,200, as Media Matters notes here (with a common-sense explanation also...more ACA myths and facts are here).

Rove also tells us the following...

The vice president went similarly overboard in suggesting America is drilling more wells, pumping more oil, and importing less oil because of this Administration’s policies. This is really happening in spite of Mr. Obama, not because of him.

WAAAHHHHH!!!!!!

Of course, maybe Rove is trying to deflect attention away from this (hat tip to The Political Junkie)…

After declining to levels not seen since the 1940s, U.S. crude production began rising again in 2009. Drilling rigs have rushed into the nation's oil fields, suggesting a surge in domestic crude is on the horizon.

The number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quad¬rupled in the past three years to 1,272, according to the Baker Hughes rig count. Including those in natural gas fields, the United States now has more rigs at work than the entire rest of the world.

"It's staggering," said Marshall Adkins, who directs energy research for the financial services firm Raymond James. "If we continue growing anywhere near that pace and keep squeezing demand out of the system, that puts you in a world where we are not importing oil in 10 years."

Gee, wonder why that didn’t happen in oh, say, 2005, 2006, 0r 2007…you know, when Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History was taking up space in An Oval Office (with Rove by his side)?

Basically, you’d be better off watching cartoons as opposed to reading or watching anything from Fix Noise, as noted here, though, when you get right down to it, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference (and I don't expect that this question will ever be answered).

And get a load of the latest from Moon Unit Bachmann here on the issue of trying to crack down on oil speculators…

"This is just about waving a tar baby in the air and saying that something else is a problem," Bachmann said in an interview Wednesday with The Shark Tank, a conservative news organization that covers Florida politics. "I have never seen a more irresponsible president who is infantile in the way that he continually blames everyone else for his failure to first diagnose the problem and second to address the problem. It's always everyone else's fault."

…

"It's anybody but Obama for Obama. And that's why we have to call him out," she said. "The president is a complete and utter fraud and a hypocrite on this issue, with all due respect."

“Waving a tar baby” – waay too damn funny (though definitely an inappropriate comment, I hasten to add)…

In response, as noted here, the CEO of ExxonMobil admitted that oil should be about $60-$70 a barrel, even though it’s really at about $100 at the moment, allowing for at least some price impact from oil speculation.

And an actual, honest-to-goodness oil trader tells us the following here…

The oil game is overrun with IB desks, hedge funders, long/short punters, algos, HFT's and private trade houses like Vitol, Trafigura and Glencore. And yes, Virginia -- fraud can happen: We've forgotten too quickly about such stellar examples as Enron and Amaranth.

These are not the guys that anyone should look to protect. They absolutely jack up the prices of oil that you and I are forced to pay at the pumps. But they are the beneficiaries of the continued defense of the broken oil markets as they are today. We haven't made much progress.

So, it looks like, once more, the Repug U.S. House Rep from Minnesota and one-time presidential candidate is showing to the whole world that she has the mendacity of a lizard, the self-reflection of the most oblivious narcissist imaginable and the cognitive capacity of a flea.

With all due respect.

Finally, a certain V.D. Hanson ramps up the right-wing noise machine against Obama some more here…

The president also unwisely attacked the Supreme Court as it deliberated the constitutionality of Obamacare. He needlessly referred to the justices as “unelected,” and wrongly claimed that they had little precedent to overturn laws that dealt with commerce. The gaffe about the Court and its history was doubly embarrassing because Obama has often reminded the public that he used to teach constitutional law.

Gosh, isn’t that a funny one from “The Pericles of Petticoat Junction”? Hanson has a problem with Obama’s reference to Supreme Court justices as “unelected,” but he has no problem apparently with Obama’s predecessor saying basically the same thing over and over again, as noted here...and for good measure, I give you this.

There’s other typically ripe stuff here from Hanson, but I’ll leave that for now because life is short and I’ve about spent my BS tolerance for one day.

And by the way, did you know Obama (and, by extension, Chicago Bears head football coach Lovie Smith) were recently accused by Hanson of “retrograde tribalism” (here) according to Hanson? Interesting racist code language, I must say.

Truly, words fail.