It’s probably just a case of too much Bud Light Lime, but Jesus on a Popsicle® stick, I think this is funny.
Remember NY-23, the district where Republicans lost a Congressional seat they’ve held since the Civil War, because they split the vote between Teabagger Doug Hoffman (who ran on the Conservative Party line) and hack Dede Scozzfava (who ran on the Republican and Independence Party lines)? Well, the Independence Party just nominated someone named Matt Doheny to run on their line in the Fall. Doheny is also running against Hoffman in the Republican primary.
Whether or not Hoffman wins the Republican primary, he’s almost certain to get the Conservative Party nomination. So he and Doheny will be splitting the Republican votes yet again in NY-23, which will probably guarantee another victory for Democrat Bill Owens, despite the near-certainty of a popular revolt against Owen’s 13 months of incumbency.
(via)
uloborus
Waiter, I’ll have more of this, please. In fact, just keep it coming. There are a lot of congressional seats up for grabs in November, so I’m going to need a lot of Tea.
Mike Kay
This is why liberals need to start 3rd and 4th and 5th parties!
inkadu
And we still haven’t heard from the the Liberty Party or Constitution Party, to say nothing of the Judean People’s Front.
Roger Moore
@Mike Kay:
You’re right. We need to start an America First Party, a Tea Party, a State’s Rights Party, and a Crazy Wingnut Party. That should be enough to split the right wing vote wide enough that they’ll never be able to stop us.
Midnight Marauder
I think these people are well beyond shooting themselves in the foot. They are pulling the trigger directly into their faces.
Cacti
Scozzafava was the Republican candidate. Your typical northeastern Rockefeller Republican (read: a few moderate to liberal positions).
Hoffman was a Tea Party carpetbagger from outside the district, supported by Talk Radio, Newt Gingrich, Fred Thompson, the Club for Growth, and a host of monied national right wing interests.
Spaghetti Lee
@Roger Moore:
Too late: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Party_(2002)
beltane
Second verse, same as the first. Bill Owens is a beacon of sanity in a sea of crazy. He is more in the mold of the non-crazy Republicans who used to represent that district than the current crop of lunatics.
beltane
@Midnight Marauder: We can only hope.
inkadu
@Cacti: “Teabagging carpetbagger” has a nice ring to it, even if it might create a confusing mental picture.
lol
@Mike Kay:
Jane Hamsher’s already way ahead of you.
Warren Terra
Slight antecedent fail there, I think:
should be:
Because the post only makes sense if you mean that Hoffman is a shoo-in to secure the Republican nomination, and Doheny is guaranteed the Conservative nomination. Mind you, if Doheny were to win the Republican nomination, there would be no ticket splitting, so your saying “whether or not” doesn’t really make sense.
Mike Kay
Who’s running on the PUMA ticket and on the Firebag slate?
Mike Kay
@lol: I hear she’s holding the party convention in Hanoi.
Chris G.
I love it when a clusterfrak comes together.
Cacti
If anybody wants to laugh and point at FDL (again), here’s
their
pre-election cheering for a Hoffman winanalysis of Bill Owens’ impending doom…The Failure of Blue Dogging
stuckinred
But Jane is soooo pretty and she’s the only one that tells the truth. BTW , they are having a big fundraiser over there now.
mistermix
@Warren Terra:
It’s complicated and I’ve had a couple of beers (not Bud Light Lime), but here’s what I meant to say:
Doheny has the Independence line.
Hoffman is almost certain to get the Conservative line. He had it for the special election, Conservatives are New York’s teabaggers, and Hoffman is a teabagger.
Depending on the outcome of the primary, either one of those clowns may get the Republican line, but it doesn’t matter. Each of them already has a spot on the ballot.
So, they a split in the Republican (or conservative) vote is almost guaranteed, greasing the skids for another Owens victory.
Elisabeth
I’m a little cranky today because I haven’t completely gone through menopause yet and I’m stuck at work listening to a band with more ambition than talent take me on a 80s musical tour but do we really have to include some Hamsher and/or Greenwald bashing in every thread? Is there a Balloon Juice rule that such is required now? I’m no Hamsher fan but she’s only really relevant to a handful of anonymous bloggers and yet she seems to pop up in nearly every thread here. Frankly, it’s tiresome and beyond old.
end of rant
stuckinred
@Elisabeth: No one is anymore anonymous than you are. If you are so unhappy about it why don’t you read something else?
arguingwithsignposts
@beltane:
Well, I’ve always heard it was “Third verse same as the first” (OK Go cover)
The Other Chuck
No, what’s funny is the ad running on the left margin. “Stop unchecked liberal power. Join the National Republican Committee today”.
