Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

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

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train.

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

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

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

Let me file that under fuck it.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

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

Let there be snark.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

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Archives for April 2009

Sunday Night Open Thread

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It was a really nice day today here. I took the opportunity to go for a walk and get some fresh air, then spent a little bit of time grocery shopping with a friend and then did some reading while sitting on the porch. It is supposed to be snowing tomorrow night, so today was love it or leave it time for good weather.

I’m glad I did, as everything in the news is just so depressing- all the mass shootings last week (there was yet another one yesterday in which a man killed his entire family and then himself), all capped by that psychopath fringe right-winger from Pittsburgh. More information keeps coming out about him, and he was clearly a deranged sociopath- exactly the type susceptible to messages from irresponsible people peddling one world government/black helicopter conspiracy theories and bullshit about the Obama administration supporting gun grabs or state sovereignty/secessionist nonsense. According to the KDKA news from Pittsburgh, he told the cops at the hospital guarding him that he wished he had killed more of them, and according to the newspapers, he was involved with Stormfront.

Oh, well. What can you do? Don’t forget about the #1 Ladies Detective Agency tonight.

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The short happy life of Culture11

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There was a very interesting article about the blog Culture11 in the WashingtonMonthly a few weeks ago (it was the source of a quote about Big Hollywood that John liked a lot). The short story is that a few non-wingnut conservatives decided to start a conservative blog that would attempt to deal with cultural issues in a non-crazy way, founded an aesthetically successful blog (I thought the content on the blog was excellent for a conservative blog), and then failed to find investors or much of an audience, surprise, surprise. And that’s where Big Hollywood comes in:

It was a grimly funny coincidence that around the time Culture11’s financial well was running dry, another Web site sharing its subject matter debuted to much greater fanfare in the right-wing media than Kuo’s project ever received: Big Hollywood, an entertainment and politics blog created by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Los Angeles–based Internet entrepreneur who helped launch both the Drudge Report and Huffington Post. Beneath an angry vermillion-colored banner, the blog offers recurring features like the “Celebutard of the Week”—tracking the latest vapidly liberal political utterances from the likes of Cher—and clips of the best conservative moments in film interspersed with rote breaking news from the entertainment industry.

The whole article is worth a read. Now, while I support efforts like Culture11 in theory, it’s hard not to note that the Tom Wolfe article that inspired Culture11 was nothing more than a high-brow version of what goes on on Big Hollywood:

Wolfe had gone to the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein’s cocktail party, watched Park Avenue’s finest flatter themselves by sharing hors d’oeurves with Black Panthers, and wrote about it in scathing detail, first in New York magazine—the cover featured three white socialites in glittery cocktail dresses with raised fists—and later in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. In doing so, Friedersdorf believed, Wolfe had made a far stronger case for conservatism than the collected works of L. Brent Bozell.

Is there anything more to conservative cultural critiques than mockery of liberal celebrities? I suppose they also have those list of “greatest conservative movies” and “greatest conservative songs“, but that’s always seemed like an exercise in futility, like assembling the list of greatest white soul singers, where before you start you’re already beat.

Update. Everyone seems to be having a good time making fun of the Great Conservative Songs list, so I thought I’d bring you this blast from the past from George Will.

I may be the only 43-year-old American so out of the swim that I do not even know what marijuana smoke smells like. Perhaps at the concert I was surrounded by controlled substances. Certainly I was surrounded by orderly young adults earnestly — and correctly — insisting that Springsteen is a wholesome cultural portent.

[…]

I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: “Born in the U.S.A.!”


Update #2. In my view, this is the greatest conservative song ever.

(via)

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Pitchforks into ploughshares?

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You’ve probably heard that Obama told a group of business leaders that

My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.

I am not a populist. But I do wonder if angry, anti-corporate populism can be put to good use. There are many industries — the credit card industry and broadband and wireless providers come to mine — that are actively ripping off consumers using lack of regulation and/or monopolistic practices.

Can populist anger be channeled into pushing back against these industries (and others, like the health insurance industry, which is perhaps less obviously a scam but more obviously problematic on a larger scale)? I think the answer isn’t clear because in the United States, populism has generally had more to do with “cultural” and racial divisions than on economic inequality. Here’s Krugman on that:

And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, “There but for the grace of God go I.” A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, “Why should I be taxed to support those people?”

[….]

Consider this: in the United States, unlike any other advanced country, many people fail to receive basic health care because they can’t afford it.

It’s not just race, of course, it’s also gay marriage, flag burning, school prayer, abortion, etc.

Is there any hope that this will change? Any chance that angry Americans will begin demanding health care for themselves and an end to corporatism instead of blaming our economic crisis on poor black people and stockpiling weapons for the coming government take-over?

I realize that the answer is probably “no”, of course. We may see a few more angry outbursts over things like the AIG bonuses, but I suspect things won’t go much farther than that. Time-Warner and MBNA and the rest likely have very little to worry about.

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RIP, Lynn Adkins

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Bethany, West Virginia lost one of her best citizens yesterday as Lynn Adkins died after a several year battle with cancer. She was a devoted teacher, mother, social worker, and wife, and I knew her my entire life. I grew up with her children, I was very attached to her former husband as a teen (he was a wonderful man), and when I was entering a troubled stage of my teen years, Lynn was there to help give my parents advice. It is no exaggeration to state that Lynn Adkins helped save my sister’s life years ago, when she went through what I will simply describe as a personal crisis. Lynn was there to help her, and they remained close friends until the very end. My parents loved Lynn, and she and her husband were members of a circle of friends who did everything together.

This is a very sad day, and my thoughts are with her family.

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Because There Isn’t Enough Going On

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North Korea launches a missile:

North Korea defied the United States, its allies and a series of U.N. resolutions by launching a rocket on Sunday that it said propelled a satellite into space but that much of the world viewed as an effort to prove it is edging toward the capability to shoot a nuclear warhead on a longer-range missile.

The launching drew swift international condemnation and prompted the U.N. Security Council to convene an emergency meeting on Sunday in which the United States, Japan and South Korea vowed to penalize the North.

North Korea’s Eunha-2 rocket blasted off from its Musudan-ri launching site on its east coast at 11:20 a.m. local time on Sunday and successfully placed a satellite into orbit nine minutes later, said the North’s official news agency, KCNA.

But Lee Sang-hee, the defense minister of South Korea, told a parliamentary hearing that the rocket “appears to have failed to put a satellite into orbit.” Mr. Lee said that all of the rocket’s three stages appeared to have fallen into the sea. If the launching was successful, the third stage, which thrusts the satellite into orbit, should have remained in orbit, according to rocket experts.

We live in interesting times.

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