I guess I missed this particular episode of wingnuttery. I’m a big fan of how after they made asses out of themselves asserting Wright and Ayers and others falsely visited the White House, they then blamed it on the WH for not warning them that different people can have the same name.
Mr. Furious, On the Blue Ridge Parkway, north of Asheville.
Moonbatting Average, Moonrise through the yuccas, Whipple Mountains, CA
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
I’m really loving this special election in NY. I’m sorry that those people are going to be represented by a Bachmann style wingnut, but hey- they voted for him, so they can just deal with it.
But what I find really amusing is that they are taking a win for the Republican in that district as a sign of a conservative resurgence, emboldening them to take their tea party on the road to savage other apostates and those insufficiently loyal to the ideology, when that district hasn’t elected anything BUT Republicans since the Civil War. Again, nothing but Republicans for 70 straight elections, and they are taking the 71st (or whatever it actually is) as a “sign.”
When you think about it, that is funnier than the birthers.
And what makes it extra special is that they will probably succeed in a few safe Republican districts, and primary out a couple of people and replace them with Glen Beck following religious nuts like Hoffman. I wonder if the short-sighted fools at Reason are proud of the monsters they helped create when they were pimping the teabaggers the last six months. I bet Hoffman has really enlightened views on marijuana, pornography, the justice system, and individuals rights. Well done, glibertarians!
I have to admit that the teabagger candidate in NY-23 is polling better than I expected he would. Though, in retrospect, it makes a reasonable amount of sense: the teabag movement appeals largely to the old and the district is old. But I’m wondering if there’s even more to it. It’s my sense that the basic tenets of teabaggerism are:
Conspicuously absent are
In particular, the Dick Armey outfit FreedomWorks seems to be about promoting freedom (I guess from taxes and regulations) here as opposed to freedom (to be a quasi-western American puppet state) abroad. And they don’t seem to talk about Jesus much. Obviously, all kinds of crazy people showed up at the 9/12 festivities, mean of them Hitler-obsessed and heavy into Jesus. But some of that is just that, to paraphrase James Carville, if you drag a Fox News crew through a retirement home, there’s no telling what you’ll find.
I think that a Jesus-reduced, Hitler-reduced conservative message might work reasonably well in some parts of the country, including the rural northeast. It’s probably too anti-union to really work in New York State at large and too anti-immigrant to really work nationally, but if teabagging is traditional wingerism with more Rand and less religion, more Galt and less GWOT, it may end up less fringey that I originally thought.
Bobo’s obsession with chain restaurants took a disturbing turn this morning:
Since April 2007, New York magazine has posted online sex diaries. People send in personal accounts of their nighttime quests and conquests. Some of the diaries are unusual and sad. There’s a laid-off banker who drinks herself into oblivion and wakes up in the beds of unfamiliar men. There’s an African-American securities trader who flies around the country on weekends to meet with couples seeking interracial sex. (He meets one Midwestern couple at a T.G.I. Friday’s.)
Insomnia, Day Three:
Haven’t slept since more than a few hours since getting back from Florida. I keep telling everyone I am “catching up on sleep.” Even my good friends, because I don’t want to burden them. No one told me it would be like this. You are either sick, your pets are sick, or you are stressed, or you have too much to do to think, or you don’t have the time to do what you want to do, or someone is pissed at you and won’t explain why, or your car breaks down, or your dishwasher breaks, or your plants get blight, or something. Always something. Guess I should just consider the fact that my mom, dad, brother, sisters, and pets are healthy. But it just always seems like it is something.
On the other hand, I am watching a lot of old Sopranos episodes. Thank ALLAH I do not have kids. I feel for you people.
The first rule of cabs is when you’re in one, ask your driver about foreign policy. When you’re in five, take an admittedly unscientific poll:
In an admittedly unscientific poll of the last five taxi rides I took with South Asian drivers, Abdullah and Mohamed claimed that the U.S. is ruining Afghanistan and making matters worse in Pakistan with drone strikes that are killing more civilians than terrorists. Najeeb and Ibrahim said it’s a travesty that the U.S. is considering reducing its commitment to Afghanistan after all the pledges to rebuild. They are convinced the Taliban will regain power in double time if the U.S doesn’t change things up soon. Ahmed wholeheartedly endorsed the McChrystal report and claimed he heard about it even before it was leaked.
It’s easy to forget that before the Moonies put him in charge of the Washington Times, John Solomon was writing misleading, Democrat-bashing articles for the Washington Post and the AP:
In his pitch at the Heritage Foundation, Solomon made all of this explicit. The Times, he explained, played an important role in pushing stories that the White House didn’t like. “Before Andrew Breitbart did the ACORN series,” he said, “we did 47 stories about ACORN.” He explained how TheConservatives.com could run the news cycle by arguing that its “Right People” aggregator, which collects tweets and news from a small group of influential conservatives, changed the debate over Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The site was in demo mode, available to Times reporters.
“When we were demoing this, we were running Newt Gingrich as a personality,” explained Solomon. “Everything Newt Gingrich did on the social media space–on Facebook, on Twitter–was aggregating through the technology. We were sitting there–[seasoned Times reporter] Ralph Hallow was sitting alongside of me–and all of a sudden this little Twitter burst comes up from Newt, saying Sotomayor was racist. We jumped on it, we put that out there. That created, as you remember, days and days of a firestorm about whether her personal views about race and gender were biasing her views from the bench.”
