I think Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog might be on to something.
Why July, though? Because congressmen are out of town?
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.
The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.
Damn right I heard that as a threat.
The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.
Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.
The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.
Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.
This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.
The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.
Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.
Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.
When I was faster i was always behind.
Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?
Tick tock motherfuckers!
Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.
Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.
Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.
Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.
Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.
We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.
And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.
Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.
The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.
We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.
Yutsano
How’s about all of the above?
jl
Repetitious resentment can only go so far.
They need to start demands for reparations for the Tan Tax racism against white people. That will turn them out, and expand the demographic beyond bitter old white dudes. Fer sher.
Johnny Bones can stand up and be a victim.
I’m going to apply for a job with Fox, I shouldn’t be giving these brilliant ideas away for free! IMHO.
demkat620
This is exactly the time last year when they ramped up the towwnhall spectacle and The Celebrity Ad in 2008.
I wouldn’t expect this to be the only thing they crank out this summer.
Tom Hilton
Why does the phrase “long hot summer” come to mind?
Nellcote
@Yutsano:
When did they ever stop calling him a racist?
Roger Moore
@jl:
That’s what you think. They just need to keep turning the volume up higher and higher. Unfortunately for them, it’s already turned up to 11.
Hunter Gathers
Racism after Labor Day is so gauche.
The summer is for hot dogs, baseball, and bitching about black people.
beltane
It’s not like Republicans are going to partake in normal summer activities such as going to the beach. I remain impressed by the way their base froths on cue every time the reparations card is pulled out. Even the dumbest golden retriever would get tired of this game after a while, but the average Republican falls for it every single time. They are dumber than the dumbest golden retriever without being anywhere near as good natured. What type of dog does that make them?
Hunter Gathers
@jl:
And Snookie will lead them in a chorus of “We shall overcome”.
MikeJ
@Hunter Gathers: That’s true. All white for the summer, then you can have black and brown for the fall.
kay
Are Republicans going to do this my entire adult life?
Don’t we have whole scholarly works on this tactic, going back decades? We have admissions, we have some who recanted or repudiated the tactic, apologies, defenders, denials, panel discussions.. for God’s sake.
Switch it up a little, conservatives. I’m bored.
james low
The Orange People demand reparations in the form of free tanning vouchers.
cat48
My husband & I almost spit out our wine when we heard this Rush line:
300baud
Wow. And the first commentator is talking coup d’etat.
I’m not worried about that. But it does remind me of those maps where North America gets split between The United States of Canada and Jesusland.
General Stuck
The lizard brain cortex is finely tuned to seek out the vulnerable, distracted voters, when the press is looking for shark attacks and congress is off fleecing their individual flocks. The hate goes straight into the human brain stem where all sorts of monsters live, antenna tuned, listening for dog whistles that work on the conscious mind. Folks are thinking about picnics and sounds of the summer playtime, but all the while Fox News marches on in the background, with little sound bytes deployed to target the bigot brain cells hidden in dark places, of even mostly modern brains. And presto, before you know it, these peeps start worrying about deficits where they didn’t before, though not having a clue what they mean.
And when the lights go out and demons of the night come out while counting sheep, some of those sheep turn black. And appear way too collective, if you know wut i mean.
cat48
Why July? Remember last year the prez told us that “the Press gets all wee wee’d up in the summer.” I guess someone should ask him why if they get a chance.
Ross Hershberger
More likely the editorial staff is all off horsing around on vacation. They dusted off something easy from last year figuring nobody would notice it was recycled.
300baud
@beltane:
That I can almost get. If they don’t know enough to know that it’s BS, then I imagine it would be upsetting.
What totally blows my mind is their utter inability to say, “Wait, if just the idea makes me mad, I wonder how centuries of historical reality make black people feel?” But no.
Maybe that makes sense, too, though. What time do you have for empathy now that the Two Minutes’ Hate has become a 24-hour news channel?
Keith
Seeing as how Beck has inexplicably decided to co-op MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech (how the FUCK is there not more outrage over this?!), I am actually surprised that they aren’t pulling this crap in June(teenth). Shameless race-baiting on their part, and 100x shame on the media for not making a bigger deal out of this. Tons to be outraged over, but this shit is utterly disgraceful.
kay
@beltane:
This dumb:
“Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” Mehlman said at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
What’s weird is, Mehlman gave that speech in JULY, 2005.
I kept wondering when they would apologize to the rest of the country, because cynical racial division for political gain harms the whole country, but they never got around to that.
They didn’t mean a word of it. They’ve simply expanded the plan to include brown people.
Expect another heart-felt apology in 2040. Blah-fucking-blah.
Restrung
@jl:
Spit take. hehe, hadn’t thought of it that way. Nice one.
El Cid
Reparations? They’d be lucky to get reparations. Obama’s gonna reinstitute the old Arab slave trade, but on your precious blonde white teens.
JGabriel
Because, as Andrew Card put it, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
September is for new product roll-out, and July is for re-entrenching the old memes and shoring up your base with the tried and true, to remind them that you’re still there and to keep them engaged for the upcoming shiny new tricks and trade.
.
