Like Kryptonite To Stupid
What. An. Idiotic. Tool.
I’ll tell my kids someday, “There was a period of about eight years when everyone at the most important jobs in our government were crazy, stupid, evil or a combination of the three. No, really. This recent bout of competence we’re going through was a rarity at the turn of the century. Bong! Oh, viagra spam is so unseemly when they beam it right into your brain.”
Yes, Paulites, stand up against the oppresors! Show them you won’t be silenced by the GOP establishment. You will be heard!
According to a recent Boston Globe tally, Paul has a grand total of 19 Republican delegates to Romney’s 260, Huckabee’s 286 and McCain’s 1,413.
In the last three months, Paul’s forces, who donated $34.5 million to his White House effort and upward of a million total votes, have, as The Ticket has noted, been fighting a series of guerrilla battles with party establishment officials at county and state conventions from Washington and Missouri to Maine and Mississippi. Their goal: to take control of local committees, boost their delegate totals and influence platform debates.
Paul, for instance, favors a drastically reduced federal government, abolishing the Federal Reserve, ending the Iraq war immediately and withdrawing U.S. troops from abroad.
They hope to demonstrate their disagreements with McCain vocally at the convention through platform fights and an attempt to get Paul a prominent speaking slot. Paul, who’s running unopposed in his home Texas district for an 11th House term, still has some $5 million in war funds and has instructed his followers that their struggle is not about a single election, but a long-term revolution for control of the Republican Party.
Remember guys, make lots and lots of noise in prime time. Make sure those TV cameras see you and make sure you’ve got your talking points down about how the Republican party has failed you and America.
Bob Barr, don’t let the GOP get you down. Run for president, run hard and to the right, Bob Barr!
The former Republican congressman from Georgia formed an exploratory committee last month and told The Washington Times he has since been subjected to the behind-the-scenes pressure from Republicans not to run.
Mr. Barr says even people who have tried to dissuade him understand why he thinks it important to raise issues from what he calls a “genuinely conservative” perspective and to offer alternatives to the positions of the two major-party candidates.
Barr/Borat 2008
Progressives beat back Ward Connerly’s anti-civil rights bill designed to turn up conservative votes in Missouri.
Because they usually come across as stupid as this claim that Bernie Ward’s trial for child pornography would be bigger news if he were a Republican. Of course, if Ward were a Republican he wouldn’t be a local talk host but a national host on thousands of stations. The reason why Rush Limbaugh’s illegal pill popping was such news is that he’s on the airwaves everywhere. Until very very recently liberal radio hosts were blocked from even the potential of such access.
It’s stupid proclamations like this why Glenn Reynolds mostly foists on us the opinions of others and is too much of a coward to say what he believes.
MORE: Sad Putz
In citing some study of donation patterns in the primary contest, Ross Douthat labels the GOP the “Party of Sam’s Club” citing donations from janitors, waitresses, etc. Sam’s Club? Perhaps Sam’s Club is different here in Maryland, but the Sam’s Club clientele trends upward - upper middle class suburban folks who have the cash and home storage space to buy goods in bulk.
I don’t think the lower end demographic Douthat is trying to associate with the GOP (and that’s flawed as well since most of those folks vote Democratic even if they’re not donating) is the Sam’s Club demo. Wal-Mart, more likely.
The righties launch a new venture - “The Next Right” - that seeks to duplicate liberal success online. You may have heard this story before when it was Redstate.com. Or Townhall.com. Or Pajamas Media.
Etc.
John McCain has been the nominee of his party for over a month now. He has no active opposition, no figure on his side of the aisle contesting him for leadership of the Republican party and the conservative movement.
And yet, Republicans are still voting against him. In Indiana McCain pulled in 77% of the vote, and he made an even worse showing with 73% in North Carolina. Even more troubling for McCain is that Huckabee is the leading protest vote. That’s the religious right vote, the anti-choice crowd and the bedrock of President Bush’s re-election victory.
In 2004 the GOP got the vote out by riling up the religious right and wooing the moderate middle. Post-Katrina and post-Iraq they have lost the middle. The press image of McCain as a maverick helps them with the middle, but they’ve still lost it. The religious right is mostly disgusted with the GOP - they haven’t kept up their end of the bargain. The religious right lined up behind the GOP to ban abortion, negate gay rights, and violate the separation of church and state. In exchange for that, the religious right was okay with allowing the business class to take their pound of flesh. But the GOP had the House, Senate, and White House and while they did enough at the edges of those issues they did not remake America into a theocracy.
