Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

How stupid are these people?

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

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

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

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

“woke” is the new caravan.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

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

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

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Archives for 2009

This Is Rich

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I can’t be the only one who read this piece by Jonathan Chait titled “Why the Democrats Can’t Govern,” a longish lament about Democrats killing Obama’s agenda, and whose first reaction upon reading the piece was:

“You know what else makes it hard to govern? When people launch venomous and nasty smear campaigns about individuals appointed to positions in the Obama administration.”

Chait should add the much-feared Free Tibet lobby to the list of obstacles facing President Obama. Although he would never take part in anything like that, I am sure.

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Heads may roll

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Liz Benjamin — one of the premier political reporters in NYS — has an interesting piece on the stakes of tomorrow’s special election in NY-20:

One GOP consultant who isn’t working on Tedisco’s camapign suggested this race could actually end up being a “perfect storm,” leading to calls for the ouster of party leaders all the way up the food chain.

On the line are local leaders like Saratoga County’s Jasper Nolan, an early champion of Tedisco and veteran chairman who has weathered several failed coup attempts; state Chairman Joe Mondello, who presided over the meeting at which the 10 county chairs picked Tedisco and was under fire even before the party’s historic loss of the state Senate majority last year; RNC’s Michael Steele, who was the first to suggest the 20th CD contest would be a bellweather of the national GOP’s ability to make a comeback.

Another interesting tidbit about the race: Sarah Palin is showing up alongside Bush and Rush in mailers being sent out by the Democratic party attacking the Republican candidate.

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Rare candor

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I’m tired of arguing about Krugman with everyone, but I’d like to point out a remarkable passage in Evan Thomas’s piece about Krugman in Newsweek:

If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he’s wrong, and you sense he’s being a little harsh (especially about Geithner), but you have a creeping feeling that he knows something that others cannot, or will not, see. By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking. The in crowd of any age can be deceived by self-confidence…

I agree with John that the piece was content-free in general. But I credit Thomas for admitting what role establishment media plays.

(via a reader in today’s WaPo chat with Kurtz)

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Memewatch: it’s all unconstitutional!

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The new Republican line against Obama is that everything he’s doing to prop up the economy is unconstitutional. Michelle Bachmann last week:

Sir, in the Constitution? What in the Constitution could you point to to give authority to the Treasury extraordinary actions that they take?

George Will today:

It is high time Americans heard an argument that might turn a vague national uneasiness into a vivid awareness of something going very wrong. The argument is that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) is unconstitutional.

Sully finds Will’s rantings fascinating. Publius has a good take-down of the article.

A reader in today’s WaPo chat:

Arlington, Va.: Isn’t “President fires CEO” as troubling as “Pope fires missile”?

Free market capitalism, despite it’s obvious flaws, has lifted more people from poverty than anything in history. When the president can hire and fire CEOs from corporations, we’re no longer a free market capitalist society. GM is clearly a disaster, but it’s up to their board and shareholders to make those decisions. Obama is clearly just helping his union buddies, but he’s destroying the foundation of our economy as he does it.

Is there anything the Supreme Court can do about it? Isn’t this clearly beyond his constitutional duties? Or, because they’re saying he “resigned”, is Obama safe (and the rest of us doomed)?

[….]

it seems from what I read that Wagoner is officially stepping aside, not being fired by the president.: That is also the official line Russia and Venezuela, etc., use when removing CEOs from businesses they dislike. This is a very scary precedent Mr. Obama is setting. Very scary.

Expect to see a lot of this one over the next few months.

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The Wagoner Freak-Out

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Here is what I don’t understand about the freak-out (which I predicted, btw) over the government refusing to give GM money unless they get rid of Wagoner. Sully provides a brief comment that serves to summarize much of the commentary from the right:

I get the heebie-jeebies any time a politician makes a business decision.

My reliably conservative relative called me last night and asked me if I was not upset about this, and then got mad at me and told me I was just blinded by love for Obama when I said I couldn’t care less. Why would I? Few on the right have any problem telling welfare recipients what to do. I doubt Andrew has ever seen a welfare reform bill he didn’t like. Other than Josh Trevino, I don’t remember any opposition from the right about the Bankruptcy Bill and all the draconian demands placed on individuals.

