Try until you get it right. Provided you can tell :)
If places were switched, the MSM would be saying things like “why can’t the Republicans close the deal out West?” and “these prominent Tea Baggers had their heads handed to them!” and “the Republicans did not get the Senate, it does not bode well,” and stuff like that.
So I’m just not going to take this crap seriously.
4.
Chat Noir
My new Pets of Balloon Juice 2011 Calendars arrived today! The envelope exploded with teh cute. Hobbes is in May and Natalie and Sherman are in September. You folks have some wickedly cute critters.
DeMint captured 62 percent of the vote statewide, compared to Greene’s 28 percent.
That’s right, more than one fourth of SC voters wanted an unemployed porn promoter really obtuse pick-up artist living with his mom as their senator.
There is really nothing I can add to that.
7.
Cat Lady
I haven’t listened to one talking head today, and have only read my local paper’s website about the analysis of how my back from the dead governor Deval Patrick beat Romney-lite v.2.0. It’s instructive. I’m +3 on my way to +4 and beyond, am still convinced that there’s no way to predict how any of this will play out, and that everyone on TV right now is talking out of their ass.
8.
Quicksand
Really, you want two crappy mojitos followed by a good one?
(*) No offense intended to anyone in AA or any other 12 step program.
10.
Corner Stone
Nate Silver should never be seen on TV. Ever.
11.
edmund dantes
Well you’ll never know you have the perfect mojito until you’ve tried all the possible versions made by every different bartender. There always may be a better mojito just around the corner.
Good luck.
P.s. Don’t forget there is a chance of life on other planets so you’ll have to keep trying until you try them all.
12.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: Or sober people who did it without a higher power.
13.
Corner Stone
@J sub D: I had somewhat of the same pickle in my local CD. The D spot was won by a crazy ass La Rooshie in the primary.
Did not vote for her though. I probably would’ve voted for anyone against DeMint.
14.
TVL
Perfect Mojito? If you’re still in San Francisco, The Orbit Room. It’s on Market and (I think) Guerrero.
Hey, I got Markos himself to respond to a comment I left at GOS. If you read my comments here, well, you probably won’t be surprised at what I say or how I sound. I’m kind of repetitive.
And I agree with it. It’s stupid and cruel policy, but policy doesn’t matter anymore to far too many people. It’s all ideology for them. Give them a heavy dose of ideology, and reality will (eventually) return to the fore.
My Woody is a Mr. May also, too. He’s in a bag, third down from the top right. He has the most intelligent eyes. I love him so.
26.
marcopolo
@J sub D: Yeah but at least the percentage for Greene is right on the line of the 27% crazy factor, which was thoroughly discussed last night with Greene being an example that the crazy vote wasn’t just limited to the Rethuglicans.
27.
lacp
@Davis X. Machina: …but if he hopped over to Philly, The Rum Bar at 20th and Walnut would keep him busy for a few days.
28.
jwb
@marcopolo: Didn’t he make it over 28%? He was at 28.2%, I think, last time I checked.
29.
Davis X. Machina
@lacp: I will pass that info along to the boys at my son’s CMU frat — road trip!
Me, I’m looking for the perfect mojito in Lewiston, ME.
I choose take it as more a sign that people really don’t like Jim DeMint.
32.
J sub D
@lacp:
Like the Delaware senate race (how many voted for O’Donnell?) It just shows that sports bar politics lunacy pervades the electorate.
In Detroit, Satan (D) would handily beat Jesus (R). In rural Texas, Satan (R) beats the Democratic carpenter without raising a sweat. A sad commentary on the average voter, no?
ETA – ( R ) w/o the spaces gives a registered trademark symbol here.
Go see Dan the bartender at the El Camino in Brunswick. He’ll make you a kick ass mojito. They also have amazing margaritas. Dan is the best bartender I’ve ever seen work. Diverse interesting crowd, but all white, alas. It is Maine.
34.
beltane
It is strange how the insanity has completely spared some areas of the country, the most notable example being California. The bubonic plague spared certain regions in a similar way.
There was no teabagger wave here. It was a sweet thing for my son and me to pass a giant Brian Dubie (R-toast) sign on the road, point at it, and exclaim “Loooser!” in unison.
@General Stuck: No, but Lenin was a ski bum there for a few years fresh out of college. Worked, IIRC, as a prep cook in a Thai joint in So. Burlington, and did calculus tutoring at St. Michaels.
Most people don’t know this.
40.
beltane
@FlipYrWhig: Kos really isn’t getting it this year. The way he was celebrating the Blue Dog losses last night was almost unhinged. It is so much easier to bitch about the Democrats’ messaging than it is to think of ways in which we can hold our own against the right-wing monolith of the American media. And yes, they’re still talking about primarying conservadems as part of their strategy final victory.
41.
Martin
@Corner Stone: I disagree. Nate getting on tv gives hope to the rest of us. Moar awkward geeks plz!
42.
jwb
@Joseph Nobles: You laugh now, but remember parody these days is only ever a quarter step at most ahead of the real thing.
And whether you think it’s a bunch of cry babies or not (and believe me, politics is chock full of insufferable egos), it’s still part of a president’s job to keep them happy.
I just read that. and lol
Kos
And whether you think it’s a bunch of cry babies or not (and believe me, politics is chock full of insufferable egos), it’s still part of a president’s job to keep them happy.
So with all Obama has on his plate, Kos is put out that he hasn’t wet nursed the cry babies enough.
I like to think of it as natural selection. It may be useful to identify likely collaborators in the coming hard times. I love my fellow Massholes today, and driving home in heavy traffic on the Pike today like I do so often I felt almost… sanguine. Then I flipped off the dick in the Mercedes texting in the passing lane like it was all just about him, because I’m sure he was a Republican, and it felt good.
46.
suzanne
So Russell Pearce is the new President of the Arizona State Senate.
Because when we go batshit, we double down.
If only matoko_chan could be the new Majority Whip, my state will have finally reached its own personal Peak Wingnut.
47.
change
‘So, you all do realize that we will have millions and millions of third party money burying BO in 2012, right?
48.
Wilson Heath
Saw a small item today that the editors of the Mooney Times are finalizing a deal to buy the paper from the Rev’s son who was going to fold it. They’re paying a buck and assuming a metric sh!t ton of debt of the “paper” to do so. I’m willing to tick off “Team R Word” on this one — that’s just frakking retarded.
That’s right, more than one fourth of SC voters wanted an unemployed porn promoter really obtuse pick-up artist living with his mom as their senator.
You can’t say that for sure. It may be that more than a fourth of SC voters didn’t want Jim DeMint as their Senator.
Hell if I were in SC I would have voted for Greene. He had no chance of winning anyway, and skipping the ballot line and not voting for anyone doesn’t count towards the vote percentages, so how else would I register my disgust at having DeMint as my Senator? It’s not like SC has a “None of the Above” slot on the ballot. Plus if by a miracle of miracles he actually happened to win the seat I still contend he’d do less damage to the country than Jim DeMint will over the next six years.
@beltane: Well, Cali may have been spared the R wave this election (and the bubonic plague) but they are suffering from a whooping cough epidemic atm. Can’t dodge all the bullets.
@NonyNony: I hear you could have written in Lisa Murkowski
53.
jwb
@change: Probably more like billions, but who’s counting? But seriously, would grow up already.
54.
Davis X. Machina
@beltane: I’ve spent some spare time, instructive, and enjoyable — in a detached kind of way — the last fortnight, re-fighting the battles between Kautsky and Bernstein, Luxembourg and Eisner and Ebert, Jaurés and Guesde, etc.
I feel like I know all these people.
There have always been Daily Kos-es, and front-pagers, and DINO’s, and firebaggers, and trolls. People have been reading each other out of the party as sellouts and trimmers since Noah shut the door on the ark.
Midterm voters tend to be older than voters in general. But this year’s midterm voters aren’t just older than the voters who show up when the White House is up for grabs. They’re older than your typical midterm voter, period.
Seniors haven’t made up this big a share of voters since 1994. Twenty-four percent of those who cast ballots this year were over the age of 65 – and their support for Democrats has plummeted. Back in ’94, 48 percent of voters over age 65 backed Democratic candidates. In 2006 and ’08, 49 percent supported the party. This year, that number sank to 39 percent.
Seniors – who say they aren’t fans of the health care bill – have discovered a newfound fondness for the GOP: the Republican Party’s share of the senior vote soared from 48 percent last cycle to 58 percent this year.
Not only did they show up in a record number for a US midterm, they went GOP by 20 percent, and largely because of HCR.
56.
Martin
@John O: Yeah, I would love to see, as a temporary 2-year measure, have Obama and the Senate propose a bill that will provide mandatory spending cuts to all states in excess of their tax receipts along a prioritized list – starting with any earmarks and highway funding and working on down. Sell it big – a prime-time oval office speech. Lay out how much money it would save. Get Democrats to sell it up as well, that we need to take tough measures. Get the teabaggers talking about all the liberal states that will get their liberal programs cut. Put lots of pressure on the House to adopt this spending bill.
That would be wonderful…
57.
jwb
@General Stuck: They have theirs, why the fuck should they care about anyone else?
Yeah but at least the percentage for Greene is right on the line of the 27% crazy factor, which was thoroughly discussed last night with Greene being an example that the crazy vote wasn’t just limited to the Rethuglicans.
I dunno. If my choices were Jim DeMint or the crazy guy, I’d probably go with the crazy guy. Crazy is more entertaining than evil any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
I think it would be good politics. Very good, actually. Let’s put the cards on the table and man up.
You use charts and stuff and call it a “teachable moment” for the geniuses who don’t have any understanding of where the money is. And yes, you coordinate, which since they’re Dems is where the whole plan falls apart.
62.
Martin
@General Stuck: Yep. The GOP got that lie out big and bold.
We’ll get the last laugh – they’re gonna die soon.
@change: Hey, remember what I said about Joe Miller the other night? You were pretty certain he would win–said something about the Tea Party not existing in 1998. Looks like I was right, though I would have preferred McAdams. But then I did live in Fairbanks for over a decade and have met Miller back when he ran for a seat in the Alaska state house. He was already a jerk way back then (2004).
65.
Delia
The Oregonian has projected that Kitzhaber will win the governor’s race over Dudley. So that means pretty much the whole left coast has stayed sane. Hell, both Cali and Oregon now have governors who are coming back for a third term.
66.
beltane
@General Stuck: Can we repossess their scooters? You know, the ones that we paid for with our Medicare deductions.
Hey, I got Markos himself to respond to a comment I left at GOS. If you read my comments here, well, you probably won’t be surprised at what I say or how I sound. I’m kind of repetitive.
You made some great points. Well done.
Kos really isn’t getting it this year. The way he was celebrating the Blue Dog losses last night was almost unhinged
It would be interesting to go back thru the archives to see how many of those people got money raised through his website- back when it was important to have a majority and not so important to have the luxury to bitch they were blue dogs.
I find these types unfathomable.
68.
frosty
@General Stuck: …they went GOP by 20 percent, and largely because of lies they were told about HCR.
FTFY
69.
jwb
@Martin: If you want to disrupt the GOP, that’s not at all how you go about it. You need to find a wedge to divide the corporate overlords and set them against one another, the same way the Goopers use race, gender, and other social issues to divide the working class vote.
70.
stuckinred
Rachel is using a laugh track as she goes one-by-one through “compromises” and the incoming committee chairs.
Yes, to be fair. They are old and vulnerable, easily preyed upon by the wingnuts with their lies about HCR. And you can bet, it was planned that way.