I’m tempted to go there and register some names (first, middle, last) like “YOU LOST DEAL” and “SUCK ON IT”.
arguingwithsignposts
@Elisabeth:
Sadly, no. She gets appearances on cable news networks, and she somehow manages to raise money for candidates, so, no she’s relevant beyond us pseudonymous bloggers. But I don’t engage in the firebagger bashing in every thread. Usually, my riposte is as follows: “Grover Fucking Norquist.”
CalD
IMHO, the very best thing that could happen to the Republican party would be to lose badly in November. The fact that it would also be the best possible thing for everyone else is cake.
Mike Kay
@Cacti:
ahahahhahahahhahahhahahahahhahahaha
Beyond parody.
Meanwhile, I just saw that Charlie Crist is up by 11 points in florida, and that reminded me of commander Markos take-it-to-the-bank-mortal-lock-bet-the-house prediction that if Crist went third party he would lose.
They’re like Nostradamus in reverse.
Mike Kay
@Elisabeth:
hear, hear! it takes away precious space away from the obama bashing in every thread.
mellowjohn
@ arguingwithsignposts:
i first heard “second verse, same as the first” in herman’s hermets “i’m henry the eighth” – a cover of an old english music hall song, iirc. (c. 1965)
joe from Lowell
There are all kinds of bullets meeting feet this year. The Senate race in Kentucky should be a foregone conclusion. Arlen Spector (R-PA) should be cruising to victory. Charlie Crist (R-FL) should be cruising to victory.
And Nevada…what the hell is wrong with Republicans in Nevada?
beltane
@Mike Kay: To be fair, Markos has been pushing a Crist indy candidacy for almost the past year. He was accused of being an unprincipled shill by many of his commenters for doing this.
Jane is just f##king nuts.
Violet
@Elisabeth:
No, there is not a rule. It is not required. It is a choice. Just like most things that are done here at Balloon Juice.
jeffreyw
Hot off the grill.
No Hamshers were mocked during production of this photo.
Elisabeth
@stuckinred:
heh. Even with the seeminly obligatory bashing this is still the best place to be; I’ll just go back to lurking and minding my own business. And praying the crappy music outside my window stops soon.
bemused
Speaking of Florida, what the heck is going on with the 2 tea parties there? One tea party says the Florida tea party is not the real tea party, other tea party is the real tea party. That’s goofy enough but what does Alan Grayson have to do with this tea party fight?
Midnight Marauder
@joe from Lowell:
In what respect, Charlie?
stuckinred
@Elisabeth: Aw don’t make us feel bad. I’ll stop for now.
Mike Kay
@beltane:
well, we’re not in disagreement. He was pushing a Crist party switch, but he said if Crist went Indie he would lose.
“For the past year, I’ve been arguing that Crist’s collapse in the GOP primary was inevitable, that his only path to the Senate was by switching parties and becoming a Democrat. Well, that window of opportunity has closed.”
beltane
@bemused: The tea partiers are like monkeys on a bus. After a mile or two they can’t help but bite and throw feces at each other.
maye
I just subjected myself to almost an hour of Hardball. I was feeling close to suicidal when I turned on my computer. I was so relieved to see a news story about Kim Kardashian’s new boyfriend. I’m so grateful for something that’s not about oil, war or financial ruin. God bless trash tv and celebrity gossip. It’s like throwing a Hershey bar to a starving woman.
Mike Kay
@Elisabeth: buy if you go galt, and pull a KO, then the terrorists win.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Totally OT but my context sensitive advertising popped on BJ popped up Whataburger. Good stuff.
Violet
@maye:
And Bachelor Jake and his “fiance” Vienna broke up! Never saw that one coming.
Oh, sorry. Back on topic. Bachelor Jake comes across as an annoying Republican. Utterly plastic and fake on the outside with a heart of greed. When he grows up, he’ll be a great teabagger.
beltane
@Mike Kay: Now he’s all about the Crist-love. I think he’s written off Kendrick Meek for good. Markos also endorsed Dede Scozzafava hoping to get the teabaggers’ panties in a bunch. He can be wrong a lot of the time, but he’s by no means in the same category as Hamsher. There are one or two other front pagers I’m not so sure about, though.
frankdawg
I know you are just pushing stories like this to get my hopes up that we might recover as a country through no fault of the sane people left in it. That’s just sadistic!
I was finally getting comfortable with my fatalistic acceptance of our decent into madness and now you toss this slender thread that I should hope the insane will save us from their own insanity. thanks . . . for nothing. :)
uloborus
@bemused:
Oh, that’s happening all over the place. That’s one of the reasons I never feared armed rebellion despite their constant talking about it. There are HUNDREDS of Tea Parties, and they’re splitting into smaller units all the time. When you fetishize idealistic purity you start discovering that absolutely no one agrees with you 100% on everything. They spend a lot of time purging each other over whether praying before a meeting is obligatory and stuff like that.
