Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

The willow is too close to the house.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

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The Company We Keep

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Looks like Sullivan isn’t the only one impressed with the “seriousness” of Ryan’s budget:

In other Palin news, it appears that Bristol Palin, who is uniquely unqualified to speak about teen pregnancy prevention issues (any one of the billion women across the planet who managed to not get pregnant as a teen would be more qualified), made a ton of money with her nonprofit. For her “labor,” she pulled in $265k, while they gave out 35k to teen pregnancy clinics. That’s probably how she was able to pay 172k in cash for a house in the Galtian paradise of Arizona. Just like average working people do every day when they buy their house with cash.

Why do I mention this? Because at $265 large, on top of all the other speakers fees and what else she “earned” last year, Bristol will be rewarded with a large tax cut under the very serious Ryan roadmap, Bristol will have a lot more money to not spend on condoms, while some poor working bastard will pay higher taxes and get kicked out of his health insurance because ACA was repealed and he has a precondition or can’t afford it on the meager vouchers he was given. The way God and serious people would want it.

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Carrots and sticks, again

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I may be forgetting someone, but the way I see it, Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert were just about the only outspoken, confrontational liberals in the punditosphere. The only other two I can think of who might qualify are Harold Meyerson of WaPo and Thomas Frank of WSJ. Remember when the first NYT public editor, Daniel Okrent, finished his stint? He took a nasty shot at Paul Krugman (along with two gentler criticisms of MoDo and Safire):

Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.

Similarly, Andrew Sullivan took a nasty shot at Bob Herbert today:

Yes, he had a role as a liberal voice. But such a boring, familiar voice. There was something about his writing that simply forced you to stop reading, even when his motives were obviously honorable, his compassion deep, and his solutions sincere, if invariably trite.

I’ll admit that Bob Herbert said the same things over and over again, but they were things that almost no one else was saying and they bore repeating. I don’t think he was any more repetitive than any of the other pundits anyway. They’re all broken records, even Krugman, who is the only one I truly enjoy reading.

Sullivan and Okrent took shots at Krugman and Herbert, because one of the rules of the game is that outspoken liberals must be mocked — they’re shrill, they’re trite, they’re naive! Elite media is a big fraternity, where midnight circle jerks alternate with the ritualistic hazing of liberals.

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The Hawks Are Winning

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The UN Security Council is about to vote on a No-Fly zone for Libya, which looks like it will pass. I’ve already stated my piece on this, and appear to be in a mind-meld with Angela Merkel, who wants to know what comes next when the no-fly zone inevitably fails.

Well, we all know what comes next- FREEDOM BOMBS FOR EVERYONE:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that a U.N. no-fly zone over Libya would require bombing targets inside the country, and a deputy acknowledged that Moammar Gadhafi’s forces were making huge gains against the opposition.

Clinton gave her assessment during a visit to Tunisia and ahead of a planned U.N. vote, making clear the risk of possible military intervention as world powers considered broader steps to protect civilians and pressure the Libyan leader.

In Washington, William Burns, undersecretary of state for political affairs, told senators that pro-Libyan government forces were about 100 miles (160 kilometres) from the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in the eastern part of the country.

The U.N. negotiations took place against a backdrop of increasing skepticism in Congress about the Obama administration’s Libya strategy. Questions focused on what action the U.S. was willing to take to back up its strong calls for Gadhafi’s ouster and whether the crisis could lead to military conflict.

This is ostensibly being sold as an attempt to save Libyan civilians, but I would recommend everyone google the FITD technique. I mean, they aren’t being subtle about it:

The top Air Force general said Thursday that a no-fly zone over Libya would not be sufficient in reversing the momentum leader Muammar al-Qaddafi now has over rebel forces.

Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz told ranking Republican Sen. John McCain, “If the president assigns the mission to maintain a no-fly zone, clearly that would have an influence on the thinking of Libyan pilots.”

McCain then pressed the point that if a no-fly zone is imposed now it would be too little too late.

“A no-fly zone, sir, would not be sufficient,” Schwartz answered.

The hearing was scheduled to address budget requests by the Defense Department, but McCain made it clear he would use the opportunity to ask about his increasing frustrations with the Obama administration’s response to the month-old civil war in Libya.

