The local Boston-area evening news stations report that Scott “Not Sherrod” Brown won’t be sworn in until February 11th, but that’s okay with him because the Democrats have promised not to “try and ram through” a vote on HCR before that date. This would be interesting, if true. (Brown’s wife Gail Huff is an anchorpod on Channel 5/Boston, incidentally. Just another of those interesting potential-conflict-of-interest minefields…)
Brown has started to reach out ! ! ! on Boston Democratic turf and his body language in today’s newsclips indicates that he’s already finding his new job more work than he expected. Too much to hope that he’ll pull a Palin and resign before he’s even seated, but at least I can look forward to adding my humble mite to his misery over the upcoming two-and-a-half long, loooong years.
And while we’re talking about smarmy little Republican weasels, I am truly enjoying Gawker’s coverage of the YR Teabuggers, not least the commentariat.
Original Lee
I hate to go off-topic so early in a shiny new thread, but check out this Slacktivist post for extreme rockitude.
Back on topic: Does anybody know when the MA special election will be certified? I’ve been hearing rumblings in the ITsphere that there were problems with the Diebold machines that might actually make a recount worthwhile.
Anton Sirius
Anne, thank you for putting something up not written by Doug.
As for those poor misguided Young Republicans, this is clearly the fault of that terrible rap music they’ve been listening to. Where have you gone, Tipper Gore? A nation turns it’s lonely eyes to you. Woo ooo ooo.
Yutsano
Where is that poll that said that a majority of Massachusetts voters expected Brown to act like a Democrat now that he got elected? It will be fascinating to watch the teabaggers turn on him hardcore when he starts representing the interests of his state. And yeah he knows he needs to behave if he wants any kind of political career in MA, which will make him poison to the rest of the Republicans. I’m suddenly not as distraught about this election.
arguingwithsignposts
Free the Nawlins’ 4. That’s all I’m sayin’.
@Original Lee: There is no topic in an open thread, silly.
Wile E. Quixote
@Yutsano:
Well Glenn Beck is already going after him, an encouraging sign.
Yutsano
@Wile E. Quixote: Beautimous.
On another note, I am so officially hooked on Southland it ain’t funny. Dear God how did this show get let go by NBC? They really are total idiots.
arguingwithsignposts
@Wile E. Quixote:
what depresses me more than anything is that Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh and their ilk have jobs that do not involve sifting through sh*t all day. At least Brown ran for something and won.
Yutsano
@arguingwithsignposts: How can you sift through something you are full of? There’s your Zen moment for the day.
I keep hoping my wifey’s fucked up sleep schedule wll let her pop on soon. I haz news that will make her squeee.
robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles
Coakley got a lot of shit for not knowing her sports. How does this idiot stack up?
Yutsano
@robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles: But…but…but…HE DRIVES A TRUCK! HE’S A REAL MERIKAN RIGHT THERE!
arguingwithsignposts
@Yutsano:
tease.
BTW, she’s got the Rusty Gardens ™ empire to deal with now, which is probably tiring her out. :)
JGabriel
@Yutsano:
And the MA voters turn on him when he starts appeasing the teabaggers.
Brown is in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. I feel so bad for him. Heh.
Of course, if Brown is really ambitious, he might move to the right, play to the teabagger crowd, and run for president in 2012, so he doesn’t have to worry about appeasing MA. It would suck for the rest of us, but since he’s unlikely to win a second Senate term, that might be his smartest move. He’d lose, of course, but financially he’d be all set on the Wingnut Welfare Gravy Train.
ETA: Or Brown could pull a Specter and switch to the Democratic Party after a year or two of right-wing abuse. I think that’s unlikely — Arlen at least had a history of being a Democrat early in his career; I don’t think Brown has any such sympathies, but I could be wrong.
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Yutsano
@arguingwithsignposts: Complete and total tease TYVM. Though that should not be a revelation by now.
I keep hoping she’ll bounce back to Minnesota Standard Time and interact when I get home from work again.
MelodyMaker
open thread?
Tim Pawlenty is talking. Keep talking, Tim. Please. Shitwit.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/3988124/from-mr-spend-to-mr-freeze?playlist_id=87249
arguingwithsignposts
@Yutsano: well, here’s some kitteh to tide you over, you tease.
M. Bouffant
At The Daily Beast.
