The next time conservatives open their big mouths on Obama “dividing this country” they might want to look within the ranks on the Right:
The leading opponents of same-sex marriage planned to defeat campaigns for gay marriage by “fanning the hostility” between black voters from gay voters and by casting President Obama as a radical foe of marriage, according to confidential documents made public in a Maine court today.
The documents, circulated by the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, are marked “confidential” and detail the internal strategy of the National Organization for Marriage.
“The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks—two key Democratic constituencies,” says an internal report on 2008 and 2009 campaigns, in a section titled the “Not A Civil Right Project.”
“Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots,” advises the document, which is a road map to the successful campaign against same-sex marriage in California.
The document also targets Hispanic voters, whom conservatives have long hoped would join the backlash against gay rights.
“The Latino vote in America is a key swing vote, and will be so even more so in the future, both because of demographic growth and inherent uncertainty: Will the process of assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture lead Hispanics to abandon traditional family values?” the document asks. “We must interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity – a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.”
In a “$20 million strategy for victory” keyed to the 2010 midterm elections, the group says its agenda “requires defeating the pro-gay Obama agenda.”
“A pro-marriage president must be elected in 2012,” the document says, although Obama has offered tepid opposition to same-sex marriage.
The same document, an update to the group’s board, described a $1 million plan through the conservative American Principles Project to “expose Obama as a social radical.”
The section, headed “Sideswiping Obama,” suggests raising “side issues” including pornography to attack Democrats’ flanks.
The group also sought to identify “victims” of same-sex marriage — children raised in gay households — and in another document budgeted $120,000 to locate “children of gay parents willing to speak on camera.”
The documents emerged in a dispute over campaign financing under Maine law, and also include detailed 2009 budget plans for the group, whose spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comments on the document.
You can read some of the court documents at the link. Conservatives have absolutely nothing positive to run on, and Mitt Romney is the least appealing or inspiring Presidential candidate in my memory. Expect more of this.
NotMax
Premised, it would seem from the info above, that there are no African-American gays and no Latino/Hispanic gays?
The stupid, it hurts.
beergoggles
I love that they got hoist on their own petard. If they’d just filed their campaign finance documents, none of this would have been exposed in court.
Now to wait and find out just how much the catholic church is financing NOM…
beergoggles
@NotMax: There are, but such a disproportionate number of them get kicked out of their homes and churches that it ceases to be their target demographic.
chopper
maybe, just maybe, latinos and blacks have become a bit resistant to blatant conservative attempts to demonize a minority group? i wonder why that would be.
Kay
@beergoggles:
The phrase “religious liberty” runs through the documents. Again and again.
David in NY
Since the new format is never OT — looking better, incorporated solutions to all my complaints without my having to carp about them. Way to go!
Lawnguylander
These people we’ve justified treating like less than human by saying they must assimilate into our superior culture but refuse to, and are plotting to make Americans speak Spanish then kill us and put Santa Ana’s picture on the flag, we must put a halt to their assimilation by convincing them that our culture sucks. If we can get them disgusted and resentful enough to become violent, that would be super awesome.
Ash Can
If it means that all the dirty laundry gets exposed and the great unwashed see people like this as the execrable shitheels they are, it’s OK by me.
beergoggles
@Kay: Oh I have no doubt that they are an RCC front group. I just want the actual numbers in millions that they are spending fighting marriage equality so I can throw it in the face of every catholic I meet on how much they are funding oppression and how culpable they are for it by remaining catholic.
PurpleGirl
@beergoggles: Actually, from my observations of co-workers and neighbors, both Hispanics and African-Americans welcome the single mother and her child/children and they also keep their gay cousins in the extended family. Their conception of family seems to include all the members as a group. Think family as clan and it includes just about every body. (You almost have to a serial murderer to get excluded.)
jibeaux
Thom Tillis, the asshat here in NC who finally got his wish of seeing an anti-recognition-of-anything constitutional amendment on the ballot, went ahead and admitted to the NC State student paper that younger people don’t give a shit about gay marriage and that if it passes, it will eventually be repealed. What a tool.
curiousleo
I’ll take this thread as an invitation to pimp the efforts of the Protect All NC Families campaign against the anti-gay marriage state constitutional amendment. It’s on the ballot May 8–primary day.
