Republicans just want to right the nation’s financial ship, that’s all.
Archives for 2011
Divided we fall, united we stand
I’m kind of pissed by that New Yorker pop music sophisticated exegesis of a sociological phenomenon that Anne Laurie rightly mocked. When will it end? How many ways can you say “white black people drive a car like this beep beep, black guys drive a car like this BEEP BEEP”? And it’s in no way restricted to black/white — Democrats go to Whole Foods, Republicans go to Applebee’s…rinse, repeat.
ENOUGH!
I was cheered up to see a straight professional athlete — even though I know Michael Irvin isn’t everyone’s favorite — appearing shirtless on the cover of a gay magazine to support marriage equality:
“I don’t see how any African-American with any inkling of history can say that you don’t have the right to live your life how you want to live your life. No one should be telling you who you should love, no one should be telling you who you should be spending the rest of your life with. When we start talking about equality and everybody being treated equally, I don’t want to know an African-American who will say everybody doesn’t deserve equality.”
Love him or hate him, Michael Irvin doesn’t care. He’s on a mission. He hopes opening closet doors for gay people will be a key chapter in his life story. “I have to make sure we do things to bring people together.
Everybody ought to feel this way, any one of us could be basically the same person we are only a different race, or a different sexual orientation, or prone to buying different music at Starbucks.
In my darker moments, I think the Galtians are doing the same shit to us now that the British did to the Hindus and Muslims in India, keeping us divided so that they can exploit us.
How Long Before This is the New CW?
The balls on these people:
Huge chutzpah points to House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steel, who sends along a statement of support in response to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s byzantine plan to avoid a debt default.
“The Speaker shares the Leader’s frustration,” Steel says. “Republicans are unified in our commitment to ensuring that the debt limit is not used as leverage to saddle small businesses with increased taxes that destroy jobs.”
So it was the Democrats using the debt limit as leverage this whole time? I have a whole bunch of corrections to write.
Who will be the first “reporter” to advance this bullshit? Safe money is always on that right-wing hack Halperin.
Tuesday Evening Open Thread
The New Yorker‘s pop music critic Goes There:
Three women run the pop world right now. Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” Beyoncé’s “4,” and Adele’s “21” split the market into neat thirds without too much conceptual jostling. Adele’s impeccably sung collection of unperturbing soul, “21,” released in February, will almost certainly be the year’s biggest-selling album. Her career is likely to be long, because she is selling to the demographic that decides American elections: middle-aged moms who don’t know how to pirate music and will drive to Starbucks when they need to buy it. The rest of the population has Gaga and Beyoncé.
So… apart from the fierce urgency of political kabuki and newsmedia shakespearianism… who’s been denigrating your lifestyle choices today?
Maybe if we made a video…
Just finished a conference call with voting supporters from all over Ohio. On the call were reps from the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), Jobs with Justice, The Urban League, Interfaith Worker Justice, College Democrats from Ohio University and Ohio State, Ohio AFL-CIO, ARC, an Ohio State professor, three volunteer voter protection lawyers, a rep from the Leadership Council and some others.
This is the second voter ID law conservatives in Ohio have passed. The first, in 2005/6, apparently didn’t get the job done, so they’re back for Round Two. No one knows what the first law was supposed to accomplish, and so consequently no one knows why we need a second, still-more restrictive law. We’ll never know because no one in media ever asks conservatives that question. I’m sure the answer is “ACORN” or “The New Black Panther Party” because when conservatives utter either of those words or phrases, media seem to lose all interest in the nuts and bolts of actual voters and voting. The voting process is (in reality) dry and rule-bound and ordinary, so maybe that’s it. Much more fun to gape at doctored video again and again than talk about the basic foundation of democracy, I’m sure.
This latest Ohio voter ID law met some unexpected (and frankly, fun to watch) resistance from the newly elected GOP Secretary of State. He opposes the law, because he (rightly) concludes it will inevitably wrongly disenfranchise lawful voters.
