Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

This really is a full service blog.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Fight them, without becoming them!

I really should read my own blog.

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

Books are my comfort food!

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Petty moves from a petty man.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

When we show up, we win.

People are weird.

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Reader Interactions

106Comments

  4. 4.

    MattR

    @kdaug:

    Good news? From anywhere? Anyone?

    Well, I picked my dog up from the kennel a half hour ago and she is quite happy to see me.

  9. 9.

    DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective

    Well, from what I heard on tv yesterday, I gleaned that the “voter intimidation” events associated with the New Black Panthers involved a district in which there were about two dozen Republican votes out of 1500 total votes.

    So, not only do these NBPs have almost no membership, they also appear to have no common sense about politics.

    Just another fringe group in a country full of little odd fringe groups. Only notable because they are B L A C K.

    The difference between us, Dems, and them, GOP, is that our guy, Obama, can and will step up and say that antics like those of NBP have no place in our politics, whereas the assholes on the right don’t have the class or the guts to step up and say that the onboxious antics on the right have no place in our politics.

  11. 11.

    Zifnab

    If Steve Jobs can assuage customers’ fears about a design flaw with a simple press conference, why can’t Obama do the same for national fears about the New Black Panther Party?

    You mean this press conference?
    http://hijinksensue.com/2010/07/16/first-world-problems/

    The only people who feel better about the Jobs press conference are the people who have accepted the fact they just purchased a $600 plastic turd. Oh, and the Apple haters.

  12. 12.

    Rommie

    Obama can’t give away cases to protect Real Americans from the NBPP problem. He can’t handwave that the problem doesn’t really exist, because shut up, that’s why. He’s a soc-beral, so Obama can’t solve problems, Big Corporate style. This is ironclad ^proof of the President’s EPIC FAIL.

    ^ Because proof is troof from certain point of view, of course.

  13. 13.

    Mark S.

    Going to the candidates debate.

    McCain has a twenty point lead, so earlier indications that Walnuts was in the fight of his life were wrong. Still, if you’re in the mood for immigrant bashing and watching a couple of guys who hate each other.

  15. 15.

    licensed to kill time

    DougJ, the title should be rubber baby buggy bumper, ’cause the iPhone be buggy ;-)

  17. 17.

    burnspbesq

    @Zifnab:

    a $600 plastic turd.

    Say what, now? My plastic turd is only costing me $299 plus tax. You need to shop harder.

  19. 19.

    superking

    So, I was listening to Marketplace on NPR last night and in the course of a story, a guy from the Cato Institute finally admitted that Republicans are vindictive children:

    Patrick Michaels: I’m absolutely unsurprised by this result. That’s Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. He shrugged at the study’s results that show “nudging” ended up reducing energy consumption by a little, 1 to 2 percent. But here’s the real headline: Some Republican households responded by using more power. Michaels: If you tell a class of grade schoolers, “no talking right now,” I guarantee you somebody’s going to talk. This is not quite as command-and-control as that, but it is a little bit paternalistic on the part of the energy companies.

    http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/07/15/pm-bringing-both-sides-for-conservation/

  20. 20.

    dmsilev

    @Redshirt: Ah, but Obama wasn’t President yet in 2008. McCain never said anything about his ability to stand up to another Senator…

    dms

  24. 24.

    Jay B.

    Get your post hoc rationales ready, Obots:

    The marker has been laid down — Elizabeth Warren needs to head the new Consumer Protection Agency.

    Odds she gets nominated AND confirmed? Odds she gets nominated and then the Senate lets that nomination wither? Odds Obama will look like he got rolled?

    Oh, this one has everything wrapped in one. Liberals wanting something specifically good to come out of dubious, but not totally horrible, legislation, “centrists” in the Senate ready to smack her down, a suspect Administration insider (Timmeh) who doesn’t like her , a poorly-sourced article claiming he doesn’t want her in this position, tons of back peddling and double-talking already AND a pre-baked theory that Ben Nelson’s support on this was predicated on Warren not being the nominee.

    It’s utterly meaningless, of course. But it’s pretty easy to see how this one will play out and, by giving a shit on outcomes, liberals once again set themselves up for failure.

    Your guesses?

  25. 25.

    Redshirt

    @dmsilev: While true, if I’m an Arizonan voter (thanks FSM I am not!), the first thing that comes to mind by that line is “Heh, didn’t Obama beat the dickens out of you just a while back?”

  28. 28.

    cleek

    revolution or civil war? The Choice Is Ours.

    there’s some seriously fucked-up shit on the other side of that link, my friends.

