Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
First as farce…then as even more farce:
Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he’s so outraged by GOP overspending, he’s quitting the party — and he’s the bull’s-eye of its target audience. But he also said he wouldn’t support any cuts in defense, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid — which, along with debt payments, would put more than two-thirds of the budget off limits.
Crazy story. A young woman at Stanford who had the misfortune to be the daughter of someone who writes for the National Review lived in a co-ed room in a co-op she had chosen to live in. Predictably, the mother freaked and wrote about it in NRO, because what better way to communicate with your children than by humiliating them in front of thousands of strangers? As you would expect, the article was filled with inaccuracies. The parents also stopped paying for the daughter’s tuition (so the daughter took out a loan in order to graduate).
This got picked up by the NYT blog “The Choice”. The daughter wrote into the comments to explain her side and outline the inaccuracies in the NRO piece:
7. This conflict has very little to do with Stanford and gender-neutral housing. Is has everything to do with my parents having a hard time adjusting to the fact that I’m out of the house (I’m the oldest), I’m 3000 miles away, and *especially* that I’m a liberal agnostic while they are conservative Catholics. The NR really should have looked into this situation a little bit before publishing that article.
I can’t believe I’m having to write this in the NYT blog. This is ridiculous.
Now, of course the parents are entitled to their own beliefs about their daughter’s living arrangements. And, since it’s their money, they’re entitled to stop paying her intuition tuition if they so choose.
But why do so many conservatives view their children not as beloved family members but as tools with which to prove their own conservative bona fides? Is this style of parenting something that Edmund Burke recommended or what?
(h/t Rottenchester, who emailed this story to me)
I approve of this:
President Obama is distancing himself from the National Day of Prayer by nixing a formal early morning service and not attending a large Catholic prayer breakfast the next morning.
All Mr. Obama will do for the National Day of Prayer, which is Thursday, is sign a proclamation honoring the day, which originated in 1952 when Congress set aside the first Thursday in May for the observance.
***Obama White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday that the president is simply reverting back to pre-Bush administration practice.
This has the usual suspects pissed. From the very same article:
“For those of us who have our doubts about Obama’s faith, no, we did not expect him to have the service,” said Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America. “But as president, he should put his own lack of faith aside and live up to the office.”
Referencing a remark the president made at a recent press conference in Turkey that Americans “do not consider ourselves a Christian nation,” she added: “That was projecting his own beliefs, but not reflecting what the majority of Americans feel. It’s almost like Obama is trying to remake America into his own image. This is not a rejection of Shirley Dobson; it’s a rejection of the concept that America is a spiritual nation and its foundation is Judeo-Christian.”
Suck it, wingnuts. Maybe if you promise to hold the event facing Mecca next year, Obama will show up.
(via)
This seems positive:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Tuesday that the discussion over whether to legalize and tax marijuana for recreational use in California would benefit from a large-scale study, including international case comparisons, to show the possible impact of such a change.
Pressure to mend the state’s fractured budget along with growing public support of marijuana legalization moved him to support such a study, Mr. Schwarzenegger said.
“I think it’s time for a debate,” he said. “I think all of those ideas of creating extra revenues; I’m always for an open debate on it. And I think we ought to study very carefully what other countries are doing that have legalized marijuana and other drugs. What effect did it have on those countries?”
I was watching Real Time With Bill Maher on the DVR last night, and Barney Frank and Fareed Zakaria were the guests. Apparently, Frank is introducing legislation to decriminalize marijuana, which shocked me, but according to the google, this is in fact the case. This strikes me as particularly good news.
One other thing- Zakaria, someone I genuinely think is interesting and who has a great show, really, really pissed me off during that show. While Maher and Frank were discussing marijuana, Zakaria kept snickering and rolling his eyes and acting like it was a joke, and basically giving the ‘Oh you crazy dopers’ looks at the audience, and it was infuriating. It was also when I realized how wrong I was in March when President Obama dismissed the marijuana question that was freeped to the top of his online town hall. I still think it was a stupid thing to do (freeping the poll), but I understand now why so many of you were pissed at Obama. We’re never going to get anywhere if everyone keeps treating this as a joke, and millions of people locked up for nothing just isn’t funny.
