Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

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

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

You cannot shame the shameless.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

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Zandar wrote at Balloon Juice from 2011-16. (1975-2023)

RIP Zandar, We are still here fighting the stupid, now in your honor.

blog Zandar Versus The Stupid.

Twitter: @ZandarVTS

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Zandar

It’s Not The Size Of The Man In The Fight…

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I honestly don’t understand the media obsession with Chris Christie’s weight.  Yeah, he’s a big guy, so what?  If you’re going to go after Christie, he’s got a long record of wingnuttery and semi-ethical New Jersey political nonsense to shine the spotlight on.

One of the most persistent stories that dogged Christie in his 2009 campaign was his unusual financial relationship with a top aide at his federal prosecutor office, Michele Brown. Christie lent Brown some $46,000, which he says was to help a family friend through a rough patch. But critics argued that the move was an improper conflict of interest heading into a gubernatorial campaign since Brown was in a position to help Christie in a variety of ways. Her job included handling FOIA requests, including those from Governor Corzine’s campaign, for example. And in one instance, she argued to colleagues in favor of wrapping up a major corruption probe before July 1, when Christie’s successor took over the US Attorney position, a move that ensured credit for the case would clearly flow to Christie. Brown resigned shortly after news of the loan broke and, according to the New York Times, she paid off Christie’s loan in October 2010.

It wasn’t the only allegation of conflict of interest that Christie fought off. The then-US Attorney testified before Congress on a series of no-bid monitoring contracts worth millions that he awarded to various law firms. One contract, worth up to $52 million, went to former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Christie’s old mentor. Another former US Attorney chosen for a monitoring contract, David Kelley, had previously investigated Christie’s brother in a stock fraud case in 2005 — he was not indicted while fifteen others were. Top lawyers at another firm he awarded a major contract to later donated about $24,000 to his campaign. Christie said the contracts were awarded on merit and accused Corzine of “character assassination” for raising the issue.

He was also accused of mishandling his office’s budget as US Attorney. In a 2010 report by the DOJ’s Inspector General, he was identified as one of the most profligate federal prosecutors in the country from 2007 to 2009, spending taxpayer cash on luxury hotels that exceeded government rates by as much as $242 a night. Christie said during the 2009 campaign that his office overspent only when there were no alternatives.

There are a number of serious ethical and corruption issues surrounding the New Jersey governor and they have nothing to do with his weight.  The more I see serious news organizations like Reuters engage the ridiculous “debate” over Christie’s size, the greater disservice to what should be the actual debate is done.  Pretty soon we’re going to be at the point where people will only talk about his size and not his record or corruption issues, and people will tune out “another story about Christie’s waistline or whatever” even when the actual reasons as to why he shouldn’t be in charge of anything are finally discussed.

No, I don’t think Christie has anything close to a real shot at the White House because of his issues as a blue state governor in a blood-red primary season and his record is pretty repugnant, but honestly I find the constant stories about the “challenges” Christie faces because of his size about as ridiculous as the stories about the “challenges” women or minority candidates face in politics (not to belittle issues that do exist, but silly me, I believe a candidate should be judged on policy and record.)  What I mean by that is whatever actual issues that may arise from stories about Christie’s weight are used for their “HA HA shock factor,” not to actually have a debate.  It’s been done to death with Hillary Clinton’s gender and President Obama’s race, Keith Ellison, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman’s religion, etc.  It’s obnoxious:

Speculation that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will enter the U.S. presidential race has led to a feverish debate about the possibility of having the fattest man in the White House since the corpulent William Howard Taft squeezed behind the big desk in the Oval Office.

Replace that “fattest man in the White House” language with any other description of race, creed, gender, sexual orientation, religion and you see what the problem is.  Why is this acceptable?  And this is Reuters, folks.  Why not just call him President Truffle Shuffle and be done with it, Reuters.  Criminy.

So yeah, lay off the size stuff and check the guy’s record.  Not only does this guy not deserve to be President, his crony capitalism adventures mean he shouldn’t be in politics at all.  The size issue is a smokescreen but it’s the latest shiny object to chase this week for our Awesome Media Guys.