    If we fail to re-take at least one house of Congress, the peaceful Revolution will not happen. The match will be lit. We will be forced into a very ugly, bloody, Civil War that will make the first one look like a Sunday stroll in the park.
    …
    The Americans who still have some semblance of reality (and fight left in them) will begin to organize into small, then huge militias in the various States. The skirmishes will start out small in fly-over country, and there will be serious bloodshed as the Government attempts to quell the uprisings. Remember that match being lit? The Governments’ use of deadly force on her citizens will ignite the rage that will sweep across the nation, like a wildfire on a hot, dry prairie in August. A lot of very good men and women will die fighting for our Liberty and Freedom
    …
    At the very least, the major metropolitan areas will be isolated (they are already surrounded by Red) and there will be no escape. To get anything in or out of a Blue county, it has to go through Red at some point. Good luck with that. When the Blue areas are sufficiently starved, they will come looking for food, and they will either be set right to the facts, pardoned or pacified. If not, we will refresh the tree of liberty with their blood!

    wingnuts, march!

    tell me again who hates America…

  30. 30.

    Mnemosyne

    @DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:

    Well, from what I heard on tv yesterday, I gleaned that the “voter intimidation” events associated with the New Black Panthers involved a district in which there were about two dozen Republican votes out of 1500 total votes.

    See? That just proves the intimidation worked since the masses of Republican voters in that district stayed home!
    /wingnut

  31. 31.

    Brachiator

    The NY Times has an interesting piece on the people (basically two) behind the snopes site, who do God’s own work trying to save people from their own stupidity. One tidbit that explains all manner of nutcakes, including most tea baggers (At Snopes.com, Rumors Are Held Up to the Light):

    Q: You would think that with the instant communications of Internet, that all this misinformation and urban legend stuff, that people would catch on that it’s not true.
    __
    A: The flaw in that theory is that for a good many people, it’s not important whether things are true or not. It reflects what people want to believe. It reflects a worldview. It’s their way of passing along things that concern them. Things they’re afraid of.
    __
    Like it could be, “I don’t care if Richard Nixon really did this. It sounds like something he would have done.” A lot of people are unwilling to acknowledge anything that contradicts their worldview. So telling them that it’s false doesn’t necessarily slow them down. That’s how urban legends get started for the most case.

    I recently had to deal with this professionally when a customer sent our office a chain email explaining how that evil Obama’s health care plan was going to force everyone to include their health insurance in their W2 income for 2011 so, of course, everybody should vote Republican in November. I had to patiently explain to the customer that this was this patently false, and was able to provide a link to snopes that gave all the background on this nonsense.

    The sad thing is, that places like snopes can only slow the BS down a little, they can never stop it outright.

    Oh, yeah, and apparently the nursery rhyme “ring around the rosy, pocket full of posey” does not refer to the plague. People just tried to backfill an explanation for one variant of song lyrics of indefinite origin.

  32. 32.

    matoko_chan

    Breitbart is going mad.

    Let me say something a tad newsworthy to the president of the NAACP. You can go to hell. … I have tapes…tape of racism and it’s an NAACP dinner. You want to play with fire? I have evidence of racism and it’s coming from the NAACP.”

    what are these people thinking? they are just rage-ravers anymore.
    Their rage is so overpowering that they have completely lost sight of their objective….that they HAVE to start attracting minority voters or go down to the demographic timer in 2020 for good.

  36. 36.

    BombIranForChrist

    Pshew, once again, I have been wise to faithfully follow my little list of life rules:

    1. Write name on underwear.
    2. Never buy a first generation of anything from Apple.

  38. 38.

    Josh

    @cleek:

    That sounds like a strategy I used once when I was playing Command and Conquer: Red Alert when I was playing as the Soviets (Red) and stomping the Allies (Blue).

    However, it’s so ridiculous that I have to think it’s either parody, or some dude forgot to take his medicine

    I mean, because every conservative thinks that this kind of thing is a good idea, I’m sure. All of the red areas on the map are crazy sympathizers and the blue are the commie mooslem sympathizers who hate freedumb, right?

  39. 39.

    matoko_chan

    @Brachiator: i really enjoyed this Jonah Lehrer piece on cognitive dissonance, fact-blocking and backfire effect.
    This comment especially rawked.

