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Gentlemen, I Believe I Have Ascertained The Empirical Flaw In Your Minority Outreach Extravaganza

by Zandar| March 15, 20135:40 pm| 152 Comments

This post is in: Assholes, Clown Shoes, Flash Mob of Hate, I wish a motherfucker would!, Stuff About Black People Written By a Black Person

“Well Zandar,” The Universe said. “As a black man active in politics and punditry, why do you believe that the GOP efforts to include more black voters has largely been ineffective?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “It may have something to do with nonsense such as this.”

A panel at the Conservative Political Action Committee on Republican minority outreach exploded into controversy on Friday afternoon, after an audience member defended slavery as good for African-Americans.

The exchange occurred after an audience member from North Carolina, 30-year-old Scott Terry, asked whether Republicans could endorse races remaining separate but equal. After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, the audience member said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?” Several people in the audience cheered and applauded Terry’s outburst.

After the exchange, Terry muttered under his breath, “why can’t we just have segregation?” noting the Constitution’s protections for freedom of association.

“Well Higgs my bosons!” The Universe stammered, clearly taken aback. “You seem to have a rather valid point there.”

And with that, The Universe slouched off, dejected. I felt badly about the whole affair, but then I remembered that I have food and housing and I’m only metaphorically shackled and beaten for it on a daily basis.

[UPDATE] Via the comments, and the man in the corner said “Boy, I’m gonna warn ya” and it turned into a ballroom blitz. BALLROOM BLITZ!

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Sequestered in Memphis

by DougJ| February 26, 201311:28 am| 110 Comments

This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, I wish a motherfucker would!, Our Failed Media Experiment, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All

Greg Sargent on the Centrist Death Cult and how it enables Republicans:

The GOP’s explicit position is that no compromise solution of any kind is acceptable — this must be resolved only with 100% of the concessions being made by Democrats — which means any compromise Dems put forth is by definition a nonstarter at the outset.

Analysts reluctant to embrace this conclusion — an affliction I’ve called the “centrist dodge” — have adopted several techniques. One is to pretend Dems haven’t offered any compromise solution, when in fact they have. A second is to argue that, okay, Dems have offered a compromise while Republicans haven’t, but Dems haven’t gone far enough towards the middle ground, so both sides are still to blame for the impasse. (The problem with this dodge is that it fails to acknowledge that Republicans themselves have openly stated that there is no distance to which Dems could go to win GOP cooperation, short of giving them everything they want.)

We’re now seeing a third technique appear: Acknowledge that Republicans are the uncompromising party, but assert that it’s ultimately on the President to figure out a way to either force Republicans to drop their intransigence or to otherwise “lead” them out if it.

I’ve never understood why anyone thinks presidents have the magical ability to get Congress to pass stuff that Congress doesn’t want to pass. It’s not just Obama who isn’t magical; Bush couldn’t get immigration reform or Social Security privatization through.

I remember when it was the firebaggers who wanted Obama to be more magically powerful about health care reform. Jim Newell summed it up well:

I’m sure if Obama just had the bill on his desk and gave it to Congress and told them to pass the damned thing, Congress wouldn’t have objected or tried to change anything, and the Senate would’ve passed it all 100-0 through reconciliation—even if they didn’t need reconciliation. This is what the spineful George W. Bush would have done.

Now, it’s the Villagers who want it, and comparison is of course, Reagan and Tip.

But it doesn’t matter how much Ron Fournier and David Brooks blame the sequester on Obama. If the levee breaks, and the cuts comes, local media will give the cuts plenty of coverage, and Republicans will take a political hit.

I sincerely hope sequestration can be avoided. I think it would be terrible for the economy. Like Tim F, I have friends whose scientific careers would be adversely affected.

But if it comes, Bobo and Fournier and Woodward won’t be able to save Republicans’ sorry asses.

Sequestered in MemphisPost + Comments (110)

Another Schiavo moment?

by DougJ| February 25, 20131:59 pm| 96 Comments

This post is in: Election 2014, I wish a motherfucker would!, Our Failed Media Experiment

One of you accurately predicted last spring that the dust-up over access to contraception — which the media portrayed as having a big political downside for Obama because Catholic Reagan Democrat swing voters blah blah blah — had the potential to be Schiavo moment politically, one where Beltway wisdom said it was good news for conservatives, but where voters felt very differently.

I have a feeling the sequester may be one too. Establishment media has gone all in on the strange contradictory Republican spin “the sequester was Obama’s fault, anyway it won’t be that bad, and if it is bad, voters will turn on Obama”.

Despite some public opposition to Congress’s action (see below) the Republican leadership seems to have succeeded in framing the discourse around a moral question: if Congress can do something to prevent a woman’s death, shouldn’t it?
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Once again, clearing away the personal part, the Republicans are on the offensive and the Democrats are on the defensive. That’s a Notable fact.

Another Schiavo moment?Post + Comments (96)

A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires

by DougJ| February 25, 201310:33 am| 139 Comments

This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, I wish a motherfucker would!

Steve M describes the Villager reaction to sequestration very well:

[T]his is not journalism — it’s catechism. Democrats must be wrong. Republicans can be wrong or they can be right, but Democrats must always be the real guilty parties. This is an inviolate tenet of the Beltway faith. It’s a myth we must all live by — otherwise we might have to address the question of whether it’s even possible to run a country responsibly with the Republicans as one of our two major parties.

