Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I’m not ready for the Republican primary to be over. I’m not ready to hear about how Romney got his mojo and Hayekian modesty back. I’m not ready to stop hearing about how the moon can apply for statehood (no, really).
Tell me we’ve got a few more weeks of this, even if you don’t believe it.
There’s a new and ugly development in the GOP’s War on Women. The Forced Birthers have enlisted an organization — Komen for the Cure, which scores of women have relied upon both to prevent breast cancer, and as a support network when fighting breast cancer — to help undermine the rights of women to make decisions about their bodies for themselves.
In a press release today, Planned Parenthood announced that The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation will no longer provide Planned Parenthood the more than half million dollars in grant funds which Planned Parenthood uses to provide breast health education, screenings, and referrals for mammograms.
Turns out that Komen’s new Vice-President of Public Policy, Karen Handel, is a Forced Birther, and even ran for governor of Georgia on a platform of defunding Planned Parenthood. Thus, it seems that Komen for the Cure, the purpose of which is to help women, has been taken hostage by Karen Handel and her right-wing Forced Birth views which undermine women and women’s reproductive choices. In her own words, “Since I am pro-life [anti-choice] I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.”
This is a pretty remarkable statistic:
Of the 1,012 spots Newt Gingrich’s campaign ran, 95% were negative. Mitt Romney’s campaign ran 3,276 ads and 99% were negative.
I hope this thing goes on forever, but I doubt Newt has the stamina.
(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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For those of us who can no longer bring ourselves to care about the point spread in a meaningless sub-semi-final. Somebody let me know if Santorum either drops out or throws his greasy foul-smelling endorsement to either of the two “serious” candidates, because Ron Paul ain’t going away before August.
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Meanwhile, what’s on the agenda out in the Reality-Based Community known as the world?
Courtesy of the We Party Patriots, we learn that Reince Priebus (and there’s a rejected Bond villain name if I’ve ever heard of one) seems to be implicated in the illegal activities that have already resulted in the arrests and indictments of several of Governor Walker’s current and former aides.
Walkergate” is unfolding into a masterwork in American conspiracy as the complaint explaining the charges against two of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s former staff members includes an email that may prove Walker had knowledge of the illegal activities happening around him. The charges have also implicated current chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, and his ties to a voter suppression scandal involving both Americans for Prosperity and former Herman Cain campaign manager Mark Block.
Mark Block is the infamous “smoking man” in that bizarre Herman Cain political ad.
The most recent criminal complaint also mentions Reince Preibus, then Republican Party of Wisconsin chairman and now head of the Republican National Committee. As the President of the RNC, Preibus was one of the main defenders of Herman Cain when his Presidential campaign was rocked by a series of scandals. As it turns out, part of money stolen by Russell was used to visit Herman Cain and his campaign manager, Mark Block, in Atlanta during December of 2010, after Walker had been elected. Mark Block, better known as the “smoking man” in Cain’s most infamous commercial, is the former Wisconsin State Director of Americans for Prosperity.
According to an Alternet article published on January 21, 2011, Block and Priebus participated in massive voter suppression of minorities in both the 2008 Presidential election and the 2010 mid-term election. This included the Wisconsin Gubernatorial race that Walker won and the Senate race which saw Russ Feingold fall to Tea Party backed candidate Ron Johnson. Block and Priebus, with help of Wisconsin Tea Party group Grandsons of Liberty and the assistance of Americans for Prosperity, ran a “voter caging” scam aimed at college students and African-Americans.
Go read the whole thing.
Scott Walker’s sea of corruption may have run Captain Preibus agroundPost + Comments (26)
Is this the end of Newt?
One of the reasons I can’t talk about politics at work or with my family is that they look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them that David Brooks would send all of us to a re-education camp if he could, but that’s exactly what he’s getting at here:
We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.
If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.
The gist of the column — which Zandar ably summarized earlier — is that the strapping young crackers (the book Bobo cites focuses only on white people) are fucking and lying about too much while their tote-bagger overlords keep them down, presumably by drinking craft beers and avoiding strip-mall restaurants.
Bobo couches his tribe-jam as a National Service program but the word “force” is of course a tell. And you all know who else wanted to roust people from their “affluent enclaves” and force them to live in camps.
Dictatorial schemes to force people to adopt conservative values are now a staple of right-wing dialog in this country. Yet the same people who promote these schemes label mild, liberal programs — universal health care along the lines what exists in the rest of the wester world, traditional expansionary macroeconomic policies, mild efforts to slow down climate change, slight increases in the (historically low) marginal tax rates that the wealthiest Americans pay — as big gubmint terror. Norm Orstein and Thomas Mann recently wrote that:
[T]he GOP, which is now firm in its identity as the insurgent party, set upon blowing up policies and public responsibilities that enjoyed bipartisan support for many decades. The Democrats are the status quo party— protective and pragmatic. The asymmetric polarization of the two camps is the most significant feature of contemporary American politics.
There’s nothing wrong with being protective and pragmatic. The mass of men lead lives of quiet pragmatism. Some might call it desperation, but I’ll always take small, sensible improvements over remaking the world via reeducation camp.