“Dow 36000”, 2 million tea baggers, “The 5000 Year Leap”…what is it with wingers and big numbers?
DougJ has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
Wired for Republican control
This is telling: the David Bradley vanity project ranks the “50 most influential political commentators”. Of the first 13, there are 9 conservatives, two liberals, and two other (Tom Friedman and David Broder).
I don’t need to tell you that this is at a time when there is a Democratic president and Republican representation in Congress is at a 40 year low.
Update. I probably shouldn’t be shooting the messenger. For all I know, this list is accurate.
Update update. Michael Calderone points out that it’s about the same as another similar recent list.
The top spots stack up nicely with Mediaite’s power grid, with break things down a bit more over several lists.There, Krugman is number one among columnists with Limbaugh atop the radio host list.
No thugs in our house
Even for Dave Dan Riehl, this is really stupid:
Riding out of DC on the Metro, 9/12, there were some folks from South Dakota and also another Mid-West state I can’t recall in the same Metro car. We were talking, nothing special, really – politics, of course.
In the back were maybe ten or so black kids taking up that section of the car. There was no confrontation, just one or two of them talking loudly enough to make sure they’d be heard.
Without resorting to the poor diction it was along the lines of, these are the people who think Obama is the anti-Christ. That McCain he wasn’t chit. Obama’s going to be president as long as he wants, so these people better get used to it, etc. It went on but not really to a level that was so loud, or so confrontational that it needed to be addressed.
We just ignored them without much trouble at all.
Yeah, they were technically thugs. But the reality was they were still wannabes really, pretty young, not that big, or many. And if the several adults there for 9/12 actually needed to do something about it, the kids wouldn’t have lasted very long.
So let me get this straight: talking loudly about how Obama will be allowed to serve out his term and seek re-election makes you a thug. Carrying pictures of Obama with a Hitler mustache, bringing guns to town halls, and contemplating beating up children on the subway makes you a patriot.
Have I got that right?
(h/t Thers)
Update. Whoops, I see this is what John just posted on. I got distracted by the video in the post and didn’t notice. Sorry.
Comment of the day
From Swampland commenter Kevin Lyda on ObamaKanyeJackAssGate:
Also, I’d like to repeat an earlier question, why was Obama even asked about Kayne’s outburst? Does every black public figure have to apologize for the misbehavior of any black celebrity? Is this some heretofore unwritten job title?
Eventually folks might start to think that’s pretty racist. So either you folks will stop adding such job titles *or* you’ll add such job titles to non-black public figures. Suddenly Hillary Clinton will have to answer for Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton’s transgressions. Gordon Brown will have to apologize for Russell Brand and Hugh Grant. John Bohner will have to apologize for Nick Nolte and Sean Penn?
Maybe you guys can have a little tick off box in your notebooks for, “Do you support/condemn [newsmaker of your ethnic group] for doing [bad thing]?”
Of course it would just be easier if black public figures just began all speeches or interviews by condemning some other black people who did something dumb. That would save you the effort of asking…
A cool one million
I have a theory about what will happen in the 2010 House elections. The Democrats will lose seats — they have to, given that the economy is in the crapper and that they gained 50+ seats the last two cycles — but not as many as they should, for the simple reason that so many Republican challengers will be terrible. My district, NY-29, is shaping up as a classic example. It’s a brutal district for Democrats with around a +5 Republican Cook PVI and an even larger Republican registration advantage. It’s lily-white, largely rural, and pretty old — fertile soil for the tea bag tree. There aren’t that many birther types, because this *is* the north, but some of the counties in the district are technically part of Appalachia. In short, it should be tough sledding for the freshman Democratic incumbent, Eric Massa.
But it may not be, because the Republican challenger, Tom Reed, is a complete idiot. I almost can’t believe he did this:
The Steuben Courier reports that Tom Reed was the recent recipient of a “Restore New York” grant facilitated by State Senator George Winner. Reed, who owns the Masonic Temple in Bath, will match that grant with $820,000 of private funding.
The obvious question is how long Reed has owned the building, and how much he paid for it. If the answers are “not long” and “not much”, then he has a huge problem.
Never mind that Reed opposes stimulus spending, the real issue here is that this might possibly be illegal. Certain ethics rules apply once you’ve announced your candidacy and these may be in violation of them. At the very least, it looks very bad.
It would be one thing if Reed tried to do this on down low, but in fact the whole thing was trumpeted in a press release by the Republican State Senator who brought in the grant.
I’ve been watching a lot of tennis this week, so I don’t want to use the term “unforced error”. Maybe “code violation” would be more apt.
Update. Just to spell what’s so wrong with this (from Fighting29th):
It’s not too tough to put together a group of investors to “risk” $820K to get $1.18 million in free money. Those investors know full well that there’s an excellent chance that they’ll make a profit when the newly renovated Bath Masonic Temple is sold, since your money and mine is serving as a $1.18 million cushion to protect their investment.
Narcissism
It always amuses me when our pundits accuse others of being self-absorbed. Bobo:
Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.
Every moment of every round table on every Sunday morning show *is* one big self-celebration. I wish I could say that these celebrations were routinely interrupted by intelligent analysis, but that isn’t true.
At some level, our entire elite media functions as a strange satire: residents of Bethesda and Georgetown telling flyover country viewers about how real Americans think, millionaires telling middle-classers they need to sacrifice more, narcissists complaining about self-celebration….
Update. And, yes, how do you write this column without mentioning “Mission Accomplished”?
Update update. More generally, it’s ludicrous to claim that our civilization has been humble in anything like the recent past. Whether it’s Francis Fukuyama claiming that the west has ended history, George Wallace declaring white Americans “the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,”, or the fact that perhaps the most iconic image in the world is God giving a white guy a high five, the western world is one self-loving place and has been for quite some time.
Wolverines!
Winger Tim Graham on WaPo’s Swayze obit (via Steve Benen):
[T]oday’s Adam Bernstein obituary for Patrick Swayze begins obviously by noting his big hits “Ghost” and “Dirty Dancing,” but doesn’t get to “Red Dawn” until paragraph 23. Even then, Bernstein wrongly suggests he had a supporting role. […]There are clearly no fortysomething Reaganites working in the Washington Post newsroom.
You can’t spoof this stuff.