What an unbelievable asshole

As if people don't have enough to be pissed off at Ed Rendell about lately, he goes and says the dumbest shit on Earth last Friday.

Even though the clock is ticking for Pennsylvania's 77,000 state workers - their next two paychecks are going to be partial, after which paychecks will be withheld - Rendell still thinks that he's the good guy here.

"Most of those state workers -- I've arranged for them to get a $15,000 loan with no interest, so if they're paying off $6,000 worth of credit debt at 14 percent, they should put a statue of me up on their mantel place," Rendell said.

Yeah, good idea Eddie. They should commemorate you for squandering their salaries and then forcing them to take out a loan in which they will be paying a low interest rate on. A loan, not a paycheck, a loan that has to be paid back. That makes a lot of fucking sense.

**UPDATE**
Apparently Ed also forgot that some of the fine folks that work for the state might not qualify for said loans. Brilliant!

How do you correlate an unrelated crisis to the nation of Iraq?

Simple; waterboard a few detainees until they're "compliant." It worked for Cheney back in 2003.

Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.

At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.

"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."

Al-Libi's claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. It also was part of Powell's February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war, a speech Powell has called a "blot" on his record.

According to CNN, the main purpose of "modifed" interrogation techniques at the beginning of the Bush Administration was to identify a smoking gun linking Iraq to Al-Quaida, and thus the 9/11 attacks. Which makes a lot of sense, actually.

"This is my opinion," Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general's office. "Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

So next time you're frustrated with your Google search for not finding that Rihanna pic that's been floating around, waterboard your computer. It'll eventually break down and surrender the information to you. Or you will get electrocuted.

Will someone please prosecute these motherfuckers so we can get on with our lives?