My latest at The Raw Story-ABLC:
I cannot be sussed to write a summary of The Faux Outrage of the Day aka The Dawn of the Obama War on Motherhood. It’s too stupid. Luckily, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has already done so:
Another day, another completely fake right wing outrage. Today’s trumped-up nonsense from the right involves Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen, who criticized Mitt Romney for using his wife to claim he understood the difficulties faced by working women. Rosen’s exact words were: “Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life.”
And a screaming went across the right wing sky, as they all realized they could use this statement to distract from the insane right wing war on women’s rights. As if by magic, every right wing blog and every right wing media source began frantically shouting in unison that this proves Democrats are waging a war on motherhood!
Yeah. That’s happening right now. That’s the Big Story of the Day. RosenGate is extremely silly, and watching it unfold on Twitter is somewhat amusing, if you’re able to stand that much cyberstupid.
When the story (such as it is) first broke last night on the Twitters, Hilary Rosen was a Democratic strategist. An hour later, she was an “Obama adviser.” An hour after that, she was “in the Obama Administration.” CNN contributor and Breitbart enthusiast Dana Loesch began drawing connections between Hilary Rosen and Sandra “Why Doesn’t Her Super Jewwy Boyfriend Pay for Her Contraception” Fluke. Apparently Rosen worked with (or at, or near) the PR firm that represents Sandra Fluke. PERFIDY! At the rate the wingnuts are going, by day’s end, Hilary Rosen will be Obama’s Special Ambassador to Ladyholes.
It’s ridiculous.
Is it weird to quote myself? Probably. But I’m no stranger to weird, so — meh.
SteveM
I hear Rosen had a 3-way with George Soros and Jezebel in Hell.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Not clicking through to Raw Story. Frankly, I’m really disappointed you have decided to take up with that rabble.
Good luck in your future endeavors. Hopefully some of them will be published here, where I will be willing to read them.
poco
Hey ABL,
Great read! Loved the Angelina Jolie reference.
beltane
And as the right-wing overreach rapidly crosses the line into poorly carried out farce, President Obama will be handed a shining opportunity to say something nice and uplifting about mothers of all persuasions. Barbara Bush actually said something that wasn’t half bad, but semi-literate shriekers like Dana Loesch are far too stupid to get it.
By the way, is it true that Ann Romney’s autobiography will be titled “My Struggle”?
David Koch
Just wait until “hard working white people” hear Queen Ann has never worked a single day in her life.
Mickey
…and of course ABL Vista Home Edition takes the bait yet again.
If there is one thing ABL has proven over and over again, it is that she will never understand that you should never try live inside the right wing narrative if you want to fight against it.
beergoggles
I can’t believe she friggin apologized. Why the fuck do I bother defending democrats for speaking the truth? They won’t even take their own side in a fight.
GregB
These conservative Republicans are clinging to their Bibles and their intra-vaginal probes rather tightly as of late.
MattF
I’m thinking that there’s a note (or maybe a chord… or maybe a whole symphony) of desperation in the winger outrage these days. The theory is that if you throw enough shit, something will stick. But, somehow, it’s just not working. Why is that, y’think?
Added: Ah, I’ve got the analogy I was going for. It’s like ‘Rachel at cardholder services’. If you hear it often enough, you figure out it’s not ‘Rachel’, it’s not ‘cardholder’, and it’s not ‘services’.
General Stuck
All of it is ridiculous, the wingnuts starting this shit, and some dems stepping in it, trying to squeeze an extra drop of pol favor out of the mentally and morally bankrupt GOP.
I figure by the time the election comes around, we will all be ready for a visit to the kool aid factory. Because we are going to see the wingnut wurlitzer set on rock and roll stoopid like never before.
And the wingnuts are counting on it to either paint the biggest lie in history, or make everyone so sick of politics, they don’t go vote. This is the modern republican party. And there will be no doubt, whatever dems say or don’t say, that a vote for the GOP, is a walk on a slippery rock, at best. Your decision, America
And for those who advocate attacking the wingers on their outrageous bullshit, let this be a lesson that there is nothing to gain by laying down in front of the GOP Clown Car, as opposed to just letting it crash on its own.
Satanicpanic
@beltane: She did struggle with MS and cancer. It’s fair.
Martin
Christ, so fucking stupid…
She’d be Obama’s Ladyhole Czar. Remember, Obama does that communist czar thing which is unlike the non-communist czar thing that Bush did, which proves conclusively that Obama is a communist.
I said it yesterday: Know your bumper stickers, people!
Forum Transmitted Disease
Obligatory:
HUNNEREDS O MILLIONS OF DOLLERS!! VICTORY!!
Against a guy whose main hobby is bitching about his racehorses and his non-working wife who talks about unzipping him so that he’ll go limp.
There’s not enough money in the world to get Romney elected.
beltane
@Satanicpanic: Do you know what other historical figure wrote an autobiography titled “My Struggle”?
Hint: I don’t think it would be legal for Ms. Romney’s book to be sold in Germany with that title.
Martin
@beltane: True. Have you any idea how hard it is to get an Austrian Warmblood in the back of a Cadillac?
Chyron HR
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
You forgot the blockbuster feature-length film.
(Sure, voters may wonder why Mitt Romney is an 8-foot-tall blue cat-man, but that’s actually quite reasonable compared to the stuff that’s actually in the Book of Mormon.)
General Stuck
@beltane:
This is how to handle these situations.
It is fine and dandy to chronicle the insanity in an easily searchable format, blog, twitter, whatever. But if you start going tit for tat with crazy, sooner or later, the bear will eat you as well.
Mark S.
TWO. HUNDRED. MILLION.
That’s the number of Americans who can’t stand Romney.
beltane
@Martin: Hmmm…Austrian warmblood…Mein Kampf er “My Struggle”. Makes me wonder…
beltane
@Martin: Hmmm…Austrian warmblood…Mein Kampf er “My Struggle”. Makes me wonder…
Satanicpanic
@beltane: Went right over my head, well played
jl
As a grizzled old
veteransurvivormedia saturation bomb add campaign stunned out zombie remnant of the Meg whitman CA gub campaign, somehow, I sense politcal deja vu all over again.The arrogant assumption that the voting population will believe anything if pushed with enough $$$, check.
The gaffes, check.
The convoluted BS conterploys and plays, check.
Hope it plays out the same.
As I said in a previous thread, crazy ol’ Jerry Brown beat it wandering around CA mumbling wise cracks.
Surreal American
@beltane:
Österreichisches Warmblut.
Villago Delenda Est
@Martin:
Shit, the deserting coward actually had a “war czar” to pay close attention to all that “Commander-in-Chief” stuff that the deserting coward couldn’t take the time to actually engage in, because it cut into his NES time.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@beltane:
I wonder what title(s) they’ll use for the German and Arabic translations?
dogwood
@beergoggles:
Rosen apologized because she stepped in it big time. The last thing Dems should do is bring Ann Romney into anything about this campaign. She is a better spokesperson than her husband and much more likable. And as much a women don’t like to be lectured about health and reproduction by right wingers, women who don’t work outside the home don’t much like being told they’ve never worked a day in their lives. Stuff like this ends up not being about Ann Romney and her privileged life,. but about Democrats disrespecting women who stay at home. But this is typical for the Democratic party. As soon as they get the upper hand on an issue and put the Republicans on the defensive, someone has to jump in and step all over the narrative. Of course this is overblown, but Rosen is supposed to be a pro, and if she thought she was advancing the cause with her comment, she needs to go back to political punditry school real fast.
trollhattan
@jl:
Megs is an avowed Willard supporter, so I hope she’s giving him all her useful campaigning tips. After all, she perfected packing three years’ campaigning into one loooooong year.
FlipYrWhig
This is such a stupid non-troversy, but rest assured they’ll spend days if not weeks trying to put, as they say, lipstick on that pig.
Villago Delenda Est
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
This assumes there is any demand at all for German or Arabic translations of this purported tome.
jl
Is Hillary Rosen the new
Bill Ayers, Chicago preacher guy I forget his name now, Saul Alinsky, Bill Maher, Kermit the Frog, Spongesquare Bobpants, who will bring down NoBama?They can hope.
beltane
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor: @Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor: Yes, I suppose a conservative Muslim person buying “My Jihad” would be unpleasantly surprised to learn it contained nothing more than the musings of a very vapid Mormon housewife.
joeyess
I love the fact that irony never sleeps on the right. Every single scandal or non-scandal, outrage or poutrage, is immediately given the suffix “gate”. As if Nixon never existed.
Are they really this fucking stupid?
Villago Delenda Est
@dogwood:
The only reason Ann Romney could stay at home was because her shitstain husband was making millions destroying once thriving companies.
dogwood
@General Stuck:
Exactly. You said it much better than I.
area man
I think you may be looking for the phrase “can’t be arsed” rather than “can’t be sussed.” At least I’ve never heard “sussed” used in that fashion.
Minor British slang pedantry accomplished!
Amir Khalid
@beltane:
It would not be illegal to try to sell in Germany a book whose title means Mein Kampf, merely very stupid.
And Adolf itler’s’s memoir isn’t actually banned in Germany. They don’t ban books over there, although they do suppress neo-Nazi political expression.
What actually happened, per Wikipedia, is that since his death in 1945, the state of Bavaria has claimed his estate, including the copyright to … uh, that book. (Hitler does actually have at least one surviving relative in Austria, who wants nothing to do with the book.) Bavaria has used the copyright claim to suppress the publication of the book, but it can do this only until 2015; 70 years after an author dies, his works go into the public domain.
