Something happen already. Preferably not another Crimean war though. We had one of those already. It sucked.
Archives for February 2014
The Tim F rule for understanding every GOP civil war
This bears repeating.
At its heart the GOP has two basic camps – business conservatives who bankroll the party and social conservatives/theocons who staff it.
OK, the leadership has its infestation of grifters and opportunistic idiots but the above rule pretty much covers the network of voters, volunteers and money that the grifters and idiots need to keep the game afloat. You can understand every major intraparty conflict in light of this simple rule. The social cons always want to sieze every chance to push their minority, gay, immigrant etc. – hating agenda one more yard down the field. Now business cons do not always oppose the social agenda. In some cases, sure. Take immigration for example. Business desperately needs cheap labor who can’t read the OSHA signs on the wall while social cons desperately hate and fear anything different from them. Immigration is the GOP’s Centralia, PA: a simmering danger zone that goes quiet for a while but cannot ever be made safe and threatens to consume any foolish politician who ventures there in flames and poison gas. Democrats have no such problem because neither side is particularly frantic about it. The pro side would be happy to see some movement in the right direction most people who feel all that strongly against it vote Republican. Unions have their own opinion of course, and that might become a problem some day when they get their political mojo back.
In other cases the Chamber o’ Commerce takes the moderate side in GOP civil wars mostly because the GOP can’t cut taxes for the rich if they spend all their capital on suicidal vendettas. Arizona fits neatly into the this category. Business interests figured correctly that the mess would complicate their financial prospects in AZ and give a significant tailwind to the party of Elizabeth Warren, so they yanked Jan Brewer’s leash and saved another windmill the trouble of knocking don Quixote off his horse.
If you want my opinion, and I feel pretty good about prognosticating after taking the right side of Peak Wingnut, I think Arizona represents the last surge of a receding tide in America. More watered down attempts to pass the same bill have already failed in three states and Ohio just bailed on theirs after Brewer’s veto denied them cover. Desperate, poorly thought out plays like this are a classic sign that a side knows it is losing. Call it political hyperinflation: when your currency is getting less valuable by the minute you rush to spend it any damn way you can before the entire wheelbarrow won’t buy a pack of cigarettes.
***Update***
When Mississippi bails on the social cons, you know the gay haters are holding a wooden nickel.
The Tim F rule for understanding every GOP civil warPost + Comments (77)
Jan Brewer, America’s Hero
In the aftermath of the bravest political act in history, ever, I have a couple of observations:
First, if Tea Partiers are the 27%, then the NFL is the 73%. If the NFL will move the Super Bowl because of something Arizona did, then the time for debate over that thing is over. So, when they moved the Super Bowl from from Arizona in 1993 over Arizona’s reluctance to celebrate MLK day, that was pretty much the end of that racist bullshit for all but the states that will never host a Super Bowl. So, congratulations to our gay friends and family, because you’ve made it, judged by the only standard that matters. By the same standard, Latinos have not made it.
Second, is there any enterprise that has brought less credibility to “professional” journalism than fact-checking? Here’s yet another example of that kind of credulous idiocy related to the Arizona “Free to be a Bigoted Business As Long as You’re a Christian Business” bill:
“This (bill) is not a discrimination bill,” state Rep. Adam Kwasman (R) said. “It makes no mention of sexual orientation.”
The fact-checking group — a collaboration between the Arizona Republic, KPNX and Arizona State University’s journalism school — rated that statement “true.” It reached that conclusion because the bill doesn’t explicitly mention sexual orientation and Arizona law doesn’t protect gay people through its anti-discrimination statute.
If you follow the link to the original piece, you’ll see some furious backpedaling where that distinguished group of hear-no-evil, see-no-evils have revised their judgment to “somewhat true somewhat false”. Why not just flip a fucking coin? On that logic, the claim that Jeff Dahmer was a serial killer would have been “somewhat true somewhat false” if he had denied it.
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Needs More Highchairs
(Walt Handelsman via GoComics.com)
Dana Milbank finds the Republicans revolting, or in revolt, or something:
… It’s perhaps a sign of progress that the House Republicans are now focusing on suing Obama rather than impeaching him, which was discussed at an earlier meeting of the committee. But if they weren’t talking much about the “I-word,” as Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) put it Wednesday, it’s only because “it’s an impractical tool,” as long as “we have Harry Reid as a shield in the Senate.”
But suing the president isn’t any more practical because the courts have long refused to settle such disputes between the elected branches. This means the proposed bills, and Wednesday’s hearing, were really about the GOP effort to delegitimize Obama…
The Republicans and their witnesses filled three hours with accusations and wild hypotheticals: “Tyranny.” “Dangerous and scary moment.” “Imperial presidency.” “Magisterial power.” “Effectively having a monarch.” “Alarming.” “Constitutional tipping point.” “Reeks of arrogance and conceit.”
“Neither the president nor the attorney general have the constitutional right to make or change laws themselves,” declared Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.). “That is what happens in a dictatorship or a totalitarian government.”