72.
Loneoak
Gitane makes a pretty good cocktail and it’s in the market district.
73.
marcopolo
@General Stuck: You wrote Medicared seniors. I think you meant Mediscared. Always good to see older folks vote in the representatives of the party that wants to privatize/reduce Social Security benefits and get rid of Medicare/Medicaid. Hey let’s go back in time to when seniors in this country had the highest rates of poverty. Yeehaw!
74.
Calouste
Lord James of Blackheath might have had a few too many mojitos before his speech in the House of Lords two days back:
Lord James of Blackheath (Conservative):
For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords [Lord Sassoon, Treasury Minister and Lord Strathclyde, Leader of the House of Lords], in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it foundation X. That is not its real name, but it will do for the moment. Foundation X was introduced to me 20 weeks ago last week by an eminent City firm, which is FSA controlled. Its chairman came to me and said, “We have this extraordinary request to assist in a major financial reconstruction. It is megabucks, but we need your help to assist us in understanding whether this business is legitimate”. I had the biggest put down of my life from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde when I told him this story. He said, “Why you? You’re not important enough to have the answer to a question like that”. He is quite right, I am not important enough, but the answer to the next question was, “You haven’t got the experience for it”. Yes I do. I have had one of the biggest experiences in the laundering of terrorist money and funny money that anyone has had in the City. I have handled billions of pounds of terrorist money.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Labour): Where did it go to?
Lord James of Blackheath (Conservative)
Not into my pocket. My biggest terrorist client was the IRA and I am pleased to say that I managed to write off more than £1 billion of its money. I have also had extensive connections with north African terrorists, but that was of a far nastier nature, and I do not want to talk about that because it is still a security issue. I hasten to add that it is no good getting the police in, because I shall immediately call the Bank of England as my defence witness, given that it put me in to deal with these problems.
The point is that when I was in the course of doing this strange activity, I had an interesting set of phone numbers and references that I could go to for help when I needed it. So people in the City have known that if they want to check out anything that looks at all odd, they can come to me and I can press a few phone numbers to obtain a reference. The City firm came to me and asked whether I could get a reference and a clearance on foundation X. For 20 weeks, I have been endeavouring to do that. I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this present moment, as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy.
I made the phone call to my noble friend Lord Strathclyde on a Sunday afternoon-I think he was sitting on his lawn, poor man-and he did the quickest ball pass that I have ever witnessed. If England can do anything like it at Twickenham on Saturday, we will have a chance against the All Blacks. The next think I knew, I had my noble friend Lord Sassoon on the phone. From the outset, he took the proper defensive attitude of total scepticism, and said, “This cannot possibly be right”. During the following weeks, my noble friend said, “Go and talk to the Bank of England”. So I phoned the governor and asked whether he could check this out for me. After about three days, he came back and said, “You can get lost. I’m not touching this with a bargepole; it is far too difficult. Take it back to the Treasury”. So I did. Within another day, my noble friend Lord Sassoon had come back and said, “This is rubbish. It can’t possibly be right”. I said, “I am going to work more on it”. Then I brought one of the senior executives from foundation X to meet my noble friend Lord Strathclyde. I have to say that, as first dates go, it was not a great success. Neither of them ended up by inviting the other out for a coffee or drink at the end of the evening, and they did not exchange telephone numbers in order to follow up the meeting.
I found myself between a rock and a hard place that were totally paranoid about each other, because the foundation X people have an amazing obsession with their own security. They expect to be contacted only by someone equal to head of state status or someone with an international security rating equal to the top six people in the world. This is a strange situation. My noble friends Lord Sassoon and Lord Strathclyde both came up with what should have been an absolute killer argument as to why this could not be true and that we should forget it. My noble friend Lord Sassoon’s argument was that these people claimed to have evidence that last year they had lodged £5 billion with British banks. They gave transfer dates and the details of these transfers. As my noble friend Lord Sassoon, said, if that were true it would stick out like a sore thumb. You could not have £5 billion popping out of a bank account without it disrupting the balance sheet completely. But I remember that at about the same time as those transfers were being made the noble Lord, Lord Myners, was indulging in his game of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic of the British banking community. If he had three banks at that time, which had had, say, a deficiency of £1.5 million each, then you would pretty well have absorbed the entire £5 billion, and you would not have had the sore thumb stick out at that time; you would have taken £1.5 billion into each of three banks and you would have absorbed the lot. That would be a logical explanation-I do not know.
My noble friend Lord Strathclyde came up with a very different argument. He said that this cannot be right because these people said at the meeting with him that they were still effectively on the gold standard from back in the 1920s and that their entire currency holdings throughout the world, which were very large, were backed by bullion. My noble friend Lord Strathclyde came back and said to me that he had an analyst working on it and that this had to be stuff and nonsense. He said that they had come up with a figure for the amount of bullion that would be needed to cover their currency reserves, as claimed, which would be more than the entire value of bullion that had ever been mined in the history of the world. I am sorry but my noble friend Lord Strathclyde is wrong; his analysts are wrong. He had tapped into the sources that are available and there is only one definitive source for the amount of bullion that has ever been taken from the earth’s crust. That was a National Geographic magazine article 12 years ago. Whatever figure it was that was quoted was then quoted again on six other sites on the internet-on Google. Everyone is quoting one original source; there is no other confirming authority. But if you tap into the Vatican accounts-of the Vatican bank-you come up with a claim of total bullion-
75.
BGinCHI
How to make the perfect mojito:
Drink a shot of ginbourbonrumvodka ok, that’s right, it’s rum.
Is there any substance to the charge that Obama bashes his base, and that why they didn’t turn out to vote?
I think you can find sniping at organized activist liberals, and you can find examples of dissatisfied rank-and-file liberals, Latinos, LGBT, labor, you name it. But I think you have to willfully blur all of those complexly commingled categories to be able to say that there’s been base-bashing, and thus What Obama Must Do is stroke and coddle his liberal base so that they turn out the next time. It probably doesn’t hurt to do more stroking and coddling, but I don’t think it matches up with The Problem.
I think it matches up with Things That Would Make Bloggy People HappyHappier Less Unhappy. That’s not bad in and of itself, but you’re talking about a small fraction of a small fraction of the people he needs to satisfy politically and policy-wise.
(I also have a hunch that Obama in general wants to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, and doesn’t particularly care about interest groups, which might be risky politically but actually does more to help people in need, even the ungrateful ones, like poor white seniors.)
77.
WyldPirate
@General Stuck:
Yeah, and they did it because Obama lost control of the fucking message on HCR and got it defined for him.
And for the record I’m back you fucking dickhead. Go back to the last thread where you started talking shit out of the fucking blue. I hadn’t even addressed you in several days. I wasn’t picking shit with you yet you have the gall to call me an “internet “tough guy”?. You were the one talking bad ass about starting the flame war. I was minding my own business, because baqsically, i think you’re a whiny little shit whose only talent is cracking unfunny one-liners.
Well, here I am you pathetic limp-dicked mother fucker. If you got it, bring it. Otherwise, again, feel free to go fuck yourself.
78.
Just Some Fuckhead
@FlipYrWhig: Wow. Yer pretty impressive. Maybe you can follow through and nurture and harness a whole freaking movement like Kos did instead of taking potshots.
I gave up cable news months and months ago, but now I don’t get out of this boat at all, except for Tbogg. This is the perch from which I prefer to view the insanity with Cole’s and DougJ’s eyes, and the smartest funnest commenters on these here intertoobz.
ETA: except for Oscar Leroy and Bob Loblaw. I hate Oscar Leroy and Bob Loblaw.
86.
mr. whipple
Not only did they show up in a record number for a US midterm, they went GOP by 20 percent, and largely because of HCR.
Fuck ’em, they’ll be eliminated thru our death panels before 2012.
As for Lady Hamsher, I’ll just note that with the defeat of Prop Toke in CA, her record of success at her biggest “progressive” crusades to date now stands at 0 for 3. (see (1) Lamont, Ned and (2) HCR, kill).
Interesting how the demise of that particular GRASSroots effort didn’t make it on her top 10 list of “Big Losers” from yesterday.
To be fair, of course, she does deserve credit for the surprise victory of Russ Feingold — her stalwart support of whom appears on her OTHER list of “Top 10 Greatest Most Awesomest Progressive Things FDL Has Done For You This Year”, so I guess I have to admit — oh wait…….
97.
marcopolo
@change: Looking forward to asking you how that hopey thing is working for you in a few days. Hah.
98.
stuckinred
@eemom: But she’s so pretty and the only one who tells the truth!
In fairness, he used to snark moderately well. But when John put him in charge of the blog, it kinda unfortunately went to his head
The only thing that goes to Stuck’s head is his ass. That’s where he parks his noggin when he isn’t pissin’ and moanin’ about someone criticizing the leader of the free world on some blog.
It’s his big responsibility in life, I guess. keeping the BJ comments section free from people being mean to Obama.
@eemom: So what exactly did happen with the MaryJane legalization thing in California? Not that I was paying a lot of attention but I vaguely recall it being well on the way towards passage last I heard anything about it (a few weeks prior to the election).
102.
JWL
The gods were kind to have arranged your being in San Francisco tonight-of-all-nights.
103.
stuckinred
@WyldPirate: And keeping jackasses like you babbling on and on and on. . .
He hates the Democrats. He hates Obama.
He hates the voters. He hates the blogosphere.
He’s a miserable fuck, and hates the whole world
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
113.
Just Some Fuckhead
@General Stuck: No, I was serious. You clearly don’t have a lot going for ya, living in a trailer in the middle of area 51 with no friends or job and only a fickle dog for company. I think it’s great you’ve been able to carve out a slim reason to continue on in yer miserable existence. My hat is off to ya. :)
114.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: You know Cole is drinking with plushies, right?
dunno exactly, except that it lost. But she has another post up bragging that even though it lost, it got LOTS of votes.
So, y’see, it is STILL one of The Top Ten Greatest Most Awesomest Progressive Things FDL has done for you this year.
It may seem a bit puzzling, but never fear — Phoenix Woman should be along any minute now to explain it to us. She has a little “attack” buzzer on her collar that goes off every time someone says something mean about Jane.
116.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: It seems to be unclear just where the grand poo-bah is this fine eve.
117.
BGinCHI
Wonder if Feingold will go on the floor of the Senate and say just what he thinks about the GOP and corporate money in politics.
That’s so sweet of you fuckhead, and no doubt why about everyone on this blog hates your guts, but you keep coming back day after day to take the punishment, but for not. I suspect it to be a desperate attempt to escape the kids and wife, who most likely hate your guts as much as we do. But now you have a wildpirate friend who matches up asshole to asshole with your sorry self. So there is that.
I don’t live in a trailer, btw. Otherwise , you know nothing about me. really.
Kind of reminds me of the anecdote about Queen Elizabeth (the one who ruled from 1558-1603). She asked a man for his dog and promised a gift in return; he asked for his dog back.
122.
beltane
@BGinCHI: Feingold giving a “J’accuse” speech on the Senate floor would be a very fine thing indeed.
So here’s what you need to know, right now: Barack Obama is, and will continue to be, a bit of goddamn miracle. He’s simply as good as we’re going get for an articulate, thoughtful, integrity-rich Democratic prez in your lifetime. Period. To hamstring his administration out of spite and laziness is childish and sad. Check the accomplishments. Understand the process. Deal with the messiness.
