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Just to butch it up a little around here. Or to demonstrate the mundane futility of middle-aged life in the semi-suburbs, where my weekend will start at either hardware or the chain drugstore, with a side trip for pet supplies, and as a reward: sock shopping.
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Anybody got more ambitious plans to share?
Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
Predicting Votes by Counting Checks?
For the stats dorks, Dan Amira at NYMag‘s Daily Intel raises the question “Which States Are Most Enthusiastic About Obama’s Reelection?”:
The Obama reelection campaign is very proud that it has now reached 1 million donors. As it should be! That’s a lot of people who still believe strongly in the president despite, you know, How Things Are. Yesterday, Team Obama launched a page where you can browse all kinds of information about these donors — their most common first names, for example, or what time of day they were most likely to donate. One piece of data that caught our eye was the number of individual donors from each state. This, we thought, could actually serve as a pretty useful indicator of which state is most enthusiastic about Obama’s reelection. A poll can tell you how many people say they plan to vote for Obama, but words are not as important as deeds, and actually donating money is a clear signal of not just support, but passion and motivation…
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So, what does the map indicate about the intensity of Obama support in each state so far this election season? Its biggest revelation, in our opinion, is Ohio. With its eighteen electoral college votes and working-class population, Ohio is a perennially important swing state. Obama won it by 5 percent in 2008. But as the map shows, it has a pretty low Obama donors-per-capita ratio. Every other state in Ohio’s color tier was won by John McCain except for Indiana (and nobody expects Obama to win Indiana again) and that one weird Omaha electoral vote in Nebraska. This doesn’t bode well for Obama’s chances in Ohio.
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It’s not all bad news for Obama, though. Virginia and Colorado are both in the top tier of Obama donors per capita. Even if Obama loses Ohio and Florida, carrying Colorado and Virginia would give him a very plausible path to victory. Incidentally, it would also set up a very plausible scenario for an electoral college tie. Yikes.
I’m guessing that progressive (read: sane) people in Ohio may have been a little distracted by all the local ugliness from Gov. Kasich & his fellow Kochsuckers right now. For the details of NYMag‘s methodology, click the link. I’m sure there’s all sorts of excellent details waiting to be parsed on Team Obama’s page, too.
Lindsey Graham: “Let’s Get In on The Ground”
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Via Charlie Pierce, Think Progress transcribes Lindsay Graham on Fox News, going for the gusto:
“… If we could have kept American air power in the fight it would have been over quicker. Sixty-thousand Libyans have been wounded, 3,000 maimed, 25,000 killed. Let’s get in on the ground. There is a lot of money to be made in the future in Libya. Lot of oil to be produced. Let’s get on the ground and help the Libyan people establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market principles.”
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I can’t top Mr. Pierce’s summary at Esquire‘s Political Blog of Sen. Embarrassment to America:
… Senator Huckleberry Grabitall is an impatient fellow. There’s oil under them corpses, and it’s by god our oil, so we should just go in and drink that damn milkshake before our plucky allies decide that, just because it’s under their sand, they have some sort of legal right to the stuff. Sorry so many of them got killed — Psst! A lot more of them would have been alive if Mighty Man Me had been running things — but we’re past all that now. Sweep ’em aside and let’s go to work….
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You know what? The United States has “a government based on free-market principles” like the one Huckleberry is recommending. Dammit, I think the Libyans can do better.
“Too small for a republic, too large for an insane asylum.” Forget the Palmetto Republic, we’re talking about Lindsey Graham’s ego.
Lindsey Graham: “Let’s Get In on The Ground”Post + Comments (58)
Open Thread: Debate Death March
The NYTimes informs us that Fox news will be sponsoring two additional debates, “adding to an already packed schedule of face-offs“, as the Grey Lady delicately phrases it. Possibly Fox, as the first NYTimes commentor suggests, has decided that “Are Any of the GOP Candidates Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?” is cheaper to produce and/or draws more viewers than its current reality show line-up. On the other hand, perhaps Roger Ailes’ underlings are worried that whichever one of the existing GOP-candidate pool “wins” the chance to run against President Obama may not only reverse the infamous 1984 Reagan-Mondale landslide, but destroy the entire Republican party, and so they’re grabbing whatever grift remains before the final train wreck.
Either way, I’m using it as an excuse to link to Gail Collins on the latest debate-debacle, because I agree that poor Seamus Romney must never be forgotten:
… This week’s debate was a triumph for Perry, who not only put Romney on the defensive, but did it in complete sentences. He did get lost in the weeds during a discussion of Romney’s Mormonism. (“And this country is based on, as Newt talked about, these values that are so important as we go forward, and the idea that we should not have our freedom of religion, to be taken away by any means.”)
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The whole First Amendment thing might be a little complicated for a governor whose State Constitution prohibits anyone who doesn’t believe in God from holding public office. This is not a joke.
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But about Mitt Romney and the landscapers. This is the story: In 2006, The Boston Globe reported that the yard of then-Governor Romney’s family home was being groomed by a landscaping firm with a history of using undocumented workers. The team of reporters, led by Jonathan Saltzman and Maria Cramer, tracked down people in Guatemala who recounted fond memories of their years of clipping the Romney grass without the requisite immigration papers.