Mike Kay
reading through some of the threads on friendly blogs, early this morning, people were clammering for McQuack’s head. They they got it and then POOF, they had nothing to say. Even here, there was little said after the firing.
Which reminds me of this ROFLOL satire on how depressed Wile E. Coyote would get if he actually caught the Road Runner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRzcCbjQ_5I&feature=related
This proves to me what I’ve always felt: the calls for obama to pound the podium or to scream and “articulate our anger” and “affirm our outrage” are like kids demanding ice cream. It tastes great, buy it leaves you hungry and unnourished.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I don’t think Jane is trying to start a separate party. I think she’s just trying convince a lot of people that they will be a lot more effective by whining about how the party they are no longer working to change is not doing what they want.
conumbdrum
i first heard “second verse, same as the first” in herman’s hermets “i’m henry the eighth” – a cover of an old english music hall song, iirc. (c. 1965)
Oh… I was going to attribute that one to the Ramones, circa 1977: “Jackie was a Punk.”
Which one is it, Beltane? Music geek reputations are on the line here…
Mike Kay
@maye: I saw the first five minutes and that’s all I could watch.
Typically Tweety: “did the president go too far or did the president go far enough?”
Beyond parody.
maye
@Mike Kay: the interview at the end with the guy from Shell Oil put me over the edge.
Violet
@Mike Kay:
Tweety on the sky: “Is the sky too blue or not blue enough?”
On food: “How much is too much?”
On happiness: “Overrated or under-appreciated?”
Serve the man up a topic and he can argue both sides of the issue, just for the sake of arguing.
Tweety on Tweety: “Too bombastic or not bombastic enough?”
dmsilev
@Mike Kay: In retrospect, it was probably for the best that the show was interrupted for me by (a) a long phone conversation and (b) a tornado warning, which included replacing Tweety with a National Weather Service warning plus a bunch of city-wide sirens.
dms
Mnemosyne
@arguingwithsignposts:
That was my thought, too. I think I had that entire album memorized by the time I was 18.
arguingwithsignposts
@Violet:
Tweety: You know, when I was growing up in Pennsylvania, real blue collar stuff, real Americans didn’t listen to all this political stuff. Do you feel that, general? Can you feel what these lunch pail guys and gals are feeling? Because that’s the heart of America – those gritty folks who get up and go to work each day.
Mike Kay
@Violet: it’s always, did the president overreach or did the president fail. it’s never did the president succeed.
arguingwithsignposts
@Mnemosyne:
we’re dating ourselves here. and who the hell is herman’s hermits? ;)
Mike Kay
I wish the President would use some Grecian Formula, his hair is turning gray too too quickly.
But he’s so arrogant he doesn’t care what his base wants.
bemused
@Mike Kay:
Hah. I have to steal that one.
Peter J
Actually, this is why election reform is badly needed. What’s needed is preferential voting so that starting or supporting a third party on the other side of the aisle no longer will work as a way to draw votes from your opponent.
I don’t want democrats to start fake tea parties and I don’t want republicans to go vote canvasing to help Nader.
Kirk Spencer
@arguingwithsignposts: Herman’s Hermits? They were an opening act for a Monkees reunion tour.
danimal
The GOP has utterly failed in candidate selection. The mild GOP favorability ratings do not translate to a majority because there are too many crazies running as Republicans (plus the teaparty splinter parties don’t help them at all). The generic GOP candidate may outperform the generic Dem opponent, but the public votes on actual candidates. The expected GOP tidal wave will only be a trickle.
Tom Q
Old guy piping in: Herman’s Hermits were a VERY successful pop group of the mid-60s, part of the British invasion that swept in on the Beatles’ coattails. They had any number of number one songs, including I’m Henry VIII I Am, Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat and Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter. Their hits extended till about 1967, when A Kind of Hush (which I think turned up in a commercial recently) was their last top 40 entry. They made movies, too.
Be prepared for 40 years from now, when younger folk will not have heard of groups you know by second nature today.
arguingwithsignposts
@Tom Q:
Yep, a year before I was born. I’ve heard of some HH songs, but I’ve owned some Beatles albums. Says a lot there.
AxelFoley
@The Other Chuck:
You, sir, have won the internets. I know, others have won it, too, but this is for real.
Steeplejack
@arguingwithsignposts:
“Second verse, same as the first.” Documentary evidence: Herman’s Hermits on the Ed Sullivan show (0:40 on clip).
ETA: Possibly their most execrable song. “No Milk Today” offered as a palate-cleansing sorbet.
Steeplejack
@mellowjohn:
What you said.
Steeplejack
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Er, possibly I triggered that with my comment in the other thread. “Sorry” or “You’re welcome,” depending on your reaction.
I’m jonesin’ for one now, myself.
ETA: Guess I couldn’t have caused that, since my comment was hours after yours. Damn you, space-time continuum!
Steeplejack
@conumbdrum:
Let the record speak for itself.