FlipYrWhig
@dogwood: Rosen was mocking the idea that the Romney campaign had been using Ann Romney as a kind of liaison for women’s issues. She didn’t drag Ann Romney into the area, Team Mitt did. That said, it was a gaffe, but I remember well Hillary Clinton making a similar statement and getting ripped for it, and it’s not like it led to Hillary Clinton becoming a pariah among moms ever after.
jl
@trollhattan: Mitt and Meg! What a match. Sounds like a dream ticket to me.
How can we make it happen?
Villago Delenda Est
@joeyess:
Bill Saffire, a Nixon minion, made the -gate suffix popular in the wake of the scandal that caused the vile criminal to resign from the Presidency in disgrace.
It’s been a form of revenge (like the utterly bogus impeachment of Bill Clinton) ever since Nixon was brought down for his criminal activity.
Chris
@dogwood:
I don’t know, going by her statement, I’d say she sounds like exactly the same kind of tone-deaf rich idiot her husband is.
@FlipYrWhig:
This.
dogwood
@Villago Delenda Est:
I said that. But that’s not gonna be the story line.
joeyess
May I please have permission to edit my comment?
joeyess
actually, I just amend it here.
I really want to thank them for being this fucking stupid. No, really. Keep it up, GOP.
Amir Khalid
@joeyess:
Ah, so you’re having that problem too?
beltane
@Villago Delenda Est: There are women who stay home with young children, even if it is just temporary, whose partners are not millionaire vulture capitalists. Hilary Rosen’s comment was snide, condescending, and judgmental towards other people’s choice of parenting style, and it deflected attention away from the useless shitstain that is Mitt Romney.
In reality, it is Mitt Romney who has never worked a day in his life: Hilary Rosen’s idiotic comment obscured this simple fact.
beltane
@Amir Khalid: Thanks for the clarification. I do think it is a horrible, horrible choice of titles. Has Stephen Colbert infiltrated the Romney campaign?
General Stuck
That’s alright. It is the Mittster running for president, not his wife, against Barack Obama, and not Hilary Rosen. And the odds are great that soon Mitt will choke on his silver spoon, and saying something rich.
chopper
i hear ann romney raised all of her kids with no help at all. no personal chefs, housecleaners, nannies or anything.
no wait, i’m thinking of my mom. romney is rich as shit and never had to worry about money at all.
chopper
@Villago Delenda Est:
to be fair, ann romney really enjoyed firing babysitters.
FlipYrWhig
Oh, I just remembered another tempest in a teapot this reminded me of: Wesley Clark in 2008 telling Bob Schieffer that John McCain’s having been shot down as a Navy pilot didn’t make him an expert on foreign policy.
FlipYrWhig
@chopper: On the other hand, she did enjoy giving the babysitter a ride in/on one of her many Cadillacs and/or performing horses.
matryoshka
As I said in the “Brain Trust” thread (comment 48), the point of the original conversation about Romney & Rosen as it was played on CNN was that Rosen said this terrible thing about Ann Romney, insulting women who were stay-at-home moms by noting that Ann Romney had not worked outside the home a day in her life. The context was that Mitt was getting all his awesome connection with women’s issues through Ann, and saying at every opportunity, “Well, my wife tells me that women don’t really want birth control,” and crap like that. Rosen was pointing out that Ann was not at all in touch with working women who are also mothers, and that Mitt using Ann to get cred with Vagina Americans was just more pandering.
I have no idea why Hilary Rosen should or did apologize. I don’t think she had anything to apologize for.
Culture of Truth
@Martin:
It was either that or the roof.
dogwood
@FlipYrWhig:
If Rosen want to claim that team Romney made Ann fair game then that’s her story or your story I guess. My standard is that if you want to criticize Ann Romney go after something stupid or offensive she said; don’t use her to go after something her husband said or did. As a woman, that pisses me off. I’m no big fan of Ann Romney, but if anyone thinks the Romney campaign can’t turn a pretty blonde, blue-eyed, stay-at-home wife and mother of five who has MS, into a sympathetic figure and a victim of mean liberals, they are sorely mistaken.
Clime Acts
ABL, you have zero self awareness: This is merely the crystal clear mirror image of the poutrage of the day crap you spew from the Obama-Center-Right.
That’s why it bugs you so much. We all react most strongly against what we see in others that we also hate in ourselves.
Grifters gotta grift.
But maybe it’s not too late: With some effort you could still get your sense of humor and back and quit taking yourself so seriously…no?
No.
Egg Berry
ABL,
do the reverse racism trolls follow you over to RS as well? Or do they just keep polluting comments here?
chopper
@FlipYrWhig:
on the other hand, the babysitter had to ride on the roof.
joeyess
@Villago Delenda Est: like I said. Irony never sleeps.
joeyess
@Amir Khalid: yes
Some Guy
The only reach Republicans know is over-reach.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Rosen shouldn’t double down on this. Nothing ticks off stay at home Mom’s more than that kind of condescension and the implication that they don’t work and aren’t doing something valuable. Honestly, THIS type of thing puts my mother into an insane crazy rage.
Clime Acts
@beergoggles:
It has ever been thus. Which is part of the reason Howard Dean had to be destroyed: Too much truth telling and too little backing down. The professional Dems such as Obama don’t like that.
Not one bit.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You got to love how the upper class sees themselves as hard working joes. I mean come on, own being a 1%er, it worked for FDR.
On the bright side for the Romney campaign it means a day were no one is paying attention to what Mitt says for a day.
Satanicpanic
Has the public’s view of a candidate wife ever swung an election? I would guess not, but I’m willing to be corrected.
General Stuck
@Clime Acts:
That’s what all the racist twits say. But is interesting to ponder, that you apparently have an inner angry black lady you hate in yourselves.
But that is for the shrinks to say for sure, for sure.
Catsy
Okay, open question to all the people who’ve posted about Ann Romney’s autobiography being called “My Struggle”. Is there any truth to this? I’ve been searching for any evidence and the Internets are only showing me comments that people posted in the last few days.
Cacti
@Satanicpanic:
Hell no.
Remember 1992? The GOP told us that Barbara Bush was grandma goodness and the living embodiment of feminine virtue, as opposed to that careerist bitch Hillary.
Just sounds like they’re dusting off the greatest hits album to me.
Some Guy
@Satanicpanic: We are 200 days out. Not a chance in the world this makes any difference. Which is why it is all the more telling that Republicans are trying so hard to make this nothing burger into a banquet. They know they have have a shitty, unmotivating candidate and women’s issues are crushing them. If they are in panic mode already, that is a good sign.
I can only hope they try to turn her apology into a decoder ring to unravel Obama’s secret plan to impose Kenyan-style gendericity on all women. Oh wait, they already did.
So maybe get in some lesbian-bashing in a Matrix-like-all-things-are-connected way. Oh way, they already did.
Maybe somebody else should step a toe over the line tomorrow and see if we can get a full on “Genocide against Good Women” meme cooking.
WereBear
Rosen stepped in it; there are people from all walks of life who sacrificed so someone can stay home with the small children, and it is hard work, believe me.
But holding Ann Romney up as an examplar of one of them… bogus. She has sacrificed nothing to stay home; while I’m sorry she’s sick, I’m sorrier for people who have the same illnesses, and no friggin’ money.
This is why the rich marry each other; so no one will be tempted to stand up at the dinner table and have at it with a large sea bass.
Cacti
@WereBear:
When her husband decided that he wanted to repeal expanding health insurance to persons with pre-existing conditions, I started to feel considerably less sympathetic.
gene108
I wish people would stay away from the Romney family.
It’s a political loser.
The family doesn’t seem to have anyone as “goofy” as Roger Clinton or Billy Carter and nobody seems to be as criminally minded as Neil Bush.
They are rich. They are out of touch with ordinary folks struggles.
Mitt Romney puts his foot in his mouth every time he tries to come across as anything but a rich guy, whose worried primarily with rich guy problems.
Folks just come off as mean, when they go after people, who aren’t themselves nasty.
Being rich doesn’t mean you have to be unconcerned with ordinary folks or that you can’t connect with the “little people”.
The fact Romney has that problem is something that should unravel on its own. The fact Ann isn’t much better at connecting with people is something that should be left to play out on its own.
Other than being rich and worried more about rich guy problems, the Romney family isn’t bad.
Clime Acts
@General Stuck:
Stuck, your bullshit is weak: RAAAAAAAACIIIIISSSSSSSSST!
Get back to me on my equivalence to ABL when I try to make a career out of my own obscure blog, post on two or three others, and spend all my time on Twitter shoveling out the same style shit I’m bitching about from the “other” side.
Then we’ll talk.
Meanwhile, fuck yourself and your hummingbirds.
Loneoak
If it were a little later in the campaign, I would bet that Rose would be the Joe the Plumber meme that gets repeated ad-nauseum by the wingers like some sort of talisman and gets picked up by the GOP candidate’s echo chamber, but yet 95% of people have no idea what they are talking about. It is still probably too early for that, but I would not be flabbergasted if Romney brought it up in the debates.
WereBear
@gene108: Well, I’ll grant you “clueless” isn’t as heartless as some of Barbara Bush’s gems. (Quoting Richard Nixon, no slouch at it himself: That woman knows how to hate.)
But they are holding themselves up as “understanding” at the same time they are yanking away the safety nets from people who have nothing else; no rich relatives, no stocks to sell, no money for a car elevator.
Rusty pitchfork time!
Loneoak
Haven’t been around all that much lately. Is Clime Acts a firebagger or teabagger or just a dick who needs to hate on ABL?
General Stuck
@Clime Acts:
LOL, lil Timmy throws a rod.
