Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Finding joy where we can, and muddling through where we can’t.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

No one could have predicted…

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

You know he’s going to shit a cat.

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A Series Of Unfortunate Ads

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Here I was about to write a semi-long post about the Clinton campaign’s fourth-quarter full court press with no goalie, and then I see Tom Levenson wrote it first.

[B]roadly speaking, judging by the issues papers on her website, Clinton has maintained a fairly sophisticated approach to global warming and applied research, with the implication that the policies near and dear to scientists’ hearts — more money, and even more important, respect for the real knowledge developed within by scientific process, would flow under a Clinton presidency. What Clinton provided for public consumption may be boilerplate, but it has been good boilerplate.

But now, what she said at the Indiana interview this morning changes the game. She said, in effect, if the smart boys and girls don’t agree with her, then to hell with them.

That is, of course, precisely the anti-rational madness that has dominated the George Bush years. It is inimical to science or a scientific world view. If we are to pick and choose the facts we like, it is a very short step, quickly taken, to making them up. And that way lies an ever more rapid collapse of the American republic.

Do I have anything to add? Not really. Hillary seemed to be doing fine until the inevitability meme died, and then her campaign went a little crazy. It’s reached the point now where she doesn’t just sound like a Republican, she sounds like the intellectual dregs that the GOP tries to keep off of network TV. She sounds like David Horowitz. Are we really that far from Gastaxofascism Awareness Week? Her rhetoric offers up the same paranoid conviction that all of the experts on Earth are either wrong or out to get you.

Maybe Hillary knows that her populist message really is pap and nonsense, but then maybe Horowitz does too. They’re both either stupid enough to believe what they’re saying or enough morally stunted to lead masses down an intellectually poisonous path in return for some cheap attention.

I’ll still vote Democratic regardless of who wins this forever primary; Supreme Court appointments matter too much to consider anything else. That said, if Dems offer this kind of leadership in ’09 I promise the same party loyalty that John showed after Schiavo.

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We’ll File This Under “Heh”

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I found this particularly amusing:

Senator Hillary Clinton’s mailing attacking Senator Barack Obama’s record on guns appears to include a striking visual gaffe: The image of the gun pictured on the face of the mailing is reversed, making it a non-existent left-handed model of the Mauser 66 rifle.

To make matters worse, a prominent gun dealer said, it’s an expensive German gun with customized features that make it clearly European.

“The gun in the photo does not exist,” said Val Forgett III, the president of Navy Arms in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Forgett’s company was Mauser’s agent in the United States when the gun was released, and who sold Mauser guns here again in the 1990s. “The bolt is facing to the left side of the receiver, making it a left-handed bolt action rifle, indicating whoever constructed and approved the mailer did not recognize the image has been reversed.”

Forgett said the error would be obvious to sportsmen.

“I find it laughable on its face,” he said. “It’s like a picture of Babe Ruth hitting right-handed.”

***

“It’s a $2,200 German import – it’s hardly typical of what the average workingman in Indiana uses,” he said.

In defense of the Clinton campaign, they probably had just knocked back some boilermakers at the bowling alley after a long day in the mill or at the mine, and this is the kind of mistake you can make after a few beers and shots of whiskey and a tough day of hard labor.

The best thing about this is going to be reading the pro-Hillary websites explain this away and that the point remains about Hillary’s long tradition of pro-gun support. Hell, only an ELITIST would even notice something like this anyway, AMIRITE? Not to mention, we all know what Hillary thinks of experts, so why would she care what gun experts think, anyway? She is ready on day one, and she is a fighter, and that is all that really matters! Facts are for pansies!

I am now going to offer some unsolicited advice to the smartest woman in America and her joke of a campaign- stop trying to out-Republican the Republicans. They are better at it than you are, as they are actually Republicans.

*** Update ***

One other question- why did the smartest woman in America decide to throw away four decades of Democratic street-cred to run as a Republican-lite in the year that a Republican President is polling just above the crazification factor?

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Open Thread

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Take a break from the battlegrounds for 5 minutes and laugh, Mr. Cole:

And on a different topic, one that relates (however tangenitally) to polical bloggers, Buzz Bissinger (author of Friday Night Lights, a superb book) lost his mind on Costas Live last week in a panel with Will Leitch, founder of Deadspin.com. Bissinger reminds me most of Willie Loman, it’s sad and repulsive all at once.

Opinion columnists and investigative journalism will never die. Without them, there would be no blogosphere at all. The newspaper medium is wasting away. Bissinger’s maudlin musings do not change the simple truth.

