Remeber when Barbara Boxer was sent thousands of roses from supporters across the nation to thank her for calling attention to voting irregularities in Ohio? Well, this Friday (as in tomorrow) is Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 70th birthday, and there’s a movement afoot to send her thousands of roses in gratitude for getting Health Care Reform through the congress. Daily Kos has the details, but it’s as simple as calling 1-866 596 186 and giving them your credit card info. For $10.00 they’ll send three roses. There’s also a website set up to promote the showing of gratitude.

You can order roses as late as this evening.

A selection of GOP temper tantrums, posted for the edification and amusement of my fellow Stinquers, with wry and amusing observations to follow:

Infantile wail: “There is no downside for Republicans,”Michael Steele, the Republican National Chairman said Monday in an interview. “Only for Americans.” (NYTimes 3/23/10)

Observation: We always knew Republicans weren’t really Americans. Read more »

“My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.”

–Andrea Fay Friedman, the actress who portrayed a young woman with Down Syndrome in a recent episode of The Family Guy that was attacked by Sarah Palin. Friedman suffers from Down syndrome herself. Palin has recently excused conservative talk show hosts who ridicule people with disabilities reasoning that, in their case it’s OK, since they do so “using satire.”

Meandering about the blogosphere the other day I ran across an amusing story detailing yet another example Fox News much vaunted propagandizing balance falling flat on face. It comes in the form of a poll published in the Fox Forum and reproduced to the left that gives some remarkably non-foxy results.

Now, it’s certainly amusing to see Fox publish a poll in which a full 75% of respondents characterize the Tea Party movement as a “fruitless mix of racism, conspiracy theories.” Read more »

If you want to know how craven the Republican party has become. If you want to know how hypocritical the Republican party has become. If you want to know the extent to which a single shameless individual can make a mockery of our entire form of government, then you need look no further than Alabama Senator Richard Shelby. A prominent member of a minority party that has twisted Senate rules to impose an near-blanket, un-democratic supermajority voting requirement on Senate legislation, Senator Shelby has now pushed the un-democratic envelope further by taking the unprecedented step of blocking every single one of President Barack Obama’s presidential appointees until his personal needs and demands are met. And what noble principle or governing philosophy motivates the good Senator, prey tell? Read more »

While we’re on the subject of great men who’ve freed themselves of this mortal coil, let us not forget the great historian, Howard Zinn, who passed away yesterday, and whose A People’s History of the United States sought to bring to the fore the forgotten history of the vast mass of people upon whose backs our nation was built.

Though a historian by trade, Zinn had some parting words for us that applied directly to the here and now:

“I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.”

So roll up your sleeves, folks and help push this administration in the right direction. Let’s do it for Howard.

On the eve of what could become a crushing defeat for Democrats in Massachusetts (a defeat that just a few months ago seemed as inconceivable as Dennis Kucinich being elected Senator in Alabama) and just one short year into the Obama administration’s tenure, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman offers up a postmortem on the Democratic agenda that’s as sad as it is likely accurate. In essence, Krugman accuses the Administration of timidity, lack of conviction and a perplexing desire to eke out compromise with an opposition party whose utter intransigence is born less of ideological cause than of a simple desire to see the Democrats fail: Read more »