Really, no better than the blue dogs.
It turns out, then, that Davis is no longer the least valuable Democrat. Instead, it is Dennis Kucinich, who voted against health care, the hate crimes bill, the budget, the cap-and-trade bill, and financial regulation — all ostensibly from the left — in spite of coming from from the strongly Democratic Ohio 10th district near Cleveland.
-Ian
This, from the Texas Textbook Wars, amused:
Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone.
I assume that the idea of a “strict constitutionalist” [sic] who hates Jefferson is self-evidently insane; however, I do think it’s possible that an introduction to Calvin will help school children in Texas by placing their awful fates into a broader Lapsarian context.
—Jason
Via Yglesias:
“If they pull off this crazy scenario they are putting together, they are going to destroy a lot of the comity in the House,” said Brian Darling, a congressional expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. […]
“It’s a huge price to say he passed something,” Darling said of President Obama.
Yes! I mean, just imagine what would happen if something were to happen to the extremely friendly and productive relationship shared by Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives. And what will become of the Obama agenda if he loses all those Republican votes?
—Jason
—Jason
If they believe that Republicans are going to actually work with them, they’re idiots. Republicans are only interested in watering-down bills that they will then vote against anyway and go on to criticize for being watered-down and ineffective come November.
If they believe that continually reaching across the aisle—only to have their hands repeatedly slapped—is somehow going to form the foundation of an effective re-election strategy, they’re even dumber than I imagined possible.
I’m willing to be charitable, though, and want to suggest that what’s actually taking place in a lot of these instances is that elite Democrats could actually give a damn whether important regulatory reform passes at all.
—Jason
You can imagine how this feels to conservatives. They’ve already run off the field, sprayed themselves with champagne and taunted the losing team’s fans. And now the other team is saying the game is still on and they have a good chance to win. There may be nothing wrong at all with the process, but it’s certainly going to feel like some kind of crime to the right-wing. The Democrats may not win, but I’m pretty sure they’re going to try. The conservative freakout is going to be something to behold.
It will be, yes. And, as ever, it remains a thing of true amazement to me that the freak-out will come because the GOP failed to secure for Americans the right of their health-insurance carriers to order them to fuck off and die. Freedom!
—Jason
Wow.
[GORDON] LIDDY: Yeah, you know, I’ve been — I spent five years in nine different prisons in this country and one thing I observed from there, they’re all constructed so as to keep people in. They are very vulnerable to an attack upon the exterior. And these terrorist people can get their terrorist buddies to make an attack on the exterior and, you know, blow a hole in it and let them all out.
[Sen. JAMES] INHOFE: I’m glad you said that because, see, you speak with authority on that.
And if Liddy were given a life-sentence, his authority would be unstoppable!
—Jason
Bachmann is a complete lunatic, of course, and there’s a significant downside to highlighting her lunacy too often, or in taking it too seriously. Still, her pronouncements underscore the extent to which conservative activists and electives are willing to say almost anything, no matter how personally humiliating, in their effort to paint any and all actions of the Congress that they happen not to like as illegitimate or unconstitutional.
—Jason
If you’ve ever wanted to hear Glenn Beck do a dramatic reading of Bruce Springsteen lyrics, well, here’s your chance. G-d help us if he ever gets his hands on “Southern Man.”
Woody Guthrie is a traitor, too (“This Land Is Your Land”!), but you already knew that.
—Jason
There’s just something about same-sex marriage that prompts conservatives to think of bizarre relations with animals.
Yoish.
—Jason
This, from the geniuses at the Heritage Foundation:
So which is it? Is the real problem here hunger, or is it obesity?
…makes me want to put my head through my computer monitor.
If you want the facts on the relationship between food insecurity (i.e., poverty and hunger) and obesity, see this, but for our purposes here today I’m more interested in the increasingly common extent to which conservative “thinkers” reduce complex and important public issues to meaningless bumper-sticker-isms meant to suggest bad faith or stupidity on the part of their political foes.
Hunger is something that this country is wealthy enough to do something about. Poverty is something that this country is wealthy enough to do something about. And doing something about both issues has enormous upside at a relatively low cost. But no opportunity should be missed to brush up against absurdly fetishized conservative tropes like the sinister machinations of the Liberal Nanny State.
—Jason
I can’t decide whether this latest line of nonsense makes more or less sense than last week’s nonsense about the Obama administration banning sports fishing, but…whatever. The goal, of course, is not to expose anything approaching actual government action, but instead to create an atmosphere of confusion and paranoia surrounding the White House and its policy goals. And the best part is that nothing actually has to be proved! The failure of the Great Liberal No-Salt Conspiracy to transpire will, naturally, be explained as the victory of Real Americans over the Nanny State: They wanted to ban your pizza, but thankfully we caught on to them just in time, and etc.
—Jason
Yes, Virginia, Jeffrey Goldberg is an idiot. I don’t understand why conservatives can’t write about Israel/Palestine without sounding like four-years-olds.
—Jason
I really, really don’t want to get into the weeds on this one, but if the Israelis are genuinely concerned about their relationship with the United States, perhaps they ought not to specifically time controversial policy announcements to humiliate the American vice-president.
The only comedy here is the increasingly absurd ADL’s predictable response.
—Jason
fullbleed74
millerbros
If-By-Whiskey 