I get it now.
It’s not every day that I read an editorial in a Catholic magazine that I like, but this is good:
The divisive effects of the new American sectarians have not escaped the notice of the Vatican. Their highly partisan political edge has become a matter of concern. That they never demonstrate the same high dudgeon at the compromises, unfulfilled promises and policy disagreements with Republican politicians as with Democratic ones is plain for all to see. It is time to call this one-sided denunciation by its proper name: political partisanship.
[….]Four steps are necessary for the U.S. church to escape the strengthening riptide of sectarian conflict and re-establish trust between universities and the hierarchy. First, the bishops’ discipline about speakers and awards at Catholic institutions should be narrowed to exclude from platforms and awards only those Catholics who explicitly oppose formal Catholic teaching. Second, in politics we must reaffirm the distinction between the authoritative teaching of moral principles and legitimate prudential differences in applying principles to public life. Third, all sides should return to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI that in politics there are usually several ways to attain the same goals. Finally, church leaders must promote the primacy of charity among Catholics who advocate different political options. For as the council declared, “The bonds which unite the faithful are mightier than anything which divides them” (“Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” No. 92).
This is by Jesuits, whom I personally have a soft spot for. I’m no longer able to remember which things my grandfather said they taught him and which things Frank Pembleton said they taught him, but I know they teach people things.
Personally, I would take this editorial a step farther: if a bishop is clearly doing the work of the Republican party, his diocese should lose its tax exempt status.
(via)
While some see John’s peak wingnut theory as having been totally discredited by the events of the last few months, I tend to believe that something really has changed in wingnuttia. I’m referring specifically to the fact that I am no longer able to understand many wingnut posts. The one from the law professor at Cornell that John linked to earlier (via Tbogg) is a very good example. The increasingly complicated, incoherent updates are something that seems new to me:
UPDATE No. 3: There may be addictive behavior involved. Here is one of Obama’s favorite lunch recipes:
President Obama’s Tuna Salad
Tuna
Grey Poupon mustard
Mayonnaise
Chopped gherkins<And here is the video proof.
There are several embedded videos, in fact, along with some screenshots from a Vanity Fair article. The writer insists that the piece is some kind of a joke, but I’m not sure how exactly. I think it may be mockery of what he feels were conspiracy theories about Bush and the press being put forward by left-wing bloggers, but it could be something far more complicated than that.
Could it be that wingnuttia has blasted past “Bush is a genius” simplicity into some kind of inadvertent right-wing version of “Pale Fire”? This isn’t about the increasing complexity of wingnut mythology; the stuff about bear DNA and field mice makes some kind of logical sense if you look at it from the right perspective. Dijongate — along with a great deal of what happens on Glenn Beck — doesn’t make any sense. It isn’t clear to me that it’s even supposed to make sense.
It’s been said that it’s almost impossible to follow the real plot of a Raymond Chandler novel (famously, Chander himself was unable to account for one of the bodies in the “Big Sleep”), that the books work more on the level of conveying some vague, overriding sense of corruption and decay. Is wingnuttia moving away from simple easy-to-follow diatribes about Islamofascism and soc-ial-ism and towards more vague, inscrutable, doomy stuff? Or am I getting carried away here? I can’t help but feel that the whole texture of wingnuttia is starting to feel different these days. And that more generally, any kind of mythology eventually moves towards forms that cannot be understood on a literal level.
Update. This, via Dave Weigel via the comments is a pretty good example too:
I understand the stuff about Reverend Wright and his grandmother and after I read Weigel’s explanation, I understood the stuff about the guy living in the shack, but around the 2 minute mark, it has him throwing Sean Hannity and a paperback copy of “Atlas Shrugged” under the bus. Isn’t the idea of throwing someone under the bus that you were chummy with them before, that they were “on the bus”? Wouldn’t Sean Hannity and “Atlas Shrugged” already have been under his bus before he threw them there, metaphorically speaking?
Still have not heard of any confirmed cases of anyone “going Galt,” so I thought I would pick up the slack. Here is Tunch quite clearly going Galt on the couch:
Consider this your open thread.