Dubya has a sad that the Bush Tax Cuts(tm) are referred to as the “Bush Tax Cuts(tm)”.
Jagoff.
Talk amongst yourselves.
by Zandar| 90 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
Dubya has a sad that the Bush Tax Cuts(tm) are referred to as the “Bush Tax Cuts(tm)”.
Jagoff.
Talk amongst yourselves.
by Zandar| 337 Comments
This post is in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, Clown Shoes, DC Press Corpse, Flash Mob of Hate, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, Stuff About Black People Written By a Black Person, We Are All Mayans Now
Via Gawker, The Daily Caller’s Mark Judge lives in DC and is white. His bike was stolen last week. This means that because DC’s population is mostly black, that Mark Judge is now free to unleash his inner racist upon the Capital, unfettered by “guilt” or “the common sense God gave a spiny echidna” or “humanity”. Handy!
When I got home I vented to my friends. I told them I was going to scour those neighborhoods until I found the bike. In reply, a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. “That person needs our prayers and help,” she said. “They haven’t had the advantages we have.”
That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.
It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.
And the shattered shards of Mark Judge’s broken soul go flying around in his own personal blame-nado, shredding whatever decency he had left. It gets worse from there.
I decided that I’m just going to let go of my white guilt. We’re all human, we all experience pain in our lives. And black pain is no different than white pain.
It felt good to say it: Black pain is no different than white pain. I’m tired of people using the moral authority of past generations for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Soledad O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, acts like she just stepped off the Amistad.
Sure. It’s cool to ignore, belittle, and denigrate the black experience because you’re tired of black people basically being black in your life, and if we would just stop being black, right? Like Trayvon Martin? Like those five shooting victims in Tulsa? Like President Obama and the Obama family?
See, here’s what guys like Mark here mean by “white guilt” and that is “I really don’t like black people, and I really want to affix blame for racism in America on them exclusively, because I’m sick of having to keep the presence of mind to not offend them and I really haven’t taken the time to try to understand them outside media stereotypes and the right wing bashing on the President for the last four years, and besides being a racist ass is just easier.”
So yeah, another guy goes and “speaks the truth about blacks” and he’ll be “unfairly persecuted in our overly politically correct society”. Which is where garbage like this always ends up in the end, down the same chute of racism as the rest.
Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one. But of course it’s our fault because we had to have collectively stolen his bike, right? And most of all throughout American history privileged white males have of course been the real victims of the last 250 years, right?
Jesus wept.
[UPDATE] And we have a winner in the “Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one” from MacRanger over at Macsmind.There are black ass clowns, black racists, black murderers, rapists and even idiots running the country. We have no reason to feel guilty for that. In fact as I’ve told you on many occassions I’m 2nd generation Irish. Never felt guilt, didn’t have to. The Irish had nothing to do with the treatment of Blacks in this country and in fact in many ways were treated even worse.
It’s time to push back against liberals who have goaded whites into guilt. In light of the crimes blacks have committed against whites in the last 100 years, I say it’s even. Move on.
Really? I mean I know Lionel Richie’s new country album is pretty bad, but…
This post is in: Election 2012, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat
Jonathan Chait at NYMag‘s Dail Intel has a cheerful perspective on “The Obama-Romney Confidence Gap“:
As the general election begins, it’s apparent that a wide gap in confidence has opened up between the two campaigns. The Obama campaign is bordering on cocky, utterly dismissive of Mitt Romney and warning against overconfidence. Obviously, campaigns always strive to convey confidence, with even the slightest hints of pessimism seen as potentially unleashing a self-defeating cycle of doom.
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So this admission, from the director of the Karl Rove–affiliated Republican Super-PAC “American Crossroads,” is unusual and telling:Mr. Law said, Crossroads research suggests that Mr. Obama’s campaign has started to gain traction among critical swing voters by arguing that Republicans, including Mr. Romney, favor an “economic plutocracy” in which middle-class voters can no longer count on financial security, even though they work hard and play by the rules.
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“His argument is: ‘The reason you feel bad is not because I’ve been an inadequate president but because the rules of the game are stacked against you,’ ” Mr. Law said. Calling it a “dystopian vision,” he added, “that narrative has some gravitational pull.”In other words, their research shows that Obama’s campaign to frame the economic debate is working. It’s genuinely quite rare for campaigns (or, in this case, quasi-campaigns) to make that sort of confession…
From the Buzzfeed article, “It’s ‘Game On’ in Chicago“:
… The Obama machine’s singular goal: to keep the president in his job by raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to recreate the momentum of 2008. There are now close to 700 hundred full time employees, an entire floor of office space, thousands of volunteers in well over 100 field offices across all 50 states, and the most impressive digital team a presidential campaign has ever assembled. There’s been experimentation—the tech team figured out a way to make the Obama website display perfectly on any device, a feat that wouldn’t have been possible even a year ago—and the entire office was designed to resemble a Silicon Valley start-up. The digital department is the largest in headquarters. Messina even consulted with Palo Alto execs to find the “best practices,” says an Obama official, including carpets (quieter), mixing the staffs on the floor into teams rather than departments, bouncy balls, and communicating with instant messages and Twitter. “We ensure maximum collaboration so people don’t sit with their departments, they sit in teams,” Messina told BuzzFeed…
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These days, the campaign’s Rapid Response team has reached out to reporters covering Romney, providing a rebuttal to every speech. They’re also in full-on courtship mode with a press that complains of a lack of access to Romney and his top aides. Obama’s headquarters averaged about ten visits a week from reporters over the past month, aides said. David Axelrod, whose official title of “senior campaign advisor” understates his role as guru and decision-maker, was at the office everyday last month. (On Thursday “Axe,” as he is known among the staff, took the afternoon off to attend the Cubs opening day with Mayor Rahm Emanuel; at his seats over the dugout, he caught a foul ball.)
