Going hand in hand with the bullshit of respectability politics is hell’s handmaiden, the centrist:
No Labels is a political outfit that hails political centrism, calls for bipartisanship, and is considering running an independent ticket in the 2024 presidential election that could end up spoiling President Joe Biden’s reelection bid. On its website, the group urges politicians and citizens to eschew the “extremists on the far left and right,” and it asks people who are “fed up with the angriest voices dominating our politics” to sign up as members and donate to the group. But No Labels neglects to inform its online contributors that a cut of their gift goes to a company that aids Republican candidates and far-right organizations that engage in the harsh politics of extremism that No Labels professes to renounce.
Donations to No Labels are handled by an online fundraising platform called Anedot. According to its website, Anedot typically charges political groups a 4 percent fee plus 30 cents per transaction. Under that formula, when an online contributor sends No Labels $100, Anedot pockets $4.30. That money bolsters Anedot’s mission to raise funds for the right and the GOP.
All centrism does, at least in modern times, is water down good policies in order to make them palatable to self-anointed champions of moderation. These champions, unsurprisingly, always look like this:
Do you remember that motherfucker? Bart fucking Stupak? I know we are all caught up on the execrable Joe Manchin and that annoying woman from Arizona, but there have been some real quality assholes who called themselves centrists or blue dogs. And they are always white, always rich, anti-choice, pro-business, and always supportive of everything fucking Republicans want, but just nicer.
Fuck them. And fuck No Labels.
Roger Moore
Actual centrists aren’t the problem; it’s conservatives masquerading as centrists to steal moderate votes from the Democrats who are the problem.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team
Blogmaster on fire today!
I’m into it.
Old Man Shadow
And the media eats the centrist bullshit up.
“He’s so moderate! He only wants to hurt and condemn to hunger and poverty just a few million people instead of tens of millions!” (Swoon)
or
“He’s so moderate because he bucked the Republican establishment once and only voted for their agenda and judges 99.9% of the time!”
I mean, I respect that Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and others refuse to cross that anti-American treason line, but they’re still motherfuckers.
S Cerevisiae
Fuck yeah John! You are on a roll today!
rockstar
Righteous rants brother John!! Please continue sir
Jeffro
Fuck fake centrists, indeed!
I forgot to mention in that last thread that George Will is boring as shit and I still have no idea how he got hired, why they continue to publish him in the WaPo, and so on. They have lots of GOP hacks and he’s the most boring one of them all, by far.
Anyway, while GQP politicians blather on, trying to make false equivalencies and incite Insurrection II, Republican insiders know the score: trumpov is going down and going to do time.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: Actual centrists are nearly nonexistent, though they get an outsize voice in the political media.
ALurkSupreme
Yes, sir!
JGreen
If you want a very good description of how No Labels, Never Trumpers and their like are all bullshit and conservatives masquerading as centrists as Roger Moore said, check out driftglass. He’s been specializing in this for ages. I think his latest post is about this, as a matter of fact and he says he pointed out how phony New Labels was about two days after they announced the formation of the group.
And, as he always likes to say: “The Left has been right about the Right all along”. It’s just that no one will acknowledge it.
Other MJS
@Roger Moore: Agree, but my gut is that these clowns have given “centrist” a bad vibe. Does “moderate” still work?
And, yes, fuck “No Labels”. Also RFK jr. “progressives”.
bg
No Labels says it will not put forth a candidate if DeSantis is the GOP nominee https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/13/no-labels-presidential-bid-trump-out-00101168
So now centrism includes theocracy, censorship, persecution of gays and trans people, and anti-vaxx?
steve g
None of that applies to Joe Biden. He is not an extreme leftist, and does not blast out an angry voice. If you want to eschew those extremists and are fed up with angry voices, support Joe Biden!
Old School
To be honest, I didn’t. I had to look him up.
He held up the passage of the Affordable Care Act over abortion funding. (He wanted it prohibited.)
JaySinWA
@Jeffro: I’ll believe this BS is real when people put their names behind it publicly. Otherwise it’s the same useless blather that R’s privately don’t support T. when they publicly vote for everything he wants and against him being punished for the illegal things he does.
Manyakitty
Right on! Cole on the loose! Bring it!
trollhattan
File under the above Go Fuck Yourself tag: It’s on.
JPL
@JaySinWA: How do you pronounce Koch!
JPL
@bg: They are only trying to help trump win? I don’t get it.
Raoul Paste
So I see that this post comes from the Go Fuck Yourself file. These days that’s a completely normal category.
JaySinWA
Coke if I think about it, cock if I think about it more.
Has Koch come out explicitly? He doesn’t speak out publicly to my knowledge.