People who need to attend conventions. As far as I can tell (with extreme prejudice), Orlando survives by lowballing convention planners to visit their sunny tropical paradise! ! ! , and then screwing the unfortunate conventioneers (and their families! how can you justify visiting Orlando — at a discounted hotel rate — if you don’t bring the spouse & kiddies to DisneySeaWorldUniversalCrapFest, you monster? ! ?) with an astonishing variety of surcharges and value-added-fees.
If you have never been to Orlando, and you feel the need to replicate the experience, I would suggest you run the hot water in the shower for about four hours straight, then take several flatscreens into the bathroom and play videos from Disney, Pixar and National Geographic while setting fire to all your money. And walking briskly on a treadmill. You’ll end up exhausted, broke, and overstimulated, just like the real thing, but at least you won’t have been groped by the TSA or forced to experience the Orlando Airport.
135.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: I like the dork in the 2 bytes are better than 1 ad.
136.
Just Some Fuckhead
@stuckinred: I once paid almost $500 for an external 9600 baud modem. I had a real hard time throwing it away because it cost so damn much.
137.
BGinCHI
@Anne Laurie: I’d rather roll around in broken glass.
At least when it was over I wouldn’t be in FL.
When the fuck will those lazy assed alligators get out of the Everglades and start eating some people??!! Their electric scooters can’t be that fast.
138.
jl
Spent a few minutes looking CA results. Except for Kamala Harris, GOP got slammed in statewide offices, Democratic candidates all won by double digits (Dems appear first in list below):
CA got rid of one GOPer seat in state assembly. This seems to be a very strong trend in state legislature: GOP seats are picked up one by one by Democrats and stay Democratic. Any CA politics buff correct me if I am wrong:
” California bucked a national trend when suburban Sacramento voters narrowly rejected Pugno in favor of Democrat Richard Pan, a pediatrician and professor at the University of California, Davis. The seat was held by termed-out Republican Assemblyman Roger Niello of Fair Oaks.”
Democrats hung on in Congressional and state assembly races that I read were supposed to be close. Except for McNerney, they won OK. Buchanan was a first term Democrat who won a long time GOP assembly seat last election, and she is still there. I think CA is one seat in both state chambers from GOP being BELOW 1/3 of seats.
I dunno. If my choices were Jim DeMint or the crazy guy, I’d probably go with the crazy guy.
Sure, if I thought crazy might win over evil.
Regarding the ‘not voting’ thing…I’ve never understood it. It’s a civic responsibility, if there’s an election you show up, period. Otherwise, you don’t complain. However, if a given race is completely filled with unpalatable choices, I’ve never seen a problem with leaving the ballot blank on that particular race.
141.
Dee Loralei
Did DeFazio win in Oregon? Or did the crazy lets put radiation waste on our land and seas win?
to answer jl’s question about the CA GOP from an earlier thread… I don’t think they have much of a chance of a comeback. They can’t win statewide office (it looked like Cooley was going to win the AG’s office but that didn’t happen). But as long as they are “the only other choice” they aren’t going to go extinct. My other concern is that if the redistricting commission attempts to create competitive seats rather than the continued gerrymandered nonsense, then there is a chance that they could come back in the legislature, depending on turn out and the quality of candidates on each side.
Since Prop 187 swung the state against them, they’ve become gigantic assholes. In the current system, they have no need to change. But, if they actually had a chance to win? To control the Legislature for a cycle or two? I would hope (key word) that they would get serious.
I admire what Markos built, which at one point was the very best thing on the web other than baseball-reference.com. I think he’s kind of inconsistent on what he actually wants, and when he wraps himself in the mantle of The Aggrieved Base it’s a rather big logic error.
And, what’s worse, _he knows all this_. DailyKos was one of the instruments that made small-dollar donations viable, and used that to get people like Ben Chandler and Stephanie Herseth elected because they were better than Republicans. That was smart politics. But every once in a while he seems to confuse himself and want to be the liberal enforcer instead. And then he whips around the other direction and wants Meek to drop out of the Senate race. I think all of that warrants a bit of constructive criticism.
But I was very surprised that he replied to me, so I thought I might as well share with everyone else I’ve been in dialogue with about these topics.
That’s so sweet of you fuckhead, and no doubt why about everyone on this blog hates your guts, but you keep coming back day after day to take the punishment
What punishment? Are you talking about unfriendly comments? Because you get a whole helluva lot more of these than practically anyone I can think of that has ever commented here, outside of the occasional rightwing troll and Church Lady.
What is your benchmark for success in this area?
147.
Anya
@General Stuck: On the bright side, those fuckers will all be dead in 30 years.
@FlipYrWhig: I read it completely differently when you dragged it over here to gloat. Perhaps I misread.
150.
Suffern ACE
@General Stuck: Makes me wonder if, after closing the donut hold and voting for a bonus SS payment, Gibbs would have said, “Obama likes old people, unlike the professional left who constantly undermine that message by stating out loud that the future will be better because the old people have died”, things would have worked out a bit differently.
@Anne Laurie:
Sadly, I will be in orlando next year. I continue to maintain that the reason there is a convention in Orlando is because *someone* wanted to go to Orlando. Not looking forward to this.
@Anne Laurie: (… we had a really good time at Disney World. Twice…).
/shuffles off in disgrace.
156.
Suffern ACE
@JGabriel: My lucky 8 ball says “Hazy on that one.”
157.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Suffern ACE: lol. You realize, of course, it’s the antithesis to the “professional left”, our own homegrown steely-eyed realists, full of Obotty goodness that are actually repeating the same “old people need to die” theme, right? FlipYrWhig, how many threads did you pollute with this juicy insight? Was it four or five or more. I lost count.
Or maybe I missed the sarcasm. Apologies if I did.
Are you talking about unfriendly comments? Because you get a whole helluva lot more of these than practically anyone I can think of that has ever commented here,
uh oh — looks like nobody even TOLD fuckhead that MJ still isn’t legal anywhere. He’s so stoned he’s forgotten what words like “unfriendly” and “more” mean.
160.
JGabriel
@arguingwithsignposts: Nah, I was just thinking along the lines of a more friendly lunacy.
@Suffern ACE: Heh. Mine says, “A fish needs a bicycle.” Note to self: move Magic 8 Ball to a different bookshelf.
Yea, I don’t like much the old folks bashing, because they are vulnerable people. The truly abhorrent memes the wingers used, like Death Panels, and the whole medicare plus bullshit goes straight into their greatest fears, and is hard to erase from minds not as sharp as they once were.
It is the strength of the lizard brain wingnuts to go this low to get elected, and until the HCR has been fully implemented, it is ripe for demagoguery from the right. When it does go into effect, it will benefit dems, I think. Which is why the wingnuts are so hot to sabotage it first. It’s hard to have nice things when half the country are hardboiled assholes.
162.
Martin
@BGinCHI: I actually remember that ad. That gives me a sad.
I take some pride in having the right enemies dude. And you are at the top of that list. I would like to get along with everyone, but that is too much to ask, and since in my late middle age, I don’t suffer asshats and idiots very well, things go where they go.
What a strawman. How dare you insult my My Little Pony Tea Party playset!
166.
Just Some Fuckhead
@General Stuck: There we go, a tacit acknowledgment you do, in fact, lead in this area. It is heroic that you so effortlessly endure so much punishment day after day, a fraction of which seems to you an almost impossible burden for your enemies.
I continue to maintain that the reason there is a convention in Orlando is because someone wanted to go to Orlando.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, convention planners — even for volunteer-run, hobby conventions — just want to pick a city that offers sufficient exhibitor floorspace & cheap enough hotel rooms that people will stop whining at them about how it’s too far away, too hard to reach, too inconvenient, nothing to do there, the food is terrible and the portions are too small. Orlando is like Las Vegas, but with hideous humidity, alligators & mosquitos. It’s “exciting”, there’s lots of discount flights, and the conventioneers won’t understand how they’ve been snookered until it’s too late.
As to why people return to Orlando, I try not to judge others’ enjoyments. Since my goal in life is to become a professional agoraphobe, I am not the target audience for most theme parks, shall we say.
How dare you insult my My Little Pony Tea Party playset!
I dare. Not only do I dare insult Your Little Tea Pony Party Set I’ll stick it in your frotting ear, rub it in your cookie dough, and melt it all all down along with your ridiculous Combat Go! Camouflage Keyboard in the fucking EZ Bake(tm) Oven!
You get more desperate and pathetic by the day fuckhead. I almost feel sorry for you. And you made yourself an enemy a long time ago, by devolving from a funny snarkster into a mean spirited a hole. It has been sad to witness.
170.
JGabriel
Deleted by author, for wrongness.
.
171.
jl
@Left Coast Tom: Thanks. I thought he was ahead, but obviously got it wrong.
Or I heard a preliminary report. After finishing ‘lection work I avoided media last night.
Oh well. CA almost avoided picking up a demon GOPer.
If the dog had an ID tag, microchip or even your phone number written on the collar, I suspect you would have had the dog back right away. Especially since you said it was an “expensive” dog.
173.
jl
@KG: The new system in CA will be interesting. It will be contest between the new primary system and more competitive districts.
I think one reason that the CA GOPers act crazy is that there is die hard crazy GOP primary voter base that predates the Teabaggers, and will fanatically oppose any moderate.
Since CA has a vile and evil, I think unconstitutional, strict term limits on all state offices, every politician knows he or she is one reelection campaign away from another primary for another office in order to stay in politics.
So will the new ‘jungle’ primary system produce a better chance for moderate GOPers to win primaries? That is the key.
But the CA GOP would have to make a huge change to win a majority. I just can’t see it. They way they act when they get an interview, it’s like they are trying alienate people. The only explanation is that they pander to the crazy GOP primary base every minute of every day in every single thing they do and say.
If they retain the same basic philosohpy, the choice for CA is either we get them and keep them below 1/3 or they a large enough minority to be cynically obstructionist and try to wreck the place.
But I will grant you this. I likely take too serious, past my pay grade, trying to keep a blog I don’t own somewhat free of trolls. Or at least doing my part, which may well exceed that which should be my part, and that is un healthy, for me, and maybe other blog commenters here as well.
Not only did they show up in a record number for a US midterm, they went GOP by 20 percent, and largely because of HCR the president is a nig… scary sociaIist mooslim.
Stuck and Fuck, you are two of my favorite Juicers, so how can you be so anti-each other? (Rhetorical question.) I’m struggling to find some appropriate Star Trek Spock goatee metaphor here.
Ooh–kickin’ Fender Rhodes piano solo. Gotta go.
178.
Gus
@eemom: You seem to be enjoying some schadenfreude over some painful losses, like it’s almost worth it that probably the best Senator left and a sane drug policy initiative lost just so Hamsher got hers.
Oh well. CA almost avoided picking up a demon GOPer.
Just poked around on another page on the CA results site, and Fresno County’s turnout (one of Costa’s counties) sucks compared to any other in the state (it was 28%, statewide was 44%): http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/status/
No idea why this is so, but something there is different than anywhere else.
182.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Steeplejack: Steep, didn’t you get Stuck’s memo? Everyone hates me. lol. You need to get your shit together before they shun you and you’ll have to eat your lunch all by yourself. (Bonus question: what song did I quote? No googling.)
183.
Anya
@Just Some Fuckhead: I always find it interesting that Kos and company don’t have any progressive black heroes (sort of like, Grayson, Dean, Feingold, etc). For people who believe in supporting progressives, they’ve never championed Meek’s cause. In fact the opposite was true, they’ve supported Cris. Also, whenever they talk about the base, it’s funny how AA is not included in that base.
