There really is nothing better than playoff hockey. Not even the NFL playoffs.
GO PENS!
by John Cole| 57 Comments
This post is in: Sports
There really is nothing better than playoff hockey. Not even the NFL playoffs.
GO PENS!
by Elon James White| 43 Comments
This post is in: This Week In Blackness
In 2012 suicide surpassed combat deaths in the U.S. military. While there have been multiple studies done on this tragic fact one man in a silly hat has done what those liberal scientist and mental health professionals are afraid to tell you.
But I’ll tell you why more and more warrior heroes of the military are killing themselves: because they are in absolute frustration and heartbreak that their boss, their commander in chief violates the Constitution that he has made an oath to, while their hero warrior blood brothers are being blown to smithereens and blown up while executing their oath to the same Constitution that the president, the vice president and the attorney general violate. – Ted Nugent
Thanks a lot Obama! Soldiers have to deal with PTSD, depression and the grief of losing their fellow soldiers but what really pushes them over the edge is President Obama using our constitution like a $2 floozy. Ted Nugent should know because he was almost drafted in Vietnam.
On today’s #TWiBRadio we discuss Ted Nugent’s facts, ESPN’s Chris Broussard tells openly gay NBA player Jason Collins he’s not a real Christian, and a Florida teen is expelled and arrested after a science experiment goes awry. Listen here:
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And on #amTWiB, political strategist L. Joy Williams and the morning crew take on the NYPD using Stop and Frisk to stop ‘lazy’ cops’, Ireland’s historic abortion legislation, and Mountain Dew’s problematic goat commercials.
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Obama Sucks so Hard, Soldiers are Killing Themselves?Post + Comments (43)
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Decline and Fall
Alex Pareene at Salon picks up the latest viral Ted Cruz video, and explains why Cruz thinks he can abuse his fellow Repubs with impunity:
… Look at the video: He’s in a room of adoring — swooning — admirers and he is basking in their adoration. This is why he got into politics. And everyone who gets confused about why this whip-smart attorney is acting like the dumbest Tea Party wingnut imaginable should probably watch this video. He’s acting like this because he’s smart. It’s great politics to be a Republican in Texas who purposefully pisses off his fellow Republican senators with his intransigence and extreme rhetoric. It’s sort of like how Susan Collins has to act the sensible moderate (while voting basically as a party-line conservative Republican) because she represents Maine, but in Cruz’s case there is no end goal beyond advancing his own career. And legislative victories aren’t an important part of becoming a beloved Tea Party favorite. In this case Cruz may be taking credit for a legislative victory he really had little to do with, but it also doesn’t matter at all to this crowd that, for example, Cruz failed to stop Chuck Hagel from becoming defense secretary. What matters is that he was a huge dick about it, not whether he won or lost.
There is no way to way to stop or shame or embarrass or cajole a politician like this into following the established “norms” of political behavior. The bigger a controversial firebrand he is, the more he riles up both liberals and Republican Senate leadership, the better he’ll look in the eyes of the people who write him checks and made him the nominee for U.S. Senate to begin with. What Rubin (who is not remotely in touch with the actual activist conservative movement base) sees as whiny these people see as, you know, heroic martyrdom. Conservatives love it when their heroes whine about being persecuted!
Just look at this political science survey of FreedomWorks Tea Party activists: They’re ultra-conservative Republicans who hate the Republican Party. They also value ideological purity over pragmatism, to the point where winning victories matters less to them than loudly saying the right thing. (Not great on strategy, these guys.) People like Ted Cruz are doing their best to establish their personal brands at the expense of the actual Republican Party and even the conservative movement. And there’s no mechanism the party can use to get him back in line, because he doesn’t care about results and there’s an entire media and activist infrastructure set up to reward him.
Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I think it’s great that Ted Cruz has decided being a rock star on the Tea Party circuit is better than boring old legislatoring. For one thing, if he’s as smart as his scholastic records, he’ll do a lot less damage being a public dick to Dianne Feinstein than he would writing ALEC strategy sheets. For two, the only thing fickle American voters love more than a shiny new idol wearing their party’s bling is a shiny new idol getting caught with a socially embarrassing sexual partner or a dramatically unsuitable substance abuse problem; the more Cruz pisses on his fellow GOPers, the more reasons they have to shine a public light on what he’s doing in the congressional cloakroom. And since Tailgunner Ted is already publicly flirting with a presidential run (now that he’s served a whole four months in the Senate), there will be no shortage of media drones looking for viral clips to enhance their own resumes, either.
by DougJ| 72 Comments
This post is in: Both Sides Do It!
I hope these nuts don’t hurt anybody, but I have some respect for the revolutionary sentiment here:
18 percent of Democrats, 27 percent of Independents, and 44 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement: “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties”.
I’m not sure how real Applebee’s salad bar going Americans feel about armed revolution. It might turn off the security moms but play well with NASCAR dads. That’s just a guess, though.
