July 2010
67 posts
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“Barack Obama understands that if people ignore George Will and believe the...”
– Matthew Yglesias explaining it all
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“[M]y children don’t look Hispanic.”
– Brian Sandoval, Nevada gubernatorial candidate, responding to a question about “how he would feel if his children were stopped in the street and asked for their papers.”
God Bless America.
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The GOP's class warfare has backfired. →
southpol:
“I have voted Republican my entire life,” he says. “I don’t want to vote for Harry Reid. But I don’t want to be told I’m lazy, and I’m dumb, and I’m living high on the hog, collecting [unemployment insurance] because I want to.”
(via ryking)
Wow. Color me shocked. The article is at least as worth-your-read for containing this opening paragraph:
Sometime this spring, Republicans...
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No One Could Have Expected →
Are you trying to tell me that immigrants spend money?
In a 2008 study, she found that Arizona immigrants contributed $29 billion annually to the state economy, representing about 8% of its activity.
When immigrants leave, Gans said, “stores experience dramatic drops in sales. Apartment owners who rent to immigrants have high vacancy rates and risk losing their buildings. Legal...
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Filibusted
jasencomstock:
“I think we should retain the same [filibuster] policies that we have instead of lowering it…. I think it has been working.” — Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) Better Democrats™ please. (via lemkin)
Well don’t get rid of the fucking thing now. the Democrats are going to be a c-hair away from losing the senate this fall, and will most certainly lose it in 2012 (I think...
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“I think we should retain the same [filibuster] policies that we have instead of...”
– Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii)
Better Democrats™ please.
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“Is Afghanistan important? Sure. Does it matter? Sure. Is the performance of a...”
– Matt Yglesias, being absolutely right even leaving aside the relative dollar-for-dollar impact of the two programs directly compared.
And but so this comparison will never be made in this country as it currently stands. And won’t ever be unless somebody, somewhere starts talking about the...
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“[Journalists] could have made the point that they were important because they...”
– Duncan Black
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The Oncoming Storm
Jonathan Chait isn’t too worried about consequences of the failure of the Senate’s cap and trade bill to find support:
I don’t think the failure of a bill means the planet will burn. I think it means that the Environmental Protection Agency will take over the issue. This isn’t ideal from an economic point of view. But it is ideal from Congress’s point of view...
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“I’d like to see labor unions spend more time negotiating pay and benefits...”
– Kevin Drum.
To which I add: Harrumph. I think this sort of framing is the model for a new Democratic century (or, for that matter, a new and revitalized GOP; there’s absolutely nothing there that Reagan wouldn’t get behind) . That nobody (well, nobody other than Bloomberg) seems to be...
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South of the Border →
Very fine piece on the foolishness of our current immigration debate:
Two days earlier, Senator John McCain, of Arizona, in a floor speech defending his state’s newly passed law requiring local officers to investigate individuals’ immigration status, described “an unsecured border between Arizona and Mexico, which has led to violence, the worst I have ever seen.” He went on to cite numbers for...
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The Afghan Wikileaks →
Jay Rosen makes some important points, among them is:
as Julien Assange, founder of Wikileaks, explained last October, if a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it.
“It’s counterintuitive,” he said then. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and...
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“Think [Schindler’s List is] about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t...”
– Stanley Kubrick, who would have been 82 today.
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“Will you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about...”
– Ken Buck, Tea Party-backed Senate candidate in Colorado.
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Sherroditus
So, we’re entering week two of an event that, thanks to quick thinking, White House officials nipped in the bud and transformed into a one day story.
On the plus side: this OpEd from EJ Dionne is superlative. I don’t share his optimism, but he points out what strikes me as the key facet linking the Sherrod narrative to a much larger issue:
The Obama team did not question, let...
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“You know, God gave us rights. Our Founding Fathers recognized that. It’s...”
– Steve King (R, Iowa), setting a new bar for the most batshit insane thing I’ve seen uttered by a public official. It’s been a while since I read the book of Acts, but I’m pretty sure the United States of America and 54’40 or fight figured nowhere in it. Must’ve been...
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A Steele Lockbox
Marc Ambinder, among many others, seems to be looking at the whole “secret debt at RNC” story as a sign of big trouble for the GOP going into the 2010 midterms; he goes so far as to characterize it as a threat to their whole fall product line:
During midterm elections, the national committee plays two essential roles. First, it serves as a bank account that can be drawn upon to...
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“I don’t think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated...”
– David Cross (via Tumble DC 25: Florida church plans to burn Qurans on 9/11 anniversary - Pew Forum on Religon and Public Life)
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“We could have waited all day. We could have had a media circus. But we took...”
– White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, reputedly speaking favorably about the White House’s reaction to the Sherrod situation.
You know, he’s right. Instead of a one day tempest in a teapot, with whose outcome you could hound and cow like-minded media Rethuglicans indefinitely,...
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“The Republicans are thinking, why don’t they just sell some of their...”
– Alan Grayson on the unemployment insurance extension
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So Glenn Beck is apparently going blind.
jasencomstock:
jhnbrssndn:
(via number-six)
[REDACTED]
masturbation?
Keep in mind that Glenn Beck is, above all, a TV evangelist and huckster. Part of the routine is to periodically go blind, lose the use of limbs, simply refuse to continue “the teachings”, receive the dreaded “call home” from an angry God, and etc…; these seemingly unrelated conditions are...
