Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

đŸŽ¶ Those boots were made for mockin’ đŸŽ”

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickel?”

Donald Trump, welcome to your everything, everywhere, all at once.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Let there be snark.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Let’s finish the job.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

You are here: Home / 2011 / Archives for December 2011

Archives for December 2011

Dog Rescue Bleg, Long Beach CA Area

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From commentor Wanda:

Her name is Taffy. She is Chihuahua mixed with Beagle. After being dumped out in the middle of the street by a previous owner, she was struck by two cars. She’s had surgery on her legs, but is still able to run and play with the exception of jumping. So no more jumping. She needed to be taught to drink out of a bowl. Classical music keeps her calm when she’s scared. She’s a sweetheart, but she would best be placed in a home with NO children or other pets. She’s a year and a half and if she doesn’t find a home soon the shelter she’s at, she will be put down…

I have a phone number — if you have any suggestions, or leads, leave a comment or email me at [email protected] (or click on my name near the top of the right-hand column).

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Bobo did a bad, bad thing

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One of you flagged this comment (which I mostly agree with) from David Brooks on the liberal NPR radio network:

Well, I think they’ve (the Obama administration) more or less quite rightly given up on the white working class. Ohio, Pennsylvania, those are going to be tough. They have to try to get the suburban voters. And I’m still a little down on this job market, this job report. Losing 315,000 people from the labor force, people don’t vote on the headline number. They vote on their lived experience. And if the 55-year-old guy next door is not even looking for work, that’s bad.

I don’t know if people vote lived experience or what they see on their teevees, but he’s actually right that the working class votes against incumbent presidents when the economy is bad. And it’s bad right now, especially for the middle-to-lower-middle-class. One of the reasons black and brown working class people will vote Democrat anyway is that the Republican party openly hates black and brown people. Also too one of the reasons the white working class votes Republican, no matter the economy, is that the Republican party openly hates black and brown people.

That’s just how it is. If the Republican debates had centered around plans to keep white working class people out of the country with sharks and moats and electric fences, then Democrats would be wise to use clips from these debates to appeal to white working class voters. But they haven’t, they’ve centered around bashing Latino immigrants. So it’s only logical, as mistermix says, that if you’re a Democrat, you see a big opportunity with Latinos.

What’s disingenuous, as always, with Bobo, is that if the economy was great, he’d say that John Q. Applebee was tired of the decadence and materialism, and wanted a return to the solid, earthy values of the Republican party. Or that John Q. Applebee wanted a strong leader to keep him safe from the Hitler du hour, economy be damned!

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Occupy Boston, Humming Along

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Perhaps because Boston has a historical memory of how well overzealous security crackdowns don’t work IRL (/snark), Occupy Boston is still in tenuous possession of a public-private patch of land. Quinn Norton, at Wired‘s Threat Level blog, has a thoughtful scene-of-the-story article on “Defying Police Blockade, Boston’s Occupy Builds a City“:

Between the 19th and the 21st of November, Occupy Boston had two teach-ins, a street-theater training, a reggae concert, and countless meetings — managing to use one of those as a cover to sneak a large weatherized tent past the ever-present Boston Police.
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It was a member of the Occupy Boston’s Women’s caucus that told me they’d managed it, grinning widely, just as the tent was being set up as a dry, safe, and relatively warm place for women to shelter in the Occupy.
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“It’s considered contraband,” she said, though she was gone before I could ask who considered it so. It was my introduction to the problems faced by these new residents of Dewey Square, in Boston’s Financial District, where it plays out its particular flavor of protest camp in the shadow of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston…
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Occupy Boston is cacophonous day and night, dense and messy with enthusiastic humanity. Volunteers feed a thousand people a day.
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The camp has a library, media tent, clothing tent, a place to make art and protest signs, and a sacred tent littered with the holy texts and statues of many faiths. It has a dozen or so events per day, managed by its 57 working groups, who do everything from taking care of animal safety and planning direct actions to documenting and improving pedal powered generators — a favorite of their MIT contingent…
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By night Occupy deals with the flip side of Boston life; the poor and hungry, the homeless, those with untreated medical problems, and those addicted to drugs. It sleeps around 230 to 250 people in an uneasy snooze punctuated by late-night talks, the quarrels of recent and ill-advised love affairs, drunken stumbles, and fights between men used to fighting — all the usual night demons that plague the troubled…

In theory, Occupy Boston will be there at least through December 15. On Thursday, per local news station WCBV-TV, “… After a four-hour hearing, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Frances McIntyre took both sides’ arguments under advisement and said she would issue a ruling in two weeks time. Until then, she said, an injunction that bars the city from booting the protesters remains in place.”

In practice, while it was the second-warmest November on record, below-freezing temperatures are past due already, and the city is working really, really hard to prevent the Occupiers from bringing in heating equipment (“fire hazards”), winterized tents (“permanent structures”), or anything that might mitigate the “sanitary violations” inseparable from preparing food for a thousand people every day without running water. (There’s video clips at the news link of the cops “confiscating” (destroying) a professional-grade camp sink setup designed to run on bottled water.) Police Commissioner Davis has gravely pronounced crime within the area “out of control“, and warned of the “drain on our financial resources… money much better spent in neighborhoods where there is firearm violence” for the overtime paid to keep phalanxes of uniformed officers alert against the incursion of contraband camping supplies.

