Enough Sturm und Drang…laissez les bons temps rouler.
Mardi Gras!
by DougJ| 81 Comments
This post is in: Beer Blogging, Open Threads, Good News For Conservatives
Mardi Gras!
Damned to Mediocrity
I’ll let this Ezra Klein deconstruction of Evan Bayh speak for itself:
So: Evan Bayh’s not a major deficit hypocrite. He’s a minor deficit hypocrite. But a deficit hypocrite all the same. In his exit speech, he describes himself as “a lonely voice for balancing the budget and restraining spending.” Of course, there’s no such thing in Washington as a “lonely voice” for a balanced budget. There is a cacophony of such voices, and a dearth of such votes. But votes are the only things able to do the job. If voices balanced the budget, treasury bonds would never rise.
Accusing a politician of deficit hypocrisy isn’t a particularly serious slur. Pretty much every politician is guilty of it. It’s a bit like trumpeting the fact that some politician or another wears a suit. But if Bayh’s sins are ordinary, so too was his career. Which is why I was surprised to see my colleague Jonathan Capehart term this a “brain drain.” I’ve talked to Bayh before, and like Jonathan Chait, found him special only in his ability to formulate platitudes on the fly. The guy missed out on a terrific career as a fortune cookie author (“Your country will be assured of greatness! Your lucky deficit number is zero!”), but the sciences will not weep for their loss.
It is kind of refreshing to hear someone in Washington speak about politicians that way- it basically reads like a cleaned up entry in the Buffalo Beast’s 50 worst people in America. In an era when the country’s greatest villains and biggest failures, after years of screwing the American people are guaranteed a reach-around on the op-ed pages of the WaPo and in the national media as they ride off into the sunset to their new lobbying jobs or wingnut welfare sinecures, having someone clearly and accurately define what a mediocrity someone was and is strikes me as a nice change.
And most devastating of all for Evan Bayh is that every word of it is true.
Open thread
An anonymous Democratic aide told me that you’re all a bunch of concern trolls.
Again
It is snowing. AGAIN.
Early Morning Open Thread: White Lady Redefined
As a Person of Size (size 3X, in t-shirts), I always take an interest in Jezebel’s food posts, but I just have to share Anna North‘s latest LOL:
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I wish organic food were affordable for everyone, and that our food system relied less on insecticides and antibiotics and other substances of questionable safety. But I also wish we could have this discussion without alarmism, and without treating people who enjoy a doughnut now and then like self-destructive crackheads…
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Comments about how healthfully one’s own family eats are a staple of Internet food threads — a significant sector of the online population seems to believe that simply sharing their own righteousness will eradicate diabetes.
There will be those who declare that I am incapable of having a correct opinion on this topic, because as a walking example of America’s Obesity Crisis, I am helplessly enthralled by Our New Worst Enemy, a substance “ten times more addictive than heroin” that “wreaks havoc on the immune system”. (They would be wrong, because it’s fat-laden potato chips, not sweets, that are my greatest weakness.) But I do think that the tendency to “demonize” particular foods or food groups springs from some of the same roots as the tendency to reject any information that conflicts with one’s personal political beliefs. People want to have a Unifying Narrative to help them understand what can seem like a cold and hostile universe. Whether that means believing that Big Agro has deliberately addicted us to Demon Sugar, that Big Gubmint has deliberately addicted us to Welfare Dependency, or that Big Oil deliberately brought down the WTC towers with the connivance of its puppets in the Cheney Regency — or some combination of all these theories — is less important than Knowing the Truth. Who was it said “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you crazy”?
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On the other hand… nobody doesn’t love puppies! John O “still hasn’t decided” how much he wants to “share” of his pet-rescue story, but here is a new picture of Dweezil:
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Early Morning Open Thread: White Lady RedefinedPost + Comments (132)
Open Thread
Number of things:
1.) Many of you found yourself trapped inthe spam filter. I guess with the new version of WP, that was bound to happen.
2.) Really lousy day today. Tried to do too much, and by 11:30 wished I was back home in bed. Shoulder is aching, and I took something for the pain for the first time in a week or so. Called the Doc to ask if it was normal for people to still experience pain three weeks after surgery, and was informed that I am an idiot and most people are in pain for eight weeks. Duly noted.
3.) I have been blocked by David Sirota, Joe Scarborough, and John Aravosis on twitter, which I find amusing. I think this is the offending tweet for the Joe Scarborough ban:
Not sure what brought on the Sirota ban, but I don’t know why I even followed him in the first place. Glutton for punishment, I guess. Aravosis banned me because I told him a tweet calling Democrats homophobes in the wak of Cheney’s BS yesterday deserved a #tcot (top conservatives on twitter):
I gotta admit, I didn’t see that coming. That is kind of weak.
4.) Can someone explain the difference between raid 0 and raid 1? Looking into purchasing a PC.
5.) With the retirement of Evan Bayh and with it looking like the Senate might even be in play, I gotta say- the suggestion to scrap HCR and starting over is turning out to be the quality advice I always thought it was in the first place.
6.) Don’t forget the Balloon Juice store is finally open! Look to the right for the link.
Yet another lie exposed
To build on DougJ’s post it is worth adding that the entire “they read him his rights only 50 minutes after he was arrested” talking point turns out to be a lie.
On Fox news this Sunday it was Lindsey Graham who took up the attack with rote repetition of these failed wing-nut talking points and the entire GOP line of attack concerning that fellow with the burning underwear continues to meet FAIL after FAIL.
According to the WaPo it turns out that this lie is only off by eight hours and 10 minutes:
The 23-year-old Nigerian man accused of attempting to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day was read his Miranda rights nine hours after his arrest, according to a detailed chronology released Sunday by senior administration officials.
Of course all of the folks who have been making this claim will rush to correct their error–and pigs will fly.
Steve Benen has some fun with this news this morning and you can too in an open thread.
Cheers
dengre