Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

T R E 4 5 O N

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

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

One way or another, he’s a liar.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

All hail the time of the bunny!

Consistently wrong since 2002

In after Baud. Damn.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

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We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

You are here: Home / Politics / Glibertarianism / Here’s Some Freedom For You

Here’s Some Freedom For You

by | 101 Comments

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Mitt Romney’s head of HHS:

At the Iowa Faith & Freedom event, [Rand] Paul mocked President Obama’s remark that his view on marriage was evolving. “Call me cynical, but I didn’t think his views on marriage could get any gayer,” he said

As this quote illustrates, much to the disappointment of the Paulists, Ron is a far better politician than Rand. If you read through Ron’s carefully manicured Wikipedia history on gay rights, it’s full of artful weaseling and dodging, some strategic anti-federalism, and a few good votes (he voted to repeal DADT, for example). Rand is just against repealing DADT as well as against gay marriage, and he thinks calling someone “gay” is the height of cleverness.

If Ron’s efforts to steal some delegates to make a splash at the convention are all about getting some kind of position for Rand, you have to wonder if it’s worth the effort. The state that elected Jim Bunning to the Senate will almost certainly keep sending Rand back to DC, but I can’t see him running the movement that Ron started.

Reader Interactions

101Comments

  2. 2.

    Cacti

    Baby doc just sounds like your standard wingnut. To what lengths will glibertarians go to ignore it?

  3. 3.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Cacti:

    To the same extent that they ignore Papa doc’s pretty blatant history of palling around with neo-Nazis.

  4. 4.

    Baud

    Rand will be ok. Like dad and his newsletters, Rand will say he was not aware of the content of his speeches.

  6. 6.

    beltane

    Ron Paul is a master at duping liberals with the occasional sane sounding comment; Rand Paul is just another wingnut identical to all the rest.

  8. 8.

    Clime Acts

    Well, he’s certainly right about the whole “evolving” thing being a load of stupendously stinky horseshit, and very cynical on Obama’s part, but since most commenters here are fine with that, I won’t pursue it further.

    That said, the problem is that Rand is a DORK. His dad is eccentric but has some gravitas, whereas Rand just comes off as a semi pretty airhead.

  11. 11.

    BGinCHI

    Anyone else noticing a trend in political dynasties on the GOP side that produce bigger and bigger assholes?

    Bush

    Romney

    Paul

    Quayle

    Any other entitled, spoiled, rich GOP fucks I’m missing?

  13. 13.

    Joey Maloney

    And speaking of “couldn’t be any gayer” I have to say Rand’s purse-lipped mien and that carefully-coiffed minifro pings my gaydar. Add in these inappropriate, out of context outbursts of homophobia and, well…

  14. 14.

    boonagain

    What always baffles me is that they are so free with spouting their hate. They are contained in such a Right Wing bubble that the thought that someone might disagree with them is the furthest thing from their mind.

  15. 15.

    FlipYrWhig

    For all the dogma and wrongheadedness, at least Ron Paul comes across as jovial. He believes what he believes and is happy about it and wants you to be too. Rand Paul comes across as smug and arrogant. There’s no joy in him.

  16. 16.

    El Cid

    And if anyone exemplifies pure heterosexual masculine identity values, clearly it’s Rand Paul.

  18. 18.

    beltane

    @Joey Maloney: Watch out, I had a comment on DKos HR’d because I made reference to Rand Paul’s rather androgynous looks. Despite the HR, I still feel Paul, Jr. has a feminine air about him.

  21. 21.

    Tyro

    . “Call me cynical, but I didn’t think his views on marriage could get any gayer,” he said

    What the heck does this even mean? “Cynical” about what?

  25. 25.

    kth

    You have the formulation exactly backwards: remarks like that are why Rand is a Senator and his father only a congressman.

  27. 27.

    Joey Maloney

    @beltane: Is there some way to HR ol’ Randy himself? I read a story in Asimov’s awhile ago where in the future everyone wears augmented reality glasses and earbuds and if someone annoyed you, you could just edit them out of your personal reality.

  28. 28.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @Joey Maloney:

    in the future everyone wears augmented reality glasses and earbuds and if someone annoyed you, you could just edit them out of your personal reality.

    I’ll take about 27 percent less reality, please?

  31. 31.

    Clime Acts

    Yup, I would agree about Rand’s pink potential.

    My gaydar has always pinged when he’s on screen.

    And my gaydar has near 100 percent accuracy.

  33. 33.

    Jewish Steel

    Is this an example Burkean modesty or Hayekian thoughtfulness? Someone make the call.

  34. 34.

