Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

There is one struggling party in US right now, and it’s not the Democrats.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

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

Peak wingnut was a lie.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

The jury literally has a bell they can ring to force Trump to show up on command. Greatest thing ever!

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

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Steve M. cross-posted on Balloon Juice from 2011-13, from his own blog No More Mister Nice Blog.

Twitter: @nomoremister

Steve M.

Here Comes That Awful Feeling Again

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Steve Benen and Jonathan Chait are flagging an excerpt from Mitt Romney’s new stump speech (Chait calls it “Glenn Beck-level insane”):

Just a couple of weeks ago in Kansas, President Obama lectured us about Teddy Roosevelt’s philosophy of government. But he failed to mention the important difference between Teddy Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Roosevelt believed that government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities. President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes.

In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing — the government….

Add this moderate-liberalism-equals-socialism crap to the Birtherism Lite of Romney foreign-policy attacks on Obama — frankly, I don’t care whether he said “keep America American” or “keep America America,” he’s still accusing Obama of not being loyal to his country — and we’ve got … well, what have we got?

In all likelihood, we’ve got 2000 all over again. Romney now, like Bush then, hasn’t always spoken like a flaming wingnut throughout his political career (and didn’t fully behave like one in the governor’s office) — which means that Romney now, like Bush then, is going to be called a “moderate” during the general election campaign no matter what he says in his speeches. Romney’s Massachusetts past, like Bush’s cooperation with Texas Democrats and prattle about “compassionate conservatism,” is going to give him carte blanche to say anything without the mainstream press grasping the fact that if he’s talking wingnut, it means he intends to govern as a wingnut.

Some beat reporter from 2000 — I think it was Adam Clymer — said after Bush took office that his right-wing leanings were obvious all through the campaign if you just bothered to read his policy proposals and listen to him on the stump. This stuff was hiding in plain sight. Everyone just ignored it. And they’re probably going to ignore it again.

****

Kevin Drum asks:

But what about the general election? Independents aren’t going to go for this stuff. They’ll just shake their heads and wonder what the hell he’s talking about. So is he going to ditch this stuff completely after he’s won the nomination and pretend that he never said it? Or will he keep pressing, literally hoping that if you say anything often enough you can get people to believe it?

Oh, he can keep saying it. The political cost Republicans have paid for calling Obama a commie and an America-hater is precisely zero: “socialist” is simply this decade’s synonym for “liberal” said with a sneer, and all that Kenyan/Muslim/anti-colonial/bows-to-world-leaders stuff is the new “hippie peacenik appeaser.” Romney’s “nice” version of it will be to preface it by calling Obama a “nice man.” That confers blanket immunity.

****

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog).

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The Next Birtherism?

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Let’s say it’s a tight race between Barack Obama and whoever emerges from the GOP scrum — the Real Clear Politics poll summary currently has Obama leading Romney by less than a point, and though Obama has a much bigger lead over Gingrich, the economy isn’t getting better all that quickly, and it’s impossible to know what could happen in Europe in the next year. So if it’s Obama vs. Gingrich, that could be close, too.

So imagine Obama ekes out a win in November, barely ahead in the popular vote and with one or two tight states separating him from the Republican in the Electoral College. Now, imagine that this comes after Eric Holder has promised an aggressive pushback against Republican laws restricting voter participation:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday entered the turbulent political waters of voting rights, signaling that the Justice Department would be aggressive in reviewing new voting laws that civil rights advocates say will dampen minority participation in next year’s elections….

Do you think the aftermath of such a squeaker victory might be the point at which the demagoguing of the “massive Democratic voter fraud” myth goes utterly mainstream? By which I mean that prominent Republican officeholders and officials may literally not accept the results of the 2012 election, and may work to get them overturned, or at least to make hearings on the subject the main business of Congress (or whatever part of Congress is GOP-controlled)? And isn’t it possible that, if they work this hard enough, it could actually seem credible to parts of the mainstream press, even though the “evidence” will be overwhelmingly anecdotal and mostly irrelevant (e.g., Mickey Mouse’s signature showing up on petitions before being invalidated under the usual perfectly adequate fraud-detection procedures)?