Just to be clear: when Solomon was at the AP and Washington Post, he was widely accused of writing ideologically-motivated pieces of dubious authenticity. The Post and AP defended him to the hilt. Now he’s openly bragging about doing exactly what his critics accused him of.
Anyway, all of this proves that the media has a strong liberal bias.
“ACORN and black people stole the NJ gubernatorial election that hasn’t happened yet. Hispanics, also too.”
I really wish I were kidding.
A small TV happy for me, and John Cole: TV Squad reports that TNT has secured the rights to Southland, primarily the rights to the seven episodes from last season and the six episodes that NBC made but refused to air:
If you want more episodes, the solution is pretty simple. Show up in droves to watch these. They start airing on Tuesday, January 12 at 10 p.m., ironically against the very show that many people think killed it: The Jay Leno Show. So if you really want to make a statement that NBC might notice, turn TNT’s Southland into the next Sons of Anarchy and actually beat Leno head-to-head!
Also, I think Steve Gilliard would have loved The Unusuals, because it was a very Ankh Morpork New York City series.
I suppose one day Rick Moran will learn:
Because Rick is not sufficiently conservative wingnutty, we are told he is just angling for a Democratic job and he is comatose. I would hope that the lesson Rick would learn from this is that the party we both loved at one point is now run by insane people, but I’m afraid he drinks deeply from the cup of Broder and will decide that “if Pam Gellar and Robert McCain hate me and the Daily Kos doesn’t link me, I must be doing something right.”
At any rate, go give him some encouragement in the comments. Someone has to save the GOP, and it damned sure isn’t going to be me. I’ve got wooden stakes, garlic, and an attitude.
Via the Washington Monthly, this WaPo piece on former McCain advisor Doug Holtz-Eakin, who is about to lose his health care, which contained this gem:
Despite his personal trials, however, Holtz-Eakin said his conviction on the hot-button issue of health care is unchanged. He believes that reform is needed, but that President Obama and congressional Democrats are going about it the wrong way. The system is “broken,” he said, but the bills now before Congress do not cut costs enough. On the campaign trail, Holtz-Eakin promoted McCain’s plan to eliminate the tax exemption for employer-sponsored health insurance and give tax credits to individuals to buy their own coverage.Of the bills moving through Congress, Holtz-Eakin said: “I wish the policies were different, and I wish I could’ve somehow gotten us to a bipartisan place. I think McCain had the capacity to do that.
Will this myth of McCain’s bipartisanship ever stop? Putting aside the fact that he ran a disgusting and ugly campaign with amoral louts like Michael Goldfarb in charge of the campaign, and putting aside the fact that he gave us Sarah Palin, and putting aside the fact that McCain is an angry old fool with a mean streak a mile long, is there ANY DAMNED EVIDENCE AT ALL from the last year that any bipartisan solution could be found? The Republicans have yet to even release their health care plan, and have done nothing but propagate lies, foment unrest, and scream no. In the meantime, they are continuing their purge of anyone to the left of Dick Cheney.
So what exactly makes Holtz-Eakin think there is any way a bipartisan solution could be found. Or Obama, for that matter?
It looks like Comcast will buy NBC now, but this caught my eye:
Other potential bidders have surfaced, including the News Corporation. But talks between G.E. and Comcast have advanced far enough that a deal with another company was unlikely, people briefed on the matter said.
It really is no wonder all the network “journalists” are so eager to defend Fox News.
(via Atrios)
Be prepared for a lot of good news for conservatives tomorrow, in Virginia, in New Jersey, in NY-23.
I think there may be so much good news that we start hearing a catch phrase like “anti-Obama backlash”, “conservative realignment/resurgence/rebirth”. Has anyone heard anything catchy along these lines yet?
Multiple Post sources independently confirmed to POLITICO that Roig-Franzia got hit while defending colleague Monica Hesse from harsh criticism leveled by her editor, Allen.
Allen, according to the Washingtonian, had told Hesse that a piece she had written was “the second worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years.”
Roig-Franzia, also working a story with Hesse that ran Saturday, told Allen not to be such a “c—sucker.”
Allen swung twice, with one punch hitting Roig-Franzi, according to sources. Next, staffers on the 4th floor —including Brauchli, who’s office is temporarily across from the Style section — jumped in to break up the altercation.
Presumably the piece in question was the paean to anti-gay activist Brian Brown that Hesse wrote.
Update. Apparently, the “second worst piece” was the one Hesse and the punchee wrote together:
One of the headlining incidents in the charticle was how a Confederate solider had lost some military plans of Robert E. Lee in a field that later found their way into Union hands. The original story reportedly said that the offense occurred in Virginia. Wrong–Maryland.
There were other errors as well.
Allen made clear his displeasure with the integrity of the piece, proclaiming that it was the “second-worst piece I’ve ever had handed to me in 43 years,” according to a source. The first-worst was a mistake-ridden profile of Paul Robeson that never saw the printed page. Those 43 years include Allen’s 39 years of service at the Post along with a tenure at the New Haven Register.
The veteran editor gave pretty much the same sharp-elbowed spiel to both Hesse and Roig-Franzia. Hesse responded by asking for the story back so that she could iron out some of the wrinkles.
Roig-Franzia responded by saying, “Henry, don’t be such a cocksucker.”
