I’m sending up the bat signal. We have an urgent need at the Balloon Juice WV HQ for cold compresses, advil, and pedialyte by the gallon.
100 Strangers
These shots are from a Flickr pool that challenges photographers to take 100 pictures of strangers, and post them with the story. I’ve been into photography for a long time, with varying levels of seriousness, but I don’t think I have the guts to walk up to 100 random individuals and ask to take their photo.
These images are used under a CC license from users colinlogan and fototastich. Click on them to see more of either photographer’s work. Here are a couple other streams I liked, from photographers who copyrighted their images. Speaking of licensing, there are a lot of Flickr users who assert full copyright on their photos. Fair use or not, I take that to mean that they don’t want me to post even a small version of the image and link back to it. I think they’re missing an opportunity to expose their work to a wider audience, and I want to put in a plug for this version of CC licensing, which is almost as restrictive as full copyright, but it lets bloggers like me link back to their work with an example.
What Kevin Drum Said
I really can’t add much to this:
Shall we roll the tape? Under Bush Sr., FEMA sucked. Under Clinton, FEMA was rehabilitated and turned into a superstar agency. Under Bush Jr., FEMA sucked again. Under Obama, FEMA’s doing great and responding quickly.
I know, I know, we’re not supposed to politicize natural disasters. Not when that politicization makes Republicans look bad, anyway. So I’ll just let you draw your own conclusions from these four data points. I report, you decide.
All Groupies Must Bow Down
In the sacred presence of the latex solar beef:
Welcome to the big leagues, Trump, you douchebag.
Alumni weekend. I will hurt in the morning. Tuaca and scotch are strange bedfellows. Tequila, also, too.
We’re the kind of country that’s built to last
I love that Jonathan Hari article that John linked to earlier. Sometimes I wonder. Consider:
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!”
[….]On Libya, he (Donald Trump) says: “I would go in and take the oil… I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff.” On Iraq, he says: “We stay there, and we take the oil… In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation’s yours.” It is a view that the world is essentially America’s property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to “stop what’s going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength.”
I mean this almost half-seriously: is there a way to justify this kind of unreconstructed mercantilism with the Haykekian principles that guide today’s most principled conservatives? Is there?
This is too much to ask of a mere Reason video, it may well require a new David Brooks book. Rest assured, though, if the Republican nominee talks this way — and he or she might, at least during the primaries — some brave Burkean soul will attempt to square this circle.
We’re the kind of country that’s built to lastPost + Comments (122)
Get the Fuck Off My Obstacle!
This epic smackdown of Trump and the GOP is a must read:
Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!” – but that wasn’t enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an “interesting coincidence” that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is “I’m better at what I do because I’m gay”, and argues “there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”
That wasn’t enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn’t anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN’s polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It’s not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.
Read the whole thing.
Pay No Attention to the Invisible Hand Behind the Curtain!
Charles Blow points out why “Silliness & Sleight of Hand” have been the GOP’s resort-of-the-newscycle:
Donald Trump is still playing to suspicions of President Obama. And it’s no longer theoretical. It’s theological. For the detractors, truth is no longer dependent on proof because it’s rooted in faith: faith that American exceptionalism was never truly meant to cover hyphenated Americans; faith in 400 years of cemented assumptions about the character and capacity of the American Negro; and faith that if the president doesn’t hew to those assumptions then he must be alien by both birth and faith.
__
This is how the moneyed interests — of whom Trump is one — want it. That is how sleight of hand works: distract and deceive. They need this distraction now more than ever because the right’s flimsy fiscal argument — that if we allow fat cats to gorge, crumbs will surely fall — is losing traction.[…] __
It all loses traction as more Americans begin to see the far right for what it truly is: a gang of bandits willing to sacrifice the poor and working classes to further extend the American aristocracy — shadowy figures who creep through the night, shaking every sock for every nickel and scraping their silver spoons across the bottom of every pot.
__
In fact, Gallup reported on Thursday that unfavorable views of the Tea Party, which was cheered and championed by billionaires and business interests, had jumped to 47 percent this month, a new high, while last week it reported that approval of Congress among Republicans and independents had dropped to a depressing 15 percent.
__
So the right needs to backfill its shaky fiscal reasoning with political segregationist rhetoric — amplifying a separation of the “us” from the “other.” […] __
In 1965, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described how the strategy of separating people with common financial interests by agitating their racial differences was used against the populist movement at the turn of the century, explaining that “the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow.”
__
He continued that Jim Crow was “a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.” He called this “their last outpost of psychological oblivion.”
__
But the right, with a new boost of energy from Trump, is reaching for new frontiers. The language and methodology are different, but the goal is the same: to deny, invalidate and subjugate, to distract from real issues with false divisions.
Of course the deliberate, “casual” racism stings — Trump is a carny geek spewing raw chicken parts at passers-by. But perhaps if we allow ourselves to be distracted by arguing over who’s insufficiently offended about the geek’s uncivilized behavior, we’re going to miss his confederates picking our pockets… again.
Pay No Attention to the Invisible Hand Behind the Curtain!Post + Comments (96)