Every other blog in the world has this up too, but God it’s funny.
Archives for August 2009
Birfer brigades
Here’s some footage of birfer types (via) at a Lloyd Doggett townhall, chanting “Just say no” and waving pictures of Doggett with devil’s horns on them:
A few points here:
* I’m not sure “just say no” is a great slogan for Republicans.
* The crowd has the same trailer park vibe I got from some of the crazier Palin rallies in the ’08 election.
I’ll have to see a bit more of this, but at this point, I think the Republican strategy of sending birfer bridages to shout at the devil is a dangerous one. Even in a conservative-friendly media environment, it’s going to be hard for the tea-ruptions to portrayed as anything other than fringe lunacy.
I’ll also say this: I’ve witnessed a lot of anti-Iraq war rallies in the general Rochester area, including a pretty large-scale one specifically protesting a Dick Cheney fundraiser, and none had the feeling of anger and general craziness of what I’ve seen from the birfer townhall footage. There *is* a difference between right-wing protests and left-wing ones in this country, at this point. (I can’t speak for what it was like in the past or in other parts of the world.)
With friends like these
I was struck by this contrast. From Marc Ambinder (in what I thought was a decent piece):
The (insurance) industry concluded that reform was inevitable. In order to save their industry, they decided to partner with the White House from day one. They’ve accommodated the demands of Democrats to scrap discriminatory policies against people with pre-existing conditions, have agreed to various premium caps, have agreed to accept various different types of basic coverage plans. In exchange, the industry gets to exist; it gets millions of more Americans with a mandate to buy coverage; it gets some flexibility in terms of risk pools; it doesn’t accept onerous restrictions on its profit-to-loss ratios. So far, the White House hasn’t gotten any votes out of this arrangement, but they’ve gotten the industry to hold its fire.
From the Politico today:
The insurance lobby has urged the public to turn out for town halls, as have members of the tea party movement and the group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, which is providing a list of upcoming public events on its website — together with videos of events that have already been disrupted.
So which is it? Is the insurance industry “holding its fire” or not?
Giving The Bikers Some Space
This seems to make sense:
As more riders take to the roads on bicycles, more states are giving them a bigger chunk of pavement — 3 feet to be precise — so they won’t get swiped by cars.
A Colorado law recently signed by Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter not only requires motorists to give riders at least a 3-foot-wide berth, it also makes it illegal to throw things at riders, says Dan Grunig, executive director of Bicycle Colorado. Previously, he says, police could only cite a motorist if they actually hit the rider.
“Cyclists need to be treated with respect and not surprise,” Grunig said.
I had to read this twice to make sure I was reading it right. What kind of twisted jackass throws something out of a car at a biker? Even something little moving at the right velocity could be extremely dangerous, let alone causing the biker to wreck and run into oncoming traffic. People are just morons. I’m seriously not sure how we made it this far as a society.
At any rate, this seems like a good thing that needs to be done. Before I got the dog and started going to the rails to trails everyday, I guess I never really noticed how much bike paths and trails added to the daily quality of life for people.
I’d Like To Hear Shelby and Corker’s Deep Thoughts
Can’t blame this on the unions:
Toyota Motor said Tuesday it lost a net 77.8 billion yen, or $819 million, in the quarter that ended in June as global vehicle sales continued to slump. But the Japanese automaker trimmed its loss forecast for the current fiscal year by about 18 percent, to $4.7 billion.
Toyota, which posted a record loss for the fiscal year that ended in March, said losses in the last three months were smaller than expected thanks to stringent cost-cutting and a decline in inventory.
Government stimulus measures aimed at spurring purchases of low-emission vehicles in Japan and elsewhere provided somewhat of a boost, leading the company to revise upward both its sales and earnings forecasts for the full year. But sluggish sales in the United States, the company’s biggest market, as well as a stronger yen, which erodes the value of overseas earnings, cut into its bottom line.
But I bet they will anyway.
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Site Re-Design Fundraiser
As you have noticed, the last couple of weeks things are going south with the site, so we are holding a one-day fundraiser to raise money to have the site re-designed, everything recoded, and a re-install of everything. The pricetag is $800.00, and I already have 100.00 in paypal that someone sent the other day. To help pay for the re-design, hit paypal:
Thanks in advance, and as soon as we get to the limit I will send the money off to the designer.
STOP! We are over the necessary amount by several hundred. Any future donations will be spent on cat food, gambling, or doggie biscuits. I’ll start a new thread to find out what all you want/need in the new design.
Changes in attitude, changes in latitude
Malcolm Gladwell has a fascinating piece in the New Yorker about the limits of southern liberalism, focusing on fictional lawyer Atticus Finch and real life governor Big Jim Folsom:
Folsom was not a civil-rights activist. Activists were interested in using the full, impersonal force of the law to compel equality. In fact, the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ended Folsom’s career, because the racial backlash that it created drove moderates off the political stage. The historian Michael Klarman writes, “Virtually no southern politician could survive in this political environment without toeing the massive resistance line, and in most states politicians competed to occupy the most extreme position on the racial spectrum.” Folsom lost his job to the segregationist John Patterson, who then gave way to the radical George Wallace. In Birmingham, which was quietly liberalizing through the early nineteen-fifties, Bull Connor (who notoriously set police dogs on civil-rights marchers in the nineteen-sixties) had been in political exile. It was the Brown decision that brought him back. Old-style Southern liberalism—gradual and paternalistic—crumbled in the face of liberalism in the form of an urgent demand for formal equality. Activism proved incompatible with Folsomism.
[….]Finch will stand up to racists. He’ll use his moral authority to shame them into silence. He will leave the judge standing on the sidewalk while he shakes hands with Negroes. What he will not do is look at the problem of racism outside the immediate context of Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Levy, and the island community of Maycomb, Alabama.
More generally, the idea here is that changing hearts and minds on the subject of race was an abject failure, that the problem has always been structural rather than personal and moral. I don’t know anything about this from the perspective of the south; I recommend reading Phil Nugent to see that.
But much the same is true of the nation’s political and media culture. There’s some notion that superficial changes like getting Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs off the air (something I do support) would have some actual impact on things. The real problems are at a much deeper, structural level, having nothing to do with individual personalities.
As long as Jeff Immelt and Rupert Murdoch have control of what does and doesn’t go on television, we’re going to see a lot of pro-corporate propaganda masquerading as journalism, no matter whether Chris Matthews or David Gregory has some kind of “change of heart” about this or that issue.
Update. If my point seems unclear here, let me put it more simply: just as pre-Civil Rights racism in the south wasn’t about a few racist nuts in this or that small town, our current political/media environment isn’t about a few birfers on CNN. I’m all for getting the birfers on CNN off the air, but they’re a symptom, not cause.
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