Chyron HR
@Clime Acts:
Hey, glad to see you’re back. I had a question about your pronouncement yesterday that Zimmerman should be set free because Obama is a bad man: Do you think ALL murder should be legal until January, 2013, or do you just think people should get a free pass for killing niggers?
lamh35
POTUS was asked in an interview today about the comments, and IMHO in one statement he has at least partialy boxed in Ann Romney as surrogate for Romney and in part indoctrinated Michelle against criticism
by members of Romney”s “direct” team…not much you can do about “un-offical” surrogates.
Serious question…can a broken nose be healed with no bruising in 45 days???
FlipYrWhig
@dogwood:
OK, let’s backtrack.
Here’s the statement. Source: TBogg.
What happened is that Romney has been using Ann as a kind of emissary to What Women Are Thinking. Rosen snarked about that.
Yes, she did it ham-handedly because that middle bit in isolation is offensive to women who know well that mothering is a kind of work. But Rosen wasn’t going after Ann Romney out of left field or something.
Jennifer
Meh.
Rosen should simply have been a little more careful in her phrasing. Had she said, “Mitt is getting all of his advice about what women think from his wife, who never had to work a day outside the home to support her children, unlike 90% of the mothers in this country. Mrs. Romney never had to worry about where the next meal for her kids was going to come from, how she would take care of them if she lost a job, or who would take care of her kids if she got sick. Her experience in raising her kids did not include a number of stresses and obstacles that the vast majority of mothers in this country have to deal with.”
They would have had a very hard time faux outrage screeching about that, though I’m sure they still would have tried.
Emma Anne
Rosen did step in it. That was an idiotic thing to say. However, her apology should have said this:
“I apologize. I should have said she never worked a day in her life without an extensive staff to do all the scut-work.”
lamh35
POTUS was asked in an interview today about the comments, and IMHO in one statement he has at least partialy boxed in Ann Romney as surrogate for Romney and in part indoctrinated Michelle against criticism
by members of Romney”s “direct” team…not much you can do about “un-offical” surrogates.
http://www.kcrg.com/news/local/Bruce-Aune-to-Interview-President-Obama-147181915.html
FlipYrWhig
@Loneoak: AFAIK Clime Acts is the commenter formerly known as Kola Noscopy and Tim, Interrupted.
ABL 2.0
@Mickey: i find it odd that you haven’t yet been able to grasp that i write about these sorts of things so that i can tie my other “pet issues” into new blog posts about the ongoing anti-women/antichoice bullshit. it’s about repetition. if you notice (and to be fair, you don’t seem like the sort who notices much) my posts tend to reiterate what i think the message is with respect to the war on women. what can i say — i have a hard-on for gender equality. it is the reason i’m doing my wiki project. so you may keen impotently in each of my comment threads here about how i’m taking the bait or nutpicking or blah blah blah (and make yourself look like an ass every time you do so), or you can do what a normal person who doesn’t like my writing would do and not read my posts. it really is that easy!
cheers!
ABL 2.0
@Loneoak: it’s lil timmy kola noscopy, the poor dear.
ChrisNYC
The outrage over the outrage is just as ridiculous. It was a breathtakingly stupid thing to say, as a political person and as a woman. Or, for that matter, as a human being. Good rule — don’t say that what other people do has no value, is not work. Apologize. Say that was stupid to say that and I apologize and MOVE ON.
But the initial screw up wasn’t enough. Rosen had to go nuts on Twitter explaining why the offensive thing she said wasn’t actually offensive if you turned it into what she meant to say, posted a non-apology on Huffington Post and then (grand finale!) apologizes in person on tv to Ann Romney. Geez, she’s not a political operative, she’s a reality show, and we’ve watched a full storyline in 24 hours. Self inflicted 100%.
JPK
@joeyess: It perpetuates their victimhood narrative. Win-win.
Clime Acts
@Chyron HR:
Your inner racist, dying to be set free, is showing itself. Glad I could give you the excuse you needed to say the N word out loud here. Let’s see, are you using it ironically or what? Why is it ok for you to write that here?
I wonder: will you be banned?
Catsy
Semi-OT, but I have to say that while I sometimes enjoy ABL’s posts and don’t have the hate-on for her that some of the other regulars do, I am not a fan of this whole “click over to this other completely different blog in order to read the rest of my post” schtick. It makes sense when you’re quoting what someone else wrote somewhere else. When you’re doing it to your own post, it just comes across as a cheap ploy to drive traffic and participation away from B-J and over to Raw Story.
Clime Acts
@ChrisNYC:
Your entire comment is why Democrats suck at politics.
Rosen should have used this as a teaching moment and expanded on EXACTLY what she meant. Most of the country identify with the sentiment and agree.
But no, Dems turn this perfect opportunity into a LOSS once again.
And guess what? Ann Romney never HAS worked a day in her life. Deal with it.
Svensker
@Loneoak:
He’s old Tim, the twisted Cole-stalker who thinks that young boys don’t mind having middle-aged coaches bung them. He’s also obsessed with ABL. I forget what name he was using in his last incarnation. Something oddly sexual, of course, but I can’t remember.
jl
@lamh35:
Well, that interview is just more scandalgate fodder.
Was Obama dissing veterans when he humorously referred to politicans’ families as ‘civilians’. Obvilutely!
And did he insult grammarians, and was he
upppityimpolite when he said ‘me and Governor Romney’? Absoluviously.Two more ‘gates’ right there.
Amir Khalid
@Catsy:
It must have started as a joke on the Intertoobz. But I doubt she would do it. Ann Romney was born into a rich family and has been a rich woman of leisure for most of her married life. Her health issues are not to be trivialized, but she cold hardly make a plausible claim that her life has been an exceptional struggle.
Valdivia
@lamh35:
do you have a link to the Obama reply?
I broke an ex boyfriend’s nose by accident(I swear I didn’t hit him) and he was bruised about a week and then the swelling went down. It depends on how deviated the septum gets and if you need surgery. Sorry about your nose! (if it is you)
Chris
@Jennifer:
I can’t imagine what it’s like being a public figure where you have to parse all your words to make sure you never spout a fragment of a sentence that, if taken out of context, would sound bad.
Rosen’s statement, as FlipYrWing put it at 79, is straightforward and perfectly accurate – it took some major cutting to turn that into a soundbite they could exploit. Not disagreeing with your point, but still, damn.
Amir Khalid
@Svensker:
He used to go by Kola Noscopy.
gene108
@WereBear:
They are trying to brand themselves as people, who understand ordinary problems and failing miserably at it.
I don’t think we need to do anything to help them along or generate sympathy for them, by coming off as jerks.
I guess Twitter has its limitations.
A better comment would’ve been, “I respect Mrs. Romney’s commitment as a mother, but she is fortunate her husband had the resources to allow her to stay at home with her children, while many families today do not have that luxury and the policies her husband advocates would make lives harder for many Americans.”
There’s no reason to give Republicans any talking points, like Democrats attack cancer survivor, with MS, especially when the Republicans are doing just fine unraveling on their own.
Clime Acts
@Catsy:
Oh, you noticed that?
David Koch
Ann “I’ve never worked a day in my life because only the little people work” Romney = Out of touch
Clime Acts
@Svensker:
” I forget what name he was using in his last incarnation. Something oddly sexual, of course, but I can’t remember.”
You find the handle “Kola Noscopy” to be “oddly sexual,” do you?
That’s interesting…scat lover are you?
Catsy
@ChrisNYC:
No, it wasn’t. Stop echoing the right-wing distortion of what she said.
Better rule: read the entire quote before buying into right-wing bullshit. A quote which reads:
Ann Romney’s comments were offensive, insulting, and tone-deaf. Rosen rightfully pointed out that she has never wanted for anything financially and has no comprehension of the kinds of economic struggles that concern the majority of women in this country. The “never worked a day in her life” phrase was very clearly pointing that out. It’s only a slam against stay-at-home moms if you completely remove it from any context.
It could’ve been better phrased so as not to give right-wing fake outrage merchants an opening to distort her words, but she wasn’t wrong and it wasn’t any kind of attack on stay-at-home moms. Don’t do the right’s work for them.
Amir Khalid
@Valdivia:
I think Iamh35 is asking about George Zimmerman’s nose.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Martin:
__
This is why at Romney Estates West, as soon as the car elevator is finished they will be installing a horse elevator right next to it. And then finally Mitt can say with pride, “Yes, my transportation modes do go all the way to the top. Why do you ask?”
Clime Acts
@Catsy:
Catsy, I know you loathe and despise me, but you’re right on here.
Hope this support doesn’t destroy your cred with the Kool Kids.
Steve in DC
@gene108
They will always have talking points due to manufactured outrage.
This was a fair blow and well played. Mitt has been running his mouth that government doesn’t count as work, community organizing doesn’t count as work, only the private sector counts as work. So by his own definition of work, Ann hasn’t worked a die in her life. Beyond that she has a slew of maids, never had to worry about a balanced check book, never had to scramble to pay medical bills, never had to worry about putting food on the table, never had to chose between fixing the car or staying sick, or any of the other work and hardships that most families deal with.
Anybody who doesn’t realize that and see’s this is as “Democrats attack cancer surviving stay at home mom” is already firmly on the right.
Loneoak
@Amir Khalid:
Speaking of obnoxious trolls changing their names, I still haven’t heard whether there is a version of the Pie Filter that wasn’t broken by the redesign. Anyone know?
lamh35
@Valdivia: sorry, I cut and pasted, but forgot to paste the correct link
here is Obama’s statment:
http://www.kcrg.com/news/local/Bruce-Aune-to-Interview-President-Obama-147181915.html
WhoopTDu
@Valdivia:
President Obama’s comments here:
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/obama-on-rosen-controversy-no-tougher-job-than
Clime Acts
@Loneoak:
giggle…poor little Loneoak making a show of pretending to seek out the alleged PIE FILTER to protect it from seeing unclean words and thoughts.
cute
Valdivia
@Amir Khalid:
so totally out of it I didn’t get that. The bruising really goes away quickly and the swelling too. But the nose doesn’t look the same afterwards.