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“[Victory] obscures defeat. Republicans managed to take a jobs bill, weaken it to...”
– Ezra Klein, witnessing the evolution of the now likely to break GOP filibuster unemployment benefits extension. This, more than anything, characterizes why left-leaning independents and Democrats are forever exasperated by what is broadly (mis)characterized as the “Obama administration.”...
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Seperate, but equal
The Vatican issued a new set of ecclesiastical laws that categorized both the ordaining of women and the sexual abuse of children as “grave crimes”
Indeed, I see no light at all between the relative severity of these offenses. Who could? Been nice knowing you, Catholic church.
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The Bush Deficit Bamboozle →
“They really do think that we’re idiots.”
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A|B Testing
Which of these tacks do you suppose the MSM will take up?
A:
-or-
B:
Answer: Serious people know it’s always bad for the Democrat. Get ready for the Demcrat Tax Bomb of 2010! Just you try and refudiate it. True deficit hawks know that, if you’re serious about the deficit you make the tough choices: like lowering taxes.
We know this is coming. Are we busily inoculating?...
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Invincible Ignorance
McConnell Blasts Deficit Spending, Urges Extension of Tax Cuts.
This because, as well know, tax cuts pay for themselves:
Didn’t happen under Bush, didn’t happen under Reagan, didn’t happen under Kennedy. Those were all the result of various coincidences, though.
Next up, we have Mitch McConnell, uh, still:
The last year of the Bush administration, the deficit as a...
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“I think the case for [repeated government shutdowns] happening is twofold. One...”
– Matthew Yglesias, with emphasis on “ratings” and “Obama will be blamed”: yep, yep, yep, a million times yep.
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What, me worry?
In which Krugman and I disagree:
Republicans, by the way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Mr. Obama took office, they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the G.O.P. is helping its chances of a big victory in November.
I...
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Goldilocks Triangulation →
Digby utterly nails it; do yourself a favor and read the whole thing:
[Obama’s political advisers] should have realized that a health care bill that nobody in their right minds would have designed from scratch, the worst aspects of which liberals will be asked to defend for years to come, would be met with dampened enthusiasm by those who watched the process devolve from a sense of...
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Ratfucking 2010 style
Dave Weigel lays it out:
One of the more jarring passages in Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” is his recounting of a popular myth that went around Iowa in 1966, the year of the conservative backlash against the Great Society. The myth was that black gang members on motorcycles were going to head from Chicago to ransack Des Moines. Reading this in 2008, it sounded preposterous,...
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GOP: No more help for jobless, but rich must keep... →
McClatchy makes my day.
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Where's My Belt?
John Boehner, March 2009: It’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ it
Barack Obama, yesterday: “At a time when so many families are tightening their belts, he’s going to make sure that the government continues to tighten its own,” Obama said.
Paul Krugman, today: We’ll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn’t been a success.
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Mr. Black
Today’s edition of What Atrios Says [numerology mine]:
I get that the realities of Congress blah blah blah means that maybe not everything passes, but would it be so hard to:
Spend a couple of weeks making the case for a crucial piece of legislation.
Publicize major votes on that issue.
Have votes.
If votes fail, continue to make noise about the vote.
Answer: Apparently...
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“There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished...”
– Mitch McConnell who has apparently never seen this.
If we had a functional press corps, somebody would be counting down to the reveal of just such a chart directly beside or behind him on live television. We’ve got the whole day to fill, Mitch-O; you’ll be delighted to hear that we...
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Letter to the President
This is how you are perceived:
Even before his unemployment checks ended, Dwight Michael Frazee’s days were filled with the pursuit of any idea that could earn him a buck. But few are working out, and now his nights are filled with dread.
[…]
Frazee, who is married and has a 5-year-old daughter, is in a financial free fall with no safety net.
“My life has been...
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Don't Forget More Tax Cuts
Jonah Goldberg: For a year or so, Republicans have been the so-called party of no. Contrary to the expectations of its critics, that tactic has been good for the GOP. It seems that the "tea parties," America's natural antibodies to Obamaism, have provided some vital stem cell therapy, helping to regrow the Republican spine. But that spine is only valuable if you use it for something....Now is the time for the GOP to call Obama's bluff and offer a real choice. My personal preference would be for the leadership to embrace Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's "road map," a sweeping, bold and humane assault on the welfare state and our debt crisis. Doing so might come at the cost of trimming the GOP's victory margins in November, but it would provide Republicans with a real mandate to be something more than "not-Obama."
Kevin Drum: I would pay cash money if the Republican leadership would promise to actually do this. Goldberg thinks that liberals aren't popular? That's peanuts. If Republicans made a serious run at passing Ryan's road map the party would end up just slightly more popular than the Taliban. I think there would literally not be a single demographic or interest group in the entire country still supporting them. Even the tea partiers would start pretending to be Democrats. Hell, they'd probably take up the cause of repealing the 22nd amendment and allowing Obama to be elected president for life [...] I dare them. I double dog dare them. Let's hear about how you're going to cut federal spending by a trillion dollars over the next five years and by a third over the next 50. Details, people. Let's hear 'em.
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“Pills of the [antimony] became popular as a medicine in the 1700s, especially as...”
– Sam Kean, blogging the periodic table over at Salon. Oh what I wouldn’t give for the simpler days of yore when we really cared about families and knew what mattered. Specifically, sifting our shit for Papa’s prize poison pill. You can just taste the love. 