"raghead"

This article from the Charleston, SC NBC affiliate is amazing in so many ways, for the offensiveness of the story itself, the inaccuracy of the guy's comments, for the choice of title, for the apology. South Carolina is a crazy place.

No, wait, this may be better. The money quote:

“She’s a f#!king raghead,” Knotts said.

He later clarified his statement. He did not mean to use the F-word.

a fool's errand

That's what it would be to draft a new bill to woo Republicans. Krugman:

So, House Democrats have a choice: do they pass the Senate bill, or do they go back to the drawing board and spend several months cobbling together a plan that’s worse in almost every dimension, generating thousands of stories about hapless Democrats — and almost surely find that Senate Republicans block the new plan, too.

The GOP is not interested in working with Democrats, only with subverting them. They've already said their strategy is obstruction, they've being using that strategy for 3 years now, and they believe they're winning with it. Why would they suddenly vote to fix healthcare now?

Reid's recent comment about Olympia Snowe's duplicity should be the lesson of the decade for Democrats. They gave her everything she asked for from weakening the mandate penalties to stripping the co-ops, the Medicare buy-in, and the opt-outs, even the public option itself, only to watch her vote to filibuster anyway.

Remember, one the GOP's main arguments against the public option was that it would be better than private insurance, and that's a bad thing:

Nevertheless, Republican senators argued that the public option would bankrupt the country and lead to a single-payer system. "Government is not a competitor. Government is a predator," said Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa).

To the GOP, the worst thing that could happen is that something gets fixed while the Democrats are in charge.

open mic night at the RNC

From NY Daily News:

Commenting on a report posted to Facebook about a gorilla escape at a zoo in Columbia, S.C., Friday, longtime GOP activist Rusty DePass wrote, "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless."

Busted by South Carolina political blogger Will Folks on his FITNEWS blog, DePass told WIS-TV in Columbia, "I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest."

Then he added, "The comment was hers, not mine," claiming Michelle Obama made a recent remark about humans descending from apes. The Daily News could find no such comment.

Yeah, I know, that's really ugly even for southern fried Republicans. And yeah, that's a pretty terrible apology.

Here's what I want to talk about, though: who was it that thought it was a good idea to get every GOP politician and stooge their own Twitter account? Seriously, am I wrong or is this perhaps the worst idea in electoral politics since McCain put Sarah Palin on his ticket?

Racism is a problem for the Republican party. A big problem. Racism is what gives them their stranglehold on the South, but it kills them everywhere else. Because of this, Republican speechwriters and campaign strategists have cooked up all manner of ingenious ways to give dog-whistle signals to the former segregationists and Dixiecrats that make up the party's southern base: "affirmative action," "welfare queens," sexual innuendo, speeches in Philadelphia, Mississippi on states' rights, etc. It's a subtle art, though; if people outside the privileged group catch your underlying meanings, you're in deep doodoo, so you don't want every Confederate cracker with a chip on his shoulder and a hood in his closet taking a turn at the GOP's microphone to do his best Jesse Helms impersonation, and you sure as s**t don't want to give them the opportunity to send unerasable, impromptu, unsupervised messages accessible to anyone with an internet connection!

Unless, apparently, you're the dumbass who thought Twitter would be the secret weapon in the great Republican electoral juggernaut of 2010. Macacas for everyone!

UPDATE: Already another one here.

UPDATE 2: And now an email. Maybe low-level southern Republicans should just stay away from writing.

diversity in the GOP

An amazing clump of stats from Markos:

In both chambers of Congress, Republicans are down to a single Jewish member, four Cuban-Americans (no non-Cuban Latinos), no African Americans, one Asian (who is a guaranteed loss in 2010), and just 21 women out of 218 total seats, or less than 10 percent.

If one can at least partly trace the GOP's woes back to their utter lack of competitiveness among non-WASPy demographics (and I believe you can), this lack of diversity in the GOP delegate is particularly problematic because it is both cause and effect, part of a "feedback loop" that makes minorities feel less welcome and in turn makes the party itself less welcoming.

