Turns out it's not about the United States Senate.
— John Dingell (@JohnDingell) July 19, 2015
Archives for July 2015
Sandra Bland Dashcam Video
The Sandra Bland dashcam video has been released, and it is worse than you imagined. It starts, if you can believe this, with the cop giving a white girl a warning and asking her about college. He then turned around, sped the other way, and was driving well over the speed limit of 20 mph, and drove up behind Bland who was in the left lane, saw him coming, and shifted over to let him pass. Instead, he pulled her over. I watched and was asking why he even pulled her over because it is clear that is what she was doing, and later, she even explained that was what she was doing. It’s that obvious.
The cop then loses her shit, and the rest is, sadly, history:
She was never any threat to him, always well within her rights, and he just got mad because she wasn’t kissing his ring. Policing in this country is fucking insane, and this cop and those who killed her (yes, I think she was murdered) belong in jail.
Trumpeting Cleek’s Law
Just an idle thought about the Donald as he is approaching base crazification factor numbers. When will Democratic aligned Super-Pacs get involved in a monumental application of Cleek’s Law in key Republican primary states?
Democratic candidates have had some success of playing the Republican primary nomination process to either pick the weakest candidate as their opponent or at least knock out the strongest general election opponent in the primary process. This is done by running ads “against” the most conservative or least electable candidate. The text of those ads goes something like this:
“Washington elite liberals truly fear Dogcatcher Tom Smith as he is too conservative for their values, he has voted for gun rights and for the unborn 119% of the time and has never raised taxes. He even voted against his town’s levee levy which would have saved it from last month’s flood… Tom Smith is the TRUE CONSERVATIVE that Washington Liberals fear….. Paid for Friends of the Incumbent Democratic Senator PAC”
And those ads and mailers are targeted at Republican primary super voters/nursing homes. This tactic has been fairly successful in producing weak GOP candidates in neutral to lean Republican districts.
Nate Silver has looked at the Trump supporters in the Republican primary electorate. From what he says, they seem to be primed to respond in a predictable manner:
My guess is that his support reflected a combination of (i) low-information voters who recognized his name and (ii) voters who share Trump’s disdain for the trappings of the political establishment and (iii) voters who were treating him as an inside joke or a protest vote
This could be especially true as reactionary talk radio are talking up Trump against the “RINO” Establishment… producing an Us vs. Them mentality in the GOP primary base could pay some long term dividends for short money in half a dozen states.
Pissing off liberals is the ur-instinct of American reaction, so time to play with that Pavlovian response.
No Wonder He Thinks White Liberals Are Dicks…
Stanford University Professor David Palumbo-Liu wrote a column at Salon about how much white liberals suck, using David Fucking Brooks as an example of a white liberal who sucks:I’m not familiar with this columnist’s work. I confess I didn’t read the whole thing once I’d ascertained that yes, the author really, really does seem to be operating under the assumption that David Fucking Brooks is a liberal.*
Lord. I hate white liberals too sometimes — have you ever been cornered at a dreary cocktail party by someone who drones on about Monsanto for two hours? We can be a clueless lot on deadly serious, heartbreaking subjects, such as the one the column was written address.
But good Christ, if David Fucking Brooks was among our number, I’m not sure I’d be able to stop punching my own self in the face. For fuck’s sake, Salon! Have you no editors?
Open thread, I guess. Jeebus.
* I think someone hit the prof with a clue-by-four while I was putting this grousey post together — it appears some of the more obvious “Brooks is a liberal” passages have been lightly scrubbed. But the thesis remains so central to the piece that it can’t be completely eradicated. It’s a pity because he’s not altogether wrong…
No Wonder He Thinks White Liberals Are Dicks…Post + Comments (78)
Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Schweet Sixteen
Typography is dead. pic.twitter.com/ziiAwCS0CN
— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) July 21, 2015
Dude's last into the race. All the fonts were taken. https://t.co/OaZFUatzan
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) July 21, 2015
John Kasich's announcement is a great advertisement for speechwriters and Teleprompters.
— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) July 21, 2015
Kasich's aides said he would speak impromptu. And he is . . speaking . . and speaking. .. and speaking. 38 minutes so far.
— Sheryl Stolberg (@sherylstolberg) July 21, 2015
Stolberg’s eventual report, in the NYTimes, “John Kasich Enters Crowded 2016 Race Facing Job of Catch-Up”:
… Mr. Kasich, joined by his wife and 15-year-old twin daughters, addressed several thousand cheering supporters inside the student union building at Ohio State University here, offering a centrist appeal designed to paint him as a common-sense Midwesterner who can fix a broken Washington. He avoided attacking President Obama, as his Republican rivals have done.
