Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

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

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

The lights are all blinking red.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

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Archives for 2009

NFL = No Football for Limbaugh

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It is going to be awesome listening to Rush and company launch the inevitable attack on the NFL:

Rush Limbaugh is expected to be dropped from a group bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams, according to three NFL sources.

Dave Checketts, chairman of the NHL’s St. Louis Blues and the point man in the Limbaugh group attempting to buy the Rams, realizes he must remove the controversial conservative radio host from his potential role as a minority member in the group in order to get approval from other NFL owners, the sources said.

Three-quarters of the league’s 32 owners would have to approve any sale to Limbaugh and his group. Earlier this week, Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay predicted that Limbaugh’s potential bid would be met by significant opposition. Several players have also voiced their displeasure with Limbaugh’s potential ownership position, and NFL Players Association head DeMaurice Smith, who is black, urged players to speak out against Limbaugh’s bid.

Should be great fun learning how the sport that dominates the country is un-American.

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Chris Matthews Leaves It There

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I kept meaning to post this, but I forgot. At any rate, after watching the Daily Show piece about CNN “leaving it there” yesterday, I then saw this exchange on Hardball and my jaw hit the ground:

MATTHEWS: The Republican Party was in office and controlled for a while there both houses, as well as the White House, and you have enjoyed periods during your tenure as a senator when the Republicans had the upper hand. Why didn‘t you take the opportunity when you did to extend health coverage to a larger number of Americans?

HATCH: Well, keep in mind, I think a lot of us wanted to do that. But I‘ve been in the Senate 33 years, we‘ve never had a fiscal conservative majority in the Senate in my whole time, other than through great presidential leadership, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II. Even Clinton from time to time would do some fiscally conservative things. But we never really had the votes to really do what would really be a health reform bill that I think would work.

Putting aside the fact that if they had any interest whatsoever in passing a health bill, they could have, but my favorite part there is how he calls Reagan, Bush 1, and Bush 2 “fiscal conservatives.” Maybe people’s memories have faded enough that he could slip Reagan and Bush 1 in there, but Bush 2 a fiscal conservative? How did he not burst out into laughter? And how did Matthews not throw something at him?

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Guilty until proven innocent

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This post by Megan McCardle and the comments that follow fascinated me:

Yesterday, more than one commenter accused me of liberal bias in my suspicion that Rick Perry’s actions in the Willingham case smacked of trying to derail the investigation. The Dallas Morning News, hardly a liberal rag, is also suspicious….


This is fairly typical of the comments:

Well Megan, I really don’t see any smoking gun in this case. We know you’re anti death-penalty but this is grasping at straws.

There is no smoking gun that the guy is innocent, so the state was right to execute him.

I realize this is nut-picking but it blows my mind to think that now only hippies believe that we shouldn’t execute people unless we’re at least somewhat certain they’re guilty.

And kudos to McMegan for not being a glibertarian here.

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Should Have Been a Bankster

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No bonus for this guy:

The dark blue captain’s hat, with its golden oak-leaf clusters, sits atop a bookcase in Bryan Lawlor’s home, out of reach of the children. The uniform their father wears still displays the four stripes of a commercial airline captain, but the hat stays home. The rules forbid that extra display of authority, now that Mr. Lawlor has been downgraded to first officer.

He is now in the co-pilot’s seat in the 50-seat commuter jets he flies, not for any failure in skill. He wears his captain’s stripes, he explains, to make that point. But with air travel down, his employer cut costs by downgrading 130 captains, those with the lowest seniority, to first officers, automatically cutting the wage of each by roughly 50 percent — to $34,000 in Mr. Lawlor’s case.

The demotion, the loss of command, the cut in pay to less than his wife, Tracy, makes as a fourth-grade teacher, have diminished Mr. Lawlor, 34, in his own eyes. He still thinks he will return to being the family’s principal breadwinner, although as the months pass he worries more. “I don’t want to be a 50-year-old pilot earning $40,000 a year,” he said, adding that his wife does not want to be married to a pilot with so little earning power.

Why doesn’t everyone just quit doing what they do and go to work on Wall Street? You clearly don’t have to be competent or know anything, because these clowns trashed the economy and then ran around for months yelling hoocoodanode all while taking bailout money. Then, they turn around and take those taxpayer loans at low interest and the taxpayer guarantees, loan them back to the taxpayer at a higher interest rate, collect their vig, call it a profit, and then give themselves billions in bonuses because they are in the black again and happy days are here again. And half the public is so beaten down and broken they will look at all this and say “Hey, but isn’t it a good thing that Wall Street is profitable again?”

Why would anyone want to fly a plane for 34k a year when you can get rich being a thief, and one and a half of the two major political parties are going to have your back? Time to break out the foam fingers again, folks! USA! USA! USA!

You know what we really need? A capital gains tax cut. Hells yeah, baby!

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The power of myth

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The other night at dinner, our seminar speaker started to explain to us about how the Community Reinvestment Act caused the subprime crisis. There was a new twist in the story, he claimed there was a flawed study (which he surely made up or at least misrepresented) that had showed that whether or not people made their mortgage payments, and, as a result, the courts/federal government (he didn’t explain the mechanism) forced banks to lend to anyone who wanted it. He had all of this on very good authority from his father-in-law at Morgan Stanley. May FSM strike me dead if I am not relating his story accurately. I thought of that when I saw this from Atrios:

5 years from now it will probably be a “fact” that ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act caused the housing bubble.

And I thought of that again when I saw (on Fallows) that the Washington Post still hasn’t amended its Nobel for Neda piece to note that Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously. And again when I saw this bizarre explanation of it all from Howie Kurtz:

Fairfax County, Va.: Hi Howard, This Sunday, I read the editorials in The Post and The New York Times about the surprise Peace Prize. I liked the NYT editorial (which was pro), but like most of us, including Obama, I could certainly have handled an editorial that was anti this choice.

When I read The Washington Post editorial, I felt so sad for what this paper has become. Their whole idea was that the prize should have gone to Neda, the woman who was murdered by the Iranian police. Nobel Peace Prizes can’t be given posthumously. It’s a basic, easy factcheck. There are other fact problems, too (the protests hadn’t happened by the nomination date, Neda may not have been a protester).

So the idea that the committee made a careless or inappropriate choice is refuted by a slapdash editorial “choice” that nobody bothered to check? It just screamed out to me “we laid off almost all the copy editors.” I feel so sad for The Post I grew up with. It’s great to have an opinion. It’s bad to look dumb.

washingtonpost.com: Post Editorial: Our Laureate: Neda of Iran (Post, Oct. 10) andTimes Editorial: The Peace Prize (The New York Times, Oct. 9)

Howard Kurtz: I take your point about no posthumous awards, though by that standard Martin Luther King couldn’t have won after being assassinated (yes, I know he won the prize earlier). My reading of the piece was that Neda was being used more as a symbol (though the rule should have been mentioned). But it’s an editorial. It is by definition opinion. Of course some readers are going to disagree.

It’s not “by that reasoning”, it’s a rule the Nobel Prize committee has! How hard is it to understand that?

Were things always like this? Did newspapers always fill their editorial pages with factual inaccuracies they refused to correct? Were criticisms of the inaccuracies always defended with non sequiturs about other events? Was it always common for ostensibly reasonable, intelligent people to go around repeating stories that are not only not true but couldn’t possibly be true?


Update. I see that Mediactive wrote about Kurtz’s strange answer as well. There are some good points there.

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