We're all just looking out for our own; the difference in our electoral success lies in the size of the group referred to by "our."

a budget with no numbers

I didn't watch the GOP's rollout of their "budget," but from how it sounds, I'm imagining John Boehner and Mitch McConnell hopping out of a clown car on the way to the podium. From Ezra Klein:

Bush, famously, described his first budget by saying, "It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." Indeed it was, and did. This isn't. There are no numbers. Let me repeat that: The Republican budget proposal does not say how much money they would raise, or spend. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a "budget" as "an estimate of income and expenditure for a set period of time." This is not a budget. It talks about balancing the budget but doesn't explain how. It advocates tax cuts but doesn't estimate their costs. It promises to cut programs but doesn't name them. The threat going around the Capitol is that some impish Democratic chairman will ask the CBO to try and score the Republican proposal.
...
The Republican proposal, as you might expect, doesn't actually have a health care plan. But it does have this: "Republicans will be on the side of quality versus mediocrity, affordability versus unsustainable debt, and freedom of care versus bureaucrats in control. And we will be on the side of patients, doctors, and the American people." They are also in favor of good things rather than bad things, moving forward rather than going backwards, the hobbits rather than the orcs, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

I have to keep beating this drum until they do something, anything to prove me wrong: the Republicans just are not serious about governing. An honest, sober, diligent personality could really take the administration to task on a number of issues (the knee-jerk dismissal of nationalizing banks and reluctance to overturn Bush era policies on secrecy are two that come to mind), but these Republicans just don't have anything productive to contribute.

The Republican Party: just not serious on economics since 1996

From The Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON - The federal agency that insures bank deposits, which is asking for emergency powers to borrow up to $500 billion to take over failed banks, is facing a potential major shortfall in part because it collected no insurance premiums from most banks from 1996 to 2006.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures deposits up to $250,000, tried for years to get congressional authority to collect the premiums in case of a looming crisis. But Congress believed that the fund was so well-capitalized - and that bank failures were so infrequent - that there was no need to collect the premiums for a decade, according to banking officials and analysts.

Wow, Congress looks pretty dumb now, eh? I mean, what kind of a moron would stop funding bank depositors' only insurance body on the assumption that the economy will never tank again?

Well, let's think about it: who ran Congress from 1996 to 2006?

rudderless

A scathing rebuke of the Republican party from Frank Rich. That party is broken, mentally spent, freshly decapitated and leaking its senior members like a sieve. The only compassionate thing for Obama to do now is avert his eyes from their sputtering and sideline them until they regain something approaching lucidity.

The voters put Dems in and 'Pubs out. They like the Democrats and Obama, they trust them, and they hate the Republicans and don't want them anywhere near power (hence why voters didn't put them anywhere near power!). Pull the trigger on Gregg and hog tie the Republicans while we take care of this problem, Roosevelt-style. They can come back after the midterms and try to put some ideas together.

Republican Family Values

Classy. AMERICAblog reminds us that the nominee of the family values party left his disabled wife for a wealthy heiress 17 years his hot, blonde junior.

Needless to say, both Hillary and Barack have opted not to trade up from their age-appropriate first spouses.

Joe Lieberman joins McCain campaign

No, I mean he literally joined his campaign. From the Boston Globe:

Sen. Joe Lieberman has been named a chairman of Republican presidential hopeful John McCain's state leadership team.

Lieberman, an Independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, has endorsed the Arizona senator and campaigned for him in Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

He is heading McCain's Connecticut campaign with Republican Rep. Christopher Shays.

George Jepsen, former state Democratic Party chairman who supported Ned Lamont's successful challenge of Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primary, said Lieberman's endorsement of McCain is an affront to Democrats who believed Lieberman when he said two years ago that he was committed to helping put a Democrat in the White House in 2008.

Arguing that he would help put a Democrat in the White House was actually used as a primary excuse to justify supporting Lieberman for many Democrats, both voters and elected officials. Once the primary in 2006 was over, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton supported Ned Lamont in the general, which makes one wonder if there's something personal in Lieberman's decision to stab his party in the back.

Of course, we've been heading in this direction for a couple of years now, so we're not exactly in "nobody could have predicted..." territory. Lieberman also co-wrote the war with Iran bill (ya know, "Kyl-Lieberman") that Clinton's been catching so much hell over, he's gone over to the dark side on torture, and most tellingly, endorsed Republican Susan Collins in her upcoming re-election battle in Maine, a prime pickup opportunity for his now former party, and has even raised money for her (partly because she supported his re-election over Ned Lamont and Alan Schlessinger).

I would like to point out, in the interest of gloating accountability, one of my scribblings from 6 months ago:

The transformation of Joe Lieberman from (D-CT) to (R-Military Industrial Complex) is fully underway, and far more advanced than most are willing to acknowledge. He's no longer any more Democrat than Republican, and he's fully admitting to that. It's not a campaign slogan, people.
...
But make no mistake, people: by the time Campaign '08 gets into full swing, Lieberman will be working for the bad guys.