Finally, Kos is hypicrtical when it comes to Blue Dogs. In the one hand, Dean is God, because of the 50 state strategy, on the other hand, Rahm is hated for running conserva dems in conservative districts.
But FlipYrWhig seems to think it’s pretty awesome. Why don’t you all work it out and let me know who we should be hatin’ on? I can adapt.
185.
jl
@Left Coast Tom: Interesting. I was going to say it was a San Joaquin Valley phenomenon, but look at the contrast with its neighbors north and south: Merced and Madera to the N, and Kings and Tulare to the S.
Since I spent time growing up in Fresno, and still have lots of relatives there, I hesitate to speculate on why Fresno would have such a worthless turnout, because my comments on the place might be considered uncivil and my conscience would bother me.
Except, it is potentially a very nice place with some very nice attributes that has been turned into a sh*thole.
Jungle primary is just a con by the duopoly to keep third parties out.
188.
jl
@Left Coast Tom: Though, Whitman’s asinine campaign assertion that Fresno was the Detroit of California because of DemocRAT policies was insulting, vicious, and absurd, probably much more so to Fresno than the Democrats.
Maybe Fresnans could not vote for Whitman after she made that argument, and could not stand to vote for an aging Moonbeam, so stayed home.
189.
jl
@Calouste: Maybe so. Bad as the CA gerrymandering is, I did not vote for it, and voted to repeal it yesterday (and lost on both). But it is here and we have to learn how to deal with it.
190.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Anya: I dunno, I might read the site once or twice a week and pretty exclusively the top recommended reader diaries (with the exception of those written by Olbermann or politicians.)
Never was a Dean supporter either. I actually worked for the Clark campaign in 2004 and was delighted to see Dean go down.
However, I will admit it never occurred to me that GOS was a white supremacist organization. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
Maybe Fresnans could not vote for Whitman after she made that argument, and could not stand to vote for an aging Moonbeam, so stayed home.
Yeah, I forgot about that nonsense. Fresno’s got a decent population too, so if that was a factor she may have cost herself a fair number of votes. For her ( R ) to take out Costa (D) would seem a bit strange though, unless the critics of blue dogs have a point regarding their effect on D turnout.
ETFA: How come you never get the kickin’ flute solos any more? Defunding of high school music classes? Inquiring minds want to know.
194.
Ron
@BGinCHI: While I will miss those guys, the worst loss IMO is Feingold in the Senate. Goddamn it, WI.
195.
Just Some Fuckhead
@General Stuck: Stuck, it is seriously frightening that you would be tracking such a thing. My teenage daughter isn’t this obsessed about who likes whom in her friend set.
“Friend set.” I like that phrase. Off to bed. I have to work a rare opening shift tomorrow, which means rise and shine at 0715. Bleah. Steep out. You two kiss shake and make up. You need each other, in some sick, dysfunctional–but totally okay–way.
I always find it interesting that Kos and company don’t have any progressive black heroes (sort of like, Grayson, Dean, Feingold, etc). For people who believe in supporting progressives, they’ve never championed Meek’s cause. In fact the opposite was true, they’ve supported Cris. Also, whenever they talk about the base, it’s funny how AA is not included in that base.
Indeed I noticed that also for quite some time, but the Meek situation brought it up again. The excuse from some members over there was that he wasn’t going to win anyways and it was best to keep Rubio out of the Senate. Well I thought that was complete bunk because I’ve seen liberals attach themselves to long shots before and took pride in their inevitable loss because their candidate was a true progressive. What pissed me off even more was that there was a post on their site today about no AA’s in the Senate. Yeah no shit!
It is my own opinion that liberals don’t give a shit about the AA base until they can use them to bash Obama. Most recent example was Velma Hart.
Keep track? you are weird fucker that reads my blog and quotes it here, worries about my dog, has all sorts of conspiracy fantasies about Cole turning over his blog to me , or me starting my own blog within his blog, or some such insane bullshit/ and now apparently obsessing over my personal life
Sick motherfucker you are. And you know what, it is so goddamn creepy, it may well work in finally convincing me commenting on this blog is just not worth it. But not today.
However, I will admit it never occurred to me that GOS was a white supremacist organization. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
You should read it. You will enjoy it because you have a flare for the dramatic.
201.
Anya
@Suck It Up!: Kos is not consistant about his reasons for supporting or opposing a Dem candidate. Most times, I give him a brake becuase he tends to fall in and out of love. But in all the years that I’ve been reading that site, I’ve never seen them championing a black progressive or a cause important to AAs. I think a little bit of reflection is needed.
202.
FlipYrWhig
@Just Some Fuckhead: Yes, I admit I have been crabby at older people today. That generation that got stuck between the Korean War and the hippies… nasty pieces of work.
DailyKos was a great platform and still could be. He just has no idea what he wants to do with it. And Jane Hamsher’s actual, honest-to-God paid trolls on the site… that’s a debacle.
As for this last thing, I wasn’t “gloating” about sticking it to Markos Moulitsas. I think he’s very confused about “the base” and I wanted to point out to him why. It just so happens that what I said over there is pretty much the stuff I always say over here, and I was surprised he bothered to respond. And I mentioned it also a little bit in the spirit of, “Hey, maw, I’m on the tee vee!”
I will say that I personally have many fewer issues with Markos Moulitsas than with, well, pretty much all the original major blog impresarios, because he actually does have a sense that it’s appropriate to pick battles and notch small tactical victories when big ones aren’t forthcoming. He made a point chiding “single issue voters” years ago that got him in deep dookie; back then he was the guy who was doing the most to push _some kind_ of Democrat into office, even in unlikely places like South Dakota, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Montana. He was excited about Mark Warner, who’s much more technocrat than liberal. After that there was Brian Schweitzer. These are not down-the-line liberal Democrats. They are effective and they push at the leftmost edge of what their electorates will stand. More liberal would be better, but more liberal wouldn’t likely get elected, so there’s a kind of equilibrium to seek. Markos knows this well.
(Remember that the initial interest in Howard Dean was _not_ that he was _liberal_; it was that he was _partisan_, i.e., he was a fighting Democrat who didn’t apologize. He was also pro-gun, from a rural state, and had a track record of balancing budgets. People have gotten the “partisan” vs. “liberal” distinction all mixed up in their memories as well, both for Dean himself and for his famous 50 State Strategy.)
But once in a while Markos lapses into wanting to be the dissatisfied progressive crusader. It’s at odds with both his history and his prevailing views (like wanting to nudge Meek out of the FL-Sen race). The only way that makes any sense is if he is making a mistake about the nature of “the base,” or if he actually knows better but _wants_ to act like his community is “the base” so that he has a bigger megaphone.
And, in particular, his repeating the stuff about the Very Offensive DOMA Brief as evidence for Obama’s liberal Dolchstosse… that’s just storing up pseudo outrage for the winter.
Yeah, kinda like she’s been schadenfreuding about the President of the United States and his entire domestic agenda getting fucked over in the midterm elections because he hasn’t done things her way.
And gloating over the Congresspeople who got defeated, even though they voted to give 40 million uninsured people coverage, because there wasn’t a public option that she could take credit for.
Don’t talk to me about “painful losses” and schadenfreude, idiot. Go swim over at Lake Batshit.
205.
Calliope Jane
@suzanne: Shit. I, just, wow. Shit. /totally useless but totally stunned comment even though I should have seen this coming.
206.
Just Some Fuckhead
@FlipYrWhig: And there have been a few frontpagers of AA persuasion. But it’s possible Kos has co-opted them, turned ’em against their own kind. Them’s the brakes, I guess.
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eemom
couple of. Couple OF. Couple OF, goddammit — I can’t TAKE it anymore.
Grammar is all I have left. Stop trampling on it.
Quaker in a Basement
Perfect mojito? I’ve been told it’s made with basil instead of mint.
WereBear
Try until you get it right. Provided you can tell :)
If places were switched, the MSM would be saying things like “why can’t the Republicans close the deal out West?” and “these prominent Tea Baggers had their heads handed to them!” and “the Republicans did not get the Senate, it does not bode well,” and stuff like that.
So I’m just not going to take this crap seriously.
Chat Noir
My new Pets of Balloon Juice 2011 Calendars arrived today! The envelope exploded with teh cute. Hobbes is in May and Natalie and Sherman are in September. You folks have some wickedly cute critters.
Tim
Alcoholism.
J sub D
Democratic Senate Candidate Alvin Greene Carried 10 SC Counties
That’s right, more than one fourth of SC voters wanted an unemployed
porn promoterreally obtuse pick-up artist living with his mom as their senator.There is really nothing I can add to that.
Cat Lady
I haven’t listened to one talking head today, and have only read my local paper’s website about the analysis of how my back from the dead governor Deval Patrick beat Romney-lite v.2.0. It’s instructive. I’m +3 on my way to +4 and beyond, am still convinced that there’s no way to predict how any of this will play out, and that everyone on TV right now is talking out of their ass.
Quicksand
Really, you want two crappy mojitos followed by a good one?
Whatever, man.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tim: Alcoholics go to meetings.*
(*) No offense intended to anyone in AA or any other 12 step program.
Corner Stone
Nate Silver should never be seen on TV. Ever.
edmund dantes
Well you’ll never know you have the perfect mojito until you’ve tried all the possible versions made by every different bartender. There always may be a better mojito just around the corner.
Good luck.
P.s. Don’t forget there is a chance of life on other planets so you’ll have to keep trying until you try them all.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: Or sober people who did it without a higher power.
Corner Stone
@J sub D: I had somewhat of the same pickle in my local CD. The D spot was won by a crazy ass La Rooshie in the primary.
Did not vote for her though. I probably would’ve voted for anyone against DeMint.
TVL
Perfect Mojito? If you’re still in San Francisco, The Orbit Room. It’s on Market and (I think) Guerrero.
Davis X. Machina
@J sub D: Create two, three, many Alan Keyes!
FlipYrWhig
Hey, I got Markos himself to respond to a comment I left at GOS. If you read my comments here, well, you probably won’t be surprised at what I say or how I sound. I’m kind of repetitive.
gbear
@stuckinred: yep.
Davis X. Machina
@TVL: If he’s looking for the perfect mojito in Pittsburgh, he’s got quite a job ahead of him…
Origuy
@TVL: Cole is in Florida, I think. He said he won’t be in SF for a couple OF weeks.
John O
This one is good, for those who haven’t seen it.
And I agree with it. It’s stupid and cruel policy, but policy doesn’t matter anymore to far too many people. It’s all ideology for them. Give them a heavy dose of ideology, and reality will (eventually) return to the fore.
General Stuck
@eemom:
But you’re not a hillbilly. We don’t like to waste prepositions on small talk.
Annie
And for the good of science, don’t settle. Keep trying until you get the best and the data to back it up.
Punchy
While would you need a married/dating twosome to help you?
lacp
@J sub D: So next time he runs as a Republican?
Cat Lady
@Chat Noir:
My Woody is a Mr. May also, too. He’s in a bag, third down from the top right. He has the most intelligent eyes. I love him so.
marcopolo
@J sub D: Yeah but at least the percentage for Greene is right on the line of the 27% crazy factor, which was thoroughly discussed last night with Greene being an example that the crazy vote wasn’t just limited to the Rethuglicans.
lacp
@Davis X. Machina: …but if he hopped over to Philly, The Rum Bar at 20th and Walnut would keep him busy for a few days.
jwb
@marcopolo: Didn’t he make it over 28%? He was at 28.2%, I think, last time I checked.
