WILL OUR MEDIA MEMBERS PLEASE STOP ANALYZING SNOWBALL SNOOKI’S TWEETS IN EXCRUCIATING DETAIL?
Now Here Are Two Thousand Words on the Shit I Found on the Bottom of My ShoePost + Comments (58)
by John Cole| 58 Comments
This post is in: DC Press Corpse
WILL OUR MEDIA MEMBERS PLEASE STOP ANALYZING SNOWBALL SNOOKI’S TWEETS IN EXCRUCIATING DETAIL?
Now Here Are Two Thousand Words on the Shit I Found on the Bottom of My ShoePost + Comments (58)
This post is in: Election 2010, Clap Louder!, DC Press Corpse, Our Failed Media Experiment
Since there was quite a bit of discussion on earlier threads today about the First Lady, the way she & other female politicians are regarded by people on opposite sides of the political divide, and the way the media perceives the distinctions made between Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin, I couldn’t resist stealing some more excellent commentary from Tom Scocca. First, he did a guest post for XXFactor (Slate‘s ‘women’s issues’ subgroup) explaining that “Linda McMahon’s Gender Gap Is Nothing Special“:
Why don’t women want to vote for Linda McMahon in Connecticut? The Times suggests it’s the “harshness” of her campaign, the overkill levels of spending, and her association with pro wrestling’s “cartoonish and demeaning depictions of women.”…
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The affiliation that’s hurting McMahon with women in the polls isn’t the WWE; it’s the GOP. This year’s surge of Republican enthusiasm is a male phenomenon. The simplest explanation for McMahon’s lack of female support is that female voters aren’t the ones who want to replace Democrats with Republicans.
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In West Virginia, Republican John Raese leads Democrat Joe Manchin by 9 points among men but trails Manchin by 10 points among women. Time has Wisconsin Republican nominee Ron Johnson ahead of Russ Feingold by 15 points among men, but tied among women.
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And in Washington state, where Democrat Patty Murray is running against Republican Dino Rossi, women favor Murray by 31 points, while men favor Rossi by 15. That’s a 46-point gender gap—McMahon’s gap is 27 points—with nobody making anybody bark like a dog.
Scocca followed up with a post on his own Slate blog:
Forty-six points! That is insane. Why do people who live in the same state and maybe sleep in the same house see the politically situation completely differently, depending on what kind of genitals they have? How did politics get so profoundly fractured along gender lines? Are men that much more emotionally wounded by the collapse of the economy? Where is Robert Bly when you need him? There’s a lot more going on here than the question of whether Linda McMahon makes Connecticut ladies uncomfortable. Maybe the Times could put a reporter or two on it.
No doubt some Very Serious Pundit — I’m guessing BoBo Brooks, but maybe Dean Broder will beat him to deadline — can explain to all of us DFHs that white suburban men are still the natural measure of all things significant…
by $8 blue check mistermix| 84 Comments
This post is in: DC Press Corpse
I agree with John that the Democrats should keep hitting the foreign donors angle to discredit this new round of corporate advertising. Maybe the DC media could take a moment from tsk-tsking and read the fucking Citizens’ United decision. Here’s the relevant passage:
Last, Citizens United argues that disclosure requirements can chill donations to an organization by exposing donors to retaliation. Some amici point to recent events in which donors to certain causes were blacklisted, threatened, or otherwise targeted for retaliation. […] The examples cited by amici are cause for concern. Citizens United, however, has offered no evidence that its members may face similar threats or reprisals. To the contrary, Citizens United has been disclosing its donors for years and has identified no instance of harassment or retaliation.
[…] A campaign finance system that pairs corporate independent expenditures with effective disclosure has not existed before today. […] With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters. Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits, and citizens can see whether elected officials are “ ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.” […] The First Amendment protects political speech; and disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way. This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.
Whether or not you agree with the rest of the decision, the Court clearly envisioned transparency as part of the deal. It hasn’t happened, and the electorate is having even a harder time than usual making informed decisions and giving proper weight to different speakers and messages.
This is what’s at stake, not some piddling little argument about whether the Sierra Club has some foreign donors, just like the Chamber of Commerce. Our stupid and infinitely distractable DC media would have us believe otherwise, and in doing so, they’re letting Congress off the hook for failing to quickly enact new transparency laws.
This post is in: Election 2010, Assholes, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Clap Louder!, DC Press Corpse
Matt Latimer, first-past-the-post WH Ustabee in the highly lucrative Wingnut Wurlitzer ‘Dubya was never really a True Conservative(tm)’ book race, provides a long, loving tonguebath via the Daily Beast to “The Cheney You Don’t Know”:
… [I]f those critics were hoping that Cheney would soon be departing the political scene, the former Veep is looking forward to disappointing them. This week Cheney—dozens of pounds lighter but in seeming good spirits, fresh from a period of healing sheltered from distractions by family and playing with the kids and grandkids—announced that he will soon be back on the campaign trail, back to issuing stern warnings about the failings of the Obama administration, and back to finalizing his long-awaited memoir that is likely to be published next year…
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Since his release from the Bush administration, Cheney has proven uncommonly, even joyfully, resistant to the standard rituals of Washington, where political rehabilitation comes from nursing your wounds quietly in a corner, offering a few timely mea culpas to re-establish your mainstream credibility, and then joining some charitable enterprise with a member of the opposite party… Instead Cheney seems to be taking his dark and dastardly image and running with it. When every PR agent in the world would tell him to avoid subjects like waterboarding and interrogation policies, Cheney proudly defends the administration’s record. He has gamely adopted the Darth Vader label as his own. Parting company with a sidelined (and quietly retooling) Bush, who feels he “owes” Obama his silence, Cheney has become the tart-tongued voice of the opposition. In the past year he has labeled President Obama a “one-term president,” taken Vice President Biden to task for the administration’s terrorism policies, claimed that Obama was politicizing the war in Afghanistan and projecting “weakness” to America’s enemies. For the Republican base it has worked wondered. It is Cheney, not his former boss, who seems more attuned with the current tenor of the GOP.
