Dogs are fed and walked, I had my after dinner before bed shower, I’m wearing pajama bottoms and a bathrobe, have two fingers of scotch in my hand, have myself positioned comfortably in front of the tv in the recliner, and I am ready for some Mountaineer football.
On the road this weekend so not much time to post, but thought we needed something a little more light-hearted today, so….
Just a quick update while working on something longer—but this from TPM caught my eye as the Republican campaign in microcosm:
Two middle-aged white Republican activists in Texas allegedly harassed and intimidated at least seven elderly African-American voters at their homes in eastern Texas, according to a complaint filed with the Justice Department on Thursday.Gerry Hebert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, submitted a report to DOJ alleging that two unidentified women visited elderly African-American voters at their homes in Bowie County and questioned them about their mail-in ballot applications, Mother Jones first reported.
The women allegedly showed up to 78-year-old Willard Wherry’s home and asked him who had helped him fill in his mail-in ballot. “We are just trying to be sure no one is trying to coax someone to vote,” one of the woman allegedly told Willard. Other individuals who were allegedly visited by the women were also listed on the complaint.
It’s been repeated so often that it’s a truism that Democrats are doing much better in polls of registered voters than in ones with likely voter screens in place.
It’s also true that a longer view of the American electorate paints an even worse picture for the GOP: their core voters are older and whiter than those of the Democrats, and there are already fewer of them than those associated with what may loosely be called the Democratic coalition —but the groups that favor the Dems have historically tended to vote in smaller percentages.
So far so nothing to see here, folks. This is all old news. Except, of course, the one thing the GOP has decided to do as demographics tilt ever more heavily against it is exactly what you’d expect from the Confederate Party. When in doubt, don’t try to expand the tent; instead, restrict the franchise.
Remember: the form of democracy can long outlive its substance. We’ve got only one real weapon against the at least occasionally violent opposition: Vote by or on Tuesday, and make damn sure all your friends do too. I don’t care how bored you are with politics…or even how justifiably cynical you are about the odds for major change. If all else fails to motivate you and yours, try this: you want to let craptacular specimens like these crow over the results Wed.?
Didn’t think so.
Image: Poster for D. W. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation, 1915
I got nothing else to say, so I will just give you this- a cat in a banana split costume eating a banana:
Why not?
This is another one of those things that makes you wonder WTF is going on out there in the world:
Citing cases dating back as far as 1928, a judge has ruled that a young girl accused of running down an elderly woman while racing a bicycle with training wheels on a Manhattan sidewalk two years ago can be sued for negligence.The ruling by the judge, Justice Paul Wooten of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, did not find that the girl was liable, but merely permitted a lawsuit brought against her, another boy and their parents to move forward.
The suit that Justice Wooten allowed to proceed claims that in April 2009, Juliet Breitman and Jacob Kohn, who were both 4, were racing their bicycles, under the supervision of their mothers, Dana Breitman and Rachel Kohn, on the sidewalk of a building on East 52nd Street. At some point in the race, they struck an 87-year-old woman named Claire Menagh, who was walking in front of the building and, according to the complaint, was “seriously and severely injured,” suffering a hip fracture that required surgery. She died three months later.
Her estate sued the children and their mothers, claiming they had acted negligently during the accident. In a response, Juliet’s lawyer, James P. Tyrie, argued that the girl was not “engaged in an adult activity” at the time of the accident — “She was riding her bicycle with training wheels under the supervision of her mother” — and was too young to be held liable for negligence.
In legal papers, Mr. Tyrie added, “Courts have held that an infant under the age of 4 is conclusively presumed to be incapable of negligence.” (Rachel and Jacob Kohn did not seek to dismiss the case against them.)
But Justice Wooten declined to stretch that rule to children over 4. On Oct. 1, he rejected a motion to dismiss the case because of Juliet’s age, noting that she was three months shy of turning 5 when Ms. Menagh was struck, and thus old enough to be sued.
This is why the world hates lawyers.
For those of you keeping score at home, it takes approximately sixty seconds for a Jack Russell Terrier, once tied outside, to knock over the mums, knock over the pumpkin, and then get hopelessly tangled in a yard sign and then start yelping like you are being beaten.
Atta girl, Rosie.
Henry Farrell has written the definitive Megan McArdle put-down piece. He lists several examples of where she lied or volubly heh-indeeded some other wingers’ lies and failed to correct herself when she was caught out on it. And he makes a good general point:
While I believe that there is an excellent case for intellectual charity when one is dealing with someone whom one does not know, or who usually seems straightforward, intelligent and honest, I also believe that it is positively harmful to intellectual life to extend such charity to people who engage in persistent obfuscation and shoddy argument over a period of years.
