Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

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

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

The revolution will be supervised.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

When I was faster i was always behind.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Nothing worth doing is easy.

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

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

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Archives for 2009

My Head Hurts

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You can almost guarantee this person gave money to the anti-Rahm tv commercials:

In the past few weeks, the two most famous and arguably most successful black men in America have taken a huge fall. It has become clear that both pro golfer Tiger Woods, just named Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press, and the American president, Barack Obama, the first black person to lead the country, suffer from a surfeit of hubris which has finally caught up with them. If both men somehow thought they were untouchable, they have been put to right. Both have crashed to earth and it may well be true that they can never recover their earlier status again.

Obligatory link.

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Chinese walls

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No one could have predicted that Murdoch would move the WSJ newsroom to the right:

Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits — “health care reform” is a generally forbidden phrase — and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)

The pro-business, antigovernment shift in the news pages has broken into plain view in the last year. On Aug. 12, a fairly straight down the middle front page article on President Obama’s management style ended up with the provocative headline, “A President as Micromanager: How Much Detail Is Enough?” The original article included a contrast between President Jimmy Carter’s tendency to go deep in the weeds of every issue with President George W. Bush’s predilection for minimal involvement, according to someone who saw the draft. By the time the article ran, it included only the swipe at Mr. Carter.

On Aug. 27, a fairly straightforward obituary about Ted Kennedy for the Web site was subjected to a little political re-education on the way to the front page. A new paragraph was added quoting Rush Limbaugh deriding what he called all of the “slobbering media coverage,” and he also accused the recently deceased senator of being the kind of politician who “uses the government to take money from people who work and gives it to people who don’t work.”

On Oct. 31, an article on the front of the B section about estate taxes at the state level used the phrase “death tax” six times, but there were no quotation marks around it…

Bing users beware, I guess.

No matter what anyone says, I believe that future generations will be puzzled that an Australian tabloidist and a Korean cult leader had so much influence on American media in the early 21st century.

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Who Said There Would Be No Change?

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Here is some change you can believe in- just a few months ago this would have been considered treason:

Way back on December 2nd, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) filed a single-payer amendment to the Senate health care bill, which was supposed to come up for a vote this afternoon. But at the last moment, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), at the behest Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), demanded that the entire 700-plus page amendment be read aloud on the floor. That’s happening now.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a 10 or 12 hour dilatory tactic. But not today. Today, Democrats were planning to file for cloture on the Defense Appropriations bill, in order to get it passed by Friday before midnight when department funding runs out. If the entire amendment is read aloud, it’s likely that the Senate won’t be able to pass the defense bill until Saturday at the earliest, and would have to pass a short-term continuing resolution to keep money flowing.

“The only thing that Sen. Coburn’s stunt achieves is to stop us from moving to the DoD appropriations bill that funds our troops – not exactly the kind of Christmas gift that our troops were expecting from Dr. No,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Does this mean Coburn and the Republicans are “objectively pro-terrorist?”

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Slow It Down and Let the Circular Firing Squad Do the Rest

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It is good to be a Republican these days:

Senate Republicans fulfilled a threat on Wednesday to require chamber staffers to read Democrats’ healthcare amendments aloud on the floor of the Senate.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took the floor to begin debate on his proposal to establish a single-payer healthcare system, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) interjected on behalf of his party, requesting Sanders’s 767-page amendment be read in full.

Their strategery is real simple- keep slowing things down and keep reading amendments while the Democrats in-fight until they finally kill the bill. And have you noticed that the Republicans have finally started to take my advice and are being quiet and just let the Democrats damage themselves? Stop being jerks, and let the Democratic circular firing squad do the dirty work. Nelson and Lieberman will come through, and if that fails, you’ve always got C-Streeter Bart Stupak in the House to fall back on.

BTW- I’m going to go on record and state I have never seen anything dumber than an ad focused on trashing the President’s Chief of Staff. Really. That is some sad shit that anyone think this will have any impact on the debate whatsoever. We’re talking teabagger grade stupidity. How much money did they burn on that foolishness? What did they think they were accomplishing? Negative ads sure are going to hurt Rahm in his 2010 race for another term as Chief of Staff. Wait. What? The guy works at the will and pleasure of the President.

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What I am Saying Is Not Controversial

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Some weird reactions in the last post about not being able to go back to the drawing board with Health Care reform. I really don’t think that is a really controversial observation- where we are right now, clearly our options are some version of the bill in the Senate, or no bill at all.

Anyone who thinks the House and the Senate are going to just say “to hell with it” and start over from scratch is just smoking rock. How many months did it take for a bill to get out of Baucus’s committee alone. On top of that, we would be treated to another six-eight months of teabaggers throwing things at congressmen, wildly inflated claims on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page and the op-ed pages of the Washington Post (although, in reality, those two things are pretty much one and the same these days), and so on. And then, you have to filter in that all of this would be happening in an election year, and with the notoriously timid Democrats, you have to be sniffing glue to think that the bill is going to be easier pass and more progressive. And then, assuming the House does manage to get it passed, does anyone think Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman are going to suddenly decide the public option is a good idea? If so, why? Does anyone think that the blue dogs and “moderates” are going to become less of a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries?

And then we add the other things in to account. You think the progressive base is pissed now? Well, let’s remember, that HCR has effectively sucked the air out of EVERY other piece of legislation. You want another year dealing with HCR every night, while financial reform, jobs bills, gay rights, and numerous other things simply languish? Are you smoking rock? The administration is already getting flamed because they haven’t ended DOMA by fiat, you think another year of ignoring it trying to re-do HCR reform is going to make things better with the base?

And look, I’m fully aware that many of you say this bill sucks. I have no idea why there are not even any attempts to control the costs, which was one of the two main points of health care reform in the first place, wasn’t it? Control costs, expand coverage. We sorta do the second, but seem to have completely ignored the first. Premiums are still going to go up, only now the insurance companies get to increase premiums and you are required by law to pay them. Way to make generations of young Republicans.

I look at this bill and see very little to cheer about, and I read the blogs that are very in favor of this reform. If I were in the House or Senate, I have no idea how I would vote. I’d probably try to flee the country, but not before kneecapping Nelson, Conrad, Baucus, Lieberman, Landrieu, Lincoln, and whoever decided that 60 votes was required.

So what I am saying is not controversial. It is this bill, or nothing. Take your choice.

*** Update ***

Apparently Kevin Drum already made this point the other day, as others have, I am sure.

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Burning Down the House

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As a side note, the question I have these days is “Why on earth would anyone want to be a member of the House of Representatives?”

A two year seat means you are constantly running, constantly having to raise money and be on the road and eating chicken and rigatoni and green beans at pot luck dinners with people who are invariably pissed at you, you don’t make that much money and have to maintain two residences, and what we have learned the last few months is no one gives a shit what you think.

You could be a member of the House for 30 years, work your ass off to get a bill passed, and then all your work gets stripped out by some jackass in the Senate. Remember in nursery school when you would finally get a neat tower built out of lincoln logs, and some jackass would walk along and knock it over the moment you turned around. It would be like that. Every single day.

Why would anyone want to do that as a career?

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