Don’t you know that can count me out (in)Post + Comments (72)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 250 Comments
This post is in: Gun nuts
Authorities in southern Kentucky say a 2-year-old girl has been accidentally shot and killed by her 5-year-old brother, who was playing with a .22-caliber rifle he received as a gift.
I’ve written before that one of the fixtures of growing up in a rural state was regular newspaper stories about some kid who killed another kid or himself in a gun accident. And nobody wrote about the many other close calls. For example, I remember that a brother of a high-school friend accidentally blew a hole in his parents’ car roof with a shotgun, from the inside, an event that was literally inches from becoming yet another bloody newspaper story. (It was tragedy enough that he was able to procreate – his parents didn’t need make it worse by handing him a shotgun. But I digress.)
If it didn’t involve the death of children, it would be almost comical to hear gun owners rush to explain away this event with “no true Scotsman” logic (no responsible gun owner would do that, why are you picking on us?) The reason that we want gun safety legislation isn’t because we want to fuck with “responsible gun owners”, it’s because any shithead can get a gun, and a lot of those irresponsible shitheads do stupid things with them. Maybe if “responsible gun owners” had decided to put their pride in their pockets and realize that a lot of law is designed to rein in the shitheads that surround us, and that it isn’t personal, we might have fewer kids blowing each others’ brains out in backyards all over our fair country.
An Isolated Incident Caused by an Irresponsible Gun OwnerPost + Comments (250)
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Republican Stupidity, Both Sides Do It!, Peak Wingnut Was a Lie!
I don’t even know how to begin with this.
Republican members of the House of Representatives have decided that knowledge of what actually is happening in US society and its economy is just too….
I don’t know what…
Inconvenient?…Unfortunate?…Too…useful?…Too important to the actual act of governing?
That last is the one, I think. Representative Jeff Duncan, out to make sure that his great state of South Carolina doesn’t lose the lunacy title to its sibling to the north, has introduced a bill that would bar the US Census [PDF] from conducting any surveys or censuses except for the constitutionally-mandated decennial one.
What would that mean? Over to this report from the Huffington Post:
Such a step that would end the government’s ability to provide reliable estimates of the employment rate. Indeed, the government would not be able to produce any of the major economic indices that move markets every month, said multiple statistics experts, who were aghast at the proposal….
“It’s hard to take this seriously because they’re really saying also they don’t want GDP. They want no facts about what’s going on in the U.S. economy,” said [Maurine] Haver, [founder of business research firm Haver Analytics and a past president of the National Association for Business Economics]. “It’s so fundamental to a free society that we have this kind of information, I can’t fathom where they’re coming from. I really can’t.”
“It’s so unimaginable. It would be like saying we don’t need policemen anymore, we don’t need firemen anymore,” said [Ken] Prewitt, [the former director of the U.S. Census who is now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University]. “To say suddenly we don’t need statistical information about the American economy, or American society, or American demography, or American trade, or whatever — it’s an Alice in Wonderland moment.”
I get Duncan’s reasoning, by the way. It’s a simple syllogism. If the data show that tax cuts, or austerity, or universal gun ownership don’t actually solve all economic and social ills, then, who needs data?
Ladies and gentlemen, your modern Republican party.
Oh, and with a nod to Mr. David Brooks and his paean to disinterested opining: this is engaged writing. I got a horse in the race. I think the Republican party in its present form constitutes a clear and present danger to the Republic. I believe it needs to go the way of the Whigs, so that we can go about the business of constructing an actual second party to engage the necessary debate our politics requires.
It is in the context of that belief that I certainly pay attention to stories like this one. This is the anecdata that, as it accumulates, tells you the problem is real; the Republican party is increasingly simply a freak show, divorced from any conception of governance. But it ain’t my fault — and it is no indictment against this or any other comment like it — that the Republican party continues to advance my argument.
Another thing: I’d vastly prefer it didn’t. But the problem isn’t that I don’t — because I can’t — say that the Democrats are just as bad on, say, anti-empiricism, for example, or that the issue of paying attention to what happens in the world is kind of important in modern political and social life. Rather, it is that in this reality there are consequences when a failed party retains its access to power — and hell, may very well expand its reach.
IOW, pace BoBo, I believe it is my patriotic duty to point in horror at the crater that is all that remains of the Party of Lincoln.
Image: Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Census at Bethlehem, 1566.
In BoBo’s World, Pointing Out How Much The GOP Hates Data Is Bad MannersPost + Comments (58)
by John Cole| 39 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Sociopaths
Once again, Republicans confirm Cleek’s thesis:
Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) revealed that some members of his party opposed expanding background checks for gun sales recently because they didn’t want to “be seen helping the president.”
Two weeks ago, only three Republican senators voted for the bipartisan background checks amendment sponsored by Toomey and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), despite overwhelming popular support for such a measure.
“In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it,” Toomey admitted on Tuesday in an interview with Digital First Media editors in the offices of the Times Herald newspaper in Norristown, Pa.
Has there ever been a more accurate assessment of the current nature of today’s politics than “Whatever Democrats are for, Republicans are against?”