The event was a return of sorts: as an 18-year-old Ohio State freshman in 1970, Mr. Kasich wrote President Richard M. Nixon to plead, successfully, to visit the White House. But Mr. Kasich seemed determined to link himself to another Republican president, the conservative hero, Ronald Reagan, whose optimistic oratory he sought to evoke.
“The sun is rising and the sun is going to rise to the zenith again in America,” Mr. Kasich said at one point, recounting his advice to citizens of an Ohio community whose economy was devastated by job losses during the recession. He wrapped up his speech with another Reagan-esque declaration: “The light of a city on a hill cannot be hidden. America is that city and you are that light.”…
Mr. Kasich also spoke of “these two wonderful African-American fellows” he met at a Wendy’s restaurant who, he said, urged him to run. (Mr. Kasich won a quarter of the black vote when he won re-election in 2014.) He told them other candidates would have more money. “And they looked at me,’ “ he said, ‘and said, ‘But you got statistics.’”…
My vote for fishiest political anecdote of the week, even in this week full of Trump. But he is bipartisanly centrist, so No Labels (or whatever it’s called this season) is no doubt scouring the couch cushions for change to support yet more tv commercials in the NH media market. Kasich’s handlers say the NH primary is “key” for him, since or because John “Prolapsed Pig Rectum” Sununu‘s in charge of his campaign there.
Supporters waiting for #Kasich to announce presidential bid. Here he is on the big screen, shaking Nixon's hand. pic.twitter.com/l3QBM1uYjT
— Sheryl Stolberg (@sherylstolberg) July 21, 2015
Apart from those commercials, that’s the most attention Kasich is liable to draw for the next many months, barring his notoriously “jerk”-ish temperament giving the lamestream media clickbait. Ed Kilgore, at the Washington Monthly, is optimistic:
… Ohio Governor John Kasich… has an anger management problem. He’s forever popping off at friends, enemies, constituents, media, you name it, to the point where the famously volatile John McCain has described him as having “a hair-trigger temper.”
You can imagine that this could be a problem in a presidential campaign, particularly one that begins with an insane two-week sprint to do well enough in national polls to make a cutoff for a debate in your own state, at a moment when Donald Trump, people attacking Donald Trump, and people yapping about foreign policy (not exactly Kasich’s forte) are soaking up 98% of the media attention. It’s enough to make you snap, crackle and pop…
Why do I have a bacon craving this morning? pic.twitter.com/OtwrqUl9Md
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) July 21, 2015
***********
Risible campaign posturing aside, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Schweet SixteenPost + Comments (99)
U Mad Bro?
As a lifelong gamer, this is not even remotely surprising:
Here’s a research finding that should surprise no one: The men most likely to harass women online … are the men most likely to have their own problems.
That bit of validation comes courtesy Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff, researchers at the University of New South Wales and Miami University, respectively. For their latest study, published in the journal PLOS One last week, the duo watched how men treated women during 163 plays of the video game Halo 3.
As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that players made to each other, the researchers observed that — no matter their skill level, or how the game went — men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players.
Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers.
***In each of these environments, Kasumovic suggests, a recent influx of female participants has disrupted a pre-existing social hierarchy. That’s okay for the guys at the top — but for the guys at the bottom, who stand to lose more status, that’s very threatening. (It’s also in keeping with the evolutionary framework on anti-lady hostility, which suggests sexism is a kind of Neanderthal defense mechanism for low-status, non-dominant men trying to maintain a shaky grip on their particular cave’s supply of women.)
“As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status,” Kasumovic writes, “the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank.”
Losers are losers- hoocoodanode.
Speaking of von Clownstick
Here are his antics today:
On Tuesday, Trump ramped up his attacks on the South Carolina senator — who made headlines Monday for calling the Donald a “jackass” — and even gave out Graham’s private phone number.
Trump began his rambling diatribe by calling Graham a “lightweight” and an “idiot.”
“He doesn’t seem like a very bright guy. He actually probably seems to me not as bright as Rick Perry. I think Rick Perry probably is smarter than Lindsey Graham,” Trump added, riffing on prior insults he had lobbed at the former Texas governor.
Then Trump transitioned to an embarrassing anecdote, which the billionaire real estate developer said was from a few years ago, in which Graham called Trump “begging” him for a good reference with Trump’s pals on the Fox News morning program “Fox & Friends.”
Trump said that he promised Graham he would put out a good word, and the South Carolina Republican then gave him his phone number to follow up.
Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaks at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, Saturday, July 18, 2015. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)Trump then read out what he said was Graham’s phone number, telling his supporters to “try it.”
“I wonder what caused that,” Graham told a POLITICO reporter who dialed the number, about the influx of calls.
“When it comes to the Donald, nothing surprises me anymore,” he said. “It’s just too bad, really,” he said, adding that Trump is taking away from a discussion on the Iran deal and more substantive policy issues.
Donald Trump is the collective voice of every ill-informed wingnut cspan caller combined with your grandfather’s email forwards.