John McCain does not inspire these people. Ambivalent at best about his faith, he is not the “God warrior” Bush pretends to be. He is very much the Bob Dole candidate. McCain is the “his turn” guy and in Obama he is going up against the first Democratic candidate in a long while who has the base of voters who are really for their guy.
The religious right is not going to move Democratic, but like in 2006 they are probably going to stay home while the Democratic base is poised to make the turnout in 2004 seem like training camp. The religious right’s relationship with the GOP isn’t just yet a divorce, but Mommy and Daddy are for sure on a break.
On Fox News tonight substituting for Bill O’Reilly, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham made a point in a discussion of immigration to note that someone can be “American OR Latino”. Because surely nobody could be both, right?
Sometimes the mask slips and cons say what they truly believe. We must cherish those moments.
Even better is the big Christian gold cross she wears around her neck.
Michelle Malkin made her name calling every hispanic a terrorist or declaring that it was right to intern Japanese Americans during WWII, and now she’s decided to join the rest of the bigoted GOPers in attacking Barack Obama for being black. Her latest syndicated column is titled “Jive Talk Expressk“. The column is most of the same warmed-over nonsense about how Obama is a secret black nationalist who wants to kill us all, and it ends saying “You be trippin’, Barry.” Because he’s BLACK, you see. Be very afraid.
In case you were wondering that in the midst of all the drama on the Democratic side of the aisle it was possible for the Republican party to remain brain dead on the seminal issues of our time… wonder no more.
Sen. John McCain on Tuesday rejected calls by his Democratic opponents for universal health coverage, instead offering a market-based solution with an approach similar to a proposal put forth by President Bush last year.McCain’s belief in the power of the free market to meet the nation’s health-care needs sets up a stark choice for voters this fall in terms of the care they could receive, the role the government would play and the importance they place on the issue.
The Republicans largely really believe some of this bull about the free market. They really think in their heart of hearts that the solution for every issue is to sprinkle some of that magical “free market” fairy dust and all will be well. The problem is, that is not what Americans feel. Oh sure, we’re willing to give the market a go of things - and for some things it works great. But we effectively operate under a free market health care system right now and its woefully unpopular. That’s the reason why health care is a serious issue in 2008 in a way that it wasn’t in 2004, 2000, etc.
John McCain is so out of touch with normal Americans (his health care costs are covered by his military disability, his Senate health care plan and should anything fall through the cracks his wife’s generous inheritance can take up the slack) that he believes that what people want is more of the current mess.
Yet the American mood on large national issues like this is not a faith based free market system, but rather historically tends to favor a collective system where we all pay in and benefit.
Tancredo is so aftaid of Hispanics he wants to put American soil on the other side of his wall. Idiot.
Republican Tom Tancredo supports the border wall. The U.S. representative attended the hearing in Brownsville yesterday.
During the hearing, he told the Brownsville landowners, “I suggest that you build this fence around the northern part of your city…” implying that all of Brownsville should be on the Mexican side of the wall.
“Hack” is almost a charitable term.
When I see nonsense like Newsweek’s cover about the so-called “Bubba Gap” for Sen. Obama and other members of the punditocracy saying that the path to the presidency can only be achieved by pandering to these 
(mostly southern) conservatives I always have to roll my eyes (I also roll my eyes at so called independent pundits always rushing to the same wrong conclusion, as usual). Because for a considerable amount of our national history these people are on the stupid and wrong side of most major issues.
ABC did a test to see what the reaction would be to two men kissing in public in Alabama. They called the cops.
A police officer even arrived at the scene after a woman called 911 because she saw Kaolin and James kissing each other in public.
ABC News obtained a copy of her call:
Operator: “Birmingham Police operator 9283″
Caller: “We have a couple of men sitting out on the bench that have been kissing and drooling all over each other for the past hour or so. It’s not against the law, right?”
Operator: “Not to the best of my knowledge it’s not.”
Caller: “So there’s no complaint I could make or have?”
Operator: “I imagine you could complain if you like ma’am. We can always send an officer down there.”
And they did. One of Birmingham’s finest came to Five-Points and spoke with Kaolin and James. Though city officials and the police department signed off on ABC’s social experiment, this officer was somehow not in the loop. The officer told our couple that the police dispatch received a call because the two of them were making out.
“Just don’t do that in public,” he told them before leaving the scene.
