Category Archives: Elections & Politics (U.S.)

On America, Obama, outrage, and absorbency

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Taking a step back from the Outrage Machine & Beltway Noise Generator, Slate‘s John Dickerson commits journalism and confirms what everyone with a functional brain, a modicum of common sense, and a resistance to right-wing partisan blinders instantly, instinctively knew upon reading Obama’s faux-outrage-of-the-day quote about America’s ability to “absorb” a terrorist attack: I asked an administration official familiar with… Read more »

A song for the Tea Party crowd

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Apropos of nothing, inspired by a random aside in comments… Yes, the song is called “The Idiot,” but I’m not being snarky by suggesting it as a Tea Party song. Its reference to idiocy is sarcastic: I could have stayed to take the dole, but I’m not one of those I take nothing free, and that makes me an idiot,… Read more »

The Democrats’ risky messaging strategy?

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I heard Robert Gibbs on NPR this morning, repeating the now-familiar Democratic talking point that the Republicans are advocating policies that would take us backward to the conditions that created this financial & economic crisis in the first place, whereas the Democrats are moving the country forward and digging us out from the hole that those GOP policies created (and… Read more »

On the Ground at the Beck Rally

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I had not even heard about the Beck Rally until about two weeks ago.  Normally I look on these sorts of events with a mild curiosity, but rarely does this curiosity force me to get off my duff and actually make the 30-minute trip down to the Mall from my home in suburban Maryland, along the dreaded Green Line.  But today… Read more »

Two years ago today…

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It’s ironic, really, how much I’ve come to loathe Sarah Palin and everything she represents, and to earnestly believe that John McCain’s selection of her as his runningmate — and elevation of her poisonous presence onto the national stage — was one of the most reckless, irresponsible, indefensible, politics-first/country-last decisions in modern political history, such that it caused me to… Read more »

The right wing’s endless culture war on “lazy” people

My tweet importer thingy, which depends on the increasingly unreliable FriendFeed, has been up and down, but I just a series of posted tweets that I wanted to reproduce here. WARNING: Rant ahead. Contains some salty language. Proceed at your own risk. The tweets were inspired by this article, in which Glenn Beck reveals himself, once again, to be a… Read more »

Letting the terrorists win

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Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson on the “Ground Zero mosque”: How precisely is our cause served by treating the construction of a non-radical mosque in Lower Manhattan as the functional equivalent of defiling a grave? It assumes a civilizational conflict instead of defusing it. Symbolism is indeed important in the war against terrorism. But a mosque that rejects radicalism is not… Read more »

Bennet and Maes

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As I tweeted earlier, I suspect that I may be the only person who attended both the Bennet for Senate victory party and the Maes for Governor victory party in Denver tonight. There certainly can’t be much crossover between the two candidates, in terms of supporters… and reporters would have been assigned to one or the other. As for me,… Read more »

Noonan: We are all pessimists now

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File away Peggy Noonan’s latest column, “America Is at Risk of Boiling Over,” into the Grand Unified Theory of PANIC!!!! file. Money quote: The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped… Read more »