    J

    @Clime Acts: Why? It sounds plausible to me, as someone of about Obama’s age whose own views have evolved considerably, from finding the whole idea ridiculous to thinking it’s a fine thing.

  36. 36.

    aimai

    Well, Rand is a Senator and Ron is a Congressman because they occupy different marketing niches in different States. Ron is rolling up the delegates, again, because the rules governing caucuses and delegates are totally not like regular voting rules and favor the small band of nutcases over the general voter. You can’t predict how someone like Rand will do on the large stage from how they did in their little State other than to say that its no prediction at all.**

    aimai

    I was caucus head for Robert Reich’s campaign in my little ward and the number one vote getter to be delegate was an 18 year old boy, just out of highschool, and one of the sweetest, dumbest, people ever to walk out of his mother’s womb. He got hundreds of votes right off the bat. Why? Because all his friends from highschool showed up to vote for him. They had literally no idea what they were doing there (I met them at the door and they would skid in and say, excitedly, I’m here to vote for Friend X! but they had no idea what they were voting for him to do). Also: they had very little else to be doing because they were so young. Ron Paul’s followers are like that. Lots of energy. No need to be bothered by the details of reality. But in the long run those aren’t the only voters.

  38. 38.

    amk

    Does anyone how the hairdresser’s speech at bigots are us univ go ? Heard some flew a plane when the hairdresser was to about to begin with a flyer gop = higher school debt.

  40. 40.

    rda909

    @FlipYrWhig:

    at least Ron Paul comes across as jovial

    Uh, maybe it’s an age thing:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOPCYVK76-k

    And who could forget Randy “Mr. Personal Responsibility” Paul’s, “I blame YOU!!!” rant against a poor government bureaucrat after he didn’t do enough research and bought a low-performing toilet. Such hypocrisy with the Paul family, so little time. I suspect there’s some dark, dark stuff in that family.

  41. 41.

    handsmile

    Randy as “Romney’s head of HHS”?

    I’d have thought that would be Frothy’s new job.

  42. 42.

    JPL

    The NYTimes has an article about Romney’s fixation with Russia. I have to wonder if that’s also a clue to his VP selection.. As we know Condi Rice is a student of Russian History and as Sec’y of State she would give him the appearance of strength in foreign policy.
    link
    It’s gonna be a long, long campaign season.

  45. 45.

    YellowJournalism

    For the Alan Rickman fans: he will be playing Reagan in an upcoming Forrest Whitaker movie. Jane Fonda will be Nancy.

  47. 47.

    Randy P

    A certain tiresome and repetitive troll has finally prompted me to figure out what a “pie filter” is and how to install it. Works like a charm!

    Now can somebody technical tell me exactly what is happening here? Where does this filter and “Greasemonkey”, the product it apparently depends on, reside? How is this intercepting and modifying the HTML coming from Balloon Juice?

  48. 48.

    Firebert

    It occurred to me that the Ron Paul campaign might just be a giant ratfuck, designed to suck hippie votes over to the R side. Little Randy is just a typical R asshole, though.

  49. 49.

    Joey Maloney

    @Randy P: Short answer: Greasemonkey is an extension for your browser. It’s basically an API that allows you to execute scripts on the pages that your browser downloads before it displays them. The pie filter is a script that looks for the usernames you specify and modifies the text in their posts to be more baked-goods-themed.

  50. 50.

    kay

    @handsmile:

    Santorum said Romney has to “step up” and use the “potent weapon” of same sex marriage against Obama.

    I knew the lunatics weren’t going to let Romney get away with that garbled mess he tried to pass off.

  52. 52.

    Silver

    I don’t know about the last sentence. Ron Paul’s fans are notoriously stupid, and he’s basically got his own little personality cult running. I think it’s not impossible that most of those morons latch onto his son for because, hey, “Same last name!”

  53. 53.

    kay

    @Joey Maloney:

    Isn’t it great? This is now an issue of Rooney’s manliness.

    I actually don’t find Santorum at all manly. He reminds me of a giant baby, and not even a peaceful content baby. A fussy, unhappy baby.

  54. 54.

    Davis X. Machina

    @kay: I see a remarkable resemblance between Rick Santorum and Andy Kaufman. If the latter were still with us, he’d still be counting the money from the primary season.

  55. 55.

    Frankensteinbeck

    It should be noted that even in Kentucky Rand Paul had trouble getting elected – although now that he’s an incumbent, I dare say he’s a lock. He did an utterly shameless job of the ‘tacking to the center’ after an extreme primary. How shameless? His victory speech the night he got nominated promised he would never go moderate. His speech the next morning was about how moderate he was. Conway tried to hang Rand’s crazy around his neck, but it didn’t quite work. Kentucky is a state made for someone like Rand – a little pretend-polite hating of everyone and validating people’s narcissism, and Kentuckians would elect you God.