Catsy
@jl:
Well, that depends. Was he the subject or the object?
Amir Khalid
@Loneoak:
I don’t use the pie filter myself, but as I understand cleek does have a post-redesign version available at his site.
Valdivia
@WhoopTDu:
@lamh35:
Thank you both!
Loneoak
@Clime Acts:
I love unclean thoughts, and engage in them all the time. Having one about your mom right now, as a matter of fact. I just don’t like stupid thoughts and their stupid thinkers.
AA+ Bonds
Well as we all know proper respect for motherhood is part of an effective völkischen Politik
Seriously, there is no difference between home & hearth worship and restriction of abortion/birth control – two sides of the same fascist coin
i.e., there is a place for women, and that is squirting out little soldier ants and worker bees for the Reich
Needless to say, these women are white, Christian, and married to men
Clime Acts
@WhoopTDu:
Well, sweet jesus, no wonder the dems are spineless. Our leader is spineless.
“No harder job than being a mom?” Let’s compare Ann Romney’s years of back breaking sweat at low pay to that of the wonderful, always good natured and efficient AA woman who greets me every time I go to Costco. Let’s compare Ann’s very difficult years of servant/nanny/cook/cleaner/groom/butler/maid-assisted child rearing to that of my single mom sister who is raising her son on one meager salary all by herself.
Yeah, way to stand up for working moms, Barack. Please.
The Other Chuck
What Rosen said was kinda dumb. So how many anti-women laws is that equivalent to?
The GOP reaction is exactly like the schoolyard bully who runs off crying the instant he gets bopped on the nose. And all it’s doing is focusing more attention on their own obnoxious policies.
Veritas
Politico: Dems on defense in war over women.
Looks like Obambi and friends just turned the ball over in a fumble at their own 30 yard line, and Romney has control off the football.
Feeling the heat yet? You’ve just lost the first news cycle of the general.
ChrisNYC
@Catsy: Everyone knows what she MEANT to say. Instead, what she said was, “This lady who has a rich husband and raised five kids HAS NOT DONE A DAY OF WORK IN HER LIFE. And MS and breast cancer.” It’s stupid. Her job is to talk. If she has to say “What I MEANT was” she’s not doing her job. And I guess she sees that since she has now, after engaging in drama all day, and fanning the flames of what is a ridiculous fire, APOLOGIZED. She just could not have played this worse.
Jennifer
@Chris: Sorry, but the “stay at home mom doesn’t work” thing has come up frequently enough over the past 20 years that there’s really no excuse for anyone involved in politics to step on that particular mine. I agree that it was one line taken out of context, but Rosen should know that’s what Republicans DO and phrased that one line to where it couldn’t be taken out of context.
Catsy @ 101: What Ann Romney comments are you referring to? My understanding is that this entire thing was a response to MITT saying that he gets all him wimmin advice from his wife, and she told him so and so. Not really accurate to take out after Ann for that, other than to note that Mitt thinking that the wife of a quarter-billionaire who never worked outside of the home is the final word in what women are concerned about.
Veritas
Politico: Dems on defense in war over women.
Looks like Obambi and friends just turned the ball over in a fumble at their own 30 yard line, and Romney has control off the football.
Feeling the heat yet? You’ve just lost the first news cycle of the general.
The Other Chuck
@Loneoak:
I’ve got a version that works with the redesign here: http://sproingie.blogspot.com/2012/01/balloon-juice-troll-filter.html
It’s less pie, more filter. Give it a try.
AA+ Bonds
P.S. if you filter people who offend you then you gain nothing from this site beyond the FP except a Daily Show-like echo chamber for your own thoughts
Filter + BJ = RedState for Liberals
Instead, hone your arguments; there is not a single real conservative on this site as far as I can tell beyond the decadent class of pro-war Democrats that still haunts the eaves, and so those who provoke you provide a perfect sparring circle
Amir Khalid
@lamh35:
I remember the previous time Obama said this: he was a Presidential candidate at the time, and the media had invited him to comment on Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. Obama refused, saying that candidates’ families, and particularly their children, should be off-limits. Of course, we all know what kind of thanks he got from Bristol’s mother.
Jennifer
@Veritas: Yes, Veritas, I’m sure that one comment, made by someone not even closely connected to Obama, will make women forget all about all those Republicans who want to shove wands up their vaginas and block their access to birth control.
Sweet christ you’re stupid.
Valdivia
@The Other Chuck:
thank you for that will give it a whirl because cleek’s update is not working with my Chrome browser.
Also too: the new new thing Obama’s War on Mom’s
shoot me now.
Veritas
@Jennifer:
It’s going to be backed up by a $200 MILLION ad campaign started by Karl Rove next month. Remember him? That’s right, Jennifer–he’s baaaaaack!
The Other Chuck
@AA+ Bonds:
I don’t filter people I disagree with, I filter people who are just plain disagreeable. The contributions of Veritas, BOB, and samara are an overwhelming net negative.
Odie Hugh Manatee
While I’m really enjoying being a spectator at the nonstop train wreck that the right has become, I have to admit that it’s a damned scary thing to watch. It’s like watching a high-speed train derailing while it’s coming straight at you. It’s fascinating to watch but at the same time you are wondering if the damned thing will come to a screeching halt before it hits you.
One more thing… moving out of the way isn’t an option.
Veritas
New poll:Romney leads Obama as Prez. approval drops.
AA+ Bonds
Look see here’s Veritas, get crackin
AA+ Bonds
Veritas just provided the Republicans’ lines for the evening, do you have a riposte, or are you going to roll over and take it and try to pat yourselves on the back while your belly is exposed
Forum Transmitted Disease
Clime Acts/KolaNoscopy/Tim, Interuppted/etc. gets a little bit…frosted about the pie filter. Really, really seems to have some issues with anything that would take away his ability to dish up hot, steaming turds in a thread.
One of my favorite non-politics forums has just instituted an “ignore list” and I’m thinking you’re going to see this show up at a lot of online discussion sites sooner rather than later. It’s WordPress compatible, so John….this is an official feature request.
Jennifer
@Veritas: Yes, you stupid motherfucker – I’m sure all the women out there working 3 jobs to support their kids are going to be a lot more upset about someone who’s not even Obama saying something about how stay at home moms don’t work – much more upset than they are about his opponent’s party trying to force them to have another half-dozen kids, and presumably, get another 4 or 5 jobs to support them as well.
It can’t be said often enough, you’re a stupid motherfucker.
How appropriate that you share a name with James O’Queef’s lame-ass operation.
GregB
@Veritas:
Hot of the presses from the Ministry of Inflammation.
AA+ Bonds
@The Other Chuck:
I don’t really remember B.O. Bob or Bill or whatever but
1) Veritas does little but provide the Republican talking points in a Republican voice, something liberals desperately need to be able to deal with directly and on their toes
2) samara provides more content on this site than anyone except certain FPers and isn’t even a troll, just someone with an esoteric perspective and a provocative way of presenting it; again, this is something liberals need to be able to handle, or at least absorb
Amir Khalid
@Veritas:
Don’t forget, Mitt has Friday and the whole weekend to put his foot in his mouth yet again — which he does so regularly you can absolutely count on it that he will. And when he does, this trivial slip of Hilary Rosen’s will be forgotten by your short-attention-span American news media.
FlipYrWhig
@Jennifer:
And that’s what Rosen said, except she fucked up and forgot to say “outside of the home.”
AA+ Bonds
Just keep in mind that you are out here on a training exercise of your own volition and can leave at any point, is my advice
If you want a tightly-controlled, civil discussion, there are any number of places where that happens, such as TNC’s blog on the Atlantic, and I really love TNC’s blog on the Atlantic
Forum Transmitted Disease
@AA+ Bonds: Boy that’s for fuckin’ sure. Nothing but firebaggers as far as the eye can see. Look at it as training day.
@AA+ Bonds: Seconded. I’m not sure she’s ready for the front page – or if she’d even want such a thing – but she always adds something to the discussion and frequently that “something” she adds is pretty fucking substantive.
Yeah, she’s wrong a lot too, but even then she’s still doing better than 90% of the posters here. Including me.
ChrisNYC
@Clime Acts: She TRIED to explain herself for 18 hours until she apologized in person.
It was a stupid thing to say. This has been a raging issue for actual women for years. Guilt about working with kids at home, guilt about not working, guilt about not spending enough times with kids and/or work. It’s talked about among women all the time. Rosen knows that. It’s impossible that she doesn’t. Just a stupid stupid error. But, yeah, Dems should die on the Hilary Rosen hill. Good plan. That’ll help women with kids who have to work — Dems demonizing women with kids who don’t have to work.
Catsy
@ChrisNYC:
This is a joke, right? It’s not about what she MEANT to say, it’s what she DID say that is being completely omitted by everyone–including you–who is still flogging this manufactured outrage.
She DID in fact say of Ann Romney:
She DID in fact say that immediately following the words that everyone is removing from their context.
Rosen’s only offense was a single line that was twisted into being offensive solely by entirely removing it from the context of everything else that came before and after it.
An apology which very notably–and properly–does NOT back down from the point she was making or concede ground to the right’s attempt to frame this as an attack on stay-at-home moms.
Good for her.
Bullshit.
The only reason this issue is having any traction at all is because people like you are helping the right wing lie about what she said.
Stop doing their job for them.
FlipYrWhig
Looking back at the statement, I think Rosen meant to say “she never really HAD TO work a day in her whole life.” Pretty small gaffe to tie up a day’s commentary.
