Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.
“Michelle Bachmann claims Swiss citizenship” – Tim Mak (Politico)
My only hope is that this is so she has a place to move to after President Obama gets re-elected.
“Austerity can’t be just for regular people” – Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)
I think Taibbi misses the essential problem with austerity: it doesn’t work. It’s never worked, anywhere, ever. There’s more than a little irony that he gets who poured gasoline all over the rag pile of the global economy, threw the Zippo on it, and walked away as it dramatically burned, only to come back a few hours later going “Oh my gosh, how did this happen?” while collecting the insurance money. I will gladly sign on for austerity, once every single financial services executive responsible for gutting the economy is behind bars.
“We’re still living in Rick Santorum’s America, somehow” – Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)
I was hoping our long national nightmare was over and we could finally stop talking about Wannabe Pope Santorum for ten seconds, but as it turns out I was wrong. Of course, the only reason I have not yet set my hair on fire is because Rick Santorum has chained himself to Mitt Romney’s ankle like the Stone of Triumph. See, Mitt Romney is going to try to run to the middle and stake out positions that are less extreme than what he took in the primary, like any good political candidate would. However, Rick Santorum and his merry band of Jesusfreaks are going to remind Mitt Romney that if he strays too far from the orthodoxy, he’ll be cast out of the First Church of Godbothering and they won’t show up, and Mitt Romney NEEDS them to show up if he’s going to have any chance whatsoever of beating President Obama. So, Mitt Romney will find himself stretching out, one ankle chained to the Stone of the Republican Base, one outstretched hand vainly reaching for the few remaining independent voters who haven’t already decided that they want nothing to do with Rick Santorum and his merry band of Jesusfreaks, finding himself coming up just short time and time again.
“How a dedicated group of Tea Party activists toppled Richard Lugar” – Sean Sullivan (The Atlantic)
People are going to try to paint the end of the Last Living Ent Dick Lugar’s political career as a big Tea Party triumph. You know what they did? They gave Joe Donnelly, who makes Joe Manchin look like Bernie Sanders, an outside chance of winning a Senate seat in Indiana, whose electoral fortunes hinge on six out of 92 counties. Lugar would have crushed Donnelly like a tin can, but Mourdock is a hack whose thoughts on bipartisanship are going to appeal to his base and not much more.
The reason that I’m writing about this is because of Lugar’s parting shots at Mourdock. Dick Lugar was Tricky Dick Nixon’s favorite mayor. He’s been the GOP’s answer to the “So, who’s your foreign policy statesman?” for damn near thirty years. He hasn’t done much else during that period, but nuclear disarmament has always been his thing, and he’s been pretty good at it.
But, for one of the most senior and well respected Senators to say this about his opponent on the way out:
He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.
Is unfathomable. Dick Lugar just called the GOP out. He called them the Spanish Inquisition. And if Joe Donnelly has two brain cells to rub together (the jury is still out on that one), he’s gonna put that in an ad and run it every day from now till November.
“The case for Ron Paul’s agents of chaos.” – Conor Friedersdorf (The Atlantic)
I agree with about a quarter of what Ron Paul says. I think the Drug War has been a colossal failure, I think a lot of our civil liberties have been trampled on by authoritarian conservative and spineless liberal politicians in the name of “national security”, and I think that US foreign policy has been far too interventionist over the last fifty years. But Ron Paul is also a racist goldbug nutbag who would almost assuredly plunge this country into a new Dark Ages.
With all that being said, I’m really looking forward to watching Ron Paul’s little worker bees cause some chaos at the GOP national convention.