Davis X. Machina
@lacp: I will pass that info along to the boys at my son’s CMU frat — road trip!
Me, I’m looking for the perfect mojito in Lewiston, ME.
Basically, I’m boned.
freelancer
Holy Shit. Can I get a “Hooray for Science!“?
Nerull
I choose take it as more a sign that people really don’t like Jim DeMint.
J sub D
@lacp:
Like the Delaware senate race (how many voted for O’Donnell?) It just shows that sports bar politics lunacy pervades the electorate.
In Detroit, Satan (D) would handily beat Jesus (R). In rural Texas, Satan (R) beats the Democratic carpenter without raising a sweat. A sad commentary on the average voter, no?
ETA – ( R ) w/o the spaces gives a registered trademark symbol here.
Cat Lady
@Davis X. Machina:
Go see Dan the bartender at the El Camino in Brunswick. He’ll make you a kick ass mojito. They also have amazing margaritas. Dan is the best bartender I’ve ever seen work. Diverse interesting crowd, but all white, alas. It is Maine.
beltane
It is strange how the insanity has completely spared some areas of the country, the most notable example being California. The bubonic plague spared certain regions in a similar way.
There was no teabagger wave here. It was a sweet thing for my son and me to pass a giant Brian Dubie (R-toast) sign on the road, point at it, and exclaim “Loooser!” in unison.
I love Vermont.
The Grand Panjandrum
I hope it takes you several to find the perfect one. You know, so you have a good baseline to work with for comparison.
General Stuck
@beltane:
Wasn’t Lenin born there?
Joseph Nobles
Wow, whitehouse.org is so full of win right now.
debit
I’m ordering my calender tomorrow. Very excited!
Davis X. Machina
@General Stuck: No, but Lenin was a ski bum there for a few years fresh out of college. Worked, IIRC, as a prep cook in a Thai joint in So. Burlington, and did calculus tutoring at St. Michaels.
Most people don’t know this.
beltane
@FlipYrWhig: Kos really isn’t getting it this year. The way he was celebrating the Blue Dog losses last night was almost unhinged. It is so much easier to bitch about the Democrats’ messaging than it is to think of ways in which we can hold our own against the right-wing monolith of the American media. And yes, they’re still talking about primarying conservadems as part of their strategy final victory.
Martin
@Corner Stone: I disagree. Nate getting on tv gives hope to the rest of us. Moar awkward geeks plz!
jwb
@Joseph Nobles: You laugh now, but remember parody these days is only ever a quarter step at most ahead of the real thing.
James K. Polk, Esq.
http://www.eotrading.com/bar/cocktails.html
E&O trading for best SF mojitos.
General Stuck
@FlipYrWhig:
I just read that. and lol
Kos
So with all Obama has on his plate, Kos is put out that he hasn’t wet nursed the cry babies enough.
Cat Lady
@beltane:
I like to think of it as natural selection. It may be useful to identify likely collaborators in the coming hard times. I love my fellow Massholes today, and driving home in heavy traffic on the Pike today like I do so often I felt almost… sanguine. Then I flipped off the dick in the Mercedes texting in the passing lane like it was all just about him, because I’m sure he was a Republican, and it felt good.
suzanne
So Russell Pearce is the new President of the Arizona State Senate.
Because when we go batshit, we double down.
If only matoko_chan could be the new Majority Whip, my state will have finally reached its own personal Peak Wingnut.
change
‘So, you all do realize that we will have millions and millions of third party money burying BO in 2012, right?
Wilson Heath
Saw a small item today that the editors of the Mooney Times are finalizing a deal to buy the paper from the Rev’s son who was going to fold it. They’re paying a buck and assuming a metric sh!t ton of debt of the “paper” to do so. I’m willing to tick off “Team R Word” on this one — that’s just frakking retarded.
NonyNony
@J sub D:
You can’t say that for sure. It may be that more than a fourth of SC voters didn’t want Jim DeMint as their Senator.
Hell if I were in SC I would have voted for Greene. He had no chance of winning anyway, and skipping the ballot line and not voting for anyone doesn’t count towards the vote percentages, so how else would I register my disgust at having DeMint as my Senator? It’s not like SC has a “None of the Above” slot on the ballot. Plus if by a miracle of miracles he actually happened to win the seat I still contend he’d do less damage to the country than Jim DeMint will over the next six years.
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred: Nor those.
marcopolo
@beltane: Well, Cali may have been spared the R wave this election (and the bubonic plague) but they are suffering from a whooping cough epidemic atm. Can’t dodge all the bullets.
marcopolo
@NonyNony: I hear you could have written in Lisa Murkowski
jwb
@change: Probably more like billions, but who’s counting? But seriously, would grow up already.
Davis X. Machina
@beltane: I’ve spent some spare time, instructive, and enjoyable — in a detached kind of way — the last fortnight, re-fighting the battles between Kautsky and Bernstein, Luxembourg and Eisner and Ebert, Jaurés and Guesde, etc.
I feel like I know all these people.
There have always been Daily Kos-es, and front-pagers, and DINO’s, and firebaggers, and trolls. People have been reading each other out of the party as sellouts and trimmers since Noah shut the door on the ark.
General Stuck
Wanna know who defeated dems this go around, not those who approve of Obamacare. Medicared seniors.
Not only did they show up in a record number for a US midterm, they went GOP by 20 percent, and largely because of HCR.
Martin
@John O: Yeah, I would love to see, as a temporary 2-year measure, have Obama and the Senate propose a bill that will provide mandatory spending cuts to all states in excess of their tax receipts along a prioritized list – starting with any earmarks and highway funding and working on down. Sell it big – a prime-time oval office speech. Lay out how much money it would save. Get Democrats to sell it up as well, that we need to take tough measures. Get the teabaggers talking about all the liberal states that will get their liberal programs cut. Put lots of pressure on the House to adopt this spending bill.
That would be wonderful…
jwb
@General Stuck: They have theirs, why the fuck should they care about anyone else?
Anya
@Cat Lady: Aso, stay away from GOS, TPM and FDL.
Citizen_X
@J sub D: Believe me, here in Texas, Satan(R) is a registered trademark.
suzanne
@marcopolo:
I dunno. If my choices were Jim DeMint or the crazy guy, I’d probably go with the crazy guy. Crazy is more entertaining than evil any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
John O
@Martin:
I think it would be good politics. Very good, actually. Let’s put the cards on the table and man up.
You use charts and stuff and call it a “teachable moment” for the geniuses who don’t have any understanding of where the money is. And yes, you coordinate, which since they’re Dems is where the whole plan falls apart.
Martin
@General Stuck: Yep. The GOP got that lie out big and bold.
We’ll get the last laugh – they’re gonna die soon.
General Stuck
@jwb:
Yup, sure looks that way.
marcopolo
@change: Hey, remember what I said about Joe Miller the other night? You were pretty certain he would win–said something about the Tea Party not existing in 1998. Looks like I was right, though I would have preferred McAdams. But then I did live in Fairbanks for over a decade and have met Miller back when he ran for a seat in the Alaska state house. He was already a jerk way back then (2004).
Delia
The Oregonian has projected that Kitzhaber will win the governor’s race over Dudley. So that means pretty much the whole left coast has stayed sane. Hell, both Cali and Oregon now have governors who are coming back for a third term.
beltane
@General Stuck: Can we repossess their scooters? You know, the ones that we paid for with our Medicare deductions.
mr. whipple
@FlipYrWhig:
You made some great points. Well done.
It would be interesting to go back thru the archives to see how many of those people got money raised through his website- back when it was important to have a majority and not so important to have the luxury to bitch they were blue dogs.
I find these types unfathomable.
frosty
@General Stuck: …they went GOP by 20 percent, and largely because of lies they were told about HCR.
FTFY
jwb
@Martin: If you want to disrupt the GOP, that’s not at all how you go about it. You need to find a wedge to divide the corporate overlords and set them against one another, the same way the Goopers use race, gender, and other social issues to divide the working class vote.
stuckinred
Rachel is using a laugh track as she goes one-by-one through “compromises” and the incoming committee chairs.
General Stuck
@frosty:
Yes, to be fair. They are old and vulnerable, easily preyed upon by the wingnuts with their lies about HCR. And you can bet, it was planned that way.
Loneoak
Gitane makes a pretty good cocktail and it’s in the market district.
marcopolo
@General Stuck: You wrote Medicared seniors. I think you meant Mediscared. Always good to see older folks vote in the representatives of the party that wants to privatize/reduce Social Security benefits and get rid of Medicare/Medicaid. Hey let’s go back in time to when seniors in this country had the highest rates of poverty. Yeehaw!
Calouste
Lord James of Blackheath might have had a few too many mojitos before his speech in the House of Lords two days back:
Lord James of Blackheath (Conservative):
For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords [Lord Sassoon, Treasury Minister and Lord Strathclyde, Leader of the House of Lords], in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it foundation X. That is not its real name, but it will do for the moment. Foundation X was introduced to me 20 weeks ago last week by an eminent City firm, which is FSA controlled. Its chairman came to me and said, “We have this extraordinary request to assist in a major financial reconstruction. It is megabucks, but we need your help to assist us in understanding whether this business is legitimate”. I had the biggest put down of my life from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde when I told him this story. He said, “Why you? You’re not important enough to have the answer to a question like that”. He is quite right, I am not important enough, but the answer to the next question was, “You haven’t got the experience for it”. Yes I do. I have had one of the biggest experiences in the laundering of terrorist money and funny money that anyone has had in the City. I have handled billions of pounds of terrorist money.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Labour): Where did it go to?
Lord James of Blackheath (Conservative)
Not into my pocket. My biggest terrorist client was the IRA and I am pleased to say that I managed to write off more than £1 billion of its money. I have also had extensive connections with north African terrorists, but that was of a far nastier nature, and I do not want to talk about that because it is still a security issue. I hasten to add that it is no good getting the police in, because I shall immediately call the Bank of England as my defence witness, given that it put me in to deal with these problems.
The point is that when I was in the course of doing this strange activity, I had an interesting set of phone numbers and references that I could go to for help when I needed it. So people in the City have known that if they want to check out anything that looks at all odd, they can come to me and I can press a few phone numbers to obtain a reference. The City firm came to me and asked whether I could get a reference and a clearance on foundation X. For 20 weeks, I have been endeavouring to do that. I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this present moment, as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy.
I made the phone call to my noble friend Lord Strathclyde on a Sunday afternoon-I think he was sitting on his lawn, poor man-and he did the quickest ball pass that I have ever witnessed. If England can do anything like it at Twickenham on Saturday, we will have a chance against the All Blacks. The next think I knew, I had my noble friend Lord Sassoon on the phone. From the outset, he took the proper defensive attitude of total scepticism, and said, “This cannot possibly be right”. During the following weeks, my noble friend said, “Go and talk to the Bank of England”. So I phoned the governor and asked whether he could check this out for me. After about three days, he came back and said, “You can get lost. I’m not touching this with a bargepole; it is far too difficult. Take it back to the Treasury”. So I did. Within another day, my noble friend Lord Sassoon had come back and said, “This is rubbish. It can’t possibly be right”. I said, “I am going to work more on it”. Then I brought one of the senior executives from foundation X to meet my noble friend Lord Strathclyde. I have to say that, as first dates go, it was not a great success. Neither of them ended up by inviting the other out for a coffee or drink at the end of the evening, and they did not exchange telephone numbers in order to follow up the meeting.