But with one crucial difference: You can’t file a frivolous lawsuit against a dictator.
Doesn’t seem to be helping with the actual target of their marketing efforts, namely the Rabid Reichtists:
… According to Larry Hart, the American Conservative Union’s director of government relations, “conservatism was on a decline in 2013 in Congress,” with fewer members moving to the right than he has seen in previous years.
“Only 16 members of the House earned a perfect ACU conservative rating of 100 percent, the lowest since 2006,” Hart wrote in a memo. “The number of senators with a perfect conservative rating of 100 percent decline from eight to three, Tom Coburn (Okla.), Ted Cruz (Texas), and Mike Lee (Utah).” Top scorers in the House included Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), and Trey Radel, a Florida Republican who recently resigned from Congress following an arrest and struggles with substance abuse.
Next week, the ACU will host the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservative activists and Republican leaders, in Maryland. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin will be among the dozens of GOP leaders and conservative power brokers who will speak at the event.
Christie, Palin, Ryan, the John Birch Society… Apparently this year’s CPAC theme is “Parade of the Has-Beens”.
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Apart from schadenfreude, what’s on the agenda for the countdown to the end of this lousy February?
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Needs More HighchairsPost + Comments (62)
Late Night Open Thread: One More Reason to Be Glad I’m An Old
It is improbable in the extreme that I will ever feel required to sext as a social obligation, unlike today’s youth, per NYMag:
… Sexting must have arrived simultaneously with texting—it’s a safe bet that any new media not invented by lust makes room for it immediately. But we first heard about sexts, close to a decade ago, only in the context of misbehaving teens. Who else could be desperately horny enough to channel sexual energy into a medium so glib, a sexual behavior so pathetically chaste as to fall in the hierarchy of sex acts somewhere below dry humping? Most of us, it turns out: In a study from McAfee, more than half of those surveyed—and 70 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds—have received sexually explicit texts, videos, or pictures. But even as sexting colonizes our phones, the activity hasn’t exactly taken over our libidos: A study of American college students recently found that 55 percent of women and 48 percent of men have engaged in “consensual but unwanted sexting,” i.e., sexting when they’re not that into it. That sounds pretty bleak: Why contort yourself posing butt selfies in the bathroom if it doesn’t turn you on?…
My first thought was, okay: McAfee, they want to sell their ‘privacy protection’ products to people who just realized they aren’t the first individuals in the world to invent the pr0n selfie. But that doesn’t explain the college-student study (or the expressed experience of the NYMag writer, for that matter). I mean, yes, Rule 34 and the limitless human imagination, but… faking non-contact sexual activity as a social obligation?!? Wouldn’t that give anyone a headache?
Late Night Open Thread: One More Reason to Be Glad I’m An OldPost + Comments (25)
Another Good Day
Shawn was a 127 before dinner and a 138 an hour later, but we ran out of test strips so will check again tomorrow after we hit the big city. I put a dry rub on ribs and used splenda instead of brown sugar along with everything else, slow cooked them for half the day in the Breville convection oven, and they were actually pretty damned good. For sides I had sauteed spinach with garlic and olive oil and some sea salt (why do I always want to write spinache?), and I soaked some black eyed peas over night, then boiled them and made a cold salad with a diced vidalia and some lemon juice and lime juice and a touch of olive oil and fresh cilantro, and cottage cheese with a little bit of diced peach. The dishes didn’t go to each other like I thought they would, but I wanted a bean like dish instead of sugar bomb baked beans, so I tried that instead.
What are you all up to?
Another Self-Inflicted Wound
By now you have heard that Brewer has vetoed the Arizona Jim Crow gay-bashing law:
After days of protests and criticism levied against her state, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) said on Wednesday that she vetoed SB 1062, which would have effectively legalized discrimination based on religious grounds.
Brewer said she had not heard of one example of religious freedoms being attacked without the bill, considered it broadly worded, and did not address any specific concerns.
She further said that SB 1062 “has the potential to create more problems than it purports to solve” and would be divisive “to a degree that no one would ever want.”
Brewer was reportedly in emergency meetings earlier in the day concerning the bill, which was passed by the GOP-dominated state legislature earlier this month, prompting not only objections by residents, businesses, and fellow Republicans, but threats of a boycott from prominent actor and activist George Takei and the prospects of the National Football League moving the Super Bowl out of the state in response.
At some point they will learn.
Actually, no, they won’t. I was burned once before with my peak wingnut speculation, and they won’t learn. Clowns like this asshole are just going to have to all drop dead, and the next generation will have fewer bigots, and the subsequent generation will have fewer, although by then we will have figured out someone else who is acceptable for the time being to abuse. The only thing that is going to change things is for these octogenarian bigots to die off.
Also, depressingly enough, the only thing that for now will keep these bigoted scumbags in line is their beloved free market, which has actually figured out that the LGBT community spends money like everyone else, and they have a lot of straight friends. Other than that, I see nothing keeping the new Confederacy trying to keep pulling this bullshit. I mean, what else can you think about these people?
Demographic changes are our only hope.