This stuff pumps up the rubes, and Republicans use it as the basis for restrictive laws in the states, but they don’t seem to try to sell the voter fraud myth to the broad general public in a serious way. Under these circumstances, would they make a mainstream move with it? And could they get, say, The Washington Post to bite? Could they effectively nullify Obama’s reelection that way?

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

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Let Newt Get His Geek On

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I didn’t watch the debate last night, but I gather that this fell flat for Mitt Romney:

Asked where he and Gingrich differed, Romney said, “We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon. I’m not in favor of spending that kind of money to do that.”

… On moon mining, Gingrich doubled down — “I’m happy to defend the idea that America should be in space and should be there in an aggressive, entrepreneurial way” …

Amazing — Gingrich not only defended this, he wrapped it in the last refuge of a wingnut scoundrel, entrepreneurialism.

But that’s the thing about people like him: if you have that particular combination of screws loose, yes, you’re going to make manic, half-schizophrenic pronouncements about space colonization and the like, but you’re also going to have the cornered-rat instinct to jujitsu any direct attack on such pronouncements, so the attacker is the only one who winds up flat out on the mat. What I’m saying is that, with Gingrich’s particular brand of crazy, it’s futile to go at him head-on.

Far better to lull him into making even crazier pronouncements on the spot. Try doing it like this:

Romney: “We’ve suffered greatly in the three years of the Obama administration, and, well, it would be nice if we could just go into a time machine and turn back the clock to a moment before all that damage was done. Unfortunately, going back in time is just impossible — right, Newt? It’s really a shame that we can’t reverse all this damage with a time machine — isn’t it, Newt?”

Gingrich: “Well, in fact, Mitt, there’s been some extraordinary work done on time travel at a laboratory in Belarus, and it’s my belief that the United States would benefit tremendously from a massive program of research not only into time travel, but also into related possibilities, including astral projection….”

Now you’ve got him going.

Newt’s going to ambush you (his attack last night on Romney as a would-be career politician who just couldn’t manage to build a lengthy career was, I see, quite effective), and Newt’s primed to rebuff most direct attacks (though attacking him for supporting child labor, as I see Romney did, is a waste of time, because the stance is one of punishing the weak, which means it naturally appeals to the right). In short, I’d say you can’t actually defeat Gingrich — you have to find a way to get him to defeat himself. Which really shouldn’t be all that hard.

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

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Do You Smell That? I Think It’s the Zeitgeist

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I was reading today’s New York Times and I spotted this in a review of The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth by Alexandra Robbins, a book that sees former high school nerds triumphing in today’s adult culture:

The teen-to-adult turnabout theme isn’t particularly novel. One of its latest incarnations is a forthcoming Warner Brothers film, “Revenge of the Jocks,” about middle-aged former athletes struggling under the yoke of the nerds, their onetime victims.

OK, first of all, I don’t fully agree with the thesis of the book under review — sure, being an ex-nerd is good training for working on drool-inducing Apple products, being a game designer, creating summer tentpole movies, writing bestselling fantasy novels, or devising exotic, mathematically complex ways for Wall Street to be even more parasitical than it already is. If you’re the kind of ex-nerd who can take advantage of any of those opportunities, life is good; if not, your adult life is probably pretty much like your high school life.

But the notion that nerds now run the world is appealingly high-concept to media types who write trend pieces (and trend books) — and now, if that forthcoming movie is any indication, there could be a shift in what’s considered zeitgeisty.

Revenge of the Jocks? Yes, the movie really is on its way; it’ll be directed by the guy who directed Jackass, and a couple of its writers worked on Tropic Thunder. So it could be a hit. And it’s coming out in, um, 2012.

Do you see how well this could fit into media talk about a “man-cession” (male nerds aren’t really men, after all, as every high school bully will tell you)? Do you see how it jibes with statistics showing that the unemployment rate for blue-collar workers is horrendous, while the rate for the college-educated is not that bad? Do you see how it could fit into the tale of Barack Obama the “elitist” — in an election year?

