Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

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

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

We’re not going back!

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

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

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

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

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

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

You can’t love your country only when you win.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

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Archives for March 2015

Abusing Senator Warren’s Good Name for Their Own Dread Purposes

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The upscale hometown paper calls her “Senator Clickbait”, because “invoking Warren can work wonders” for online marketing. Professor Lessig and his sad Both Sides! PAC won’t shut up demanding she serve as the hobbyhorse for their feckless campaign. Even the usually-sensible Boston NPR station won’t take a hint — hell, a direct denial:

No one in politics today is hearing more calls from progressives to run than Elizabeth Warren, the popular and populist Massachusetts senator. Warren, though, denies any interest in the presidency and continued to do that Monday in an interview with Jeremy Hobson on WBUR’s Here & Now.

“I’m out here fighting this fight,” Warren said. “I’m fighting it every single day in the United States.”

Asked if she wants to run, Warren said bluntly, “I do not.”…

“What I care about is that everyone who runs for president, who runs for any national office right now, talks about this core set of issues about what kind of a country we are and what kind of a future we’re building. For me this is really personal.”

She also said she won’t challenge Chuck Schumer to be the Democrats’ top Senate leader and all but endorsed the New York Democrat, whom some on the left have accused of being too close to Wall Street…

So I guess we can’t expect better from the (Dis)Loyal Opposition, or the GOP’s enablers among the Media Village Idiots. Mr. Pierce, at Esquire:

It is an interesting place in which Senator Professor Warren finds herself these days. If it’s not progressive nuisances acting as though she’s running for president, even though she’s not, it’s Republicans virtually daring timid Democrats to align with her so that they can then be defined by Republicans as radical redistributionists or some such nonsense. Naturally, the elite political press is above all this petty foolishness and trickery. It simply casts the whole business into the basic paradigm of Both Sides Do It, and it finds a template that does not require the messy business of actual analysis.

To wit: Elizabeth Warren Is—oh, excuse me, “plays the role of”—Ted Cruz…

This person is an idiot and should not be allowed to hold anyone’s money, including their own… Ted Cruz is an authentic extremist; his views on church-and-state are blatantly theocratic, and his notion of the federal union stopped evolving when the results came in from the presidential election of 1860. Elizabeth Warren’s primary mission during her time in the Senate is the re-establishment of an economic order with which most people were happy from 1945 until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. There’s nothing radical about the Glass-Steagall Act. There’s nothing extreme about supporting both Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in their traditional forms…

In case you think this is overstated, I stole the video clip below from the paleoconservative Weekly Standard, which ran it under the title “Elizabeth Warren Gives Presidential Podium a Test Run“:

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Open Thread: Principles

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Today’s Twitter tempest in teacup, per Dave Weigel at Bloomberg Politics:

… On Monday, Vox‘s Max Fisher introduced [Trevor] Noah to readers with “seven of his funniest clips,” and predicted that the host would make his show “a fresh and perhaps invaluable contribution to how we talk—and joke—about race and nationality.” He proved it, with a dive into Noah’s popular videos, pulling out solid routines about how bad Africans looked in famine relief ads and how mixed-race people get “upgraded to black” when they’re famous.

Yet within a day, there was dissent within Vox; writer Kelsey McKinney was explaining why Noah might be unfit to lead TDS. “A Daily Show host should be held to a higher standard than other comedians,” she wrote in regard to the tweets. “These jokes are offensive because they are reflections of cultures that are oppressive and privileged—and rather than being critical of those societal constructions, the jokes instead reinforce them.”

In another era, like when Stewart took over TDS, a couple of clunkers about race and gender would have been just that—clunkers. The audience groans, the show moves on. But the show plays a larger role in progressive life and thought than anyone could have expected when Stewart took the job…

Implicit in that analysis: The elevated status of The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show, meant that they needed to enrich their viewers as well as entertaining them. The phenomenal success of John Oliver’s HBO spinoff of TDS, Last Week Tonight, has not entirely been about his humor. Oliver’s monologues show up on progressive sites, on Monday mornings, as viral explainers for things that are Wrong With America. The brand of satire Stewart invented now plays for progressives the role that Fox News or talk radio plays for conservatives.

In his Vox analysis of why Noah would work, Fisher insisted that a South African comic with routines that challenged people’s hidebound views of race was just what the show needed. It wasn’t just a way for Comedy Central to avoid replacing Stewart with a carbon copy. “Americans love to hear themselves mocked by foreigners,” wrote Fisher. “It’s a low-stakes way of talking about American problems and weird habits, and there’s also a real degree of narcissism to it: people just like hearing about themselves.”…

Just not quite as much as they like hearing themselves talk!

Apart from the usual circular firing squads, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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Straight Talk

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Gov. Dannel Malloy from Connecticut cuts to the chase:

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) on Tuesday described Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) as a “bigot” and said that politicians have a responsibility to speak out against Indiana’s divisive religious freedom law.

Pence is “not a stupid man, but he’s done stupid things,” Malloy said during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “And signing this law — and quite frankly promoting this law, knowing exactly what it was going to do — was an incredibly stupid thing for him to do.”

“When you see a bigot, you have to call them on it,” he said.

Later in the segment, Malloy said Pence made his intentions clear when he signed the bill into law flanked by “three homophobic men who have made it a part of their business to make gay people as miserable as possible.”