NC can beat this amendment even if the national groups don’t think we can. There’s an ActBlue moneybomb this week.
twitter tag #firstinfight
Chad
@beergoggles: disproportionate from whom? Where do you have proof that more gay blacks and latinos are kicked out of their homes then others? It seems part of their strategy was very effective in convincing people that black and latino people are that much more bigoted against gay people than the rest of the country.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
Wingnuts will next hatch a plot to overthrow Comedy Central
NotMax
Without some kind of linkage to documented modern and reputable data or studies on such numbers or percentages (and any correlation or lack thereof with the numbers or percentages found among other racially-defined groupings), that remains more anecdotal than evidentiary, IMHO.
.
That is not to say it doesn’t happen; it is just to question the presumed frequency of occurrence over the broader spectrum of any delineated populace across the entire country.
Culture of Truth
what horrible people
curiousleo
@beergoggles: Link or other proof of your assertion? Anecdote is not data. Absent such proof, methinks you’ve fallen for a different sort of divide and conquer effort. Plenty of white gays get kicked out, etc.
Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity
They don’t give a shit about that. They don’t give a shit about anything save this:
50% + 1
Redshift
Well, of course. Any time Republicans attack Democrats for doing something, it nearly always means that Republicans are openly and unapologetically doing it themselves.
I don’t think it’s even projection so much as “if we shout about it loudly enough, we can never be accused of anything but ‘both sides do it.'”
beergoggles
@Chad: From visiting the Ali Forney Center. I don’t think it’s NOM’s strategy causing this. It’s religion that’s the cause of the brainrot that turns a family against their children. Just like saying poverty disproportionately affects minorities, this isn’t a judgement but an observation.
Amir Khalid
@David in NY:
Just one more wee little thing. Right now, the reply button straddles the line between its comment and the next. If it could be persuaded to sit entirely within the box drawn for its comment, that would be good.
burnspbesq
@beergoggles:
No doubt and no proof. I’d say that makes you either a bigot, a fool, or both. The rest of your comment resolves the doubt in favor of “bigot.”
Barbara
Is there any reason to think that as young Latinos (in particular) assimilate they will exhibit a markedly different level of tolerance for gay men and women than their peers? I believe this is likely true of all groups, with some perhaps more than others.
But the idea of being anti-gay as a badge of Latino identity makes me really angry — identifying yourself by what you hate, and appealing to people on that basis rather than the things that might make them advance, oh, you know, like the DREAM Act. These people are pathologic.
sublime33
I agree with the content of this entry but not necessarily the conclusion about Romney being the most uninspired choice for president. Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis are right there in the team picture.
handsmile
It’s heartening to see this ratf*cking exposed so brutally in all its hatefulness and cynicism, but I expect that the National Organization for Marriage will respond with the strategy adopted by the Heartland Institute: switch the focus by denouncing how these documents were obtained and find some wingnut mouthpiece to question their authenticity. Then feed it into the Wurlitzer and put the group Human Rights Campaign on the defensive.
.
As Kay wrote, “Expect more of this.” Each and every day.
Tone In DC
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero):
LULz.
amk
@Redshift: Bingo. That’s how they cow down the boneless media.
Bulworth
Sigh. I wonder how that’s working out for them? #as$holes
Chad
@beergoggles: that sounds like anecdotal evidence that confirms an already held bias. I know plenty of gay black folk with good relationships with their families and who go to church on the regular. I know gay black folk with a strained relationship with their parents. I can’t say that’s the norm because that’s just my anecdotal experience.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Kay:
Their God-given right to hate whomever they want? These people are disgusting…
Several years ago, a friend of mine was at a Catholic wedding when the priest took it upon himself to launch into an anti-gay tirade right in the middle of the ceremony… I kid you not… yes, his behavior did elicit obvious groans and even some hisses and boos from the assembled guests… and afterwards, the newlyweds complained LOUDLY to the priest’s superior w/in the church, who did apologize for the priest’s actions…
It was not a gay wedding… the priest just had a things for teh gay and wanted to share it during this couple’s very special moment… makes ya feel all warm and tingly just hearing about it, huh?
jibeaux
@Bulworth: I know some of those, but I don’t think NOM would be too interested in what they have to say.
