Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

This really is a full service blog.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

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

Tick tock motherfuckers!

In my day, never was longer.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

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

Usually wrong but never in doubt

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

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Archives for January 2015

Open Thread: In NRO-world, Oprah Winfrey is the Real Racist

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Not just open, but gaping! Rich ‘Starbursts’ Lowry explains it all for you his readers:

… The movie’s stars showed up for the New York City premiere with “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts, and held their hands up for photos. One of its producers, Oprah Winfrey, says of the film, “It is here for a reason in this moment.” The actor who plays Martin Luther King Jr., David Oyelowo, calls the parallels with Ferguson “indisputable,” and the rapper Common, who plays activist James Bevel, pronounces, “Obviously, the story took place in 1965, which is almost 50 years ago, but we know that it’s happening now.”…

Whatever you think of the merits of voter-ID laws — often brought up to make the case that the struggle for voting rights is not over — they are not the least bit redolent of the Deep South of the mid-20th century. No one asks anyone to recite the preamble to the Constitution to get a driver’s license or some other valid ID…

As for policing, the worry in 1965 wasn’t ambiguous encounters or tragic accidents. It was beatings, or worse. It was whips and forced march by cattle prod. It was the violence of police who were the oppressive instruments of a lawless authority.

The protesters who faced off against the police in Selma didn’t shout abuse, although they would have been amply justified; they didn’t burn down local businesses; they didn’t randomly fire guns, or throw rocks or stones. The difference between demonstrators in Selma and Ferguson is the difference between dignity under enormous pressure in a righteous cause and heedless self-indulgence in the service of a smear (that Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown as he surrendered)…

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Happy New Year

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Hi All,

Thinking of you guys.  My absence has been largely due to me starting a new job in October. I’m now on the finance end of my previous operations role. What that means is that I frequently stare at an Excel sheet with a “what the heck” sort of look. Its been 3 months and things have calmed a bit. I found the ground underfoot and my days working from home look like this….

 

.Rockadoo at work

He should be on the payroll.

Happy New Year!

 

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Elective Policing

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If the NYPD’s work slowdown is causing them not to make arrests “unless absolutely necessary”, then it means fewer arrests for public urination, selling loosies, walking while black, and the rest of the stuff that poor minority neighborhoods experience every day. Is that a bad thing? Matt Taibbi:

It’s incredibly ironic that the police have chosen to abandon quality-of-life actions like public urination tickets and open-container violations, because it’s precisely these types of interactions that are at the heart of the Broken Windows polices that so infuriate residents of so-called “hot spot” neighborhoods.

In an alternate universe where this pseudo-strike wasn’t the latest sortie in a standard-issue right-versus left political showdown, one could imagine this protest as a progressive or even a libertarian strike, in which police refused to work as backdoor tax-collectors and/or implement Minority Report-style pre-emptive policing policies, which is what a lot of these Broken Windows-type arrests amount to.

[…]

It would be amazing if this NYPD protest somehow brought parties on all sides to a place where we could all agree that policing should just go back to a policy of officers arresting people “when they have to.”

Because it’s wrong to put law enforcement in the position of having to make up for budget shortfalls with parking tickets, and it’s even more wrong to ask its officers to soak already cash-strapped residents of hot spot neighborhoods with mountains of summonses as part of a some stats-based crime-reduction strategy.

Taibbi’s take on the Garner case is worth a read, too, as is his book The Divide. Matt Ford covers the same territory.

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Old Lies, New Wrappers

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Just before Xmas, the Washington Post obtained early copies of the emails Jeb Bush planned to release from his 1999-2007 gubernatorial tenure:

… Bush has cast his decision to publicly release his electronic correspondence next month as part of his commitment to being “totally transparent” as he mulls whether to run for president…

… [A]ll the e-mails Bush will release have long been available through a records request to the Florida Department of State. What’s more, the former governor is expected to release only documents already required to be made available under state law, which allows exemptions for legal communications and personnel matters, among others… And the e-mails that he will release show a somewhat filtered version of operations within his administration, in part because Bush was keenly aware that his correspondence could one day become public…

Even the heavily groomed emails have already provided some useful oppo-research leads, per Annie Linskey at Bloomberg Politics:

Republican donor Ric Cooper had a straight line to Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and days after Hurricane Katrina used the access to help secure a $236 million deal that Democrats later called a “boondoggle contract,” according to a trove of e-mails released last week by the Democratic opposition research group American Bridge…

Yesterday, Jeb — or his handlers — took the next step. Per Charles Ellison, the new blogger at the Washington Monthly:

In a blow-the-spot-up signal that he’s definitely got his eye on the Republican presidential nomination for 2016, the son and brother of Bush Presidents I and II respectively quit every private and non-profit board he currently sits on.

