You can’t make this shit up:
Uh… Open Thread!
[cross-posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 94 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Seriously
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 26 Comments
This post is in: Assholes, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Serenity Now!, Seriously
True to the GOP plan to make sure not to put any Americans back to work in the hopes that the economy and high jobless rate will kill President Obama’s reelection chances, Kevin McCarthy gleefully reported that everybody hates President Obama’s jobs bill.
He then linked the blog post (which I assume someone on his staff wrote) on Twitter and lied about what the blog post says.
First the blog post/press release:
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 277 Comments
This post is in: An Unexamined Scandal, Balloon Jobs, Because of wow., Crock Pot Craziness, Kiss My Black Ass, Republican Stupidity, The Brown Enemy Within, Clown Shoes, General Stupidity, I Hate All of You, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To, I wish a motherfucker would!, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, Manic Progressive, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!, Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment, Serenity Now!, Seriously, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks), WTF?
For those of you who aren’t aware, Obama caved BIG-TIME yesterday… or something.
See, he wanted to address Congress about his jobs plan on September 7, which is Congress’s first day back from summer recess. (You remember jobs, right? Most of you probably don’t have one because Congress refuses to do its job and come up with a plan to put Americans back to work.)
John Boehner, in an unprecedented yet unsurprising move, sent a letter to Administration saying, “No” — after initially offering no objection to the Obama administration’s chosen date:
[A]s the Majority Leader announced more than a month ago, the House will not be in session until Wednesday, September 7, with votes at 6:30 that evening. With the significant amount of time – typically more than three hours – that is required to allow for a security sweep of the House Chamber before receiving a President, it is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening, when we can ensure there will be no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.
Despite the fact that the date was floated to the GOP and the GOP didn’t object, the White House pushed the address back a day because getting into a slapfight with Boehner would have only served to make everyone — not just the GOP, but also the Administration — look like asshats.
He pushed back the date by a whole day? The horror! The horror!
Delaying the address definitely proves that Obama caves on everything, and this is why he’s going to lose in 2012. Voters will remember the Day the Address Got Delayed By A Day, and voters will view it as Obama being a wimp (as Markos called him) or petty and incompetent (as Jon Walker of FDL called him) or so weak that he doesn’t even realize he’s being weak (as Cenk Ugyur called him).
What the hell is wrong with these people?
Every single Professional Left blog has front-page posts claiming that Obama is a wimp, a cavemeister, naive, petty, or incompetent:
ZOMG! ScheduleGate!! President Obama is a Cave-Dwelling Cave Meister!Post + Comments (277)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 96 Comments
This post is in: Seriously
Atrios links to this Media Matters post about the day of service on 9/11, where they find a bunch of stupid wingers (Gateway Pundit, Pam Geller, somebody at Fox Nation*, Weasel Zippers and, of course, El Rushbo) calling Obama a socialist because he asked us to serve soup at a kitchen instead of shop.
My questions: is it worth even paying attention to those blogs? Are they influential enough to bother? Does what they say trickle down to Fox News and then into major media outlets?
In other words, I wonder if energy spent calling out the fringe-y, absolutely predictable “Obama can do no right” critics just empowers them. Should they be treated like trolls and simply ignored, or does shining a light on them help further discredit them?
Just to be clear: I think Media Matters does a great job, I think Geller and others say is despicable, and I don’t think there’s anything to fear by calling them out. I’m asking a question of practical politics: I’m pretty sure that pissing off liberals puts some gas in Geller and Rush’s tank, so is it worth calling them out over every issue? I just don’t pay that much attention to right-wing blogs, so I don’t know how these bloggers rank and what influence they have in the general media environment.
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[*] My understanding is that anyone can post at Fox Nation — it’s not an official Fox News vehicle. Correct me if I’m wrong.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 29 Comments
This post is in: Seriously
Canadian reader Bob sends the sad news that Jack Layton, leader of the NDP and the Canadian opposition, died this morning at age 61. Layton took a leave of absence last month to fight a cancer recurrence.
This post is in: Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Seriously
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Via Emptywheel (now at her very own free-standing url, and you should check it out if you haven’t already), because it seemed like the right way to start another morning.
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What else is on the mid-week schedule?
by Freddie deBoer| 143 Comments
This post is in: Seriously
From the “this is excellent news for Republicans!” file, early indications are that the media are going to spin Wisconsin as a big failure for Democrats and their base. This is about as surprising as Mark Halperin saying something stupid, so I’m not shocked, but to inject a little reality into the discussion– here is a website that contains a list of recall elections in state legislatures. There have only been twenty attempts in American history. Recalling state legislators is really, really rare. Getting two in one night, in a rebuke of a governor who won by a 6 point margin less than a year ago, is a big deal. Yes, we all wanted the Democrats to get the majority, and yes, two Democrats stand a chance of being recalled and making it a wash. But to cast this as this major disappointment is– well, it’s the media doing what the media does. I genuinely think every reporter at Politico has some version of “this is excellent news for Republicans” saved as an AutoText.
The liberal media knows that Everything is Always Good for Republicans, because of their dastardly liberal bias.
Update: Some commenters are making fair points about reasons to be discouraged by these results. A point I meant to make here: sure, there is room for debate in this instance. But there isn’t a national forum for that debate in our media. Since everything is always good for Republicans and bad for Democrats in the Beltway media, parsing these kinds of distinctions is impossible. If Politico was ever willing to call any close issue a win for Democrats, I could take Politico more seriously when it runs its same old “good for the GOP!” story. But they aren’t willing to do that, the media in general isn’t willing to do that, and so there’s no space to look at the issue openly. Nor is there any context presented about how very rare recalling state legislators really is.
reality check: state legislator recall election historyPost + Comments (143)