More of this. There’s no reason to play around with these homophobes in 2015. Call them what they are. I don’t give a shit what Clinton signed 3 decades ago, the 1st Amendment is all the protection from religious persecution that anyone needs. You need more, write an amendment to the Constitution.

I’m so old I remember when Muslim cab drivers refusing service because of alcohol was a big deal for Republicans.

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And While We’re On The Subject Of Idiot Governors And Gay Rights

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It’s easy for me to laugh at Indiana Pence and the Backlash of Doom when next door here in Kentucky we have Dinosaur Steve Beshear finding a way to make the guy look like a genius.

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear says the state’s ban on gay marriage should be upheld in part because it is not discriminatory in that both gay and straight people are barred from marrying people of the same gender.

In an argument labeled absurd by gay marriage advocates, Beshear’s lawyer says in a brief filed last week at the U.S. Supreme Court that “men and women, whether heterosexual or homosexual, cannot marry persons of the same sex” under Kentucky law, making the law non-discriminatory.

The argument mirrors that offered by the state of Virginia nearly 50 years ago when it defended laws barring interracial marriage there and in 15 other states, including Kentucky, by saying they weren’t discriminatory because whites were barred from marrying blacks just as blacks were barred from marrying whites.

The Supreme Court in 1967 rejected that argument in the historic case of Loving v. Virginia, in which Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a black woman, were charged with a crime for marrying.

Beshear has done a lot for Kentucky, overseeing Kynect, arguably the most successful state insurance exchange under the ACA, expanding Medicare, and improving education out of the “close in state rankings to Mississippi” range.

But on LGBTQ rights, the guy lives up to his nickname, and I can’t frankly wait for current Attorney General Jack Conway to replace him in elections this November.

Unless, you know, the Republican who wants to kick 400,000 people off Medicare wins.

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Dr. King Was Seeking Creative Accommodation, You Know

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So what have you got for me today, NY Times, from our nation’s best pundits on the situation in Indiana?

David Brooks, you say?

Like a purty girl dancin’ to Both Sides music, and a mess of Mom’s Bobo, mess of Mom’s Bobo, mess of Mom’s Bobo-cue.

If the opponents of that law were arguing that the Indiana statute tightens the federal standards a notch too far, that would be compelling. But that’s not the argument the opponents are making.

Instead, the argument seems to be that the federal act’s concrete case-by-case approach is wrong. The opponents seem to be saying there is no valid tension between religious pluralism and equality. Claims of religious liberty are covers for anti-gay bigotry.

This deviation seems unwise both as a matter of pragmatics and as a matter of principle. In the first place, if there is no attempt to balance religious liberty and civil rights, the cause of gay rights will be associated with coercion, not liberation. Some people have lost their jobs for expressing opposition to gay marriage. There are too many stories like the Oregon bakery that may have to pay a $150,000 fine because it preferred not to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex ceremony. A movement that stands for tolerance does not want to be on the side of a government that compels a photographer who is an evangelical Christian to shoot a same-sex wedding that he would rather avoid.

Furthermore, the evangelical movement is evolving. Many young evangelicals understand that their faith should not be defined by this issue. If orthodox Christians are suddenly written out of polite society as modern-day Bull Connors, this would only halt progress, polarize the debate and lead to a bloody war of all against all.

As a matter of principle, it is simply the case that religious liberty is a value deserving our deepest respect, even in cases where it leads to disagreements as fundamental as the definition of marriage.

Morality is a politeness of the soul. Deep politeness means we make accommodations. Certain basic truths are inalienable. Discrimination is always wrong. In cases of actual bigotry, the hammer comes down. But as neighbors in a pluralistic society we try to turn philosophic clashes (about right and wrong) into neighborly problems in which different people are given space to have different lanes to lead lives. In cases where people with different values disagree, we seek a creative accommodation.

Because of course the history of various civil rights movements in America is filled with “neighborly problems” solved with “creative accommodations” like fire hoses, billy clubs, dogs, armed National Guardsmen firing into crowds of students, firebombings, lynchings, and assassinations.

At no point is anyone trying to “write Orthodox Christians out of history” here, but it’s a nice little fantasy necessary for justification of “Hey you know what, gay people?  You should probably be nicer to Republicans making laws to be used against you, and they would probably stop it, just like Malcolm X played a friendly game of Parcheesi with the Dixiecrats to end Jim Crow in the South.”

I mean come on, history is replete, if not goddamn gravid with examples of the ruling class happily giving rights to oppressed minorities when asked really nicely. You guys, people have lost their jobs being mean to gay people. When will the madness end?

Puppies and rainbows can live in harmony and crap before it turns into a bloody war or something. Suck it up and accept some structural discrimination for a while and eventually it’ll stop, because it’s hard being a white Christian guy in a state like Indiana, you know.

Just get you some of that there respectability politics and a mess of Mom’s Bobo-cue.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread

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Here’s the front page of today’s Indianapolis Star:

I love how this is blowing up in Pence’s stupid face. He deserves it, the beady-eyed fuck-nugget.

[H/T: Valued commenter lamh36]

Via Buzzfeed, looks like new “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah has a Twitter problem. Don’t these giant media corporations have vetting minions to address this kind of shit? Do they not have Google, FFS?

Andrew Sullivan says he nearly died of blogging. Boo-fucking-hoo.

My kiddo is flying cross country today for a school thing, so I’ll be a bundle of nerves for the next several hours.

What’s on your agenda for this fine Tuesday, the last day of March 2015?

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