Two questions/statements that get tossed around whenever I vent about one of these hot button issues were in a thread from yesterday, and I think they are worth talking about. The first:

OK, don’t have time to read all 289 comments but just wanted to ask why John is so obsessed with what gay people think of Obama? I mean, seriously, lately every third or fourth post is knocking some gay blogger or gays in general for being critical of Obama.

The second:

This post is representative of a weird mindset. As someone who was on the BushCo train, and only ditched out on them when it was obvious to everyone with a brain that they were failing us miserably, it seems that some who then in turn embraced Obama want to apply that kind of hero-worshiping that they did with Bush to Obama. That’s not how any of this stuff (stuff meaning how citizens observe and interact with presidential politics) was ever supposed to work.

I’ll answer them together because I think they are related. In response to the second statement, I think it is a very valid question/assertion to wonder if I am just shilling for Obama the way I did for Bush. I do at times seem to have an odd authoritarian streak, and I was completely and totally uncritical of Bush until I finally couldn’t take it anymore, so I think it is fair to think maybe I am just resorting to type.

The thing is, I don’t think I am just in the tank and think Obama can do no wrong. And this is where the first question/comment comes into play. If I’m obsessed with anything, I’m obsessed with people saying what I think are crazy and irrational and stupid things and then making fun of them. It just seems recently, a lot of that stuff has been coming from gay bloggers over gay rights issues. I also think that there is a certain mindset among some people that if you are not spending every day dramatically freaking out that Obama sucks, you aren’t doing your duty as a citizen and aren’t thinking critically and are “just in the bag” for the President. There honestly seems to be a group of people out there who think that when the President tells them to “make him do something,” they don’t understand that he wants them to apply constructive pressure on him and on Congress, they think it is a license to scream and flail and yell “just words” and adopt Republican messaging frames. They think it is permission to have a hissy fit. And I don’t think it is being “in the bag” for Obama to point out those hissy fits.

Where I have made mistakes on this issue is assuming or seeming to assume that I think certain bloggers speak for all gay people. I’ve also been flippant and given the appearance that I just think all gay people are just whiny drama queens. And, something I thought about while watching Milk the other night was that this has been going on for a long, long time, and I might not truly understand the anger and frustration of a lot of people in the gay community.

Lemme give you some examples. I have no problem with people being mad that Obama has not issued a statement about the marriage equality issue in the state of Maine. I think he could and should do more, and won’t say a peep about people flaming the WH for not doing more.

On the other hand, I think you are an insane crazy person if you flip out like Steve Clemons because Obama’s HRC speech was not up fast enough on the White House web site on a Saturday night. I think you have lost your shit when you insist that the WH house release a list identifying all the gay people who came to a ceremony (maybe the WH can also demand they wear pink triangles on their jackets!). I think you have lost your ability to reason if you spend an entire day hyperventilating because the President did not use the word “gay” at a ceremony for hate crimes legislation that covers EVERYONE. I think you have serious issues if you point to an unsourced anonymous quote from John Harwood and then boldly announce to the world that the WH hates gays. And I don’t think I’m obsessed with gays to point at these things and laugh. And I don’t think it is wrong to note that a good bit of this anger is based on the turf war between certain online gay bloggers and the HRC.

Likewise- you will never see me attack Marci Wheeler or Glenn Greenwald for their accurate chronicling of the administrations backpedaling on certain civil liberties issues, because I think they document their arguments and are right. Hell, as much as I love having flame wars with Armando, I think he is more right than wrong on many of these issues.

I will, on the other hand, mock you repeatedly if you tell the world that Obama is worse than Bush because Gitmo is not closed yet and because he hasn’t completely altered the overall outlook of the national security machinery. I will mock you endlessly if you scream that Obama sucks because Gitmo still has prisoners, when the Senate has repeatedly screwed Obama. Hell- remember the 96 to nothing vote a couple months ago about “freeing terrorists on domestic soil.”

I’m not going to say a peep to folks who argue the administration has not done enough to reign in the banksters or the credit ratings agencies or the insurance boys. I think it is ridiculous we have not started a new regulatory regime by now. I’m kind of shocked we have not broken up the boys who are “too big to fail” and have sat by while they taking bigger and bigger risks and leverage themselves more than they were before they almost killed the country. I think the Goldman Sachs presence in our government is to the point that it is blatantly criminal.

