QOTD, Steve Benen: Look, I know Republican pundits feel compelled to say things like this. If only President Obama were more Republican-like, the GOP would be devastated. What a missed opportunity for the White House! Please. ... I still get the sense that some in the media establishment find it outrageous that President Obama is doing exactly what he said he'd do. It's almost as if Villagers expected, counter-intuitively, to see the president run to the middle after the election. ("What do you mean he's fulfilling campaign promises? He's not supposed to deliver the agenda he ran on!")
QOTD2, DougJ: ... I wasn’t surprised that the people at the Politico think Democrats should cower in fear of Rush and his silly-putty-mailing army. I was surprised, though, to see that George Lakoff, author of Don’t Think Of an Elephant and the father of liberal “framing” thinks Rush-baiting is a bad idea too: ... Is this framing stuff the liberal answer to Burkean bells? Just some high-brow nonsense that gives an intellectual veneer to a half-baked PR strategy? I don’t know the answer, but I’m skeptical of any philosophy that opposes using an oxycontin-addicted egomaniac as foil.
Blue Texan tells me that "The Drug-Addicted Thrice Divorced Sex Tourist is about as popular as anal cysts, so Erick's right, he is the most popular conservative out there."
Sully's Quote For The Day
"One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat [the Democrats] is with better policy ideas," - Rush Limbaugh.
Sully: The GOP's 1997 I
atrios We're Not Laughing With You: We're laughing at you. Really.My column considers the plight of the post-Blair Tories a decade ago with the post-Obama Republicans:
It’s 1997. Maybe you remember the feeling. A new premier of the left: charismatic, careful to appeal to the political centre, replacing a deeply tainted, long-endured conservative brand, all with a sprinkle of fairy dust to keep the scepticism at bay. One of his core missions is keeping the right off balance – by appropriating its language and, in some cases, policies, while relentlessly draining the atmosphere of polarising rhetoric.
Barack Obama is more ambitious – much more ambitious – than Tony Blair, but he has absorbed his lessons. He is removing ideology from the discourse, gradually whittling away at the left-right divide by claiming pragmatism and seizing the public mood. And the most threatened and flummoxed of entities in America today, as in Britain a decade ago, is the political right. The Republicans in 2009 feel increasingly like the Tories of 1997: beleaguered, desperate and flailing for ways to appeal to the middle.
Last Tuesday was not a good omen.
...
John Cole: Frankenbirthers
Deep in this Ben Smith piece on the numerous conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate and the desire by some on the right to get rid of the “birthers” is this nugget:
Meanwhile, the Birthers’ persistence has prompted another, competing conspiracy theory on the right.“I’m not a conspiracist, but this could be a very big conspiracy to make conservatives disgrace themselves,” Medved said.
They have cultivated the crazy for so long that it is spinning out of control, and now they are struggling to reel it back in. I guess a years worth of whisper campaigns about Obama not being a citizen, being Muslim, being ....
And now they are so frustrated with their own creation that they are paranoid that it is a conspiracy to discredit them. No conspiracy is needed, Mr. Medved. We just need to give you all a microphone and let you guys take care of the rest.
atrios on Disappearing Bush: 8 years of dear leader adulation and it's like he never existed.
Warren Buffet: ‘Our Country Has Faced Far Worse Travails’
...
Amid this bad news, however, never forget that our country has faced far worse travails. In the 20th century alone, we dealt with two great wars (one of which we initially appeared to be losing); a dozen or so panics and recessions; virulent inflation that led to a 21 percent prime rate in 1980; and the Great Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment ranged between 15 percent and 25 percent for many years. America has had no shortage of challenges.
Without fail, however, we've overcome them. In the face of those obstacles—and many others—the real standard of living for Americans improved nearly seven-fold during the 1900s, while the Dow Jones Industrials rose from 66 to 11,497. Compare this with the dozens of centuries during which humans secured only tiny gains, if any, in how they lived. Though the path has not been smooth, our economic system has worked extraordinarily well over time. It has unleashed human potential as no other system has, and it will continue to do so. America's best days lie ahead.
...
Two articles/op-eds in the NYTimes today on the filibuster. Filibusters: The Senate’s Self-Inflicted Wound and Make My Filibuster. Neither takes into account that the blogosphere has been all over this of late, and about a week ago uncovered a critical point that neither article mentions. Ezra Klein: WHY HARRY REID DOESN'T FORCE REPUBLICANS TO FILIBUSTER.
One of the most common assignment desks is recent weeks has been on the filibuster: Why, you ask, doesn't Reid just make the GOP talk all night? Ryan Grim looked into this and obtained a memo Reid's office wrote on the Senate rules. The problem, Reid's people concluded, is that the Republicans wouldn't have to talk. And the Senate parliamentarians agree.
The archetypal filibuster was Strom Thurmond's 24-hour talk-a-thon in opposition to civil rights. Thurmond read the phone book, the recipes, all of it. ... When he exhausted himself, they invoked cloture and voted on the bill.
But delay in the Senate, Grim finds, doesn't require a long speech. It requires only one Republican to be president, and he or she doesn't need to say anything in front of the cameras at all. Every time the Democrats tried to vote, the Republican would simply have to say "I suggest the absence of a quorum." At that point, says Grim, "the presiding officer would then be required to call the roll. When that finished, the Senator could again notice the absence of a quorum and start the process all over. At no point would the obstructing Republican be required to defend his position, read from the phone book or any of the other things people associate with the Hollywood version of a filibuster."
