Now that the primaries have actually begun and the sham contest featuring all those Republican ass-clowns that has filled the media for the last five months is coming to an end with the less-than-surprise result that Mitt Romney is going to be the nominee, it’s probably a good time to point out to you exactly WHO is behind The Mittster.

OpenSecrets.org has been keeping track of who has been putting up the cash for all the candidates, so let’s just see who Romney’s main contributors are:

Yep. Seven of the top ten are Wall Street financial firms or major banks, with good ol’ Goldman Sachs right at the top, and several more in the next ten.

For comparison, here’s the same Top 20 list for Barack Obama:

Not much Wall Street by comparison. Goldman Sachs is way down on the list, and the only financial firm in the top ten is Chicago-based Chopper Trading. Which is not to say that Obama isn’t seeing plenty of money from big corporations, because that’s mostly who’s filling up the rest of that list — all those law firms are lobbyists who represent nothing but big corporations.

So there’s your choice, America: the candidate who represents Wall Street versus the candidate who represents Big Corporations. It’s a long way to November, but it really doesn’t even matter who you choose, because nobody represents you or me.

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, PROOF that Newt Gingrich is DESTINED to be the next President of the United States: a 1996 photo of then-Speaker of the House Gingrich receiving blessings from a space alien, while then-Senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole looks on with chagrin. As we all know, Bob Dole lost convincingly to Bill Clinton that year, and Clinton had also received the stamp of approval from our Alien Overlords:

In fact, that Space Alien has picked EVERY winning presidential candidate since 1980:

So, OBVIOUSLY, when he met with Gingrich and NOT Dole in 1996, he was telling Gingrich to be patient and wait his turn! WAKE UP SHEEPLE! THE FIX IS IN!

And did you know that Barack Obama was a teenage time traveler for the government back in the 1980s and teleported to Mars? IT’S ON THE INTERNET SO IT’S TRUE!

2. Dear American college students: you were only 10 years old when 9/11 happened. I realize there usually aren’t any good parties on a Sunday night, but please stop with the debauchery as if your school just won the NCAA tournament. According to Yahoo, most of you don’t even really know who Osama is (well, was).

3. Dear every other American who has behaved like the aforementioned college students over this news: remember how pissed off you were about the Palestinians cheering in the streets on 9/11? That’s you. Shut the fuck up, take a minute to soberly remember the dead — not just the 3,000 Americans but the tens of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been sacrificed for our moment of revenge — and hope that Bin Laden’s death really DOES mean something more than an excuse for you to behave like gorillas in heat.

4. Dear Asif Ali Zardari: you are the biggest lying piece of shit in the world. You make George W. Bush look good in comparison if you really expect a single person anywhere to believe the assertion that the Pakistani government did not know that Bin Laden was living next door to a military base FOR SIX YEARS. The American government has far too long put up with the charade that Pakistan isn’t the actual driving force behind the Taliban and Al Quaeda, and maybe with Bin Laden out of the way there will be little reason to pretend much longer.

5. Dear Barack Obama: at what point do you stop being a pale imitation of George W. Bush? Is this that moment? Now that you’ve actually trumped Bush (see what I did there?) at the one thing he couldn’t claim as “Mission Accomplished”, is it even remotely possible to step away from a decade of war, the crumbling edifice of civil liberties, the encroachment of a police state, the fear-mongering, the jingoism? Please? PLEASE!?!?! I know that this country will never again be the same, but you gave up so quickly and so thoroughly and almost gratefully accepted the mantle of despot that Bush left behind. You seem like such a smart man that I have a hard time understanding what political calculus you’ve gone through that made it seem okay to you to carry on the same way things had been going for the eight years prior. It’s not okay. You can have as much credit as you want for being the guy who gave the order to pull the trigger on that sonofabitch, but you also get to own all the blame for the trillion dollars wasted to accomplish that, the lives lost or ruined, and the legacy of a greatly diminished nation. If you really think it was worth all that, maybe you’re not as smart as you look. I shudder to think that maybe Donald Trump is right about you.

Large Hadron Collider scientists finding the “God Particle” — not so much

iPhone tracks your every single movement and rats you out to the Feds — sort of, but not really, and Steverino swears they’ve got a patch for that

Barack Obama releases birth certificate, proving he was born in Hawaii — still a no-good sekrit Muslin nigra according to almost 25% of the entire population of the U.S.

Is it me, or has Obama completely given up any pretense whatsoever of being anything but a total do-over of George W. Bush? Despite the Charlie Sheen-like ranting of the right-wingers, the guy is a total neo-con meat puppet, and the military intervention in Libya is merely the latest nail in the coffin of his “hope-y, change-y” charade.

Dissent Magazine co-editor Michael Walzer’s critique has earned a lot of attention, though it just sort of hits the highlights: no clear purpose, no defined “endgame”, lots of dissenting response from other Arab countries as well as Russia and Germany. This post at The Awl from American Conservative editor Michael Brendan Dougherty brings a few more points to the table, not the least of which is that the domestic political opposition comes from both sides of the spectrum. My hero Dennis Kucinich is actually thumping the table for impeachment. The only people really happy with this are, you guessed it, the neocons.