I also predicted that Joe Lieberman will be the keynote speaker at the 2008 Republican National Convention. That may well happen, but it's becoming increasingly likely, if McCain wins, anyway, that he may be making that speech as the VP candidate on the GOP ticket.

See You Next Tuesday

Yes, this is real. It's a group started by Roger Stone, a famous Republican trickster.

The group on which he got his start is a particularly apt acronym: CREEP.

Fred Thompson drops out

(highlight reel of Thompson's first debate performance)

I've gotta tell you, admittedly I haven't been around for many presidential elections, but Fred Thompson: male prostitue may have been the least prepared presidential candidate I've ever seen, at least as a campaigner. He never seemed to be up on the news or any of the local issues where he was campaigning, he didn't have any positions on, well, anything, and spent so long fiddle-farting around on the sidelines that he was on his third campaign manager before he even announced his candidacy. I mean, for God's sake, people, he was still using note cards in the last debate! Note cards!

This early exit also says a lot about the state of the GOP, the "electability" opinions of its primary voters, and perhaps, just perhaps, the direction of the party. The most conservative candidates in the race were Tancredo, Hunter, and Thompson. And the first three to get bounced? Tancredo, Hunter, and Thompson.

Meanwhile, the three with the most dubious conservative cred? McCain, Romney, and 9iu11ani. And who did Fred Thompson spend the last month calling "a liberal on everything but abortion?" Mike Huckabee.

take the mittens off, Michigan!

Heh.

the Reagan coalition

It's a little-known fact that Ronald Reagan was also ten feet tall. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by challenging Gorbachev to single combat in the famous "Berlin Wall Brawl," throwing the Premier over the wall and breaking his neck with his trademarked "Gipper Flipper." Ronald Reagan is the illegitimate father of over half of white conservatives in the South, and yet it is rumored that Reagan's mother died a virgin. And he had an actual, real-life tax-cutting magic wand, created from the skeletal middle finger of Barry Goldwater and magically bound with the soul of Ayn Rand.

Do the GOP presidential candidates dramatically underestimate southern conservatives in these debates, or are South Carolina Republicans really this succeptible to blatant mythopoiesis? Do southern Republicans watch this tripe and really say, "Well, I would vote for Mike Huckabee, but he doesn't love Ronald Reagan as much as Mitt Romney does?" Do South Carolinians watch these debates and ever think, "Ya know, the way they're all using Reagan's corpse as a ventriloquist dummy is really pretty crass and obnoxious?"

fiscal responsibility in George W. Bush's world

Truly sick. From KDKA in Pittsburgh (c/o TPM):

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

Dear God, please make Brian Williams run a segment about this tonight.
Dear God, please make Brian Williams run a segment about this tonight.
Dear God...

"a different experience"

From TPM:

Do you know more about torture than John McCain?

RUDY GIULIANI: ...I have had a different experience than John. John has never been -- he has never run city, never run a state, never run a government. He has never been responsible as a mayor for the safety and security of millions of people, and he has never run a law enforcement agency, which I have done.

Now, intensive questioning works. If I didn't use intensive questioning, there would be a lot of mafia guys running around New York right now and crime would be a lot higher in New York than it is.

Have you ever heard an answer so crammed to the top with bullshit? Rudy was responsible for the safety and security of millions? As the mayor? Are you kidding me? Rudy personally waterboarded mafiosos, chained them naked to the floor while lowering the temperature to 40 degrees, and made them sit in stress positions for 12 hours, pistol-whipping them every time they moved? Does anyone really believe this wanker?

Greg Sargent notes:

"A "different experience" than McCain? Hmmm -- that strikes us as kind of a casual, offhand way for Rudy to be describing what McCain went through. After all, McCain was tortured regularly for five years in Vietnam, while Rudy secured five draft deferments, according to preeminent Rudy biographer Wayne Barrett. Indeed, as Barrett wrote in Grand Illusions, his book about Rudy and 9/11, Rudy got one deferment for every year that McCain was tortured."

That Rudy, he's a real hero.

Huckabee surging

David Yepsen thinks Huckabee can win Iowa, which would be a pretty stunning coup. It's hard to tell sometimes in these horserace-y elections whether there's a genuine darkhorse, or whether the press is just trying to make it seem more exciting, but I think there's something substantial in Huckabee's surge. For one, it's the Democratic race, not the Republican one, that needs a little injection of excitement; the Republican race is already pretty exciting, what with Giuliani leading national polls but Romney comfortably ahead in Iowa and New Hampshire and Fred Thompson's surging, then stagnating numbers.

