Failing Up
Former Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina may have not have been able to run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination after his 2009 cheating scandal, but he will at least get to talk about the campaign on national television – as a paid contributor on Fox News, the Caucus has learned.A network spokeswoman confirmed that Mr. Sanford, once considered a potential Republican presidential contender, has signed on with the network. While he is certain to appear prominently at the debate Fox News is holding in South Carolina in January, he will appear well before that and will stay on with Fox even beyond the general election.
What is the likelihood that Anthony Weiner will one day a paid contributor to one of our “liberal” media networks?
October 21, 2011 10:28 pm
Posted in: Our Failed Media Experiment
76 Comments
Predicting Votes by Counting Checks?
For the stats dorks, Dan Amira at NYMag’s Daily Intel raises the question “Which States Are Most Enthusiastic About Obama’s Reelection?”:
The Obama reelection campaign is very proud that it has now reached 1 million donors. As it should be! That’s a lot of people who still believe strongly in the president despite, you know, How Things Are. Yesterday, Team Obama launched a page where you can browse all kinds of information about these donors — their most common first names, for example, or what time of day they were most likely to donate. One piece of data that caught our eye was the number of individual donors from each state. This, we thought, could actually serve as a pretty useful indicator of which state is most enthusiastic about Obama’s reelection. A poll can tell you how many people say they plan to vote for Obama, but words are not as important as deeds, and actually donating money is a clear signal of not just support, but passion and motivation…
So, what does the map indicate about the intensity of Obama support in each state so far this election season? Its biggest revelation, in our opinion, is Ohio. With its eighteen electoral college votes and working-class population, Ohio is a perennially important swing state. Obama won it by 5 percent in 2008. But as the map shows, it has a pretty low Obama donors-per-capita ratio. Every other state in Ohio’s color tier was won by John McCain except for Indiana (and nobody expects Obama to win Indiana again) and that one weird Omaha electoral vote in Nebraska. This doesn’t bode well for Obama’s chances in Ohio.
It’s not all bad news for Obama, though. Virginia and Colorado are both in the top tier of Obama donors per capita. Even if Obama loses Ohio and Florida, carrying Colorado and Virginia would give him a very plausible path to victory. Incidentally, it would also set up a very plausible scenario for an electoral college tie. Yikes.
I’m guessing that progressive (read: sane) people in Ohio may have been a little distracted by all the local ugliness from Gov. Kasich & his fellow Kochsuckers right now. For the details of NYMag’s methodology, click the link. I’m sure there’s all sorts of excellent details waiting to be parsed on Team Obama’s page, too.
October 21, 2011 8:31 pm
Posted in: Election 2012, Excellent Links
65 Comments
Song of the week
Buoys, “Timothy” (1971)
Weird shit dept.: Sounding for all the world like the post-hippie bubblegum overrunning the airwaves at the time, “Timothy” is actually something much, much darker. It’s more famous now for its words—most of the YouTube videos I found are pleased to hammer you over the head with the theme (see here, and this is pretty good too). I don’t actually remember much controversy. I had heard it a lot before I caught the drift, and then I was kind of shocked. The Bloodrock, on the other hand, a full-on creepshow, was controversial, but that was more because the original version included sirens for effect and people hearing it in their cars were reportedly pulling over, which was understandably annoying. A later cut took out the sirens but that didn’t make it any easier to take.
More 1971 shock: Bloodrock, “DOA”
More stuff at Can’t Explain.
October 21, 2011 8:20 pm
Posted in: Music, Readership Capture
19 Comments
Friday Night Open Thread
Slowly starting to get better- I can hear out my left ear and my right nostril opens up briefly every now and then. I’m in the stage where you feel better when you wake up, then two hours later feel like death again, so you go to sleep, and then wake up feeling better, rinse and repeat.
For you gamer dorks, I guess Blizz is actually gonna go there:
Not sure how I feel about that, but I’m just waiting for the Old Republic anyway.
October 21, 2011 6:42 pm
Posted in: Open Thread
88 Comments
Much to the Village’s frustration, President Obama isn’t giving up on job creation
Pass one of the damn bills. JUST ONE! It won’t hurt. I promise.