MeDrewNotYou
@Bulworth: Don’t you know that one angsty teen prove that all gays are unfit parents (that are probably molesting their kids to boot!)?
Seriously, though, $120k for that? You could probably find a teenager that hates their parents in 5 minutes, maybe half an hour if the parents are a SS couple.
Face
And here I thought this post was golf-related.
russell
somebody’s been reading ‘rules for radicals’
beergoggles
@Chad: You should try google. I just typed that search in here and got the following hits: http://www.pamf.org/teen/sex/orientation/lgbt-homeless.html
http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/publications/425?task=view
http://www.prrac.org/full_text.php?text_id=743&item_id=7785&newsletter_id=61&header=Race+%2F+Racism&kc=1
Amir Khalid
@sublime33:
Agreed, Michael Dukakis somehow managed in 1988 to be just as lackluster a candidate as George H.W. Bush, whose only real advantage was being the incumbent VP. But Dukakis’ defeat was partly due to another Dukakis taking up all the family’s luck: his cousin Olympia won an Oscar that year for best supporting actress (she played Cher’s mother in Moonstruck), leaving him with no chance.
Chris
@Redshift:
I agree. It’s much too systematic to be simple projection.
SRW1
That seems to have gone about as well as the attempt after Katrina to find a family farm or family-owned business ruined by the estate tax.
beergoggles
@burnspbesq: You can eat it when the full disclosure comes out.
http://washingtonindependent.com/116452/nom%E2%80%99s-2010-financial-records-raise-questions
Just 2 individuals are responsible for over 6 million in donations to the group. Anyone who’s followed this is betting on it being the RCC and the Mormons.
@Chad: I posted links and the post went into moderation.. so you could try searching the intertubes urself.
Nodakfarmboy
Completely off topic… I’m currently checking in on my fellow juicers from a 767 at 34000 feet somewhere over Iowa. I know this kind of thing is probably commonplace now, but I’m a rather infrequent flyer, so it’s the first time it’s been available to me. If you’d told ten year old me I’d be able to send snarky messages to people from a chair in the sky, I get the feeling he would have been rather skeptical.
A small thing. But a reminder to me that, even with all the crap we face, we still pull off some pretty awesome stuff now and again, even if it may come to seem commonplace.
Redshift
@Chris: Thinking about it, it’s just “I know you are, but what am I?” Apparently if you’re quick enough to do that pre-emptively, the political press finds it convincing instead of juvenile.
Redshift
@Nodakfarmboy: Yeah, it’s still pretty cool. Even if we don’t have jet packs and flying cars, we’re still living in the future in lots of ways.
artem1s
slightly off topic, but the Komen hate machine is resulting in some resignations…
http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml?id=375100019
the more groups that are targeted, the more ridiculous it makes the conservative movement look. And their resources are spread thinner and thinner as they continue to fight on multiple fronts.
beergoggles
@Chad: And more..
Culture of Truth
Maybe God just has a lot of frequent flier miles and a big smart phone
Lawnguylander
@beergoggles:
Black and Latino gays were once the target demographic of NOM but, since they’ve been alienated from their families and churches, they aren’t any more? Makes no fucking sense on its own but even less in the context of a reply. The comment you’re replying to merely notes that the wording in the BuzzFeed article doesn’t allow for the existence of non-white gays. It’s a paraphrasing from the NOM document featured in the article and the fallacy is not pointed out. It’s not an uncommon thing to portray the default voter within a group as white. You see it all the time, “conflict between female voters and black voters” during the 2008 primary . Like black females were an unheard of entity in the Democratic party. Or more recently, “conflict between black voter and liberal voters,” like liberal black people are as mythical as leprechauns.