Never mind the fact that the biggest brainiac in the punditocracy — as defined by the fact that he has a Nobel Prize and no other regularly scheduled pundit does — is constantly railing against policies that keep blue-collar people unemployed. Never mind the fact that MSNBC prime-time viewers are well-educated people who want unions to thrive even if they’ll never belong to one. If this movie is a big hit, pundits will see its success as the public’s way of expressing outrage at effete, technocratic, cerebral types like those in the Obama administration (as if the problem is smart people rather than the wrong smart people), and as a certain harbinger of the triumph of the GOP in 2012 (yes, that’ll be true even if Romney is the nominee — maybe he’ll start eating pork rinds or something).

The David Brooks and Maureen Dowd columns will write themselves.

I see an analogue to this in the past: Bruce Springsteen’s song “Glory Days.” Yeah, Bruce is a lefty, and the lyrics to that song are bleak, but the sound of that song, and of “Born in the USA” (despite its skeptical, downbeat lyrics), helped them fit perfectly into the Reagan “morning in America” moment, with its narrative of flag-waving anti-intellectuals with simple notions of heroism triumphing over wussy effete rootless-cosmopolitan nuance-loving liberals.

Springsteen’s mid-’80s jock-gone-to-seed could be 2012’s jock-getting-back-at-Obambi. And if that happens, once again we’ll be warping the real class war to fit a right-wing frame.

(X-posted.)

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A Long-Term Rental in the Village of the Damned

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First of all, I guess I’d better make a dry-cleaner run really soon — I’m at an age when I haven’t been invited to a lot of weddings lately, but since a hell of a lot of residents of my state might be heading to the Chapel of Love all of a sudden, I’d better make sure my good clothes are looking tidy and fresh. Mazel tov, folks. And thank you, Governor Cuomo — you may be a Christie Lite with regard to taxes and public-sector unions, but on this issue you’re conducting a master class in arm-twisting for progressive ends, a class I wish a certain rather more prominent Democrat would show up for and take notes.

****
Having said that. I want to shift gears extrememely awkwardly, and talk about, um, David Brooks.

Yesterday’s Brooks column concerned a Rolling Stone story about a teenage girl who gained some fame posting provocative content online, with ultimately unpleasant consequences for herself and her family. Brooks lives for the moments when he’s given an opening to express moral outrage, in a squeaky, soft-spoken, but ultimately noodgy neo-Victorian way; this is a rather tawdry story, so I guess you can’t blame the guy for piuncing on the opportunity to finger-wag and scold.

But the conclusion to which his column builds is preposterous:

She is an extreme case of an enormous uncontrolled experiment that is playing out across the world. Young people’s brains are developing while they are immersed in fast, multitasking technology. No one quite knows what effect this is having….

Most important, some young people seem to be growing up without learning the distinction between respectability and attention.

What is he saying? That failing to learn “the distinction between respectability and attention” is some sort of Net-driven, multitasking-derived disease that’s utterly new, and that’s turned our kids into strange beings we respectability-craving elders can’t recognize — or control? Is he arguing that we have failed to communicate our highly developed focus on respectability to our young?

Has he been living in the same country I have for the past few decades?

Has he watched reality television? Has he missed the entire dysfunctional-youth memoir boom?

For that matter, has he missed the rise of shock-jockery and the infusion of its values into political discourse (Glenn Beck, Michael Savage), or the infusion into news of penny-dreadful tabloidism (from Hearst through Murdoch and Nancy Grace)? Has he missed thelast three years of Sarah Palin’s life?

This is America. We don’t do anything “respectable” — or at least we have nothing but contempt for those who do what’s respectable (e.g., schoolteachers, or people who punch in at a factory and do honest work). “Respectable” work isn’t honored, and, if it pays a decent wage, we want to put an end to that, stat. So, since most people can’t be Steve Jobs or Lloyd Blankfein, there’s simply no reasonable path to feeling “respectable” than doing something sensationalist.

That’s not the fault of synapse-fried teens. That’s our fault, as American adults.

(X-posted.)

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I’m the School Bully, the Classroom Cheat, the Nastiest Play Friend You Ever Could Meet

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Kevin Drum* and Ezra Klein have been chatting about how Republicans negotiate. They seem to agree that it’s remarkable how Republicans have made raising taxes (on anyone whatsoever) in the service of a budget/debt ceiling deal seem unthinkable and extreme.