No major politician gives up that kind of prestige and cheddar unless he or she is about to press on with a full-time career in campaigning. The move gives him the elbow space he’ll need to build a presidential exploratory machine. And with a packed GOP nomination field already taking shape, kicking it off at the top of 2015 should offer some head start in the race to lock donors, advisers, staff, etc…

The resignations became effective December 31st, thereby giving him some clean slate in 2015 and enough time between now & the official start of the Republican primaries for voters to forget about it….

If Daniel Larison, at the American Conservative, is any indicator, the not-stupid not-dishonest portion of the GOP base may not be entirely Ready for Jeb:

…[M]ost conservatives aren’t interested in reviving a “compassionate” conservative agenda… they regard most of that agenda with suspicion and even loathing… In fairness, Jeb Bush was a fairly conventional Republican for the mid-2000s. His political problem is that the GOP and the country have changed enough in the last ten years that his pro-corporate “centrism” and pro-immigration views separate him from most of his party to a much greater degree now than they would have when his brother was still president. Being the preferred candidate of corporate America might have been considered a very large advantage before 2008, but now it is a much greater liability than it used to be… It is also a reminder that Bush’s long time away from retail politics has left him mostly oblivious to the changes that have taken place since he left office, and that is why he seems even more out of step with the rest of the GOP than one would assume just by listing the differences he has on policy…

Perhaps Jeb’s best bet would be to follow Andy Borowitz’s (satirical) advice: “Jeb Bush Resigns as George W. Bush’s Brother“.
***********
Apart from the recurrent herpes-like eruption of the Bush Crime Clan, what’s on the agenda for the first Friday of 2015?

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Late Night Open Thread

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ICYMI: TPM explains how “Fox News Hashtag #OverIt2014 Backfires Big Time“:

Fox News closed the year with a bang on Tuesday when its morning show “Fox & Friends” tried to start a hashtag and instead invited a wave of Internet bile.

The hashtag in question was #OverIt2014. Asking viewers to tweet what they hope to leave behind in 2014, the anchors offered some examples, including “pretzel buns” and “attacks against Christianity.”…

Not since Fox contributor Ann Coulter left herself wide open for parody in mocking #BringBackOurGirls have conservatives seen such a boomerang effect on social media….

One would think that Murdoch’s minions would have figured out, by now, that Twitter is not the natural for its target viewers…

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Lamar White Jr. — A Blogger to Watch

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From the Washington Post, “Meet the Blogger Who Is Keeping Steve Scalise Up at Night“:

… On Sunday, White broke a story on his Web site, cenlamar.com, that has left Scalise struggling to explain how he ended up speaking at a gathering of white nationalists in 2002.

Just as James O’Keefe has become a thorn in the side of liberals, White fills that slot against conservatives. He was famously on the receiving end of one of Andrew Breitbart’s last tweets before the conservative provocateur died; Breitbart called him a putz on Twitter…

Cutbacks in political coverage at the state level have provided an opening for bloggers like White, who have largely partisan missions and a singular focus…

But this election cycle, White… didn’t limit himself to what he calls “the circus of Louisiana politics.” He also figured rather prominently in the governor’s race in Texas, where he is currently a law student at Southern Methodist University.

At an October press conference, White, who has cerebral palsy, argued that Wendy Davis (D) was a champion of the disabled, while her opponent, now-Gov.-elect Greg Abbott (R), himself in a wheelchair, was not. White, who is sometimes unsteady on his feet, was moved from the center of the stage while seated and critics said he was dragged across stage and was awkwardly used political prop.

He then took to Twitter and to his blog: “I Was Smeared Online for Being Disabled: How the Internet Amplifies the Politics of Hate…”

There’s much more at the WaPo link, including a short phone interview. Of course O’Keefe is a bad comparison, and yet “correct” in the sense that liberal/progressive White relies on honest research while “conservative” O’Keefe relies on ambush video & dishonest editing. Pretty fair exemplars of our modern Dem-vs-Repub debate!

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