ETA: Also, here you are, in a thread about NOM’s desire to use alleged minority views on gay rights issues as a wedge issues, talking up said alleged wedge issue. Well done.
rlrr
For every child of gay parents willing to speak on camera, 10,000+ children of straight parents could be found and it won’t cost $120,000.
McJulie
@Chris: I suspect deliberate strategy among the party directors, more sincere projection/deflection among the rank and file.
artem1s
the haters worst nightmare…
http://www.youtube.com/v/D85yrIgA4Nk
everyone getting along.
beergoggles
@Lawnguylander: Actually I was looking at it from the perspective of the most strident homophobes being closeted LGBTs (I forget the study but it showed that over 80% of homophobes get turned on by gay porn). Once they actually come out as LGBT and kicked out of their communities, they lose the power to be leading homophobes and thus cease to be the target audience for NOM.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kay:
A moment from The Princess Bride is appropriate here.
__
“Religious liberty” does not mean what these vile fascists think it means. It does not mean that they have the right to ram their primitive superstitions down the throats of everyone in the country.
Roger Moore
@chopper:
Because they’ve been brainwashed by the Democrat Party into voting in lockstep for their radical socia1ist agenda, of course. SATSQ /wingnut.
jrg
@burnspbesq:
It took me about five seconds to google “rcc stance on marriage equality”.
If you can’t own up to the RCC’s position, that’s your problem. Don’t expect the rest of us to walk around with our heads up our asses.
AA+ Bonds
LOLing at this
.
Closing the barn doors after the barn has burned down
.
Fascists are terrible at minority ID politics
Veritas
Nothing about the Supreme Court and ObamaCare?
After ObamaCare is struck down by SCOTUS, what will be left of Obambi’s legacy come January 2013?
His signature accomplishment, which he expended 90% of his political capital to drag across a bloody finish line, right down the drain.
Bye bye, ObamaCare.
Davis X. Machina
@beergoggles: NOM may have been active in the Maine referendum battle, but the local Catholic diocese was active in its own right.
wasabi gasp
Lots of cheap crap at the Values Voters going out of business sale.
Roger Moore
@Redshift:
Not all of them good.
AA+ Bonds
@AA+ Bonds:
LOLOLOLOLOL, “swing”
.
I guess you never want an internal document talking openly about voter suppression
Yutsano
@Veritas: Welp I’m convinced. What are you going to replace it with?
Veritas
@Yutsano:
Nothing. How’s that?
AA+ Bonds
@Yutsano:
Current line is the Republican bill from that year
Yutsano
@Veritas: So you have no ideas for the country period. You just want THAT one out of the White House. Good luck running on that.
Mnemosyne
@Veritas:
Dude. Learn to scroll before you embarrass yourself again.
Chyron HR
@Veritas:
Actually, there were several threads yesterday about just that topic.
What about you? Any more declarations of VICTORY!! for Tim Pawlenty, your first choice for President?
Veritas
@Yutsano:
We want ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank repealed, make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and pull out all the stops to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon, along with entitlement reform and taking a chainsaw to unecessary federal red tape holding back our economy.
AA+ Bonds
Veritas: still ownin
AA+ Bonds
@Veritas:
You forgot putting a halt to illegal immigration through real border security
Davis X. Machina
@AA+ Bonds: The replacement plan is right here, from the Heritage Institute. Its distinguishing feature is a ‘mandate’ — check out p. 6. (link to PDF…)
Yutsano
@Veritas: So you have no ideas for the country period. You just want THAT ONE out of the White House.
Chyron HR
@Veritas:
Gosh, that won’t fit on a bumper sticker. No wonder you went with “Don’t Re-Elect the Nig” instead.
Veritas
@Yutsano:
You have no ideas except more taxes, more spending, more regulation, more government, more socialism.
Veritas
@Yutsano:
You have no ideas except more taxes, more spending, more regulation, more government, more socialism.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@Veritas:
I’m enjoying living under the loving umbrella of RomneyCare up here in Massachusetts, bro.
