Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Watching the video of Raskin below will take 2.5 minutes of your time, but I’m fairly sure that the joy of watching it will add years to your life.
Raskin to Boebert: Democrat is the noun. When you use it as an adjective, you say Democratic.. As if every time we mentioned the other party it just came out with a kind of political speech impediment like, oh, the Banana Republican Party. pic.twitter.com/eSVfqzeZqN
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 28, 2023
h/t cain
Open thread.
Is anybody writing postcards tonight?
If anyone wants to get started, we have addresses from Voces for the Wisconsin State Senate seat in SD-8 and for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In keeping with our usual focus, we are writing to Latino and African American households for Voces.
If you want addresses, just send email to WaterGirl: my nym at balloon-juice.com – and we’ll get you started!
We also need people who are willing to write postcards in Spanish for the Latino addresses from Voces. We worked with Voces on the message, which they translated for us. So you don’t have to know Spanish to write the postcards, you just have to be able (and willing!) to copy the Spanish text.
Other groups are writing postcards, as well, and everyone is welcome to the postcard writing parties!
Mousebumples wondered if maybe folks might like a daytime postcard writing thread on Saturdays, rather than Saturday evenings, so please weigh in on that if you are a postcard writer.
MUSIC
I find this song haunting, in a good way. It’s been my ear worm all week.
Who else has music to share?
Tuesday Evening Wisconsin Postcard Writing & MusicPost + Comments (75)
(Image by NEIVANMADE)
I have had a very busy, very draining couple of days. Nothing bad, but I’m worn out. So we’re just going to run through the basics so I can go eat and rack out.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 370: Just the Basics Tonight. And Rye Bread!Post + Comments (69)
President Biden calls out Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for yelling “Liar!” during the State of the Union and then proceeds to ?? himself. pic.twitter.com/8MlMC4WIA0
— The Recount (@therecount) February 28, 2023
Unpaywalled link from the Washington Post — “Biden plans to defend health-care spending while ridiculing possible GOP cuts”:
… Biden is traveling to Virginia Beach on Tuesday afternoon as part of a new line of attack that puts the White House and congressional Republicans on a collision course over possible budget cuts. Some top Republicans have threatened to vote against raising the debt ceiling — which would cause the federal government to default on its loans within a few months — unless Biden agrees to significant cuts in federal spending.
“He’ll discuss how MAGA Republicans in Congress are threatening default and an economic catastrophe unless they can force through a deeply unpopular agenda,” Kate Berner, principal deputy director of communications at the White House, said on a call with reporters on Monday.
Biden’s attempt to focus on health-care coverage is the next front in an ongoing debate he has been having with Republicans — one that broke into the open most publicly during his State of the Union address, when he was heckled by some Republicans as he disparaged their proposals that could risk cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Republicans have largely backed away from any discussion of cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who previously wanted Congress to vote every five years on all government programs, recently amended his plan to make exceptions for Medicare and Social Security.
But Republicans are still committed to balancing the budget, which could require cuts in large government programs. With Republicans largely refraining from offering details on where those cuts would come from, Biden is attempting to focus on an area of spending that is large — but one that, because of its popularity, might become politically problematic for Republicans to cut.
“Congressional Republicans have committed themselves to very deep cuts to programs that tens of millions of Americans count on,” said Aviva Aron-Dine, deputy director of the National Economic Council. “The president believes that they owe the American people transparency about what that will mean. If they won’t provide it, he will.”…
Biden’s own budget proposal will be released on March 9, where administration officials say he will outline plans to build on the Affordable Care Act and bolster Medicaid.
Meanwhile, MTG has troubles of her own:
Tuesday Evening Open Thread: President Joe, Showing ‘Em How It’s DonePost + Comments (51)
It’s way past tine for another thread for all the lurkers out there. I don’t think we’ve had one since the holidays
You may already know this, but when you post your first comment, it goes into moderation, and sometimes it takes a while for one of us to see it and free your comment so it shows up for everyone. Once it’s released from moderation, it goes into the comments with the time-stamp for when you first submitted it, so then most people probably never see it. So it’s not surprising that first comments often don’t get replied to.