If people don’t want to be mocked as pernicious charlatans, they should strive to be more accurate. And I say the same thing about the epic level of VSP whining about the Colbert-Stewart rallies: if media/political elites don’t want to be seen as buffoons, they should stop acting like buffoons.
Jean Schmidt delivers Republican campaign message to 1st graders at a Catholic school:
Parents of Cincinnati elementary school students are upset over remarks made by U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt. She reportedly brought up the abortion issue in front of children as young as 6. The school’s principal sent a letter home to parents on that same day informing them that the topic of abortion came up during Schmidt’s appearance.
Here’s part of the apology letter the school sent parents after Mean Jean turned a civics forum into a stealth campaign event:
I do not recall the exact words she used, but she paused towards the end of her speech and stated that this would be the only time when she would be ‘political’ in her address. She defined abortion as the taking of a child’s life in the mother’s womb. She indicated that abortion involves the killing of a child before it is born. She was not graphic or any more detailed in this regard. Later, when a child asked about it, she indicated that an abortion is something that a doctor does when a mother requests this.
The school’s principal asked that parents keep the incident within the parent community to avoid the school becoming “embroiled in any sort of political controversy during an election season.”
Reading the school’s letter, it’s clear Schmidt carefully and deliberately inserted the anti-abortion speech, because she actually prefaced it with an announcement she was now going to be “political” and a child asked a question on abortion only “later”, after she delivered her stump speech.
Schmidt is a war-mongering clown, so I’m not surprised she’s blatantly pushing the GOP political agenda on 1st graders in the week before an election but the incident brought this particularly brutal and cruel media-generated “controversy” to mind:
President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening.
The uproar over the speech, in which Mr. Obama intends to urge students to work hard and stay in school, has been particularly acute in Texas, where several major school districts, under pressure from parents, have laid plans to let children opt out of lending the president an ear.
It was complete bullshit, of course. Reagan and Bush I did the same thing, and no one batted an eyelash. FOX News promoted the lie, mainstream media picked it up and it was treated it as a legitimate controversy. Complete bullshit, ginned up by conservative activists and treated as fact.
There have been tens of false charges leveled against Obama in the last two years but this one hit me hard. It was so clearly malicious and mean-spirited. It was about barring the schoolhouse door not to The President, but to this President. It was about denying his legitimacy as President, but it went further. It was about assuming he had the absolute worst intentions, and insisting he prove he didn’t. It was about questioning his character with not a shred of evidence to back up the allegation, and making him sit for a test that has been applied to no other President in my memory, but one that this President, uniquely, has been forced to take again and again.
“Did President Obama set out to indoctrinate 1st graders? Perhaps! Discuss”.
“Will President Obama seat a death panel to deny senior citizens medical care? Perhaps! Discuss.”
President Obama passed the school entrance test that conservative activists insisted that national media administer. He was grudgingly and with great reluctance permitted to address school children, where he urged them to work hard and stay in school.
That national media went along with this blatantly race-based nonsense and gave him a test prior to admission that no other public figure in my memory has been forced to take is something I won’t forget, or forgive.
Jonah Goldberg calls for Julian Assange’s murder.
He (Assange) told the New Yorker earlier this year that he fully understands innocent people might die as a result of the “collateral damage” of his work and that WikiLeaks may have “blood on our hands.” WikiLeaks is easily among the most significant and well-publicized breaches of American national security since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the bomb.
So again, I ask: Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?
It’s a serious question.
Of course, this is nowhere near as bad as using the word curb-stomping in a post.
When hundreds of thousands of Iraqis die as a result of “collateral damage”, that just proves freedom is messy. It also earns the architects of the collateral damage Medals of Freedom, natch.
If you don’t think that the right is serious about using violence to take power, you’re not paying attention.
(h/t BGinChi)
The NY Times has an op-ed on why lethal injection is in fact tantamount to torture, and I can’t help but think writing about this is just an exercise in futility. The American people are about to go to the polls and elect a large number of people who enthusiastically embrace torture of anyone the government yanks off the street. Does anyone think they give a shit if a condemned man is tortured?
I’m really very pessimistic about the future. But hey, all the right people will probably get some more tax cuts.
Future Senator/Queen Sharron Angle allows that she might possibly speak with the “lamestream media” after the election.
“And I’m hoping that as we get into this once I get elected senator,” Angle continued, “that they will be much more civil and we will have a very civil discourse.”
Angle’s big beef isn’t with Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, it’s with TV stations in her local markets. It was local reporters, not national press, who were crass enough to chase her into parking lots and impertinently ask questions. Apparently Angle thinks that something will change when she becomes Senator, and that she’ll have some power to assert over local media.