When the Republicans voted in unison to avoid even a debate about President Obama’s American Jobs Act, President Obama told us he would not be giving up.
And true to his word, he hasn’t given up, even as it becomes increasingly apparent that Republicans will do nothing that might fix the economy, because fixing the economy could lead to the reelection of President Obama. (The horror! The horror!)
Yesterday, Republicans filibustered the Teachers and First Responders Back to Work Act, the portion of his jobs bill which would have sent 35 billion dollars to the states to save the jobs of teachers, firefighters, and police.
Two bills came up for vote, two bills were blocked by Republicans. President Obama asked the Republicans, “Hey, how do you feel about a bill that will create two million jobs?” In response, the Republicans flipped Obama the bird.
President Obama then said, “well, ok—what about this portion of the bill that will create 400,000 jobs? Jobs for people we like! Teachers, and firefighters, and police! (Oh my!)” In response, the Republicans farted in President Obama’s general direction.
And now, it’s on to the third bill—The Rebuild America Jobs Act, which is all about infrastructure, baby:
Read the rest of this post »
October 21, 2011 5:28 pm
Posted in: Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment
127 Comments
Almost there
Friday.
Max goes crazy when I use the Chuckit! to bounce a rubber ball halfway to low Earth orbit. He will normally let it bounce once to position himself, then jump as high as he can to catch it on the apex of the first bounce. This is about the only game he loves enough that he will give up the ball rather than play keep-away or ransom it for a treat.
Chat about whatever.
October 21, 2011 4:45 pm
Posted in: Dog Blogging, Open Thread
38 Comments
Lindsey Graham: “Let’s Get In on The Ground”
Via Charlie Pierce, Think Progress transcribes Lindsay Graham on Fox News, going for the gusto:
“... If we could have kept American air power in the fight it would have been over quicker. Sixty-thousand Libyans have been wounded, 3,000 maimed, 25,000 killed. Let’s get in on the ground. There is a lot of money to be made in the future in Libya. Lot of oil to be produced. Let’s get on the ground and help the Libyan people establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market principles.”
I can’t top Mr. Pierce’s summary at Esquire’s Political Blog of Sen. Embarrassment to America:
... Senator Huckleberry Grabitall is an impatient fellow. There’s oil under them corpses, and it’s by god our oil, so we should just go in and drink that damn milkshake before our plucky allies decide that, just because it’s under their sand, they have some sort of legal right to the stuff. Sorry so many of them got killed — Psst! A lot more of them would have been alive if Mighty Man Me had been running things — but we’re past all that now. Sweep ‘em aside and let’s go to work....
You know what? The United States has “a government based on free-market principles” like the one Huckleberry is recommending. Dammit, I think the Libyans can do better.
“Too small for a republic, too large for an insane asylum.” Forget the Palmetto Republic, we’re talking about Lindsey Graham’s ego.
October 21, 2011 3:56 pm
Posted in: Assholes, Foreign Affairs, Lindsey Graham's Fee Fees, Republican Venality
57 Comments
President Obama has written personal checks to those in need while Republicans continue to do jacksquat
ObamaCares
As details emerge about the relentless negative coverage that President Obama receives as compared to every other presidential candidate1 (and even the non-presidential non-candidates—coughSarahPalincough) it is important, I think, to highlight positive coverage.
So here’s a bit of positive news reported by Jake Tapper: President Obama reads 10 letters from constituents every day; often times, he feels powerless to act in a direct manner to alleviate some of the pain that Americans are in, so he does what he can—he occasionally writes them a personal check:
In February 2009, ABC News was first to report on the 10 letters from constituents that the president is given each day.Culled from the thousands the White House Correspondence Office receives each day from Americans who have taken the time to sit down and write to their president,” the letters “help him focus on the real problems people are facing,” said then-senior adviser David Axelrod.
Some of these, maybe two or three each day, the President responds to in his own hand.
Then-White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told us that before two different economic speeches, the President “pulled letters he has gotten and distributed them to staff, to understand what people were going through.”
