Open Thread

So part of the whole not being able to sleep thing is I listened to a couple Mitch Hedberg albums. So I’m sleepy, but laughing my ass off.

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Willard, Jumping on the Couch

Another analysis of the Presumed Republican Nominee, from Paul Constant at The Stranger:

As for Mitt Romney? For some reason, the guy has always reminded me of Tom Cruise, and I never could figure out exactly why that was. It’s not that both men have made People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People list, even though they have; or that both men belong to religions that creep everyone else out, even though they do; or that both men are ridiculously wealthy and unnaturally moisturized, even though they are. It wasn’t until watching Romney’s South Carolina concession speech that I finally realized what it was about him that made me think of Cruise.

In all his movies and, more importantly for our purposes, in all his talk show appearances, Cruise only comes in one flavor—INTENSE. Even when he’s not gibbering up and down on an overstuffed settee, he’s staring directly at the person he’s talking to, his jaw clenched, his eyes smoky and penetrative. He can’t make jokes, because jokes are born of nuance and self-understanding, and Tom Cruise doesn’t have time for any of that shit. He’s busy being Tom Cruise all the goddamned time, and the only thing harder than being Tom Cruise all the time is being Tom Cruise when he’s pretending to interact with other human beings.

For the last six years, Romney has set his formidable brain to one task: become the perfect Republican presidential candidate. He’s surrounded himself with the best political team money can buy. He’s financed extensive surveys of early primary states, he’s paid experts ridiculous sums of money to run scenarios for every single eventuality that could occur in the 2012 campaign, and he’s in all likelihood dropped exorbitant sums of money in the laps of branding experts to tell him at what angle he should hold the microphone away from his body to look most presidential.

But like Tom Cruise, Mitt Romney gets lost in the Uncanny Valley because his outsize ambition blinds him. He’s spending all of his time thinking about what a perfect presidential candidate should say and look like and do rather than being a presidential candidate…

But then, some people say Romney’s actually been planning on being president since approximately 1970:

... Upon completion of his foreign mission, he immersed himself in the 1970 senatorial campaign of his mother, Lenore Romney, who was running against Phillip Hart in the Michigan general election. That same year, the Cougar Club — the all male, all white social club at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City (blacks were excluded from full membership in the Mormon church until 1978) — was humming with talk that its president, Mitt Romney, would become the first Mormon president of the United States. “If not Mitt, then who?” was the ubiquitous slogan within the elite organization. The pious world of BYU was expected to spawn the man who would lead the Mormons into the White House and fulfill the prophecies of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith Jr., which Romney has avidly sought to realize…

As the master of modern political journalism wrote: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And if you think this presidential campaign has been pretty weird so far…

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It’s 2 Am, Do You Know Where Your Blog Host Is?

And the insmonia continues for day 9.

I’ve had this shit before, but it has been bad the past few weeks. And if anyone tells me to exercise, I will pick up and throw my fucking four hundred dollar towel rack exercise bike at your head. I’m using it, god damnit.

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Monday Night Open Thread: Willard the Barbarian

Charlie Pierce is not impressed by the mas macho talk about/from Romney’s campaign:

... Willard Romney has made a great effort over the past two days, butching himself up in spiked shoulder pads and hollering for mead and slave women, in order to “get back” what he’d never truly lost in the first place. Yes, he looked like a jackass in South Carolina. In any sane political party, he’d be allowed to brag about that. Now, though, he’s back running in a state that he can carpet-bomb with money, which he will use to explain again how he’s the only one of this troupe of buffoons who even halfway looks like a president. He’s outspent Newt Gingrich five-to-one in a state where all campaigning is done tarmac-to-tarmac. He’s always been the candidate best suited to take advantage of the twisted new landscape of campaign finance, and to take advantage of the fact the most of his party is out of its mind. He’s always been the only one of them operating within the fundamentally overlooked twin realities of this campaign.

The test comes afterwards, though. I fear we’re now in for a fearsome period of reality-detached spin. The Republican “Establishment” — although having bottom-feeding slugs like Matt Drudge, indicted crooks like Tom DeLay, superannuated media harpies like Ann Coulter, and Bob Dole, The Vengeful Undead, for your “establishment” illustrates another story about Republicans that’s worth a second look, but won’t get it — has lined up impressively behind Willard Romney, who has abnegated himself impressively enough just to make that happen.