    Hi Jonah. You said… “And it’s worth pointing out that this irrationality applies to both sides of the political spectrum.)”
    But you overlooked something in the Boston Globe article you were writing about. The article is mainly about the so-called “backfire” effect, wherein contrary information not only doesn’t inform but actually strengthens the existing (and incorrect) belief, thus backfiring. Seems irrational, right? Here’s what the article says about this irrationality applying across the board:
    Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.
    For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.
    In other words, the backfire effect did not occur “across the board.” It was observed among conservatives and not among liberals, at least in this portion of the study. However, blocking out facts that were inconvenient did occur among liberals, as well. This shows that liberals are not immune to these irrational tendencies, but it does not show that the irrationality discussed in the Globe article is evenly distributed across the political spectrum. I think that’s an important qualifier.
    I also think that there’s a danger of PC thinking taking over here. In being careful not to encourage fantasies among liberals of being immune from these tendencies, which is an entirely valid thing to do, some writers, I have noticed, are too quick to suggest that a kind of symmetry reigns over political behavior. I don’t think we should be doing that.
    By the way, here’s a link to the full study:
    http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pd
    Posted by: Jay Rosen | July 13, 2010 1:48 PM

  40. 40.

    some other guy

    So now bearing arms in a public place is considered intimidation? I eagerly await right-wing demands for Holder to prosecute the assholes who insist on being able to go anywhere and everywhere with handguns strapped to their 60″ belts.

    Or is it only “intimidation” when the people brandishing weapons are black?

  41. 41.

    Third Eye Open

    @cleek: Yeah, we dipped our toes into that little Cesspit yesterday.

    But, I am sure that this does not reflect on Redstate or EE in any way, other than its been on their hotlist all week. Too bad a majority of these He-men can’t be bothered to say this without anonymity. Fucking reprobates…

  44. 44.

    Jay B.

    @kdaug:

    It’s going to be a federal agency, it’s hard to see how it’s just an appointment — I think it’ll involve a whole nomination process.

  46. 46.

    Nethead Jay

    @PeakVT: That picture has been all over my friendslist and some of the memeverse sites the last few days, usually with the caption “Fuck you, owl”. Still cracks me up but I can’t explain why.

  47. 47.

    Bubblegum Tate

    @Brachiator:

    At my favorite wingnut blog, snopes and factcheck.org are both considered unsuitable sources of information because of–you guessed it!–liberal bias.

  50. 50.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @Brachiator:

    The sad thing is, that places like snopes can only slow the BS down a little, they can never stop it outright.

    So the score is
    Snopes: 12
    Monkeys Flinging Poo: 14,250,779

    Nobody could have predicted such an inglorious end to the Snopes Monkey Trial.

  51. 51.

    Third Eye Open

    @Toast: Blasphemy! I would totally buy it, but then I would never get my thesis done. Plus, its not for console, which is teh suxxors!

    @Josh:
    I totally await the next ME. I just hope they finally fix the damn resource searching mechanism. ME2 was way better than ME1 in that respect, but still left a lot to be desired, IMHO.

    Have you folks seen the screenshots for Brink? That looks like a pretty good game, at least for multiplayer.

  53. 53.

    Redshirt

    @cleek: I’m a card carrying member of the ALCU and a big defender of the 1st Ammendment – but! Surely, that diary crossed a line towards inciting violence, yes? Investigation worry?

    Wait, what am I saying. A right winger posted it. Sorry, nothing to see here. All good.

  54. 54.

    comrade scott's agenda of rage

    @cleek:

    tell me again who hates America…

    Oh, that was a rhetorical question. Gotcha. You betcha.

  55. 55.

    Josh

    @matoko_chan:

    I go to U of M, so I wonder if I could find some time to talk to this guy in person about his study. His office really isn’t that far from my apartment.

  56. 56.

    some other guy

    @matoko_chan:

    Oh noes, he’s got teh tapes! TAPES, PEOPLE!!!

    I don’t buy it. I will offer $100,000 to anyone who can provide a tape of Brietbart’s tapes. Or $50,000 for a tape of the tape of the tapes. Or a piece of old bubblegum from a Topps baseball card pack for a drawing of Breitbart with the caption “IM IN YER DINNERZ RECORDIN YER RACIZM.”

  57. 57.

    4tehlulz

    If we fail to re-take at least one house of Congress, the peaceful Revolution will not happen. The match will be lit. We will be forced into a very ugly, bloody, Civil War that will make the first one look like a Sunday stroll in the park.

    Cool story, bro.

  58. 58.

    Sheila

    I don’t think most Americans are afraid of the new Black Panther movement outside of the Fox/TeaParty contingent, and they’re afraid of all black people anyway, so what’s new? Would it not be beneath our President’s dignity for him to address this radically silly issue?

  59. 59.

    LivingInWingnutHell

    @Brachiator: I agree with the fellow from Snopes that people don’t like having these things discredited. I once replied to one of these emails I received from someone at work (the stupid one about Pepsi leaving out “Under God” from the pledge) with a link to the snopes article discrediting it. The result? In the remaining 18 months that I worked at that place, the woman never spoke to me again.

