There’s a link to Balloon Juice’s very own ActBlue page over there on the right-hand column —->, and we’re making good progress towards what Cole labelled “a very ambitious goal”. As a jumpstart, here’s an ad from one of the candidates we’re targetting, Scott McAdams:
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Thanks to commentor Linda Featheringill for the link. I admit to a bias in favor here, because my mother-in-law is Norwegian-born. In the thirty-plus years we’ve been acquainted, she has never actually cursed me out, because she doesn’t need profanity to obtain compliance. But I will attest that the experience builds character.
Archives for September 2010
Not Like There Isn’t Anything Else to Do
Via PZ Myers, this odd story of a creepy Assistant Attorney General:
For nearly six months, Andrew Shirvell, an assistant attorney general for the state of Michigan, has waged an internet campaign against college student Chris Armstrong, the openly gay student assembly president at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Using the online moniker “Concerned Michigan Alumnus,” Shirvell launched his blog in late April.
“Welcome to ‘Chris Armstrong Watch,'” Shirvell wrote in his inaugural blog post. “This is a site for concerned University of Michigan alumni, students, and others who oppose the recent election of Chris Armstrong — a RADICAL HOMOSEXUAL ACTIVIST, RACIST, ELITIST, & LIAR — as the new head of student government.”
Among other things, Shirvell has published blog posts that accuse Armstrong of going back on a campaign promise he made to minority students; engaging in “flagrant sexual promiscuity” with another male member of the student government; sexually seducing and influencing “a previously conservative [male] student” so much so that the student, according to Shirvell, “morphed into a proponent of the radical homosexual agenda”; hosting a gay orgy in his dorm room in October 2009; and trying to recruit incoming first-year students “to join the homosexual ‘lifestyle.'”
Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox has declined to comment directly about Shirvell’s comments, saying he is pursuing legal action against the civil servant, who works on the blog during his off-hours.
If for nothing else, he should be fired for punching so far below his weight class. Seriously, a student body president?
Not Like There Isn’t Anything Else to DoPost + Comments (89)
Cover of the Rolling Stone
Let’s everybody go buy at least one copy of the October 15 issue of Rolling Stone, and see if we can stealth-seed them into the waiting rooms at the dentist, Jiffy-Lube, Gymboree, the break room at the office, and wherever “low information” voters might be in need of an easily palatable update on How The World Works. It has a nice tasteful Newsweek–worthy cover, three-quarters profile of Our President, nothing that might hint of naughty thoughts or profane words to even the most tender sensibility. And there are two great long-form articles that deserve to be widely read.
First, Jann Wenner’s interview with “Obama in Command“, which includes a lot of the details people need to be reminded about, starting right on the first page:
How do you feel about the fact that day after day, there’s this really destructive attack on whatever you propose? Does that bother you? Has it shocked you?
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I don’t think it’s a shock. I had served in the United States Senate; I had seen how the filibuster had become a routine tool to slow things down, as opposed to what it used to be, which was a selective tool — although often a very destructive one, because it was typically targeted at civil rights and the aspirations of African-Americans who were trying to be freed up from Jim Crow. But I’d been in the Senate long enough to know that the machinery there was breaking down…
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But the delays, the cloture votes, the unprecedented obstruction that has taken place in the Senate took its toll. Even if you eventually got something done, it would take so long and it would be so contentious, that it sent a message to the public that “Gosh, Obama said he was going to come in and change Washington, and it’s exactly the same, it’s more contentious than ever.” Everything just seems to drag on — even what should be routine activities, like appointments, aren’t happening. So it created an atmosphere in which a public that is already very skeptical of government, but was maybe feeling hopeful right after my election, felt deflated and sort of felt, “We’re just seeing more of the same.”
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How do you personally feel about hedge-fund managers who are making $200 million a year and paying a 15 percent tax rate? Or the guy who made $700 million one year and compared you to Hitler for trying to raise his taxes above 15 percent — does that gall you?
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I’ve gotta say that I have been surprised by some of the rhetoric in the business press… I know a lot of these guys who started hedge funds. They are making large profits, taking home large incomes, but because of a rule called “carried interest,” they are paying lower tax rates than their secretaries, or the janitor that cleans up the building. Or folks who are out there as police officers and teachers and small-business people. So all we’ve said is that it makes sense for them to pay taxes on it like on ordinary income….
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The average American out there who is my primary concern and is making 60 grand a year and paying taxes on all that income and trying to send their kids through school, and partly as a consequence of bad decisions on Wall Street, feels that their job is insecure and has seen their 401(k) decline by 30 percent, and has seen the value of their home decline — I don’t think they’re that sympathetic to these guys, and neither am I.
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It’s Money – Nothing More, Nothing Less
Henry Waxman, of all people, serves up another reminder that corporations run DC by adopting the Google/Verizon net neutrality plan as his own:
How did we get from FCC Chair Julius Genachowski’s proposals for clear net neutrality enforcement and ISP transparency rules based on limited common carrier provisions to this?
First, factor in massive pushback, lawsuit threatening, and Capitol Hill lobbying from the telco and cable ISPs. That seems to have sparked the agency’s open secret “back door” negotiations, in which the Commission invited the big ISPs and content providers to bargain at the agency’s HQ over some kind of legislative solution to the log jam.
The process appears to have helped percolate the Google/Verizon proposal—both of these companies being major participants in those discussions.
Next, plug in a bitterly partisan midterm election year, which seems to have scared the daylights out of the Obama administration. Various DC folk have told us their theory—that the FCC’s reluctance to carry out its own agenda is a by-product of pressure from the White House. We don’t know if that’s true, but it has certainly been alluded to often enough by various Capitol Hill reporters.
Congress is a place where good policy goes to die, smothered by a pillow full of corporate money wielded by shit-scared Democrats.
There’s No Place Like the Senate
If Jim DeMint can singlehandedly shut down the Senate by just clicking his heels together three times, I can only imagine what he would be like as minority leader. I hope I see that day soon. This guy is a one-man wrecking machine.
Early Morning Open Thread: Pumpkin Season Pet Rescue
From commentor Bowler1701:
This is Pumpkin. When she was a tiny kitten, I grabbed her from under the hood of our Beetle. We already had a house full of cats so I was going to ask our veterinarian to find a good home for her. After a few seconds of holding her close I couldn’t let go. She’s been with us now for 8 years, and she’s a delight. She follows me around the house and talks a lot.
What’s on everybody’s agenda for Hump Day?
Early Morning Open Thread: Pumpkin Season Pet RescuePost + Comments (40)
Pot, kettle
I don’t see another explanation for what Tom Friedman was doing when he wrote this column:
The Tea Party that has gotten all the attention, the amorphous, self-generated protest against the growth in government and the deficit, is what I’d actually call the “Tea Kettle movement” — because all it’s doing is letting off steam.
[…..]The important Tea Party movement, which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats, understands this at a gut level and is looking for a leader with three characteristics. First, a patriot: a leader who is more interested in fighting for his country than his party. Second, a leader who persuades Americans that he or she actually has a plan not just to cut taxes or pump stimulus, but to do something much larger — to make America successful, thriving and respected again. And third, someone with the ability to lead in the face of uncertainty and not simply whine about how tough things are — a leader who believes his job is not to read the polls but to change the polls.
So no one on the non-centrist right or non-centrist left gives a fuck about the country? Even David Broder doesn’t write stuff like this.
Maybe this sounded better in the original Mandarin.
Where the fuck is Matt Taibbi these days?
Update Speak of the devil.