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New For The Fall 2011 Season

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Howdy.  Zandar here.  I understand foul-mouthed vitriol inside jokes introductions are in order, so let’s start this off.  You’re probably wondering who I am and why I’m here.  I’m not terribly sure about the latter (or why John Cole believes I should be here other than I’m “interesting”) but the former is easy enough.  Before we begin, however, let’s get something out of the way.

I have no pets.

Not even goldfish.  Not even a stolen road cone named “Murray the Obtuse.”  No pets have I.  I live in an apartment building in the Cincinnati suburbs of northern Kentucky which doesn’t allow pets, so I’m basically pretty good with that.  I like animals, I just don’t have any.  Kinda bachelory over here too.  You might have seen me at my blog (where I yell at Rand Paul a lot) or some of the other blogs I contribute to, so if you’re wondering “who the hell is this guy, anyway?” I’ve left a lot of digital evidence around as to how my mind works, such as it is.

I like the Atlanta Braves, the Nebraska Cornhuskers, and the Duke Blue Devils.  I’ve been known to make a number of pointless eighties movies references for no apparent reason, and to me the only Doctor Who is Tom Baker (Nothing against the new guys.  Love the new series.  New guys are not Tom Baker.)  I like my Kindle, I hate coffee, and I come from a long line of Long Island Catholic Democrats (which is funny because I was adopted when I was three days old.)  I was born in Nebraska, grew up in North Carolina as the oldest child of four, and now live in Kentucky.  I do IT work for a Fortune 100 company and I’m in my mid-30’s.

The last ten minutes of Meet The Robinsons makes me cry every damn time.  I refer to John Boehner as “Orange Julius”.  I do not like oatmeal, but I enjoy a pickle, pastrami, and pepperoni sandwich on rye with Tabasco sauce with the best of them.  I played tuba in high school and was pretty decent.

Mostly however, I am an unapologetic supporter of Barack Obama.  I don’t always agree with all of his policies, those of you who have read my stuff are aware of my vehement disagreement with his choice of Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary and there are a number of things I feel he could have improved on a civil liberties perspective.  But given the alternative, I’ll vote for him again in 2012 without hesitation for a number of reasons, chief of which is the fact he really has been the most progressive President we’ve had in decades if not generations.  I believe the Republican Party is all but lost right now, that its leaders do not understand basic macroeconomics, and that have resigned themselves to misguided and dangerous efforts to disenfranchise the voting rights of millions of Americans because it’s the only way they can retain power, and I think that’s the largest issue we face as a country today.  I write because I feel that this needs to be addressed and both issues do not get enough attention, so I fling posts into the abyss out of the vain hope that I can make “a difference.”

That anyone listens to what I have to say is coincidental, I assure you.  Anyway, I am terribly grateful to be in the presence of writers I have a lot of respect for, as well as a community that dwarfs my own comfortable environs by about two orders of magnitude.  I’ve been called up from AAA to pitch in the rotation, as it were.  I will try not to implode the place.

Maybe I’ll get a hedgehog, too.  Who knows.

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The Country’s Worst Governor Strikes Again

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Florida Republican Rick Scott (who just in the six months he has been in office has managed to approach The Twenty-Seven Percent Solution(tm) on his approval numbers) has now put into place one of his more odious laws, random drug testing for all public assistance recipients (because they have to be criminals.)

Under the law, which went into effect on Friday, the Florida Department of Children and Family Services will be required to conduct the drug tests on adults applying to the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

The aid recipients would be responsible for the cost of the screening, which they would recoup in their assistance if they qualify.

Those who fail the required drug testing may designate another individual to receive the benefits on behalf of their children.

So why bother with this additional government regulation?  Money, of course.  Let’s recall Scott is in fact a Medicare fraudster of the highest order.

Controversy over the measure was heightened by Scott’s past association with a company he co-founded that operates walk-in urgent care clinics in Florida and counts drug screening among the services it provides.

In April, Scott, who had transferred his ownership interest in Solantic Corp. to a trust in his wife’s name, said the company would not contract for state business, according to local media reports. He subsequently sold his majority stake in the company, local media reported.

On May 18, the Florida Ethics Commission ruled that two conflict-of-interest complaints against Scott were legally insufficient to warrant investigation, and adopted an opinion that no “prohibited conflict of interest” existed.