Too, also, there’s this in our favor:
This post is in: Open Threads
I went to bed about an hour ago, but Rosie decided that I and everyone within a quarter mile should wake up and be PISSED PISSED PISSED about the stray cats from down the block who had the nerve to walk up our alley-way. NOTE TO SELF- stop leaving the back door open at night for the girls.
Other than that, I have nothing to say other than I had a discussion with someone today who said they loved Van Halen, and when I asked them which albums they liked, they said 5150 and OU812. When I heard them say that, I guess I sort of felt like I was listening to someone say they liked the NFL because they enjoyed watching field goals. It made me physically ill.
Van Halen was one of the quintessential rock groups of the seventies and eighties, but Van Halen ended with the departure of David Lee Roth. Period. The Van Hagar and Cherone periods don’t count. They were not rock and roll, they were top 40 crap. I am so fucking sorry for all you idiots who think “Why Can’t This Be Love” is actually rock and roll, but it wasn’t.
Van Halen ended in 1985. Van Halen was Jamie’s Cryin’, Runnin’ With the Devil, Feel Your Love Tonight. Van Halen was the hard pumping chest throbbing rock and roll of Sinner’s Swing and Loss of Control and and Romeo Delight and Mean Street. Van Halen was the whimsical, with Ice Cream Man and Beautiful Girls and Big Bad Bill and Hot for Teacher and Could This be Magic and, of course, stuff that led to Dave TV:
Van Halen was the sick guitar riffs and chest thumping drums of the Van Halen brothers, and, of course, David Lee Roth that completely captured the late 70’s and early 80’s zeitgeist. And it died in the middle 80’s when I was a teenager when Roth left and they hired some jackass who liked to yell about his driving habits and speed limits.
Everything after David Lee Roth left should be considered the New Coke of Van Halen. Period.
I feel very, very strongly about this. I feel like someone is trying to rewrite the rock and roll of my childhood.
by Tim F| 82 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Gun nuts, Assholes
In 2010 Carl England found Pernell Jefferson, who by that time already had a respectable rap sheet, trying to break into a neighbor’s apartment. England hit Jefferson with a stick. Jefferson pulled a gun and shot England in the chest. Oklahoma had and still has an ALEC and NRA-approved ‘stand your ground’ law so prosecutors let him walk.
This year England’s 19-year-old son and a 32-year-old friend went on a tear on twitter about that incident. Then they fetched their guns and shot five black people. Carl England was white and Pernell Jefferson is black.
It seems likely that George Zimmerman will walk for shooting an unarmed teenager. The special prosecutor has more or less thrown up her hands and I can hardly blame her, caught between that stupid law and the absolute hash that Sanford PD made of their initial response. That, at least, might go punished. I have some hope that the Federal investigation into their department will at least shame the Sanford PD into doing a better job next time.
Almost everyone affected by these ‘stand your ground’ laws grits their teeth and accepts that sometimes the law is an ass. I have no doubt that Martin’s family will as well. However, the more often successful defenses fail to pass the justice smell test the harder it will get for some people to resist evening the scales by hand. It has already started.
by John Cole| 51 Comments
This post is in: Television
Waiting for Smash to come on, so I was watching Anthony Bourdain, when I saw this commercial that made me chuckle:
Mildly amusing.
This post is in: Gun nuts, Post-racial America, Sociopaths
No one could have predicted:
According to NBC News correspondent Mara Schiavocampo, George Zimmerman has launched a new website:
Zimmerman’s attorneys have confirmed the site is operated & authorized by him RT @thinkprogress:@maracamp How do you know this is authentic? 9 Apr 12
On the website — therealgeorgezimmerman.com — Zimmerman solicits donations to support his “living expenses and legal defense.” He writes: “I have created a Paypal account solely linked on this website as I would like to provide an avenue to thank my supporters personally and ensure that any funds provided are used only for living expenses and legal defense, in lieu of my forced inability to maintain employment. I will also personally, maintain accountability of all funds received.”
He also features a photo of a vandalized black cultural center at Ohio State University.
Might as well get in on the wingnut welfare gravy train, this time with the broad appeal to the Stormfront crowd. Although you will be pleased to know that Stormfront and Neo-Nazis are “civil rights groups” according to Fox.