Conspiracies of convenience, Mitt’s meltdown, the path of least resistance, Sibelius and the Hatch Act, trickle-down doesn’t work, Florida voter purge restarted, Hobby Lobby Misogyny, Rand Paul swings and misses, and the CTU’s plan to fix Chicago’s schools.
Welcome to the Daily Sausage.
Today we resume our regularly scheduled liberal/reality-based programming after a brief foray into the dark heart of online conservatism. As I noted yesterday, I was mostly bored by the articles. Every day I read about voter intimidation, vast income inequality, major geopolitical problems, racism, bigotry, misogyny, government corruption, and a host of other real honest-to-God Problems. So when I read headlines from World Net Daily calling the President a secret homosexual, all I can do is shrug and laugh. As I said, we have real honest-to-God Problems in this country that require serious people to solve, and there just aren’t serious people on the right, at least not in the blogosphere. I’ll put ThinkProgress up against RedState any day of the week.
First up, via Balloon Juice, an article from Hani Shukrallah from Ahram Online, “Conspiracy of convenience: what’s behind the film fracas?”
Mr. Shukrallah argues that the Zionist elements of the American Right, as well as their Neocon allies, deliberately create material offensive to Muslims to inspire reactions like yesterday’s attacks from extreme elements like Al-Qaeda in Islamic states, who in turn use this to paint America with broad strokes of hate and intolerance.
The right-wing nutjobs here deliberately inflame right-wing nutjobs over there, who in turn do something that inflames right-wing nutjobs here, and so on and so forth.
And people wonder why I call the Tea Party the American Taliban.
However, there are reasonable people. Here are pictures from a demonstration condemning the attacks on the American Embassy and mourning the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens.
Gail Collins has an excellent take on Mitt Romney’s missteps yesterday, titled “Mitt’s Major Meltdown”.
Essentially, her argument is that the American people, or really just American independent voters, were willing to tolerate lip service to Mitt’s conservative base under the assumption that he’d govern as much more of a moderate. His colossal fuck-up yesterday dispelled that myth. Everyone was already uneasy with Mitt’s foreign policy credentials on account of his complete lack of foreign policy experience (NB: Mitt has zero foreign policy experience, which is less than what President Obama as a US Senator had four years ago, which the right wouldn’t shut up about; where the fuck are they now?) and his slightly-less-than colossal fuck-up in the UK during the Olympics. Mitt’s only saving grace is the Republican Foreign Policy Clown Car rolled into town immediately afterwards with Donald Rumsfeld, War Criminal; Reince Priebus, Obvious Anagram; and Jon Kyl, Purveyor of Non-Factual Statements.
Krugstradamus chimes in, calling Mitt “small and hysterical”, and notes that the real impact may be that the Press may take off the kid gloves they’re handling him with and start landing some body blows.
Speaking of which, 58% of Americans believe that Obama would kick Mitt Romney’s ass in a fight. I think a boxing match in place of a third debate would be phenomenal; Marquess of Queensbury rules, one week before the election.
Ed from Gin and Tacos has another great article titled “Path of Least Resistance”.
His argument is that the GOP knows that they have to appeal to more than just their base of terrified old white people, but doing so would require actual work, so they just run back into the arms of their enablers. I agree completely. Change is hard; were the GOP to embrace a post-white majority America, they’d find themselves in the political wilderness for a decade, but doing so is the only way to save their party before they become unelectable. If Barack Obama were named John Smith, he’d be beating Mitt Romney by twenty points and well on his way to winning every state in the country.
TPM reports that the Office of Special Counsel notified President Obama that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius violated the Hatch Act when she “made extemporaneous partisan remarks in a speech delivered in her official capacity” before the Human Rights campaign earlier this year. Secretary Sibelius has met with an ethics expert, HHS reimbursed the government for all travel costs, and retroactively reclassified the event as political.
Owen M. Zidar, a staff economist on President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors and a grad student at Cal-Berkeley, has published a study that proves that there is virtually zero correlation between tax cuts for high wage earners and GDP growth, whereas tax cuts for low wage earners directly correlate to high GDP growth. Worth noting: Zidar also worked for Bain Capital.
Well, that about wraps it up for Supply Side Economics.
ThinkProgress is reporting that Florida plans to restart it’s voter purge program prior to the November 6th election.
Vlousia County Supervisor of Elections Ann McFall (R), said :
We’re 55 days in front of a huge election. It just doesn’t help us whatsoever. I went through the SAVE training today—it’s the most convoluted thing you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s awful.
Even if they got the list of names to us tomorrow, there wouldn’t be time. That person has due process. Anyone has due process in the state and country.
We are so fucked.
To the Green family, the owners of Hobby Lobby: go fuck yourselves.
Senator Rand “Ron’s Spalpeen” Paul compared the case of the federal government reappropriating stolen property to Nazi Germany taking valuable artwork from the Jews. This offends me, not on the grounds that he’s comparing the Federal government to Nazi Germany, but that it’s a fucking stupid analogy.
Finally, the Chicago Teacher’s Union has a plan to fix the city’s schools.
- Smaller class sizes.
- More playgrounds, recess time and physical education classes.
- More art, dance, theater, music and foreign language instruction.
- More funding for libraries.
- Healthier school lunches.
- An end to the “apartheid-like” Chicago Public School system today and to “discipline policies with a disproportionate harm on students of color.”
- Guarantee pre-K and full-day kindergarten for all students.
- Higher teacher salaries and more teacher “autonomy.”
- Better bilingual and special needs programs.
- Higher-quality school facilities.
Well, so far we’ve let parents, politicians, churches, administrators, and businesses take a crack and reforming schools in this country, and none of those have panned out. Maybe we oughta give teachers a shot and see what happens. All it’ll cost is an extra $700 million a year.
