Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

“Let’s not pretend [Trump] wants to engage in high-minded discourse.”

Chutkan laughs. Lauro sits back down.

Please don’t feed the bears.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Donald Trump, welcome to your everything, everywhere, all at once.

There is one struggling party in US right now, and it’s not the Democrats.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

People are weird.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

We’re not going back!

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Everybody saw this coming.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

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Archives for January 2009

Great Moments In Headline Writing

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This Howard Kurtz piece takes the cake:

Kristol Severs Ties With the N.Y. Times

Bill Kristol was fired. Let go. Canned. He severed his ties to the Times in much the same way that a barnacle severs its ties with a ship when it is scraped off and tossed into the rancid muck.

I suppose the WaPo editors have to spin his FIRING FROM THE NY TIMES positively, since they have decided to give him a shot.

*** Update ***

An idea from the comments: what if the Washington Post editors wrote the headline to this story:

It might look like this:

Tens of Thousands of Workers Sever Their Ties With Their Employers

By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: January 26, 2009

After years of employment, tens of thousands of workers are exploring other options, as they have chosen to sever their relationship with their employers.

*** Update ***

Apparently TBOGG and I are having some sort of freakish mind-meld. There are no unique thoughts on the internet.

Discuss.

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Fundamentally Incapable of Telling the Truth

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While DougJ taunted the Strike Farce again last night, he missed out on something- even in their email calling Tim Geithner, the editors at Red State are lying:

Yesterday, Tim Geithner lied to the Senate Finance Committee telling them that the tax program Turbo Tax was to blame for his failure to pay taxes.

Did he? Did he really blame Turbo Tax?

No:

GRASSLEY: Did you use software to prepare your 2001 and 2002 tax returns?

GEITHNER: I did.

GRASSLEY: You did not?

GEITHNER: I did.

GRASSLEY: Oh, you did, OK. Which brand did you use?

GEITHNER: I’m going to — I’ll answer that question, sir, but I want to say these are my responsibility, not the tax software responsibility.

GRASSLEY: OK.

GEITHNER: But I use TurboTax to prepare my returns.

GRASSLEY: Did the software prompt you to report income and pay self-employment taxes on your IMF income?

GEITHNER: Not to my recollection, Senator.

GRASSLEY: If yes — well, “not to your recollection.” Well, I thank you for answering those questions.

Not only did he not blame Turbo Tax for his mistakes, but he went out of his way to not blame them. As always, when dealing with Republicans, up is down, black is white. Can Republicans and movement conservatives tell the truth about ANYTHING?

And this is where we are now- I don’t know if Geithner was the best choice for Treasury. I don’t know if the stimulus bill is the right approach to our economic crisis. I don’t know the answers to a lot of the questions out there, but right now my options are to go with the Republicans, the folks who got us into this mess and who seem incapable of uttering a sentence without a bold untruth, and the Democrats.

It really isn’t a close call.

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Tradition, discipline, and rules

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Like many of you, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the financial crisis. But I was never able to ascertain how much of it was caused by rising rates of defaults, how much was caused by the complicated credit default swap market, and how much the securitization of mortgages may have helped lead to more defaults.

But after reading David Brooks, I’ve learned that it’s all a lot simpler than I thought:

Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction.

There’s all kinds of problems with this. First, it’s not clear what “used to” means here since it certainly doesn’t apply to the 1920s. Second, a persuasive case can be made that the end of “banker’s code” was caused not by a desire for “liberation” but by the fact that banks that had been privately held became public companies, which meant the bankers were now playing with other people’s money, not their own.

Brooks’s claim is that everything was better when people just shut up and did as they were told. Not surprisingly, his prime example of someone who’s done well by shutting up and doing as he’s told is a millionaire, former Cubs second-baseman Ryne Sandberg.

This is an argument that we often see from Villagers, whether it’s Tim Russert’s reverence for his father’s unthinking ways or Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation shtick or Howard Kurtz’s hagiography about Brian Williams and his regular guy ways. More often than not, of course, the rule-followers raise millionaire children or are themselves millionaires.

I’ve often wondered why pundits feel such a need to tell us that things would be better if we all just stopped asking questions. They must know that the public hears it all the time already, with or without their new columns on the subject.

I think the reason is this: our pundit is class is populated by wholly amoral people, most of them multi-millionaires, who got where they are, not by hard work or talent or accomplishment, but by following a certain set of rules that no thinking, decent person could accept.

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Another victory for the Red State Strike Force

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This came in last week:

XXXX:

Call your Senator right now at 202-224-3121 and tell him to oppose Tim Geithner for Treasury Secretary.

Yesterday, Tim Geithner lied to the Senate Finance Committee telling them that the tax program Turbo Tax was to blame for his failure to pay taxes. Prior to that time, Geithner said he simply forgot. At the time he failed to pay his taxes, Geithner signed a statement saying that he would pay his taxes.

If Tim Geithner cannot be honest with the United States Senate with his money, how can he be honest with our money?

Call your Senator right now at 202-224-3121 and tell him to oppose Tim Geithner for Treasury Secretary.

Sincerely yours,


Erick Erickson
Editor, RedState.com

Today:

Tim Geithner was just approved by the Senate, 60-34…

Yeah, yeah, I know, nothing MoveOn does ever works either. Sorry, I just like making fun of the Red State jackasses.

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Has He Reached Rock Bottom Yet?

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Easily breaking our old record of three Bill Kristol posts in one day, post #4 about Mr. Kristol is filled with awesome:

On Sunday afternoon Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist Bill Kristol — in an email exchange with Big Hollywood — agreed to debate Matt Damon on his Hollywood home turf after being informed the 38-year old actor ridiculed Kristol in an interview in the Miami Herald.

“He’s an idiot — he wrote that we should be grateful to George Bush because he won the Iraq war. We! Won! The! War!”

As the sponsor of the event, Big Hollywood is offering $100,000 to Damon (or to the charity or carbon credit of his choice) to publicly debate Kristol at a mutually agreed upon time, date and venue.

Certainly this must be the new low for the man the National Review calls “among the most intelligent, creative, and articulate conservative voices in America” is now reduced to proving his intellectual rigor debating the star of Stuck on You. Even better, it is even money he will lose the debate. For an encore, maybe he can challenge Tonya Harding on the Man Show.

Say it again to yourself- “Among the most intelligent, creative, and articulate conservative voices in America.”

*** Update ***

What Ken Layne said.

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Smearing their own

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The race for the RNC chairmanship has taken an amusing turn (from Greg Sargent):

This image of a parodied USA Today cover is being anonymously blasted around among Republicans — it imagines what the front page of the paper will look like if South Carolina GOP chair Katon Dawson, who was a member of a whites only club, wins the RNC chairmanship:

Some candor from former RNC chair Jim Nicholson on the quality of the six candidates competing for the office:

Nicholson said the six candidates for chair appeared to be capable leaders, but admitted that he had approached higher-profile candidates about running earlier in the election process, including former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating and former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who served as secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration. Both men had the communications skills to perform the job effectively, Nicholson said.

[…]

“That’s the field. One of them is going to be chairman and they may rise to the occasion,” Nicholson said. “Or they may already be there.”

Translation: you go to war with the RNC chair you have, not the RNC chair you would have if the party hadn’t scared off every sane person with half a brain.

Update: RSA notes the apostrophe in “white’s only”.

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