  60. 60.

    Josh

    @some other guy:

    Brietbart probably considers it racist for them to talk about the collective struggle of the African-American community from the time of slavery to the time of Katrina.

    Brietbart: “O NOEZ! THEY WANT TO EMPOWER THE BLACK COMMUNITY AND HELP BLACK PEOPLE! RACISTS!”

  61. 61.

    Third Eye Open

    @Redshirt: I look forward to the day after the mid-terms, because no matter the outcome, there will be no satisfaction for these nimrods.

  63. 63.

    4tehlulz

    Just wanted to add (cuz I’m not allowed to edit, for some reason) that similar jackasses tried the same stunt in 1860 and ended up being proven wrong by U.S. Grant and Sherman.

    So please, make the same mistake again rightards.

  64. 64.

    some other guy

    @Josh:

    Worse, he’s probably got them on tape saying “colored people” a lot! And nevermind the strange editing that removes “national association for the advancement of…” from the beginning that phrase. We all know who the real racists are. Just ask civil rights leader and master of satire Mark Williams.

  65. 65.

    Corner Stone

    If we fail to re-take at least one house of Congress, the peaceful Revolution will not happen. The match will be lit. We will be forced into a very ugly, bloody, Civil War

    So essentially, if they fail at democracy they’ll be forced to disregard the results and incite violence?
    I especially like the lack of agency, “we will be forced”. Nope, it’s not our fault! You race traitors made us!

  67. 67.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @Sheila:

    The scene: Obama at the next WH press conference:

    O: [droning on in his professorial voice]

    ..and that’s why we can’t continue the old, outworn practice of printing footnotes to the Congressional Quarterly using Helvetica font, because today’s Americans need us to get beyond sterile partisan squabbling over standards of graphic design and find a new..

    [looks up in horror, with eyes as big as saucers, and points dramatically at the back of the room]

    O: ZOMG! It’s the NEW BLACK PANTHERS!!

    [the entire WH press corps turns immediately to look. Several of the more tender minded faint]

    O: Ha! Ha! Made you look! Suckers.

  68. 68.

    Corner Stone

    @Jay B.:

    Your guesses?

    The liberals should’ve grown up and done something more adult like that didn’t involve wishing for ponies?

  70. 70.

    Jay in Oregon

    @Corner Stone:

    I don’t remember who said “States’ rights is shorthand for ‘states should be able to move as far to the right as they want'” but they pretty much nailed it.

    Dubya installed by the Supreme Court with a popular vote margin of less than 600,000 votes? Will of the people, baby!

    Obama crushing McCain with over 8.5 million vote margin? ACORN stole my vote!

  72. 72.

    gbear

    The Nokia 6010 that I use now has never been recalled. Take THAT, apple users.

    And taking a call on my Nokia never fails to make an impression with the techies.

  73. 73.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Jay B.:

    Your guesses?

    Not believing every rumor that HuffPo pumps out there to curry favor with their primary audience of people who are sexually gratified by political disappointment?

  76. 76.

    ellaesther

    Mad about the fact that Israel seems to think that it can demand the money and political pressure of the world’s Jews while rejecting their actual Judaism? Click here -> http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/bad-jews/

    Kinda wonder if Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day might enjoy watching a scene from Star Wars performed on a moving subway train? Click here -> http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/good-stuff-american-idiot-star-wars-shenanigans/

    Now to figure out what completely random thing I’ll post about today.

  77. 77.

    matoko_chan

    @Josh: wow, i loved that paper.
    that would be so cool.
    My hypothesis is that backfire effect is related to Kanazawa’s work on savannah effect and intelligence and also this UT study by Hirsch–

    Researchers at UofT have shown that the psychological concern for compassion and equality is associated with a liberal mindset, while the concern for order and respect of social norms is associated with a conservative mindset.
    “Conservatives tend to be higher in a personality trait called orderliness and lower in openness. This means that they’re more concerned about a sense of order and tradition, expressing a deep psychological motive to preserve the current social structure,” says Jacob Hirsh, a post-doctoral psychology student at UofT and lead author of the study.

    my own hypoth is that conservatism also represents self-selection for social levelling of IQ and education…..like rubberband theory in game theory.
    i wish i could talk to him.
    lucky!

  78. 78.

    matoko_chan

    @Josh: backfire effect is probably why the teabaggers keep insisting they are not the racists.
    everytime it gets pointed out to them that they ARE racists, the salience of the teatard leadership like Breibart and Beck goes through the roof.

  79. 79.

