Everyone seems to have gone Galt, and I think I will too.
Also, the Masters is on. I’m rooting for “not Tiger.”
CBS Sunday Morning
I’m moving slow to day, which makes no sense, because I was in bed by 10:15.
Oh, well.
Early Morning Open Thread: Straw Men
David Weigel at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, Saturday, 11:45am:
[…] Nancy French’s Evangelicals for Mitt has been offering around 200 tickets for free, for anyone who wants to come and support Mitt Romney. At the party before Sean Hannity’s live taping of his TV show, French’s group handed out 800 copies of their man’s book, “No Apology,” and countless piggy banks. It’s hard to say how many of the people grabbing those favors will back Romney — one woman I spoke to, clutching two piggy banks, snorted when I asked if she’d vote for Romney.
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“These are for my grandkids,” she said.
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… [W]hile the outcome won’t matter in the long run, there’s a big difference between the narrative of a Paul victory, say, a Palin victory. Few, however, expect Romney to pull it out.
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“Evangelicals for Mitt,” laughed one GOP strategist who wasn’t backing any particular candidate. “You notice that their signs mention everything except religion.”
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David Weigel at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, Saturday, 7:01pm:
In a surprise, Mitt Romney edged out Ron Paul to win the SRLC straw poll by a single vote.
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Romney took 439 votes (24 percent) to Paul’s 438 votes (also 24 percent), a result that disappointed a Paul-heavy crowd that had stuck around to watch the results. Sarah Palin came in third with 330 votes (18 percent), and Newt Gingrich came in fourth with 321 votes (18 percent); Mike Huckabee, who did not attend the event, scored 4 percent. Total ballots cast: 1,806.
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Romney, who also did not attend the conference, benefited from a grassroots effort from Evangelicals for Mitt, a group run by David and Nancy French — who’d helped Romney score a second-place finish at the 2006 SRLC. They’d purchased around 200 tickets, 800 copies of Romney’s book “No Apology,” and 2000 piggy banks with the Evangelicals for Mitt logo. Before the vote, French soft-peddled the meaning of the exercise, stressing that it was “not binding.” After the vote, French held court near the press boxes as his small team hugged and high-fived.
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“Is that not incredible?” French said into a cell phone. “Our guy wasn’t even here!”
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When I spoke to French, he stuck by his “not binding” comment, then basked in his victory. “We just wanted to show that Mitt has friends down here.”
Remember how offended the Repubs got when Michael Steele suggested their votes could be bought for “tchotchkes”? Looks like Mitt’s Minions gambled, correctly, that just enough of their votes could be bought with re-giftable doorstoppers and piggy banks for the kiddies.
Willard Romney will be the death of me yet. A Romney/Palin or Palin/Romney ticket, barring total societal breakdown, would be crushed by the Obama 2012 team like a grape beneath a juggernaut, but I’m not at all sure my blood pressure could survive 18 months of toxic smarm poured over a word-salad of equal parts MBA-jargon and Talibangelical-tongues.
These are the days of miracle and wonders… a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires and babies…
Confederate History Month
A few days ago the Governor of Virgina designated April as a month to celebrate the Confederacy and their treason against the United States. I was not surprise to see Republicans from all over enthusiastically follow his lead this weekend as they gathered in New Orleans for a celebration of the founding fathers of the Confederacy in an over-hyped gathering know as Southern Republican Leadership Conference.
It is a bit ironic that the Party of Abraham Lincoln has been captured by the deadenders of the Confederacy–but it has. The Confederacy was one of the evil movements of history and I do not say that lightly. It was a movement based on the buying and selling of humans beings and the theft of their liberty and labor. This is the fact of it and no amount of myth weaving, fable spinning and even repeated screenings of Birth of a Nation can change that reality.