FlipYrWhig
@ChrisNYC: “Demonizing”? You can’t possibly be serious.
OzoneR
Well at least everyone now realizes how quickly the message can be given a life of his own and how little control we have over it.
The media made this a story and spun it out of control, and any attempts to control it failed.
We can’t even decide how to, some of you say apologize, other say don’t, others say fight back.
Face it, the media controls the message, not the parties.
The Other Chuck
@AA+ Bonds:
If you honestly think Veritas is interested in engaging at all, you’re nuts. That said, I occasionally peek at the filtered stuff just to see if there’s something worth reading (more horn tooting: this is easy to do with my filter).
That’s about as far as I feel like justifying myself to you, so next time you feel the urge to dictate the bounds of my discourse, I would kindly invite you to wrap your concerned opinions in crinkly tinfoil, shove them up your ass, and go hop in a microwave.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Jennifer:
Pravda would be even more appropriate.
Catsy
@AA+ Bonds:
Bullshit. She has repeatedly and explicitly stated that she goes into threads and aggressively tries to disrupt them, and boasts that she can do this as much as she wants unless someone bans her.
AA+ Bonds
Here is FoxNews.com a couple minutes ago
Veritas is not doing anything but presenting the point of view of your opponent in the terms your opponent will use to present that point of view
OzoneR
@Clime Acts:
You clearly don’t pay attention to her do you? cause thats EXACTLY what she did over and over again until early this afternoon.
So what? see how far that gets you.
AA+ Bonds
@Catsy:
Amen to that, and God bless
Forum Transmitted Disease
@The Other Chuck: Not what he said at all.
Veritas is invaluable, because if you can’t deliver a one shot knockout punch against this piss-poor parody of a conservative, you’ll never be able to successfully argue one in real life.
ChrisNYC
@Catsy: Listen, I’m not doing anyone’s job for them. You want the campaign to be about Hilary and how noble it is that she slammed the wife of the GOP nominee but just messed up the phrasing and boo hoo was taken out of context, go ahead. I think that’s a waste of time and helps exactly zero women.
Also, PS, that Huff Po thing was the non apology, which was the noonish position. Rosen APOLOGIZED a few hours later.
“I apologize to Ann Romney and anyone else who was offended,” Rosen said in a statement. “As a pundit, I know my words on CNN last night were poorly chosen.”
I agree with her, I just wish she had cut out the 18 hours of keening and wailing about how UNFAIR it all is (no shit!) before she shut the thing down.
AA+ Bonds
@The Other Chuck:
Tip: the Republicans are not interested in ‘engaging’, in the sense of having a discussion with you where you meet at some sort of mutual point of agreement
They are interested in blasting their message and drowning yours out and playing on the anger and fear of Americans
Politics is an arena and the prizes in the United States are
1) the ill-tempered narcissist known as the “swing voter”
2) the surprisingly hard goal of getting your own people riled up enough to show up at the polls
3) control of different branches of the government, I understand this to happen at some point in the process
You might as well start practicing
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Bingo
jl
I’ve assumed Veritas was a DougJ spoof, and was sympathetic to the theory proposed that SatireV was some people from some Harvard satire mag.
I do hope he is a Romney operative, probably from the Whitman campaign, since the thinking is so reminiscent of that flop.
I suggest letting Veritas/SatireV ramble. As a spoof or satire it is depressing, but as representative of the Romney gestalt, it is informative, exhilarating, and promises a bright election day ahead for us.
Hill Dweller
This tempest in a teapot will fade, and we’ll be back to the republicans’ actual policies, which really does qualify as a war on women. Even Ryan’s budget, which Willard called marvelous, disproportionately hurts women and children.
As for that Fox poll, I’d bet the farm they changed the weighting(as the ABC poll did a few weeks ago). It certainly is an outlier among the other polls this week.
Catsy
@ChrisNYC:
I can’t decide what’s worse about the way you keep repeating this right-wing lie long after it’s been exhaustively pointed out that nobody (including Rosen) did anything of the sort: the possibility that you’re doing it out of knowing dishonesty, or just out of plain old pigheaded ignorance.
I’d prefer to believe it’s ignorance, because you’ve never struck me as dishonest before but everyone has their days of pigheaded ignorance now and then.
Heliopause
Seems to me we’re talking about two different stories here. One is that Ann Romney has led a privileged life, which everybody already knows. The other is that Rosen went beyond making that simple point and said something that was mean-spirited on a personal level. She was right to apologize and the President was right to distance himself from it.
Furthermore, that the right is throwing a shit fit is no excuse; that’s what they do. Since they’re going to do it anyway don’t make it easy for them by teeing up a fat one like Rosen did.
Really, there are enough reasons to dislike the Romneys without resorting to gross generalizations about their personal lives. We already have blog comment sections for that shit, talking heads need to do a little better.
Calouste
@beltane:
“Kampf” means fight rather than struggle. The Germans didn’t name their tanks “Armored Struggling Vehicles”.
FlipYrWhig
Also, let’s not forget this whole stupid episode comes on the heels of a series of even stupider things. To recap:
1. Dems link birth control and “personhood” restrictions to one another, call it a “war on women” by Republicans.
2. Republicans take to the airwaves, say that it’s Obama who has been waging war on women, because women are still reeling from the bad economy.
2a. This often takes the form, e.g. Nikki Haley, of saying that women don’t care about contraception, women care about the economy.
3. Team Romney cites Ann Romney to reinforce point 2a.
4. Hilary Rosen scoffs, saying that Ann Romney doesn’t know what it’s like to be a struggling working woman.
4a. Rosen’s statement comes out wrong because by omitting a qualifying phrase like “outside the home” it seems to rehash ideas about the relative merits of motherhood and work that have been hammered by anti-feminist backlash for 20-30 years.
5. Team Romney leaps, tries to wipe out points 1, 2a and 4 in one fell swoop.
AA+ Bonds
Look all I am saying is that filters and bannings don’t do you any good
AA+ Bonds
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
I wish samara had a blog :(
WereBear
Very true and worth pointing out.
I feel for Ann Romney being sick; my own husband has an auto-immune disorder.
Where we part company is that he had to lose EVERYTHING before getting any help; a townhouse, a job, his health insurance; before his illness, CIFDS, was recognized as a disability.
Ann Romney was cushioned.
He’s still pretty touchy over the accusations of “slacking” because he lost a career as a graphics artist, and one as a musician, and one of an aviation artist with gallery exposure; all on-going until the diagnosis. Which took two years, and a bankruptcy, befor he could get on disability.
Ann Romney was cushioned.
Now, he’s helping the cats,, (click on my nym,) and doing his own music, but for the love of all that’s holy:
Ann Romney has no clue. NONE.
David Koch
@Heliopause:
How dare you call her “fat”, that’s sexist.
FlipYrWhig
@AA+ Bonds: And, accordingly, arguing with Veritas is like arguing with a bumper sticker on a car in a parking lot.
Clime Acts
@AA+ Bonds:
I would totes read that!
Baud
I was away from the computer and TV all day today and missed to whole damn thing. Yay!
Omnes Omnibus
@AA+ Bonds: Oh, yippee, you are in full-on dick mode again. How fun. The conversation here doesn’t need to go the way you want it to go. You can you it for what you want and others may use it for what they want. Fair? Also, if you are trying to persuade people to see things your way haranguing them is often ineffective.
Svensker
@FlipYrWhig:
What’s wrong with that? I do it all the time and I WIN!
Catsy
@ChrisNYC:
When you parrot right wing lies, yes, you most certainly are. And you have been repeatedly doing exactly that in this thread, claiming (falsely) that Rosen was demonizing stay-at-home moms and echoing the single out-of-context phrase as if it was the whole quote without acknowledging that the context it was in completely changes the message it conveys.
Knock it off. Everyone here can read the quote for themselves. Why invest yourself so much in pushing a story that isn’t true, especially after you’ve had the facts repeatedly corrected for you?
This is a false choice and a straw man.
Women are not fucking stupid, okay? This is a real scandal only to bloggers, pundits and political hacks. It will be largely forgotten in a week. It will have zero effect on the general election. And it will not magically cause women across America to forget the real and actual war that the GOP is waging on their rights and health.
The campaign will not be about this. It will not be about this tomorrow, it will not be about this next week, and it would not be about this if even Rosen had unflinchingly stood her ground and refused to dignify the wingnut manufactured outrage with an apology of any kind.
Omnes Omnibus
@AA+ Bonds: She does, I believe. Sorry, I don’t have a link.
AA+ Bonds
@Omnes Omnibus:
Trying to get people banned most certainly prevents this from happening, and my hat is off to the FPers for refraining almost all of the time
As for filters, my real response to that is: what the hell, this is not a knitting circle
jl
@AA+ Bonds: OK, I’ll bite. I do not understand the sampling scheme in that Fox News Poll. From the full results:
Results among subgroups have larger sampling errors, including:
Democrats (n = 361) ± 5%
Republicans (n = 354) ± 5%
Independents (n = 173) ± 7.5%
GOP Primary Voters (n = 376) ± 5%
So, the election ‘match up’ represented by this poll is 29 percent Democratic, 14 percent independent, and 57 percent GOP, 51 percent of which will be GOP primary voters?
Seriously, can anyone explain it? Maybe I misunderstand. The headline number is from unweighted total sample.
Omnes Omnibus
@AA+ Bonds: FWIW I am not in favor of banning, nor do I use the pie filter. I get the point of the wading through the sewage. Others have different views.
