Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans in disarray!

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

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

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

In after Baud. Damn.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

“woke” is the new caravan.

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

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

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

Wait, what?

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

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

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Archives for 2009

The Capital Letters Make It Important

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Steve Benen looks at the silly poll questions the RNC sent out this morning, and I will let others muse over the leading nature of the questions. What caught my attention was the following:

Which do you believe creates more jobs for the American economy: Government Programs and Spending or The American Free Enterprise System?

Why is “The American Free Enterprise System” capitalized? When you google it, there doesn’t seem to be any official “The American Free Enterprise System,” and if you turn it into an acronym, TAFES, nothing else shows up.

Am I missing something? Is this a well known right wing code I never picked up on? Is this more Bircher stuff like Bachmann has been pushing? Or is this just more of them being silly?

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Drudge rules their world

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From an interview Gibbs did with the Post’s Lisa Romano:

MS. ROMANO: The teleprompter changed last night.

MR. GIBBS: Mm-hmm.

MS. ROMANO: What was that about that? It’s a big jumbotron now.

MR. GIBBS: You know can I tell you this?

MS. ROMANO: Yes.

MR. GIBBS: I am absolutely amazed that anybody in America cares about who the President picks at a news conference or the mechanism by which he reads his prepared remarks. You know, I guess America is a wonderful country.

MS. ROMANO: You’re saying this is all Washington Beltway stuff?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t even know if it’s that. I don’t think I should implicate the many people that live in Washington.

MR. GIBBS: No, I you know, I don’t think the President let me just say this: My historical research has demonstrated that the President is not the first to use prepared remarks nor the first to use a teleprompter.

From a chat with Chris Cillizza today:

In the first few months of the Obama Administration conservatives — spurred on by Matt Drudge — have mocked the president for using a teleprompter at nearly every public speech.

[….]

But, look how much time we have spent discussing the prompter in this chat. And, there’s no question that Drudge has been the prime driver of that story.

I’m not criticizing Cillizza here. To the contrary, he deserves credit for admitting where the story comes from. But why the hell is Romano pushing what she must also know is a Drudge meme?

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More evil JournoList activity!

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From the Politico:

Well now, long-time “Klein Klub” critic Mickey Kaus has posted a leaked JList exchange where members of the group discuss whether former and current TNR owner Marty Peretz is racist, as well as, if Olbermann is insufferable.

Check out the thread here, and follow the back-and-forth from JList regulars like Eric Alterman, Jonathan Chait, Katha Pollitt, Matt Yglesias, and Brad DeLong.

How presumably intelligent people could differ on the issue of Marty Pertez’s racism — we all know Marty would be rounding up Muslims and marching them into the ocean if he could — is beyond me.

But other than that, how the hell is this a real story?

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Special election update

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Democrat Scott Murphy has pulled slightly ahead in the race to replace Kirsten Gillibrand in NY-20, according to the latest poll. Moreover, after weeks of staying out of what was thought to be an unwinnable race (the district is heavily Republican and the Republican candidate, Jim Tedisco, is a local legend), the party — specifically Obama and the DNC — is getting behind Murphy.

I know a lot of people in NYS politics and virtually none of them thought Murphy had a shot to make this close when I spoke with them a few weeks ago. They attribute the closeness of the race to Tedisco having run an awful campaign (hedging on the stimulus for weeks, getting in a dust-up with Rush, performing poorly in debates, etc.). What’s interesting is that they also tell me that in a special election like this one, the best operatives in each party will get involved (because there’s no other campaigns for them to be running at the time). So why has Tedisco’s campaign gone so badly? My guess is that almost any race that gets framed as Rush Limbaugh and Eric Cantor versus Barack Obama will go badly for Republicans.

In my view, the Republican party is insane to present a unified front against Obama. Cut the ones in competitive district loose to vote how they want to win races. That really seems like a no-brainer to me.

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Underwater

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Not sure if you have been paying attention, as there has been so much going on, but we might be about to lose another American city to flood waters:

The rising Red River broke a 112-year-old record early Friday and was eroding a dike south of downtown, forcing authorities to issue a mandatory evacuation order covering about 150 homes.