But I am going to mock you if you tell me Obama is the worst president ever because of daily fluctuations in the DOW or the value of a dollar. I am going to give you a rhetorical punch to the neck if you bitch that Obama has not “turned the economy around” when just a few months ago we were on the verge of global armageddon. I am going to point and laugh if you kvetch about the deficit and the national debt when it would still be disastrously out of control from the previous administration if Obama had spent not one penny.

In short, I don’t think I’m in the tank for Obama, I think I’m just applying common sense. Maybe I am too sarcastic and snide, and we all know I can be a real jerk, especially to people I like. And if you disagree with me, or think I am wrong, well, you get to go ahead and call me an asshole in the comments and tell me why I am wrong. Try it. You might find it very liberating, and I know that when enough of you start to point out I am wrong about something, I probably am. I’m hard-headed, but I am capable of learning.

I have finished polishing the latest round of edits, corrections, and additions—even a stolen cool epigraph!—to the first section of the new tripartite Balloon Juice Lexicon (A – H). Your revisions, suggestions, and links are hereby solicited.

Specifically: I could use some good links for ACORN that would give a better flavor of the whole mishagaus than Wikipedia’s blandly correct entry. I’ve been told there is such a thing as a Cavuto Mark, but its meaning is not clear to me. I know people had some wonderful snarky links to explicate the Doughy Pantload, but the list has been lost and my google-fu is not strong enough. If there is to be an entry for Freeping, and there probably should be, someone is going to have to explain its history.

And finally, perhaps there should be some explanation of why accusations of goat molestation are so popular, but I’m not even gonna try googling that meme!

The apparent bugs in the lexicon got much worse today. The page didn’t seem to load fully when I tried to edit it, and then when I returned to see the original page it appears to be gone entirely. The problem is thus twofold: (1) Does anyone know whether the HTML is recorded anywhere? I have heard about interweb archives but I have no idea how to access it or whether it applies to this site. (2) How do we figure out what happened and how to fix the code? I guess that we will probably need to hold a fundraiser and pay a programmer.

Thanks.

***Update***

Credit goes to demomondian for sending me a copy of the Google cache that let me extract the source code. I just plugged the code into the WP edit box and whammo! the page is back. But now I cannot edit it. Here is the error message:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 4864 bytes) in /home/jcole1/public_html/bal/wp-includes/kses.php(1005) : runtime-created function on line 1

Either we’re halfway there, or I just broke something even worse.

WordPress still won’t let me change so much as a misplaced comma in the Lexicon. Actually, WordPress is only allowing me to read the site about 60% of the time this week, just in case anybody thought the secondary front-pagers got some kind of special access. Either the Red State Trike Farce Strike Force is being unusually modest, or John Cole should never have paid the NRO support team to upgrade Balloon Juice.

Here are some entries that will be added to the BJ Lex someday, I hope, along with DougJ’s latest, Wingerati...

27 Percenters – Those Americans who will predictably vote against their own best interests. In his seminal post on the Crazification Factor, John Rogers used the 2004 Obama/Keyes senate race as a measure: “Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.” Or, as commenter Davis X. Machina phrased it:

“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”

Banana Republicans - The modern Robber Barons; individuals who dedicate their political efforts to turning America into an oligarchy where they assume they will be the rulers. Erik D. Prince, founder and sole owner of private military company Blackwater (now Xe), may be the foremost exemplar of the breed.

Bobbleheads – Derogatory nickname for television talkshow hosts and the pundits who use them—empty novelty items nodding in uniform approval of “their team”. See also Media Village Idiots.

Since I know there are professional developers out there, a question. Starting Sunday morning, whenever I attempt to Edit the BJ Lexicon, I’ve been getting the same message:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 122880 bytes) in /home/jcole1/public_html/bal/wp-includes/general-template.php on line 1524

I’ve tried it on two separate systems, so I don’t think it’s my PC. Can anyone out there tell me if there’s something I can do from the peon user end to rectify this? Or at least explain why WordPress has banhammered me in terms I can understand?

It seemed like a good idea to add basic terms like ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ to our growing word list, but I get stuck. First I checked Dictionary.com.

Liberal, adj.

1. favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.

Conservative, adj.

1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.

That doesn’t really sound right, does it? The English language, like the Constitution (some would say), is a living thing. Practically nobody remembers anymore that Begging the Question exclusively means making an argument that takes its own conclusion for granted. Even Kevin Drum, who kept sniping from a tree in the Philippines decades after purists lost the war to preserve begging the question, eventually gave up in 2005.