Now, look, these folks have a right to their own personal beliefs, but we debase our politics if we try to pander to them. We have only moved forward in this country when we ignored the loudest voices in the “Bubba” contingent who were never quite ready for women’s rights, equal rights or gay rights.
Larry the Cable Guy can be amusing, but I don’t want him dictating the future direction of western civilization. That probably makes me a coastal elitist snob from the midatlantic, but so be it.
Git ‘R Done.
(via)
If you’ve read Rick Perlstein’s Before The Storm, this increasingly regular infiltration of the Republican party at the state party level as well as getting involved in arcane ways with the national platform is right out of the same strategy the Goldwater faithful used to take over the Republican party. They didn’t have the power to get their candidate into viability, but I sense that they are on the verge of throwing a small but disruptive wrench into the workings of the well-oiled GOP machine.
Conservatives have regularly had to do a song and dance to cover up the fact that their policies are not favored by most Americans (and conversely liberals have done a suck job at selling their majority positions) but I like the idea of Paul’s brand of unabashed yet tone-deaf conservatism getting louder in the Republican party. Especially in the next ten years.
He’s the nominee, but with the religious cons and the libertarian cons he doesn’t seem to have closed the deal.
Mr. McCain won every county in Pennsylvania in the Republican primary Tuesday — yes, the Republicans had a nominating contest there, too — but former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (who dropped out of the race in March) and Representative Ron Paul of Texas did surprisingly well in some of its most conservative counties.
Overall, according to The Associated Press’s count, Mr. Paul took 15.9 percent in the Pennsylvania G.O.P. primary, with 11.3 percent of Republicans voting for Mr. Huckabee.
In case you were wondering if Erick Erickson and Redstate were still stupid, wonder no more. In this insipid post, Erickson tries to attack Sen. Obama, which is nothing new but what is novel (read: stupid) is that he tries to use highly respected professor Lawrence Lessig to do it. He posts a highly edited clip of a presentation Lessig gave in which one of the clips cited is a silly video of Jesus singing “I will survive”. Erickson then goes on to call Prof. Lessig a “digital communist” because of his long-standing objection to our crazy pro-corporate copyright laws and his hand in the creation of the Creative Commons copyright alternative.
Oh, Erickson also accuses Google of complicity in the whole digital communist conspiracyTM because they didn’t think they should host Michelle Malkin’s anti-Muslim hate videos on Youtube. And net neutrality, that’s bad too according to Erickson and part of the conspiracy as well — never mind that net neutrality benefits sites like Redstate.
You know that he’s grasping for straws because even a good amount of the Redstate commenters think this is a stupid and sloppy attack.
Scarborough tries to cut off Rachel Maddow, unlike so many other liberals in the media, Maddow doesn’t let him get away with it and in retaliation Scarborough walks off the set. It’s the schoolyard bully you give a good whack in the nose, folks.
In John McCain’s Bush 2.0 tax plan he rolled out Tuesday, former Fred Thompson staffer Sean Hackbarth sees echoes of old mint julep himself. Considering the way Thompson shuffled and ambled two inches in the campaign before falling flat on his face, how is this a good thing?
Of course, these are the guys who seriously think privatizing social security is a good thing. Yes, put our senior’s future in the next Bear Sterns or Enron. Brilliant! Go with that.
They won’t contain themselves. No matter how much John McCain asks his party and fellow conservatives to tone down the racial rhetoric, they will not be able to stop themselves. The idea of a black man beating their Republican candidate for the presidency will be too much to bear for the party of the Southern Strategy.
This summer the GOP Bigot Eruptions are going to go nuclear.
Cue the knuckle-dragging Geoff Davis:
Congressman Geoff Davis, took the criticisms of Mr. Obama a few steps further, likening the change slogan to the pitch of a “snake oil salesman.” He then relayed to the audience that he had taken party in a “highly classified, national security simulation” with Obama.
“I’m going to tell you something: That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” Mr. Davis said. “He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country.”
Once the “boy” remarks began to circulate on the Internet, the Obama campaign moved swiftly to criticize them. “It’s hard to tell what is more outrageous - Representative Davis’s condescending and personal attack, or his absurd and offensive claim that Barack Obama is not prepared to defend America. Geoff Davis may hide behind offensive tough talk, but he has marched in lock-step with Bush-McCain policies that have devastated our national security, while Barack Obama has stood up against a misguided war in Iraq and worked with respected Republicans like Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel to secure loose weapons and nuclear materials from terrorists,” Bill Burton, the campaign spokesman said.
