Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

Chutkan laughs. Lauro sits back down.

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

Peak wingnut was a lie.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Bogus polls are all they’ve got left. Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls a year from now.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

You are here: Home / Archives for Kay

Kay wrote at Balloon Juice from 2010-15.

Since then Kay has been sharing her thoughts in the comments rather than on the front page.

Kay

Headed Our Way

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A good primer on what may be the next racial issue we’ll be hearing about, but not actually dealing with in any substantive or helpful way:

Another public conversation about race may be the last thing the Obama administration wants, but thanks to the Supreme Court, one is very likely on the way. It has been nearly three months since the court “invited” — that is to say, ordered — Solicitor General Elena Kagan to “express the views of the United States” on whether laws that take away the right to vote from people in prison or on parole can be challenged under the Voting Rights Act as racially discriminatory.

The bigger issue of restoration of voting rights to felons has been fought for 10 years at the state level. It’s not new, and it’s not an issue that’s specific to the Obama Administration.
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However. Based on the increasingly insane way each and every issue that touches on race has been handled since Obama was elected, I think it’s safe to say this will be presented in the most explosive and least sympathetic way possible.
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If one or another conservative activist submits a grainy, heavily edited video clip to major media that has any tangential relationship to “felons” or “voting”, all bets are off, and it could be a new low. On the current scale, as a reminder, our latest new low was Breitbart versus Sherrod, so lower than that.
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Anyway, read the stories in the Sentencing Project Report, because it’s amazing what people will go through to vote.
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More here

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Texas Doesn’t Secede…This Time

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There are more uninsured residents of Texas — 6.1 million and counting — than there are people in 33 states. The state’s elected officials might be expected, therefore, to cheer a federal health care law that is likely to deliver billions of dollars from Washington to Austin and cover millions of low-income Texans.
In Austin, legislative hearings and agency planning sessions proceed despite Gov. Rick Perry’s vow to fight “on every front available” against a law that he characterizes as “socialism on American soil.” Bureaucrats apply for federal grants and collaborate with the Obama administration at the same time that Attorney General Greg Abbott strategizes to eviscerate the law in court.
“That’s sort of the operational norm in Texas,” said F. Scott McCown, executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for safety-net programs in the state. “Your leadership may be railing against Washington, but federal supremacy still requires that the people in the trenches get the work done.”

Perry runs on “fighting on every front” while Democrats address a huge problem in his state, a problem he knew needed fixing, because every governor knew.
Conservative governors get to dodge political risk and accountability with one-liners about “shredding the Constitution” while Democrats in the federal government address their health care problem, a problem they could have addressed at the state level, but didn’t.
Even-handed commentary will focus on Perry’s supposed reluctant acquiescence to federal supremacy, the legal matter, continuing the myth that Texas is one of a loose collection of 50 states, soldiering on independent of the other 49 and the feds, mostly burdened by the relationship.
Perry refused comment on this story. Of course he did. Telling the truth about the deep and abiding relationship his state enjoys with the federal government contradicts conservative dogma and makes it impossible for him to make secession speeches.
And Democrats aren’t helping any:

The Democratic nominee for governor, Mayor Bill White of Houston, has not made an issue of Mr. Perry’s approach. He said in an interview that he also opposed the health care law because of its potential impact on the federal deficit.

Health care reform going to the states is a good opportunity for Democrats to start countering Republican’s abstract theories on state’s rights by telling the truth: that this relationship is long-standing and mutually beneficial, every politician at the state level knows it, and that’s the real reason it isn’t going away.

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Two Tiers

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These bailed-out workers took a real hit:

Among workers building the Jeep Grand Cherokee here, there are few obvious distinctions. Clutching lunch sacks and mini-coolers, they trudge together through the turnstiles at the plant’s main gate each day to tinker with the same vehicles, along the same assembly line, performing the same tasks. Yet they fall into distinctly unequal classes: About half make $28 an hour or more, while the rest, the recently hired, make $14. This oddity, which could become the norm in much of the domestic U.S. auto industry, arises from the jury-rigged labor agreement that the United Auto Workers, U.S. automakers and the federal government reached during the industry’s near-death experience last year.
“The idea of the UAW and the steelworkers negotiating so that workers could make it into the middle class, of allowing them to make it as manufacturing workers — that is all gone,” Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University. “And it’s difficult to see how they will be able to find their way back.”
The two-tier agreement “effectively ends many of the principles established 70 years ago in the UAW’s birth,” Bill Parker, a negotiating committee leader, wrote in an unusual dissent. “For years, the UAW embodied industrial unionism and the gains of the New Deal. So goes the UAW, so goes the American middle class.”

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Center Right Nation

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Hello again.

I was kay the commenter and now I’m Kay.

I live in a rural Ohio county and I’m active in the county and state Party.

I’m a political minority here, and I am sometimes photographed standing next to the other Democrat, so I get  email “notices” like this from local Republicans who know me, or somehow got my email address:

Jul 17, 2010 … Jerry Garcia in concert. MONTPELIER -The public is cordially invited to a Southern gospel concert with Jerry Garcia at 10:30 a.m. Sunday.

It says Jerry Garcia so it goes to the Democrat.  That one was actually pretty funny.

I don’t mind at all being a being a numerical political minority here.

I think of us as “scrappy” rather than “the designated losers”.

In any event, all Democrats are a political minority, regardless of numbers, because as you-all know despite the math, this is a Center Right Nation.

Thanks for having me, John.

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