Loesch is more

We may nearing the end of civilization.

This is an instagram of Andrew Breitbart, created by CNN’s Dana Loesch.

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Catholic liberals and moderate Republicans

One thing I’ll never understand is people who don’t fight back.

There is a real struggle going on in the Church right now between conservatives, who seem intent on making President Obama a target and downplaying the Church’s social mission, and more progressive Catholics, who think the Church should be placing even more emphasis on social justice and issue more emphatic rejections of budget cuts along the lines of Bishop Blaire’s letter. Conservatives have had the upper hand over the last few months, but Bishop Blaire’s statement can be seen in part as a response to the pushback from Catholic liberals who wondered where the Bishops have been in the ongoing budget fight.

The “Catholic liberals” will bend over and take it the same way “moderate Republicans” do. Tell me I’m an anti-Catholic bigot in the comments, folks.

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Something About These Guys I Don’t Trust

The latest round of Americans Elect nonsense is at CNN.com this weekend as a technocrat appeals to the iGeneration about voting, the Sensible Centrist Austerity way.  Now with technology!

This digital revolution is more than just innovating for convenience. Something deeper and more significant is at stake: the integrity of our consent, the underpinning of our government’s legitimacy and authority.

“Consent of the governed” only exists if it can be expressed, and that is an increasingly difficult task. When we vote for president, we don’t simply vote for the best candidate; we vote for the best candidate who has previously been ratified by one of two political parties.

This creates a philosophical “blackout” space in which no candidate, because of his or her beliefs, will ever be elected president (see Jon Huntsman). This blackout space should concern all of us, because of its appeal to the general electorate, who will never get that option. What’s worse is that this space is growing with each cycle. It’s not clear that either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton would get through their primaries today.

That’s why the Americans Elect innovation is so exciting—because it relieves us of anachronistic structures that harm our political system. It’s the iTunes of politics.

Status quo apologists and those who benefit from partisan gridlock might pooh-pooh this idea, particularly if the candidate doesn’t get to Ross Perot levels in November. But these critics miss the point. Americans Elect is not just about running for the White House in 2012. It’s about electing our leaders in a new way so that the governed are truly consenting.

Right, because removing the political party middlemen from the traditional process of the rich buying our elections makes it that much better solely on the purity factor, except for the fact that they are lying about doing it.  Primaries are for suckers, now engage in our primary!

That particular cargo shipload of manure up there was written by Nathan Daschle.  You know, son of former Dem Senate Leader Tom Daschle.  Just a reminder that it’s not just wealthy, obnoxiously centrist Republicans flogging the Throw Your Vote Away movement here in an attempt to make the “reasonable” case for crushing austerity amid tax cuts for the one percent because it’s our duty, being good serfs, to pay for our lords.  It’s feel-good political euthanasia, designed solely to put down resistance to the status quo of “We’re your betters, now here’s what you need to do for us.”  To help you remain tranquil in the face of almost certain electoral death, smooth jazz will be deployed in 3…2…1…

Daniel Larison nails these guys to the wall:

There is a powerful case to be made that a two-party system that operates within the very narrow confines of bipartisan consensus on many major policies is harmful to the country. Americans Elect isn’t making that case or anything like it. What the Americans Elect project represents is an effort to produce the distilled essence of everything that is wrong with the current two-party system and then pretend that it is an exciting, new alternative.

S’truth right there, folks.  By comparison, Paul Ryan is at least somewhat honest about his plans to Soylent Green us all.  And let’s remember that there’s nothing Centrist about the GOP.

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Masters of their domain

This illustrates the decline of our so-called civlization (h/t commenter Waingro) better than any other short passage I have ever read (though the whole piece rambles a bit):

Then suddenly it was over, and The Atlantic’s own godfather, David G. Bradley, was marching toward David Weigel, a young and prolific journalist specializing in Republican politics who had recently made a name for himself getting fired and rehired by the same media company within several weeks. For Bradley, this shift in nameplates apparently constituted a Chalabi-caliber show of resilience:

“DAVID! So good to see you!”

“Hello, David.”

“David, you really came back swinging, didn’t you? You were out for all of, what, a week? But now you’re back!”

“Well, I mean, it was actually a few weeks, and it really screwed up my health insurance . . .”

“David, I just want you to know I’ve been scheming ways to deploy you here for quite some time now! Now, of course I realize you may be enjoying your present . . . deployment!”

“Well I mean, heh, I did just start . . .”

“But David, let me tell you this. David, I know you think your mastery is politics. But I think . . . I think your mastery . . . ”

Dramatic pause.

“. . . may be . . . mastery.”