The river had risen to 40.32 feet early Friday — more than 22 feet above flood stage and inches more than the previous high water mark of 40.10 feet set April 7, 1897. It was expected to crest at up to 43 feet on Saturday.

Just after 2 a.m. Friday, residents in one neighborhood were roused from sleep and forced to evacuate after authorities found a significant leak in a dike. Police Capt. Tod Dahle said that while water wasn’t rushing to overtake the neighborhood, the integrity of the dike was in question.

***

“We do not want to give up yet. We want to go down swinging if we go down,” Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker said Thursday, just hours after the disheartening news that forecasters had — yet again — increased the projected crest of the north-flowing Red River.

Residents in this city of 92,000 had been scrambling in subfreezing temperatures to pile sandbags along the river and spent much of Thursday preparing for a crest of 41 feet, only to have forecasters late in the day add up to 2 feet to their estimate.

I spent a couple of weeks in North Dakota, and aside from the fact that I thought the skies were too low and that it just seemed uncomfortably flat, the thing that stood out to me was how much water there was- there were lakes everywhere. I didn’t expect that. I was to the west of Fargo, at Devil’s Lake for military training, and it was probably two of the best weeks I was in the Army. Perfect weather- it was about 75-80 with blue skies every day, and there was a golf course about a mile down the road from the barracks that you could walk to and play a round for relatively cheap. Also, the locally grown beef. So good.

Here’s to hoping the folks in North Dakota pull through.

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A Quick Explanation for the GOP Seppuku Today

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For some reason or another, the Republican leadership held a press conference, held up a blue binder that allegedly held a budget, but didn’t really, and the results were pretty disastrous. Via the Great Orange Satan, here is the immediate reaction:

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why they rushed out to do that. They clearly don’t have a budget ready, and also via the Great Orange Satan and Dave Weigel, here is part of their “blueprint”:

That must have taken a lot of work to get together. They had to have spent at least… minutes. So why did they rush out in front of cameras to make fools of themselves? For that, we must look to Josh Marshall’s Bitch Slap Theory from the 2004 election:

One way — perhaps the best way — to demonstrate someone’s lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves — thus the rough slang I used above. And that I think is a big part of what is happening here. Someone who can’t or won’t defend themselves certainly isn’t someone you can depend upon to defend you.

Demonstrating Kerry’s unwillingness to defend himself (if Bush can do that) is a far more tangible sign of what he’s made of than wartime experiences of thirty years ago.

Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person’s supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who’s receiving the hits into an object of contempt (even if also possibly also one of sympathy) in the eyes of the uncommitted.

Pretty clearly, this debacle today was a result of this line from President Obama the other night at the fundraiser:

And because we’ve inherited an economic mess and a fiscal mess — (laughter) — this budget makes the tough choices necessary to cut the deficit by the end of my first term in half — even under the most pessimistic estimates. We’ve already proposed $2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade. We’ll continue making these tough choices in the months and years ahead as our economy recovers.

And to a bunch of the critics out there, I’ve already said, show me your budget. (Laughter.) Show me what you want to do. (Applause.) And I’m happy to have that debate — because I believe in the vision of the Democratic Party. (Applause.) I believe in a vision that helps people help themselves. And I believe that in the end, the best way to bring down our deficit is not with a budget that continues the very same policies that led to the false prosperity and massive debts that we’ve seen. It’s a budget that leads to broad economic growth, moves us from an era of borrow and spend to save and invest.

So when GOP operatives are running around telling the Politico “We need to hold something up and say, ‘Here are our charts. Here are our graphs. It’s real,” the reason they ‘need’ to just throw out something, anything, is because they know they got bitch-slapped. And rather than just lay low and wait a week and come out with an actual budget, they couldn’t, because they are operating at a level of emotional maturity equal to a 12 year old.

And that is why they went out and made fools of themselves today, even when they don’t even agree internally on the budget they claim to be putting together.

*** Update ***

The kids at Fark are having fun with the Republican “budget”:

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