“We are seeing the momentum and the success of Muammar Qaddafi and his killers massacring people while we sit idly by,” McCain said. “And one of the arguments used is that we somehow can’t do it, despite the fact that General Odierno just a few days ago said that it would take a very short period of time in order to impose a no-fly zone.”

The number one goal is not saving civilians, it is getting the no-fly zone in place so that escalation will be easier. When the no-fly zone doesn’t work, we’ll move up to shock and awe, and before you know it, we’ll have troops on the ground. After all, we’re Murrika!

I’ll let you figure out how this is in our national interest and how entering another war with no clear definition for victory or understandable mission is what we need. And someone let me know what color to change the blog to so we are not accused of being with the terrorists.

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You’ll either be a union man or a thug for David Koch

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I believe that the past week has been a watershed moment in American politics. People are starting to use the word “class” again and I wish Kevin Drum (in the excellent piece I talked about earlier) had used it here:

American politicians don’t care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early ’90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that’s not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don’t respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that’s not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don’t respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.

Click here for more infographics on America’s plutocracy. It doesn’t take a multivariate correlation to conclude that these two things are tightly related: If politicians care almost exclusively about the concerns of the rich, it makes sense that over the past decades they’ve enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich.

What’s wrong with the rich? I’m moderate income now, but one day I will be rich, and you will still be a dirty fucking hippie.

Fuck that. Nowadays, some studies show that “the lower classes of Canada, Britain, Germany and France have an easier time earning their way up the social ladder than their American counterparts”. If you’ve seen Ben Quayle or Luke Russert or Jenna Bush on tv anytime recently, you know damn well we’re not living in a meritocracy.

The entire conservative project is about defining and maintaing economic class structure. Trickle down: if you give the productive rich enough, their productivity will benefit everyone else. Bell curve: the middle and lower classes are genetically inferior. Bobo’s new book: the primal scent of the wealthy entitles them to treat the rest of us like slaves.

There’s nothing convincing behind any of it. The millionaires at Goldman Sachs think that fucking the middle-class with more spending cuts is actually bad for the economy. Not many people in the fed believe a word of the Chicago school economic nonsense. But supply side and rational market dogma appeals to the rich (even though it may even hurt their investments in the long run), because it justifies tax cuts and deregulation, it justifies giving the rich more money and letting them do whatever they want. And the rich rule our world.

This week we moved a little closer towards convincing Americans that the real conflicts aren’t Sam’s Club Republicans versus strapping young bucks or Jesus freaks versus dirty fucking hippies, they’re rich people versus the middle and lower class. They’re the top few percent against everyone else. It doesn’t have to be that way — the policies that help working people wouldn’t hurt the rich that much — but it is, because some rich people have created an apparatus that pushes an extreme anti-working person ideology.

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Paging Conor Friedersdorf

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Daniel Foster has written another thoughtful piece for National Review that deserves a hearty heh-indeed from every serious conservative.

There’s no pay-wall this time, so you can peruse it yourself, but it’s pretty easy to summarize: a few college students tweeted that they wish Scott Walker would DIAF and Foster made a YouTube video of it.

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Under Assault

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I’m just starting to get a real bunker mentality- Planned Parenthood is apparently the new Acorn. We’ll do a fundraiser for them sometime soon.

As to Sullivan’s “Of course cuts hurt people” bullshit, a couple thoughts:

1.) Who is this ED Kain and what did he do with the old one?

2.) No one writes with the fire of a convert.

3.) The fundamental thing you need to understand when talking to deficit hawks is that when they say something is painful or that cuts will hurt people, you need to recognize that what they really mean is that the cuts will be painful TO SOMEONE ELSE and hurt people THEY DON’T KNOW AND WILL NEVER MEET. That’s why it’s so easy to be a condescending asshole about the budget. That’s why it takes nothing to suggest raising the retirement age for Social Security. That’s why, after taking a month off from writing on the internet to recover from a cold, he can tell people who work back-breaking manual labor every day of their god damned lives for much less money than he or McMegan earn that they should “contribute” more to their health care costs.

I’ve added “the math demands it” to the rotating taglines.

BTW- For you insane people who keep asking, Tunch’s anal glands are fine. I’m in a hotel in an undisclosed location this weekend, and am going to spend the night streaming Chuck episodes so I can catch up. I should note that Sarah with black hair has me all sorts of hot and bothered.

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