__
Damn shame he can’t run on what, 20-30 years from now, will be recognized as the crowning achievement of his career, innit?
scav
OK, file this under the future may not be as entirely bad as all that if research even possibly suggests some connection between eating chocolate regularly and being thin.
__
OH, and Chex_mix is saying “nothing” so consistently that I suspect he’s looking into a mirror or the abyss of his own intellect.
AA+ Bonds
@Davis X. Machina:
Except it won’t be what they offer because it requires a mandate
.
I mean I understand that “Republicans did it first” is a good debating point but surely you know the Republicans have thought about this and also that people don’t remember jack shit
.
If you think that anyone needs to offer a plan that works, well, I mean, none of these plans will work, the only plan that will work is single-payer (which also allows for much greater defense re: the Constitution)
Veritas
The Heritage Foundation plan from the ’90s was never a serious proposal. We had zero intention of passing it, it was just a red herring against HillaryCare.
Notice that when we controlled both houses and the Presidency, we didn’t even try to pass it.
Davis X. Machina
@AA+ Bonds: The Heritage Institute even mentions auto insurance as an analogous requirement.
It is to laugh.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@AA+ Bonds:
Keerist on a cracker, what an ominous phrase that is. You know who else was inappropriately assimilated?
Thor Heyerdahl
@Veritas: So then that’d mean that individual states like Vermont & Montana would be able to pass their own state level public option health care sooner than is currently in the law? And then large ones like California join in…
What’s that phrase again…the law of unintended consequences? SCOTUS shoots down Obamacares and America actually winds up with a more liberal version.
HA HA!
AA+ Bonds
@Veritas:
QFT
matryoshka
I’ll have to ask my daughter (raised by lesbians! aaaakkkk!) if she’d like a slice of that $120K pie, but I don’t think she’ll paint the portrait of despair they’re looking for. She seems to think she had a pretty good childhood.
Veritas
@Thor Heyerdahl:
LOL, California is bankrupt. They’re not going to be passing anything.
beergoggles
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor: Wasn’t the Massachusetts health care law passed with veto proof majorities so it wouldn’t have mattered whether Romney approved of it or not?
Yutsano
@Veritas:
Oh I got lots of those. Some I can even mention in public!
Uhh…this is an unintentionally funny thing to say to an IRS agent. And I like having nice things. Which means paying for nice things.
What we spend on things now is ridiculous. But this is just a trite talking point from you.
Well you have proven you can’t play in the sandbox without hurting the other kids. So obviously you’re not mature enough to govern your own selfish impulses. Deal with it.
Stop using terms you don’t know the definition of. And the most sociallist organization in the US is the military. But that doesn’t fit your talking points, so you blithely ignore the glaring contradiction in your philosophy.
What else ya got?
Veritas
Oh, but VERMONT! Mighty, mighty, Vermont will pass single payer, because when I think “large purchasing power” I think “Vermont”.
Even liberal Oregon put single payer on the ballot one year and it went down in flames.
Davis X. Machina
@AA+ Bonds: You got sixty votes, I’m all over it.
Me, personally, I’m a public school teacher. I like the NHS model — the state owns the whole thing, bricks, mortar, etc, and hires the employees.
It’s a public good — have the public provide it, directly. You can throw your Congressman out. It’s hard to throw out the Chief Actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
matryoshka
As an aside, can I just take a moment to thank all you straight allies out there? I don’t comment here much, but I always appreciate reading the threads about gay issues and seeing what good friends my tribe has. Muchos gracias.
Mark S.
We spend more than any other country on health care, have tens of millions uninsured, and generally have worse results. But replacing Medicare with Vouchercare might solve all those problems, and tax cuts always work.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
@Veritas:
While I think you are full of shit, if not the fluffy spoofy kind, you also perform a valuable blog service, to keep the resident vicious snarling jackals from chewing on each other. So Carry on. But pace yourself, it’s a long and winding road to November.
Yutsano
@Veritas:
That ship has sailed. Your talking points need updating. You should make your conference calls with Frank Lunt more often dude.