"To get an idea of what the scene would look like on the Senate floor if Democrats tried to force Republicans to talk out a filibuster, turn on C-SPAN on any given Saturday. Hear the classical music? See the blue carpet behind the 'Quorum Call' logo? That would be the resulting scene if Democrats forced a filibuster and the GOP chose not to play along."
...
Aravosis: Jindal and GOP think volcano monitoring is silly. Alaska volcano reportedly ready to blow. (Frieda - please stay safe.)
One of the things that GOP posterboy Bobby Jindal criticized in his response to Obama's address to Congress was "volcano monitoring." Jindal thinks it's silly, and a waste of taxpayer money. Well, one of the volcanos that Jindal finds silly is apparently ready to blow. Ironically, it's just outside of Anchorage.
I was in Anchorage the last time Mount Redoubt blew in December 1989. It was surreal. We were driving to an officemate's sister's place when we heard on the radio that the volcano blew. ... ... suddenly we noticed a black cloud on the horizon. Over the minutes, it crept closer. And closer. Suddenly, 1/3 of the sky was black. The rest was sunny and clear. ... By the time we got to my friend's sister's house, the sky was black. Pitch black. Street lights came on. It was the middle of a sunny day. And it was darker than the darkest closet, lights off, middle of the night. But there were no stars. Nothing. I've seen few things as creepy, and nothing as apocalyptic-seeming, in my life. The city initiated a quarantine, so I was stuck at my friend's sister's for 24 hours. Then the ash fell. Fascinating. A snowshower of volcanic ash - they're these sort of large grey snowflakes that fall even slower than snowflakes. Beautiful in a way. But not very good for you, healthwise. Volcanic ash has a way of making you choke. It nearly brought down a commercial airliner after it got sucked into the planes engines and they all turned off.
The next morning I had to cab it through the volcanic ash over to the FAA headquarters in town because Senator Stevens was upset that I wasn't at work. Mind you, it was still pitch black, in the middle of the morning, and everything in town, the roads, the buildings, the cars, everything was covered in volcanic ash. We were all wearing surgical masks to help our breathing. We were still under quarantine, and Stevens was pissed that I wasn't at work. ...
Anyway, this is what Bobby Jindal finds silly. Bobby Jindal who doesn't mind sucking at the teat of the federal government any time a strong wind blows through New Orleans has a problem helping other states through their own natural disasters. Then again, he is a Republican. And we learned long ago that Republicans love to practice what they preach against.
John Cole: Hell Hath No Fury "... I can’t say I didn’t laugh at Zarlenga’s revenge, but what else could he do? They ran him into the ground. At any rate, this dovetails nicely with ...."
digby on Sex Lies
Frederick Clarkson writes about this report on the state of abstinence education in Texas and it isn't pretty. They might as well let kids learn about sex in the street. They'd get better information. Virtually everything they are taught is wrong, from statistical lies to old wives tales.
I particularly liked this:
"At the Austin press conference announcing the report, Wilson stated that abstinence-only programs, "often promote restrictive, even sexist gender roles and suggest that flirts are responsible for aggressive male sexual behavior." In one passage from an abstinence only program, she observed, "women are compared to crock pots that take awhile to get warmed up, while men are like microwaves that are ready to cook at a moment's notice."
"While this kind of stereotyping may seem mild," she averred, "it should be shocking to learn that abstinence-only programs often suggest - sometimes in not very subtle ways - that it's the fault of young women if men become too sexually aggressive. ..."
This is, rightly, ubiquitous. Think Progress: Vanden Huevel rips Rove: ‘It’s laughable for you to talk about fiscal responsibility.’
digby on cable talk shows:Celebrity Cretin
Karl Rove is on Stephanopoulos this morning.
What do you have to do to become a pariah in the Village? Launch nuclear war? Would that even be enough? The man is the architect (as named by his creature George W. Bush) of the program that destroyed the country. If we can't put him in jail, shouldn't he at least have the decency to disappear from public view while the rubble is still smoking?
Meanwhile, NBC is obsessed with using the DOW as "the metric" for the economy. Somehow, they got the directive that they have to find a "metric" for assessing whether or not Obama is successful and this seems to be what they've settled on. It's ridiculous, as even their own money people have said over and over again on their programs all last week, but they persist.
...
Update: And by the way, Harold Ford needs to be pulled from the rotation. He goes on every show saying that he sure hopes the stimulus works but "who knows?" and if it doesn't, well, then maybe the Republicans deserve to win. It's not helpful. Having two buckets of lukewarm water like DeeDee Myers and Ford face off with snarling political animals Mike Murphy and Joe Scarborough is a mistake.
- Ygelsias: Tax Policy With Media Celebrities.
Barack Obama has proposed a budget that, among other things, would reduce taxes on over 90 percent of the population and increase taxes on around 2 percent of the population. Flipping through the Sunday talk shows, it’s striking to see how uniformly wealthy media celebrities think it makes sense to characterize this is a “tax increase” or “raising taxes” and to leap immediately to a discussion of what the impact of these “higher taxes” will be. I think that the majority of people whose taxes are set to go down might be more interested in learning about the impact of lower taxes.
But I suppose this is how the world really looks from David Gregory’s chair. ...
Via von at Obsidian Wings:
A U.S. military spokesman, responding to a query about the soldiers, was incredulous. "Just so I understand this clearly, you saw U.S. soldiers at a nightclub in downtown Baghdad outside of the Green Zone in uniform drinking and dancing?" asked Tech. Sgt. Chris Stagner.
Club manager Salah Hassan said Thursday's visit was not exceptional. "The Americans come here four or five times a week," he said. "They buy drinks and pay for them."
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