“Oh uh, thanks . . .”

“Do you know what I mean, David?” Bradley finished, gliding out the door. “It’s the same thing with David Brooks. He thought his mastery was politics, but his mastery was actually, whatever he put his mind to. Think about it, David!”

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This Here’s Prime Wankery Territory, Boys

Hey, Sensible Village Centrists?  If you want a jump on Duncan’s next list of all-star hemorrhoids, there’s the exquisite opportunity to tell us yokels how Hilary Rosen’s statement about Ann Romney is just as awful as the Motor City Madman threatening the President’s life if he’s re-elected.

“If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year,” Nugent said, according to a video posted on YouTube by the NRA. “If you can’t go home and get everybody in your lives to clean house in this vile, evil America hated administration, I don’t even know what you’re made out of.”

He accused the government of “wiping its ass with the Constitution you’re living under a rock some place” and labeled members of the Obama administration, including the vice president, attorney general and secretary of state “criminals.”

“We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November. Am I, any questions?” Nugent said.

Only question I have is who will bite first.  Seems like this will need Bobo-level, if not FULL AND LUSH Mustache-level wankery (or MoDo The Red on the mother of all benders) to make the false equivalence Mt. Everest here.  Bonus points for “Nuge didn’t mean it, and this is central to my point, anyone who thinks he did is by and large the problem with American electorate today.”  C’mon, it writes itself, you lazy bastards.  Make it so.

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Game Of Chik’n

For some reason, this story really annoyed the hell out of me this morning.

Whenever a new Chick-fil-A opens, hundreds of its devoted fans walk in after spending days, sometimes weeks, outside the front door. Some devotees will wait in line at multiple restaurant openings, just to say they were among the first to eat at that Chick-fil-A. They must really love the chicken sandwiches there, right?

They do, but there’s another reason why they do this. At each grand opening, Chick-fil-A hands out coupons for one free Chick-fil-A Meal per week for a year (52 meals) to the first 100 people in line. For the most devoted Chick-fil-A fans who attend multiple openings, that means having free lunch and dinner for weeks, months or even years.

This leads us to Christina Heise and Matthew Robinson. They are regulars at Chick-fil-A openings, showing up to more than 70 combined. Eventually, they met and started talking. One chicken sandwich led to another, and now they’re engaged to be married.

Oh yes, NOW I remember why this story pisses me off.

As Equality Matters has reported, Chick-fil-A’s WinShape foundation has given millions of dollars to organizations that oppose marriage equality (Marriage and Family Legacy Fund, Family Research Council), bully gay students (Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Focus on the Family), and promote harmful ex-gay therapy (Exodus International). In addition, the company has a score of 0 on HRC’s corporate equality index, offering absolutely no protections to LGBT staff and even firing employees who engage in “sinful” behavior. Compare that to how many Fortune 100 companies offer non-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation (94 percent) and gender identity (69 percent).

Free waffle fries, free bigotry.  Yeah, that pretty much sums up America The Beautiful.  I wonder if they’d honor the coupons for Christina and Matthew here if they were Christina and Madison, or Christopher and Matthew, engaged to be married.  I’m thinking no.  But then again, I’m thinking they wouldn’t be in line anyway…then again, taking 52 free meals from these guys on the company’s dime seems like a pretty good entry into the sweet revenge column to me.

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Steal This Bike

Via Gawker, The Daily Caller’s Mark Judge lives in DC and is white.  His bike was stolen last week.  This means that because DC’s population is mostly black, that Mark Judge is now free to unleash his inner racist upon the Capital, unfettered by “guilt” or “the common sense God gave a spiny echidna” or “humanity”.  Handy!

When I got home I vented to my friends. I told them I was going to scour those neighborhoods until I found the bike. In reply, a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. “That person needs our prayers and help,” she said. “They haven’t had the advantages we have.”

That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.

It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.

I decided that I’m just going to let go of my white guilt. We’re all human, we all experience pain in our lives. And black pain is no different than white pain.

It felt good to say it: Black pain is no different than white pain. I’m tired of people using the moral authority of past generations for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Soledad O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, acts like she just stepped off the Amistad.

Sure.  It’s cool to ignore, belittle, and denigrate the black experience because you’re tired of black people basically being black in your life, and if we would just stop being black, right?  Like Trayvon Martin?  Like those five shooting victims in Tulsa?  Like President Obama and the Obama family?

See, here’s what guys like Mark here mean by “white guilt” and that is “I really don’t like black people, and I really want to affix blame for racism in America on them exclusively, because I’m sick of having to keep the presence of mind to not offend them and I really haven’t taken the time to try to understand them outside media stereotypes and the right wing bashing on the President for the last four years, and besides being a racist ass is just easier.”

