Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

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

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Wait, what?

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

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

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

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

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

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

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Archives for 2009

The Hazards of Gerrymandering

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James Joyner links to a a story about the competitiveness of House races, and states:

CQ titles the piece “Nearly Three Dozen GOP House Winners Dodged Obama’s Coattails,” as if to signal that this is an extraordinary number of seats potentially up for grabs. Another way of looking at it, though, is that 401 of the 435, or 92.2 percent, of the districts voted along party lines. That’s an extraordinary number of seats where the party primary is synonymous with the election.

Making it worse, some of the mismatches are one-off flukes, such as the Louisiana 2nd where William “The Freezer” Jefferson was narrowly defeated in a multi-candidate race run under arcane rules and which are likely to return to form in the next election.

Put more bluntly, this is why there are so many seemingly crazy people in Congress.

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Responsible critics

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I like to read Michael Scherer because he provides such a clear view of how our national media thinks. Today he has a simplistic, if relatively inoffensive, piece about how Obama has to reassure everyone that things are okay if our economy is going to recover. I don’t necessarily disagree. Here’s a snippet of his last paragraph:

He will, over time, have to find a way to calm the markets, address the concerns of his responsible critics, and then use these successes to assure consumers everywhere that better days do, in fact, lie ahead, a claim that virtually every economist would endorse, though many disagree on the timing.

I think that the notion of “responsible critics” is very important to our national media. There’s an idea that there will be some kind of sensible give-and-take between Republicans and Democrats and that the job of the journalists is to referee this give-and-take. In a more perfect world, this might work very well.

The trouble is that there are no “responsible critics” in the Republican party. All Congressional Republicans offer now is warmed-over Hooverism, at best. On the subject of the banking crisis, for example, there are three alternatives, as I see it: do nothing and let the banks fail on their own, keep bailing the banks out, or nationalize the banks. The problem here is that while the first alternative is completely insane, “let them fail” seems to be the new Republican mantra.

What’s so damaging here is that all the time spent on the let-them-failsters is time that could be spent arguing the merits of nationalization. Similarly, the argument about the stimulus package could have been about whether or not to make it bigger as opposed to about whether “porkulus” was a good description or not and whether or not the Republicans were now back in the saddle again. With health care, we could be arguing about single-payer versus mandates instead of listening to one side compare government health care to Das Kapital.

The list goes on and on, of course. And it’s not clear what we can do about it. David Gregory is never going to have a round table discussion featuring Dean Baker, Paul Krugman, and someone from the Treasury Department. At best, we’d get Krugman, a Treasury guy, Amity Shlaes, and George Will. And the media is never going to press Republicans on the idiocy of their so-called plans.

So, while the country is facing all sorts of important decision, the media is going to pit the rantings of Galttards against the sane (if often flawed!) plans of the Obama administration. There will be no — zero, zip, zilch — responsible criticism of Obama in the media, even though there is plenty of solid responsible criticism of Obama out there.

If a system collapses in the woods, and no Republican hears it, does it make a sound?

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They Know the Title of the Book, But They Haven’t Read It

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Dow 36,000 author and former McCain advisor calls Obama the Manchurian Candidate, and accuses him of assaulting the economy. Nate Silver has the details, but this reminded me of the McCain campaign’s Manchurian Candidate nonsense from last fall (stuff that had bubbled up from the crazies periodically, I might note). Quick question- what is up with former McCain advisors chucking out the “Manchurian Candidate” stuff? Have they no clue about the plot of the book? Wikipedia:

Captain Bennett Marco, Sergeant Raymond Shaw and the rest of their platoon are captured during the Korean War in 1952. They are all brainwashed into believing Shaw saved their lives in combat, for which he receives the Medal of Honor when they return to the United States. Years after the war is over, Marco, now an intelligence officer, begins to have a recurring nightmare in which Shaw murders two of his comrades while being watched by Chinese and Russian officials. When he learns that another platoon member has been having the same dream, he sets out to uncover the mystery.

The Communists intend to use Shaw as a sleeper agent and, using the queen of diamonds in a deck of playing cards as a subconscious trigger, compel him to follow their orders, which he does not remember afterwards. Shaw is controlled by none other than his own politically ambitious and domineering mother, who is working with the Communists in a plot to overthrow the U.S. government.

American military officer captured and held as a prisoner in an Asian land for years, returned to the United States and hailed as a hero, and later on in life he starts to act erratically. I know the first person I think of from the last election is President Obama. How about you?

Seriously. Of course John McCain is not a Manchurian Candidate (an accusation which I think is a pretty nasty and ugly smear) and in fact I believe he is a genuine American hero for his service, but talk about missing the plot. Jeebus.

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Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again

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Everybody likes to re-fight battles that they’ve already lost. I’ve probably replayed the last two minutes of the 2008 Superbowl in my head a hundred times, usually with Eli Manning getting sacked or Ashante Samuel picking off that pass that was thrown right to him.

But no one likes to fight re-fight lost battles as much as today’s conservatives. The “southern strategy” is, of course, built on anger about the Civil War and civil rights movement. I’m pretty sure I once read David Brooks indicate he wished the Age of Enlightenment had never happened (and Gary Wills believes that conservatives may have re-won the War Against Enlightenment). But the mother of all battles that needs re-fighting is the FDR presidency. Not many conservatives have the balls to ally themselves with Herbert Hoover, though Amity Shlaes comes pretty damn close. And yesterday McCain and Richard Shelby came out in favor of letting Citi and Bank of America fail. In fairness, Shelby’s description of letting them “close down” sounds a lot like nationalization and, in fact, letting these two banks fail would probably usher in a second Great Depression on which they could test their neo-Hooverite theories again (I don’t think that’s too much of an exaggeration).

Luckily, going to jail seems to sober conservatives up. Conrad Black offers a shockingly lucid defense of FDR in the National Review:

The more extreme revisionists now claim that Roosevelt should not have stabilized food prices and financed, through public-works projects, flood and drought control and rural electrification, because it would have been better to starve these people off the land and to the cities, where, a generation or more later, they would have had higher standards of living. Apart from the fact that the resulting human misery would have been morally and politically unacceptable in the United States, the already militant farm unions would have disrupted the nation’s food supply. Such a policy would have put Roosevelt in the same general category of agrarian reformers as Stalin and Mao.

[….]

It is, to say the least, unrigorous for current spokespeople of the intelligent Right to claim that Roosevelt’s peacetime elimination of unemployment was a failure, that war-mongering was his real antidote to economic depression, and that the grateful electors of the most successful politician in the country’s history were hoodwinked, as FDR would have said, “again and again and again.” Instead of trying to debunk FDR, Amity Shlaes, Holman Jenkins, and even Jim Powell should complete his liberation from leftist kidnappers and claim him for themselves. He was a reformer, and also one of the very greatest conservatives in American history.

I’m not sure I buy the “Roosevelt was a conservative” line but I don’t really care: if conservatives want to take sane policies and embrace them as “conservative”, God bless them.

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Less Religulous

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Interesting new survey:

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers.

The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:

• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, “the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion,” the report concludes.

In not unrelated news:

A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help.

The nine-year-old had conceived twins after alleged abuse by her stepfather.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re told Italian paper La Stampa that the twins “had the right to live” and attacks on Brazil’s Catholic Church were unfair.

It comes a day after Brazil’s president criticised the Brazilian archbishop who excommunicated the people involved.

Brazil only permits abortions in cases of rape or health risks to the mother.

Doctors said the girl’s case met both these conditions, but the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho said the law of God was above any human law.

For an omnipotent and omniscient being, God has made some really lousy earthly staffing decisions.

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