Karl Rove arms the next death star.
Hey! Maybe he did have something to do with the Swift Boat Liars. (Ya think?)
This man is strictly about manufacturing the consent of the governed. Offering a choice to be made rationally? Why would he choose in advance to lose?
The White House is doing its level best to make sure that everyone has seen the bikini chart:
Now the next spin point is out: If job creation continues at the same rate for the rest of 2010, Barack Obama will have presided over the creation of more jobs in this year alone that Duhbya did in his entire eight-year maladministration.
Unlike Republican spin points and cherry-picking, this one comes with explicit caveats to help readers understand it fully. Whether the trend continues is one, and the future is always speculative. Another is the huge job loss that continued from the Bush recession throughout 2009, when Obama was in office and the best you could say was that job losses were slowing.
More important, we can't forget the sheer size of the need for jobs, left from the Bush disaster, which was relatively jobless even in its best times, and from Obama's first year in office.
Employment is better, that's true. But we have a long way to go before it's good.
Long-lived institutions have a choice: adapt or die.
The path of rigidity - the conservative path - can work well, sometimes for quite a while, especially if the institution is willing to change by small degrees. But the path of absolute rigidity - saying no to everything, for instance - is the path of senesence and death. Just ask the Shakers, and they were only rigid about a few things.
The Catholic Church right now is in an existential crisis. With a billion adherents, the church might seem safe from doom. After all, it has survived previous crises - non-sexual child abuse in its schools and orphanages, acquiescence to fascism, the commonplace selling of absolution, the Inquisition, to name a few - that would have killed a less persistent, poorer, or less canny institution. Of course it doesn't hurt that the church claims every Sunday to have god on its side.
But buggering children and criminally covering it up practically everywhere is a different matter. It impeaches every claim to divinity or infallibility. And that billion already includes many who are one generation more away from merely having Catholic ancestors.
Even now, there are Catholics, both lay and priest, who apparently believe that the anti-gay passages of their bible are some of its most important. These doctrinaire Catholics still react to the idea of admitting to parochial school a child of a lesbian couple with statements like this:
“The real question here is why two people who radically repudiate the moral teachings of Catholicism would want their child educated in a Catholic school,’’ [C.J. Doyle, executive director of Catholic Action League of Massachusetts,] said in a statement.
“It would seem that they are either looking for an excuse to litigate or an opportunity to embarrass the church in the court of public opinion.’’
“But,’’ he said, “I am disappointed that . . . this faith that I love seems to find new ways to shoot itself in the foot.’’Despite the willingness of some parishoners and priests to adapt, it's an open question whether the church hierarchy can change fast enough to retain its believers. How they've done it so far is beyond me.
Given the choice between pumping up a continuing narrative or writing a one-off but accurate story, which will big media do? The Globe today buried the content of an actual lead paragraph of the State Senate special election story:
The results in the two races won’t alter the makeup of the state Senate, since a Democrat succeeded a Democrat and a Republican followed a Republican. Nonetheless, coupled with Brown’s stunning victory in the US Senate race this year, the Massachusetts Republican Party immediately seized on Ross’s victory as a harbinger of more wins in the fall.Even this spins the Republican way. The second sentence could as easily have been, "Nonetheless, we'll tell you that this tie is good news for Republicans, when they didn't even have a second candidate to compete for a sweep." (And for fellow grammarians out there - not including the Globe staff who missed it - the mere thought of Mass Republicans coupled with anything stunning means that a modifier is dangling, at least!)
Giving the state GOP another boost as November elections approach, state Representative Richard Ross, a Wrentham Republican, last night won the state Senate seat recently vacated by US Senator Scott Brown.The race the Democrat won? Repeatedly referred to as "the other race".
Is it really "trending" news that Sen. Jame Inhofe (R-wingnuttiest) opposes Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court? Ho hum.
If he stopped mid-tantrum, admitted that he was tired of advocating for a return to the dark ages, ripped the mike off his lapel, and walked away from the cameras, now that would be news I could use!
Montana reactionaries firebomb a couple of marijuana dispensaries. Yeah, Montana has medical marijuana! Who knew?
No one was hurt, like an ELF political arson. When ELF burns down a real estate development to make a political statement, the right-wing goes even more hysterical than usual.
I wonder (only rhetorically) whether they'll piss their pants over this similar piece of political terror.
Of course not. Consistency is not something the wingnuts even recognize could guide their behavior.
A compendium of Republican radicals...
A sample:
[Minnesota State Senator Tom Emmer, the Republicans' choice to succeed Governor Tim Pawlenty,] has even proposed a state constitutional amendment that would allow federal laws to operate in Minnesota only if they were consented to by super-majorities of the state legislature.The Republican solution to the fact that the American Constitutional republic is not going their radical way: Quang Tri it.