Gravie
Do you remember Americans Elect (or more appropriately “American Select”)? They were a “centrist” organization like No Labels that was displeased with the likelihood that Barack Obama would be the Democratic nominee in 2012 so they launched a national campaign to get ANYONE ELSE on the ballot as a third-party candidate. I happened to be on an Amtrak from DC to NY with someone in the mid-high echelons of the organization and we had an interesting conversation in which he could not articulate one damn good reason for his organization to exist or why they were coming right out of the starting gate with Presidential politics. I’m sure No Labels is equally unimpressive.
Chris
I remember that he basically ended his own career as a congresscritter by forcing an amendment into the ACA that prohibited the use of government funds for abortion. Despite that, soon thereafter the priest at my local church was thundering that the ACA was something we should all oppose because argle bargle abortion.
In addition to being one of the things that really kicked my burnout with the Catholic Church into high gear, it nicely illustrates the futility of the whole centrist project. “Let’s be moderate so that the social conservatives aren’t angry with us.” Yeah, that’s not a thing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
When did infrequent front-pager /checks notes/ John Cole start talking politics? //
I remember Stupak. There was an internet rumor back in 09-10 that he was persuaded by the US conference of bishops to throw a monkey wrench into Obamacare in return for some bauble from Pope Benedict of the Red Shoes (and Matching Hat), but I’ve never been able to confirm it one way or the other.
Ruckus
2 posts in just 4 hrs?
John, are you OK?
@Roger Moore:
I agree, we all have a right to our views on the world. That is part of what makes it so that we are not all the same. But being a rigid conservative means that really everything is OK and no change is needed, or should be allowed. And of course nothing imperfect humans (every last fucking one of us) ever do is perfect. We should strive to make things better, rather than just the selfish fuckers richer. All of us are a part of life, not the end all be all of it. And when we make improvements we should damn well share in that so that it improves everyone’s life. In the concept of earth’s time we are here and gone in an instant, we should work to make that world better, not just for the few, but for all. And no, none of us can do this alone, we have to work together to make things better. People like SFB never, ever make the world better while they are here, because they are against everything that takes away from their personal betterment. Which means they are never better, never a decent part of the circle of life. They are like dog shit on your flip flops or sandals, which never, ever stays just on the bottom of the soles and always ends up on your feet.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Raoul Paste: We are all Roy Kent.
smith
@JPL: They want a Republican to win, and they are afraid that TFG can’t do it without help. So they put up a fake “centrist” to bleed votes from Biden to give TFG a boost. Apparently they think that if TFG is out of the picture, DeSantis as the nominee won’t need this help (little do they know). The important thing is that an R wins, and they’re actually OK if it’s TFG.
Same thing applies to the fake “progressive” RFKJr, BFF of Steve Bannon and antivaxxers everywhere.
davecb
Canada used to have two centrist parties, simply called Liberals and Conservatives. The not-too-right-centre part of the Conservatives was officially called the Progressive Conservatives (PCs), after the former Progressive party (my dad was a progressive).
The two parties distinguished themselves by saying they each had a different emphasis, but for years they were both vaguely centrist, and power went back and forth peacefully.
Then a far-right party broke off from the PCs, did some fundraising and party building and pulled a hostile takeover of the PCs. So for a while we had only one centrist party, still called the Liberals, trying to bridge the gap between left and right. Net result? They were neither, and suffered from lack of a mission, or even a theory of what you mean when you say centrist.
The good part is that the Liberals have pulled back from the muddy middle a bit, and are governing fairly sanely as an explicitly centre-left party. With the help of the New Democratic Party (leftist) they make the former PCs look like raving Trumpists. The bad part is we don’t have a right-center party to take over from them if they get lazy or even just too long in the tooth…
The moral of the story?
eclare
@steve g:
QFT. Joe is optimistic, calm, cool…good grief, his favorite food is ice cream!
different-church-lady
Nice to have you back John!
Jay
PAM Dirac
@JaySinWA:
Yes, see for example this. I think it was a $5 million buy. Of course he wants Desantis in, so he still garbage, but he is very explicitly calling drumpf a loser and spending money to spread that message.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: You know how you can tell that “Centrism” is absolute bullshit? On every issue which commands 60% or higher support from the general public but which is opposed by Republican orthodoxy, the “Centrists” start blathering about “the tyranny of the majority.”
Other MJS
Also FTFNYT.
Jay
@davecb:
we used to have “Red Tories”, extinct now as a species.
Social media has whack jobs showing up everywhere,
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/kelowna-short-hair-girl-gender-identity-1.6875738
Alison Rose
LOLOL show me who fits this label who is currently a member of either the Biden administration or Congress. Sanders? AOC? Mayor Pete? Come the entire fuck on.
Baud
Your new diet seems to be working well.
Redshift
The same No Labels that took 200K from Clarence Thomas’ sugar daddy? Who could imagine those guys could be ratf*ckers trying to get a Republican elected?
Alison Rose
@trollhattan: Very glad to see Bonta pursuing this.
rikyrah
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team:
Me too.