    Brachiator

    @matoko_chan:

    i really enjoyed this Jonah Lehrer piece on cognitive dissonance, fact-blocking and backfire effect.

    I saw the Boston Globe article referred to, but was not aware of the Lehrer piece. Thanks.

    A lot of this is not bounded by any particular political ideology (see, for example, Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Strange Things). Skeptics blogs are regularly attacked by various folks with all kinds of deeply held beliefs that are resistant to facts (e.g., the lack of any evidence of the efficacy of alternative medicine, herbal supplements, organic vegetables, World Trade Center conspiracies, climate change denialism and that all time perennial, creationism).

    There are progressives who are deeply unhappy that Obama and the Democrats did not push the obvious and bestest health care alternative, single payer. But when you point out to these people that countries with universal healthcare did not uniformly adopt single payer systems, these people halt for a second and then push some internal reset button that let’s them ignore historical reality and continue to insist that single payer is the only bestest health care option. Not much difference here between them and nutty conservatives.

  80. 80.

    matoko_chan

    @Brachiator: both liberals and conservatives do fact-blocking, but only conservatives exhibited backfire effect in the study.
    i thought that was very interesting.

  82. 82.

    Midnight Marauder

    @matoko_chan:

    what are these people thinking? they are just rage-ravers anymore.
    Their rage is so overpowering that they have completely lost sight of their objective….that they HAVE to start attracting minority voters or go down to the demographic timer in 2020 for good.

    What?! Prominent Republicans self-destructing?!

    Well, I’ll be damned completely unsurprised at all by this turn of event!

  83. 83.

    Jay B.

    @FlipYrWhig:

    I think you’re very close! It’s got all the classic afflictions of Juiceism — it blames the very thing I said was “poorly-sourced” while calling liberals masochistic and naive for thinking that the person most qualified to run it is the very well-qualified liberal who came up with the idea and who now has become the latest bone “we” want thrown. I’ll also be tickled when, inevitably, she’s not either nominated OR confirmed that liberals were the ones being unrealistic in our expectations.

  84. 84.

    Cacti

    @Mark S.:

    McCain has a twenty point lead, so earlier indications that Walnuts was in the fight of his life were wrong. Still, if you’re in the mood for immigrant bashing and watching a couple of guys who hate each other.

    Makes me a little sad because even though Hayworth is a Bush era sleaze bag and nutcase, his victory would give the dems a far more credible chance of picking off a seat in AZ.

    Looks like were in for another 6 years of the worthless dinosaur, who likes to brag about how much money he doesn’t bring our broke-ass state.

  85. 85.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @matoko_chan:

    both liberals and conservatives do fact-blocking, but only conservatives exhibited backfire effect in the study.
    i thought that was very interesting.

    I think we should be very cautious drawing broad conclusions from that study about differences between the two groups. It seems to me that in some situations people are more than justified in their backfire reaction, i.e. if the new data is presented to them in a way which triggers reasonable suspicions that they are being lied to or taken advantage of by somebody who is known to be not worthy of trust. In the latter case, the fact that additional data is presented would make a skeptical person wonder why they were being given new info, and to question the motives underlying this event.

    For example: if I were to put you in a room and present you with questions about the economic utility of the shadow banking system, and then follow that up later with additional data supporting the claims of the banksters to be providing a socially beneficial service to the larger society, how would you react? Would you accept the revised claims at face value, or would you smell a rat? What if the revised claims were presented by somebody obviously affiliated with Goldman Sacks?

    So one of the things being measured in backfire studies is the nature of the trust relationship between the subjects of the experiment and the source of the new info which is being provided by the experimenters. Backfire may occur because the subjects do not trust the latter, and differences in backfire between liberal and conservative subjects may be due to differences in the way those two groups perceive those who are providing the supposedly reliable new information.

    My conjecture is that liberals tend to trust technocratic elites more than socioeconomic elites, and the other way around for conservatives. If the new information which triggered the backfire was presented in a technocratic manner, that could produce greater backfire from cons than it would from libs. Try re-running the experiment with a different presentation of new information, e.g. as if it came from business elites rather than newspapers, and see what sort of results you get. That’s a followup study I’d like to see.

  87. 87.

    Brachiator

    @matoko_chan:

    both liberals and conservatives do fact-blocking, but only conservatives exhibited backfire effect in the study.

    The study was flawed. It’s too easy to come up with examples where liberals behave similarly. And the distinction between “conservative” and “liberal” is artificial, and doesn’t represent any universally significant distinction between people.

  88. 88.

    Allison W.