This isn’t the government going to Microsoft and telling Bill gates what to do. This isn’t the government coming to your profitable small business and telling you who to hire and fire. Hell, this isn’t even the government telling GM what to do in the daily operation of their business. These are companies who have made decades of bad decisions coming to the government for yet another bailout, and as a requirement, the Obama team is demanding some leadership shake-up. Not only does it make sense to get rid of the guy who has been there for the last ten years as things went down the drain, but it would be politically impossible to bail these guys out unless some changes were made.

If GM wants Wagoner to stay, they can go without federal money. It is that simple. Hell, if I had my way, we would have leadership turn-over at every bank or institution receiving TARP money.

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Just Making Things Up

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Another winner from Breitbart today:

We must not let that go unanswered.

Uninvited Democratic activists are on a mission to demoralize the enemy – us. They want to ensure that President Obama is not subject to the same coordinated, facts-be-damned, multimedia takedown they employed over eight long years to destroy the presidency – and the humanity – of George W. Bush.

Political leftists play for keeps. They are willing to lie, perform deceptive acts in a coordinated fashion and do so in a wicked way – all in the pursuit of victory. Moral relativism is alive and well in the land of Hope and Change and its Web-savvy youth brigade expresses its “idealism” in a most cynical fashion.

The ends justify the means for them – now more than ever.

Much of Mr. Obama’s vaunted online strategy involved utilizing “Internet trolls” to invade enemy lines under false names and trying to derail discussion. In the real world, that’s called “vandalism.” But in a political movement that embraces “graffiti” as avant-garde art , that’s business as usual. It relishes the ability to destroy other people’s property in pursuit of electoral victory.

Hugh Hewitt’s popular site shut off its comments section because of the success of these obnoxious invaders. Breitbart.com polices nonpartisan newswire stories for such obviously coordinated attacks. Other right-leaning sites such as Instapundit and National Review Online refuse to allow comments, knowing better than to flirt with the online activist left.

First off, there are a large number of us out there who thought Hugh Hewitt was a moron LONG before we ever heard of Barack Obama.

Second, the Instapundit and the NRO decided their comment policy before Obama was even a Senator, let alone after Obama had organized a digital reign of terror on the comments sections of right-leaning websites. Also, your slip is showing. Everyone knows the Instapundit is a libertarian. Duh!

Third, as has been pointed out elsewhere, it was not an Obama tactic to mobilize internet trolls to harsh on the Republican’s parade. That was the explicit McCain internet strategy:

John McCain’s campaign is using their campaign website to encourage supporters to post supportive comments on political blogs, including the most well-known liberal site in the blogosphere. And to make things easier, they’re including talking points with which sympathizers can use to get out the McCain message.

“Select from the numerous web, blog and news sites listed here, go there, and make your opinions supporting John McCain known,” instructs the page.

McCain supporters are asked to send the details of their comment to the campaign, which in turn will verify it and then reward the supporter with “points” (assumedly to accumulate for McCain swag).

I really am starting to buy into the notion that anything these guys accuse you of they are actively engaged in themselves.

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Business As Usual

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Life inside the DC bubble:

For most of the last three decades, the lobbyist Paul Magliocchetti might have been mistaken for an owner of the Alpine, a wood-paneled Italian restaurant across the Potomac River from Washington where he routinely presided over boisterous tables of lawmakers and their staff members.

“Get me some oysters! Get me some steamed crabs! Get me a rack of lamb!” Mr. Magliocchetti would tell the cooks, strolling into the kitchen. “Every day a different thing,” the chef and owner Ermanno Tonizzo recalled fondly. “I don’t think he has ever seen the menu.”

That impresario act — pulling bottles from the private wine locker labeled “Mags” to entertain lawmakers at the clubby Capital Grille steakhouse, sending gift baskets or wine to lawmakers and their aides, or leasing each of his lobbyists a Lexus — helped Mr. Magliocchetti, a protégé of the powerful Representative John P. Murtha, build his lobbying firm into one of the 10 biggest in Washington.

Now, however, Mr. Magliocchetti’s generosity is coming to an abrupt halt: his firm, the PMA Group, is closing its doors next week, after reports that federal prosecutors had recently raided his office and his home.

Will be fun to see who all is caught up in this one. Murtha’s name is being tossed around already.

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