Chad N Freude
It’s even worse than that. Zandar has a comment on the cited blogpost that links to his posting about a Rush Limbaugh bradcast.
M. Bouffant
There was plenty of chatter in the reactionary blog-o-sphere about “Negroes & Anarchists” (Band name already copyrighted.) plotting to burn Oakland to the ground after the Oscar Grant verdict.
I’m sure they’re all quite disappointed w/ the anarchy. I know I am.
Chad N Freude
When Obama was elected, I thought that that we had finally overcome the nation’s racist history and were showing the world that we really are color-blind (or at least had finally achieved color-blindness). My naiveté was surpassed only by my wishful thinking. (I wasn’t deluded enough to think that the parts of the country where racism is ingrained in the culture were suddenly going to change, just that we were finally over it as a nation.) I now think it’s gotten worse, and I won’t live to see it change. Maybe it’s forever. I’m really depressed about this.
kay
@Chad N Freude:
I think voter suppression was really key, hence the absolute balls to the wall blatant race-baiting, and the focus on the civil rights division at the DOJ.
They’ve completely given up on ever attracting non-white voters, which is itself sort of frightening. The numbers don’t really work.
You gotta wonder about that. If I go back to even 2005-6, there was some attempt to hide this or have candidates distance themselves. No more. Whatever the Democrats did re: voter protection in 2008, they better redouble in 2010. Republicans don’t have a Plan B, longer term. They’re actively repelling non-white voters, and they aren’t a bit worried about that.
Chad N Freude
@kay: Do we have any reliable statistics or evidence about voter suppression?
AhabTRuler
@El Cid:
That’s OK, unpaid labor doesn’t contribute to our inflation problem.
kay
@Chad N Freude:
I’m more hopeful than that. True believer conservative voters are in a real logical bind. They (finally!) got to the economic promised land, where deregulated markets ruled and conservatives were running all three branches, and the whole economic system collapsed on them. Individuals got hurt.
It can’t be The Dogma, so they need someone to blame.
And there’s Obama.
If Rush tells the truth, he’s out of a job, and the disciples need an explanation.
Chad N Freude
@kay: Yeah, well I think if Bush were in his fantasy third term they wouldn’t be upset with him. They’d be mad as hell at someone, but not the white president that they supported so avidly before.
And “Rush” and “truth” should never appear in the same sentence. Or paragraph.
QuaintIrene
Off for the month of July? I thought that was August.
Oh wait, that’s psychiatrists.
kay
@Chad N Freude:
I actually know a lot about this, and “suppression” is both too broad and too narrow. It’s one of those issues that is hard to discuss rationally, partly because election law is state law, so there are 50 different schemes. The federal civil rights framework overlays those schemes, and then it’s further complicated by HAVA (Help America Vote Act) which was put in place post-2000 debacle.
I believe there is little or no data to justify the Republican belief that there is wide-spread or election-consequence-producing voter fraud. Beginning in 2004, Republicans made a concerted and successful effort to institute voter ID provisions (state law) that have a disparate impact on minority voters. Indiana’s and Georgia’s are the most draconian. This myth is completely set in stone now. Rank and file Republicans believe there is massive voter fraud in this country, further, they believe voting is a “privilege” (like buying booze or driving) not a “right”, so there’s no middle ground. We aren’t going to reach agreement.
You’re either “access” (like me) or “fraud protection” (like them). I can split a room in two. It’s a way of thinking.
However, I think the whole issue was muddied by what amounted to liberal myths on fraud using voting machines, and further complicated by a real misunderstanding by “regular” (read: middle class) voters about how poor or marginal people don’t have ready ID, because they don’t have bank accounts, etc. Middle class voters think the ID provisions are not onerous, and they aren’t, unless you’re poor or young or marginal, and then they are.
Anyway, I take the voter protection training each year, and I stay available election day, but I no longer work at the polls, because I feel too strongly about the issue to discuss it rationally with (local) GOP pollworkers who don’t share my belief that voting is a civil right, not a privilege. I was going to start throwing chairs.
Now I take questions on a cell phone, from voters who are refused or given a provisional ballot. I don’t think I would be much help if I ended up arrested, and that’s where we were heading.
Do I think the ID laws were passed to have a disparate impact on Democratic voters? Yeah. I do. I think that because there’s no evidence of anything like widespread voter fraud. There have been 9 voter fraud convictions in Ohio in the last ten years.
That’s not even a blip, in terms of “crime”. They “solved” a problem that doesn’t exist. So why did they do that?
Roger Moore
@Chad N Freude:
Is it fair to point out that you just used “Rush” and “truth” in the same sentence, or is that just too meta? Besides, I’m sure that there are ways of using the two in the same sentence fairly, like, “Rush has such great respect for the power of the truth that he avoids speaking it.”
Awktalk
It doesn’t help when the New Black Panthers leader uses the “r”-word, as he did today on Faux News during an interview when asked about fighting for equal rights.
kay
@Chad N Freude:
My sister in law was a big Bush supporter and she still loves him. She attended a pro-life conference somewhere recently where he gave what she presented as a sort of mea culpa on Iraq and she drunkenly harangued me to accept that he “did the best he could” and “everyone had the same intelligence”.