    @Jay B.:

    Oh, this one has everything wrapped in one. Liberals wanting something specifically good to come out of dubious, but not totally horrible, legislation, “centrists” in the Senate ready to smack her down, a suspect Administration insider (Timmeh) who doesn’t like her , a poorly-sourced article claiming he doesn’t want her in this position, tons of back peddling and double-talking already AND a pre-baked theory that Ben Nelson’s support on this was predicated on Warren not being the nominee.

    It’s utterly meaningless, of course. But it’s pretty easy to see how this one will play out and, by giving a shit on outcomes, liberals once again set themselves up for failure.

    Your guesses?

    You got it covered perfectly. I am really getting worn out by all this drama. Did you sign the petition? I didn’t. Not that I don’t want Warren, but there are more important things to protest.

  89. 89.

    Jay B.

    But when you point out to these people that countries with universal healthcare did not uniformly adopt single payer systems, these people halt for a second and then push some internal reset button that let’s them ignore historical reality and continue to insist that single payer is the only bestest health care option.

    But what’s the “argument” here? What’s your point? Sometimes things are different in other places at other times so you should just shut the fuck up?

    It doesn’t automatically follow that since we don’t have single-payer now, we will have single-payer later. It doesn’t follow that because we now have health care insurance reform now that we will have single-payer later. It’s ALSO easy enough to point out the opposite, we ALREADY have three major single-payer programs in place (VA, Medicare, Medicaid), thus, the next logical step would be single-payer now for the rest of us — you know, since you’re so vested in “historical reality”.

    Pointing out that other countries have taken different routes to single-payer means, exactly, shit. It doesn’t mean it’s an inevitability anymore than it means it’s an impossibility. It is a fact, sure. You are not wrong. But it isn’t an argument.

  90. 90.

    Jay B.

    @Allison W.:

    Not that I don’t want Warren, but there are more important things to protest.

    And you’ll bitch about us bitching about those too.

  91. 91.

    Cacti

    If we fail to re-take at least one house of Congress, the peaceful Revolution will not happen. The match will be lit. We will be forced into a very ugly, bloody, Civil War

    When I see things like this, I have to ask the hypothetical question.

    If there is a right to armed revolt against the elected government…

    Why are there laws against sedition and insurrection?

  93. 93.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Jay B.:

    I think you’re very close! It’s got all the classic afflictions of Juiceism — it blames the very thing I said was “poorly-sourced” while calling liberals masochistic and naive for thinking that the person most qualified to run it is the very well-qualified liberal who came up with the idea and who now has become the latest bone “we” want thrown. I’ll also be tickled when, inevitably, she’s not either nominated OR confirmed that liberals were the ones being unrealistic in our expectations.

    I’m not calling you anything for having a view on Elizabeth Warren, a figure I also love to a degree that’s practically unseemly. I’m calling out the characteristic bullshit of the second half of your point: you’re basically choosing to believe a story you admit is poorly-sourced in order to be pissed off about something _that hasn’t fucking happened yet_ in hopes that it will match a pattern of Dolchstosse _that doesn’t exist_. And, because it will make you feel proud to have been jaded and disillusioned early, you are actually admitting that you will enjoy it if she doesn’t get picked because it will be a chit for some imaginary card game between sycophantic Obots and the “liberals” who are sanctified by losing. Seriously, this is broken-souled bullshit. It’s like a fan of Sarah Palin liking her because liberals don’t.

  94. 94.

    Jay B.

    @Allison W.:

    Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I think there’s plenty to be mad about. But it’s the hilariously predictable response from the hard- headed “realists” here — everything they agree with is wrong is deserved of outrage, everything they agree isn’t is “poutrage” from “firebaggers” — that I find to be insultingly insular and particular to whatever John says is important versus something that is seen as detrimental to the Administration.

  96. 96.

    Jay B.

    @FlipYrWhig:

    And, because it will make you feel proud to have been jaded and disillusioned early, you are actually admitting that you will enjoy it if she doesn’t get picked because it will be a chit for some imaginary card game between sycophantic Obots and the “liberals” who are sanctified by losing.

    I’m not pissed off about something that hasn’t happened. I’m predicting this is how it will play out, as it has with other, real, important, things that “liberals” have worked for, hoped for and voted for — and have been promptly mocked for because we didn’t vest enough cynicism into our support.

    Over and over again on this site people consume themselves with Greenwald hate, or “hippie-punching”, or firegagging because, while it’s “true” — or so I’m told — that Obama isn’t perfect and there are sensible things to complain about, no one ever gets around to saying what they are, or what’s OK for people to be disappointed with. If it’s Civil Liberties, it’s “well, what did you expect?” If it’s the smaller-than-optimal stimulus, it’s “oh, that’s on Harry Reid”. Ad nauseum.