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There was quite a bit of grass to clip. The family lived in an affluent Boston suburb in a house on two-and-a-half acres, with a pool and a tennis court. Not as fancy as the $12 million beachfront pad the Romneys are currently renovating in California, but it was home….
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Interestingly, though, Romney kept using the same service until a year later when he fired them after The Globe did a follow-up. (“Lawn Work at Romney’s Home Still Done by Illegal Immigrants.”)
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What do you think took him so long? Was he distracted by the pressure of preparing for the 2007-8 season of presidential debates, during which Romney accused Rudy Giuliani of making New York a “sanctuary city,” Mike Huckabee of supporting “in-state benefits for illegal immigrants” and McCain of pushing “amnesty”?
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Also, how was the paperless worker that Mitt ordered off the property transported away?
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If a crate on the roof plays any part in this story, we are going to be really, really disturbed.
Open Thread: Invisible DFHs!
Via Joe Coscarelli at NYMag‘s Daily Intel:
The NYPD deputy who was seen far and wide on video firing pepper spray not once, but twice at nonviolent Occupy Wall Street protesters feels “tortured” by the incidents, but “would do things the same way,” according to sources who have spoken with him. DNA Info reports that Anthony Bologna said, “I did not intend to spray the women,” and has a different version of events than what the video appears to show. According to the officer, who sources say believes he “acted with the best intentions,” there were three men on the ground attempting to grab the legs of other cops from underneath the orange netting that had protesters corralled. That’s not what it looks like; maybe he just has really bad aim.
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According to Bologna, his intended targets jumped up in the commotion and ran east. The second video of Bologna’s trigger-happy pepper-spraying is not accounted for, but did contribute to getting him relegated to desk duty.
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Bologna was lightly punished, but according to sources, hopes to be “back on the street.” Maybe then he could track down the three mysterious hoodlums who nearly ruined his career.
Someone who’s a middle-management veteran of the NYPD should be able to come up with a better explanation than a crumb-faced toddler who blames the broken cookie jar on “Mr. Boogie Monster and the bad bears”.
Thurston Willard Howell Romney
If we’re approaching the time when we can start ignoring the nutballz, teahadists, and vanity candidates to focus all our righteous Democratic animus upon Willard “Mitt” Romney, I’m glad to have Mr. Charles P. Pierce on our side:
… Here are the two things we learned about the actual frontrunners last night. First of all, Mitt Romney is still a smug, entitled prick. His regular-guy shtick has never been convincing, and it never will be, so he abandoned it entirely last night. If he wasn’t whining, continuously, about how he wasn’t being allowed to speak, he was letting loose with the kind of contemptuous snicker that you aim at the help when they fall down the stairs. (Remember in 2000, when pundits wouldn’t shut up about Al Gore’s alleged sighing? This was worse.) For some reason — and “utter, flop-sweaty desperation” is the first answer that leaps to mind — Perry decided to go after Romney on an old story from the Boston Globe in which it was reported that the Romneys had illegal immigrants doing yard work on the family manse back in Massachusetts. Romney parried the attacks ably with his usual mixture of condescension and contempt for the lower classes who dare question him. And then he proceeded to drop his hands, and stick his chin out.
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First he said that, when he learned that the landscaping company had hired undocumented workers, Romney told Perry that he told the company, “You can’t have any illegals working on our property. I’m running for office, for pete’s sake, we can’t have illegals.”…
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The answer was not, “Hey, we can’t have this. It’s illegal.” No, for Mitt, the first problem was that he couldn’t find a way to spin it if anyone found out. And then, Mitt continued, that “it’s hard to know, when you’re hiring people to work on your property, if they’re hiring illegals or not.”…
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What a rhetorical bonanza was sitting right there in front of the dirt farmer’s kid from Painter’s Gulch. Mitt Romney was asking — nay, begging — to be framed as a wealthy, elitist snob, complaining about the difficulty of hiring a decent lawn service, and worried more about his political future than the fact that he was accessorial to breaking the immigration laws.
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Unfortunately, the second thing we learned, one more time, is that Rick Perry isn’t that quick. Unfortunately, Perry is molasses running uphill in February. The opportunity went a’glimmering.
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Which is too bad because, earlier that day, Romney let his inner loan officer shine through even more clearly in a video interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, in which Romney said we should let the foreclosure crisis “bottom out.” This is of a piece with his earlier contention that the Obama Administration should have let the auto industry go belly-up. It’s a chilly, accountant’s answer to a deeply human problem, and one that has at its roots more than a little outright criminality.
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If you want to know why so many Republicans have trouble, as the pundits put it, “warming up” to Mitt Romney, you saw exactly why last night. It’s because, basically, at some level, even Republicans are human, and they’re not going to get cozy with a guy who acts as though at any minute, he’s going to tell them to go out and trim the hedge…
Open Thread: “You Smell Like Bacon to Us”
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Felix Salmon has a nifty little post on meme generation, OWS, and what he calls “The Abacus Sign“, Abacus being the bankster grift Thot Expermint referenced in the quote. It’s a good pic, which deserved to go viral, but it also gave Salmon an opportunity to brag on his contribution to Probably The Greatest Work of Art Created in 2011 If Not In This Entire Century.
ETA: If you’re not clicking the second link (William Powhida), you’re missing out. Seriously.
Open Thread: “You Smell Like Bacon to Us”Post + Comments (57)