Keith Olbermann, who has been off the radar for a couple of months since getting the boot from MSNBC, even took this opportunity to return from his exile with his new blog, cheekily named FOK News Channel (FOK supposedly short for “Friends Of Keith”), to lambaste George W. Obama:

Chris Weigant has a piece at the Huffington Post that looks at the three basic outcome scenarios and what each one might have in store both in terms of domestic political fallout and on-the-ground changes in Libya. And Michael Moore turns his soapbox over to guest-poster Medea Benjamin, who would like to point out that part of the problem with Libya in the first place is that up until a couple of weeks ago the U.S. and its allies were lavishing Gaddafi with all sorts of weapons — a policy maneuver from the Bush Administration that the Obama Administration was all too happy to continue.

The irony of all of this starting on the 8th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War is, quite frankly, almost too much to stand.

Compromising on extending the Bush-era tax cuts.

Compromising on health care reform

Steering the Democratic Party through tough times

Facing down his toughest opponent every single morning

Today’s post is about Franklin Roosevelt and his beloved dog, Fala. Apparently, everybody in the White House loved the little Scottie and so many people gave him treats and scraps that it wasn’t too long before the dog developed intestinal problems. Roosevelt subsequently gave orders to White House staff that only he was to feed the dog.

But the intrigue to this post is how the Republicans made up total bullshit about Roosevelt and the dog. They claimed that FDR had accidentally left Fala behind on a trip to Alaska and dispatched a U.S. Navy destroyer to Alaska to retrieve the dog at a cost to the taxpayers of $20 million, during the middle of the war, no less.

Sixty-six years and a few extra zeros later, and the Republicans are STILL making up lies whenever it suits them. The difference is that in 1944, Roosevelt was able to turn it around and nail the Republicans with his famous “Fala Speech”:

If you watch that entire film clip (the part about Fala is near the end), you’ll also hear FDR chastise Republicans for trying to disenfranchise the average voter in favor of the millionaires and corporations that even then were the Republican “base”. He also speaks out about Republican efforts to blame the Great Depression on the Democrats. Some things just never change, I guess.

Needless to say, Maher has caught some flack for using “The N Word”, but not a ton, since no less than Queen Sarah herself was so vocal in defending Dr. Laura Schlesinger a few weeks ago. Seems context really IS everything, eh?

Not in the clip, but quoted elsewhere is this remark from Maher about overstating American greatness:

I am not like Mitt Romney, whose book is called ‘No Apology, The Case For American Greatness,’ Really? You know always waving the big foam number one finger. We’re not number one in most things. We’re number one in military, we’re number one in money, we’re number one in fat toddlers, meth labs, and people we send to prison. We’re not number one in literacy, money spent on education, we’re not even number one in social mobility. Social mobility means basically the American dream, the ability of one generation to do better than the next. We’re tenth. That’s like Sweden coming in tenth in Swedish meatballs.

Mmm, Swedish meatballs…

Earlier this year, when the health care reform bill finally made it through Congress, Representative Patrick Kennedy left this little card at the gravesite of his father, Senator Ted Kennedy. The card reads “Dad — The Unfinished Business is done”. Universal health care was the grand cause of the last thirty years of Ted Kennedy’s career, and his death at this time last year came just as the final battle for passage was beginning.

Charlie Pierce (or Charles P. Pierce, as he is usually styled in print), who writes mainly for the Boston Globe, wrote this blog post for Esquire magazine on the anniversary of Ted Kennedy’s death, asking a very real and very important question: who exactly will step up to the plate and be the voice of liberal conscience in the enormous void left by Kennedy’s death? A pullquote:

The former could be replaced, and has been, most notably by a president whose official crest ought to be half-a-loaf of bread, and who now finds himself battling the forces not only of an intractable political opposition, but also the undeniable power of clear and uncompromising public bullshit. It is the latter Teddy that this president needed the most but, looking around at his putative allies within his own party, and assuming that the president is unwilling or unable to do it himself, there was nobody willing or able to step into the role. While it was unquestionably surprising that Kennedy was replaced in the Senate by a stealth Republican named Scott Brown, it is altogether shocking that he has yet to be replaced within his own party by someone willing to be the obstreperous lefty voice to counter an increasingly shrill and increasingly manic Republican Right.

There is an enormous amount of unfinished business to be accomplished, and yet once again the noise machine of the right has brought everything to a (literally) screeching halt over building a “mosque” (or, what Pierce equally mischaracterizes as a “culinary school”; it is neither) two blocks away from the World Trade Center, and STILL not one progressive leader can find a spine or a set of testicles to put the howler monkeys in their place and get refocused on problems far more likely to sink us all than the opening of a cultural center. The vacuum of leadership in this country is palpable, and with each passing day the lack of a strong countervalent force to undo the machinations of the right draws us to a point of no return into chaos. I don’t think that the presence of Ted Kennedy would be the only thing forestalling that, but clearly the role he played was critical and can’t go unfilled much longer. I just wish I had the slightest idea who might do that.

(tip o’ the hat to blog-buddy Steve for clueing me in on the Pierce post)