    Well, here I’m laying out the stakes because this is becoming crystal clear: Liberals want Warren. They’re already making a shit about it. IF it doesn’t happen — nominating and approving an entirely decent, intelligent, perfect choice — it will confirm many of substantive reasons we’re disappointed with the Democratic Party (the Administration and Congress both). Moreover, again I’m predicting, many of the Juicers will come up with utterly lame excuses about why this happened and how naive we were to expect anything else.

    If not, I’ll be wrong! I’ve been wrong before and I’ll be wrong again. You are the one who has decided to read into what I wrote and vest a “broken-soul” into it.

  97. 97.

    Brachiator

    @Jay B.:
    RE: But when you point out to these people that countries with universal healthcare did not uniformly adopt single payer systems, these people halt for a second and then push some internal reset button that let’s them ignore historical reality and continue to insist that single payer is the only bestest health care option.

    But what’s the “argument” here? What’s your point? Sometimes things are different in other places at other times so you should just shut the fuck up?

    Jeez. It’s really quite simple. If someone claims that single payer should be adopted, shouldn’t they have to make a case as to why it should be adopted? If someone makes the special claim that single payer is the only universal care option that should be considered for the US, shouldn’t they have to explain why they believe this, especially if they on to make the claim that Obama has somehow failed them and the country by not pushing for single payer?

    There is a special kind of cognitive dissonance going on when someone says “Every major industrialized country has universal health care. We should have universal health care. France has the best universal health care system. We should have single payer.”

    This is a partial reproduction of an actual post from another blog. The fun thing, of course, is that France does not have a single payer system. I think it matters when someone says that we should have a health care system like Frances, but then goes on to ignore how that and other health care systems are funded.

    It’s ALSO easy enough to point out the opposite, we ALREADY have three major single-payer programs in place (VA, Medicare, Medicaid), thus, the next logical step would be single-payer now for the rest of us—you know, since you’re so vested in “historical reality”.

    This does not follow logically at all. But a nice try.

    Pointing out that other countries have taken different routes to single-payer means, exactly, shit.

    Sigh. No. It’s that different countries have taken different routes to universal health care. Universal health care and single payer are not synonymous.

    And I am not making an argument against either. The point was that some people assume the value of single payer as an article of faith and feel that they don’t have to explain why they prefer it or to consider why it has not been uniformly adopted as the funding mechanism for other, successful, universal health care systems.

    And on a similar front:

    The marker has been laid down — Elizabeth Warren needs to head the new Consumer Protection Agency.

    Why?

  98. 98.

    Jay B.

    If someone claims that single payer should be adopted, shouldn’t they have to make a case as to why it should be adopted?

    Who are you arguing against? Did you pick literally the dumbest person you could find, or do you not really know the argument in favor of single payer? While your stunning intellectual triumph against the retarded must have felt awesome, the case for single payer — as was presented everywhere at the time (usually, as part of, “not that it will ever get to the floor, but”) — is that it’s simpler to administer, it has lower per capita costs than our patchwork coverage, it is easier to control costs on drugs and treatments and record keeping, is truly universal coverage and works very well in Canada, among other places.

    Nor was there a whole lot of confusion between single-payer and universal coverage. I’m sure there was some. Many arguments brought in the Dutch example of compulsory insurance at rates and conditions that were heavily regulated and where profits were capped, which provided the necessary conditions to allow the Dutch to pay around half what we do for better health care.

    Finally, we have a step toward universal coverage, with some gaps, with fewer (not none) cost-controls than other industrialized nations and a few important additional insurance regulations, while still not only maintaining, but entrenching, our costly, opaque, for-profit system for benefits we hope to see in 2014.

    Still, I’m glad you were able to TOTALLY pwn that 8-year old you overwhelmed with FAX.

  99. 99.

    DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective

    @Cacti:

    Makes me a little sad because even though Hayworth is a Bush era sleaze bag and nutcase

    Of course, McCain is also a Bush era sleaze bag.

    McCain and Keating had become personal friends following their initial contacts in 1981,[11] and McCain was the only one of the five with close social and personal ties to Keating.[42][43] Like DeConcini, McCain considered Keating a constituent as he lived in Arizona.[35] Between 1982 and 1987, McCain had received $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates.[44] In addition, McCain’s wife Cindy McCain and her father Jim Hensley had invested $359,100 in the Fountain Square Project, a Keating shopping center, in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.[7][45] McCain, his family, and their baby-sitter had made nine trips at Keating’s expense, sometimes aboard Keating’s jet; three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating’s opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.[7] McCain did not pay Keating (in the amount of $13,433) for some of the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln.[7][46] In 1989 Phoenix New Times writer Tom Fitzpatrick opined that McCain was the “most reprehensible” of the five senators.[47]

    This is the guy who clucked “Country First” and then picked Sarah Palin as a running mate. A complete liar, crook, and goddammed fool who never ever gets called on his shit by anybody because SHUT UP POW THAT’S WHY.