Go Cole!👏🏾
SpaceUnit
If I had some random encounter with that grinning dipshit I would immediately guess his name was Bart Stupak.
eclare
@Jay:
God those flood scenes. Just catastrophic.
Doc Sardonic
Yep Liz and Mitt are motherfuckers that won’t cross the Treason Line that the rest of the Republic party are tightroping. The only difference is that Liz and Mitt will bring your mother flowers, candy and maybe a nice bottle of wine or whiskey before they fuck her.
rikyrah
@Jeffro:
Always with the anonymous bullshyt 😡
No
.be strong enough to go on the record 😡
Tony Jay
‘Centrist’ – Species of nomadic parasite typically found occupying territory recently vacated by The Right.
Soprano2
@bg: That’s definitely the “tell” that their only objective is to help the Republican candidate get elected. They’ll throw all their support behind DeSantis if he’s the candidate, bank on it.
JaySinWA
@PAM Dirac: Okay, I had heard about the ad buy. It’s under Americans for Prosperity PAC so lightly laundered Koch money, but not putting a person’s name on it. The CNBC target demo is interesting, kind of a Chamber of Commerce target market. Baby steps, I guess.
misterpuff
This is good news for John McCain.
James E Powell
@Jeffro:
He was raised up back in the Reagan days. He wore bowties & spoke well & made references to writers that most people never heard of let alone read, and thus provided an intellectual patina to the hateful ignorance & bigotry of the Reagan administration.
And he talked about baseball a lot – though he was as full of shit as most people who talk about baseball a lot – and that was like the 80s equivalent of wearing a fleece vest.
UncleEbeneezer
Meanwhile, Cornel (definitely NOT a Centrist) West is trying to become the Jill Stein of 2024 😡😡
James E Powell
@Alison Rose:
It is the political media’s established practice to use whatever definitions the Republicans use, so the man formerly known as the Senator from MNBA is now a far-left radical socialist.
Matt McIrvin
Whenever I see people going “fuck centrists” I usually have to read on a little to figure out whether they’re one of those horseshoe-left or Green Party saboteur types whose definition of a “centrist” is a Democrat. But not if it’s John Cole
Functionally there is little difference between No Labels and the Jill Stein movement, even though they claim to be in completely different places.
Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride
@James E Powell: I first became aware of him in the Nixon days, when he appeared to be the only self-identified conservative columnist to denounce Nixon and (IIRC) even call for his resignation as soon as Watergate started heating up. That gave him a reputation for intellectual honesty which he forfeited a long time ago.
Rusty
Since we are mentioning supposed centrists, let me take the opportunity to say fuck Joe Liebermann. He was my senator from CT and he as so obviously a self centered asshole that when Gore picked him for VP and announced it I yelled at my television.
Much of “centrism” makes no sense. Abortions banned on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but available the other days? Poor people with cancer that have a last name that starts with A-M get healthcare, but those with N-Z are out of luck and die? Well funded public schools for even grades, but nothing for odd grades? There is a lot of policy that is either/or, there is no centrist position. Somehow supposed centrist positions are always beneficial to the already rich. Go figure. Fuck all those people too.
p.a.
@James E Powell:
Will prepped Ronnie Rayguns for his debates against… Carter? Mondale? while he was an ABC employee and actually supplied him with some of the questions IIRC. The results when this became known were a week’s worth of furrowed eyebrows and some tut-tuts.
JPL
@smith: In GA you can vote in either primary. Don might be getting a surprise vote from me, because Ron has already shown how dangerous he is.
might because I have a weak stomach
UncleEbeneezer
@James E Powell: I think he was trying to be the heir to the William F. Buckley throne, but he never had the right charisma for it.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
The one way in which I’m very “centrist” is that I think the last decade or so have made clear that there’s very little difference between the Jill Stein type so-called leftists and the Joe Lieberman type so-called centrists.
There’s a reason Krysten Sinema has been able to seamlessly transition from the former to the latter.
Fraud Guy
I read
and I hear Bill Cosby’s joke:
Jeffro
@JaySinWA: yes
@JPL: yes
@PAM Dirac: you beat me to it! Yes, Charles Koch is already out there trying his very evil best to keep trumpov from the GOP nomination.
Jeffro
@James E Powell:And he talked about baseball a lot – though he was as full of shit as most people who talk about baseball a lot – and that was like the 80s equivalent of wearing a fleece vest.
this is a very good point/comparison, thanks
(also, I’m off to rename my punk band “Intellectual Patina”, that’s awesome!)
Another Scott
@JGreen: Indeed.
driftglass: No Labels – It was Magatha All Along (from May 29):
Anything that makes it harder for Democrats to win helps the GQPers. No Labels is a GQP front.
Eyes on the prizes.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jeffro
I thought that was Carper? Or Bill Roth (RIP)? =)
Fits all three, honestly.