Do we see a Romney victory as a triumph of tactics, as a victory for those tough-as-nails Ostrogoths who hired on from such fallen juggernauts as the Bachmann campaign? Or do we understand that there is nothing important about Willard Romney as a candidate that has changed at all. He is still an unprincipled opportunist, incapable of telling the truth about his own record, and utterly without conscience when it comes to lying about someone else. Almost everything he says about the incumbent president is just as much a lie as it was when he said it in Iowa, or in New Hampshire, or in South Carolina, or 10 goddamn minutes ago. He still so represents the kind of capitalism that nearly wrecked this country that Thomas Nast might come back from the dead just to draw “GREED” with his face. All of this was true a week ago. All of this will be true next week. And next month. And in November, when the threadbare puppet theater finally comes down.

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“Israel firsters”

Tebow knows I’m not a speech police, and I agree with John that there’s nothing wrong with describing Jeff Goldberg as a “former Israeli prison guard”, given that his best known work is about his experiences as an Israeli prison guard, but I think everyone should stop using the phrase “Israel firster”. People like Spencer Ackerman have the same attitude and opinions about US policy towards Israel that I (and probably most of you) have, but unlike me (and probably most of you), they’re actively involved with trying to change it. If your political allies find the language you are using offensive and alienating, just better not to use it. What’s the point? Maybe when you say “Israel firster” you mean the real lunatics, but if other Americans who are interested in US policy towards Israel think that you’re questioning their loyalty to the US, then it’s just not productive to use the phrase.

I’ve described Jackson Diehl and Jennifer Rubin as “Israel firsters” before but I won’t again. Yes, they care primarily about what is going on in Israel to the exclusion of other issues, but that’s not what’s wrong with their punditry. What’s wrong with their punditry is that it advocates simple-minded, militaristic right-wing solutions to all of Israel’s problems.

I don’t call Rick Santorum an America-firster, I call him a bigoted, homophobic, right-wing asshole. Diehl and Rubin are bigoted, Islamophobic, right-wing assholes and should be described as such. To describe their support for self-destructive Likud party policies as “pro-Israel” cedes them ground they don’t deserve: I don’t think their blatherings are in any way beneficial to Israel as a nation, in point of fact.

There’s been a lot of discussion of the language that gets used here in the discussion of Israel, and I just wanted to get this off my chest.

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Simp Phony For The Devil

Having taken over Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog for Steve Benen (now part of the Maddow team at MSNBC, and more power to him there, he’s badly needed), Ed Kilgore is doing a pretty solid job so far.  He flags this article from The Hill written by FOX News punching bag Juan Williams and immediately asks the correct question: How long will Juan Williams now last at FOX after stating the obvious about the network’s racial dog-whistle language?  Williams states:

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

One has to wonder then why Williams is hanging out at FOX News, arguably the number one source for disseminating these code words.  I have zero sympathy for the guy, he made his choices and he has to live with them.  But Kilgore immediately grasps the issue:

When Newt Gingrich turned Juan Williams into the perfect foil during the January 19 Republican candidate debate in Myrtle Beach, SC, ironic symbolism certainly abounded. Aside from the fact that Newt vaulted himself into the lead by beating up on an African-American journalist on MLK Day in the Cradle of the Confederacy, there was the additional fact that Williams is a Fox News panelist who briefly became a conservative celebrity after NPR fired him for on-air remarks deemed insensitive to Muslims. The debate audience didn’t know or care, presumably viewing Williams as just another “race-card” player who needed to be slapped down for suggesting anyone railing against the work ethic of food stamp recipients might be appealing to atavistic motives.

Now, I think Kilgore is on the right track, but my cynical side wants to move the grubby, Cheeto crud-covered GOP chess pieces forward a few moves and says Williams lobbed such a fat, tasty curveball over the plate of Gingrich in South Carolina for a reason, and that is to make a horse race out of the coronation of Marquis du Mittens as long as possible to keep the faithful glued to the primary noise machine.  With Newt down in Florida and big by most accounts, he’s pitched another juicy one right into Gingrich’s ego wheelhouse with the primary just hours away.  I don’t know if it’ll do any good, but the plan seems pretty obvious.