The White House is now cooperating with a book about those letters, written by the Washington Post’s Eli Saslow, who says that sometimes the president has written a check to help his correspondents. “A few times during his presidency, Obama admitted, he had written a personal check or made a phone call on the writer’s behalf, believing that it was his only way to ensure a fast result,” Saslow wrote in the Post.
Read the rest of this post »
October 21, 2011 3:55 pm
Posted in: Election 2012, Our Failed Political Establishment
81 Comments
Afternoon Thread Of Openness
Hey, I like physics and physicists, thanks.
October 21, 2011 3:06 pm
Posted in: Open Thread, Science and Technology
65 Comments
Herman Cain has some explaining to do on health care
Great piece by Ryan Cooper at the Washington Monthly on Herman Cain’s role in defeating the Clinton health care plan.
In a surprising swing in the Republican presidential field, Herman Cain has rocketed to second place, just behind Mitt Romney. Like all the other candidates, he has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and even claimed (falsely) that he would have died from his liver cancer under Obamacare. Cain actually got his start in politics helping to defeat the 90’s health care reform plan. Organizations from several different areas attacked the Clinton effort, but some of the most effective opposition came from small business organizations, led by the National Restaurant Association and the National Federation of Independent Business. That effort to kill health care reform, coupled with the total failure of the right to pass (or even seriously propose) their own plans, ultimately hurt small businesses.
Cain is a lot clearer about what he is against that what he is for. He opposed the Clinton reform, Ted Kennedy’s Patient Bill of Rights of the late 90’s, Canada-style healthcare, and SCHIP (the children’s health insurance program). He opposed both the Medicare prescription drug benefit and the House proposal to allow negotiation with drug companies in order to control the program’s increasing costs. And, of course, he opposed the Affordable Care Act.
I live and work in a rural county in Ohio where lots and lots of low-wage and part-time working parents rely on S-CHIP to cover their children. The program is wildly popular. I would like Herman Cain to address his opposition to the state childrens health insurance plan, given that his entire claim to fame is that he ran a pizza chain, which is a low wage service sector employer.
Herman Cain, when he got cancer, could call up T. Boone Pickens to get him into a top-notch facility in Houston. But his efforts to defeat reform, in the end, did no such favors for small businesses or their employees, who were increasingly left twisting in the wind.
Health care for me, but not for thee, and not for the children of my low-wage employees, either. Cain was wrong about the Clinton plan, he’s wrong about the ACA, but he was also wrong about S-CHIP. The difference between S-CHIP and the Clinton plan and the Obama law is that we know S-CHIP is a great program that millions of children currently rely on. S-CHIP works. Parents love it. Covering millions of children was the right thing to do. In fact, the one and only reason we were able to pass and then expand S-CHIP over conservative opposition, including last-ditch vetoes by former President Bush, is because the public knew it was the right thing to do.
Herman Cain should have to address the parents of the millions of children covered under S-CHIP and explain why he opposed providing basic health care to their children, and whether he regrets that.
October 21, 2011 1:15 pm
Posted in: An Unexamined Scandal, Domestic Affairs, Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor
56 Comments
Card game hating soshulists
I’ve heard you guys talking about this video in the comments. It’s very good.
October 21, 2011 1:07 pm
Posted in: Excellent Links, Jump! You Fuckers!
31 Comments
Over
Twitter informs me that Obama is scheduled to announce a complete withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. What did we accomplish? What did we gain? Other than the removal of Saddam, nothing that I can tell, and I don’t understand how we are better off with Iraq in chaos and more closely aligned with Iran. Anyone who supported this debacle, as I did, should forever have their judgment questioned on everything. Even if you think they are right, remain suspect of their opinions. It’s just that simple. When I look at it now, it was such an easy call, such an easy test of critical thinking skills, and I and others failed it. It’s just that simple.
Which leads me to the most nauseating aspect of this announcement- all the people who were wrong will now be given airtime to do “victory laps” on national tv, complete with Liz Cheney and other dead-enders going on tv claiming this vindicates the previous administration. If I weren’t already bedridden with the flu, it would be enough to make me sick.