No conflict of interest here, nope.  But all Scott’s friends in the Florida medical services industry?  Well, they just added a couple million drug tests a year to their balance sheets, and it’s a guaranteed revenue “stream” (if you’ll excuse the pun.)  And even if 99% of the people they test are clean because they’re scared straight, the taxpayer gets to foot 99% of the bill.  Lovely, huh?  The more “effective” the program is, the greater the cost to taxpayers.  I love it.  LexCorp has nothing on this guy.  Does it matter that a Michigan law that warranted the same testing was struck down in 2006 under fourth amendment issues?  That was then.  These days?  Who knows?

But let’s stick it to the young bucks and the Cadillac Queens.

[UPDATE] And Mr. 29% here is already talking about how great his second term will be.

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Couldn’t Have Been Wall Street, Right George?

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Guess who’s buying into the revisionist idiocy that Dems and poor minorities created the financial crisis?  George Will:

Put on asbestos mittens and pick up “Reckless Endangerment,” the scalding new book by Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times columnist, and Joshua Rosner, a housing finance expert. They will introduce you to James A. Johnson, an emblem of the administrative state that liberals admire.

The book’s subtitle could be: “Cry ‘Compassion’ and Let Slip the Dogs of Cupidity.” Or: “How James Johnson and Others (Mostly Democrats) Made the Great Recession.” The book is another cautionary tale about government’s terrifying self-confidence. It is, the authors say, “a story of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home.”

The book centers on the Community Reinvestment Act and of course, the Big Dog.

The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act pressured banks to relax lending standards to dispense mortgages more broadly across communities. In 1992, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston purported to identify racial discrimination in the application of traditional lending standards to those, Morgenson and Rosner write, “whose incomes, assets, or abilities to pay fell far below the traditional homeowner spectrum.”

In 1994, Bill Clinton proposed increasing homeownership through a “partnership” between government and the private sector, principally orchestrated by Fannie Mae, a “government-sponsored enterprise” (GSE). It became a perfect specimen of what such “partnerships” (e.g., General Motors) usually involve: Profits are private, losses are socialized.

Got it?  The Carter-era CRA and the Clinton-era push for home ownership forced banks to give mortgage loans to “those people”, and because they couldn’t pay it destroyed America.  Wall Street is 100% innocent, you see.  It was all about the road to hell paved with Democrats and horrible government regulations and affirmative action and “those people” who destroyed the country.

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Ironic License, Please

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One of the Ohio Republicans who pushed a state law to toughen voter ID restrictions to “prevent fraud” because there’s no reason why “citizens wouldn’t have a driver’s license” would himself lose the right to vote under the law because his license may be revoked for an Indiana DUI.

 

On April 23, an Indiana state trooper pulled Rep. Robert Mecklenborg over for a burned out headlight on a 2004 Lexus he was driving. After failing three separate field sobriety tests, Mecklenborg allegedly refused to take a breath test and was placed under arrest. A blood test later revealed that he had recently taken a Viagra.

“Given that he likely is not in possession of his own drivers license (it should have been confiscated and suspended in accordance with Indiana DUI law and procedure), perhaps he will opt to arrest his drive to repress voting rights,” the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s Carolyn Fiddler wrote in a blog post.

Mecklenborg’s arrest was first reported by local news station WLWT. His arrest report has been posted online. It shows that Mecklenborg was accompanied by a 26-year-old woman, who a local blogger claims has “personal connections” with Concepts Show Girls strip club, which is right near where Mecklenborg was arrested.

 

Republican stupidity really cannot be demonstrated in the real world any better than this.  In their zeal to make voting as hard as possible for students, the elderly, minorities, and the poor, this asshole caught drunk and on Viagra with a 26-year old girl near a strip club would in fact revoke his own right to vote, on top of being a criminal douchebag while proclaiming to the world that only bad, evil people would be against a voter ID law.  They can’t even take over the country when the means to take over the country are literally handed to them, because they’re too busy thinking with the wrong head and getting arrested for breaking laws they are supposed to be writing in the first place.  Joss Whedon could not pen better material for any medium.

The irony, it forms myriad threads that interweave on so many different levels, it creates a 17-dimensional sweater.  I understand that yes, Republicans are still dangerously crooked bastards who will destroy the country given the first opportunity to enrich themselves (and proceed to do so on a daily basis) but the Darwinian elimination of the ones who are just too stupid to get that simple process down?  Why, that’s the only moment of levity we have on this ginormous wallowing dirigible bound for the lower planes.