So yeah, another guy goes and “speaks the truth about blacks” and he’ll be “unfairly persecuted in our overly politically correct society”.  Which is where garbage like this always ends up in the end, down the same chute of racism as the rest.

Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one.  But of course it’s our fault because we had to have collectively stolen his bike, right?  And most of all throughout American history privileged white males have of course been the real victims of the last 250 years, right?

Jesus wept.

[UPDATE]  And we have a winner in the “Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one” from MacRanger over at Macsmind.

There are black ass clowns, black racists, black murderers, rapists and even idiots running the country. We have no reason to feel guilty for that. In fact as I’ve told you on many occassions I’m 2nd generation Irish. Never felt guilt, didn’t have to. The Irish had nothing to do with the treatment of Blacks in this country and in fact in many ways were treated even worse.

It’s time to push back against liberals who have goaded whites into guilt. In light of the crimes blacks have committed against whites in the last 100 years, I say it’s even. Move on.

Really?  I mean I know Lionel Richie’s new country album is pretty bad, but…

(Cross-posted at ZVTS)

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What you know….to be real

Freddie’s post touched on the myth that dominates that American political discourse: the idea that soft-headed liberals refuse to acknowledge the inferiority of black people. There are two great conservative storylines—strapping young bucks buying T-bones with their welfare checks and liberals needing to be “mugged by reality”—and this is where the lines meet.

It doesn’t matter that speculation about this or that race being genetically deficient is almost always completely unscientific, it’s still bold, gutsy, the kind of tough-minded look at reality that liberals refuse to take, just as it doesn’t matter that Paul Ryan’s budget numbers are garbage, the budget is still bold, gutsy, etc.

That’s just how things work. Eventually, they will change, but probably not in my lifetime. James B. Stewart and William Saletan and the rest may die before I do, but their kids will likely be the next wave of Villagers. And the NRO crowd will keep fucking that chicken until the big meteor hits, maybe longer.

Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight this, but don’t expect it to end anytime soon.

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Sometimes I wish a rain would come and wash away all the scum of the city

It wouldn’t be hard to write an artificial intelligence type program that produced this kind of idiocy:

This week, President Obama called him a social Darwinist. The conservative Club for Growth criticized him for wimping out on Medicare and military spending, and Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican, blasted him for not cutting tax rates more drastically.

I figure Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is head of the House Budget Committee, must be doing something right.

It’s not that “if both sides are complaining you must be doing something right” is incredibly fucking stupid the first time someone says it—though it is—it’s that these morons think it’s clever to repeat it a thousand times a day.

Can you imagine thinking such a thing? I simply cannot.

It’s hard for me to have much optimism about a future in which the “paper of record” prints this kind of pap.

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The Orange Julius Job

The White House noted yesterday that if Republicans were really serious about job creation, we’d have local and state governments hiring and infrastructure humming.  Since Republicans are serious about creating only jobs with the word “Chief” in the start of the title, that’s not going to happen, of course.

Obama has long championed sending more aid to state and local governments and boosting infrastructure spending. These two areas received billions of dollars from his 2009 stimulus act in hopes of reversing the nation’s freefalling economy. But Congress has resisted funneling more money to assist these sectors.

Since then, they have continued to lag, even as companies have ramped up their hiring. State and local governments have shed nearly 600,000 jobs since the recovery began in mid-2009, though they have recently stabilized. And the unemployment rate for experienced construction workers remains higher at 13.1% for the fourth quarter of 2011 than the national average of 8.3%.

Now is an especially good time to revamp the nation’s infrastructure, which would boost job growth, Obama said. Interest rates are historically low, construction workers are dying to get back on the job, and contractors are competing for projects, coming in on time and under budget.

Seems like a simple prospect to me.  Sadly, since we now live in a totalitarian thugocracy where there is no rule of law if the President is re-elected, the House GOP will of course have to respectfully decline actually doing anything like this until we rid the country of all Democrats and usher them into a permanent supermajority which would be completely nothing like Obama’s current crypto-fascist Hunger Games.

Hurry up, Mayans.  I’m getting a headache from the waiting.

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Even the liberal New York Times

Dear Bieber (h/t reader DE). I made it halfway through and I need a drink…and I’ve had a already had three. (Party/reception at work.)

The Obama administration stipulated the incontestable to a disgruntled federal court on Thursday, formally declaring that “the power of the courts to review the constitutionality of legislation is beyond dispute.”