I found myself between a rock and a hard place that were totally paranoid about each other, because the foundation X people have an amazing obsession with their own security. They expect to be contacted only by someone equal to head of state status or someone with an international security rating equal to the top six people in the world. This is a strange situation. My noble friends Lord Sassoon and Lord Strathclyde both came up with what should have been an absolute killer argument as to why this could not be true and that we should forget it. My noble friend Lord Sassoon’s argument was that these people claimed to have evidence that last year they had lodged £5 billion with British banks. They gave transfer dates and the details of these transfers. As my noble friend Lord Sassoon, said, if that were true it would stick out like a sore thumb. You could not have £5 billion popping out of a bank account without it disrupting the balance sheet completely. But I remember that at about the same time as those transfers were being made the noble Lord, Lord Myners, was indulging in his game of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic of the British banking community. If he had three banks at that time, which had had, say, a deficiency of £1.5 million each, then you would pretty well have absorbed the entire £5 billion, and you would not have had the sore thumb stick out at that time; you would have taken £1.5 billion into each of three banks and you would have absorbed the lot. That would be a logical explanation-I do not know.
My noble friend Lord Strathclyde came up with a very different argument. He said that this cannot be right because these people said at the meeting with him that they were still effectively on the gold standard from back in the 1920s and that their entire currency holdings throughout the world, which were very large, were backed by bullion. My noble friend Lord Strathclyde came back and said to me that he had an analyst working on it and that this had to be stuff and nonsense. He said that they had come up with a figure for the amount of bullion that would be needed to cover their currency reserves, as claimed, which would be more than the entire value of bullion that had ever been mined in the history of the world. I am sorry but my noble friend Lord Strathclyde is wrong; his analysts are wrong. He had tapped into the sources that are available and there is only one definitive source for the amount of bullion that has ever been taken from the earth’s crust. That was a National Geographic magazine article 12 years ago. Whatever figure it was that was quoted was then quoted again on six other sites on the internet-on Google. Everyone is quoting one original source; there is no other confirming authority. But if you tap into the Vatican accounts-of the Vatican bank-you come up with a claim of total bullion-
BGinCHI
How to make the perfect mojito:
Drink a shot of
ginbourbonrumvodkaok, that’s right, it’s rum.Eat a
tumsAltoid.Fall down.
FlipYrWhig
@General Stuck:
@beltane:
Is there any substance to the charge that Obama bashes his base, and that why they didn’t turn out to vote?
I think you can find sniping at organized activist liberals, and you can find examples of dissatisfied rank-and-file liberals, Latinos, LGBT, labor, you name it. But I think you have to willfully blur all of those complexly commingled categories to be able to say that there’s been base-bashing, and thus What Obama Must Do is stroke and coddle his liberal base so that they turn out the next time. It probably doesn’t hurt to do more stroking and coddling, but I don’t think it matches up with The Problem.
I think it matches up with Things That Would Make Bloggy People
HappyHappierLess Unhappy. That’s not bad in and of itself, but you’re talking about a small fraction of a small fraction of the people he needs to satisfy politically and policy-wise.(I also have a hunch that Obama in general wants to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, and doesn’t particularly care about interest groups, which might be risky politically but actually does more to help people in need, even the ungrateful ones, like poor white seniors.)
WyldPirate
@General Stuck:
Yeah, and they did it because Obama lost control of the fucking message on HCR and got it defined for him.
How do you like them apples, asshole?
@General Stuck:
And for the record I’m back you fucking dickhead. Go back to the last thread where you started talking shit out of the fucking blue. I hadn’t even addressed you in several days. I wasn’t picking shit with you yet you have the gall to call me an “internet “tough guy”?. You were the one talking bad ass about starting the flame war. I was minding my own business, because baqsically, i think you’re a whiny little shit whose only talent is cracking unfunny one-liners.
Well, here I am you pathetic limp-dicked mother fucker. If you got it, bring it. Otherwise, again, feel free to go fuck yourself.
Just Some Fuckhead
@FlipYrWhig: Wow. Yer pretty impressive. Maybe you can follow through and nurture and harness a whole freaking movement like Kos did instead of taking potshots.
freelancer
@Calouste:
wtftl;dr
stuckinred
@WyldPirate: Hi punk, macrame class over so early?
General Stuck
@WyldPirate:
teehee. You need to pace yourself there tough guy. Wouldn’t want your noggin to explode.
arguingwithsignposts
Warning: Shameless blogwhoring ahead.
Well, the TS and I are still working on the Sept. music reviews, but in the meantime, we’ve found another gem for you. Check it out here.
And thanks for checking out the new blog effort everyone. Hope it’s fun for you all too.
Martin
@John O: It’d be pretty interesting to see how it played out.
General Stuck
@FlipYrWhig:
I don’t see it. But we have big brains Wyldpirate and fuckhead here to enlighten us.
Cat Lady
@Anya:
I gave up cable news months and months ago, but now I don’t get out of this boat at all, except for Tbogg. This is the perch from which I prefer to view the insanity with Cole’s and DougJ’s eyes, and the smartest funnest commenters on these here intertoobz.
ETA: except for Oscar Leroy and Bob Loblaw. I hate Oscar Leroy and Bob Loblaw.
mr. whipple
Fuck ’em, they’ll be eliminated thru our death panels before 2012.
freelancer
Also,
Let’s Go, Livonia!
Just Some Fuckhead
@WyldPirate:
In fairness, he used to snark moderately well. But when John put him in charge of the blog, it kinda unfortunately went to his head.
mr. whipple
@General Stuck:
I see it, and weep daily into my tie dye. I am a delicate flower.
General Stuck
@WyldPirate:
Shorter Wyldpirate – I’m to stupid to do anything but blame OBAMA……….
Jonathan
I had the best mojito I’ve ever had in Barcelona at Hotel 1898.
It’s a “Chili Coconut Mojito”, and thought I’m not usually one to enjoy these types of drinks, this one blew me away.
I think it consisted of limes and extra lime juice, 1 thai chili, chopped, mint, cane sugar, and coconut rum.
General Stuck
@mr. whipple:
LOL
Dr. Squid
Suggestion for finding the perfect mojito: forget about it and go with straight small-batch bourbon instead.
change
@marcopolo:
We’ll see about all those “write-ins” won’t we?
It isn’t over for Miller yet!
marcopolo
Well here is some additional trailing good election news. It now looks like Kitzhaber has pulled it out against the carbetbagging, prevaricating, lousy ex-b-baller Dudley to take the Oregon governor’s race. And I was being nice to Dudley.
eemom
@FlipYrWhig:
Kos is FOS. Nice try, though.
As for Lady Hamsher, I’ll just note that with the defeat of Prop Toke in CA, her record of success at her biggest “progressive” crusades to date now stands at 0 for 3. (see (1) Lamont, Ned and (2) HCR, kill).
Interesting how the demise of that particular GRASSroots effort didn’t make it on her top 10 list of “Big Losers” from yesterday.
To be fair, of course, she does deserve credit for the surprise victory of Russ Feingold — her stalwart support of whom appears on her OTHER list of “Top 10 Greatest Most Awesomest Progressive Things FDL Has Done For You This Year”, so I guess I have to admit — oh wait…….
marcopolo
@change: Looking forward to asking you how that hopey thing is working for you in a few days. Hah.
stuckinred
@eemom: But she’s so pretty and the only one who tells the truth!
WyldPirate
@Just Some Fuckhead:
The only thing that goes to Stuck’s head is his ass. That’s where he parks his noggin when he isn’t pissin’ and moanin’ about someone criticizing the leader of the free world on some blog.
It’s his big responsibility in life, I guess. keeping the BJ comments section free from people being mean to Obama.
BGinCHI
@arguingwithsignposts: Site looks great and will check out the tunes.
Best with the project.
marcopolo
@eemom: So what exactly did happen with the MaryJane legalization thing in California? Not that I was paying a lot of attention but I vaguely recall it being well on the way towards passage last I heard anything about it (a few weeks prior to the election).
JWL
The gods were kind to have arranged your being in San Francisco tonight-of-all-nights.
stuckinred
@WyldPirate: And keeping jackasses like you babbling on and on and on. . .
Just Some Fuckhead
@WyldPirate: We all gotta have a reason to be.
stuckinred
@JWL: He’s in Orlando
John O
@Martin:
For better or worse (I say worse) the playing field has been defined. Time to get on it and actually play some offense for a change.
General Stuck
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Man, that’s deep fuckhead. I think you could be improving yerself.
Southern Beale
Here’s a lovely gift for the kiddies this Christmas:
“The Liberal Clause: Socialism on a Sleigh,” where Obama is the Grinch who stole Christmas.
Wish I were joking.
mr. whipple
I was following intently, but I seem to have forgot what happened.
JWL
@stuckinred:
No shit? Well, then the gods as much as told him to go fuck himself.
stuckinred
@JWL: That’s what he said last night.
freelancer
@stuckinred:
He hates the Democrats. He hates Obama.
He hates the voters. He hates the blogosphere.
He’s a miserable fuck, and hates the whole world
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
Just Some Fuckhead
@General Stuck: No, I was serious. You clearly don’t have a lot going for ya, living in a trailer in the middle of area 51 with no friends or job and only a fickle dog for company. I think it’s great you’ve been able to carve out a slim reason to continue on in yer miserable existence. My hat is off to ya. :)
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: You know Cole is drinking with plushies, right?
Who goes to Orlando on purpose?
eemom
@marcopolo:
dunno exactly, except that it lost. But she has another post up bragging that even though it lost, it got LOTS of votes.
So, y’see, it is STILL one of The Top Ten Greatest Most Awesomest Progressive Things FDL has done for you this year.
It may seem a bit puzzling, but never fear — Phoenix Woman should be along any minute now to explain it to us. She has a little “attack” buzzer on her collar that goes off every time someone says something mean about Jane.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: It seems to be unclear just where the grand poo-bah is this fine eve.
BGinCHI
Wonder if Feingold will go on the floor of the Senate and say just what he thinks about the GOP and corporate money in politics.
I think it’s going to be muy picante.
Downpuppy
Valid complaint or bad dog owner?
You be the judge
General Stuck
@Just Some Fuckhead:
That’s so sweet of you fuckhead, and no doubt why about everyone on this blog hates your guts, but you keep coming back day after day to take the punishment, but for not. I suspect it to be a desperate attempt to escape the kids and wife, who most likely hate your guts as much as we do. But now you have a wildpirate friend who matches up asshole to asshole with your sorry self. So there is that.
I don’t live in a trailer, btw. Otherwise , you know nothing about me. really.
John O
It must be time to go to bed. I think I just saw a commercial for a cell phone that was marketing itself as the answer to cell phone unawareness.
BGinCHI
@Downpuppy:
Kind of reminds me of the anecdote about Queen Elizabeth (the one who ruled from 1558-1603). She asked a man for his dog and promised a gift in return; he asked for his dog back.
beltane
@BGinCHI: Feingold giving a “J’accuse” speech on the Senate floor would be a very fine thing indeed.
Ash Can
@Calouste: lolwut
freelancer
@John O:
Microsoft has truly gone ’round the bend with that one.
BGinCHI
@beltane: If anyone is going to do it, and do it with brio, it’s going to be him.
I predict a riot, to quote the catchy song.
MikeJ
@stuckinred: He asked about things to do in SF, but yesterday he said he was at a conf in Orlando.
stuckinred
Check out these vintage technology ads, $3398 for a 10 meg hard drive!
jwb
@MikeJ: He’s at a conference in Orlando this week, and will be in SF in two weeks, IIRC.