Reconstruction almost killed the Confederacy, but it found a host in the Democratic Party. For decades, it was the Democrats–especially those from the South–who kept the goals of the Confederacy alive. Over time the Confederacy lost their grip on the Democratic Party and when LBJ passed Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation, the spirit of the Confederacy went looking for a new political host. For a time this racist ideology found a home with the third party efforts of George Wallace, but it was Richard Nixon who thought he could invite this ideology of hate into the Republican Party and control it. He was wrong.
Now the Confederacy controls Nixon’s Party so completely that they would kick Dick out for being a squish. Reagan would get the boot as well.
There is just so much hatred and stupid driving the modern Republican Party. Bob McDonnell’s proclamation about Confederate History month was a ‘tell’ and so was the highly scripted ‘rebel yell’ of the SRLC. Lincoln’s Republican Party is dead. Like in a bad science fiction or horror film it has been taken over by a malevolent spirit: the Confederacy.
So in honor of Confederate History Month it is time to update the logo of the GOP:
Cheers
dengre
Saturday Night Open Thread
Since I know we are not all pet people here, I offer you this- Someone (Samkitten, spawn of Redkitten) got his first haircut:
I’m not a baby person, but that kid is pretty adorable. And that shit eating grin on his face is priceless- “Hey, ladies!”
Saturday Afternoon Open Thread
Grass cut, yard weed-eated, hedges trimmed, sidewalks swept and clean.
House dusted and vacuumed, glass cleaned, all wood lemon-oiled, kitchen clean, laundry done. Sheets changed, bathroom cleaned, toilets and shower spotless.
AND NOW WE NAP.
Things I Did Not Know About
Bob Herbert’s latest New York Times column celebrates “A Voice of Reason“:
[…}One of the reasons so many conservative Republican absurdities became actual U.S. policy was the intellectual veneer slapped upon them by right-wing think tanks and commentators. The grossest nonsense was made to seem plausible to a lot of people — people who wanted to believe in a free lunch. When Mr. Reagan told the country that “government is the problem,” the intellectual handmaidens of the corporate and financial elite were right there to explain in exhaustive detail why that was so…
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The liberal or progressive community was slow to counter the remarkable effectiveness of this intellectual offensive from the right. But during the 1990s and into the early-2000s, that began to change. And one of the progressive organizations that has done a really good job (but has never been particularly well known) is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary.
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Demos, headquartered in New York City, grew out of a series of meetings of scholars, activists, journalists and elected officials who were concerned about the ever-increasing influence of the right on public policy. “The thinking was that there should be more moderate, liberal and left-of-center voices,” said Miles Rapoport, the group’s president. The group was formed in 2000, a year that would later see the disputed election that gave the presidency to Mr. Bush.
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It didn’t take long for Demos to begin issuing loud warnings about the danger that ever-increasing debt was posing to American households, while pointedly disputing the argument that over-the-top credit card debt was primarily the result of excessive consumer spending.
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Working people from the middle class down were in serious trouble, and Demos, along with many other voices (the bankruptcy expert and middle-class advocate Elizabeth Warren comes quickly to mind) was sounding the alarm long before the Great Recession hit like a Category 5 hurricane…
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[…] Ronald Reagan and the right-wing zealots who revere him have preached a gospel that, when carried to its logical conclusion, would all but abolish government. It’s a failed philosophy.
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Demos has responded with admirable real-world scholarship, a highly respected fellows program to encourage new writers and thinkers and steadfast efforts to promote civic engagement. (It’s a big champion, among other things, of same-day voter registration.)
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It’s not just comforting but essential to have sane countervailing voices like Demos to remind us that government action is necessary to plan for the common good, to set proper rules for economic activity and to be a bulwark against predatory practices in the private sector.
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Demos is holding its 10th anniversary celebration on May 11, and Ms. Warren will be one of the honorees. If you think about it, raise a toast in the group’s honor.
For some reason, I had not previously been aware of Demos’ website, www.demos.org. Looks like much more than one weekend’s worth of good reading over there.