Day: October 21, 2010

Tumble DC 25: Receipt

MY CONTRIBUTION IS A: First membership contribution

AMOUNT: $25.00

MEMBERSHIP THANK-YOU GIFTS:
None selected.

Related, comments from one James_Gary on Yglesias’ Juan Williams ruminations are on point:

Hopefully NPR will get the clue here and do something similar on their next pledge drive: “…if we get $1 million in the next hour, we promise to sack Cokie Roberts and the entire simpering-Republican crew of Planet Money!” […] Every time I hear a Planet Money commenter on NPR, I feel like I’m listening to a completely earnest version of John Hodgman’s “expert” from The Daily Show– pompously condescending and, if not actually wrong, then misleadingly simplistic to the point of stupidity.

Either one of those offers tied to such a guarantee would net $100 from me. Instantly.

Tumble DC 25: Receipt

Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

Juan Williams, getting himself fired from NPR. You’d think by now that anyone leading a sentence with “I’m not a bigot, but…” would have the sense to pause and reflect.
The sad part is that he’s said worse things than this on NPR. That they have enabled him, for years, to parrot right wing talking points in the guise of “analysis” on NPR, and then to turn around an paint a patina of “the reasonable liberal” on any bit of trash that FOXnews wants to peddle, more or less borders on an unforgivable act for what claims to be a serious news organization. All they did was make him quit identifying himself as an NPR analyst while on FOXnews; instead, they should have fired his ass years ago.
Never fear, though, we’ll always have Cokie “It’s out there” Roberts to fill in the void in our “this is bad for the Democrats” lives.

Looking at You, Nevada

jonathan-cunningham:

Raise the minimum wage to a living wage.

I think this, more than anything else, is what truly explains the electoral map:

They are almost the same (though inverted) image, with the exceptions of the Nevada/Utah/Texas WTF are they thinking™ lunacy corridor (and the fact that CO is lately a genuinely purple state, seemingly awakening from a long and careless slumber). And, honestly, Nevada’s current and indefensible Tea Klan tendencies are indeed a reflection of this: we’ve got Reid and still can’t get economic reforms going in this state.

It is not and may never be clear to me why all the Democratic “strategists” in the employ of the national party apparatus are so seemingly oblivious to the fact that we live in a polarized nation, but not polarized along any of the lines they parrot…polarized along the “I can afford to live where I do” and “I have to work three jobs just to buy my dollar’s worth of potted meat product and still keep myself and my family off the streets” lines. This is the real and only issue. It drives everything, most definitely including the Tea Klan.
Yet strategists and their candidates almost never pay more than lip service to the idea of it; more often than not, it’s dismissed entirely in service of better enabling the lives and fortunes of plutocrats.

That the term “working poor” now basically defines the middle class in this country is the real, existential issue. And still nobody but nobody ever wants to talk about it, much less do anything.