So true, but every poll I’ve seen shows that, by a fairly wide margin, the public is against sequestration and will blame Republicans for it. There’s no way Republicans can control the messaging once it hits, because while Cokie and Co. could really give a fuck about spending cuts that disrupt ordinary American’s real lives, a lot of local media will give the story a lot of negative play.

Beltway Republicans live in kind of a double bubble. The first layer is made of their own WOLVERINES and the second is made of establishment media’s BOTH SIDES DO IT. We saw how this played out last November, when they weren’t unskewing the polls, they were agreeing with Joe Scar that the race was a toss-up and that Nate Silver couldn’t possibly know more than Michael Barone.

We know how that one ended.

A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionairesPost + Comments (139)

“Let’s Not Make A Deal”

by Anne Laurie| November 10, 201210:57 am| 140 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Republican Venality, I wish a motherfucker would!

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Capsule summary of the latest skirmish, from Dashiell Bennett at the AtlanticWire:

Both President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner have revealed their opening gambits in the great fiscal cliff debate and they are basically starting from the same spot they’ve been in forever. Boehner held a second press conference on Friday morning to reiterate his position that raising taxes is not acceptable. Obama followed it up with a short White House speech in the afternoon reiterating his position that the wealthy need to pay more in taxes. The president basically admitted that not only should this news not be surprising, it’s basically what the entire election was fought over. An election that he won, by the way: “On Tuesday, night we found out the majority of Americans agree with my approach.”

But a deal still has to be made, so Obama also announced that he’s inviting Congressional leaders (as well as other business and community leaders) to the White House next week to get the ball rolling on negotiations. Obama said, “I am not wedded to every detail of my plan. I’m open to compromise. I’m open to new ideas.”…

My emphasis. Professor Krugman, another certified winner, has this strong reminder:

… It’s worth pointing out that the fiscal cliff isn’t really a cliff. It’s not like the debt-ceiling confrontation, where terrible things might well have happened right away if the deadline had been missed. This time, nothing very bad will happen to the economy if agreement isn’t reached until a few weeks or even a few months into 2013. So there’s time to bargain.

More important, however, is the point that a stalemate would hurt Republican backers, corporate donors in particular, every bit as much as it hurt the rest of the country. As the risk of severe economic damage grew, Republicans would face intense pressure to cut a deal after all.

Meanwhile, the president is in a far stronger position than in previous confrontations. I don’t place much stock in talk of “mandates,” but Mr. Obama did win re-election with a populist campaign, so he can plausibly claim that Republicans are defying the will of the American people. And he just won his big election and is, therefore, far better placed than before to weather any political blowback from economic troubles — especially when it would be so obvious that these troubles were being deliberately inflicted by the G.O.P. in a last-ditch attempt to defend the privileges of the 1 percent.

Most of all, standing up to hostage-taking is the right thing to do for the health of America’s political system.

So stand your ground, Mr. President, and don’t give in to threats. No deal is better than a bad deal.

As for Getting to Yes, I like Gail Collins’ suggestion:

… Root for a bipartisan solution that does not involve the White House being hijacked by a guy who keeps babbling about going halfway over a cliff…

If all else fails, strap John Boehner to the roof of a car.

“Let’s <em>Not</em> Make A Deal”Post + Comments (140)

Ann Romney Snaps at GOP Critics: ‘Stop it. This is Hard.’

by Imani Gandy (ABL)| September 20, 201211:46 pm| 142 Comments

This post is in: Kiss My Black Ass, I wish a motherfucker would!

::cue tiny violins::

In audio obtained by The Last Word, Ann Romney loses her shit on an Iowa radio station in response to a question about GOP critics who are calling her husband’s campaign a clusterfuck:

“Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring. This is hard. And, you know, it’s an important thing that we’re doing right now and it’s an important election and it is time for all Americans to realize how significant this election is and how lucky we are to have someone with Mitt’s qualifications and experience and know how to be able to have the opportunity to run this country.”

Oh cry me a river, Miss Ann. It’s hard for you?

[read full post at ABLC]

Ann Romney Snaps at GOP Critics: ‘Stop it. This is Hard.’Post + Comments (142)

Am I hard enough, am I rough enough?

by DougJ| July 14, 201212:20 pm| 87 Comments

This post is in: Bleg, C.R.E.A.M., Election 2012, I wish a motherfucker would!

I’m less and less crazy Josh Marshall’s “bitch slap theory of politics”, both because the term makes me uncomfortable (all the time I’ve spent around you militant feminists in the comments, I guess) and because I think he exaggerates its importance somewhat. But he’s certainly right that when Romney hides behind Glenn Kessler’s skirt he doesn’t look much like the Ericksonian ideal of a rugged frontier tough guy:

There’s a meta-politics Obama is playing by slashing at Romney with suggestions he might be a felon. He’s wounding Romney, who is clearly rattled and angry about the charges, but just as clearly can’t defend himself or strike back. As I’ve noted many times, a thick layer of presidential politics (in a way that’s distinct from US politics at really every other level) resides at the brainstem level of cogitation — with gambits to assert power and demonstrate dominance. Obama looked in control of this situation; Romney didn’t.
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This is and will remain a low single digit race. But the President’s team is making Romney look shifty and silly and weak.

The Obama campaign is doing a great job with this issue, so give them some money if you can.

Goal Thermometer

Am I hard enough, am I rough enough?Post + Comments (87)