[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.
God Bless America.
The GOP’s class warfare has backfired.
“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 turned against unemployment. In Nevada, Sharron Angle ®, the candidate facing incumbent Sen. Harry Reid (D), told local reporters, “You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job.” (Untrue.) Angle also called the unemployed “spoiled.”
Emphasis added to point out that it’s just not that hard to take a point of view. Especially a sensible and informative one: what Angle said was demonstrably false. Period. No “opinions differ” or, even worse, simply print what she said and “leave it there.”
More please.
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 workers or renters or consumers don’t generally step in quickly enough to prevent these businesses from experiencing real additional hardship.”
At 43rd and Thomas, such short-term economic perils are no abstraction.
“If people don’t come here, I don’t make money and I don’t pay taxes,” Katchi said.
[…]
merchants say the repercussions are clear — not just in how it’s prompted many families to leave the state, but scared others enough to curtail their regular activities.
“The economy’s already bad, but on top of it [SB 1070] is like a bullet in the head to us,” said Osameh Odeh, 35, whose Eden Wear clothing store was empty one recent afternoon. “People don’t come out of their houses anymore.”
Odeh has laid off workers and doesn’t pay his utility bills until the day they come due. He’s not sure he can stay open and notes that the effect spreads well beyond the rough-and-tumble streets of Maryvale. A resident of the middle-class suburb of Gilbert, Odeh has cut back his purchases at home.
Filibusted
“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 republicans only have to defend something like 9 seats that election).
They’d just be beating the rush. The first thing the Republicans will do upon retaking the Senate is eliminate the filibuster. To add insult to injury, they’ll point to their own obstructionism as evidence of the system’s failure. And won’t be challenged by the media in any way shape or form; quite the contrary, any Democrats making a complaint will be painted as “sore losers” who, as usual, want to ignore clear mandates from the American people.
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.
Better Democrats™ please.
Is Afghanistan important? Sure. Does it matter? Sure. Is the performance of a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Khost Province more important to the long-term interests of American citizens than the performance of the Riverside County Public Schools? I don’t think so. Are American efforts in Afghanistan achieving some humanitarian purposes? Sure. Is building a T.G.I. Friday’s at Kandahar Air Base a better way of undertaking a humanitarian mission than increasing appropriations to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria? It’s almost silly to even ask the question.
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 underlying factors intelligently. It’ll take years of that conversation to get to a point where a national politician could then address this issue in a meaningful way, at least publicly.
Obama, perhaps the only politician in my lifetime that actually seems suited to undertake such a rational long-play, shows absolutely no inclination to do it. So I doubt this happens now or ever. Smiles everyone, smiles!
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 underlying factors intelligently. It’ll take years of that conversation to get to a point where a national politician could then address this issue in a meaningful way, at least publicly.
Obama, perhaps the only politician in my lifetime that actually seems suited to undertake such a rational long-play, shows absolutely no inclination to do it. So I doubt this happens now or ever. Smiles everyone, smiles!
[Journalists] could have made the point that they were important because they were skilled at compiling and communicating what might interest people, or they could cling to their AUTHORITAH and claim they were important gatekeepers, deciding what the rabble should know. They chose the latter, and now they wonder why we don’t applaud.
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 – or, at least, the conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans who hold the deciding votes in Congress.
I agree up to a point. But I think the biggest winners here will be the far right. This sort of quiet expansion of governmental powers plays right into their hands; likewise, they have a base that’s already sure the EPA is right up there with [Godwin’s law alert] the Gestapo, meddling as they do in our water and air and such when the little guy with a massive industrial waste stream is just trying to get by. Likewise, it will be taken as yet more “proof” of the creeping Socialization of everything.
This is usually the moment that sensate individuals take recourse to the facts: why, cap and trade is a Republican idea, and Republicans are the ones stopping it; this means it is they who will suffer the consequences.
To which I say: don’t worry your pretty little head about that; the facts do not matter. This is additionally one of those cases where it is genuinely Bad for the Democrat; this outcome dispirits the base and empowers the opposition.
Were I an optimist, I might say that the administration and its cronies will easily foresee this eventuality, and be ready to combat the inevitable “it’s not enough for the government to take our water and other precious bodily fluids and poison them with fluoride and God knows what other Communistic contaminants, now they want to control the air we breathe” style-nonsense that will inevitably emit from the maw of the far right. Yes, theoretically optimistic me opines that the various trans-limbic individuals inhabiting American polity will furthermore soon begin their own inoculations against such future tropes so that, when said tropes arise, the public will be well prepared to disregard the new, and incompatible information. After all, it is well known that fact-primacy is everything in the current environment.
But I am not an optimist.
Lemkin 