Sweet schadenfreude.
JK
Scott “Beefcake” Brown will be on Jay Leno’s pathetic excuse for a tv show on Thursday. Fuck the Beefcake and the Big Jaw.
MelodyMaker
@MelodyMaker:
The bridge fell into the fucking river! Thirteen people died, Tim. And 3 elected MN Republicans were kneecapped for overriding your shitwit veto on the gas tax. Keep talking, Tim.
OK, I’m done with that. For now.
Wile E. Quixote
The folks at The Onion come through again.
MelodyMaker
@Yutsano:
11th dimension, rook takes knight.
Do I feel better this week? YES.
MelodyMaker
And best wishes to John Cole and his helpers. I’ve been on that six-week life-limiting post-surgery prescription, but with a leg. I sure missed driving.
Coincidentally, I was carrying an escaped cat back to the house when my injury happened.
Percocet and weed and stupid movies. Yup. Kevin Smith worked for me. (not calling Kevin Smith stupid:)
MelodyMaker
what happended to the commenters? dammit
Xenos
@Wile E. Quixote: I was in Boston last friday, and got to listen to Jay Severin make Beck walk his comments back. Man, that is one shameless propaganda machine they have going there.
Brown won a poison chalice. Just like Obama did. I suppose either could survive the poison and turn it into wisdom and power (insert Dune analogy here), but I don’t like the odds for either of them. First rate drama, though, and beats the usual network programming.
JGabriel
Anne Laurie @ Top:
That thread’s got some jewels in it, especially this summary from commenter RollsRoyceRevenge:
Damn. I wish I’d come up with that one.
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JGabriel
Another gem from the Gawker thread, by GW06, a self-described classmate of Dai’s in the 2004-2005 time frame*:
(*Paragraph breaks added to improve readability.)
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JGabriel
So, any ideas on how Teabuggergate would be handled differently on Fox News if it were committed, not by James O’Keefe, but by Jamal al Kief?
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JGabriel
Everyone’s gone. So sad. Alone again. Naturally.
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Something Fabulous
@JGabriel: Wow! I was about to say, “Aww, don’t be sad…” that you are not the only insomniac, etc, but then I clicked on the link! Let’s address this instead! I’ve never seen what Gilbert O’Sullivan looks like before… wowzers, that’s a time-capsule isn’t it?? Whatever happened to him, do you know?
Sly
@JGabriel:
The CRs at GW were douchebags before 2004. From my experience, Dai sounds like the norm and not the exception. Though I don’t see any references to fondling catatonic women after hours at the SAE or DTD houses, so maybe there’s been some improvement.
In their defense, however, they weren’t as huge wastes of life as Georgetown CRs.
JGabriel
Something Fabulous @ 28:
Gilbert O’Sullivan, 1992.
Gilbert O’Sullivan, 2007.
(Pausing in baffled speechlessness.)
The hair hasn’t aged a day.
It’s really quite frightening, in a Dorian Gray kind of way. Presumably there’s a mass of hair — dry, spidery and corrupted — rotting in an attic somewhere, the perfect expression of all of O’Sullivan’s sins. I’ll bet it took a nasty hit when he recorded “Clair”, his paean to pedophilia, or, as O’Sullivan’s duet partner pronounces it in this video, “Cwrair”*.
(*Warning: may melt your eyeballs, pierce your eardrums, and cause permanent damage to your psyche. Proceed with caution.)
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MNPundit
Huh? How is that interesting if true? Obama said it himself on that damned interview with the boy traitor.
bob h
Brown’s 2012 re-election campaign, centered on his claim to have single handedly denied Teddy Kennedy’s greatest dream and life’s work, should play well with Mass voters.
Brown may or may not be smart enough to know that just being Mitch McConnell’s 41st no vote will not keep him at the center of public attention.
beltane
@robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles: He’s a pro a strip poker. He seems to lose a lot of games, though.