And yes, there are strip clubs in Indiana.

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Land Of 10,000 Furloughed

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And so Minnesota’s government and a number of “non-critical” state services are shut down until further notice as of today.

Visitors won’t be able to go to the state parks or the zoo, and travelers will find the highway rest stops shuttered. Road construction projects will cease, as will licensing for teachers and businesses.

Many social service agencies will lose their funding, cutting state support for programs such as job training and homelessness prevention. Those that don’t have reserves will likely close their doors.

And up to 23,000 state workers are scheduled to be laid off, though they will continue to get health benefits and can return to their jobs when the budget impasse is resolved.

Basic health and safety services will continue, a judge ruled on Wednesday. The state must continue funding custodial care for residents in prisons, treatment centers and nursing homes. The state troopers will continue to patrol. The state universities will also remain open.

Dem Gov. Mark Dayton wants to close the state’s $3.6 billion shortfall with a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes on the wealthiest 2%.  Republicans vowed that zero tax hikes will be acceptable and want to take out every bit of the shortfall on the working class, the elderly, and the poor after passing a $200 million tax cut on businesses.  They then shut down the government in response.  Sound familiar?

Now we go to the “Who will the voters blame?” stage of the negotiations.  Meanwhile, thousands of state workers don’t know when they are going to go back to work again.  Best irony?  The state’s unemployment and job force workers are as of today out of a job to go to.

If they can’t get 100% of what they want, Republicans blow up the whole thing.  As goes Minnesota, so goes the nation?

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Colbert’s Joke Is On Us, Apparently

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Campaign finance reform advocates are worried that Stephen Colbert’s SuperPAC shtick may open the door to some real abuses by the corporate-owned press depending on how the FEC rules.

 

For its part, the commission has been treating Colbert’s request like any other. It’s created some quirky moments, like when Colbert had to assure the commission that the cash he collected outside their office was “received by Mr. Colbert personally as payment for shaking his hand” and wasn’t going to his yet-to-be-formed “super PAC.”

Ultimately, if they follow the suggestions of their staff, the FEC seems set to let the Colbert Super PAC go forward one way or another. The commission will consider one of three draft opinions authored by their staff, all of which appear to let Colbert’s parent company Viacom pay for the Colbert Super PAC’s expenditures without having to publicly report their donations.

That’s a move that has campaign finance reformers worried. Public Citizen wrote a letter to the FEC on Wednesday calling on the commission to reject the request.

“This would carve out a gaping loophole in campaign finance laws, allowing any company involved in media to foot, in secret and without limit, the electioneering expenses of political committees,” Public Citizen’s government affairs lobbyist Craig Holman said in a statement.

Holman warned that if the FEC granted Colbert’s request, “the next request will be for media companies to directly finance unlimited candidate campaigns under the press exemption – an abuse that is already being advocated in some quarters.”

 

Now, nobody does satire like Colbert.  The whole point of satire is to play the absurd straight and let the unintentional humor shine through.  And I honestly think Public Citizen is overreacting.  Colbert is clearly drawing attention to corporations and their control over media influence and elections, which seems to be the entire point of the exercise.   Yes, if media corporations are allowed to use the press exemption to get around campaign finance laws, it would be a disaster (what campaign finance laws we have left, anyway.)  But there do seem to be some potentially ugly ramifications here if the FEC approved Colbert’s PAC as is.

I personally think the FEC understands this and will not approve Colbert’s request for precisely that reason.  The press exemption is pretty ludicrous, and needs to be examined.  Colbert I believe is using this farce to force the FEC to erect some strict barriers on using the press exemption and spell them out in the campaign finance rules.  The whole point is for Colbert to play all this out by drawing attention to just how ludicrous it all is on its face.  He does it daily.

At least, I hope that this is where all this is going.  If the FEC says “Hey sure, press exemption, whatever, go for it media conglomerates!” then the joke’s truly on us.

 

(Cross-posted at ZVTS)

[UPDATE 12:10 PM]  Well.  Looks like it’s a moot point as the FEC has in fact approved Colbert’s PAC as is. (h/t The Moar You Know)

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