Month: October 2010

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.

The Rodeo Clown

This is why you have to point out O’Donnell’s foolishness early and often:

Are you telling me separation of church and state’s in the First Amendment? It’s not. Christine O’Donnell was absolutely correct – the First Amendment says absolutely nothing about the separation of church and state.“
–Rush Limbaugh

And he’s right…if your requirement for Constitutional legality is based on applying some sort of misguided Biblical Inerrancy to the Constitution and its legal meanings, then you’re going to be disappointed re: church and state. This is, not coincidentally, also why the very same Tea Klanners see a major difference between:

separation between church and state

–and–

separation of church and state

These are seen as completely different statements. And one of those two is coming at you straight from Hitler. And you want the facts to matter?
That the establishment clause of the first amendment implicitly creates a separation between church and state is unimportant to the Tea Klan. They are reading this as the literal string of words and most definitely not for any deeper meaning. We don’t want to cast our lot in with a bunch of pointy-headed lawyers, now do we? The words separation, of, church, and state do not appear. Period. Furthermore, "In God We Trust” is on the currency; the Tea Klan worships Lord Jesus, so that word “God” must mean Christian God and not, say, Tiamat, God of Chaos. That it was put there relatively recently is utterly unimportant: the facts do not matter. It is there; we are a movement made up of Christians, therefore the US must be an inherently christian nation, (because some of the founders were, in fact, Christians) and thus we should be, on that basis, ruled by christian laws, morals, and ideals.

Look, the Tea Klan has about 10 preferred narratives. You’re not going to beat any of them based on the facts or some sober assessment of the deeper meanings of the Constitution and its amendments. The facts simply do not matter.
The only way you beat these memes is by linking them inextricably in the minds of the broader populace with outright lunacy. As soon as anyone starts talking about nullifying the 17th amendment, you need a large fraction of the population to link that with nuts like O’Donnell and instantly, reflexively turn off. Oh, 17th amendment again, that is a rube’s issue, this person must be a nut just like that know-nothing O’Donnell. Wait, didn’t I hear Sharon Angle talking about that same crap? That makes me uncomfortable, no matter how strong she is on the menace of Social Security. Hey, why is the GOP nominee for President yapping on about the 17th amendment just like that crazy woman did? Thus ends the Tea Klan.

I Guess I Didn’t Get That Far

Christine O’Donnell: “…perhaps they didn’t teach you Constitutional law at Yale Divinity School.”
Chris Coons: [Creationism, implicitly “a religious doctrine,” should not be taught in public schools due to the Constitution’s First Amendment.]

Christine O’Donnell: “The First Amendment does? Let me just clarify: You’re telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?”

Chis Coons: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,”

Christine O’Donnell: “That’s in the First Amendment…?”

In a New York Times/CBS News Poll last month, fewer than one in 10 respondents knew that the Obama administration had lowered taxes for most Americans. Half of those polled said they thought that their taxes had stayed the same, a third thought that their taxes had gone up, and about a tenth said they did not know. As Thom Tillis, a Republican state representative, put it as the dinner wound down here, “This was the tax cut that fell in the woods — nobody heard it.”

What if a president cut Americans’ income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?(via southpol)

OR:

This is why they fail.

Source: The New York Times

What They Won’t Tell You

I’ve heard at least a half dozen media reports on the boom in “anonymous” campaign financing, mostly of the “a pox on both houses” variety, e.g. utterly misleading. Then there’s this email that was sent to Glenn Greenwald in reference to a bit of crap logic from David Brooks:

There are 435 House seats, and 37 Senate races being run.

Average Cash on Hand for Democratic House Candidates: $430,153
Average Cash on Hand for Republican House Candidates: $376,720
Average Cash on Hand for Democratic Senate Candidates: $2,937,267
Average Cash on Hand for Republican Senate Candidates: $2,998,816

So, the average House race has less than $1 million cash on hand to spend for advertising in the last month, between both candidates.

The average Senate race has less than $6 million between the two.

So, let’s say that Rove and his $60 million wants to target 30, close house races, and 10 close Senate races.
He could spend $3 million each on the 10 Senate races, DOUBLING the amount candidate spends.
He could also spend $1 million each in the House races, and effectively spend 3 TIMES more than the candidate.

Just $60 million is a HUGE amount targeted at just a few races.

And of course the “chamber of commerce” is spending even more than that.

And, of course, the vast majority of all this class of contribution is going straight into GOP pockets. Not that anyone would ever deign to mention it.

What They Won’t Tell You