So here’s a special open thread where I can keep a particular eye out for first comments that go into moderation.
A few of you who poked your heads up on previous lurker threads have turned into commenters, but don’t let that scare you away!
In any case, it’s lurker appreciation day here on Balloon Juice! Welcome, all.
Totally open thread.
I got a news alert about Rupert Murdoch last night, and my hopes were raised momentarily that he had finally taken the A train straight to hell. Unfortunately, his diet of white rhino steak seasoned with puppy and kitten tears is working, and the motherfucker is still breathing. The “scoop” is that Murdoch testified that the lies Fox was spewing about Dominion voting machines and the “stolen election” were, indeed, lies. Oh, also, the sun rose in the East this morning.
I get that the press has to report this, and I get that it’s good to bury the election lies deep in the ground and salt the earth, but the breathless reporting of this “scoop” is, for me at least, part and parcel of the whole DC Press Corpse sickness. This story exhibits two big symptoms of that disease: They have to report something obviously true as a big surprise, and a fact (the Dominion lie) is only established when a Republican admits that it is true.
Anyway, that reminded me of another gripe — they (and by this I mean the mainstream media in general) are massive prudes. On the one hand, we have the human race, fucking like the naked apes we are, and on the other hand we have a press where you’d have to read very carefully to find that out. Things have definitely changed — at least for Republicans — since, apparently, it is now OK to have a President who cheated and harassed women, but I think prudishness is part of why Trump wasn’t taken to task by the press for the harassment. Their template for reporting this kind of behavior is the enormously broad “sex scandal” story arc. When that template was thrown out in their effort to normalize Trump, they couldn’t separate the stuff that nobody really cares about (Trump having consensual sex with adult women)* from the stuff that is awful (harassment at best, rape at worst).
The “sex scandal” template was a pretty easy one, since these guys are at core lazy and entitled. Unless a male politician’s sex life involved his wife, in the missionary position, at home, in bed, with only one orgasm being had (the man’s, the way baby jebus intended), it’s a “sex scandal.” Lather, rinse repeat.
The 90s were awful for a lot of reasons, but one of them was the massive furor over a god damned blowjob. Of course, the real story here is whether an intern could consent to that act with a man who held power over her, but the salacious way it was reported focused entirely on a really commonplace sex act. The key point about that scandal is that careers were made in reporting that tawdry affair, and that made a real mark on the DC Press Corpse, who are in almost every way stuck in the glory days of the cable news 90s.
Another factor is the predominance of WASP Ivy culture in the mainstream media. I can’t remember the title or author of a book I read a while ago (sorry) — it was a war memoir by a Ivy-educated WASP officer who was stationed on a island in the Pacific. He said that censoring the letters home written by his enlisted men was a real revelation because those guys would write, in graphic detail, what they were going to do with their wives or girlfriends when they got home. It was something just foreign to him, and I think that class/experience divide still exists to some degree in our Ivy educated press corpse. “Educated” and “sophisticated” people do not discuss sex, the end.
This second gripe was triggered by my general bad attitude and also by listening to Dan Savage being interviewed by Ezra Klein on Ezra’s podcast. I really like Dan Savage, so I listened to Ezra’s show, which is usually like listening to a bunch of virgin college freshman discuss politics and political theory after half a bong hit and a sip of beer. Ezra has always struck me as a bit of a prude, and boy does he dance around avoiding a frank discussion of the mechanics of sex. Still, I thought it was a good listen, especially the parts about chosen family and how the gay community could be a model for raising children. The part that really bugs me about the podcast wasn’t the content, it was the context. Dan Savage is now mainstream enough to be Ezra’s guest, but when he started in the 90s, his frank discussion of sexuality was seen as almost revolutionary. In modern memory, sex was such a taboo subject that in this vast country of ours, a mouthy gay man writing in an indy newspaper was one of the few journalists who could write about it frankly.
