Whether you think Mr. Snowden is a hero, traitor, self-aggrandizing ass, tool of a self-aggrandizing ass or whatever, it appears we can strike “competent travel agent chooser” from his list of attributes. Or maybe it’s Julian Assange’s fault Snowden has been camped out in the Moscow airport for more than a week. Even if he ultimately ends up in Rivendell, Snowden probably won’t look back fondly on this layover.
Florida woman, still rocking a punk rock ethos in the 2020s, which is kind of sad. Betty Cracker has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2012.
Happy Canada Day / Bonne Fête du Canada
O Canada: We love you for your exceptional beer, hockey prowess and William Shatner. America thanks you for being such a stylish hat.*
*Stolen from someone, somewhere.
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Creepy-Ass Crackers, Race and Bias in the Zimmerman Trial
Yesterday, one of the defense lawyers in the Zimmerman trial said that shooting victim Trayvon Martin injected race into his fatal encounter with George Zimmerman by referring to Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker” while on the phone with his friend, Rachel Jeantel. The attorney tried to get Jeantel to own up to the term being a racial slur, whereas she said it was just slang.
We can put some of this down to different group perceptions of the word “cracker,” and I may be in a somewhat unique position to crackersplain at least one aspect of it. In Florida, the word “cracker” did and does have benign connotations among some groups: It means the people who lived in Florida during its frontier era (think the family from “The Yearling”) and their descendants, of which I am one.
Does the use of the word “cracker” in that sense have a racial component? Sure — it means white people, but it also means a certain subset of white people, i.e., Florida natives who have a rural, Southern culture distinct from that of the Northern-born white folks who started arriving in the state in great numbers after the blessed invention of air-conditioning.
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Tammy Smash (Open Thread)
If you’ve ever thought of parlaying that repetitive motion injury you got while shoveling popcorn into your mouth during “The Hurt Locker” into a disabled veteran set-aside contract from the US government…just don’t:
Representative Tammy Duckworth, ladies and gentlemen. She’s the Democrat who kicked deadbeat dad teabagger Joe Walsh’s ass to win her seat.
Apparently ass-kicking is something of a thing with Representative Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. Try not to piss her off.
[H/T: Valued commenter Trollhattan]Terms of Surrender
When facing defeat, some retreat to the hills and vow to fight on unto the 12th generation, while others angle to achieve the most advantageous terms of surrender. Chunky Bobo signals his affinity for the former group but urges them to be open to the tactics of the latter:
Unless something dramatic changes in the drift of public opinion, the future of religious liberty on these issues is going to depend in part on the magnanimity of gay marriage supporters — the extent to which they are content with political, legal and cultural victories that leave the traditional view of marriage as a minority perspective with some modest purchase in civil society, versus the extent to which they decide to use every possible lever to make traditionalism as radioactive in the America of 2025 as white supremacism or anti-Semitism are today.
And I can imagine a scenario in which a more drawn-out and federalist march to “marriage equality in 50 states,” with a large number of (mostly southern) states hewing to the older definition for much longer than the five years that gay marriage advocates currently anticipate, ends up encouraging a more scorched-earth approach to this battle, with less tolerance for the shrinking population of holdouts, and a more punitive, “they’re getting what they deserve” attitude toward traditionalist religious bodies in particular.
If religious conservatives are, in effect, negotiating the terms of their surrender, it’s at least possible that those negotiations would go better if they were conducted right now, in the wake of a Roe v. Wade-style Supreme Court ruling, rather than in a future where the bloc of Americans opposed to gay marriage has shrunk from the current 44 percent to 30 percent or 25 percent, and the incentives for liberals to be magnanimous in victory have shrunk apace as well.
[Paragraph breaks added because…damn–Ed.]
Douthat couches the debate in the “religious liberty” framework, which is pure bullshit. No one is trying to force Cardinal Dolan to sanctify same-sex marriages. On the contrary, it is the pro-marriage equality side that requires the “religious liberty” to tell a celibate man in a dress and red beanie to stop trying to control our sex lives and secular social commitments.
But I think Douthat may be right about how the loss of this battle in the larger culture war will play out. Will they retreat to the jungles of Guam and hold out for decades or accept the victory of the godless and move on?
Victory in Texas
Thank you, Texas State Senator Wendy Davis (D-Ft. Worth):
A bill that opponents claimed would virtually ban abortion in Texas failed to pass late Tuesday after lawmakers missed a deadline by just minutes.
[snip]Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, acting as Senate president, initially said the voting began just before midnight, NBCDFW.com reported, and several reports suggested that the bill had been passed and would go to Gov. Rick Perry.
But Dewhurst later announced that the vote had been held too late. At 3 a.m. local time (4 a.m. ET), he said that the session had expired and the bill could not be “signed in the presence of the Senate … and therefore cannot be enrolled.”
“It’s been fun, but see you soon,” he added.
Dewhurst’s taunting “see you soon” isn’t an idle threat: They’ll be back to ban abortion, and in comments to local reporters, Dewhurst signaled how they’ll characterize the opposition:
“An unruly mob, using Occupy Wall Street tactics, disrupted the Senate from protecting unborn babies,” he said.
Dewhurst hinted that Governor Rick “Goodhair” Perry will call another special session to get the bill passed.
The ongoing War on Women circus in Texas will continue as states that need to suppress voting to give Republicans a fighting chance will use the assist from the Republican faction of the SCOTUS to enact new measures to make it harder for minorities and young people to cast ballots. This can’t possibly backfire on the GOP, can it?
Putin Steals Snowden’s Laptop During Moscow Layover
MOSCOW – June 23, 2013 – NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden left Hong Kong on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow. His ultimate destination is thought to be Venezuela by way of Havana. However, during Snowden’s Moscow stopover, he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who stole his laptop.
“He said he wanted to see my laptop, so I showed it to him in the airport lounge,” said Snowden. “Putin picked it up and said, ‘I could kill someone with this.’”
“I reached out to take it back, but his secret service guys surrounded him, and he walked out of the airport with my fucking laptop!” Snowden continued. “Son of a bitch!”
Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
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