Category: Uncategorized
I’ve got a little list
From digby:
-
Tea Party’ers are not more likely to have racist tendencies than other conservatives.
(Except they are.) -
Democrats are scheming to hit 94 percent of small business owners with tax increases.
(Except they aren’t.) -
Bloody violence is out of control along the Mexican border, and illegal immigrants are streaming into America at record levels.
(Except it’s not and they’re not.) -
Obamacare will send Medicare spiraling out of control.
(Except it won’t.) -
Marriage is a religious union that’s all about procreation.
(Except it isn’t.) -
Voters say cutting the deficit is more important than creating jobs.
(Except they don’t.) -
Social Security is going broke, it adds to the deficit, and we have to raise the retirement age because people are living longer.
(Except it’s not, it doesn’t and we don’t.) -
The earth is getting cooler.
(Except it’s really really not.)
Small enough to print, laminate, and keep in your pocket, David Gregory (et al.). Go and do likewise.
It’s up to Republicans to decide if they agree with this strategy. Do they want an issue or do they want us to get it done quickly?
Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Statements like this boggle the mind. Welcome back from Mars, Jim, how has the weather been on The Red Planet? Much rain since your arrival there in the early-70s?
Statements like this boggle the mind. Welcome back from Mars, Jim, how has the weather been on The Red Planet? Much rain since your arrival there in the early-70s?
The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.
Edward M. Kennedy, in an undelivered paragraph written for his RFK eulogy. Print out and post in the White House if you please because we are not on drugs. We have judged the evidence and find you timid and fearful in the face of old ideas and positively cowering in the face of anything like a new idea.
We were not deceived by the idiotic rhetoric of the far right. We knew you were a centrist and a pragmatist from the get-go. We are inherently sympathetic to the cause and appreciate the moments of progress, no matter how diminished or incremental they may be, when those moments have stumbled and sputtered into being. Unlike the people you classify as not on drugs, we actually give you credit for them. And but so we’re getting awfully tired of being portrayed as a villain by the same group that treats FOXnews as a thoroughly impartial and purely journalistic concern.
As was noted on the crazed liberal outlet msnbc the other night, right now in China people are commuting on a spanking-new ~200mph MagLev train. In America, we’re un-paving roads because we can’t afford them anymore. Precisely where in that sentence can you find the “great enterprises of American Society,” Mr. Gibbs? That’s what makes us uneasy. That’s why we’re crying out for some leadership, especially if it’s just tilting at windmills. Because that’s a part of leading: taking up an important cause, no matter how unpopular or unheralded, and fighting for it, whatever may come. Yes: even if you lose.
And, not coincidentally, that is precisely what we have never seen out of this administration. Must be all the drugs.
We were not deceived by the idiotic rhetoric of the far right. We knew you were a centrist and a pragmatist from the get-go. We are inherently sympathetic to the cause and appreciate the moments of progress, no matter how diminished or incremental they may be, when those moments have stumbled and sputtered into being. Unlike the people you classify as not on drugs, we actually give you credit for them. And but so we’re getting awfully tired of being portrayed as a villain by the same group that treats FOXnews as a thoroughly impartial and purely journalistic concern.
As was noted on the crazed liberal outlet msnbc the other night, right now in China people are commuting on a spanking-new ~200mph MagLev train. In America, we’re un-paving roads because we can’t afford them anymore. Precisely where in that sentence can you find the “great enterprises of American Society,” Mr. Gibbs? That’s what makes us uneasy. That’s why we’re crying out for some leadership, especially if it’s just tilting at windmills. Because that’s a part of leading: taking up an important cause, no matter how unpopular or unheralded, and fighting for it, whatever may come. Yes: even if you lose.
And, not coincidentally, that is precisely what we have never seen out of this administration. Must be all the drugs.
In that spirit, let me end by saying I don’t pretend to have all the answers to the challenges we face, and I look forward to periodic conversations with all of you in the months and years to come. I trust that you will continue to let me and other Democrats know when you believe we are screwing up. And I, in turn, will always try and show you the respect and candor one owes his friends and allies.
Barack Obama sounding oh so 2005 on the Great Orange Devil, and apparently Gibbs would agree: that was all a bunch of meaningless horseshit aimed primarily at the center-right that is so desperately underserved by American “politics.”
Abandon those that put you there and then blame them when you’re not there anymore. That’s change we can believe in, all right.
Abandon those that put you there and then blame them when you’re not there anymore. That’s change we can believe in, all right.
In 18 short months, we went from “hold me accountable” to “get drug tested.”
Glenn Greenwald, once again pointing out that which is painfully obvious to everyone but those raving socialists in the White House. Must be all that socialism. (via apsies)
(via jasencomstock)
(via jasencomstock)
Nothing that Does Matter
So good:
It does not matter where presidents or their wives go on vacation. IT DOES NOT MATTER. Presidential approval, election outcomes, support in Congress — nothing that does matter depends on where presidents go on vacation. It did not matter when Clinton apparently polled to figure out where he should go. It did not matter when Bush decamped to Crawford. It did not matter when the Obamas went to Martha’s Vineyard. It does not matter now.
Dowd writes:
In politics and pop culture, optics are all.
By that she means, “In politics and pop culture, optics are all that matters to me.”
You could not ask for a better distillation of why so much political commentary is so completely and utterly detached from what actually affects political outcomes. War and peace, economic prosperity and hard times, real scandals — these things pale beside the fact that the Obamas once went to New York City on a date!
To the privileged, equal treatment feels like discrimination.
Adam Serwer, The American Prospect (via abbyjean)
Saying to a senator, ‘You can’t bring up your amendment,’ is like saying to your 5-year-old son, ‘OK, Johnny, whatever you do, don’t touch the stove.’ Johnny’s going to spend the whole week trying to figure out a way to touch the stove.
Lamar Alexander, trying to explain Republican obstructionism in the Senate.
Close, but no cigar. It’s actually that The Democrat warned of the painful repercussions of touching this hot stove, but GOP Johnny, upon touching the stove and finding it not only cool and delightful, but even refreshing to the touch, then began to spend the whole week figuring out ways to get back onto the stove.
Threats made, no matter how ominous or ill advised they may have been, had better have consequences. Democrats in the Senate apparently do not understand this. The GOP does.
Close, but no cigar. It’s actually that The Democrat warned of the painful repercussions of touching this hot stove, but GOP Johnny, upon touching the stove and finding it not only cool and delightful, but even refreshing to the touch, then began to spend the whole week figuring out ways to get back onto the stove.
Threats made, no matter how ominous or ill advised they may have been, had better have consequences. Democrats in the Senate apparently do not understand this. The GOP does.
Obama’s Watergate
This paragraph from Yglesias got me thinking:
This is the oddity of American politics in 2010. To simply appropriate funds to give to poor foreigners (”foreign aid”) is hideously unpopular and politically unthinkable. To appropriate funds to give to state governments to keep the public sector operating is also politically untenable. But to appropriate the funds to build facilities for Americans but located in Afghanistan is easy.
In a nutshell: while we’re turning out the streetlights in Colorado and chopping up paved roads that states can no longer manage to pay up-keep on (and etc…), the Congress can always find plenty of money for our overseas adventures.
So: whoever Obama’s edition of Oliver North is, that person should build up some kind of sufficiently large yet sufficiently innocuous project that just needs doing over to Afghanistan. Money in hand, said North should then redirect that money to secret infrastructure improvements in this country. We can call it the Tuttle Initiative. Tuttlegate inevitably follows.
That this seems not only doable but probably the only way such a project gets done says a lot about our collapsing empire. Tap tap tap.
Lemkin 