  56. 56.

    Davis X. Machina

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    a little pretend-polite hating of everyone and validating people’s narcissism, and Kentuckians would elect you God.

    Not after You leveled with them and told them You actually didn’t just put those fossils there 6000 years ago to confound liberal scientists, they wouldn’t.

  58. 58.

    Marcellus Shale, Public Dick

    aqua buddha doesn’t get to use “gay” as an adjective.

  59. 59.

    handsmile

    @kay: (#53)

    And what better way to quiet the bawling baby than to have him latch onto the teat of Health and Human Services? Sucking dry that government agency would keep little Ricky occupied, letting Rmoney and his fellow sociopaths pillage and plunder elsewhere.

  60. 60.

    marv

    @maya:

    Not to mention, now that you got me thinking about it, the Ur-Paul of homophobia for the right wing, just plain Paul

  61. 61.

    Clime Acts

    @J:

    Why? It sounds plausible to me, as someone of about Obama’s age whose own views have evolved considerably, from finding the whole idea ridiculous to thinking it’s a fine thing.

    It’s on record that Obama came out publicly in favor of gay marriage in the mid 1990s, then changed his story to one of being against it as he ran for prez, and now has rediscovered his 1990s stance after a number of years re-evolving I guess to where he was in the first place.

    Where have you been?

  63. 63.

    handsmile

    @kay:

    OT (also too): Thanks for your insight the other day re Rob Portman. Seems recent polling on that very question confirmed what you already knew.

  64. 64.

    Yutsano

    @Liberty60: I’ll make popcorn. It will get epic. Although I don’t think Jane is frail enough to play Nancy. Plus I have no idea how this will get made with her alive. She’s VERY protective of Ronnie’s public image.

  65. 65.

    gaz

    @Randy P: The browser runs it.

    Greasemonkey allows your browser to run arbitrary scripts (based in Javascript, IIRC). The pie filter uses greasemonkey to to crawl the HTML document, and remove the offending HTML.

    ETA: FYWP tag filters for killing my backslashes.

    Dude, don’t worry about this stuff. You don’t need to know. If you did, you’d know where to find it.

    They generally reside inside your browsers extensions stuff. Different browsers put it in different places, but I imagine it’s somewhere under your local user files (like in windowsusersmelocal settings… or something like that – failing that, they are buried under your program filesetc)

    Is there a reason you need to care? Are you trying to modify it? if so, you can get to it under the greasemonkey options

  66. 66.

    Hill Dweller

    @Clime Acts: Even if Obama didn’t come out for marriage equality, he would still have done more for the LGBT community than any President in history, by a wide margin.

    Moreover, Obama has always been for civil unions and giving gay and lesbian partners all the other legal/economic benefits afforded heterosexual people. He has hired hundreds of openly gay people in his administration. He has nominated openly gay judges.

    Conversely, Willard is openly hostile to gay people, and whenever he has pretended to care about their plight, it lasts about a day.

  67. 67.

    Tony J

    @Liberty60:

    Wow. Jane Fonda playing Nancy Reagan. Wingnuts of a certain age will react with mild discomfort, I am sure.

    My thoughts exactly. Whitaker simply couldn’t have cast anyone more certain to paint the inside of the Wingnutosphere with mass cranium detonation juice.

    But Rickman as Reagan? I has ma doots. He’s a great actor, but he talks the way he talks and he does not talk like Reagan.

  69. 69.

    Pyro Joe

    Alright, so Business Insider just posted the transcript of Romney’s Liberty U address.
    Some choice bits:

    In some ways, it is fitting that I share this distinction with Truett Cathy. The Romney campaign comes to a sudden stop when we spot a Chick-fil-A. Your chicken sandwiches were our comfort food through the primary season, and there were days that we needed a lot of comforting. So, Truett, thank you and congratulations on your well-deserved honor today.

    I will always remember [Jerry Falwell’s] cheerful good humor and selflessness. Several years ago, in my home, my wife and I were posing for a picture together with him. We wanted him to be in the center of the photo, but he insisted that Ann be in the middle, with he and I on the sides. He explained, by pointing to me and himself, “You see, Christ died between two thieves.”

    [Falwell] believed that Liberty might become one of the most respected Christian universities anywhere on earth. And so it is today.

    I had to stop reading and catch my breath after that last one.

  70. 70.

    Cassidy

    @El Cid: That’s one thing I find hilarious, all these conservative “men” imagine themselves as some sort of manly man.

