Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I really should read my own blog.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

I was promised a recession.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

The willow is too close to the house.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Consistently wrong since 2002

The revolution will be supervised.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Joe Lieberman disappointingly reemerged to remind us that he’s still alive.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

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Archives for January 2015

There’s Always An Idiot

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I’d been sitting on the protest video, and on the subsequent Daily Beast stories (“The Monsters Who Screamed for Dead Cops” and “Trayvon Martin’s Family Rejects ‘Dead Cops’ Marchers“) because it felt like bringing theatre to a crowded fire. But the flapmouth arseholes (ir)responsible for the chant have decided to out themselves at Buzzfeed…

NEW YORK CITY — On Dec. 13, about 100 protesters splintered off from the #MillionsMarch in lower Manhattan — a huge, peaceful demonstration against police brutality — and headed up Sixth Avenue…

The chant in the video — “What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want it? Now!” — has been viewed nearly half a million times and rallied critics of the protest… Indeed, the chant soon became central to allegations that the movement against police brutality, whose leaders have called for non-violent action, could not be as easily separated from the murders as its members would like. That claim has, in turn, has produced outrage from nonviolent protesters and their leaders.

But one group has been largely silent since lighting this particular match: the people who marched down 32nd street, chanting.

BuzzFeed News on Friday spoke to one person who participated in the Dec. 13 chant heard on the video, along with two other people who marched with other radical contingents involved in the protests that day. All of them claimed that, despite the literal words of the chants, they weren’t actually advocating for the murder of police officers…

The unplanned chant, the person said, was to distinguish a more radical message from the vast majority of the protesters. “The larger march … had a liberal, reformist agenda. The people who wanted a broader transformation, they were gravitating toward whatever chants could express that,” the person said.

“In that moment of outrage, the chant was the only way to express that we wanted to separate ourselves from people who just want to get a guy fired,” the person added. “We wanted to see the police disbanded.”…

“I don’t think people wanted dead bodies,” the person who participated in the chant said. “It was not bloodlust. Some people were laughing when they were chanting it — there was a humorous element to it. Everyone is a human being, and I don’t think any of us wants to see someone suffer and die.”…

Rhetorical calls for violence against the police are nothing new, the third person argued.

“Death to cops chants have populated protests since the ’90s and beyond!” the person told BuzzFeed News. “Blaming TMOC [the ‘Trayvon Martin Organizing Committe’, i.e., the idiots chanting] is a mess, and a dangerous one for sure, especially considering that fighting cops is so entrenched in popular imagery,” including popular rap music….

So, this was the “street fighter” version of the well-worn trustafarian “Rap musicians use the n-word, why can’t I establish my radical credentials the same way?” whinge. Can someone wrap the Mumia hoodies really tightly over their mouths, now? Because I think they’ve contributed more than enough to the conversation already.

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Gas and nuts

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The ‘nut’ in a family budget is the bare minimal amount of money that has to go out the door every period to minimize negative consequences.   It is the short term mostly fixed costs.   This concept of the nut is very important in thinking about presidential popularity and gas prices as I don’t think it is gas prices per se that can drive presidential popularity but the gap between the nut and total family income which has a strong influence on presidential popularity.  The post-nut gap is a more restrictive definition of income than disposable personal income.

In my family, the nut is the sum of the mortgage, gas, electric, student loans, car insurance, life insurance payment, food, gas for the cars, daycare, car loan, and bus passes.  If my family was only meeting the nut, life would be tough, and it would only work as long as nothing goes wrong.  It is a stressful life to have very little space between the current nut and total income.

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Hood Rats

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When it comes to 1) firearms and 2) sweatshirts with hoods on them, guess which one Oklahoma Republicans want to regulate to the point of making illegal?

Oklahoma lawmakers are planning to introduce a bill this February that would make it illegal to wear hooded sweatshirts, or “hoodies,” in public, according to a report from Oklahoma’s Channel 6 News.

Republican Senator Don Barrington will introduce the bill, which would make it a misdemeanor to “wear a mask, hood, or covering” either while committing a crime or in order to intentionally conceal one’s identity. If the bill is passed, offenders would be subject to a fine of $50 to $500, and up to one year in jail. The ban would not affect mask-wearers on Halloween or at masquerade parties, nor would it apply to people who wear head coverings for religious purposes.

The bill’s purpose is seemingly to deter crime. As Channel 6’s report notes, robberies caught on surveillance camera often show the perpetrator wearing a mask or hoodie to cover his or her face. With the bill’s language only prohibiting wearing hoodies while committing a crime or to intentionally hide, supporters say the ban wouldn’t negatively affect people just trying to wear a sweatshirt in day-to-day life.

Others, however, have argued that bans on hoodies — no matter the intention — only serve to exacerbate problems with racial profiling. CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin took on the issue when an Indiana mall banned the garment in March:

“This is about the pretext of being able to stop young African-American males,” she said. “Hoodie is code for ‘thug’ in many places and I think businesses shouldn’t be in the business of telling people what to wear. The Fourteenth Amendment protects us from this.”