My favorite sum up of the dustup comes vie Fire Joe Morgan, in an excellent evisceration, my favorite line is this:

Picking a random blog comment and wielding it as a club to bash “blogs” is like picking a random romance novel off an airport bookstore shelf and saying, “This book sucks. Fuck you, Tolstoy — your medium is worthless!”

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Tom Friedman is Shrill

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I don’t know what happened to Friedman on his break, but it was a good thing. He is now shrill:

Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is “toughening up” Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”

But with Hillary, Tom, you get someone who has been lied about for two decades and who is tough enough to lie about her opponents and lie to the American people. Isn’t that what America really wants and needs? And, you know, her baggage has been fully vetted.

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Thank You, Tim Noah

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A brief moment of sanity from the press:

Here’s a rule I would like every political reporter, campaign official, TV talking head, and politician in the United States to follow. Go ahead and say, if you like, that Hillary Clinton retains a serious chance of winning the Democratic nomination. If you say this, however, you must describe a set of circumstances whereby this could happen. Try not to make it sound like a fairy tale.

Read the whole things. Apparently there is a Joan Walsh piece floating around in which she states that the media was, at the beginning of the campaign, totally in the bag for Obama. I don’t think there is any denying that Obama received exceedlingly friendly coverage at the start of the campaign. However, if the past two months of endless loops of Rev. Wright and Hillary basically saying anything with no one questioning her bullshit has you still thinking that they are all in the bag, I don’t know what to say.

You know what I would pay to see- the next time Clinton starts yapping about the bullshit gas tax holiday, I would pay a reporter to ask her these questions:

“Where is the bill? When did you write it? What are the details? How much will it cost? When did you submit it to the Senate? When do you think it will be considered? Will it get passed?”


Hillary Clinton, Blue Collar Icon

Talk about a free ride- Hillary’s say anything tour the past few weeks has been nothing but a free ride, because even though there really is no realistic way for her to win, the press loves a horse race. Otherwise we would all be laughing at the Wellesley educated lawyer in this picture pretending to blue collar her way to another bowling alley, where she can knock back another whiskey and bitch with the patrons about the price of gas. I am half surprised she doesn’t have her aides calling her Norma Rae.

*** Update ***

Shameless:

Hillary Clinton has just started doing an Indiana town-hall meeting being broadcast on ABC, and George Stephanopoulos asked her a direct question:

Could she name a single economist who agrees with her support for the gas tax holiday?

Hillary sidestepped the question, and tried to use the complete dearth of expert support for the idea to her advantage, pointing to it as proof that she’s on the side of ordinary folks against “elite opinion” — a phrase she used twice.

“I think we’ve been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion behind policies that haven’t worked well for hard working Americans,” she said.

A bit later she added: “It’s really odd to me that arguing to give relief to a vast majority of Americans creates this incredible pushback…Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that don’t benefit” the vast majority of the American people.

So after she loses, how long before she pulls a full Lieberman and decides to get away from al lthe elitists on her side of the aisle?

*** Update ***

More collateral damage. Hillary has driven Steve Benen to madness.

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Random Thoughts

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A bunch of random thoughts that don’t merit their own post:

1.) Ax Men on the History channel sucks. It may not be quite as bad as Ice Road Truckers, but it is bad, nonetheless.

2.) The Deadliest Catch and How Its Made, however, are both awesome.

3.) Two birds flew into my living room window one after the other, fell to the ground stunned, and flew off a minute later. If they were human, they would have been raced to the hospital and I would probably get sued.

4.) It is impossible to drink regular soda after being acclimated to diet soda. Of the diet sodas, the best are diet 7-Up, Diet Sunkist Orange, and Diet Rite Black Cherry. The worst is diet ginger ale. Diet Dr. Pepper isn’t half bad.

5.) I generally hate throw-away stuff like this, but the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser is, in fact, magic. I don’t know if I can clean my shower any other way anymore. And with Febreze, even. OMG.

6.) Mrs. John Conyers is not very bright, has an ethical compass that trails behind 8th graders, and probably wishes this video had never been made.

7.) It is going on 30 years, but Stripes is still pretty damned funny. For some reason, one of my favorite parts is when John Candy looks at John laroquette and says “How’s it going, Eisenhower?” Such a breach of military etiquette.

8.) Canned asparagus is horrible.

9.) Tina Fey is much, much funnier than Amy Poehler. It isn’t even close. Tina Fey is also one of the best looking women in television.

10.) Railroad Tycoon II- Platinum may be the perfect video game. Or maybe Civilization III.

11.) One of my all-time favorite characters in a movie is John Lithgow playing Roberta Muldoon in the World According to Garp.

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