AA+ Bonds
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I do not envy the task of pitching a strategy of identity politics to Republicans, in Republican language, and simultaneously helping to allow them to convince themselves that they are neither liberals nor racists
.
I think I could do it better than these guys though
.
A secondary appeal contained in pretty much every strategy pitched to them nowadays is that this strategy will serve to calm their panic attacks about the Hispanic vote and considering that this is impossible without openly endorsing disenfranchisement, these guys did as good a job as possible with that part probably
Veritas
@Mark S.:
This refutes the infant mortality chestnut the left loves so much.
AA+ Bonds
@Davis X. Machina:
It’s not a question of whether it will happen, it’s a question of the level of disaster if/when it does not happen
.
Personally I am attending a bunch of seminars about applying my skills/education outside of the U.S.
Veritas
@Yutsano:
Good, let’s see the People’s Republic of Vermont go bankrupt as a warning to everyone else.
BDeevDad
So, they’re racist and homophobic. Not surprised, just saying.
rlrr
@Shit for Brains:
Consider the source…
AA+ Bonds
@Yutsano:
What does this mean
Soldiers do not own the means of production, I assume you mean wealth is highly redistributed within the military, which is not true either because 1) the tax base is overwhelmingly non-military and 2) most of the money goes to contractors through DoD
.
I think you mean that the most fascist organization in the U.S. is the military which is a little like saying the most communalist organization in the U.S. is the family – an observation only surprising in its banality
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@beergoggles:
Romney pushed the original Bill himself while Governor, and the General Court (ie our lege) added to it. Romney did veto some of those additions while signing the Bill (the Governor here has line-item veto power), but eventually those did all get overriden .
__
He sure was happy to take credit for it as his Bill when it passed.
Chyron HR
@Veritas:
Gee, you sure loved Vermont three weeks ago when you were desperately trying to find a Romney VICTORY!! to jerk off to.
Linda Featheringill
@NotMax:
I guess those idiots have never met a Latina Lipstick Lesbian. One of God’s better efforts.
curiousleo
@matryoshka: Getting this thread back on track. Straight, gay, bi, white, Af-Am, Asian-Am, etc. are humans working for equality.
May 8 in NC. The first of the season on these anti-gay laws. There’s a good chance to win if people get the eff on board. Freedom to Marry–that means you. Get on board w/ helping the NC campaign w/ your nat’l org.
Mark S.
@Veritas:
Ha! Some Reason blog post saying that infant mortality is high because Americans are fat is not exactly a refutation.
Davis X. Machina
@AA+ Bonds: Are you implying that tort reform won’t stop a pandemic?
Veritas
@Mark S.:
There’s also differences in how infant mortality is measured between countries as well.
rlrr
@Mark S.:
Reason Magazine should get some sot of award for having an ironic title.
Roger Moore
@BDeevDad:
And admitting that they’ve lost majority Anglo culture. They know they’re losing badly, and they’re trying to keep things going for a little while longer by appealing to a wider range of bigots than they usually do. That and trying to use marriage equality as a partisan wedge issue to separate minorities from the Democrats. Ugly, ugly, ugly.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Veritas: LOL, Veritas is mentally bankrupt. It’s not passing anything except bad gas.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
And, BTW, we had the same “You Can’t Mandate Me!” courtroom theatrics here after the Bill passed, except our court system dismissed the suit.
__
The challengers tried to get a trial by jury (probably thinking that would be the easier path to repeal– and given my personal experience as a resident of Essex County, where the challengers were from, I agree) but that was declined on the grounds that there were “no facts to be determined”.
russell
I’m not really that interested in wading in on the Yutsano v Veritas thing, just wanted to observe that I’m getting lots of laughs out of Veritas’ “Oh that health insurance plan we proposed? We were totally full of shit” rhetorical gambit.
And Vermont is not going bankrupt. Other than being freaking cold in the winter, it’s a great place to live. They take care of their people.
Conservatives should love it, everybody’s got guns up there.
AA+ Bonds
@Davis X. Machina:
I don’t know that anything would stop a pandemic short of shutting down all air travel 24-48 hours after initial outbreak
.