BGinCHI
Oregonian calling the OR Guv race for Kitzhaber.
The slow white bullet has been dodged.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@BGinCHI: Oh man, I hope so.
Darkrose
@marcopolo:
The stoners had the date wrong, and the rest of the Bay Area was still in shock due to the Giants finally winning the World Series.
stuckinred
@MikeJ: Roger dat.
SIA
Letter to a whiny young Dem.
__
Anne Laurie
@BGinCHI:
__
People who need to attend conventions. As far as I can tell (with extreme prejudice), Orlando survives by lowballing convention planners to visit their sunny tropical paradise! ! ! , and then screwing the unfortunate conventioneers (and their families! how can you justify visiting Orlando — at a discounted hotel rate — if you don’t bring the spouse & kiddies to DisneySeaWorldUniversalCrapFest, you monster? ! ?) with an astonishing variety of surcharges and value-added-fees.
If you have never been to Orlando, and you feel the need to replicate the experience, I would suggest you run the hot water in the shower for about four hours straight, then take several flatscreens into the bathroom and play videos from Disney, Pixar and National Geographic while setting fire to all your money. And walking briskly on a treadmill. You’ll end up exhausted, broke, and overstimulated, just like the real thing, but at least you won’t have been groped by the TSA or forced to experience the Orlando Airport.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: I like the dork in the 2 bytes are better than 1 ad.
Just Some Fuckhead
@stuckinred: I once paid almost $500 for an external 9600 baud modem. I had a real hard time throwing it away because it cost so damn much.
BGinCHI
@Anne Laurie: I’d rather roll around in broken glass.
At least when it was over I wouldn’t be in FL.
When the fuck will those lazy assed alligators get out of the Everglades and start eating some people??!! Their electric scooters can’t be that fast.
jl
Spent a few minutes looking CA results. Except for Kamala Harris, GOP got slammed in statewide offices, Democratic candidates all won by double digits (Dems appear first in list below):
Governor: Brown 54, Whitman 41 (+13)
US Senate: Boxer 52, Fiorina 42 (+10)
Lt. Gov: Newsom 50, Maldonado 39 (+11)
Sec State: Bowen 53, Dunn 38 (+15)
Controller: Chiang 55, Strickland 36 (+19)
Treasurer: Lockyer 56, Walters 36 (+20)
Attorney General: Harris 46.1%, Cooley 45.6% (+0.5)
Insurance Commissioner: Jones 50, Villines 38 (+12)
Supt. of Public Instruction: Torlakson 55, Aceves 45 (+10)
CA got rid of one GOPer seat in state assembly. This seems to be a very strong trend in state legislature: GOP seats are picked up one by one by Democrats and stay Democratic. Any CA politics buff correct me if I am wrong:
” California bucked a national trend when suburban Sacramento voters narrowly rejected Pugno in favor of Democrat Richard Pan, a pediatrician and professor at the University of California, Davis. The seat was held by termed-out Republican Assemblyman Roger Niello of Fair Oaks.”
Democrats Gain More Sway In California Legislature
November 3, 2010 5:55 PM
CBS News San Francisco
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2010/11/03/democrats-gain-more-sway-in-california-legislature
Democrats hung on in Congressional and state assembly races that I read were supposed to be close. Except for McNerney, they won OK. Buchanan was a first term Democrat who won a long time GOP assembly seat last election, and she is still there. I think CA is one seat in both state chambers from GOP being BELOW 1/3 of seats.
CA-11: McNerney 82,124, Harmer 82,003 (wow)
Calitics
http://calitics.com/diary/12811/kamala-harris-claims-victory-in-attorney-general-race
Assembly Disctrict 15
Joan Buchanan 52.7 Wilson 47.3
Congress
CA-39
Sanchez 64.0, Andre 31.9
Anyone know of GOP pick ups in CA? I can’t find one.
BGinCHI
Of all the people who lost yesterday, I think Tom Perriello was the saddest.
What a damn good guy, good pol, and good Dem. Others should aspire to be what he was while in office.
We’ll miss Grayson too, but Perriello was the real deal. Shitty.
Left Coast Tom
@suzanne:
Sure, if I thought crazy might win over evil.
Regarding the ‘not voting’ thing…I’ve never understood it. It’s a civic responsibility, if there’s an election you show up, period. Otherwise, you don’t complain. However, if a given race is completely filled with unpalatable choices, I’ve never seen a problem with leaving the ballot blank on that particular race.
Dee Loralei
Did DeFazio win in Oregon? Or did the crazy lets put radiation waste on our land and seas win?
Left Coast Tom
@jl:
So far, Costa’s behind (CA-20). That’s it, as far as I know.
http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/us-congress/district/20/
KG
to answer jl’s question about the CA GOP from an earlier thread… I don’t think they have much of a chance of a comeback. They can’t win statewide office (it looked like Cooley was going to win the AG’s office but that didn’t happen). But as long as they are “the only other choice” they aren’t going to go extinct. My other concern is that if the redistricting commission attempts to create competitive seats rather than the continued gerrymandered nonsense, then there is a chance that they could come back in the legislature, depending on turn out and the quality of candidates on each side.
Since Prop 187 swung the state against them, they’ve become gigantic assholes. In the current system, they have no need to change. But, if they actually had a chance to win? To control the Legislature for a cycle or two? I would hope (key word) that they would get serious.
FlipYrWhig
@Just Some Fuckhead: Is that “Like you could do better!” snark? Really?
I admire what Markos built, which at one point was the very best thing on the web other than baseball-reference.com. I think he’s kind of inconsistent on what he actually wants, and when he wraps himself in the mantle of The Aggrieved Base it’s a rather big logic error.
And, what’s worse, _he knows all this_. DailyKos was one of the instruments that made small-dollar donations viable, and used that to get people like Ben Chandler and Stephanie Herseth elected because they were better than Republicans. That was smart politics. But every once in a while he seems to confuse himself and want to be the liberal enforcer instead. And then he whips around the other direction and wants Meek to drop out of the Senate race. I think all of that warrants a bit of constructive criticism.
But I was very surprised that he replied to me, so I thought I might as well share with everyone else I’ve been in dialogue with about these topics.
Greenhouse Guy
@Anne Laurie:
Brilliantly done/said! Gratzi!
Just Some Fuckhead
@General Stuck:
What punishment? Are you talking about unfriendly comments? Because you get a whole helluva lot more of these than practically anyone I can think of that has ever commented here, outside of the occasional rightwing troll and Church Lady.
What is your benchmark for success in this area?
Anya
@General Stuck: On the bright side, those fuckers will all be dead in 30 years.
Bnut
@Calouste:
Foundation X sounds like the Office of International Treasury Control. Here’s the wiki for them also.
Just Some Fuckhead
@FlipYrWhig: I read it completely differently when you dragged it over here to gloat. Perhaps I misread.
Suffern ACE
@General Stuck: Makes me wonder if, after closing the donut hold and voting for a bonus SS payment, Gibbs would have said, “Obama likes old people, unlike the professional left who constantly undermine that message by stating out loud that the future will be better because the old people have died”, things would have worked out a bit differently.
Left Coast Tom
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I went over and read it all, and for my money you completely misread.
arguingwithsignposts
@Anne Laurie:
Sadly, I will be in orlando next year. I continue to maintain that the reason there is a convention in Orlando is because *someone* wanted to go to Orlando. Not looking forward to this.
JGabriel
People, people: Can’t we all just get along?
.
arguingwithsignposts
@JGabriel: what, you want some sanity restored?
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@Anne Laurie: (… we had a really good time at Disney World. Twice…).
/shuffles off in disgrace.
Suffern ACE
@JGabriel: My lucky 8 ball says “Hazy on that one.”
Just Some Fuckhead
@Suffern ACE: lol. You realize, of course, it’s the antithesis to the “professional left”, our own homegrown steely-eyed realists, full of Obotty goodness that are actually repeating the same “old people need to die” theme, right? FlipYrWhig, how many threads did you pollute with this juicy insight? Was it four or five or more. I lost count.
Or maybe I missed the sarcasm. Apologies if I did.
freelancer
@JGabriel:
Fuck you. Wrong blog for that, asshole.
eemom
uh oh — looks like nobody even TOLD fuckhead that MJ still isn’t legal anywhere. He’s so stoned he’s forgotten what words like “unfriendly” and “more” mean.
JGabriel
@arguingwithsignposts: Nah, I was just thinking along the lines of a more friendly lunacy.
@Suffern ACE: Heh. Mine says, “A fish needs a bicycle.” Note to self: move Magic 8 Ball to a different bookshelf.
.
General Stuck
@Suffern ACE:
Yea, I don’t like much the old folks bashing, because they are vulnerable people. The truly abhorrent memes the wingers used, like Death Panels, and the whole medicare plus bullshit goes straight into their greatest fears, and is hard to erase from minds not as sharp as they once were.
It is the strength of the lizard brain wingnuts to go this low to get elected, and until the HCR has been fully implemented, it is ripe for demagoguery from the right. When it does go into effect, it will benefit dems, I think. Which is why the wingnuts are so hot to sabotage it first. It’s hard to have nice things when half the country are hardboiled assholes.
Martin
@BGinCHI: I actually remember that ad. That gives me a sad.
JGabriel
@freelancer:
What’s that? You wanna get tough with ME, you filthy little marzipan eater?
I shit on your Cabbage Patch Kidz(tm) Dining Table Collectibles set, you fucking nincompoopic swine.
.
General Stuck
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I take some pride in having the right enemies dude. And you are at the top of that list. I would like to get along with everyone, but that is too much to ask, and since in my late middle age, I don’t suffer asshats and idiots very well, things go where they go.
freelancer
@JGabriel:
What a strawman. How dare you insult my My Little Pony Tea Party playset!
Just Some Fuckhead
@General Stuck: There we go, a tacit acknowledgment you do, in fact, lead in this area. It is heroic that you so effortlessly endure so much punishment day after day, a fraction of which seems to you an almost impossible burden for your enemies.
Anne Laurie
@arguingwithsignposts:
__
In my (admittedly limited) experience, convention planners — even for volunteer-run, hobby conventions — just want to pick a city that offers sufficient exhibitor floorspace & cheap enough hotel rooms that people will stop whining at them about how it’s too far away, too hard to reach, too inconvenient, nothing to do there, the food is terrible and the portions are too small. Orlando is like Las Vegas, but with hideous humidity, alligators & mosquitos. It’s “exciting”, there’s lots of discount flights, and the conventioneers won’t understand how they’ve been snookered until it’s too late.
As to why people return to Orlando, I try not to judge others’ enjoyments. Since my goal in life is to become a professional agoraphobe, I am not the target audience for most theme parks, shall we say.
JGabriel
@freelancer:
I dare. Not only do I dare insult Your Little Tea Pony Party Set I’ll stick it in your frotting ear, rub it in your cookie dough, and melt it all all down along with your ridiculous Combat Go! Camouflage Keyboard in the fucking EZ Bake(tm) Oven!
Foul nitpicker! Don’t fuck with me, tough guy! I’m surprisingly nimble!
.
General Stuck
@Just Some Fuckhead:
You get more desperate and pathetic by the day fuckhead. I almost feel sorry for you. And you made yourself an enemy a long time ago, by devolving from a funny snarkster into a mean spirited a hole. It has been sad to witness.
JGabriel
Deleted by author, for wrongness.
.
jl
@Left Coast Tom: Thanks. I thought he was ahead, but obviously got it wrong.