Just the kind of scrum FOX excels at creating and running with.  Williams knows damn well what he’s doing now, just like he damn well knew what he was doing in South Carolina, people.  Weep not for Juan.

Like I said, zero sympathy for this phony simp’s symphony.

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Open Thread

I’m on day two of my blog hiatus. Not dead.

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Occupy the Toybox

I would love this even I didn’t have a half-dozen tchotchkes on my desk right now. From the Guardian:

Police in the Siberian city of Barnaul have asked prosecutors to investigate the legality of a recent protest that saw dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: “I’m for clean elections” and “A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin”.

“Political opposition forces are using new technologies to carry out public events – using toys with placards at mini-protests,” Andrei Mulintsev, the city’s deputy police chief, said at a press conference this week, according to local media. “In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event.”

Activists set up the display after authorities repeatedly rejected their request to hold a sanctioned demonstration of the kind held in Moscow to protest disputed parliamentary elections results and Vladimir Putin’s expected return to the presidency in a March vote.

Passersby admired the display with giggles, but police took it more seriously, examining its details and writing down each placard…

Worth clicking the link just to read the comments. I’m looking forward to seeing what American protestors can achieve with their homespun Makerbots and the fast-advancing field of 3D printers.

And then, * sigh *, there is the state-sanctioned “creative play” of this guy, complete with gender-biased color insult:

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Send the Panty Sniffing Squad to Inspect Mitt’s Magic Underoos

Now that Michelle Obama’s underwear is up for discussion at all the usual wingnut sites, can we start talking about Mitt Romney’s? After all, for a Mormon, it’s “the most sacred of all things in the world, next to their own virtue, next to their own purity of life”, so I’d think that it’s something that Romney should discuss. Or are there two sets of standards, one for Mrs. Obama, and one for Mitt Romney?

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Open Thread

Squirrel!

Chat about whatever.

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Don’t envy him his plane, you jealous leftists

We had an organizing event here Saturday, at a diner.

Angela Zimmann was there, she’s running for the US House:

And John Vanover was there, he’s running for the Ohio legislature. That is his first wife standing there with him:

We talked about a lot of things, but I think I can safely say the GOP primary is good for Democrats, based solely on this tiny and unrepresentative sample. It’s at least as reliable as my recounting an imaginary conversation with a cabdriver, so let’s just go with it. They’re really, really enjoying watching the GOP candidates duke it out, particularly the ultra-brilliant and learned Professor Gingrich, because they (of course) remember the old (real) Newt Gingrich, and not in a good way, either. A real walk down memory lane for them.

One other thing we talked about is how a local business owner has all but completed his conversion from Republican to Democrat. It isn’t new this change of heart, he publicly endorsed Obama in ‘08, but he hadn’t really joined with Democrats until this year, when he came to our banquet and agreed to meet with all of our candidates. It’s a nice fit for us, too, because this business owner is not just a big employer, he’s a big union employer.

This public conversion is important to us, because we believe we need someone who is trusted who might make it okay to vote for a Democrat, if a disgruntled Republican or wishy washy independent was leaning that way anyway. We need someone to go first.

It’s especially interesting that our recent convert is sounding more and more like Woody Guthrie with each passing day because he is, in fact, a wealthy person. He and his family live quite modestly and unremarkably here locally, he lives close to where I live, but he also has three other homes in some really nice places. And a plane. He has a plane.

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I’m still not clear on why conservatives don’t want people voting early, yet they do want people voting absentee

Sunshine in the sunshine state:

Election experts and Democratic voting advocates told U.S. senators Friday that a Republican-backed overhaul of Florida election laws will suppress Democratic turnout in the nation’s biggest battleground state next fall.
Democratic Sens. Bill Nelson of Florida and Dick Durbin of Illinois held a field hearing at the Hillsborough County Courthouse that drew a racially diverse crowd that at times resembled an orchestrated Democratic rally. In packed pews in a sixth-floor courtroom, people wore yellow stickers that read “Our voice, our vote” and hissed a witness who defended the law.
Testimony centered on the most controversial changes: reducing early voting from 14 days to eight, from 96 hours to a minimum of 48, and ending it on the Saturday before the election; requiring third-party groups to register and face fines if they turn in voter registration forms after 48 hours; and requiring voters to cast provisional ballots if they moved from another county since they last voted if they did not update their addresses.
Nearly 200 people attended the hearing and about 200 more watched on TV from a nearby room. The crowd erupted into loud applause when Durbin said: “There are people literally fighting and dying for the right to vote in countries like Syria, and we are finding ways to restrict the right to vote?”
As the two-hour forum ended, Nelson said: “The rule of law has been assaulted in this state by this election law under the pretense of cutting down on election fraud.”

