Fugelsang

About the Pope Emeritus:

Today's Pix

Today's Wingnut

...just happens to be Chief Justice of SCOTUS.  And I'm thinking I may hafta consider changing my name.

From Charlie Pierce:

One of the more signifying moments in Wednesday's oral arguments at the Supreme Court regarding the Voting Rights Act came when Chuef Justice John Roberts asked Solicitor General Ralph Verrilli:

"Do you know which state has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout?" "I do not know that," Verrilli answered.

"Massachusetts," Roberts responded, adding that even Mississippi has a narrower gap.

--snip--

The problem is, Roberts is woefully wrong on those points, according to Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who on Thursday branded Roberts's assertion a slur and made a declaration of his own. "I'm calling him out," Galvin said. Galvin was not alone in his view. Academics and Massachusetts politicians said that Roberts appeared to be misguided. A Supreme Court spokeswoman declined to offer supporting evidence of ­Roberts's view, referring a ­reporter to the court transcript. On Thursday, Galvin tried to set the record straight. "We have one of the highest voter registrations in the country," he said, "so this whole effort to make a cheap-shot point at Massachusetts is deceptive...In the November 2012 election, there was little difference in voter turnout in Boston neighborhoods with high concentrations of white or black voters. In Charlestown, where 80 percent of residents are white, 68 percent of voters cast ballots in November. In Roxbury, the traditional heart of Boston's African-American community, about 64 percent of voters came out to the polls. Galvin and political scientists speculated that Roberts drew his conclusions using US Census Bureau data known as "The Current Population Survey," which collects information on voting and registration every other year. Political scientists say this is one of the few national databases, if not the only one, providing state-by-state voting information.

Read the whole thing and then tell me they're not trying to fuck us with our pants on.

Today's Gun Nut

Welcome to the new normal, courtesy Wayne LaPierre.

Via Addicting Info, from WKMG in Orlando:

ORANGE CITY, Fla. - A man arrested for opening fire in a busy Walmart parking lot said he was trying to stop a shoplifter and is now defending his actions.
Orange City police arrested Jose Martinez, 35, after they said he unleashed at least five bullets in the parking lot of the Walmart on Veterans Memorial Parkway.

Martinez told Local 6, he was defending himself from a shoplifter who nearly ran him over and injured him.

Except that Martinez pulled his gun and opened fire well after the time the bad guy's car posed any kind of "threat" to him.  This was not defense - this was retribution - at best, just some dumbass rube playing out his Wyatt Earp fantasies.

Put something in place that the cops can use to charge Martinez with a low-end felony, get a conviction, and then put him on the list of People Too Fuckin' Stoopid To Own A Gun.

God, I'm sicka this shit.

Something's Wrong

...with one of our political parties.

From DecodeDC:



Seabrooke doesn't come straight out and say it, but it's there. Republicans - or at least a very powerful subset of the Repubs - are at the root of our problems right now.

And the best take-away for me is what Ornstein says at the end about how it's really up to  us as individuals to stop bunkering ourselves, and start figuring out how to reach compromise with each other - one citizen to another - and try to pass that on up to our Reps in Congress (wtf - self-government?  now there's a thought).  Easier said than done of course; especially when your 'debate partner' says practically nothing but the crap he hears on Beck or Limbaugh every day, but Ornstein's a Senior Fellow at AEI, which makes him pretty seriously Republican; and he's been saying for a while now that the GOP's kinda fucked up.

So I guess we just keep pluggin' away; trying to isolate the more radical ones, and give the system a chance to work a little self-correction magic.  Here's hoping.

What's Real?

hat tip = The Rude Pundit

Back in that time, the "bad guys" were often foreign; be it your mad Sheik or your Toru Tanaka, you were always encouraged to boo at the non-white dude while men in cowboy boots stomped them.

Why bring this up? Because it's encouraging to find out that the current WWE champion is a Mexican character, Alberto del Rio, who is a widely loved "good guy." And the bad guys gunning for him are two redneck Tea Party members, Zeb Colter and Jack Swagger, whose rhetoric is just like anything you'd hear at a teabagger rally. 

Why bring this up? Because internet radio host Glenn Beck got all upset at the portrayal of his beloved nutzoid Tea Party as racist jerk-offs who spout meaningless, jingoistic bullshit. He called the WWE's fans "stupid" and wondered, "I just don't see a bunch of progressives going and buying their tickets to the WWE." That's right. Glenn Beck turned against a Republican-led company and its customers.