The best-looking vacant buildings in downtown Wilmington, good ol’ MBNA!
Alison Rose
@James E Powell:
who to the what now?
Jeffro
110% this
It always seems to be “centrist” to a) work within the current tax system (or with lower rates for rich folks) but taxes can never go up, and b) there are always public services to be privatized in “centrist” systems.
There’s no such thing as robust, well-funded public services in “centrist-World”
Jeffro
@Alison Rose: huge credit card company/bank that was headquartered in Wilmington, DE
Now scattered to the winds (Bank of America, Virgin, Lloyds, etc)
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
The claim they’re in different places is functionally important. The media allows the two major political parties to define the Overton Window. Anyone who can claim to be a centrist with a straight face will be treated with utmost seriousness, while anyone who claims to be left of the Democrats or right of the Republicans will be ignored.
Alison Rose
@Jeffro: Ahhh okay. I was like…a men’s basketball player?
Roger Moore
@Rusty:
You can still be a centrist even if none of your opinions are exactly in the center. You just have to agree with the left on some issues and the right on others. The classic approach to this is the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” approach to centrism, where you give the ultra-rich everything they want but say no to the right wing culture warriors.
Chris
@Rusty:
There’s two separate though ultimately very much related problems with centrism.
One, there are problems that it simply isn’t equipped to solve. Slavery wasn’t a problem with a “centrist” solution. Neither is abortion. Those are all-or-nothing issues. Half the point of the way the United States was originally designed was to make a “centrist” compromise that left the pro and anti slavery sides just not-unhappy enough to stick together… and sure enough it spent the next century going to pieces until the Civil War, because that kind of thing isn’t sustainable over the long run.
Two, there are problems that are amenable to “centrist” solutions. A stupendous amount of twentieth century economics (the successful parts, at least) is based precisely on “centrist” thinking; let’s borrow liberally from socialist and capitalist ideas both to see if we can make something that keeps the good parts of both while limiting the bad ones as much as possible. There’s just one problem with this; the people who accept this kind of thinking are called “liberals.” Today’s professional “centrists” keep trying to pretend that these people are socialist extremists who are the mirror image of the Ayn Randian capitalist extremists on the other side, and that centrists are the only sane people in the middle. When in reality, the spectrum is People Who Want A Compromise Between The Economic Left And The Economic Right versus People Of The Cult That Says The Economic Right Can Do No Wrong.
The common point between the two kinds of problems, of course, is that either way, the “centrists” are stalking horses for the right.
eversor
Around these parts a centrist is socialy liberal but fiscally conservative. Give us Republican economics but Democratic social issues. Also the economics matter more. If you dare give us Sanders or Warren than burn the nation to the fucking ground. Fuck the poors marry the gays, keep abortion legal but let’s slash social security.
Virginia politics.
Redshift
@Roger Moore:
I’d want to hear your definition of actual centrists before I could agree with that.
I agree it once meant someone who was closer to the center than the mainstream of their party, so more conservative Dems and more liberal Republicans (species now extinct.) But along the way it came to mean something like the No Labels BS, “both sides are too extreme, halfway between in the center is the right and moderate place to be.” But as we all know, Republicans sprinted to the right and Democrats moves slightly to the left while Republicans made up stories about Dems becoming extreme, so staying in the center meant becoming conservative (perhaps without even realizing it) and opposing pretty mainstream things just to not be part of the supposed extreme.
And the reason this is a problem is for a lot of normies, being a centrist sounds like being a moderate (which is certainly how the punditry treats it), so they get a concept of what ideas are moderate that’s skewed to the right.
Roger Moore
@Chris:
I would make one additional point, which is that many issues that are amenable to compromise actually result in compromises. The budget is a good example. We rarely get a budget that perfectly reflects either Democratic or Republican priorities. Instead we get some kind of ugly compromise that nobody is happy with but that can scrounge up enough votes to pass. What that means in practice is that the all or nothing issues that can’t be compromised on take up a disproportionate amount of space in the discourse.
UncleEbeneezer
@Chris: Yup. And it wasn’t Centrists who helped deliver W and Trump to the Presidency.
Sis
You are so right, John!
BlueGuitarist
House defeated an attempt by far right rep Luna to censure Adam Schiff and fine him $16 million
Tom Q
@p.a.:
It was the Carter/Mondale debate. And the worst part was, he appeared on a post-debate panel, telling everyone how well Reagan had done.
To give ABC minimal credit, they did blackball him from political analysis for a while afterward. But, to withdraw credit, they eventually forgot about it and restored him to the position.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: And that implies it’s quite dangerous that extreme rightists are mostly willing to work within the Republican Party, whereas extreme leftists seem to have a drive to split off from anything mainstream and work against the parties adjacent to them.
