Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

75% of people clapping liked the show!

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Giving up is unforgivable.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

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Archives for 2008

Great Moments in the “New Professionalism”

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Via Crooks and Liars, more appalling police abuses for the law and order tase at will crowd to excuse:

It will be fun reading all of the excuses- “But she gave them her sister’s ID!” and “They have to keep people naked in jail so they cant hurt themselves!” and “They were just following procedures- you don’t know how tough it is to be a cop!”

Things are out of control when people can do things like this and think they are doing “the right thing.” Check their faces- an odd sort of professionalism, going through the motions pinning this defenseless woman to the ground and essentially raping her, and no one stops to think it is inappropriate for men to be in the room (not to mention against clear procedures). No one asks “why are we doing this?” No one asks “Why is this woman here” (she was the one who called for help- I bet she will not make that mistake again). No one asks why she needed to sit for hours naked, humiliated, hysterical, and alone in a cell for anyone to walk by and gawk at her in a completely vulnerable state. No one thought to give her a blanket or talk to her as she was covering herself in toilet paper to keep warm.

What is wrong with our system? What is wrong with the police that it is not a radical belief for me to think “I should probably cross the street, there is a cop walking down this side.”

Things have got to change. The police have a bad rep, and every day, they go out and earn that bad rep.

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Who Knew You Could Make An Internet Out Of Straw?

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I have experience in enough fields (evolution, genetics, climate) to know that when a reporter writes about more or less anything other than reporting he will inevitably get some important things wrong. Learning the business of journalism is hard enough without also having to memorize economics, statistics, genetics, evolutionary biology and the fine details of the Thai textile business. Beat reporters eventually pick up fundamentals through experience and long contact with people who do know things, but more often reporting is a business of passing information from non-specialist writers to readers who know even less.

When blogging comes up the problem usually usually goes from bad to weird. Reporters and bloggers, especially leftwing bloggers, have a certain cat-and-dog relationship (the deal with rightwing bloggers often seems like something more like codependence) so it can be hard to distinguish lack of knowledge and personal agenda. Joe Lieberman, for example, brought out the worst in them. Via Thers, here’s your example of the day:

But notwithstanding this stunning success, this week’s withdrawal by John Edwards, coming a week after the departure of Dennis Kucinich, means that both of the preferred presidential candidates of the liberal blogosphere are now out of the race.

Which liberal blogospere supported Kucinich? Kos and most of the Kossacks despised him. The rest of us mostly dismissed him as a quirky nonentity. If the nomination race was a movie Kucinich would be Steve Buscemi.

It gets easier to connect dots into a handy trendline when you get to make some of them up.

As to the larger point, arguing against the influence of the liberal blogosphere by now is so much pissing in the wind. The liberal blogosphere has been crucial to everything from killing Social Security privatization and kicking Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic party to ’06 netroots candidates like Jon Tester and Jim Webb. We haven’t won yet on telcom immunity but the issue wouldn’t even be an issue anymore if the liberal netroots hadn’t given Chris Dodd the support he needed. There is no question that blogosphere left has dragged the Democratic leadership in all kinds of directions that it clearly didn’t want to go.

It isn’t out of weakness. As a party we’re winning, and unless bin Laden knocks both coasts into the sea along with most of the mountain west the massacre in November will be almost painful to watch*. The Democratic leadership is listening to us because they have to. They hate it, especially Harry Reid, but they don’t have much choice.

For a fun time consider how the article would read if you swapped in ‘left’ for ‘right.’ How did the rightroots candidates do this cycle? Depending on the rightwing blog you have Rudy Giuliani, at $50 million for one delegate the most embarrassing failure in presidential politics history. Mitt Romney, still hanging on by the skin of his vast fortune. Fred Thompson, saviour, slept through the race and pulled out by email. Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul all had significant backing from different constituencies on the right. Lumped together they had traction like a Yugo on ice.

The rightroots obviously didn’t just fail to influence the presidential election. They have collectively failed to make any meaningful impact on Republican politics at all. I can’t think of a single major issue where they forced the GOP to move its agenda towards something that the leadership didn’t want to do anyway. But hell, don’t listen me. Let’s hear what TownHall has to say.

Even some conservative bloggers object to the new blog activism.

“If you look at the top tier of right-wing bloggers, they’re almost unfailingly civil,” wrote Dean Barnett for the opinion Web site Townhall.com.

He charged that Erickson was trying to turn right-wing Web sites into “the kingmakers that the left-wing blogs are.”

That word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Anyhow, kudos to Ron Klain for writing an insightful article with only a few words misplaced.

***

(*) No it won’t. It will be fucking hilarious, and I hereby promise to get roaring drunk and liveblog it.

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Sunday Open Thread

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Apparently there is a football game today. I might be heading off to a party myself, but have had the flu since Wednesday and may sit it out so that I do not infect everyone.

Besides, who really cares about the pats and the Giants anyway?

*** Update **

How come programming like CBS Sunday Morning is not good enough that there is something like it at night during primetime? Am I really now that old and uncool that my tastes are radically out of the mainstream?

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Phony People and Their Fake Issues

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In case you missed it, three morons chained themselves to the Marine Corps recruiting station in Berkeley, and our liberal media and the liberals in the blogosphere are silent in the face of this grave threat to our nation:

The demonstrators promptly said they will keep protesting outside the recruiting station at 64 Shattuck Square until the Marines leave Berkeley – which is what the City Council advised the service to do in a vote Tuesday night that called the Marines “unwelcome intruders.”

The council also voted to allow members of Code Pink, the protest group that helped organize Friday’s blockade, to park at a designated space in front of the recruiting office every Wednesday afternoon and operate a loudspeaker.

The council’s action apparently made Berkeley the first city in the nation to call for the ouster of a military recruiting station from its borders.

“We made really great statements by blocking the door,” said one of the three blockaders, 64-year-old Mary Ann Thomas of Oakland. “It’s time we became more articulate about what we’re doing.”

Fortunately, conservative bloggers and Sen. Jim DeMint are springing to the aid of the downtrodden Marines:

Conservative bloggers and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., also believe more articulation is necessary – from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

DeMint began drafting legislation Friday to cut $2.1 million in federal funding to Berkeley in a current congressional budget bill and transfer the money to the Marine Corps. The funding would include $750,000 for prospective ferry service, $87,000 for the Berkeley Unified School District nutrition education fund and $243,000 for the Chez Panisse Foundation, which promotes nutritional awareness in school lunch programs.

“The First Amendment gives the city of Berkeley the right to be idiotic, but from now on they should do it with their own money,” DeMint said in a statement.

He called the council’s vote “a slap in the face to all brave servicemen and women and their families.”

Conservative blogs blasted the council and Berkeley in general all day with comments such as one on “Gathering of Eagles”: “These cretins disgust me.”

It is always heartening to watch our right-wing friends stick up for the little guy- the USMC and the federal government. Without their help, these three old people chained to the door of a recruiting station might get us all killed by Islamofascists.

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“Appalling Gap”

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Your daily piece of evidence that Bush is the worst President ever and has completely decimated the military with his adventurism:

The U.S. military is not prepared to meet catastrophic threats at home, and it is suffering from an “appalling gap” in forces able to respond to chemical, biological and nuclear strikes on U.S. soil, according to a congressional commission report released yesterday.

The situation is rooted in severe readiness problems in National Guard and reserve forces, which would otherwise be well-suited to respond to domestic crises but lack sufficient personnel and training, as well as $48 billion in equipment because of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report by the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.

Stupid Dhimmocrats! That is why we are fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here!

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