Michael
From the Gawker commentariat, a reprise of good old times:
For us boomer fogies, who, observing these Watergate-esque antics, are reminded of CREEP:
We’re Basel and Flanagan, Dai and O’Keefe
We thought we could play it like To Catch A Thief
To think that a bug worth hardly a shrug,
Could end up by getting us tossed in the jug
We all got the gate for no reason or rhyme
You’d think we’d committed some horrible crime
Just citizen journalists catchin’ some grief
Basel and Flanagan, Dai and O’Keefe
We’re Basel and Flanagan, Dai and O’Keefe
Just practicing our right-wing beliefs
We might have our flaws, like bending the laws
But O’Reilly will tell you, it’s for a good cause
We’re Basel and Flanagan, Dai and O’Keefe
We’re callin’ our daddies for legal relief
With backs to the wall, we’re taking the fall,
But we’ll still say to ACORN, “Nuts to you all!”
Michael
Oh, hysterical – there’s a GOS commenter who ferreted out a Leadership Institute/Morton Blackwell connection between these little douchebags.
I’ve been to a couple of their events back in the fever pitch days of Conservoascendancy, and can tell you that a smarmier collection of mendacious, back climbing pieces of shit never existed in this country.
Given the “activist” genesis of the Watergate plumbers, these guys are cut from exactly the same cloth.
The academics were right – Conservatism as ideology is a mental disorder.
russell
She was also the femme fatale in the video for Boston new-waver Digney Fignus’ Girl With The Curious Hand
Cosmo, MTV, broadcast news, and American Idol. They’re the big media family.
It’s Boston. That’s how we roll.
If Jay Severin is the new voice of moderation, we are well and truly screwed.
Ash Can
@Michael: I’m old enough that I LOLed at that. Beautiful. “Our minds may be dirty but our hands are cleeean…”
Xenos
@russell: There is no ideology to Severin – just a maniacal pursuit of power and the spoils system. His buddies getting the jobs and the connections and the graft and everybody else are just peasants who don’t deserve shit. It is a bit refreshing to hear modern conservatism reduced to its core values. He is the prophet of the ratfucking college republicans.
I guess that makes him a pragmatist and a moderate.
Deborah
Ya know, in all fairness I’m not down with suggesting that if one person has a job in the media or government, then their spouse cannot. Is his wife supposed to quit her long time career because he was elected to the Senate? Should she have quit when he was elected to the state senate? Should he have never run because of his wife’s job?
His ability to get coverage came down to things like actually campaigning, mentioning his truck at every opportunity (?? I know. But it’s not like she helped him here, and it seems to have worked), and running on simple things like “I am JFK” and “I will block hcr” and “it’s the people’s seat.” He didn’t get news coverage because his wife happened to work for a local news show.
Ash Can
I’m guessing that, based on his past behavior (e.g., his disgraceful performance at King Philip H.S.), Brown will prove to be too much of a petty, self-absorbed putz to actually serve the interests of his constituents. I’m betting on him going native once he settles in with the rest of the GOP dickweeds in the Senate, and ending up making excuses one after another not to make any trips back to MA lest his pathetic ass be chased through the streets of Boston.
shortstop
Is it me or does Scott Brown’s wife totally look like Tammy Faye Bakker minus a little mascara?
xian
so this is the repetition of watergate, but this time as farce?
Church Lady
@Deborah: Anne Laurie fails to compare Scott Brown and his wife, Gail Huff, to Sherrod Brown and his wife, Connie Schultz. From what I have read, because of her position, Gail didn’t campaign for her husband. Connie, on the other hand, is a columnist for The Plain Dealer and took a leave of absence in order to campaign for Brown during his Senate race, later to be immortalized in that famous best seller “….and His Lovely Wife: A Memoir from the Woman Beside the Man.” She returned to work at The Plain Dealer in Janurary, 2007. But I guess that’s “Just another of those interesting potential conflict-of-interest minefields…” that Anne Laurie sooooo loves to write about when it concerns a Democrat.
Hey, Annie – much of a hypocrite?
JGabriel
Shorter Church Lady, 12.5 hours after the original post and 2 hours after the last comment:
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deadrody
Hmmmm… pretty sure this mythical poll is exactly that – a myth. I live in Massachusetts. I voted for Brown and know a LOT of other people that did, too. We didn’t vote for him because we hoped he’d act like a Democrat – we voted for him because he said he would kill HCR and stand in the way of the ultra liberal socialist Obama agenda, and we expect him to do what he said he would.
Church Lady
@JGabriel: Sorry I couldn’t weigh in a little earlier, Mr. Gabriel. This was my morning to fill backpacks at the foodbank.