Category: Politics & Elections

Best line of the day

Raese is a very rich guy. (“I made money the old-fashioned way. I inherited it,” he told an interviewer.) His $2.9 million, 7,000-square-foot crash pad has made numerous appearances in Democratic campaign literature, which always notes that the driveway is paved in pink marble. Raese rejoined that it is “peach-colored tile” that he didn’t even pick himself, leading a West Virginia union leader to say that the coal miners felt “great sympathy and understanding for multimillionaires who were steered in a wrong direction by their interior designers.”

From Gail Collins’s column today , a second on the most awful state in the current election cycle. It’s a must read.

Best line of the day

“Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them.”

From Tea & Crackers by Matt Taibbi

If you care to understand politics in 2010 I urge you to take time to read Taibbi’s fine, scary but — it being Taibbi — amusing and insightful analysis. It’s the best look at political America I’ve read in some time.

Special Public Service Annoucement

With the election just 8 weeks away, NewMexiKen wanted to pass along this public service announcement. Because of difficulties counting ballots in Florida after the 2000 vote, and in Ohio after the 2004 vote, and in New Mexico after any vote larger than for 8th grade class president, there has been a change of procedures nationwide.

All who wish to vote for Democratic candidates are still supposed to vote on November 2.

All who wish to vote for Republican candidates are supposed to vote on November 4.

Remember, November 2nd for Democrats, November 4th for Republicans. Don’t show up on the wrong day.

Things to come

On his blog, Nobel-laureate economimist and Times columnist Paul Krugman suggests the future. He begins:

What’s going to happen, economically and politically, over the next few years? Nobody knows, of course. But I have a vision — what I think is the most likely course of events. It’s fairly grim — but not in the approved way. This vision lies behind a lot of what I’ve been writing, so it might clarify things for regular readers if I laid it out explicitly.

The rest is worth your time. He’s been right on most things.

The political press follows; it doesn't lead

Matt Taibbi has a good Taibbi-esque treatment of the current media “conspiracy.” It includes:

Palin never had anything like that kind of attitude toward the press [accomodating], although in fairness the bullets were flying at her from the moment she entered the campaign. It doesn’t matter; the point is that she’s getting it from all angles now and that wouldn’t be happening if she still had any friends in high places.

The press corps that is bashing her skull in right now is the same one that hyped that WMD horseshit for like four solid years and pom-pommed America to war with Iraq over the screeching objections of the entire planet. It’s the same press corps that rolled out the red carpet for someone very nearly as abjectly stupid as Sarah Palin to win not one but two terms in the White House.

Redux post of the day

From two years ago today:

I was thinking a little about Al Gore.

You remember the reaction when Gore sighed during one of the 2000 presidential debates after Bush had said something particularly ignorant? I got to thinking that if instead of sighing — if in fact Gore did sigh — and if in fact sighing is a sign of elitism — Gore might better have said to Bush, “You stupid son-of-a-bitch.”

If he had, I think Gore could have taken the popular vote by more than 500,000.

Oh, wait. Gore did take the popular vote by more than 500,000.

Political thought of the day

I’ll say this for George Bush: you’d never have caught him frantically negotiating against himself to take the meat out of a signature legislative initiative just because his approval ratings had a bad summer. Can you imagine Bush and Karl Rove allowing themselves to be paraded through Washington on a leash by some dimwit Republican Senator of a state with six people in it the way the Obama White House this summer is allowing Max Baucus (favorite son of the mighty state of Montana) to frog-march them to a one-term presidency?

Matt Taibbi – True/Slant

Most prescient line of the day

“First, those who don’t want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don’t want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s — a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy — are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).”

Paul Krugman January 28, 2008

I keep getting more cynical about our politics

But no matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.

With the escalating standard of Republican craziness and whackadoodlism over recent days, I’d been wondering if Sarah Palin would feel pressed to get back into the game, if for no other reason than to defend her brand as chief Republican moonbat.

And I think my question has been answered.

Palin is now out claiming that Obama’s “death panel” might decide to euthanize her Down syndrome baby.

Josh Marshall

Seriously, people, get help

NewMexiKen is taking the day off to celebrate the blog’s sixth anniversary.
The posts today are being written by readers just like you. This is from Jill.

According to a poll released last week by Research 2000, only 42 percent of Republicans believe that President Obama was born in the United States.

Twenty-eight percent believe he was born elsewhere and another 30 percent are “not sure.”

Is it because he is black? Is it because he was born in Hawaii? Is it because his father was African? How can so many people actually subscribe to this idiocy?

I used to think only crazy people believed this. But even I can’t argue that 58 percent of Republicans are crazy. (Demented, maybe, but not crazy.)

Best line of the day

If I’d written about, say, the Cleveland (61-101) Indians in August of 1987 as though the team were a serious pennant contender, I’d have been fired before I got back to the hotel. And yet, there they were on Charlie Rose: serious political pundits, talking seriously about what a power Sarah Palin is in the Republican party without any of them pointing out that the very fact that she is a power is prima facie evidence that the party is a festival for fruitcakes.

Charles Pierce

‘Family Values’ politician of the day

While this sounds like a garden-variety Republican Sexual Hypocrite, [Tennessee State Senator Paul] Stanley takes it up a notch with his legislative CV: 1) he campaigned against the right of gays and lesbians to adopt (“When you’re married, there’s a commitment there,” Stanley said last year, while discussing legislation to prohibit gay people from adopting children); and….drum roll…2) he introduced a bill prohibiting viewing porn while driving (WTF!? Is this some kind of rampant problem in Tennessee?)

Pandagon

Stanley, married father of two, was having an affair with an intern. Intern’s boyfriend found photos, tried blackmail. Sting set up. Boyfriend arrested. Politician “will continue his social conservative legislative agenda.”

Sex and power

Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, takes a look at the C Street House, “the secretive religious enclave on Capitol Hill thrust into the news by its links to three political sex scandals.”

An excerpt:

If sexual license was all the Family offered the C Street men, however, that would merely be seedy and self-serving. But Family men are more than hypocritical. They’re followers of a political religion that embraces elitism, disdains democracy, and pursues power for its members the better to “advance the Kingdom.” They say they’re working for Jesus, but their Christ is a power-hungry, inside-the-Beltway savior not many churchgoers would recognize. Sexual peccadilloes aside, the Family acts today like the most powerful lobby in America that isn’t registered as a lobby — and is thus immune from the scrutiny attending the other powerful organizations like Big Pharma and Big Insurance that exert pressure on public policy.

Money quote: “If you’re chosen, the normal rules don’t apply.”