Tom Q
@Rusty:
I remember waking up the morning Gore’s VP announcement was made, and turning on my computer for the news. I had AOL at the time, which had its premier headline in a box. However, I had a popup box (I think it said Friends/Contacts/something else) that covered a small portion of the larger box. That popup meant what I initially saw was
Gore Picks (BLANK SPACE)
For Vice-President
I rapidly closed the popup, and, when I saw “Lieberman” fill the space, I did like you: Screamed NO!
I’ll always believe that Lieberman cost Gore the election. If he was chosen to help in Florida, that obviously didn’t pan out. And I have no doubt he goosed the Nader vote, which probably cost NH, at minimum.
Chief Oshkosh
@Roger Moore: This is the exact point I was going to make, and go further to say that real centrists are Democrats these days. I work with two “rock-ribbed Republicans” who’ve been voting Democratic since Reagan – the party left them long, long ago.
Manyakitty
@Alison Rose: should be MBNA.
zhena gogolia
@Tom Q: Yeah, that was a big mistake. Remember his friendly chat with Cheney?
Betty Cracker
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Ha! Perfect!
Betty Cracker
@UncleEbeneezer: West was recently seen shilling in the WSJ for Ron DeSantis, so maybe he’ll embrace “centrism” yet since its most salient feature these days is a tendency to define itself in opposition to Democrats — whatever they’re for at any given moment.
Redshift
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, but being willing to compromise to get a deal isn’t the same as your political identity/starting position being a compromise. The budget compromise didn’t happen because either Biden or McCarthy was a centrist.
Scout211
O/T This isn’t about centrists, but the crazy caucus.
GOP effort to censure Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff fails in key vote
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
Most Democrats are probably centrist.
The trick is to define what you mean by centrist.
I certainly tire of pundits (e.g., The Young Turks) and politicians (Bernie) who assume that everyone is on board for their ill-defined and meaningless “progressive” agenda.
Baud
@Redshift:
@Brachiator:
Agreed.
geg6
OT, but since the thread is posted in the Go Fuck Yourself topics, maybe not. But the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter trial will finally have closing arguments tomorrow and, if we’re lucky, the jury will have it by noon. I expect a lightning fast guilty verdict and then on to the punishment phase. The USA is asking for the death penalty. That may be the more difficult decision for the jury. Some victims and their families are not wanting death and others definitely do. I am not generally in favor of the death penalty. But in this case, I could make an exception. Not just because of the nature of the crime but I fear this asshole being a hero to the white supremacists who are everywhere in prisons and to the assholes outside of prison who laud him. I just want him gone. He’s a waste of oxygen.
Citizen Alan
@Roger Moore: Which is bullshit. Because if you are really socially liberal and fiscally conservative, you are a democrat. There has been no point in the last thirty years at least when any significant number of republicans could even pretend to be either socially liberal or truly fiscally conservative. Unless you take the idiotic position that the government paying for anything that benefits ordinary non billionaire americans is per se fiscally irresponsible.
Gin & Tonic
@geg6: Will he be more of a hero if he is executed?
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Cornel West??? He has really lost his mind?
Fleeting Expletive
Hope I’m not the only one who thought of an old saying, “only thing in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” Maybe it’s a Texas thing. Or something someone famous said. I’m agnostic on its origin.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
I believe he’s found his wallet.
mrmoshpotato
Centrism Silver (™) May Be Right For You!
-driftglass
Gin & Tonic
@zhena gogolia:
Seen this?
different-church-lady
“We regret this error. In the future we will ensure the language is changed to ‘actual dictator’.”
James E Powell
@Alison Rose:
I want to stress that I wasn’t the one who called Joe Biden the Senator from MBNA, it was the right wingers. That is, the same people who now call him a far-left radical socialist.
The Senator from MBNA. It’s the National Review reprinting American Spectator, so please exercise appropriate caution.
Maxim
@trollhattan: Given his administration’s deep respect for the rule of law, I’m sure those documents will be immediately forthcoming.
geg6
@Alison Rose:
They called Biden that for years because MBNA was headquartered in DE and Joe did his constituent service for them quite robustly. See the bankruptcy laws for one example.
Pittsburgh Mike
No Labels isn’t centrist, it’s a pure BS attempt to fool people into not voting D.
Baud
@Pittsburgh Mike:
Agree, but it uses centrism as a tool toward that end.
Jeffro
@James E Powell:
@geg6:
shorter: (me, at #65) =)
Splitting Image
@Jeffro:
My favourite George F. Will column is a screed he published in 2009 or so complaining about people wearing blue jeans to work. It was perfect timing as it coincided with jeans becoming less popular with women and leggings starting to replace them as casual wear.
It was notable for how strongly Will argued that people need to become adults at some point in their lives and put aside childish things, and for suggesting that men and women should model themselves after Fred Astaire and Grace Kelly respectively, being two actors who have been dead for decades but who were popular when George F. Will was a lad.