I think these field hearings are a great idea. Part of the problem with conservatives changing voting requirements every twenty minutes is that voters don’t know that the rules have changed or what, exactly, the ever-changing rules now require. The more attention voter suppression laws get, the better. Targeted groups have to know they’re targeted before they can act to protect their right to vote.

Nelson called this witness:

University of Florida political science professor Daniel A. Smith will testify Friday before several U.S. senators about Florida’s new voting law.
Smith was invited to the hearing by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights.
The hearing, to be held in Tampa, will examine a Florida law that limits the time available for early voting, makes it more difficult for volunteer organizations to register voters and changes the cause for voters to cast provisional ballots.
Smith was selected by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson’s office to “speak from an academic viewpoint, not an activist’s,” Smith said. Smith was chosen as a witness because of his work on Florida election law and voting behavior.
Smith’s testimony will look at three features of the new law and how they potentially limit voting rights of Floridians.
“The first is early voting. The new Florida law truncates the early voting period from a 14-day window to an eight-day window, and most importantly, it eliminates the final Sunday before Election Day,” Smith said.

Early voting is popular with voters, yet Republicans are working hard all over the country to limit early voting. The crazed conservative assault on early voting makes even less sense than their other nonsensical, wholly imaginary claims re: voting, because there’s absolutely no difference between an early vote and an election day vote in terms of security or potential fraud. They don’t even have a remotely plausible storyline on Fox News on why we must limit early voting. They have nothing. People like early voting because it’s convenient. Conservatives oppose early voting because… well, we don’t know why conservatives oppose early voting.

Smith and Michael Herron, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, matched the voter file from the 2008 general election with the early voting file from that election, identifying trends such as which ethnic, racial, gender, or age groups were more likely to vote early in 2008, and how the new law likely will affect them.
Smith said they found African-American, Hispanic, youth, and first-time voters were much more likely to vote on the Sunday before the election.

Oh. That explains it.

Maybe at the next hearing we can discuss this:

Not mentioned at the hearing was that Florida has made it easier for voters to cast absentee ballots by mail as an alternative to early voting or visiting the polls on Election Day. But UF’s Smith said the highest likelihood of fraud involves absentee ballots.

If there’s a conservative lawyer out there who can defend the fact that conservatives push absentee balloting, the least secure voting method, while aggressively acting to limit early voting, I’d sure like to hear what they have to say. That doesn’t make any sense, unless they’re targeting voters who disfavor conservatives.

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Reince, watch, repeat

What struck me about that clip from old man Schieffer that mistermix put up wasn’t so much how offensive Reince’s comparison was but how obscure it was. How many viewers could possibly have known who Captain Schettino is? I had no idea. I had heard of the crash, but not to the point where I knew the captain’s name. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe Italian ship disasters are exactly what Real Murkins like to talk about it around the Applebees salad bar, but I doubt it.

In 2008, I was similarly struck by how often John McCain would yell “field mice” or “bear DNA” at odd moments, and by how Mark Halperin and Chuck Todd thought this was a killer tactic, even though there’s no way most Americans had any idea what he was talking about. This set of Republican debates has been even worse, with the constant references to Saul Alinsky and silver dimes. What Atrios wrote a few years ago is more true than ever:

I’ve written before that I think part of the problem that conservatives/Republicans face is that their mythology has become a bit too complex for mere mortals (people who don’t listen to Limbaugh and read The Corner obsessively) to comprehend. They reference rogues’ gallery of enemies and various “bad things” that most people have never heard of. Simply trying to navigate through the various wingnutty minefields while throwing out the appropriate red meat has become difficult to do, and the result is incomprehensible to most of the country.

Here’s another example of what I’m talking about, in the context of the Christian right’s response to Gingrich’s anti-media debate tirade a few weeks ago:

The way Land sees it, Gingrich’s answer went beyond merely nodding toward the anti-media spirit among conservative Christian voters and reached forward instead to what they imagined would be an apocalyptic, nearly eschatological campaign between Obama and Gingrich. “They would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated by a real intellectual,” Land told me. “He would tear Obama’s head off.”