This is laughably naive. For starters, political coverage just isn’t that important to local TV stations. Local TV lives or dies based on its performance during ratings sweeps, when news directors comb their cities for anything that fucks and/or bleeds. Politics is a sideshow that leads the newscast on days when there wasn’t a five-car pileup on I-80. Plus, running after Sharron Angle, or having an interview where she walks out in a huff, is better TV than the usual boring political interview topics like water rights or agricultural subsidy payments.
The other thing Angle apparently doesn’t get is that she’s going to be putting millions into the pockets of these TV stations in six years no matter how well they treat her. There aren’t enough TV stations in Nevada for Angle to start compiling an enemies list of affiliates who won’t get her campaign cash in 2016.
If this teatard beats Harry Reid, it’s going to be painful, but watching her become a local media punching bag for 6 long years will provide at least a little bit of consolation.
Krugman paints a happy portrait of our political future:
This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.
I’m inclined to agree.
Verizon Wireless will pay the FCC a $25 million fine, and refund $52 million to customers, because they set up their network to generate $1.99 in fees every time a customer unintentionally accessed data from a phone.
I doubt that a Republican House will have the guts to impeach Obama, but I’m certain that one of the first subpoenas to be issued will be for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, that the FCC’s enforcement division will be the target of some righteous deficit-busting, and that Fox will soon uncover secret Muslim infiltration in that despicable socialist agency.
From commentor Redshift:
These are Leland (the dapper gentleman in the grey and white) and Georgia, his trophy wife. They are two of our three current adopted rabbits. Leland had been turned in to a shelter; we don’t know his story before that, but he was a shelter workers’ favorite before he was liberated by the House Rabbit Society of Maryland, DC, and Northern Virginia ( http://rabbitsinthehouse.org ). He is now eleven and a half. Georgia I met several years ago when a friend called me up and said “I have this rabbit living in my yard, and I don’t think it’s wild because it’s black and white and eats carrots out of my hand.” She became a foster bunny for a short while until I decided I couldn’t let her go, and we got her matched up with Leland.
_I’ve never had any regrets about life with rabbits. There have been “learning experiences” with phone cords and stereo cords, but they are litter-trained, they are fun and entertaining, and have quite distinct personalities. Georgia wants constant attention, and will sit with you to be petted for as long as you’re willing, or sit at your feet and beg for more attention if you stop. When she gives up on that, she’s energetic and inquisitive, running around and leaping and dancing, and only occasionally getting into trouble. Leland is a bit more reserved, but is still pretty sociable if you approach him. He was an incorrigible carpet-chewer in his younger days, but he’s grown out of that. Leland enjoys running around the living room, playing tag with Georgia.
In addition to these two, we have Isis, a tiny black girl, and we also foster for HRS, so we almost always have a foster bunny living in the kitchen, too. Everyone says their favorite animal is smart, and are house rabbits are no exception. They know their names, they know us, they learn (sometimes too quickly!), and they are an important part of our family. I wouldn’t want to imagine living without them. I would encourage everyone who’s looking to adopt to expand their horizons beyond dogs and cats; you won’t regret it!
(Though I don’t have direct experience with chapters other than my own, you can find other House Rabbit Society chapters through the national organization at http://www.rabbit.org )
Despite my weariness, I am fired up about voting on Tuesday. I like voting on election day. I know some of you out there like to vote early. I like voting with the masses, and then I like sitting at home watching the results. I remember staying up as long as I could in 2000, and finally dragging myself to bed, hoping and wishing that when I woke up in the morning, Al Gore would be president.
I remember election night, 2008 like it was yesterday. I remember taking the day off from work because I wanted to sit and watch the east coast results pour in. I remember being pissed off that, after calling the No on H8 headquarters multiple times to figure out where I could go and what I could do to make sure that abomination of a proposition did not pass, I never received a call back. I remember sitting at home checking Nate Silver’s blog; using it as whisky for my election anxiety; “PleasenoPalinPleasenoPalin” was running like ticker tape through my mind.
I remember crying when Obama won. I remember drinking when Obama won. I remember crying when Proposition 8 passed. I remember drinking when Proposition 8 passed.
As tired as I am, however, I’m not as tired as the millions of Americans who are looking to us to make sure the Republicans don’t get the keys back (even if some of those Americans don’t understand that the Republicans shouldn’t get the keys back because those Americans have been glamoured by all the crap flowing from the Tea Party, or Republicans, or Fox News, or “manic progressives.”)
This is no longer about “I love Obama!” or “I hate Obama!” or “Obama? Meh.” It’s not even about me (so troll away if you must). I’ll be fine, with or without Obama and the Democrats. In fact, I’ll be better, actually—in terms of material wealth—if the Republicans take over. But I don’t want to be better financially. It’s not about me. It’s about people like B. Yung. It’s about people who have risen above the short stick they drew at birth, and it’s about all those people who have yet to achieve their potential.
That’s why I’m voting.
Why are you voting?