The chef’s kiss is that Grace Kelly had a lot to do with blue jeans becoming respectable for women to wear in the first place when she wore them in Rear Window in 1954. I don’t think Fred Astaire wore jeans, but Ginger Rogers did, all the way back in the 1930s.
Ksmiami
@different-church-lady: good. Maybe Biden as dictator can shut that useless propaganda channel down.
Jeffro
while we are busy yelling “fuck centrists!” let’s also let loose a hearty “fuck horse-race, Pitchbot-style pundits” where everything bad for trump could, you know, be good
trump’s indictment has a silver lining for the GOP: just get him to step aside and endorse some other Republican who’ll pardon him
(barf)
Shorter: don’t do the right thing for the country, GOP. Do what works for the Republican Party – help Donald Trump avoid justice, even after selling our country’s secrets, inciting insurrection, and making obvious threats against the family of the special prosecutor.
Baud
@Splitting Image:
Like faux nostalgia, perhaps.
geg6
@Gin & Tonic:
He’ll be gone and not turning young, impressionable criminals who may be released and who may not yet be lost causes into assholes like him to target more synagogues. As I said, I’m not into the death penalty in most cases but I’m okay if this mother fucker dies.
Jay
According to its website, Anedot typically charges political groups a 4 percent fee plus 30 cents per transaction.
Great! Let’s all send a dozen 10 cent contributions.
bjacques
“Social liberal, fiscal conservative” is a cop-out, meaning “I’m all for progress as it doesn’t remotely threaten to inconvenience me”.
Rights that exist on paper often cause money or time (an opportunity cost) to exercise. If people can’t afford to exercise those rights, they don’t have them. This is really a feature for “social liberals/fiscal conservatives”, who hope you missed them palming that card.
Brachiator
@Splitting Image:
Great catch with respect to Grace Kelly. I had almost forgot about the scene with her in jeans, at the end of the movie.
And Fred Astaire was more from an earlier generation. And of course they were dressed by studio designers. It’s not like they were pulling outfits out of their own closets.
ETA. I think that Roger Moore wore some of his own clothes in The Saint TV series.
Geminid
@Jeffro: Good luck getting Trump to step aside in return for the promise of a pardon. He believes he can win the nomination and then the general election, and that the only way out is through.
Baud
@Geminid:
He won’t step aside. I think the idea is that if he loses the nomination, he has an incentive not to undermine the nominee out of spite.
C Stars
Oh my god, LAST MONTH the Washington Post published a George Will screed about the same freaking thing, lionizing, of all things, the fucking J. Crew catalogue, as “preferable to egalitarian shabbiness.” The guy is a parody of himself. ETA and it really steams my salmon that he likely gets paid ten times more than the news assistants and copyeditors who work valiantly to make his columns vaguely coherent.
Also, “No Labels” is just a stupid name for a political group.
“We stand for nothing.”
“We don’t care about anything but our own interests”
“With all the words in the English language, we couldn’t be bothered articulating or expressing our views other than that they are inexpressible. But hey, donate!”
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: No, but their brand name needs some work!
Baud
@C Stars:
Agree with everything you say. But there are people who are not part of the No Labels grod6t who seem to think there is some unity among “independents” who are not a member of one of the two parties.
Brachiator
@bjacques:
Nope. Why would you favor any policy that would inconvenience or threaten you? Isn’t that playing at political martyrdom?
Or many you mean that people should be willing to feel a little economic pain in order to make sure that everyone is reasonably provided for. Maybe. But even here, there are limits.
zhena gogolia
@Splitting Image: Oh, I forgot those blue jeans! At the end.
C Stars
@Splitting Image:
@Brachiator:
Yes, she’s always showing up in these ridiculous evening dresses so at the end she must be signaling that she’s meeting James Stewart in the middle, dressing like an “everyman” like him. But Kathryn Hepburn did that long before Grace Kelly.
Jay
zhena gogolia
@C Stars: But she has the fashion magazine stashed behind the other one.
Kelly
Nihilists stand for nothing
Baud
@Jay:
That’s bipartisanship I can get behind.
Geminid
@zhena gogolia: Cornell West has already won the nomination of the “Movement for a People’s Party” (MPP). Denise Oliver-Velez had this to say about it:
Yesterday West announced that he would seek the Green Party nomination as well, in order to create a “United Front.” Comments at the Post Left Watch twitter site said that West was encouraged by people opposed to Howie Hawkins, the party’s 2020 nominee and 2024 contender, because Hawkins supports Ukraine.
Another angle may be that the MPP’s grifty, cult-leader founder is attempting to take over the Green Party. That could end up destroying the Green Party, which would be no big loss.
Baud
@Kelly:
They’re worse than National Socialists.
zhena gogolia
@Geminid: Haha, go, Denise!