AA+ Bonds
Look, I will throw y’all a bone:
have you actually read that Fox News poll story that Veritas just posted? The fact you can use to mock it is within the text of the story, and they are counting on the mutual poor attention span of all Americans to push their propaganda point
[jl has it above I see]
AA+ Bonds
@jl:
YES
AA+ Bonds
@Omnes Omnibus:
Good on you and I thank you and if anyone has samara’s blog please post it up
David Koch
Heartland to GOP: Why should we listen to an east coast idle elite like Ann Romney — she doesn’t understand us, she’s never worked a single day in her life.
ChrisNYC
@Catsy: Good lord, you sound insufferable. Keep repeating out of context. That is a real political winner. I KNOW the facts. You didn’t because you didn’t realize that Rosen apologized. No bullshit, no out of context excuses. Apologized.
Also, I never said it was a big deal. My whole beef is that everything that Hilary Rosen did raised the profile of it, she helped make it a fucking story.
Also, read this thread and see if you would like to read it if you were a woman who had enough money to stay at home and care for kids. There’s plenty of people commenting who say, “THAT’s NOT WORK!” (I work, I have no kids.) But wake up and smell the coffee, saying that people “do no work” is demonizing, no matter if that is your point or if you just say those words. In this country. I thank the lord that elected Dems know not to do this crap. Never in a million years would you catch Nancy Pelosi or DWS saying that shit without pulling it back the next instant. Because they get it.
jl
@AA+ Bonds: Nope. I figured it out. The poll is not that lopsided. They counted everyone who participated in a GOP primary as a separate group for a sub analysis, regardless of party affiliation.
But that means this poll is for an election where a over a third of the voters in the general election will be people who voted in a GOP primary, though those people could be of any party affiliation.
So, not as lopsided as sample summary at top of full poll report indicates, but unrepresentative sample for the general election.
I admire their cunning. Pretty damn clever, if you ask me. All the fixing is nontransparent, down in the guts of determining the sample frame and only see it if you bother to take a look at the full poll report. The distribution of party affiliation would not look all that out of place when compared to other polls . Nice work. Clap clap.
Just Some Fuckhead
OMG, that’s gold.
jl
@Just Some Fuckhead: This will bring down Nobama when it gets out that Hillary Rosen is Obama’s top secret unpaid Ladyhole CZAR.
FlipYrWhig
@ChrisNYC: It seems like you have a very low threshold for applying words like “demonizing” and phrases like “no work.”
ETA: “Demonizing” is a VERY strong word for what you think you perceive in other people’s comments.
gogol's wife
I never heard of Hillary Rosen before today, I’m still not entirely sure who she is, but based solely on her egregious misuse of the word “fulsome” in the quotation presented in #142 above, she should not be in the language game.
The Other Chuck
It’s hard work overseeing the nannies who raise your children.
ChrisNYC
@FlipYrWhig: The phrase was “has never worked a day in her life.” What is the difference between that and “no work”? Demonize seems to have really hit a nerve. But you know what — I’ve been taken out of context! and I meant to say something completely DIFFERENT! :)
FlipYrWhig
@gogol’s wife: I noticed that too. It was like she was trying to make “full” into a noun and then back into an adjective.
amk
@General Stuck:
Nice.
So cole’s vista moment gets worse ? No more html tags. Editing has gone to the shitters. Nice job, cole.
Amir Khalid
@Calouste:
My German dictionary is right in front of me, and among the translations it offers for Kampf are:
1. In general, fight, battle, struggle, conflict;
2. In a sports context, contest, bout, match;
3. In a military context (e.g. as part of a compound noun), fight, battle, combat.
FlipYrWhig
@ChrisNYC: Well, if we’re talking about the Rosen statement that’s one thing, but I understood you to mean that the responses here to the whole episode were validating the idea that motherhood wasn’t work, and I didn’t notice that at all. And I do think that “demonize” is disproportionate even to the worst possible reading of what Rosen said. “Disrespect” might be closer to it.
lamh35
Uh huh, and with the NK rocket lauches, the real world trumps stupid…like I said earlier today, there is just not enough oxygen to fuel the minor fires that these non-traversy try to do.
Rosen-gate is already losing steam, and Romney choice is to talk about Ann or discuss foreign policy, my guess, that’s it for Rosen-gate.
ChrisNYC
@FlipYrWhig: But seriously, do you really think “demonizing” is too strong for the attitude in this country for people who are tagged as doing “no work”? I don’t AT ALL. I think it’s a MAJOR (political) weapon. See, eg, welfare, unemployment insurance.
gaz
@Svensker: Kola Noscopy.
And he’s neither a firebagger, or a teabagger. He is however, a pedophile. And I think that it’s only fair to mention that every single time he rears his nasty little head here in the comments at BJ
MikeJ
@gogol’s wife: RIAA shill. I don’t mind any thing bad that happens to her, I just wish she’d go the fuck away.
The Other Chuck
“Mein Kampf” wasn’t intended to be connoted as “My War” — at least not in the present tense of when it was written anyway :-/
It’s a vague word, like “fight”
satanicpanic
Need moar thread
FlipYrWhig
@The Other Chuck: Hey, you’re demeaning not just Ann Romney but every woman who can afford a staff of childcare specialists, horse-jumping coaches, and Cadillac mechanics. The Obama campaign is still reeling!
Amir Khalid
@The Other Chuck:
And if Hitler meant for his book to be My War, he would have titled it Mein Krieg.
gaz
honestly, why are folks re-arguing what Mein Kampf means?
My Struggle, or My Conflict.
Most popularly of course, “My Struggle”
Seriously, this line of discussion is stale beyond belief. I’m pretty sure we had it cleared up by the 50’s.
FlipYrWhig
@ChrisNYC: I think Republicans demonize people who don’t work, by depicting them as the enemy, as vermin, and as lower forms of life. But the only time stay-at-home moms have ever been subjected to similar rhetoric was _maybe_ at the height of lesbian separatism. I think ~ 20 years ago Hillary _Clinton_ found, to her regret, that there are sensitivities to the idea that women who don’t have paying jobs are lesser women than those who do. But “demonize,” no way. The word has “demon” in there for a reason. YMMV.
The Other Chuck
@Amir Khalid: I guess that was the sequel.
ChrisNYC
@FlipYrWhig: No, the responses here, several, call raising kids with money “no work.” Comment 69 is one. I have to leave WORK now (ha ha funny but true) so I can’t find others. It’s just a losing game this thing of “you have a nanny/cleaning person/etc and your husband has money so you are not really doing anything…” Same as the game that says, “You are horribly ambitious and money hungry for working while your kids are young if you don’t have to.” Person to person, if you want to think that someone’s life is easy/has no “work” in it fine. But saying anything that seems like that about a group of people is just crazy, politics wise.
Disrespect is fine. I’m corrected. Heat of the moment.
Catsy
@ChrisNYC:
And you sound impossibly dense. Pleased to meet you.
Thank you, I will when it is a fact that you have repeatedly been misrepresenting the out-of-context comment as if it was the whole of what she said.
Then fucking ACT like it already. Because when you write complete bullshit like this:
You are not working with facts. You are parroting right-wing lies.
I’m sure you think this is a cute gotcha, but you’re conflating two different facts. It is true that I did not realize that Rozen had made a subsequent apology. That has no bearing on who is correct about the facts of what she originally said. Pro tip: you’re not.
You really think anything she subsequently said or did has one whit to do with how desperately the wingnuts are trying to twist her words? Good grief, this is what they do. Her original comment could’ve been phrased better so as not to give them an opening. But once that opening presented itself, she could’ve prostrated herself on national TV and kissed Ann Romney’s feet, and the right-wing fauxtrage machine would still be fucking this chicken hard enough to make Bullshit McNuggets.
You are rapidly exhausting the benefit of the doubt that you have any idea what the fuck you’re talking about.
Saying that people “do no work” is not inherently demonizing. Context–that dirty word!–matters.
Regardless, Rosen did not say that anyone “do[es] no work”.
She certainly did not–as you falsely stated–demonize “women with kids who don’t have to work”.
What she did was scoff at the idea that Ann Romney, who has never had to work for a living or wanted for anything financially, has the slightest ability to understand the existential financial issues that concern women who don’t have a husband with fuck-you money.
The only world in which she was actually attacking or demonizing stay-at-home moms is the world of right-wing fantasy.
Most of the rest of your arguments about the political wisdom of different approaches to responding to or handling this nontroversy would be unobjectionable if you didn’t keep inserting bullshit that validates wingnut lies, like claiming that she was “demonizing women with kids who don’t have to work”.
eemom
You know, I’ve never really believed in the brouhaha about “paid trolls”…..but after Horsegate yesterday, and this “demonizing” bullshit today, I’m beginning to wonder.
Fuck Ann Romney, and fuck Rosen for being chickenshit enough to apologize for calling a spade a spade.
Mnemosyne
@ChrisNYC:
That’s not what WereBear said at all. She said that Mitt and Ann Romney did not have to SACRIFICE for her to be able to stay home the way most couples who decide to have one parent stay home have to sacrifice.
If you have proof that, like most couples with a stay at home parent, the Romneys had to make a financial sacrifice for Ann to stay home, please present it. Otherwise, I think WereBear’s point is a completely valid one — it was not a financial hardship for the family for Ann to be a stay at home mom. That is not AT ALL the same thing as saying that being a SAHM is “no work.”
(Edited for better grammar)
Odie Hugh Manatee
OT: New North Korean leader can’t get it up either.
Sounds like a stable transition to the new leader, nothing new to see.
jefft452
@dogwood: “She is a better spokesperson than her husband and much more likable.”
evidence?
Mike D.