  100. 100.

    Brachiator

    @Jay B.:

    Who are you arguing against? Did you pick literally the dumbest person you could find, or do you not really know the argument in favor of single payer? While your stunning intellectual triumph against the retarded must have felt awesome, the case for single payer — as was presented everywhere at the time (usually, as part of, “not that it will ever get to the floor, but”) — is that it’s simpler to administer, it has lower per capita costs than our patchwork coverage, it is easier to control costs on drugs and treatments and record keeping, is truly universal coverage and works very well in Canada, among other places.

    You keep trying to turn a simple observation about people, liberals and conservatives, making beliefs into articles of faith into an argument for or against single payer.

    Odd.

    Another example of this was an episode of Bill Moyer’s Journal in which Moyers and two guests spent an hour talking about why single payer was opposed in the US. Nowhere in the show did they ever explain how they believed single payer should work or mention a single alternative. They certainly weren’t trying to persuade anyone who had not already made up his or her mind, but were stewing in their outrage that mean corporate interests were standing in the way of what everyone should know to be right and necessary and wonderful.

    Nor was there a whole lot of confusion between single-payer and universal coverage. I’m sure there was some.

    There is confusion all the time. Often exactly in this here blog. Even in this very thread.

    Still, I’m glad you were able to TOTALLY pwn that 8-year old you overwhelmed with FAX.

    Here you are not only making stuff up, but apparently arguing with yourself. You provide a great, if unintentional example of the backfire effect. Thank you very much.

  101. 101.

    matoko_chan

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ: the trust relationship is part of the studies, for looking at conformation bias, and im sure the researchers are testing your objections.
    this whole suite of research is based loosely on the savannah principle.
    I have an additional hypoth, that lower IQ is a correlate with backfire effect.
    eventually we will be able to overlay conservative and liberal fMRI’s on IQ and g.
    If, as i suspect, there is a proveable correlation between conservatism and lower IQ, do you think we will see IQ riots or just people changing their voter registration to look smarter?

  102. 102.

    matoko_chan

    @Brachiator: if you believe the work is flawed, you will have to take up the authors on their methodology.
    Like I said, a LOT of current research is based on explorations of the savannah principle.
    I sense a critical mass of data accruing.
    if you think of conservative as the base state of homo sap. that we are sort of evolving away from, then conformation bias, cognitive dissonance, respect for authority and past experience, backfire effect, rule based behavior, supernational belief, all could have been fitness enhancers for tribal hunter gathers in the EEA.

  103. 103.

    Jay B.

    You keep trying to turn a simple observation about people, liberals and conservatives, making beliefs into articles of faith into an argument for or against single payer.

    Because that was your point why liberals and conservatives were no different. You made some point about the “fact” of how single payer came about in other countries as “proof”. It was an idiotic point. And proved literally nothing one way or another about anything.

  104. 104.

    Corner Stone

    @Jay B.:

    Because that was your point why liberals and conservatives were no different.

    Brachiator doesn’t think very highly of liberals. Apparently because they push for peace but somehow haven’t freed the hundreds of millions of other people across the globe who still aren’t free.
    He’s really pretty much of an idiot, all things considered.

  105. 105.

    Origuy

    I was a regular on the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban, where snopes got their start. The producers of Mythbusters did some of their research there in the early days. It seemed for a while that between Mythbusters, AFU, and snopes.com, that the debunking business was winding down. It took a black President to get it back into high gear.

  106. 106.

    matoko_chan

    hey guys, think about what a fitness enhancer xenophobia was for hunter gatherers.
    Why conservatives are racists–

    Kanazawa believes that the explanation for the link lies in the Savannah hypothesis. This is the idea that general intelligence evolved as a way to deal with evolutionarily novel situations. It lets us transcend our evolved behaviour and do things that contravene our instincts.
    In support of this, Kanazawa shows that intelligence is linked to liberal ideals in the same way. In particular, the link seems to be between intelligence and openness to support of people from other ethnic groups (i.e. whites supporting government intervention to help blacks)

    .
    Sexual exclusivity would not be a fitness advantage in the EEA.
    Why conservatives sleep around–

    What’s more intelligence in those adolescents increases belief among men (but not women) in sexual exclusivity – i.e. that people should not sleep around.

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