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To those who know [him], it is impossible to contemplate that Bush ever would have put himself in the position of handing decision making over to any other person. From the outset of the administration, moreover, Bush heard from a steady complement of competing voices, all of whom were less conservative, personally closer to the President, and more politically-preoccupied than Cheney. The strong-willed and ever present Texas contigent of Karen Hughes, Karl Rove, and Dan Bartlett would not have long stood for a vice president hogging face time with the boss. Condoleezza Rice, a longtime friend to the Bush family who is as close to the president as a sister, also was not one likely to be steamrolled. Chief speechwriter Michael Gerson, who once supported Jimmy Carter, was a key advocate of the administration’s signature policy known as “compassionate conservatism,” a confection of increased social spending and federal regulations that it is hard to imagine Cheney gleefully endorsing…
Tanned, Rested, Ready: Darth Cheney ReturnsPost + Comments (63)
This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter, DC Press Corpse, Democratic Stupidity, Fucked-up-edness, Manic Progressive
Let’s just say that I heartily disagree with Glenn’s latest post about the WH and the Chamber of Commerce. Glenn apparently is still fighting the Dean battles of years gone by, and seems incapable of separating Robert Gibbs, the man, and Robert Gibbs, the official spokesperson for the administration, who, in his current role, isn’t hypocritical at all for advancing this line of attack. That’s his job description, for chrissakes.
But overall, I remain surprised how ingrained it is that the White House and Democrats are just supposed to sit around and get beat on, and if they fight back, they are out of bounds. When they point out that Rush Limbaugh is the spokesman of the GOP and they are all insane like him, Peter Daou and numerous others lose their shit. When they point out that it would be horrible if Democrats listened to the non-stop drumbeat of negativity of the “Professional Left” and sit out the election, people freak out. When they point out that there were actually a lot of positive pieces of legislation passed the past year, the same crowd freaks out and says “Yeah, but what about…” When they point out that Fox News isn’t a news organization but the PR wing of the GOP, the beltway boys freak out. When they point out that the Matthew Shepard Act as well as any number of other positive gay friendly legislation was passed, they are met with screaming about DADT (which, btw, near every Democrat supported). And now, when they point out that the Chamber of Commerce and Republicans are hiding who is funding them, they are accused of “McCarthyite innuendo.”
I have no idea why anyone would want to be President, and I have no clue why anyone would want to be a Democratic President. It isn’t just the GOP and the media making up special rules for the Democrats, it is everyone. At this point, if Obama were to come to a podium in 2011 and say “Fuck you all, Hillary can have this job, figure 2012 out on your own, you ass clowns” my only response would be “Right on” and then to offer him a beer.
But it would have to be a faggy microbrew, because that’s how us Kenyan Muslim Socialists (who aren’t allowed to engage in politics while the other people beat the fuck out of us) like to roll these days.
by John Cole| 37 Comments
This post is in: Election 2010, DC Press Corpse
Greg Sargent has a nice round-up (via the GOS). Given that the village has been pretty much wrong about everything, I think this seals the deal and Dems should be pushing hard on this issue.
More on the Foreign Money “Conventional Wisdom”Post + Comments (37)
by John Cole| 62 Comments
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Election 2010, Clown Shoes, DC Press Corpse
And now here is Sullivan making no damned sense again:
Nyhan goes after the Democrats for baseless attacks against the US Chamber of Commerce. It is very depressing to see them descend to this kind of stuff. What they need are not tactics and resentment, which is what we’re seeing. What we need is a narrative of recovery and reform from Obama. He has the record, and he has made a couple of great speeches. But this distracts.
The Chamber of Commerce is spending 100 million dollars this election, who knows how much of it from foreign funding because they refuse to say, all of it to attack Democrats. And in Sully’s world, it is the Democrats to blame for pointing this out. “Ignore those attacks, Obama! Be above it all!”
Richar Cohen, is that you? Way to elevate concern trolling to an art form, Andrew.
Why is it that Democrats aren’t “allowed” to fight back? Why do our media elites like Andrew think this way?
Fox News spews lies non-stop for years, and the press corps gets the vapors when Gibbs points it out. The Chamber of Commerce is spending millions lying and fear-mongering, but if the Democrats point it out, Andrew gets a sad face. It is just baffling how the rules are different for the Democrats, and it is just ingrained for these guys.
*** Update ***
BTW- Rachel Maddow dropped the hammer on Andrew’s conventional wisdom on this issue tonight. Video when it is available.
The Moral Thing to Do Is To Go Into Combat UnarmedPost + Comments (62)