  71. 71.

    yopd1

    Just proves the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, only the intellect and nuance does.

  73. 73.

    scav

    @Joey Maloney: On the upside, Rickman’s able to work in an solid vein of evil and scary iccckkk under an otherwise handsome exterior. That part could work.

  74. 74.

    gaz

    @Hill Dweller: That’s not what Clime Acts is about. He’s all about negativity. If he won a million dollars he’d find a reason to complain.

    Also I doubt he’s a troll in the purest sense of the word.

    Clime Acts is simply miserable. It’s a cry for help, and he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. He’s got a shattered id and it pollutes his thought process. What he needs is some psychiatric help, and maybe some head meds so he can realign.

    I know this because we can smell our own. I’ve been fortunate enough to actually get some with my own depression, etc. I don’t think he has.

    Up until recently I used to rip on him all the time. That was wrong of me, and I don’t intend to do it anymore. Mostly, I just feel sorry for the guy. He’s hurting. That’s why I’ve made a commitment lately to not respond to him. It’s a very recent commitment, admittedly. In the end, I think it’s the most moral thing to do. Unfortunately for him, venting on a blog is not going to help him at all, and it’s not like anything anyone ever says to him here is going to convince him to get the help he needs.

  76. 76.

    Clime Acts

    @gaz:

    shorter gaz: “People who disagree with me, and who don’t bend to my rhetorical will, are as mentally ill as I am.”

    HOOOOKAY, then…

  77. 77.

    Steve

    Hey guys, after Clime Acts said for the first time in recorded history that he’d let an argument drop, thanks so so much for getting him going again!

  78. 78.

    Clime Acts

    @Steve:

    Hello? Exactly.

    It seems obvious to me that everyone at BJ who disagrees with me is as mentally ill and depressed as gaz.

  82. 82.

    gaz

    @Steve: If you haven’t realized by now that Clime Acts must ALWAYS have the last word you haven’t been paying attention.

  84. 84.

    Roger Moore

    @Joey Maloney:
    It’s a good movie; just don’t treat it as a history lesson. Let’s just say that casting Rickman as DeValera in a movie about Collins tells you everything you need to know about its editorial slant.

  86. 86.

    JGabriel

    @Joey Maloney:

    Now I’m picturing giant pie slices walking back and forth in front of my augmented reality lenses.

    Whoa, it’s just like acid.

    .

  87. 87.

    Donut

    Rand in many ways is the perfect Teabagger dogmatist: born on third base and thinks he hit his very own home run; thinks he’s entitled to everything within his purview, and that he is responsible to no one or no thing but his supposedly pure and clean ideology.

    But I agree with mitermix – he’s got none of the charisma and networking skills of his old man. He instead is coasting on the old guy’s name.

    Fuckim sad and scary mix, all of that.

  89. 89.

    Tony J

    @Joey Maloney:

    Rickman doing Reagan’s midwestern/California/dementia accent? Does not compute.

    I know.

    “We will staaaaarrt.. bombing.. Russia in.. two.. minuiiiiits.”

    “Mister Gooooorbachev, will.. you.. please.. tear down this.. ‘waaaall’?”

    I’d like to see it, sure, but really?

  90. 90.

    A Humble Lurker

    @Clime Acts: Call me crazy, but I’d rather a guy who is insincere about the bad things he says than a guy who is sincere about the bad (or in the Pauls’ case, crazy) things that he says.

  91. 91.

    Randy P

    @gaz: Nah. But I’m a programmer. Part time anyway (my job title usually has “engineer” in it). I like to know how stuff works. Getting in between my browser and HTML seems like modifying a part of the browser that shouldn’t be accessible to an third-party program unless the browser specifically put hooks in for it. So I was curious how they pulled it off.

    But if “HTML” is one of the file-types you can tell your browser to give to a third party… then I guess I sort of see it. There’s still a piece missing, but I imagine I can puzzle it out now.

  92. 92.

    The Sailor

    Please allow me to introduce my self … I’ve commented here a few times, and I read it a lot, but I thought it only polite to give a bit of bio and explain why I like this treehouse.

    My ‘nym was plastered on me when I joined the blog VidiotSpeak. I also wrote for SteveAudio. I got burned out when I noticed I’ve been complaining about the same things for years and my outrage got dulled and repetitive.

    BTW, I’m not real happy about my ‘nym, but it’s how a sizable portion of blogtopia* knows me. and it does bring a smile to my face every time someone says “Hi Sailor!”

    I do sail, love it more than my job, (and I like my job a lot), but the ‘nym is presumptuous and not one I would have chosen for myself.

