Oh, look. There was a tragedy, so that means some wanker at the NRO needs to pen a column about the demise of civilization and calling all the survivors wimps. Not quite up to the Derbyshire standard, but after calling professional soldiers wimps, you’ll remember he went all in and blamed the Va. Tech shooting victims.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA RAVENS
That is all.
Gabrielle Giffords Stepping Down
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Via NYMag’s Daily Intel. “I’m getting better… I will return.”
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Any Arizonans want to tell us about potential candidates who could keep her seat in the (D) column now?
Birthers Stuck On Endless Loop
Whether you believe that the Republicans will self-destruct in November or not, the Birther component of the anti-Obama campaign will never, never end unless the people who continue to spew this nonsense are actually made to pay a price.
A judge has ordered President Barack Obama to appear in court in Atlanta for a hearing on a complaint that says Obama isn’t a natural-born citizen and can’t be president.
It’s one of many such lawsuits that have been filed across the country, so far without success. A Georgia resident made the complaint, which is intended to keep Obama’s name off the state’s ballot in the March presidential primary.
An Obama campaign aide says any attempt to involve the president personally will fail and such complaints around the country have no merit.
The hearing is set for Thursday before an administrative judge. Deputy Chief Judge Michael Malihi on Friday denied a motion by the president’s lawyer to quash a subpoena that requires Obama to show up.
If the President shows up, every other state GOP machine will file similar complaints with friendly judges and he’ll have to show up there as well. If the President ignores the complaints, it will “prove he has something to hide” and feed the nasty e-mail whisper campaign that basically hasn’t stopped since early 2008. The sinister point of all this is not to prove or disprove anything, but to so demoralize voters that they’ll entertain the notion that if the Republicans win, all this idiocy will go away and that the GOP will behave themselves again.
It’s complete bullshit, of course. All of it. The idiocy was always there and surrender by the electorate is the only way the GOP wins with their current field of cartoon villain mouth-breathing doucheknockers. But that’s the point: no matter how many times the President personally staples his birth certificate to people’s foreheads, they’ll never believe him. Jesus Christ could descend from the sky with John Wayne’s pet T-Rex that’s piloting the Millennium Falcon, during halftime at the Super Bowl, grab the mic while Sam Elliott hands him his own mustache and say “You guys, he was born in Hawaii, knock this crap off already” and they would wonder how POTUS managed to brainwash America and the world into seeing such a perfect simultaneous mass hallucination. They would in fact blame fluoridated water. I shit you not.
Almost enough to drive a guy to drink.
Football open thread
All my Steelers’ fan friends are rooting for the Pats. Who are you rooting for?
Joe Perry Steve Tyler (I can’t keep those two straight) was awful, as he’s consistently been since he stopped taking coke.
And don’t forget, we’ve got the book club discussion at 8.
Brokered convention!
Shame on me, but I’m watching all the cable garbage about the Republican primary and I’ hearing a lot of BROKERED CONVENTION, from Michael Steele, from Joe Scarborough. Scarborough claims that Erick Erickson and Bill Kristol are also talking about it, but I I’d never know, because I wouldn’t read the filthy motherfuckers. (Not true, I do read EE sometimes.) Atrios’ post on brokered conventions is one of my all-time favorites:
Yes all political junkies dream of the brokered convention. It would be exciting!! But I started to think about how the news media would deal with such a thing if it were necessary. The primaries are early. The convention is in August. Between the primaries and the convention the bobblehead discussion would be unbearable. I don’t know how the campaigns themselves would deal with it. They couldn’t go dark, but they couldn’t campaign as the presumptive nominee either. There’d be calls and pressures from various quarters for one of the candidates to “do the honorable thing” and bow out for the sake of the party, or Tim Russert’s Nantucket vacation, or whatever.
Good news for Evan Bayh
I disagree with mistermix on this one:
Listening to this, I’m struck by one thing: if Newt is the candidate, he’s going to drive the discussion into all the nooks and crannies of noise and diversion that have occupied Fox News viewers since Obama’s victory. In other words, Newt is the candidate of the 2009 media cycle, where the Tea Party dominated media coverage. If Romney is the candidate, a big part of the discussion will be how he managed to pay 15% tax on the millions he made. He’s the candidate of the 2011 media cycle, dominated by Occupy Wall Street and issues of jobs and equity.
[….]Newt is like a kid with ADHD who’s off his Ritalin when it comes to distraction, and Republicans win when they make the election about distractions rather than the issues. The question isn’t whether Gingrich is the best imaginable candidate, just whether he’s the best of this bunch, and after watching that speech, I can’t say that Romney is any better.
Newt’s favorability/unfavorability split is 27/59. That’s a killer. (Romney is 39/44, by contrast.) The non-Republican portion of the electorate dislikes Gingrich too much to vote for him in a general.
The stories about the open marriage, leaving his wife after he was diagnosed with MS, etc., true or not (and they’re mostly verifiably true anyway), are “part of a the culture” as Cokie would say. Yes, voters get sick of sex scandals and, yes, Republican voters blame it all on the librul media, but all those suburban “soccer moms” Chuck Todd is always yakking about, I just don’t see them voting for Newt.
If Newt is the candidate, the conversation won’t be about fiat money or income inequality, it will be about Newt and how a major party ever put someone like him up as their nominee. And I would assume that if Newt is the nominee (I don’t think he will be), there will be some at least semi-serious third-party candidacy.