Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Call your Senator to thank him for giving Republicans a critical bonus month to whip up lies and hate over health care. Make sure to mention how you appreciate his crippled compromise bill that netted the same zero Republican votes that single payer would have done.
If you do not live in Montana (i.e., a constituent) or run a health insurance firm (i.e., a supervisor) then Baucus does not care what you think. Call your own Senator and yell at him or her about something else.
This is a beaut:
If Jay Leno Wants Better Reviews He Can Start By Removing the Lapel Flag by John Nolte
You want to be edgy in the entertainment business today? Be polite and keep the politics as across the board as possible. Walk on stage with the “edgy” goal of wanting to entertain and take away from their daily frustrations as many people as possible.
Jay Leno’s the new edgy, the new ballsy…
And that lapel flag makes him a downright iconoclast.
I didn’t see his show, but I’m pulling for him because all the right people are not.
If John Nolte is so concerned with Leno’s ratings, maybe he should quit wanking about lapel pins and start watching.
Are there any history majors out there who can tell me if there ever was a time that one of the major political parties was so concerned with something as trivial as lapel pins? This has been an ongoing obsession of the wingnut crowd for several years now, and it is just downright bizarre.
From Swampland commenter Kevin Lyda on ObamaKanyeJackAssGate:
Also, I’d like to repeat an earlier question, why was Obama even asked about Kayne’s outburst? Does every black public figure have to apologize for the misbehavior of any black celebrity? Is this some heretofore unwritten job title?
Eventually folks might start to think that’s pretty racist. So either you folks will stop adding such job titles *or* you’ll add such job titles to non-black public figures. Suddenly Hillary Clinton will have to answer for Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton’s transgressions. Gordon Brown will have to apologize for Russell Brand and Hugh Grant. John Bohner will have to apologize for Nick Nolte and Sean Penn?
Maybe you guys can have a little tick off box in your notebooks for, “Do you support/condemn [newsmaker of your ethnic group] for doing [bad thing]?”
Of course it would just be easier if black public figures just began all speeches or interviews by condemning some other black people who did something dumb. That would save you the effort of asking…
I have a theory about what will happen in the 2010 House elections. The Democrats will lose seats — they have to, given that the economy is in the crapper and that they gained 50+ seats the last two cycles — but not as many as they should, for the simple reason that so many Republican challengers will be terrible. My district, NY-29, is shaping up as a classic example. It’s a brutal district for Democrats with around a +5 Republican Cook PVI and an even larger Republican registration advantage. It’s lily-white, largely rural, and pretty old — fertile soil for the tea bag tree. There aren’t that many birther types, because this *is* the north, but some of the counties in the district are technically part of Appalachia. In short, it should be tough sledding for the freshman Democratic incumbent, Eric Massa.
But it may not be, because the Republican challenger, Tom Reed, is a complete idiot. I almost can’t believe he did this:
The Steuben Courier reports that Tom Reed was the recent recipient of a “Restore New York” grant facilitated by State Senator George Winner. Reed, who owns the Masonic Temple in Bath, will match that grant with $820,000 of private funding.
The obvious question is how long Reed has owned the building, and how much he paid for it. If the answers are “not long” and “not much”, then he has a huge problem.
Never mind that Reed opposes stimulus spending, the real issue here is that this might possibly be illegal. Certain ethics rules apply once you’ve announced your candidacy and these may be in violation of them. At the very least, it looks very bad.
It would be one thing if Reed tried to do this on down low, but in fact the whole thing was trumpeted in a press release by the Republican State Senator who brought in the grant.
I’ve been watching a lot of tennis this week, so I don’t want to use the term “unforced error”. Maybe “code violation” would be more apt.
Update. Just to spell what’s so wrong with this (from Fighting29th):
It’s not too tough to put together a group of investors to “risk” $820K to get $1.18 million in free money. Those investors know full well that there’s an excellent chance that they’ll make a profit when the newly renovated Bath Masonic Temple is sold, since your money and mine is serving as a $1.18 million cushion to protect their investment.
Working out some stuff with the Handycam, and I took it to the Rails to Trails for the inaugural LilyCam. Here she is just doing her thing:
About a mile or two in, there is a little field I go to and let her run around:
Also, don’t forget to vote for Bitsy:
You are on your own. Behave.
I know I spend too much time focusing on the clowns at Reason, but this piece by Katherine Mangu-Ward is just too priceless a sample of the type of asshattery that dominates the magazine these days. Starting with the news that Obama called Kanye West a jackass (a statement everyone in the western world agrees with), she pivots to a statement by Muhtar Kent, the President of Coca Cola, making a Soviet Union reference regarding the taxation of soda, and then moves in with that glibertarian smarm we’ve all grown to love:
In his heart of hearts, Obama would clearly love to tax soda. And he may yet get his wish. But for the moment he is worn down, beaten by uppity legislators and people who like fizzy, corn syrupy drinks. Having the CEO of an all-American/massive multi-national company compare his administration’s policies to those of the Soviet Union should be good for another few weeks of presidential despair.
Keep it up, Mr. Kent, and you too might earn the coveted Presidential Jackass Medal.
Not only is it impossible for her to know what is in Obama’s “heart of hearts,” she is radically misrepresenting what Obama said, which was the following:
Yeah. That just suggests he is “beaten down by uppity legislators.”
Aside from being the typical snide gibberish I’ve become accustomed to from the deep thinkers over there, if Mangu-Ward would have thought for thirty seconds before going full wingnut, she would have realized there actually are some libertarian arguments that are really relevant right now in regards to the taxation of soda. For example, why tax sweetened drinks before you end the ludicrous farm subsidies that have led to the glut of high fructose corn syrup? And why else are companies using so much high fructose corn syrup? Because the tariffs are so high on sugar in order to protect American sugar cane farmers. Two direct government actions in the form of transfer payments and protectionism that have had a huge impact on the type of drinks we ingest as a nation.
The last I checked, transfer payments, free trade, and smart government were things libertarians were allegedly concerned about. In fact, before the days of the great socialist Obamenace, Reason used to be nominally interested in these issues. But then again, this is Reason magazine in the Gillespie/Welch Obama era, where it is better to be a reactionary smart-ass than smart.
It always amuses me when our pundits accuse others of being self-absorbed. Bobo:
Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.
Every moment of every round table on every Sunday morning show *is* one big self-celebration. I wish I could say that these celebrations were routinely interrupted by intelligent analysis, but that isn’t true.
At some level, our entire elite media functions as a strange satire: residents of Bethesda and Georgetown telling flyover country viewers about how real Americans think, millionaires telling middle-classers they need to sacrifice more, narcissists complaining about self-celebration….
Update. And, yes, how do you write this column without mentioning “Mission Accomplished”?
Update update. More generally, it’s ludicrous to claim that our civilization has been humble in anything like the recent past. Whether it’s Francis Fukuyama claiming that the west has ended history, George Wallace declaring white Americans “the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,”, or the fact that perhaps the most iconic image in the world is God giving a white guy a high five, the western world is one self-loving place and has been for quite some time.