Rationally Irrational

"The Right" has been in freaked-out mode for what is getting to be a very long time now.  And I won't put up a big list of shit they're freaked out about, because it's a lot of trouble and anybody who's been paying any attention for the last 20 years should know at least a few of the items on that list anyway.

But I'll focus on one item - Iran - and use it as an illustration of what I think is going on.

The Neo-Cons are always on about the horribleness of Iran's efforts to get the bomb.  And they use it constantly trying to get some leverage on every issue having anything to do with the Middle East.  Pick anything you like - Lybia, Benghazi, Syria, Hamas, Iraq, Hezbollah, Chuck Hagel - eventually, they'll bring it back around to their belief that Iran is doing all of these terrible things in all of these dangerous places because the Ayatollahs want to fuck the Israelis.

From Balloon Juice:

The point isn’t that Hagel “favors” containment and deterrence. Like virtually everyone else, he’d much rather Iran not get a bomb. But by reminding Americans of the potential costs of preventive war, Hagel was implying that containment and deterrence might be preferable. He was suggesting that if the U.S. can’t stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons short of war, it should make the same tradeoff that Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy made when they allowed the Soviet Union and China to get the bomb. This horrifies hawks for two reasons. First, some of them, echoing Benjamin Netanyahu, claim Iran represents an existential threat to Israel. But were that their sole concern, they’d pay more attention to the near-consensus view among top Israeli security professionals that although Iran poses a threat, it does not pose an existential one, in large measure because Iran’s regime, while vile, is rational when it comes to preserving its own existence.

And there it is - I hi-lited in yellow so ya wouldn't miss it.  While the guys running things in Iran (eg) may talk big, they're not fuckin' stupid.  But in order to cut thru the Media Clutter, neo-cons have to make it sound like Iran is champin' at the bit to rain fire and destruction down on Tel Aviv.  If you can make your opposition look totally wacko, it can make your own insanity seem a little more palatable in comparison.  So you can do something completely irrational - like invading countries for bogus reasons - and make it look OK simply because enough of us are convinced the other guy is even more of a dick that you are.

Paraphrasing: In a world of complete assholes, the man who is just kinda of a jerk is king.

So, can we talk about the Wimpy-But-Reasonable Dems vs the Bat-Shit-Crazy Repubs thing now?  No wait - that's actually for real.  (just something to watch out for, y'know?)

The point is that ya gotta stay as rational as possible.  You don't want to become what you're supposed to be fighting against.

And from The Rude Pundit, here's the cherry on the top:

2/27/2013
Tweets About Elaine Chao: On the Left, We Treat Our Screw-Ups with Honor:
Here in Left Blogsylvania, we give a fuck. We give a fuck because we believe it matters to give a fuck. When someone on our side fucks up and fucks up badly, we don't automatically circle the wagons. We want punishment. Look at Anthony Weiner versus, say, David Vitter. We want apologies - real apologies, not apologies that go something like "I'm sorry if I offended you when I murdered your dog. It wasn't my intention to offend you but rather simply murder your dog."

So when an offensive tweet from Progress Kentucky, a not-really Super PAC devoted to defeating Senator Mitch "What the hell is that between your chin and neck? You should get that tumor checked" McConnell, was brought to everyone's attention nearly two weeks after it was sent out to the 2000 followers of the account, Left Blogsylvania went all Twitchy on its own. (If you understand what that last part of the sentence means, the Rude Pundit feels your pain. Let's jab needles in our eyes together.)

The tweet was about McConnell's wife, George W. Bush's Labor Secretary, Elaine Chao, whose record is worthy of criticism. But she's Chinese-American. And you can't link to an article about her, identify her as the Senate Minority Leader's wife (must...resist...urge to joke...about "Minority Leader"...), and say, "May explain why your job moved to #China!" See, that shit's just racist, whatever you intended, and we on the left understand that if we're gonna go nutzoid when someone on the right does it, then what's good for the motherfuckers is what's good for the progressives.

Left Blogsylvania and the actual liberal media condemned it thoroughly. Salon, Think Progress, Wonkette, Talking Points Memo, even Huffington Post, taking a break from all Anne Hathaway's nipples all the time, and the New York Times all posted variations on "That's some bullshit."