Baud
@Geminid:
Has West come out against Ukraine?
Splitting Image
@C Stars:
Thanks for linking to that. It was hilarious. He even says that the 2009 article generated so much disagreement it proves he was on to something. A centrist to the very last.
Brachiator
@Baud:
This would be an interesting dilemma for Trump. He hates to be a loser and clearly believes that he has a divine right to the presidency. He also assumes that the GOP base will love him forever. I don’t think that he can even imagine losing the nomination.
On the other hand, it would eat at his soul to be beholden to someone else for a potential pardon.
Either way he would be marked as a loser, which of course he is anyway.
Roger Moore
@Redshift:
I agree, but the groups like No Labels aren’t just about finding squishy centrist politicians. They’re built around the idea that the problem in our politics is the inability of politicians to compromise. My point is that compromise is actually happening all the time, even between politicians who disagree wildly on the issues. It’s just we never hear about those issues very much because they get solved without too much drama. It’s only the issues where compromise is really impossible that result in impasses, and all the wishful thinking in the world won’t solve that problem.
Geminid
@Baud: I can’t say that he has, but it’s almost certain that West opposes aid to Ukraine. That sentiment is very strong among the “Dirtbag Left” whose support he needs.
Miss Bianca
Would any of you be shocked, SHOCKED, to discover that the Colorado Libertarian Party is in bed with the Republicans?
In case you can’t click through to the article, love our Governor’s Twitter response to the announcement that the Libertarians won’t run candidates in “close races”:
Baud
@Geminid:
Thanks. Makes sense. I’m just trying to ascertain how dead to me he is.
C Stars
@zhena gogolia: Oh yeah! Behind a photography magazine?
He’s the cad in that duo, but I could see why those dresses annoyed him.
It’s not until now, in my 40s, that am picking up on the intense gender dynamic rippling through all of Hitchcock’s movies. He really starkly demonstrates how women were subjugated and victimized and dismissed in the culture of his time, and I’m not sure whether it’s intentional or not.
Baud
@Miss Bianca:
I’m glad those people are getting exposed. I hope the lesson sticks.
Roger Moore
@Maxim:
IIRC, he had the state legislature rubber stamp a law that exempted the program from sunshine laws, so he can legally deny Bonta as long as this is submitted as a government records request. Presumably Bonta could upgrade that to a subpoena, but I think it would be a federal case to see if Florida has to honor the subpoena in that case.
Sparkedcat
@JPL: In TN I will be voting for Trump in the Republican primary and voting for Biden in the general. My money will be going to the swing states.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
The FL courts are stacked with loyalists, but I believe their Sunshine laws are in the constitution. It’ll be an interesting legal case.
Jay
@Brachiator:
we used to have Red Tories here as a majority in the Progressive Conservative Party. They were socially liberal. They funded AIDs clinics, kept abortions legal, increased UI, welfare and immigration.
They were fiscally conservative, cutting back on wasteful military spending and nixed a bunch of Federal boondoggles, (economic investment when the economy was hot, they preferred to finance those sort of Federal programs when the economy was not).
Sadly, they are extinct as a species.
Instead, we have Trudeau, with my one only big gripe, spending billons over the actual value to buy TMP, the expansion is billions over budget, and that whole exercise, didn’t buy him a single Alberta vote, which was the whole point, but it sure pissed off a lot of folks in BC and Indigenous Peoples.
O. Felix Culpa
@Splitting Image:
In which “centrist” = “tiresome scold.”
Brachiator
@C Stars:
Hitchcock gives Kelly the last word. She is dressed in jeans and reading some book about the Himalayas, indicating that she is compromising with the character played by Jimmy Stewart. But the last shot in the film shows her putting the book down and picking up a high fashion magazine, Harper’s Bazaar.
frosty fred
@Fleeting Expletive:
Jim Hightower
narya
@Dorothy A. Winsor: We’re here, we’re there, we’re everyfuckingwhere.
trollhattan
@Miss Bianca: Did somebody say “Libertarian?” Here’s a fresh take from them.
https://twitter.com/reshetz/status/1669003636544765952?cxt=HHwWgICw0d79vqkuAAAA
Chris Johnson
@Brachiator: I’ve only recently gone HARD against TYT. The Young Turks are currently acting like paid chaos agents, to the point where they’re pissing off real (pro Ukraine) leftists really badly. They’ve been doing a series of takes that will inevitably lead to a ‘why I left the left’ heel turn.
And the thing is, Dave Rubin, Jimmy Dore, Michael Tracey, all came through them, so it’s like this isn’t new.
Assume The Young Turks are the baddest of bad faith. It sure looks like it to me. You gotta be suspicious of the mysteriously super well funded, high production value guys who just need to tell you for the Nth time how Democrats are not your friends…
JPL
@different-church-lady: That made me laugh.