Second, the Huckabee surge is confirmed by numerous polling outfits.

Third, Huckabee makes by far the most sense as a GOP candidate. I've been dumbfounded at his lack of support all this time. Look at his credentials: he's a relatively popular governor, a lifelong conservative (and not like a Fred Thompson "I-lobbied-for-pro-choice-groups" conservative, but an actual, bonafide conservative), and a Baptist minister. He's a humble, likable speaker, and has an interesting and endearing personal story: he used to be morbidly obese, and by cleaning up his life he lost 110 lbs. It might not seem like much, but it makes him seem much more "real"-- or to use the political buzzword, "authentic"-- than the other guys.

And don't think for a second that he's unelectable. Huckabee may not be perfect, but he's a hell of a lot more ideologically pure than Romney, Giuliani, Thompson, or McCain, and comes off as more likable than them as well. He'd have no tougher of a time against Hillary Clinton than the others, and unlike some of them, he could actually beat her in a personality contest.

Not that the Huckster isn't without baggage. He suffers from much of the ignorance and sexual Puritanism one would expect from a southern Baptist minister: he doesn't believe in evolution, for instance (you're right, Mike, man didn't come from monkeys. Humans actually descended from primates), which bothers me considering what happened the last time a president refused to listen to information that didn't conform to his beliefs. He also listens a little too much to rightwing conspiracy theories, which ultimately led to make his extremely stupid and myopic decision to free a convicted rapist, against the advice of every advisory position in Arkansas, because he thought Clinton framed the man.

That rapist later raped and murdered a young woman in Missouri, and has since died in prison.

Of course, he's also kind of a dipshit, but let's be honest, Republicans, and some independents, have been falling for the "dipshit with common sense" routine over and over for the last 20 years at least.

And, apropos of the last link, he's the worst kind of anti-Roe: the kind that really just wants women to stop having sex except when called upon to do their duty as baby-farms. He doesn't want abortion to be legal, but he really doesn't want people having safe sex, either, hence the apprehension about condoms. I guess life is a sacred, wonderful thing that comes as a gift from God as punishment for defiling one's body.

is Ron Paul going to make a 3rd party bid?

From Political Insider:

During an MSNBC interview Wednesday, Rep. Ron Paul was asked if he would run for president as a third-party candidate. Paul replied, "No, I don't plan to run in a third party. That's not my goal. But if we have a candidate that loves the war and loves the neocon position of promoting--" Interviewer Norah O'Donnell cut Paul off at that point, and did not return to the topic during the rest of the interview.

Does anyone else find it so delicious that the reporter cut Paul off right as he was about to bash the kind of people running Giuliani's campaign and Bush's foreign policy? Right as he was getting to the juicy stuff? It was like the whole national discourse in microcosm!

I put the odds at about 1000:1, but it would really be something if Giuliani won, and then both the Christian Right and Ron Paul made a 3rd party run. The one thing that keeps me from saying this definitely couldn't happen is that there is already, in existence and on the ballot in most states, a party tailor-made for each of them.

Then again, I think the last thing anyone wants is for that kind of realignment to stick: that would mean a viable Constitution Party.

John McCain's health care plan

A strong dose of finger-wagging at patients for not buying insurance, getting too much care, eating too much, and always suing their doctors, combined with a solid regimen of cutting the number of procedures Medicare covers and using that money to subsidize HMO profits.

If that's not a winning combination, I don't know what is!

Oh, and a message for the Mitthead and Ru9/11dy: ya know what's the most "portable" insurer of health care? Medicare.

It is the sense of the Senate

that American citizens, even when organized into massive grassroots groups, have no business criticizing the military leadership.

Lincoln Chafee quits the GOP

I guess it was inevitable, but it's still surprising to hear. From the Providence Journal (h/t Smintheus @ dKos):

Chafee said he disaffiliated with the party he had helped lead, and his father had led before him, because the national Republican Party has gone too far away from his stance on too many critical issues, from war to economics to the environment.

“It’s not my party any more,” he said.

Chafee’s departure is another step in the waning of the strain of moderate Republicanism that was once a winning political philosophy from Rhode Island and Connecticut to the Canadian border.

I do often consider Chafee one of the very few "unfortunate" casualties of the '06 midterms, but it seemed like he very rarely actually had the backbone to dispute with his party vocally. Still, Lincoln Chafee and the Republican party were a terrible fit, as I think most Republicans would agree.

You know you want to, Linc. Come to the side of the light.