Republicans are clearly for smaller, less intrusive government.  Unless it’s for black people, in which case criminalize every aspect of their lives.

Bonus points: under this legislation, who decides if a person is wearing a hoodie to “intentionally conceal” their identity?  Why, the cops, of course.

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Did He Do Something or Did Something Happen?

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Obama_generic_history
Sam Wang posts this chart and relates it to the following:

To identify possible causes, we should look to events prior to the jump. The obvious event is the President’s newfound liberation from the pressures of the election cycle. Since the November election, the President has done the opposite of what many people expected: he showed strong assertiveness to Congress (shortly after November 4), acted boldly on immigration (November 20), made frank public statements on race (December 17), and normalized relations with Cuba (December 17). Could it be that voters like a strong leader?

Here’s another possible cause I’d like to examine:
gasprices
I don’t know what’s driving Obama’s approval ratings. Like Sam Wang, I would like to think that his more assertive stance since the November election turned some people around. But I also think that anyone who doesn’t have a durable opinion about the job Obama is doing after 6 years of watching him is probably going to be swayed by something other than a policy decision. Of all the things that have gotten better in the past few months, the one fact that everyone can see, no matter what the media tells them, is that gas prices are significantly lower. So if we’re guessing about a small swing in one of the most ephemeral of all political measurements, that’s mine.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread

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Sometimes ceremony is all one has to offer. From the NYTimes:

… “It’s important that this be done right,” said the man, Zhao Ru.

In the complex choreography of Chinese funerals, an important element is the funeral scroll, made from cloth or paper and adorned with messages rendered in calligraphy to express condolences or to praise the life of the deceased.

Mr. Zhao, 73, a Chinese calligrapher who lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, has been making ceremonial scrolls for much of his life. On Friday, he undertook one of his most high-profile jobs, creating a pair of scrolls for the wake and funeral of Wenjian Liu, one of the two police officers killed last month by a gunman in Bedford-Stuyvesant…

In his home city of Toishan, in southern China, Mr. Zhao was a schoolteacher and well-known calligrapher. He immigrated to the United States in 1989 with several family members, and he worked in Chinese restaurants and garment factories in New York.

But his fame as a calligrapher had migrated with him, and over the years he has frequently been commissioned to provide calligraphy for funerals and other occasions.

In the case of Officer Liu’s funeral, Mr. Zhao said, he was acting on his own accord and was not getting paid: He had been planning to do the scrolls since hearing of the officers’ murders.

“I could use my calligraphy to memorialize the officer,” he said in Mandarin. “What a pity it is. He was such a good police officer. He was an only son.”…

Read the whole story here.

***********

What’s on the agenda for the new day?

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Friday Night Open Thread

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… And will it matter? The Grey Lady says it’s all about “Millennials and the Age of Tumblr Activism“:

On a recent day, the feed of a Tumblr blog called Black Culture featured a drawing of Lupita Nyong’o, a video of a protest at William Paterson University and a text that read, “black lives > white feelings.” The blog FreeQuency Frequently Writes posted a Tweet from Solange Knowles decrying depictions of outspoken women, while another called Soul Revision turned up a post with the hashtags #SeasonOfInconvenience and #BlackLivesMatter.

As protests sparked by a grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson began spreading nationwide, furor was also growing in cyberspace, in the social-justice halls of Tumblr, a social-blogging platform dominated by users in their teens, 20s and early 30s. Their feeds were vivid mash-ups of articles, GIFs, cleverly labeled images, court documents, smartphone videos, stickers and cartoons, and their posts contained news about Ferguson, along with tidbits about identity, inequality, police abuse, racism, body shaming and more.

“A lot of millennials have been discouraged for a long time,” said Zellie Thomas, 30, creator of Black Culture. “Now, with social media, they feel empowered, like people are hearing their voice. And Tumblr is a great platform for all types of media.”.

There are more than 215 million blogs on Tumblr and, according to comScore, an analytics company, 50 percent of Tumblr users are from 15 to 34 years old. The company’s internal surveys show that 64 percent of users say that they care about social causes and look into them on Tumblr. These numbers suggest that millennials, who have long been pigeonholed as an apathetic bunch, have a strong interest in social issues — it’s just hidden from the eyes of their elders…

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Friday Evening Open Thread

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It STILL doesn’t feel like Friday. The mister and I are parked in the tiki bar enjoying a glass of merlot. (Well, he has beer; the merlot is mine.)

It’s uncommonly warm — 70s even now that the sun has gone down and supposed to be in the 80s again tomorrow. It’s the warmest holiday season I can ever remember in Florida. Thanks, Koch Bros!

My godless heathen teen is attending a church youth group function with a friend. I told her I didn’t have a problem with that as long as she didn’t come home with a crate of snakes and babbling in an unknown tongue.

What are y’all up to?

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