Davis later issued an “apology” but it’s a load of crap. He said what was in his heart and in the hearts of many on the right.
Embrace the racist inside, Republicans!
MORE: Pam Spaulding has more.
UPDATE: If you want to know why this sort of thing is going to be an ongoing problem for McCain and the GOP as Obama moves up to officially become the nominee look no further than the comments on conservative blogs QandO and Rick Moran. Both McQ and Moran know that this is really really stupid but at least one of their commenters simply cannot see the problem with calling a grown ass black professional man, let alone one as accomplished as Sen. Obama, a “boy”. They simply chalk it up to “political correctness”.
What’s next? Some con calls Obama a n****r and they shrug their shoulders and say “What’s the big deal?” I wouldn’t bet against it.
You’ll remember years ago that Redstate.com was created as a counter to DailyKos. Fast forward to today and Redstate.com is just another subsidiary of right-wing publishing house Regnery. It has none of the impact on the political discourse that Dailykos does - nor even more organically created sites on the right do, for that matter.
MoveOn was founded by normal Americans, built a huge grassroots membership, then became an institution on the left. Freedom’s Watch, like the right often tries, skipped the whole messy grassroots bottom-up segment and leapt right into being an institution of the right with its financing by the same money barons who fund so much of the right. There are problems.
Almost eight months later, some Freedom’s Watch watchers are wondering whether some of the cavalry got lost. Even as the group has mounted a new campaign to coincide with General David Petraeus’ testimony on Iraq to Congress this week, there has been conservative grumbling about Freedom’s Watch—and Adelson. And several Freedom’s Watch staffers, including its first president, Bradley Blakeman, have left the group. Now Washington conservatives are worrying that Adelson may not be the white knight they had wished for.
In not-for-attribution interviews, a few conservative think tank hands and activists expressed frustration that Freedom’s Watch has yet to develop a comprehensive strategy, and they gripe that it has been slow to set up a MoveOn-style infrastructure. Freedom’s Watch hasn’t realized its full potential, they say, in part because Adelson overly involves himself in the group’s decision-making and won’t heed the good advice of…well, people like them.
“He is both meddlesome and attached to his own agenda,” says a conservative think tanker. “And he is not listening to people who are giving him good political and strategic advice.… Everyone I know comes away very frustrated from their experience” with Freedom’s Watch. “They are late to the game and they need to recognize that,” he adds. “MoveOn has had a microphone to itself for a number of years. Freedom’s Watch is not entirely ineffective, but they are not well organized or maximizing their impact.” (Conservatives may be too obsessed with MoveOn to realize that it’s a membership-based organization and not a precise model for a top-down outfit like Freedom’s Watch.)
When the right was on the outside looking in, they did in fact build institutions and organizations representing real people - the fringe, no doubt - but real people. Since they’ve become the party of Washington they have adopted the astroturf strategies of those DC pressure groups and lobbyist firms, running campaigns that profess to speak for people yet in fact turn out time and time again to be the production of a big coporate slush fund.
My hope and belief is that they’ll be on the outside looking in before they realize that.
This time the conservative peddling the attack is nepotism-beneficiary Michael Reagan who writes in the conservative backwaters of Townhall.com that “The goals of the Democrats and both al Qaeda and al Sadr insurgents are the same: the defeat of the United States in the war in Iraq.” Dude, this is so 2002! I know there’s a conservative legacy of always conflating America’s enemies with the left, but they always forget that it was the hardcore conservatives who pushed FDR to be soft on Hitler (with groups like Lindbegh’s America First committee) and it is conservatives who illegally financed guerillas in South America and armed Saddam Hussein.
The story smelled from the get-go. The little Michelle Malkin got busted.
A 13-year-old girl who claimed she was attacked by a group inside Athens Middle School was caught on a surveillance camera causing the injuries to herself.
The girl now faces disciplinary action from the school and will be charged with filing a false police report, AISD superintendent Fred Hayes said during a news conference today.
The parents of Melanie Bowers have since sent letters of apology to school and law enforcement investigators.
Hayes said officials in investigating the matter saw the tape that caught her scratching herself on the arms and neck. Last week she had claimed the injuries were inflicted by a group of about 20 students who also threatened to sexually assault and kill her.
The girl had participated in a history class project with a “protest” theme. She brought to school a protest sign reading “If you love your country stop illegal immigration.”
She claimed she was attacked because of the sign.