Ezra:

It is remarkable to watch how Republicans have taken tax increases, which have long been present in deficit-reduction deals and generally considered the equivalent of spending cuts, and turned them into something vastly more extreme and unthinkable. How unthinkable? Here’s a little game. Take almost any of the Republican leadership’s comments yesterday and substitute the words “bombing the moon” for the mention of taxes. See if the comments don’t just work, but in fact work a little better.

“We’ve known from the beginning that bombing the moon would be a poison pill to any debt-reduction proposal,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor. See? Or: “President Obama needs to decide between his goal of bombing the moon, or a bipartisan plan to address our deficit,” said McConnell and Sen. on Kyl in a joint statement. Or: “First of all, bombing the moon is going to destroy jobs,” said Speaker John Boehner. “Second, bombing the moon cannot pass the US House of Representatives — it’s not just a bad idea, it doesn’t have the votes and it can’t happen. And third, the American people don’t want us to bomb the moon.” …

But, see, I don’t think Republicans have made tax increases (at least on the rich, and possibly even on the middle class, if mild and targeted) seem extreme to most people. Ezra cites poll numbers that make this abundantly clear. And I think the walkouts on budget talks by Eric Cantor and Jon Kyl, taken in isolation, make Republicans look intransigent, in a way that generally polls very, very badly. In isolation, it’s a bad political move. Voters, especially swing voters, regularly tell pollsters they want the parties to compromise and negotiate like grown-ups, not act like stubborn children.

The problem is, those same voters also think that if Democrats can’t somehow persuade Republicans to negotiate like grown-ups, then they’re equally at fault. So it’s a wash. And Republicans know it’s a wash. So there’s no downside for them in acting like stubborn children.

Now, if the mainstream media would even occasionally float the theory that perhaps, just perhaps, the Republican Party is sometimes a tad extreme and irrational, maybe the truth of what’s going on here would have a chance of sinking in with average voters. But it’s taboo to say that. (It is not, by contrast, taboo in the mass-audience right-wing media to say that Democrats are insane socialists/fascists/compulsive spenders/plotters of the overthrow of America as we know it. Far from it — it’s mandatory, and it’s said on a daily basis.)

So, as far as swing voters know, these negotiations are just like playground interactions between two children, one of whom is perhaps a bit less willing to share than the other, but both of whom are basically good kids. They don’t see the bullying for what it is, and they value it as no worse than the sulking the other kid does when (as always) he doesn’t get his way.

(X-posted.)

*Whoops, my mistake — it was Andy Kroll, not Kevin Drum.

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Because There’s Been a Yawning Clown Gap in the GOP Field Since Trump and Palin Took a Pass

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This was odd yesterday:

Representatives of Republican candidates are meeting today in Ames, Iowa for what is essentially a real estate auction, buying up the best pieces of the Hilton Coliseum at Iowa State University, where Augusts’ Ames Straw Poll will be held.

The presence of operatives who refuse to identify which candidate they work for, however, has led the representatives of the declared candidates to threaten to walk….

Sources tell ABC News, the mystery candidate is Rep. Thad McCotter, R- Mich., an undeclared candidate….

McCotter’s been <A HREF=”http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55546.html”>hinting</A> at a run for a while, and if he does run, I’m jazzed. When the general public begins to take a look at the Republican Party, I want one of the faces of the party to be a guy who writes prose like this, from 2008:

…No starker episode exhibits our anile need for a moral hospice before we slither into the dust bin of history than the one playing out before Americans’ astonished eyes. Legacy building with the urgency of a dying Pharaoh staring at an unfinished Sphinx, George Walker Bush is bent upon being the first U.S. President to attend a foreign nation’s Olympics. The nation in question is communist China, the shock troops of which are presently bludgeoning Tibetan Monks as if they were orange bathrobed baby seals. (One shudders at the prospect this Tibetan repression is the Chi-coms’ sedulous sally into Olympic demonstration sports.)

Notwithstanding the Global Generation’s remaining misanthropes’ unsophisticated quibbling (i.e., me and mine), our Compassionate Conservative-in-Chief has eagerly RSVP’ed to the communist dictatorship’s dramatic recreation of the Berlin Olympics. Given “The Decider’s” resolve, hope dims we might disabuse his whimsy that watching a wobbling discus with the wanton butchers of Tiananmen Square can advance the sacred cause of human freedom….

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