But yes certainly our failure to establish individual dependence on state-managed health care sites in this country would raise mortality by some significant degree; people would have no goddamned clue where to go or what to do
shortstop
In the future, it may very well become so if Democrats don’t stop taking it for granted.
For the present, however, I will observe that only the most self-deluding party would call this a “swing vote.” This bloc has moved sharply leftward since Bush.
Barry
@Nodakfarmboy: “If you’d told ten year old me I’d be able to send snarky messages to people from a chair in the sky, I get the feeling he would have been rather skeptical.”
Of course. Now, it you told him that he could toss stuff down on their heads, he’d be ecstatic :)
shortstop
@matryoshka: Of course she does. You let her sleep late on Sundays instead of taking her to church to hear about how sinful her moms are. Teenagers love sleeping in!
Barry
@jrg: “It took me about five seconds to google “rcc stance on marriage equality”.
If you can’t own up to the RCC’s position, that’s your problem. Don’t expect the rest of us to walk around with our heads up our asses.”
If you head way back into some posts on a certain organization’s protection of child molesters, I think that you’ll find enough comments from burnspbesq to clearly establish just who is a bigot.
AA+ Bonds
@russell:
It can be pitched more smoothly: that back during the Clinton years the Republicans had to seek centrist compromise to prevent Hillary Clinton from turning us into the USSR, but now the American people have all come to realize the dangers of socialism while the Democrats have become even more socialist, so there is both an opportunity and a need for real market-based reform that eschews mandates
Mark S.
@Veritas:
Yeah, that one’s bullshit too:
The problem is the US has a much higher rate of preterm births.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@rlrr:
Yes, I love that part, the whole “don’t you be white like that” aspect of their sales pitch, in which they manage to simultaneously insult both groups. That’s Jedi Master levels of fucked up.
Daaling
lol….that orange site I love to hate is all “booga booga” over this like it’s news or something. Then again that orange site is pretty much a single issue site now. All gay all the time and the good is ALWAYS the enemy of the perfect far left agenda. My god are you people all that stupid?
Jesus titty fucking christ on a stick. How do you people managed get through a day without shitting your pants or get hit by a car crossing the street.
This shit is going on all around you and yet you people most of which are political junkies have no idea what is actually going on. You take the bait of this political theater every single time and seem shocked when you find some memo that details the script they are writing for the latest performance.
The stupid it burns.
jibeaux
That would be the Romneybot. For a guy who’s done very little the last 7.5 years besides run for president and oversee the construction of his car elevator, the man is not exactly a consummate politician.
jibeaux
@Daaling:
Yeah, I don’t see any shock.
rlrr
@jibeaux:
Which is why he’s had to spend gazillions of dollars to win states like Michigan and Ohio by 1%….
matryoshka
@shortstop: Well, yeah, that and all the kumbayah camping trips and sincere talk of girl power. Churches in Missouri burst into flames when gay people enter them, so we were never welcome in church anyway.
shortstop
@jibeaux: Right, but shhhhh…pointing that out is invalidating Daaling’s tired old script.
jibeaux
@rlrr: No one makes the tone deaf go to 11 like Romney.
“So I got my ass kicked in this election one time, and what I learned is that if you say you want to eliminate puppies, your opponents get that all twisted and use it to say that you don’t like puppies or some shit. So, yeah, I am totally going to kill some pets when I’m president. But what I figured out from that ass-whooping is that I shouldn’t tell anyone which pets that’s going to be.”