Now I’m finally going to get to the point: this prudishness is part of why there’s so much receptivity on the part of the Times and other outlets for anti-trans hatred. Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina, and they meet in one way, just how we learned from the gym teacher in 8th grade health. Anything else is wrong, and open for shaming. I know there’s way more to anti-trans bigotry, but in the media, prudishness is one part of it.
* This may be a minority opinion, but I personally don’t like cheating and have never/would never do it, but in politicians, I only care about cheating if they’re hypocrites or if there are consent issues. Also, some of what is characterized as “cheating” is an arrangement between two people doing what they need to stay married, but even in our slightly more permissive environment, a politician couldn’t stand up and just say that.
.?@VP? at a Black History Month celebration at the White House:
“Black history is American history.”
“We will not as a nation build a better future for America by trying to erase America’s past.” pic.twitter.com/RdQqZLqPg4
— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) February 27, 2023
Puck‘s Tara Palmeri is a journalistic botfly, but I find it reassuring that Vice-President Harris has strong, outspoken supporters & strategists:
Eight months before the 2020 election, when Joe Biden was looking for a running mate who would solidify his coalition, the Democratic strategist Karen Finney and a small group of prominent Black political savants (Minyon Moore and Leah Daughtry, among others) pushed him to choose a Black female running mate. One month later, they specifically made the case for his one-time foe, Kamala Harris.
Finney, who is also a CNN commentator, remains a friend of Harris and a member of her kitchen cabinet. She reliably defends the vice president in the wake of stories about turnover in her office, say, or other political challenges. She’s also among a group of powerful female strategists who have met in D.C. to deeply ponder how to rewrite the narrative that Harris is underperforming in her historic role.
As Biden prepares to embark on a re-election campaign, Harris will enter uncharted territory: She’s on the bottom of the ticket, sure, but she will also be understudying the oldest commander-in-chief in history. Unlike in 2020, she’ll be very much in the political foreground, the subject of scrutiny within her party and brutal attacks from her opponents. I spoke to Finney about the Harris narrative, and how it might be revised before Biden hits the stump.
Tara Palmeri: Greg Craig, White House Counsel during the Obama administration, wrote an op-ed in the Times arguing that Biden should let the delegates at the Democratic convention pick his running mate. He suggests it’s the best way to address fears about Biden’s age and succession.
Karen Finney: It’s ridiculous. I chalk this up to the sort of inside-the-Beltway parlor chatter we always see. Remember when they talked about if Trump was going to drop Pence? There are always these machinations. President Biden has made it clear he’s running, he’s running with Harris, full stop. All of the rest of this is noise. Having been in this business for 30 years, I’ve seen this movie before…
The vice president’s approval rating is tied to the president’s and the administration. I would remind people inside the Beltway that the conventional wisdom when Joe Biden was vice president was that he would never run for president and couldn’t be elected. They said Barack Obama couldn’t be elected. And people said there’s no way Donald Trump is elected. Oh, and the Red Wave—that was supposed to happen. Of course, with the Red Wave people were not paying attention to women and people of color and young people, who felt very strongly about democracy and reproductive freedom. Everybody was banking on the old way of thinking, and it turns out they were completely wrong.
Harris is extremely popular with the base of the Democratic party. That’s why Karen Bass had her come to Los Angeles several times to help rev up Democratic turnout. That’s also why they had her come to New York several times. To my mind, I won’t entertain [removing Harris from the ticket]—Black voters would read it as Well, you don’t value what we bring to the table. As Black women, we bring our community out to vote. Are you really going to tell Black voters you’re not interested?…
Throughout history, the role [of Vice-President] has evolved. I see Kamala Harris evolving the role. On the other hand, she’s completely different, and she’s bringing her own expertise and experience to the role. She’s a historic first.
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: I’m Proud to Stand with Vice-President HarrisPost + Comments (175)