    I like most of the folks here, and I see some of you on other sites’ comments. I hope I’m welcome, and I’d like to buy a round for the bar.

    *Why, yes, I do know skippy coined that term.

  95. 95.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @A Humble Lurker:
    You miss the subtle goal of the ratfucker, in his many permutations and motivations. It’s to leave out context, move the goalposts, and pretend that it’s reasonable to grade politicians against perfection – to sum up, to describe EVERYTHING in negative terms, to poison every success until you can’t praise your champion without feeling obligated to add ‘I disagree with a lot of things…’ Haven’t you noticed that they parachute in by the brigade in every thread about how great Obama is, until the conversation is no longer about his latest incredible success?

    In today’s example, Clime Acts wants you to believe that a politician should be graded on absolute truthfulness and loud declarations of principle. Think about that for a minute. Realize how asinine it is, how no politician anywhere, ever, could stand up to such a standard. How the ones who get even close are useless dumbfucks who achieve nothing. How it’s a way of pretending Obama doesn’t have the best history of forwarding gay rights of any president by changing the conversation to one that measures him against nice sounding but actually ridiculous standards.

    EDIT – And remember, it’s not ‘Has he always publicly supported gay rights’. Oh, no. It’s ‘If he hasn’t loudly and publicly supported the most ideal but politically poisonous stance he’s dishonest’. It’s a standard that doesn’t stand up to reality at all, so it can be used to make even a fabulous champion of civil rights sound wishy-washy.

  96. 96.

    Steve in DC

    @Donut

    I don’t think Rand has much of a political future for himself. He hits the right notes for libertarians when it comes to the patriot act, the NDAA, military expansion, and a few other key issues, but falls flat in other areas.

    Rand’s going to do himself in, he’s trying to be both a Republican and a Libertarian, that’s mixing oil and water. A good portion of his fathers odd charm is the fact that he’s never been afraid to go after the Republican party for it’s bullshit. Ron Paul is very much a (Paleo) Libertarian using the Republican party to get into office. Rand Paul is very much a Republican using Libertarian talking points to get into office.

  97. 97.

    The Sailor

    @Frankensteinbeck: Yep. President Obama admits to eating dog when he was 6. Cue poutrage.
    Mitt commits assault with a deadly weapon in prep school, ‘that doesn’t count!’

    I’m waiting for the “nih-CLANG”, and it can’t be too far off.

    It’s kind of surprising; I’m white, middle aged, straight, male, and middle income. And yet except for those facts, I have nothing in common with these folks.

  98. 98.

    Rabble Arouser

    @Silver: FWIW, the plural of anecdotes not being data, etc. etc., I know a couple of folks that worked for months on the Ron Paul campaign, and they believe old Ron farts sunshine and just plain radiates goodness, character and wisdom of the highest sort, and neither of them gives two tugs of a dead dog’s cock for little Rand.

  99. 99.

    The Sailor

    Umm, I’m not much for cooking, so tonight I’m going to the rib shack down the street. Pulled pork and chicken combo, sides of cooked greens, dirty rice, and mac & cheese.

    They also throw in cornbread, but it’s fluffy, cake-like cornbread. I prefer the johnnycake pan fried type.

  100. 100.

    gaz

    @Randy P:

    Nah. But I’m a programmer. Part time anyway (my job title usually has “engineer” in it). I like to know how stuff works. Getting in between my browser and HTML seems like modifying a part of the browser that shouldn’t be accessible to an third-party program unless the browser specifically put hooks in for it.

    Go to Tools|Add-Ons or Tools|Extensions in any modern browser. OF COURSE they provide hooks. It’s not 1998 anymore. Flash for example has been around for YEARS.

    If you want to know SPECIFICALLY, you’ll have to be more specific about which browser you use, then GOOGLE it. There’s reams of docs.

    If you code, you are seriously limiting yourself by trying to ask people general stuff like this. That’s what google is for.

    Or shorter: Coding is 1 part understanding computers, 1 part knowing a language, and 10 parts being able to dig up and absorb docs. You’re not putting enough emphasis on the last bit.

  101. 101.

    Jason

    Proof once again that most so-called libertarians don’t have the courage of their alleged convictions. The correct libertarian position on gay marriage is that the state should not interfere in the voluntary arrangements adults choose to engage in. The libertarianoid position, on the other hand, is to oppose gay marriage, but claim it’s a tenther issue that devolves upon the states to allow or forbid as they see fit.

    Libertarians like Rand Paul are simply in search of a superior justification for selfishness and privilege. The poke little exceptions into their “philosophy” for anything they don’t like.

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