I mean, I can amp it up a notch, but I’m still using his formula, you know?
lamh35
darn it, i thought I downloaded the pie filter, but it’s doesnt’ seem to be working. Anyone have the link to the updated pie filter?
jibeaux
@shortstop: What’s a girl supposed to do, engage Veritas? No thanks. :)
Roger Moore
@lamh35:
The new pie filter is in the same place as the old one, but you have to re-enter all the people you’ve pied. Also, too, it seems to have a problem where it eats the reply button and time stamp for any posts it has replaced with pie quotes. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, since I wasn’t really planning on replying to those quotes anyway.
shortstop
@jibeaux: Never that, sister.
scav
There is a way to combine the Romney and child/cousin turning threads: Park Romney: Why he turned against the Mormon church. Not a great article, chiefly notable from being from the bbc. And that chains into the president of Russia Mr Medvedev remarking that the Rombot’s comments “smelled of Hollywood” and advising him to “use his head” (bbc here.
shortstop
OT, why does Jeffrey Toobin have a job? He is fundamentally incapable of not freaking out and making hyperdramatic pronouncements based on the slightest change in the breeze.
Wait, I just listed the entire job description of cable pundit.
Daaling
@shortstop: Thank you for showing such concern over my feelings on this my little groupie.
curiousleo
ActBlue moneybomb on behalf of the NC folks fighting amendment one. You want love to win? Help NC fight this terrible amendment.
Ben Cisco
Masters of Projection – that’s what they are. More projection than a multiplex.
RalfW
So this was a perfectly good thread about how the conservatives are fvcking themselves over their affiliation with racist haters at NOM, and the certifiable asshole Veritas thread-jacked.
Ignore the twerp.
He could see how we were all enjoying a few minutes of fun laughing our assess off at the exposed, raw nerve of racist manipulation of NOM. But he managed to get a bunch of people to talk about healthcare on this thread.
For shits sake.
CynDee
The site is looking more integrated now.
Appreciation: The little calendar icon and Posted icon are excellent.
More appreciation: It’s great to see the rotating tag line right below the site name.
Appreciation plus Quibble: Most of the text is now readable. Headline font is still irritating and institutional
Picky Thing but I Say it Anyway: The author names are awfully small. Why do they have to be that way? It keeps the flow going to be able to read the name without squinting.
Beef: In the logo title I still miss the full concept that includes the little guy and the little symbol — the presence of a person intending to say something. I don’t like the depersonalization of the original, really artistically solid concept of quirky-but-serious.
Appreciation plus Big Beef: So glad to have the comment numbers back, but they overtake the other elements.
First in importance is the commenter’s name.
Second in importance is what the commenter has to say.
Third in importance is the number, which should be clear and unobtrusive.
Instead there is this big gray shadowy thing that doesn’t line up with the name OR the comment and creates a weird distraction by displacing the opening of the comment text.
The big gray shadowy thing yells out: LOOK AT ME!! I’M A HIGHLY DESIGNED COMMENT NUMBER AND YOU HAVE TO STOP AND NOTICE AND SHAKE HANDS PAST ME TO SEE THE IMPORTANT STUFF. ‘CAUSE I’M THE GAAAAATEKEEEEPER HEEEEERE. SEE?? WE GOT NUMBERRRS!
Anyway, thanks for the whole site. We’d be a sight (site) worse off without it.
The Other Chuck
@CynDee:
If you use firefox, install Stylish then use the little icon thingie it puts un the statusbar to search for themes, and pick the “Balloon Juice 2012” theme which makes the post numbers not suck quite as much. There’s ways to do user styles on other browsers too (even IE), but I don’t know exactly how offhand.
__
I wish I could fix the lack of blank lines between paragraphs with a style, but that’s a FYWP thing where it uses one (and only ever one) BR tag between grafs, and those can’t be styled with CSS. It also loses the distinction between mere line-breaks and paragraph breaks, but I suspect that wouldn’t be much of an issue.
__
To fix FYWP formatting issues like that, I’d have to go after it with GreaseMonkey, which I’m already starting to do with the Troll Filter — it removes the “Says:” after a poster’s name because it gets in the way of collapsed comments — but I otherwise don’t touch formatting in the filter. The only real fix to this is on Cole’s end. And let it serve as a warning for any blog ever thinking of using WordPress.
Sasha
This is exactly the idea behind the “Abortion = Black Genocide” campaign as well, you know …
NotMax
@beergoggles:
.
Wow. Misdirection much?
.
Careful of fire around that huge straw man you constructed up above, friend.
juilliard string quartet
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