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., bowing to an unusual demand of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, made official the backpedaling of the past few days over remarks by President Obama about the Supreme Court’s coming ruling on the constitutionality of his health care overhaul. Mr. Obama said on Monday that it “would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step” for the court to overturn the law.

Ever since, the White House has been struggling to explain what the president meant.

Obama engages in legitimate criticism of the most partisan SCOTUS in American history. Winger judge gets his panties in a wad over it. That just shows that Obama went over the line of civilitude and seriousness.

Shoot me.

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How many divisions do Erick Erickson and David Gergen have?

John last night:

Democrats just seem like such spineless wimps who never fucking fight for anything they believe in. I’m a Democrat now and more sensitive to language than I once was, so I’m hesitant to call Democratic officials pussies because I know it will result in 20 emails yelling at me for my sexism, but good Christ the Democrats were and still are pussies. It’s enough to make you want to smash your head through your computer monitor when you see them constantly capitulating. Republicans might be crazy, but at least they fucking fight. Whether I am right or wrong, I stand up for what I believe. I’ll put my name, my ass, and my money on the line. So watching people repeatedly cave just makes me have no respect for them whatsoever. Sure there are political realities, but good grief, stand for something. I’m honestly shocked that other than a few jackasses, the Democrats fought the good fight on this latest contraceptives bullshit.

It’s not that Democrats need to make every hill a hill to do die on. On the contrary, we need to recognize that Republicans do do make every hill a hill to die on, and when they choose a particularly disadvantageous hill, Democrats need to show up to do the slaughtering. Fuck the “oh noes, what will the Bishops say”, the “Romney’s quote was taken out of context”, the “we’re still a right-center nation”. When Republicans decide to fight to the death on some issue where their position alienates a wide swath of the population, and excites no one but Villagers and Teahadists, fucking fight them.

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Balls and strikes

Remind me again why I’m supposed to have faith in the Burkean integrity of John Roberts and the gang:

Well, the entire blogosphere is talking about 5th Circuit judge Jerry E. Smith, who ordered the Justice Department to tell the court whether the Obama administration believes that Supreme Court has the right of judicial review (which the administration obviously does, as Judge Smith knows full well). I just want to note that according to a September 2000Baltimore Sun article, Judge Smith was seen as a possible Supreme Court pick for then-candidate George W. Bush

There’s a lot of hard-core wingers in the judiciary and they’re not going away. If you don’t think they’re going to flood the subway, you’re an optimist.

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Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Scary black guy is scary.

Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) on Tuesday accused President Obama of “threatening” the Supreme Court as it prepares a ruling on the constitutionality of the healthcare reform law.

Speaking a day after Obama warned against “unelected” judges overturning the law, Johanns said Obama crossed the line with his remarks.

“What President Obama is doing here isn’t right,” Johanns said Tuesday in an interview with local Nebraska radio station KLIN. “It is threatening, it is intimidating.”

Seven more months of “But he’s The Uppity Kenyan Colonialist Gangsta Thug!  Hide your nubile daughters!” is going to be awesome like a migraine surrounded by smaller autonomous migraines.  Then again, it’s not like Republicans can run on issues or anything, so the full court press on BLOOGITY BLOO HE’S BLACK is pretty much their entire hand at this point.

I for one think people would remember 15 months of this in 2007-2008 not working, but it really hasn’t stopped these guys from regularly visiting the dog whistle factory, ordering crates of dog whistles, melting them down into slag and then using the slag to paint HE’S BLACK in 50 foot tall letters on the side of every skyscraper in America as a stimulus project.

I swear if the President ever gave anyone the side-eye, there would be Articles of Banishment to the Phantom Zone before the end of the day.

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I’m gonna make my big attack

Greg Sargent:

To the fainting couch! Obama attacked the Supreme Court and threatened it with a backlash, should it strike down his tyrannical scheme to impose a government takeover of health care on the nation!

That’s what many conservative writers and even some centrist ones are arguing. They are saying that Obama’s words about the Court yesterday were “unsettling” and a “witch-hunt,” and they’re likening them to F.D.R.’s efforts to pack the Court in retaliation for decisions striking down New Deal initiatives.

Please. If what Obama said yesterday is an “attack,” it’s pretty timid stuff indeed.

If Villagers say you’re being uncivil, you’re winning.

Anyway, what with all the conservative SCOTUS justices who were drafted out of high-school (not to mention all the crazy right-wing federal judges appointed by), we’re going to be stuck with a lot of craziness from the judiciary for years to come. If these unelected hacks want to act as a purely political body and tarnish the reputation of the court forever, they have to expect a reaction. You play with matches, you get burned.

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