I’d forgotten how funny this episode was:
The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
Pap Smears at Walgreens | ||||
|
Hilarious.
by John Cole| 62 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links
I’d forgotten how funny this episode was:
The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
Pap Smears at Walgreens | ||||
www.colbertnation.com | ||||
|
Hilarious.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 47 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links
John’s right about how we need to fight, and after reading Planned Parenthood Saved Me, all I can think is bring it on. Reading story after story of women for whom Planned Parenthood was a last choice, and who were treated with dignity, compassion and the kind of love that Jesus preached makes me spitting mad. How could we have sunk to such a low point that a national treasure like Planned Parenthood is treated like an outcast and pariah? Why do we even deserve these people? They’ve gotten nothing but a ration of hate, bullets and bombs, and embarrassed and cowardly tolerance from a lot of “moderate Democrats”.
DougJ and SteveM are right that the noise machine is formidable. But at some point people just decide “enough” and there’s really no amount of media noise that can change their minds. Usually that point is when the human damage and pain caused by policies from the right are just too much for the overwhelming majority of Americans to tolerate. In the last couple of years, a number of factors coalesced to connect homophobia with teenage suicide, and while there’s still plenty of hate for the gays by a minority in our society, is there any doubt that efforts like the It Gets Better project and thousands of other efforts have made a lasting change in the way an overwhelming majority looks at homosexuality? When I read Planned Parenthood Saved Me, I feel the same way that I did when watching the first It Gets Better videos. It’s hard to tell if something’s really changed until long after it happens, but I have some cautious hope about attitudes toward Planned Parenthood changing after the Komen incident, and the attention that it brought to Planned Parenthood.
This post is in: Election 2012, Excellent Links, Open Threads, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
__
His Supreme Shrillness sorts out Romney’s “I’m not concerned… ” bullshit:
… [J]ust a few days ago, Mr. Romney was denying that the very programs he now says take care of the poor actually provide any significant help. On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”
__
This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false: U.S. poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as, say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?
__
Also, given this whopper about how safety-net programs actually work, how credible was Mr. Romney’s assertion, after expressing his lack of concern about the poor, that if the safety net needs a repair, “I’ll fix it”?…
__
Specifically, the candidate has endorsed Representative Paul Ryan’s plan for drastic cuts in federal spending — with almost two-thirds of the proposed spending cuts coming at the expense of low-income Americans. To the extent that Mr. Romney has differentiated his position from the Ryan plan, it is in the direction of even harsher cuts for the poor; his Medicaid proposal appears to involve a 40 percent reduction in financing compared with current law.
__
So Mr. Romney’s position seems to be that we need not worry about the poor thanks to programs that he insists, falsely, don’t actually help the needy, and which he intends, in any case, to destroy.
__
Still, I believe Mr. Romney when he says he isn’t concerned about the poor. What I don’t believe is his assertion that he’s equally unconcerned about the rich, who are “doing fine.” After all, if that’s what he really feels, why does he propose showering them with money?
Go read the whole thing, get yourself in the right fighting frame of mind for a new day, maybe forward it to some of your low-information FB acquaintances who don’t understand why everyone keeps saying mean things about that nice Romney fella.
Also, what Mr. Pierce said:
… We are falling like dim children, like the suckers we always are, to the notion of the deserving and undeserving poor, the have-less-and-lesses are being pitted against the have-littles, and the have-nots. That’s what Willard Romney’s been about the last couple of days. He wants to find a way to harness the fear people have of becoming poor to his advantage at the expense of the people who actually are. That is the basis of the entire public career of Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, and the whole party has signed the guestbook into his little S&M parlor of a budget.
What else is on the agenda for this Friday in February?
Early Morning Open Thread: Calling Willard Out (Again)Post + Comments (22)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Assholes
Thanks to commentor Boxer Beater for the news that Koch-mocking prankster Ian Murphy at Buffalo’s The Beast has finally published this year’s edition of The Fifty Most Loathsome Americans. An excerpt, special for DougJ:
48) Christopher Hitchens
Crimes: First dead atheist to inspire such hagiographic dreck since Mother Teresa. Born British, died unmistakably American, having been so wooed by the “War on Terror” that he was sworn in by then DHS head Michael Chertoff. He was a pompous misogynist and warmonger who, above all else, loved the sound of his own voice. He palled around with comb-licking goon Paul Wolfowitz, advocated for Bush’s reelection, and clung to his scotch-soaked end that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. With his undoubtedly elegant prose, Hitch provided more support to Islamophobes than a Lowe’s 2×4.