“I believe that if you have a government-issued check, a utility bill in your name with your address on it, that no one made that up,” Husted said to reporters following his speech during League of Women Voters of Ohio’s annual Statehouse Day. “They didn’t call AEP and establish utilities in their name to commit voter fraud.”
Of course they didn’t. That’s crazy.
Anyway, the bill was held up for a while, and now there is apparently discussion on some hurry-up changes to the most egregious portions. The law isn’t set in stone, so we are unable to plan voter education efforts just yet. Hopefully conservatives in the Ohio legislature will find time between the many, many hours they spend loudly showboating on abortion to finally complete the new restrictive rules they demand so voters and others have time to learn the new restrictive rules they demand.
My take on the conference call was that the college students were the most alarmed. They will be a particular area of concentration for voting rights advocates and others who value the right to vote.
When the final law goes in I’ll let you know what approaches we’re using to help make sure that each and every registered, eligible voter gets a first class ballot that is counted.
All over the map
Rather than analyze every Republican tack and jibe on the debt ceiling, I would just point out that they seem to have a different message every day. Sometimes two or three. On the rare occasions that Boehner looks ready to shake hands, Grover Norquist or Eric Cantor or Jim DeMint will step in and torpedo it. Meanwhile Obama has said the one thing over and over again: he will concede a lot but he won’t concede everything. People can tell the difference, for what that’s worth.
Republicans have no idea what to do. The business base has no doubt phoned with their concerns by now, but if GOP even baby steps towards a deal the tea party idiots will eat them alive.
How do you defuse that situation? Search me. It looks like the party has arrived at a truly existential moment – it has to decide who is in charge, and halfway measures won’t do. Does the party serve wealthy people, who mostly want low taxes and stability, or does it serve tea party anarchists? The issue here is quite similar to the GOP dilemma on immigration in that the party utterly depends on two factions whose demands are not just misaligned but diametrically opposed. The Chamber of Commerce not only wants but in fact depends on undocumented immigrants for more jobs than most people realize, while redneck racists will do almost anything to clean the brown people out of their towns and states. With the most passionate and irreconcilable parties in fight both on their side the GOP cannot address the status quo in any way without serving one and shafting the other.
As recently as the mid-Bush administration Republican initiatives still served the CoC at least as much as they catered to racist bubbas. Can you imagine that now? Of course you can’t. Leading edge GOP policies like Arizona’s SB1070 and the Georgia law that left their unpicked fruit harvest to rot make it look an awful lot like angry, stupid bubbas have a solid grip on the steering wheel.
Boehner and his business lobby could still rally and put armaggeddon back in snooze mode for a few more months. If they do it would count as one hell of an upset against a raging ‘roided-up faction that has won every intra-party battle so far.
***Update***
Sometimes I should read my own damn blog. Clearly DougJ is more optimistic than I am about Mitch McConnell’s latest idea. McConnell still needs to win over Eric Cantor and I’m not as confident at DougJ that it will happen. YMMV.
If you shoot at a king
I’m tired of the debt ceiling stuff because it’s probably kabuki that ends in a clean vote. The phone hacking scandal in the UK is much more interesting to me. I don’t know much about Peter Osborne (apparently he’s a conservative), but his writing on the scandal has been fascinating to me:
For more than three decades the most powerful man in Britain has not been a politician; it has been the brilliant but ruthless US-based media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who burst on to the scene with the purchase of the News of the World in an audacious takeover bid in 1968. Within barely a decade he had built up a controlling interest in British newspapers.
But he did not just control our media. He dominated British public life. Politicians – including prime ministers – treated him with deference and fear. Time and again the Murdoch press – using techniques of which we have only just become aware – destroyed political careers. Murdoch also claims to determine the results of general elections.
Here’s my question: would Labour come after Murdoch this hard if they didn’t think could neuter him politically? Or is the calculation more complicated than that, i.e. they know that he’ll keep playing both sides no matter what?