@Catsy:
Nice try, but not happening. “Never worked a day in her life” inherently begs the question, Well, what has she been doing? Thence, motherhood. That colors the sentence about her not understanding economic issues facing women. IOW, while Rosen certainly meant that Romney never faced any scarcity and thus doesn’t understand those issues, the statement reads as though she’s saying she doesn’t understand them because she’s never worked. Which is wrong, because lots of non-rich stay-at-home moms do understand the economic issues facing them. She doesn’t understand them because her husband is rich, AND ROSEN NEVER SAID THAT! That is a fuck-up, my friends.
She stepped in it and derailed the Dems’ two effective lines of attack (Romney out of touch, GOP war on women) in one fell swoop. Stop insulting people’s intelligence by saying it takes a right-wing frame to see this was a fuckup by Rosen. Get real.
Catsy
@Catsy:
And to be absolutely clear, she didn’t disrespect “women with kids who don’t have to work” either.
She disrespected Ann Romney for presuming that she has any idea what kind of financial struggles and fears ordinary Americans have.
Period.
Any other interpretation requires you to remove that one sentence entirely from its context and pretend that’s all there is to it.
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom: Nah, it’s just people who get very stubborn about their point. Never happened to you, right?
David Koch
Elites in the Village won’t get this, but working folk just won’t get how someone so rich has never worked a day in her life.
Even the stuff about raising kids is a canard, as they were sent away to boarding school.
Spending all day at the country club, riding equestrian horses and playing tennis, while snacking on foie gras will go over like a lead weight with average people.
The more this circulates, the better.
Keep fucking that chicken, Mitt.
Cassidy
So we’re equating Ann Romney with SAHM’s? Wow. Anyone who thinks she knows what work is because she stayed home is a fool. Many (most) SAHM’s work hard. She is not one of them.
jefft452
@beltane: “There are women who stay home with young children, even if it is just temporary, whose partners are not millionaire vulture capitalists”
True, but how many will rush to defend the virtue of Lady Ann?
Some will, but they were already in the 27%
The claim that a billionaire, with an army of servants, works just as hard as any American is what is “snide, condescending, and judgmental toward” stay-at-home mothers
Suffern ACE
Seeing as I hadn’t really heard about Emily Rosen until yesterday, but she’s worth six posts a day, I assume she must be the Karl Rove of the Democraric party. Or maybe the new Gloria Steinem of the Women’s movement.
Oh this twitter box thing is gonna be the end of us.
Omnes Omnibus
@David Koch:
There are other kinds of horses?
Suffern ACE
@Omnes Omnibus: Well, she could ride draft horses. But that would be unusual.
jefft452
@dogwood: “Ann Romney, but if anyone thinks the Romney campaign can’t turn a pretty blonde, blue-eyed, stay-at-home wife and mother of five who has MS, into a sympathetic figure and a victim of mean liberals, they are sorely mistaken.”
“you know, I don’t feel rich” – Lady Ann
Suffern ACE
@Omnes Omnibus: Also equestrian donkeys. The sport must exist. The phrase “the boss was riding my ass all day” refers to the ancient sport of burroing.
Omnes Omnibus
@dogwood:
Many could, sure. The Romney campaign, though? Doubtful.
Catsy
@Mike D.:
You mean “raises” the question, not “begs”–and no, it doesn’t.
That’s not what Rosen meant, that’s what she said:
Why would someone NOT have to worry about how they are going to feed their kids? Or how we send them to school?
Would Ann Romney NOT have to worry about those things because she’s stay-at-home mom? Of course not. If anything, she might have to worry more.
No, a person would only NOT have to worry about those things if they are financially secure.
It has nothing to do with whether or not one chooses to be a stay-at-home mom. Your alternate interpretation doesn’t make any sense at all.
And she probably should’ve. That’s what made the statement poorly phrased.
But it’s a huge leap from a statement being poorly phrased in a way that allows dishonest political hacks to take it out of context and make it sound like an attack on someone else, and a statement being so poorly phrased that they actually did inadvertently make that attack on someone else.
And that’s what’s pissing me off here and drawing insults: people who are, either willfully or out of ignorance, conflating those two things.
No she didn’t. Not at all. The right wing will try to flog this for all it’s worth, but in the end this will blow over very quickly. Rosen will be gone from the news within a few days (if not sooner), but Romney’s tone-deaf inability to connect with normal people and the GOP’s real and actual war on women’s rights and health aren’t going anywhere. Like I said: women aren’t stupid. They can tell the difference between what the GOP is doing and a foolish gaffe by a pundit who isn’t even part of the Obama campaign.
It doesn’t take a right-wing frame to see that Rosen committed an unforced error by giving dishonest hacks a sound bite they could easily take out of context.
It does take a right-wing frame to repeatedly claim that Rosen was actually demonizing/disrespecting stay-at-home moms or attacking Ann Romney’s choice to raise her kids, as opposed to giving the right wing an unnecessary opening to dishonestly claim that she was doing so by cherry-picking one sentence out of an entire quote. And anyone who persists in doing this long after they’ve had the facts corrected for them absolutely does deserve to have their intelligence insulted.
That’s the difference here.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suffern ACE: Borrowing is a sport? I thought it was a way of life.
FlipYrWhig
@Catsy: To be fair, I think the one valid, or at least defensible, point about all of this is that if you’re a pro you should know better than to offer up statements that _can_ be taken out of context in the first place. Rosen’s mistake was that she said something for which it was possible to “remove that one sentence entirely from its context and pretend that’s all there is to it.” I think that’s where ChrisNYC is making a stand.
But that’s what makes them gaffes. You don’t plan for them. Once they happen you only have two courses of action: explaining the context, or letting it go and apologizing. You can’t get preoccupied with How Stupid It Really Was any more than you should get preoccupied with why you shouldn’t stub your toe on the coffee table. You curse a little, then move on.
David Koch
Can you imagine if a Democrat running for President had a spouse (male or female) who had never worked a day in their life?
The Wurlitzer and corporate media would never stop with the “they’re elitist and out of touch” and the “value of work” and “work ethic” memes.
But, IOKIYAR.
OzoneR
@Omnes Omnibus:
Murdoch to the rescue
Suffern ACE
@Omnes Omnibus: Burro-ing is the sport. But the two are often confused.
Mike D.
@Catsy:
It isn’t taking the statement out of context to say that it’s was about her staying home rather than her husband’s wealth – because she never explicitly created that context. It’s (quite obviously) legitimately ambiguous, which for a communications professional is a complete fish-up, and which makes your high dudgeon absurd. I know you’d like it to be as clear as you make it out to be, but it ain’t.
You’re right that it’s disturbing to suggest that stay-at-home moms who aren’t rich don’t understand economic issues facing them, but since nowhere does Rosen distinguish Romney from other stay-at-home moms by her wealth, she makes that an entirely viable interpretation, since Romney is in fact a stay-at-home mom – something that’s easy enough for her to point out. It’s a disturbing thing to think that someone would say; that’s why people were disturbed by it. But it’splausible – a person certainly could claim that only working outside the home can give a person a full understanding of the economic issues facing their family. Many people clearly thought that’s what she was saying, or at least that it could plausibly have been.
You come across as in a kind of desperate denial here.
Mike D.
@Catsy:
It isn’t taking the statement out of context to say that it’s was about her staying home rather than her husband’s wealth – because she never explicitly created that context. It’s (quite obviously) legitimately ambiguous, which for a communications professional is a complete fish-up, and which makes your high dudgeon absurd. I know you’d like it to be as clear as you make it out to be, but it ain’t.
You’re right that it’s disturbing to suggest that stay-at-home moms who aren’t rich don’t understand economic issues facing them, but since nowhere does Rosen distinguish Romney from other stay-at-home moms by her wealth, she makes that an entirely viable interpretation, since Romney is in fact a stay-at-home mom – something that’s easy enough for her to point out. It’s a disturbing thing to think that someone would say; that’s why people were disturbed by it. But it’splausible – a person certainly could claim that only working outside the home can give a person a full understanding of the economic issues facing their family. Many people clearly thought that’s what she was saying, or at least that it could plausibly have been.
You come across as in a kind of desperate denial here.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suffern ACE: Based on last night’s horsy thread, burro-ing may be a way of life as well. Who knows?
Elizabelle
I think this is going to blow back badly on the GOP.
Women who don’t have as many choices as Ann Romney understand what Rosen meant (albeit clumsily), very well.
This reminds me a bit of the “clinging to their guns and religion” scandal du jour.
Obama’s comments were and are true, whether the GOP and other detractors want to acknowledge that or not.
Mike D.
@Catsy:
But it’s enough for me that you acknowledge the statement was malformed. It’s a pretty big deal for a political hack (which is what Rosen is) to make a statement in “a way that allows dishonest political hacks to take it out of context and make it sound like an attack on someone else.” Quite a big deal, really, and she really did jack it up so bad that she hardly left the other hacks with much work to do at all. I do agree that she wasn’t heself attacking stay-at-home moms. And I agree that this is a 48-hour story at most. But I’m not sure that it doesn’t get the Dem message off its highest gear for longer than that. We’ll see. But either way, it was a major fuck-up for a pro. To this day, I never wonder why HRC’s campaign sucked so much, when I see her closest associates operating in the field.
Clime Acts
@gaz:
You take that back, you.
The ten year old boy I’m dating easily passes for twelve.
Clime Acts
@gaz:
And is very mature for his age.
Jules
You know I’m a mom and during the last 20 years I have been both a SAHM (homeschooled while running an online business) and also waited tables and hands down waiting tables 40 hours a week mixed with motherhood was way harder then being at home.
ChrisNYC
@Mnemosyne: Which is just another way of saying that what Ann Romney did is not “hard work.” The comment says that sacrificing in order to have one parent stay home with kids is “hard work.” So, not sacrificing, since Ann Romney has not sufficiently sacrificed to meet the “hard work” criteria, is not “hard work.” In which case, you all don’t agree with Hilary Rosen because she really never did mean to say that Ann Romney has failed, in her life, to do “a day’s work.” Hilary Rosen has said all damn day she thinks that raising kids is hard work.