Mayor Menino, who’s basically NYC Mayor Bloomberg without the private fortune or the ready patter (even his boosters call him ‘May-ah Mumbles’), has two great bugaboos in his quest to become mayor-for-life: Litterbugs, and Rich Back Bay Fvcks. Occupy Boston is a nightmare fusion of the two, in his perception — Rich BB Lawyer Fvcks defending Litterbugs (some of them Rich BB Fvck offspring). But until some combination of inclement weather and unsympathetic authority manages to disperse these unruly settlers, I think they’re creating new forms of urban community that would have fascinated Jane Jacobs.

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Auto-Neurotic In Alabama

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One has to wonder what Alabama cops have against foreign car executives anyway.  Oh wait: they have no choice but to ask for papers, please.

The Guardian reports that Honda manager Ichiro Yada was arrested earlier this week at a checkpoint in Leeds, Alabama, despite being able to show police his passport, US work permit, and international driver’s license. He was not taken into custody, however, but was ticketed and released on a signature bond.

Yada’s international license was apparently not sufficient to satisfy the letter of the law, which required him to carry either an Alabama license or one issued by Japan. The charges were dismissed only when his attorney faxed a copy of his Japanese driver’s license to the judge.

The mayor of the city of Leeds defended his officers, saying, “The police are instructed to follow the law as written. People are trying to use this to make the law look bad. That’s not our problem. We’re going to enforce the laws of state of Alabama.”

And you know, when laws against interracial marriage (which by the way technically existed as part of Alabama’s state constitution until 2000 long after the Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967) and Jim Crow laws were in place in Alabama, they used the exact same excuse.  Here’s a tip, man:  it’s the law itself that makes Alabama look bad, not the stringent efforts to enforce it.

And yes.  It is your problem as an elected official in the state.  It’s a law forcing you to be a racist, reactionary douche bag.  Saying “that’s the law, it’s not our problem” immediately makes it your problem.

I’m guessing at some point, these automakers and other foreign companies are just going to stop doing business with the state.  Alabama’s already lost major agriculture business due to the law.  It really is an example of “job-killing regulations”.

But it doesn’t matter.  Gotta rid the state of the unclean and the impure.

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Giving Up on Hitting a Moving Target

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The latest Fox News bullshit meme is that Democrats are giving up on white middle-class voters, which as Steve Benen explains, of course they aren’t. The origin of this was a piece by Tom Edsal that pointed out that white, non-college-grad males are leaving the Democratic Party and are hard to persuade.

As Benen and others point out, white lower-middle class males are not a monolithic block, and plenty of them can separate rhetoric from the economic realities of their situation. No Democrat has been trying to replace Medicare with a voucher or invest their Social Security in the stock market, and lots of lower-middle class white males know that. But what about the others — those who will vote for Republican against their economic interests to further some other ill-defined interest? What even motivates these voters?

A social theorist, or a think tank researcher, would have a number of explanations centering around tribalism, false consciousness and perhaps a wee bit of racism. I don’t have any of those credentials, so I’ve got no theories, but I do get the distinct impression that chasing after any group of voters whose main motivation is essentially irrational is a pointless exercise if there’s any alternative. And, for 2012, the alternative is clear: play the anti-immigrant rhetoric from the last hundred debates on an endless loop on any TV channel that reaches a Hispanic neighborhood. That’s got to be a far better way to spend campaign cash than an effort to cozy up to “NASCAR dads” by proving that Obama is the kind of guy they’d want to have a beer with. Trying to associate the Democratic brand with some ill-defined tribal signifiers is a hell of a lot harder than convincing Hispanics that they would be second-class citizens in a Gingrich or Romney administration. The former involves chasing down a shimmering mirage that’s always a few miles further in the distance. The latter just requires articulating a simple, easily demonstrated fact.

(Image from Buffalopundit)

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Celebrity Clown Bigfoots the GOP Primary Car

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Good news for John McCain Stewart! Dave Weigel brings news of the Great Trump Debate:

It’s all true. Newsmax, the magazine whose Ron Kessler more or less magicked the Donald Trump presidential boomlet out of thin air, has booked Trump to moderate a debate in Iowa on December 27, to be “broadcast on the cable network Ion Television.”
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Who’s going to kiss the ring of a guy best known in national politics for telling lies about Barack Obama’s citizenship? Not clear yet. Newsmax’s Christopher Ruddy tells me there’ll be “news next week” about the attendees. Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul is diplomatic but non-committal: “We just received the invitation, and we’re taking a look at it.” But two high-minded candidates who have struggled for traction have already said they’re out. Tim Miller, spokesman for Jon Huntsman, typed out “LOL” when I asked about the debate.
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“We look forward to watching Mitt and Newt suck-up to The Donald with a big bowl of popcorn,” said Miller. (Huntsman, on Twitter on elsewhere, has tweaked the other candidates for traveling to New York for secretive meetings with the celebrity TV host/builder of ugly hotels.)
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I asked Buddy Roemer, the former governor of Louisiana who’s unexpectedly become a gadfly candidate, whether he’d show up for the debate. It would be his first.
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“Yes,” he said, “driving a clown car with a bumper sticker that reads, ‘Really people? Is this what the debates have come to!?'”

Probably not a coincidence that Newsmax announced this, at least to the “secular” media, on a Friday afternoon. The NYTimes post is a Grey Lady, Very-Serious-Persons masterpiece in its own right: “But despite being derided by liberals – President Obama likened Mr. Trump to a “carnival barker” for his repeated assertions that the president was actually foreign-born – the real estate mogul carries weight with a certain element of the conservative base… Newsmax is a powerful player itself. It has a broad reach into the conservative base, with monthly Web traffic second only to Fox News among sites with conservative-leaning audiences… “

Let me state for the record: Thank goddess I’ve retained my amateur status, because there is not enough money in the world to pay me to liveblog that particular debate.

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