They couldn't throw any more tantrums than the Republican Party:
"Even if it's a nominee that we can't seriously stop, we can accomplish several things, and so a hard fight is worthwhile," [Curt Levey, director of the conservative Committee for Justice,] implored. "Certainly it can be to the political advantage of Republicans.... There's everything to be gained from making the Supreme Court vacancy a campaign issue in 2010."
"There's broader goals such as just distracting Obama from other items on his agenda," Levey added. "The tougher the fight the less capital and time and resources and floor time in the Senate there is to spend on immigration and climate change, etc."
Elections have consequences - where have I heard that?
(h/t mcjoan at Kos)
After nearly three years, I was ready for a new look. There may be further changes to come.
What do you think?
If you for some odd reason still need to see more of a certain common type of conservative stupidity heavily leavened with hypocrisy, you can seldom go wrong with the flagrantly doctrinaire and unfunny cartoons of Chuck Asay. Here is today's.
In one cartoon, Asay - his head firmly in place in BP's ass - tries all of the following:
Under UCMJ, desertion carries the death penalty. But reduction in rank and 25 years in the stockade ought to be enough.
By the way, even though it's clear that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, I would assert that he is a natural born citizen no matter where he was born because his mother was a citizen at the time of his birth. And there's no explication of the phrase nor any case law to contradict me.
Amusing and instructive when other countries also have trouble sorting out just exactly how they prefer to manufacture the consent of the governed...
Best to remember that there are many different ways to build a democratic election. Here in the US, picking a different way to decide winners decidely takes a back seat to the need to fix our ability to count votes honestly, transparently, and accurately.
More proof, if any were needed, that Wall Street doesn't know your ass from a hole in the ground.
[M]addeningly, the cause or causes of the market’s wild swing remained elusive, leaving what amounts to a $1 trillion question mark hanging over the world’s largest, and most celebrated, stock market.These are the people we've left without adult supervision, despite the fact that they might at any moment hoist our living economy up on the mortuary table and drain its blood out in preparation for embalming.
Someone's holding a gun lobby to Lindsey Graham's head. Graham (R-you thought he could be both from South Carolina and sane? Ha) sacrifices this burnt offering on the altar of the NRA:
“I think you’re going too far here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. He was speaking in opposition to a bill that would keep people on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list from buying guns and explosives.This is a guy who thinks he can't get any more heterodox on any topic, and his model for orthodox is Jim DeMint (R-teabaggers' first Presidential candidate). Graham keeps going:
[He] pointed out, “when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution, they didn’t consider flying.”Though of course the founders did all keep their budget Chinese AKs over the fireplace, and their superiority over ancient British musket meant they didn't need to venture up to Saratoga except to bet on the ponies. Yorktown was just some movie-maker's wet dream. The whole revolution was done in a couple of months - to account for the awful transportation infrastructure of the time, though I'd bet they in fact were wishing they could fly even then.
“I am all into national security. ... I want to stop reading these guys their Miranda rights,” he said.
This week, the Supreme Court closed its front door. Over the door is engraved in Vermont marble one of the fundamental aspirations of America, EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.
The court took this step because it fears terror. Never mind the symbolism.
This week, evidence led to the arrest of a Pakistani, naturalized to be an American citizen, for what was, by all appearances, his plot to blow up Times Square. Front door, back door, side door, it didn't matter to him.
But he understood how attacking a symbol instills fear, the strategic purpose of the tactic of terror attacks.
Republicans, true to form, think that this alleged citizen terrorist, arrested for a crime on American soil, should not have been read his Miranda rights, as our law demands. Instead, they want to exploit the fear of Americans to score the cheapest political points. Never mind that the feds used a public safety exception to Miranda initially to interrogate the suspect.
Republicans in Washington - and a substantial proportion of their voters - do not believe in law. They believe in summary vigilantism. They are dismayed that the defendant has apparently confessed and is cooperating. They were eager to flay the Obama administration for not torturing this man, but now they're all dressed up in leather like a sadist with nowhere to go but home to the missus.
The Republicans are happy to risk the validity of the suspect's confession, happy to let him off the hook under our law. That would give them more political wedge issues to divide the country. Perfect!
It's scary that one of the major political parties in the United States couldn't give the slightest crap about the legal foundation of our country. They are in fact not the literal definition of conservatives. They are radicals. Their promise is coup d'etat in slow motion.
And yet they're not a marginal splinter group. They're the second largest political grouping in America.
... but this man has professional pride.
Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.