This stuff, it’s toxic, mostly because people feel fine holding forth on women and their value and their choices. It leads to this nonsense about women staying home and eating bonbons and that is another reason that HR should have just shut it down.
And, really, wife of Mitt Romney? Mother to the birther son? That there is work. :) Not as hard as Callista’s job but still.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Suffern ACE:
I’d pay to see her run some course on a Clydesdale. :)
eemom
@Omnes Omnibus:
Moi? I bend with the breeze. Mine is the way of Zen.
Clime Acts
@eemom:
Eemom, would you like to meet my ten year old boyfriend sometime?
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom: Of that, I had no doubt.
Mnemosyne
@ChrisNYC:
No, it’s a way of saying that most families have to sacrifice financially so one parent can stay home. How you leap from “most families have to sacrifice financially to have a SAHM” to “being a SAHM is not hard work” is beyond me.
Again, show me that, like many families with a SAHM, Ann and Mitt Romney sat at the kitchen table long into the night figuring out who got to get a new pair of shoes first because they couldn’t afford to buy shoes for all of the kids at the same time and I’ll buy your claim that Ann Romney really understands the sacrifices that other people have to make in order to have a SAHM. Until that point, you can claim that Ann Romney understands what it’s like to be a SAHM, but not that she understands that most women don’t have that choice because the family can’t handle it financially. I think she’s completely clueless to the fact that her choice to stay home was an easy one because the family didn’t have to decide between having a SAHM and health insurance.
ETA: Also, try reading the fucking comment you claim to be criticizing:
Learn to fucking read, you moron — it’s the “staying home with small children” that is hard work, not the sacrificing to do it.
Mnemosyne
@ChrisNYC:
Also, too:
What Rosen said is that Ann Romney has never worked outside the home a day in her life and therefore she doesn’t actually understand what it’s like to have an outside job and also be a full-time mom, which is what the Romneys were claiming.
Please explain why Rosen is wrong about this and Ann Romney DOES TOO understand what it’s like to have to put your kids in daycare all day so the family can have health insurance instead of torturing one sentence of Rosen’s statement that you ripped out of context so you could claim that Rosen is attacking stay at home moms.
jefft452
@ChrisNYC: “Which is just another way of saying that what Ann Romney did is not “hard work.””
Ann Romney never did a day of “hard work” in her life
Not outside the home
AND not as a stay-at-home mom either
The nannies, chauffeurs, chefs, maids, boarding school employees, etc may have “worked hard” raising the five princlings
Lady Ann not so much
ChrisNYC
@Mnemosyne: WTF? Show me where I said that “Ann Romney really understands the sacrifices that other people have to make in order to have a SAHM” OR that she “understands what it’s like to be a SAHM”? Both of which you call “my claims”???? I never said that or anything like it, not even in the ballpark. I’m not being clear or you’re not following my argument but you’re talking about an almost completely different set of issues than I am.
ChrisNYC
@jefft452: Thanks. You state it very clearly. Flip Your Whig, this is what I’m talking about.
ChrisNYC
@Mnemosyne: I already did this argument upthread.
ChrisNYC
@Mnemosyne: You like the word claim. Thanks for the moron thing. I don’t know what you’re so pissed off about. I’m happy to say I was wrong about that comment. There are a ton. There’s a new one that says that Ann Romney has indeed never done work in her life. 241. I am able to admit I made the terrible error of referencing the wrong comment. My point stands, with the amendment to the comment reference.
Now, since you have to read for me, point out to me where I made the claims that you read but I did not ever make?
jefft452
@ChrisNYC: It is true, though
aint it
PS
the Marquis de Mittens never worked a day in his life neither
Thats ok
Eleanor Roosevelt had an army of servants to take care of her kids too
But she didn’t pretend that she had to work just as hard as the rest of us
That is what is offensive about Lady Ann’s claims that women don’t care about these crazy Republican anti-abortion laws, anti-equal pay laws, anti-BC laws, Limbaugh’s rants. and the crusade against PP, etc
Lady Ann knows that what women really want is a cut in the capital gains tax
I don’t object to SAHMs, my own mother was one (thanks to the New Deal, she could afford to be one)
I do object to lazy parasite aristocrats who claim they have it rougher the the rest of us
Mnemosyne
@ChrisNYC:
Don’t attack WereBear, especially for things she didn’t even say. That’s all.
FlipYrWhig
@ChrisNYC: Yes, fine, no one should say that any set of motherly activities isn’t hard. Then again, I think it is not unfair to suggest that when Mitt Romney cites Ann as his resident expert on What Women Want he’s getting a skewed and privileged view. And that’s what Rosen was talking about, to wit, that Ann Romney is not a reliable source for the female face of economic hardship. And, again, if Rosen had said “Ann Romney has never had to work a day in her whole life” rather than “Ann Romney has never worked a day in her whole life,” this whole thing probably never happens. That’s how small a gaffe it is. It’s a statement about wealth and privilege, not one about whether motherhood is a valuable kind of work.
eemom
@FlipYrWhig:
if only there was some way to channel the energy that you and a few others here spend explaining the fucking obvious.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Flipped on the car radio today and tuned in to Catholic Radio (IH Network, Cornbinder Radio!) to listen in on the crazy for some amusement. My curiosity was rewarded when I heard the host of the show going after Ann and Mitt, backing up Hilary Rosen and agreeing with what she said about Ann.
I love circular firing squads!
BTW: Hilary wuz right, the right pulled a Sherrod on her and some of you fell for it.
Mike
I thought little green footballs was a right wing blog. They were all the rage with the freepers during the Bush years. Did the owner of the blog have some sort of epiphany?
Mike D.
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Wow, really? What were they saying more specifically, and what seemed to be motivating them to say it?
longtime lurk
I have exactly zero interest in the topic of this post. Meaningless bullshit to distract the rubes.
On the other hand, I’m very interested in the whole “click here to read the rest of this post on a different blog” thing. I’ve been reading the internet for a long time now, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blogger use someone else’s blog to drive traffic to their home blog. A guest blogger using their own blog to drive traffic to the place where they are guest blogging? Sure. But this is a horse of a different color.
This is a terrible breach of blogging etiquette — unless of course Cole agreed to allow it. Maybe he did, but from what I know of ABL, it is very much in her character to just do it without asking and dare Cole to call her on it. Which he won’t. Nice racket, I guess.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@longtime lurk:
Okay, whose sock puppet is this?
longtime lurk
No sock puppet here. Much too lazy to run multiple characters. Are you trying to disagree with my point?
The prophet Nostradumbass
@longtime lurk: The ignorance displayed in your first comment suggests that you’re either a spoof, or haven’t actually spent any time reading this blog before.
longtime lurk
I’ve read every single post here for the last 5 years. In exactly what way was my comment ignorant?
The prophet Nostradumbass
@longtime lurk:
For someone who claims to have read every post here for the last five years, you really don’t know much of anything about either ABL or John Cole.
longtime lurk
Well, you obviously don’t want to address the substance of my comment. It appears that you’re taking the ad hominem approach: am I sock puppet? Have I really been reading this blog a long time? etc. I’m not interested in arguing that with you. Believe me or not, I don’t care.
All I know about Cole and ABL is what they’ve written here. Cole is afraid of conflict with his bloggers (other than the occasional drunken, ill-directed rants — which are fun to read, btw).
As for ABL, I don’t feel like rehashing everything that’s happened over the last six months or so, but the point I’m making, which every regular BJ reader knows, is that she thinks the rules don’t apply to her.
Cole should never have left the door open for her to come back after The Incident. It was the perfect opportunity (she quit!!!) to shed a destabilizing influence, but Cole, in his wisdom, allowed her to come back.
Ok, well I thought that was a bad decision, but so be it, it’s his blog and he can do what he wants. And but then so this is how she repays him for being a gentle, forgiving soul? Blatantly using his site to build up her page views on another blog? Totally ridiculous. I’m surprised more people haven’t objected to it, though, as I mentioned, I’m not at all surprised that Cole hasn’t.
Anyway, you can explain how I’m wrong and come up with an argument that justifies what ABL is doing (not holding my breath). Or you can continue to pedantically question my personal motivations and credentials (yawn).
Either way, I’m unlikely to respond. I’ve already written more words in these few comments than I have in the several years I’ve been reading this blog — and I seriously doubt the topic has been worth it.
BUT, if you’re really interested in further discussion, CLICK HERE to go over to my own blog and read the rest of my views on the matter!!
The prophet Nostradumbass
@longtime lurk:
Cole has explicitly approved of what ABL is doing on this site, multiple times. If you had actually read every post in the last five years, you would know that. Everything else in your comment is a bunch of hand-waving nonsense.
Cain
Hillary Rosen is a big girl, and she’s used to being hated. She’ll be fine.
If people don’t remember, Hillary Rosen used to head the RIAA, and the kind of vitrolic hate piled on her while she was doing her job was pretty bad.
Even when she personally didn’t agree with what the music industry was doing, she still did whatever was asked to do.
cain
Cain
@Mike:
Yeah, pretty much. Went through a Cole moment as well. Now we’re quoting him.. which still blows my mind considering what kind of trash he used to post on there. Once he left the group mind, he got better.
Mike D.
@Mike D.:
…But I really can’t be sure of any prediction about the impact of this. Perhaps it could be more considerable and potentially long-lasting than these faux-scandals tend to be.
Clime Acts
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Doesn’t mean it’s not still tacky and weird.
The prophet Nostradumbass
take a look in the mirror.