Evidence in support of Land’s analysis can be found in a webcast on the Internet site of Don Wildmon’s American Family Association. On the site, Matt Barber, an aggressive promoter of a socially conservative agenda, voiced unalloyed joy over a video celebrating the Gingrich-King confrontation like a nature show. Barber describes

footage of a lion chasing down a zebra. And then after the lion kills the zebra and looks up with his fur bloody, they switched back to a picture of Newt Gingrich with blood over his face. He had just made a meal out of John King.

To most viewers, I’m sure Gingrich came across as a guy who was angry that his philandering ways were being discussed on tv, but to some on the right, Gingrich came across as an intellectual lion-eating zebra zebra-eating lion. It’s no wonder these debates are killing Republicans’ favorability with independent voters.

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Over There

While I have so recently been reminded by our friends in the 101st Chairborne that I’m some arugula-chomping, word-chopping, bubble-bound faux-American, it happens that even folks from my particular corner of Alinskystan talk to people whose daily life is as real as it gets.

Which is to say that one of my friends most often in my thoughts is an infantryman to the bone, decades in uniform, absolutely dedicated to the idea of service and his men.  He’s an enlisted man, on his third tour in the Iraq/Afghanistan long war—and you can take this to the bank:  if you or your child had to hump up some hill where folks sought to do you or yours ill, you’d want my friend there too.  He’s one of nature’s sergeants, I’m trying to say, the kind of guy who knows what he’s doing to some very deep level, and takes the use of that knowledge as an obligation he owes anyone under gaze.

In December, I wrote him a quick note—just a “happy holidays – hope you’re OK” kind of thing.  When I got his reply, I asked for permission to post it here—which I’ve just received.

My friend speaks for himself. I’m not going to gloss it further except to say this:  I’m past tolerating being told by comfortable American Exceptionalists about the necessity of the next war, or the war after that.  My friend and his friends carry the load for all such  Dulce et Decorum posturing.

So.  Notes from Over There:

I am still in Afghanistan in [Deleted] province at an altitude of [Deleted] feet. We have no heat in our bee huts (plywood shacks that sleep six), the temperature at night is in the low teens. They tell us they are working on getting a heater.

It is a tough tour.  We lost six men to an IED three days before Christmas, [not his unit] we worked closely together and I knew them well. We have lost twenty Americans since I arrived. Today I was on an air mission we flew high into the mountains in a heavily Taliban controlled area, luckily we had no trouble. War is a strange thing, going out on missions almost everyday and not knowing if it will be your last day on earth.

We work with the provincial governors and sub governors to build roads, bridges, schools, and give out humanitarian aid, but the leaders steal most of the money and little gets down to the people. I am out in the boonies, we fire artillery all day and night and they rocket us. Soldiers...are killed and wounded almost weekly, the call goes out over the loud speaker all this type or that type of blood report to the aid station. I have carried wounded on to helicopters in the field and carried others off the helicopters back at base. It always makes my eyes water and heart hurt to see their broken bodies. It is surreal. I will finish my tour in [Deleted], I had a short leave home in [Deleted]. It is interesting; we raid villages at night and capture terrorist responsible for the bombings, we caught the ones who killed the [men lost before Christmas] the night before last.

I am fine. I am an old soldier, and still tough, I plan missions and lead them and so far, thank God, I have not lost one of my men. The fighting in Ramadi Iraq was more bloody, but this place is no joke either. I will never understand why nations go to war, I know the politics, countries do bad things, but it is so ugly. I now have a collection of faces of men that I knew who have been killed in action that live in my head. I am sorry to write like this but I guess I was feeling philosophical.

I hope you join me in sending every good wish and hope to my friend and those with whom he serves.  That is all.

Image:  Rembrandt van Rijn, Old Soldier, undated—first half of the seventeenth century.

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It’s Funny to Compare Obama to a Coward Who Killed People

I don’t know what’s worse, Bob Scheiffer and Reince Preibus laughing about Preibus’ comparison of President Obama to the Captain of the Costa Concordia (17 dead, 16 missing), or Bob Scheiffer’s bewildered old man face before he gets the joke. Isn’t it about time for one of Scheiffer’s kids to take over that show?

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