Smoking Gun: “Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad.”
Sentence: Remembered accurately.
Not everyone will agree with all Murphy’s choices, but an article which refers to Frank Miller(#21) as “the Stephenie Meyer of comic books” and suggests that Ayn Rand (#25) be “Dug up, bones put on eBay; bidding war between Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, and Penn Jillette; proceeds used to lift dozens out of poverty” might just be a mood-lifter on a February Wednesday…
Apart from that, what’s the mood in your neighborhood tonight?
by John Cole| 41 Comments
This post is in: Election 2012, Excellent Links
Rick Perlstein, in a piece about why Romney’s Mormonism won’t matter in the general, makes a great observation:
That’s the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the right comes around too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place. (Take their treatment of Martin Luther King – they went from initially blaming him for his own death, to, by the 1990s, lionizing him as a conservative role model – as an example.) Then they move on to some new existential terror, and the cycle repeats itself.
He forgot one part of the process, which is when the right blames the left for their own sins- “DEMOCRATS ARE THE REAL RACISTS,” but overall it is spot on.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 34 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links
If you’ve ever wondered what Balloon-Juice looks like through the Great Firewall of China, reader Brian sends this screenshot (click to embiggen). Basically, the text makes it through, but YouTube is blocked. On the plus side, there doesn’t seem to be an ad for a sugar daddy matching service. Brian has more about Internet access in China in a post on his blog.
After all the attention given to Foxconn and working conditions in China, Brian’s also working on a series on his experiences in China. Here’s his first post about a young woman he got to know who worked 12 hour days in some kind of tourist trap art gallery. Brian also promised that he would write about a conversation about Michelle Bachmann with a Taiwanese lady he met in Kaohsiung (in the southern part of Taiwan).
This post is in: Election 2012, Excellent Links, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
Another analysis of the Presumed Republican Nominee, from Paul Constant at The Stranger:
As for Mitt Romney? For some reason, the guy has always reminded me of Tom Cruise, and I never could figure out exactly why that was. It’s not that both men have made People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People list, even though they have; or that both men belong to religions that creep everyone else out, even though they do; or that both men are ridiculously wealthy and unnaturally moisturized, even though they are. It wasn’t until watching Romney’s South Carolina concession speech that I finally realized what it was about him that made me think of Cruise.
__
In all his movies and, more importantly for our purposes, in all his talk show appearances, Cruise only comes in one flavor—INTENSE. Even when he’s not gibbering up and down on an overstuffed settee, he’s staring directly at the person he’s talking to, his jaw clenched, his eyes smoky and penetrative. He can’t make jokes, because jokes are born of nuance and self-understanding, and Tom Cruise doesn’t have time for any of that shit. He’s busy being Tom Cruise all the goddamned time, and the only thing harder than being Tom Cruise all the time is being Tom Cruise when he’s pretending to interact with other human beings.
__
For the last six years, Romney has set his formidable brain to one task: become the perfect Republican presidential candidate. He’s surrounded himself with the best political team money can buy. He’s financed extensive surveys of early primary states, he’s paid experts ridiculous sums of money to run scenarios for every single eventuality that could occur in the 2012 campaign, and he’s in all likelihood dropped exorbitant sums of money in the laps of branding experts to tell him at what angle he should hold the microphone away from his body to look most presidential.
__
But like Tom Cruise, Mitt Romney gets lost in the Uncanny Valley because his outsize ambition blinds him. He’s spending all of his time thinking about what a perfect presidential candidate should say and look like and do rather than being a presidential candidate…
But then, some people say Romney’s actually been planning on being president since approximately 1970:
… Upon completion of his foreign mission, he immersed himself in the 1970 senatorial campaign of his mother, Lenore Romney, who was running against Phillip Hart in the Michigan general election. That same year, the Cougar Club — the all male, all white social club at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City (blacks were excluded from full membership in the Mormon church until 1978) — was humming with talk that its president, Mitt Romney, would become the first Mormon president of the United States. “If not Mitt, then who?” was the ubiquitous slogan within the elite organization. The pious world of BYU was expected to spawn the man who would lead the Mormons into the White House and fulfill the prophecies of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith Jr., which Romney has avidly sought to realize…
As the master of modern political journalism wrote: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And if you think this presidential campaign has been pretty weird so far…