Or I heard a preliminary report. After finishing ‘lection work I avoided media last night.
Oh well. CA almost avoided picking up a demon GOPer.
Steeplejack
@Downpuppy:
Bad dog owner.
From the first comment:
jl
@KG: The new system in CA will be interesting. It will be contest between the new primary system and more competitive districts.
I think one reason that the CA GOPers act crazy is that there is die hard crazy GOP primary voter base that predates the Teabaggers, and will fanatically oppose any moderate.
Since CA has a vile and evil, I think unconstitutional, strict term limits on all state offices, every politician knows he or she is one reelection campaign away from another primary for another office in order to stay in politics.
So will the new ‘jungle’ primary system produce a better chance for moderate GOPers to win primaries? That is the key.
But the CA GOP would have to make a huge change to win a majority. I just can’t see it. They way they act when they get an interview, it’s like they are trying alienate people. The only explanation is that they pander to the crazy GOP primary base every minute of every day in every single thing they do and say.
If they retain the same basic philosohpy, the choice for CA is either we get them and keep them below 1/3 or they a large enough minority to be cynically obstructionist and try to wreck the place.
boognish
If you can find it, use pineapple mint for your mojitos. That was my weapon of choice all summer.
General Stuck
@Just Some Fuckhead:
But I will grant you this. I likely take too serious, past my pay grade, trying to keep a blog I don’t own somewhat free of trolls. Or at least doing my part, which may well exceed that which should be my part, and that is un healthy, for me, and maybe other blog commenters here as well.
But you will get no quarter.
Mnemosyne
@General Stuck:
Fixed. Because you know it’s true.
Steeplejack
I am playing Donny Hathaway’s “The Ghetto” over and over tonight. It makes me feel better. That and being +5.
Stuck and Fuck, you are two of my favorite Juicers, so how can you be so anti-each other? (Rhetorical question.) I’m struggling to find some appropriate Star Trek Spock goatee metaphor here.
Ooh–kickin’ Fender Rhodes piano solo. Gotta go.
Gus
@eemom: You seem to be enjoying some schadenfreude over some painful losses, like it’s almost worth it that probably the best Senator left and a sane drug policy initiative lost just so Hamsher got hers.
General Stuck
@Mnemosyne: LOL,
ningún argumento aquí
Mnemosyne
@Just Some Fuckhead:
You mean the movement that crashed and burned last night under the weight of the Blue Dogs that Kos crusaded to put into office? That movement?
I remember when Democrats like Stephanie Herseth Sandlin were going to be our saviors. Now Kos can’t forget who helped get her elected fast enough.
Left Coast Tom
@jl:
Just poked around on another page on the CA results site, and Fresno County’s turnout (one of Costa’s counties) sucks compared to any other in the state (it was 28%, statewide was 44%): http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/status/
No idea why this is so, but something there is different than anywhere else.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Steeplejack: Steep, didn’t you get Stuck’s memo? Everyone hates me. lol. You need to get your shit together before they shun you and you’ll have to eat your lunch all by yourself. (Bonus question: what song did I quote? No googling.)
Anya
@Just Some Fuckhead: I always find it interesting that Kos and company don’t have any progressive black heroes (sort of like, Grayson, Dean, Feingold, etc). For people who believe in supporting progressives, they’ve never championed Meek’s cause. In fact the opposite was true, they’ve supported Cris. Also, whenever they talk about the base, it’s funny how AA is not included in that base.
Finally, Kos is hypicrtical when it comes to Blue Dogs. In the one hand, Dean is God, because of the 50 state strategy, on the other hand, Rahm is hated for running conserva dems in conservative districts.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mnemosyne: Well, when you put it that way..
But FlipYrWhig seems to think it’s pretty awesome. Why don’t you all work it out and let me know who we should be hatin’ on? I can adapt.
jl
@Left Coast Tom: Interesting. I was going to say it was a San Joaquin Valley phenomenon, but look at the contrast with its neighbors north and south: Merced and Madera to the N, and Kings and Tulare to the S.
Since I spent time growing up in Fresno, and still have lots of relatives there, I hesitate to speculate on why Fresno would have such a worthless turnout, because my comments on the place might be considered uncivil and my conscience would bother me.
Except, it is potentially a very nice place with some very nice attributes that has been turned into a sh*thole.
Edit: corrupt sh*thole.
Steeplejack
@Just Some Fuckhead:
In this comment?! I have no idea. What, are you DougJ now?
(Heading for +6 and belatedly looking up train songs.)
ETA:
Uh, I have to eat my lunch all by myself now.
Calouste
@jl:
Jungle primary is just a con by the duopoly to keep third parties out.
jl
@Left Coast Tom: Though, Whitman’s asinine campaign assertion that Fresno was the Detroit of California because of DemocRAT policies was insulting, vicious, and absurd, probably much more so to Fresno than the Democrats.
Maybe Fresnans could not vote for Whitman after she made that argument, and could not stand to vote for an aging Moonbeam, so stayed home.
jl
@Calouste: Maybe so. Bad as the CA gerrymandering is, I did not vote for it, and voted to repeal it yesterday (and lost on both). But it is here and we have to learn how to deal with it.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Anya: I dunno, I might read the site once or twice a week and pretty exclusively the top recommended reader diaries (with the exception of those written by Olbermann or politicians.)
Never was a Dean supporter either. I actually worked for the Clark campaign in 2004 and was delighted to see Dean go down.
However, I will admit it never occurred to me that GOS was a white supremacist organization. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
Left Coast Tom
@jl:
Yeah, I forgot about that nonsense. Fresno’s got a decent population too, so if that was a factor she may have cost herself a fair number of votes. For her ( R ) to take out Costa (D) would seem a bit strange though, unless the critics of blue dogs have a point regarding their effect on D turnout.
General Stuck
@Just Some Fuckhead:
To keep the record straight, I said “about” everyone hates you. Obviously, not quite everyone.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Note: If I wasn’t listening to “The Ghetto” tonight I would be playing Gil Scott-Heron’s “Winter in America.” Trying to keep it upbeat.
ETA: Kickin’ flute solo at 3:57.
ETFA: How come you never get the kickin’ flute solos any more? Defunding of high school music classes? Inquiring minds want to know.
Ron
@BGinCHI: While I will miss those guys, the worst loss IMO is Feingold in the Senate. Goddamn it, WI.
Just Some Fuckhead
@General Stuck: Stuck, it is seriously frightening that you would be tracking such a thing. My teenage daughter isn’t this obsessed about who likes whom in her friend set.
Steeplejack
@Just Some Fuckhead:
“Friend set.” I like that phrase. Off to bed. I have to work a rare opening shift tomorrow, which means rise and shine at 0715. Bleah. Steep out. You two
kissshake and make up. You need each other, in some sick, dysfunctional–but totally okay–way.Suck It Up!
@Anya:
Indeed I noticed that also for quite some time, but the Meek situation brought it up again. The excuse from some members over there was that he wasn’t going to win anyways and it was best to keep Rubio out of the Senate. Well I thought that was complete bunk because I’ve seen liberals attach themselves to long shots before and took pride in their inevitable loss because their candidate was a true progressive. What pissed me off even more was that there was a post on their site today about no AA’s in the Senate. Yeah no shit!
It is my own opinion that liberals don’t give a shit about the AA base until they can use them to bash Obama. Most recent example was Velma Hart.
Suck It Up!
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Yes, as we know Liberals and Democrats can never be racists.
General Stuck
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Keep track? you are weird fucker that reads my blog and quotes it here, worries about my dog, has all sorts of conspiracy fantasies about Cole turning over his blog to me , or me starting my own blog within his blog, or some such insane bullshit/ and now apparently obsessing over my personal life
Sick motherfucker you are. And you know what, it is so goddamn creepy, it may well work in finally convincing me commenting on this blog is just not worth it. But not today.
Anya
@Just Some Fuckhead:
You should read it. You will enjoy it because you have a flare for the dramatic.
Anya
@Suck It Up!: Kos is not consistant about his reasons for supporting or opposing a Dem candidate. Most times, I give him a brake becuase he tends to fall in and out of love. But in all the years that I’ve been reading that site, I’ve never seen them championing a black progressive or a cause important to AAs. I think a little bit of reflection is needed.
FlipYrWhig
@Just Some Fuckhead: Yes, I admit I have been crabby at older people today. That generation that got stuck between the Korean War and the hippies… nasty pieces of work.
@Just Some Fuckhead:
@Just Some Fuckhead:
DailyKos was a great platform and still could be. He just has no idea what he wants to do with it. And Jane Hamsher’s actual, honest-to-God paid trolls on the site… that’s a debacle.
As for this last thing, I wasn’t “gloating” about sticking it to Markos Moulitsas. I think he’s very confused about “the base” and I wanted to point out to him why. It just so happens that what I said over there is pretty much the stuff I always say over here, and I was surprised he bothered to respond. And I mentioned it also a little bit in the spirit of, “Hey, maw, I’m on the tee vee!”
I will say that I personally have many fewer issues with Markos Moulitsas than with, well, pretty much all the original major blog impresarios, because he actually does have a sense that it’s appropriate to pick battles and notch small tactical victories when big ones aren’t forthcoming. He made a point chiding “single issue voters” years ago that got him in deep dookie; back then he was the guy who was doing the most to push _some kind_ of Democrat into office, even in unlikely places like South Dakota, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Montana. He was excited about Mark Warner, who’s much more technocrat than liberal. After that there was Brian Schweitzer. These are not down-the-line liberal Democrats. They are effective and they push at the leftmost edge of what their electorates will stand. More liberal would be better, but more liberal wouldn’t likely get elected, so there’s a kind of equilibrium to seek. Markos knows this well.
(Remember that the initial interest in Howard Dean was _not_ that he was _liberal_; it was that he was _partisan_, i.e., he was a fighting Democrat who didn’t apologize. He was also pro-gun, from a rural state, and had a track record of balancing budgets. People have gotten the “partisan” vs. “liberal” distinction all mixed up in their memories as well, both for Dean himself and for his famous 50 State Strategy.)
But once in a while Markos lapses into wanting to be the dissatisfied progressive crusader. It’s at odds with both his history and his prevailing views (like wanting to nudge Meek out of the FL-Sen race). The only way that makes any sense is if he is making a mistake about the nature of “the base,” or if he actually knows better but _wants_ to act like his community is “the base” so that he has a bigger megaphone.
And, in particular, his repeating the stuff about the Very Offensive DOMA Brief as evidence for Obama’s liberal Dolchstosse… that’s just storing up pseudo outrage for the winter.
FlipYrWhig
@Anya:
Sorry I missed your comment my last time through. You said many of the things I just belabored.
There’s at least one: Donna Edwards. Edwards vs. Al Wynn in the primary was a pretty big deal IIRC.
eemom
@Gus:
Yeah, kinda like she’s been schadenfreuding about the President of the United States and his entire domestic agenda getting fucked over in the midterm elections because he hasn’t done things her way.
And gloating over the Congresspeople who got defeated, even though they voted to give 40 million uninsured people coverage, because there wasn’t a public option that she could take credit for.
Don’t talk to me about “painful losses” and schadenfreude, idiot. Go swim over at Lake Batshit.
Calliope Jane
@suzanne: Shit. I, just, wow. Shit. /totally useless but totally stunned comment even though I should have seen this coming.
Just Some Fuckhead
@FlipYrWhig: And there have been a few frontpagers of AA persuasion. But it’s possible Kos has co-opted them, turned ’em against their own kind. Them’s the brakes, I guess.