JPL
@Sparkedcat: We live in strange times. Make sure you bring plenty of tums, and if necessary leave a puke bag in the car.
Salty Sam
That was the title of a book by Jim Hightower, former Texas Agriculture Commissioner in Anne Richards’ administration. After the Repub takeover of the Texas State govt, he became a writer/investigative journalist, with a newsletter called “The Hightower Lowdown”
Miss Bianca
@Scout211: Is (some of) our Republicanz learning?
Geminid
@Chris Johnson: TYT’s money may be coming from people like Peter Thiel and David Sacks.
Are you familiar with the Twitter site, “Post Left Watch?” Their pinned tweet is about funding of Rumble, which hosts people like Jimmy Dore and Aaron Mate. They closely follow actors in the Red-Brown, “Horseshoe” alliance.
AWOL
See Reagan 1980.
Will is a liar and rat fucker.
George Will – Wikipedia
Sister Golden Bear
@zhena gogolia:
He’s protecting his grift.
jimmiraybob
Sure, Superman has some valid points but so does Bizarro Superman.
Join us at No Labels, along with our co-founders Joe Lieberman and Lex Luther, where we are absolutely sure that we can find a sensible compromise solution.
Miss Bianca
@Baud: My pal D, the only Libertarian I know who actually doesn’t seem to be nothing but a Republican in disguise, rolled his eyes so hard when I (somewhat gleefully, I confess) told him about this article, I thought they were going to come out of his head.
Sister Golden Bear
Meanwhile the U.S. has an internal refugee crisis as 120,000-260,000 trans people have already fled to safer states, and more than a million are considering doing so, but the mainstream media continues to obsess about drag queen story hours and lies about “groomers.”
So yeah, fuck Centerists who are OK with splitting the difference between human rights and genocide.
jnfr
So say we all.
artem1s
do libertarians next, plz!
persistentillusion
@Miss Bianca: I do love that Jared, for all his occassional position I oppose, does know how to bring it.
Fleeting Expletive
@Salty Sam: I loved Hightower! Thank you for identifying the author.
Miss Bianca
@trollhattan: Ah, another one of their ice-cold hot takes, I see.
Brachiator
@Jay:
Thank you for the insights on Canada. I don’t follow the news from there as well as I should. And even here it’s usually through BBC News stories.
PaulWartenberg
These No Labels poseurs are not true centrists. They are warmed-over conservatives desperate to protect tax cuts and deregulation while avoiding the hazards of the racism and sexism that’s overwhelmed the modern Republican Party.
They can do this because the media always wants a goddamned horse race, and the “third party” vanity antics provide that narrative.
Jay
Baud
@Sister Golden Bear:
Wow. That’s higher than I would have guessed.
Odie Hugh Manatee
No Labels is almost like an asshole… it’s in the middle and its purpose is to deliver nothing but shit. Almost, except for the fact that an asshole actually serves everyone.
No Labels just serves assholes.
Jay
@Baud:
The numbers will continue to climb, as others leave.
If Tran’s arn’t safe, and Drag Queen’s arn’t safe, then LGBQ people arn’t safe,……… and it goes on and on.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/kelowna-short-hair-girl-gender-identity-1.6875738
Luckily, we don’t have “free speech” up here and charges will be laid.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
It’s noteworthy that the only Democrat who ran for President in 2020 who was proposing anything extreme was Andrew Yang. He went on to found the Forward Party, which just so happens to have the same stated mission as No Labels
All the people I knew who discovered Libertarianism when Ron Paul was running for President went on to be some of Trump’s most vehement supporters. ‘Nuff said.
dave319
@Jeffro: All these “privately, we want him dead” Republican hooftwat assclown traitors had their chance. Twice, there was impeachment. Coulda stopped this malaise douchebag dead, pulled his plug, stood up for their oath to the Constitution, let the process work as it was intended to. The cowards couldn’t find in themselves the decency to do what was right and proper.
Not for nothing, but there is no one left on this planet who can claim, from the very escalator ride on, that they did nazi Dump, and his value to the dunderheaded base, and their combined value to the fascist project, for exactly what it was–a towering stench of rancid John Birch rabid possum that now had a standard bearer to ooze, scuttle, and shamble behind.
Dump’s all yours, scumbags. Jacob Marley’s chains got nuthin’ on you , individually and collectively.
Dan B
@Sister Golden Bear: Are there robust programs for assisting Trans who cannot afford to move? I’ve heard of discussion but no activity.
Ixnay
@Fleeting Expletive: Jim Hightower, a buddy of Mollie Ivins.
C Stars
@Dan B: I don’t know about robust, Sister Golden Bear probably knows more, but from the groups I am involved with of families/guardians of trans young people, there are definitely grass roots support networks starting to develop.
ETA there are some harassment issues that may prevent people from being more open about their plans or mutual aid work.