You know what you didn't see? You didn't see any of the major voices of theleft leaping in to defend Progress Kentucky. You didn't see Daily Kos writing posts about how, of course, Progress Kentucky didn't mean anything racist; they just meant to point out that Chao's tenure as Labor Secretary saw a shift in American jobs to China. If this had been someone on the right saying it? If it had been one of Karl Rove's Super PACs? The wagons would have circled like they were protecting American Jesus from the Lamanites. Rush Limbaugh would have devoted half a fuckin' show to blowharding about liberal political correctness. Bill O'Reilly would have blamed Obama. Laura Ingraham would have had Michelle Malkin on as an honorary Asian to talk about how it wasn't offensive at all, just true. They would have gone all Todd Akin. They would have gone all Richard Mourdock, trying to say what's wrong is the attempt to silence it. Somehow, guns would have been mentioned, for sure.

But we're not them because we're generally not dicks about such things (we're dicks about other things and have blinders on many more, but that's not what's being discussed today). We call out racism, sexism, and homophobia. We hope that those being called out will do the right thing. In this case, potential McConnell opponent Ashley Judd condemned the tweet, as did the Kentucky Democratic Party.

In fact, after at first trying to say it wasn't racist, Progress Kentucky issued a full apology: "We apologize to the secretary for that unnecessary comment and have deleted the tweets in question." You see how easy that is? 

Now, Progress Kentucky is a tiny, mostly worthless organization. It's easy to pile on it. But time and again, the left proves that it demands a devotion to truth and fair discourse.

Which, by the way, is why the right is able to walk all over us all the time.

Today's Tweet

From Jay Rosen, NYU:

I don't use expressions like LOL, but if I did... RT @natpkguy Democrats: 1+1= 2 Republicans: 1+1= 3 Media: 1+1= 2.5.
— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) February 26, 2013

My Kinda Justice

I think this may be what a real US Supreme Court oughta look like.

According to CNN, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and another Justice took the rather unusual step to speak out over racist remarks made by a federal prosecutor in a drug case. The case is Calhoun v. U.S. (12-6142).

--and--

While questioning an African-American defendant in a drug case, Ponder asked: “You’ve got African-Americans, you’ve got Hispanics, you’ve got a bag full of money. Does that tell you – a light bulb doesn’t go off in your head and say, this is a drug deal?”

The first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, Sotomayor wrote that the prosecutor had “tapped a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our nation.”

The question was “pernicious in its attempt to substitute racial stereotype for evidence,” she added. Sotomayor also accused the Obama administration of playing down the issue.

I hope Sotomayor's pointed criticism is a sign that she'll continue to stand out simply because she understands that the court isn't supposed to be a political or ideological counterweight.  It's there to keep the other 2 branches from becoming too powerful - just as the other branches are there to provide balance against the courts.

(from Addicting Info)

Yeesh

Ever notice how there's really no such thing as Conservative Comedy?  There's no Liberal Comedy either - because that's not how it works.  People laugh at different things for different reasons at different times.  The audience decides, not the performer.  And whatever you're trying to joke about, what you say has to have something kinda universal about it - something that most people can identify with - it has to have some kernel of truth to it.  So if Comedy seems to cut a little to the "left", doesn't that kinda hafta mean the majority of us are at least slightly to the left as well?

Try watching Dennis Miller these days.  Since he went "conservative" it's so obvious that he's aiming everything at a certain audience with a certain ideological mindset that it's like sitting through a marketing presentation at work.  (I really miss the old Dennis btw; there was a time he didn't seem so scared and desperate)

Anyway, enter Michelle Malkin, trying (again, desperately) to poke fun at Michelle Obama's dance thing...



...and missing by a wide margin.  Of course, her audience thinks this is a hoot - in exactly the same way (and for exactly the same reasons) they thought Willard was gonna win the White House in a semi-landslide, and that Obama has launched a campaign to confiscate their guns, and is close to declaring Religion a mental disorder, and and and; ie: they were told to think that way.

But getting back to Malkin fer a minute, it's just like Jesus said in the Parable of the Blind Prostitute: ya gotta hand it to her. (hat tip = Wonkette comments)

And btw also too - that shit you just watched Malkin doing?  Here's a little eye bleach:



...because Barack and Michelle are forever cool, while Malkin and Miller and all the rest are forever lame - which is why they have to try so hard just to tear shit down.