She pursued me at a family vacation event inside, got me alone, to present me with this sort of belligerent demand, so it must be pretty important to her that I agree.
“He’s a good man”.
Okey doke. There’s half a million dead people, but don’t let them spoil his “legacy”.
Chad N Freude
@kay: Thanks for the dissertation. I am appalled by the notion that voting is a “privilege”, although the way it’s managed by most states, if not all, it’s not much different from driving a car. And massive voter fraud is now firmly embedded in the zeitgeist, evidence to the contrary be damned.
I’m not sure what liberal myths about voting machines you’re referring to. There were serious security/information integrity issues with Diebold machines (and others if memory serves). Without troubling to do a fact check, I’m willing to say that there have been a number of suspicious data (i.e., votes) manglings and losses in places where computer-based voting machines were used.
Chad N Freude
@Roger Moore: Dude, I said “should”, as in “I should lose weight and exercise”. But your observation of the ironic cognitive dissonance is not lost on me.
Chad N Freude
@kay: You have my most profound sympathy. I’m lucky, all of my relatives are flaming liberals. Well, maybe not my brother-in-law so much, but my sister keeps him in check.
Wile E. Quixote
@Nellcote:
I want to start hammering on Huckabee and start calling him a cop-killer and a rapist.
kay
@Chad N Freude:
I think there are potential security issues with voting machines. I think there were some weird results in isolated cases, but I never saw anything that convinced me that there was deliberate or systematic voting machine fraud. My problem with the rumors were that made it easy to do “on the one hand, on the other hand” media analysis: “liberals say voting machine fraud, conservatives say voter fraud”. There’s not enough to back either claim up.
In the 2004 election, in Ohio, there were issues with the allocation of voting machines. Sadly, that actually happened
But, County Bds of Elections are in charge of securing and delivering sufficient machines, and there are an equal number of Republicans and Democrats on each county board. The people who failed those 2004 voters were the members of the local Bds of Election, or pollworkers, or Bd of Election employees, and it was incompetence, not deliberate suppression.
There is so much confusion and nuttiness surrounding elections since 2000. When you really drill down into the mundane details and mechanics, on a county by county basis, you find poorly trained pollworkers who fuck up, not fraud.
My big issue with voter ID laws is that pollworkers do not apply the regs equitably. A voter who is a poor reader or cowed by officialdom is likely to accept whatever pollworker decision is handed down, and the decisions are arbitrary.
El Cid
@Awktalk: Black Panther leaders have always used the “R” word and always will.
Hey, give ’em credit for turning California white conservatives (including Ronald Reagan) against 2nd Amendment rights when they saw black people carrying guns.
Hob
@300baud:
I’m pretty sure that a lot of them really do think about that… except that the lesson they take from it is more like this:
“Yeah, I sure am right to be afraid of black people– better never give ’em an inch, or they’ll rob me and kill me like they constantly dream of doing. They’re full of nothing but greed and hate. They must be. I mean, I’m full of greed and hate, and I haven’t been kicked in the nuts for 300 years; think how much worse someone must be who has an excuse!”
Mnemosyne
@Chad N Freude:
I don’t know that it’s gotten worse so much as it’s gotten more apparent. We’ve had to deal with these stupid racist dogwhistles since at least Nixon, but they were better able to keep things under wraps by implying that, say, Bill Clinton was a n-lover and a race traitor than when they have an actual, real, honest-to-God BLACK MAN standing right up in front of them.
It’s kind of like Tunch’s ass problem. The abscess was there for a while, working away under the skin, but Cole didn’t notice it until it worked its way to the surface and burst in all of its nasty, smelly, pus-filled glory. So it is, I think, like this current outburst of racism — it’s always been this gross, but it was festering under the surface and now we can actually see it and smell it out in the daylight.
(Yes, I’ve been dying to compare the Republicans to Tunch’s stinky, nasty, disgusting butt abscess ever since Cole started posting about it. It works, though.)
asiangrrlMN
@Awktalk: WTF is the “r” word? Racism? Redneck? Ridiculous? Rambunctious? Rebellious? Ratshitfuckingcrazy?
@Chad N Freude: Think of it as the last gasps of the culture war. The racist, sexist, homophobic asshat bigots are losing their country, and they are not going to go quietly into the night. They are going down in flames, and they are taking as many people with them as possible. The younger generation, for the most part, doesn’t give a shit about these hot-button issues, so the bigots have to get in their licks while they can. In other words, it’s gonna get muthafuckin’ ugly up in here for the next couple decades at the very least.
@Hob: You got it. They know how much the country fucked with minorities, and they know how poorly the white people in power acted for the last, well, entire existence of this country. They are very afraid that payback will, indeed, be a bitch.
debbie
@Keith:
I really thought people would be jumping all over Beck for his chutzpah on that. On the other hand, I haven’t heard much publicity for it. I wonder if he’s getting the kind of audience interest he thought he would.
Paris
I think the A team at Faux goes on vacation in July and the B team is lazy so they just recycle stuff.