The BJ lexicon should take common usage into account, but that doesn’t work here. With respect to common usage liberal and conservative have gone batshit insane. Conservative used to imply defending individual liberties against government interference. By that definition the ACLU is the most conservative nonprofit entity in America, and Glenn Greenwald, Joe Klein’s “civil liberties extremist”, counts as more conservative than practically anyone writing today. Yet for some reason nearly every American who calls himself ‘conservative’ hates Glenn Greenwald and despises the ACLU*. Conservative dogma also dictates resisting international adventures. Back when such things mattered, the Republican party tried to block the war against Hitler and it was two liberal Presidents (Kennedy and Johnson) who sent us to war in Vietnam. Today “conservatives” on FOX News sneer down their noses at anyone who disagrees with bombing and (this part particularly tickles traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley) militarily occupying Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Burma, Venezuela and whoever else they hate today.

Some help here. We’re a political blog, so we need some definition for the central terms in American politics. Clearly Dictionary.com won’t do the job. For now I will just plug in a Barry Goldwater quote that I picked up from urbandictionary.com.

“Today’s so-called ‘conservatives’ don’t even know what the word means. They think I’ve turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That’s a decision that’s up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right. It’s not a conservative issue at all.”—Barry Goldwater

If you think that you can do better, have at it in the comments.

(*) Perfectly distilled by a brief exchange that I had with Ed Morrissey in the comments of this thread.

We are making great progress with the dictionary, but there are still some glaring omissions. We need definitions for the following:

birthers
teabaggers
clown shoes

Black Jimmy Carter

Clap Louder
And a pony

Daydream believers
Chewbacca defense
Tinkerbell strategy

I smell a pulitzer!

KMBA
Spectering

tire gauges

He’s a Celebrity
Palling around with terrorists

I can see Russia from my house

McMeghan

Technically true, but collectively nonsense
Wingnut Event Horizon
spoof
Darrell
Wingnut Voltron
LGM
LGF
O-Dub

Kossacks
GSAVE
Known Unknowns

Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage
Schiavo
He has a book to sell
The decider

There are many others that I am sure we have missed. Have at it.

I’m trying to do some pretty advanced things with Final Cut, and I can honestly say I have not been this ready to slit my wrists since I was taking a college course in COBOL when I was 13 using a PR1ME mainframe with dummy terminals.

Seems like there are a helluva lot more of them lately, and I don’t want to ruin this place for those who don’t want to deal with pointless back and forth. So heed the advice.

Alright, I’ve gone through the other thread from the other day, and it seems like the main thing most of you want is for the comment preview, the comment buttons, and the comment editing function, as well as a generic phone application. Some of you mentioned the ability to troll rate comments, but I’d personally rather shower in prison than have rated comments or nested comments, so that is simply not happening.

Now that that is settled, on to the look. Do you all want to keep the column on each side? Or move to a different look. I really don’t care because I spend most of the time looking at the site through the WordPress Dashboard- that is why I hardly ever know what you are complaining about regarding the ads, because I never see them. If there is a format you really like or would make the site better, speak now. I’ve already paid the designer so I’d like to get this done this week.

Next stage in the re-design is to figure out what all you need to have fixed and upgraded and what not. The list I can think of so far is:

comment editing function
comment buttons for html functions
rss feed
iphone app.

Is there anything else that is fubared? Also, someone is pestering me while I write this, and clearly wants to say hello:

If you can think of anything else to add, throw it in here.

As you have noticed, the last couple of weeks things are going south with the site, so we are holding a one-day fundraiser to raise money to have the site re-designed, everything recoded, and a re-install of everything. The pricetag is $800.00, and I already have 100.00 in paypal that someone sent the other day. To help pay for the re-design, hit paypal:

Thanks in advance, and as soon as we get to the limit I will send the money off to the designer.

STOP! We are over the necessary amount by several hundred. Any future donations will be spent on cat food, gambling, or doggie biscuits. I’ll start a new thread to find out what all you want/need in the new design.

Internet has been in and out and waiting for the technician to swing by, but I was curious. Does the site seem to be fixed, or are you all still having problems? How about the mobile and rss feeds- someone mentioned that, too.

*** Update ***

Does anyone know where I can watch the first episode or two of Leverage. I want to give that series a shot, but don’t want to waste thirty bucks on the whole first season. I can’t find anything on Hulu. Is there anything Huluesque where I can watch an episode or two?

The site is still acting funky and we don’t know why.

A number of you have emailed to tell me the site looks funky, and I have no idea why it would. Please explain what the problem is, what browser you are using, and what OS, and if you can put up a screen cap on an image hosting service, that would be appreciated.

If any of you know what has caused this and have a workaround, please fill me in.