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It always rains on the alternating-week night when the recycling goes to the curb, but especially if the last recycling pickup was missed. #firstworldproblems.
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And, yes, I am fully aware that I should count my damp-cardboard blessings because it could be snowing, instead. How’s the weather out there?
When honesty informs history…
The Atlantic Magazine has come out with a special issue to commemorate the 150 Anniversary of the Civil War. TNC has been working on a piece for that issue and it is up online. It is excellent, honest and challenging. Here is a taste:
The Civil War marks the first great defense of democracy and the modern West. Its legacy lies in everything from women’s suffrage to the revolutions now sweeping the Middle East. It was during the Civil War that the heady principles of the Enlightenment were first, and most spectacularly, called fully to account.
In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved—to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people—is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery—chief among them, its flag—still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of “freedom.” It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.
The journey that Ta-Nehisi Coates has been on to explore the Civil War has produced some exceptional work. This piece is another on that journey. It is one of the best things I’ve ever read on the reasons for–and the meaning of–the Civil War. I encourage you to take a moment and read it.
Cheers
Open Thread
Share your awesome and clever gift ideas.
Crazy like on Fox
Libby Spencer tags an amazing stat (from):
Among Republican voters in Iowa, nearly 40 percent say they get most of their news from the network (Fox) and its many conservative hosts, according to the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll. And among those viewers, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, is trouncing Mr. Romney.
I’d be curious to know if you ask “do you get most of your news from either Fox or right-wing radio”, if that figure would go over 50% (Rush isn’t on Fox and his audience is at least as large as Fox).
Who’s Next? The race is on…
This Frederick Burr Opper cartoon from an old issue of Puck (The Onion/Daily Show of its day) seemed like a perfect image to describe the GOP race for the White House. It is just one pratfall after another.
Now, conventional wisdom tells us that it is only a matter of time until Newt takes a fresh pratfall. In fact, waiting for Newt to slip and crash seems to be Romney’s campaign strategy. And this might be a winning plan as Newt has done the “Pan-cake Drop” so many times that you could almost rename the move as the “Gingrich Drop”. OTOH, Newt has taken so many falls that it is hardly newsworthy. The Professor crashes to the ground so often that his supporters just brush it off. They expect him to do pratfalls and could care less when he does.
By contrast, Willard “Mitt” Romney fears the peel–and with good reason. His recent disaster of an interview on Fox News showed that whenever he leaves his Mitt-buble-of-protection he finds himself doing the “Dude Kick”, “Vanderbilt Slide” and “Langtry Twist” with ease. And yet, the Gingrich surge is forcing him to do just that. After almost two years, Willard “Mitt” Romney will finally go on one of the Sunday News shows. Sure it’s Fox News, but even Chris Wallace will be tossing banana peels at Mitt’s feet (and I’ve heard rumors that Willard might even feel forced to grant some non-Fox interviews and even take questions from the press). Also, too, the Des Moines Register debate on the 10th and another Fox News debate on the 15th will litter Willard’s pathway to January with pratfall peril.
The race is on to see which potential GOP candidate will crash and burn next. Newt is the odds on favorite for that roll. I expect that he will have regular slips and that his supporters will not care, but he could have a massive fall that takes him out. And then again, it could be Mittens who implodes. He really has not been tested in this cycle and has barely left his bubble. Newt needs a massive screw-up to get knocked out of the race while a much smaller fuck-up by Romney might take him out.
As for the rest of the field, I expect them to matter very little in the near term. Bachmann and Perry are comic relief. They fall with such regularity that that is all folks expected out of them. Ron Paul is good at avoiding implosion, but the GOP power brokers hate him so much that the only way he’ll be on the ballot in November is as a Libertarian. And that leaves Santorum and Huntsman who hope if they stay in the shadows long enough they’ll be the last two standing come March or April–and then their pratfalls will be noticed (until then, nobody really cares what they do).
The coming weeks should be quite entertaining.
Cheers
That obscure object of desire
“Reasonable” conservatives’ latest crush (Huntsman) goes wingnut:
“[T]here is — there are questions about the validity of the science, evidenced by one university over in Scotland recently. I think the onus is on the scientific community to provide more in the way of information, to help clarify the situation.”
Ha ha, you stupid gullible motherfuckers.
Open thread
Classic Max. He has gotten somewhat bigger in the sixteen months since then.
Chat.