Trillions of dollars, untold tens of thousands dead, god knows how many wounded, millions scarred, and for what?
Now let’s GTFO of Afghanistan.
October 21, 2011 12:50 pm
Posted in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin., War
185 Comments
Everbody pulls his weight
Real Murkins don’t hate the Occupy hippies (via):
In the National Journal poll, 56 percent of non-college-educated whites back the demonstrators, though the right-wing media continually depict them trust fund babies gone wild.
In the strange case of Occupy Wall Street, none of the usual cultural signifiers by which we’ve been conditioned to hate one another seems to be working. Where have you gone, Archie Bunker? What gives?
Would Archie even qualify as a Real Murkin now? He probably had a lot of friends in unions, he lived in a fairly densely-populated area, so he didn’t drive that much or shop exclusively at big box stores. I’m not sure they had Applebees and Chilis in Queens back then (not many of them there now).
October 21, 2011 12:17 pm
Posted in: Jump! You Fuckers!
71 Comments
Whether Men, Underground
A funny thing happened on the way to the Koch Brothers’ latest “scientific triumph” over the nefarious forces of global warming mind control. First, the story as K-Drum rolls this out:
Physicists are notorious for believing that other scientists are mathematically incompetent. And University of California-Berkeley physicist Richard Muller is notorious for believing that conventional wisdom is often wrong. For example, the conventional wisdom about climate change. Muller has criticized Al Gore in the past as an “exaggerator,” has spoken warmly of climate skeptic Anthony Watts, and has said that Steve McIntyre’s famous takedown of the “hockey stick” climate graph made him “uncomfortable” with the paper the hockey stick was originally based on.So in 2010 he started up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) to show the world how to do climate analysis right. Who better, after all? “Muller’s views on climate have made him a darling of skeptics,” said Scientific American, “and newly elected Republicans in the House of Representatives, who invited him to testify to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology about his preliminary results.” The Koch Foundation, founded by the billionaire oil brothers who have been major funders of the climate-denial machine, gave BEST a $150,000 grant.
House Republicans and energy companies pinned a lot of money and time on BEST as the ultimate weapon to permanently cloud the “debate” on climate change. But the problem is the skeptical physicist who said “yes, I’d like to take a look at those numbers!” has run them and discovered that hey, they’re right:
But Muller’s congressional testimony last March didn’t go according to plan. He told them a preliminary analysis suggested that the three main climate models in use today—each of which uses a different estimating technique, and each of which has potential flaws—are all pretty accurate: Global temperatures have gone up considerably over the past century, and the increase has accelerated over the past few decades. Yesterday, BEST confirmed these results and others in its first set of published papers about land temperatures. [3] (Ocean studies will come later.)
Oops. Hey, Muller centered his entire debate on running the numbers correctly and with complete integrity and guess what? The vast group of scientists working on it were pretty much right all along.
In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.” In other words, climate scientists know what they’re doing after all.
I’d be laughing if the deniers in Washington and K Street hadn’t killed any efforts for the US and the world to do anything substantial to save the planet.
October 21, 2011 9:24 am
Posted in: C.R.E.A.M., Science and Technology, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
135 Comments
Friday Pimpcast
Here are the folks who wrote in about their organization or cause during the last week:
- If you’re in the Seattle area, there’s a Veterans Therapeutic Massage benefit brunch on November 6.
- Dames for Danes is “dedicated to saving the lives of homeless, abused and neglected Great Danes in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia, as well as to areas resources will allow.”
- In Warren County, Ohio, the local National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) chapter had a tough time at their fundraiser this year and could use some help. Here’s their donation page. NAMI is a worthwhile organization—here’s their national webpage.
- Finally, one person wrote in to suggest mailing a brick to credit card companies using their postage-paid return mail envelopes.
Every Friday, I pimp the legit causes people send me during the week. Send me an email (my email is in the upper right-hand corner) if you’d like your cause highlighted.
October 21, 2011 7:49 am
Posted in: Excellent Links
34 Comments
