The big push is coming, but it’s coming from Karl Rove and I really don’t know how much more of his bilge voters can take.
Especially given how the Democrats are planning to fight back:
Democratic candidates across the country are opening a fierce offensive of negative advertisements against Republicans, using lawsuits, tax filings, reports from the Better Business Bureau and even divorce proceedings to try to discredit their opponents and save their Congressional majority.
Sorry, but mutual mudslinging plays into Karl Rove’s hands. The dirtier it gets, the more he likes it. The tough stuff needs to come out in debates, and allegations should come from our candidates’ mouths while looking the teabaggers in the eye.
Negative ads are chickenshit, and help prove that Dems are EXACTLY like Republicans (because yes, Republicans will be running the same ads to make sure you see there is no difference).
We should be campaigning on having cut taxes for the middle class. We should be campaigning on having brought ALL the troops home. We should be campaigning on how we cleaned up Wall Street.
But that would be lying, wouldn’t it?
The truth is that the Republicans stopped all those things from happening but because we had too many “centrists/blue dogs” in our ranks, it’s not a clean message.
Cue the WaPost with a Frank Luntz advertorial (note that the sputtering teabaggers in his stories are always described as “undecided voters”). All a part of what Tom Toles is saying in his ‘toon today:
It took me a minute to figure out the cartoon, but I’m not a cat person.
More:
Digby on stinking, filthy lies
Wolcott reviews Money Never Sleeps (too bad Oliver Stone didn’t consult him before filming) [bonus link: Wolcott reviews Steve Buscemi's Boardwalk Empire]
Media whores can’t help themselves: they’ll attack even a teabagger when they smell blood in the water
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Ted Sorensen on the 50th anniversary of the first Nixon-Kennedy debate:
“It was style over substance, with Kennedy winning on delivery and looks.” In fact, there was far more substance and nuance in that first debate than in what now passes for political debate in our increasingly commercialized, sound-bite Twitter-fied culture, in which extremist rhetoric requires presidents to respond to outrageous claims.
Though it seemed at the time to be a battle between two opposing worldviews, the truth is that the two candidates did not vastly differ in that first debate. And while Kennedy would probably find a home in today’s Democratic Party, it is unlikely that Nixon would receive a warm welcome among the Tea Party.
My parents still get mad if I mention Nixon. I’ve never dared criticize Reagan in their presence (those fights were always couched in terms of his advisors deceiving him).
But in 1960 I was totally in Nixon’s camp, going so far as to get into daily fights with my buddy Kent on the school bus. Kennedy-Nixon was a very important election to me because Kennedy was Catholic, and I’d been brought up to realize how dangerous it would be to have a Catholic in the White House.
Nuances like depth of religious belief eluded me, but I remember how much easier it was to live in a black and white world every time I hear the teabaggers’ empty-headed chatter.
I didn’t leave the Republican party because I was drawn to the Democrats. I left because I couldn’t stomach their embrace of the military-industrial complex, or their rush to embrace Southern-fried racism and the false populism of Dixie.
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In an odd bit of timely and apt reporting, the WaPost (Kwame Anthony Appiah, actually) lists four areas of modern day American life that will come back to shame us:
- Our prison system
- Industrial meat production
- Institutionalization of the elderly
- The environment
There’s even a poll on page two. I voted for our prison system, still being of the mind that we are judged by how we treat the least among us, but that just prompts me to wonder why they didn’t mention our treatment of the children of the poor.
The Post also polls readers today to see if they think federal employees are overpaid. Given how many federal employees read the Post, it’s amazing the shit they get away with publishing. (Would any other newspaper in the country be pulling in that result? It’s the right answer, but hardly the popular one.)
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Quick: without looking it up, spell the last name of the incumbent senior U.S. Senator from Alaska, the one running a write-in campaign.
Yes, she may have a problem come November 2, but that’s a good thing. Keep splitting those rightwing votes sweetheart!
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This is impressive: if you disparage Tom Emmer and Mark Dayton constantly while running friendly stories about Tom Horner, Horner will creep up in the polls into Jesse Ventura territory. He’s at 18% despite still being to the right of Arne Carlson and way deep into the Minnesota corporate business side of things. (Maybe we should start calling Star Tribune-favored candidates stribudates?)
No money for ads and no existing cult of personality to drive his campaign. The Independence party has next to nothing for GOTV so yeah, let’s give the Star Tribune full credit for keeping this race tight (Dayton 39%, Emmer 30%).
Meanwhile, in Cali polls are starting to make more sense. Needless to say, that’s prompting an infusion of Koch Bros. cash. [more on the Brothers Koch & Karl Rove]
In Iowa, things have changed since I left (maybe because I was but one of hundreds of thousands of Iowans who couldn’t find a job the last time the Emmeresque Terry “Ask Me About My Son the Serial Drunk Driver” Branstad last ran the state). The lack of credible third party candidates isn’t helping Culver either.
Meanwhile, new polls show 92% of Americans want Swedish style wealth distribution, while only one in five thinks health care reform sucks even as one in four says it didn’t go far enough.
I am loathe to speak further about Sweden, so here’s BDM with more. See also WINston smITh who finally writes a post to go with all those tasty videos he’s been posting. (Seriously, if you’re looking for something different to listen to, scroll down and check out his recent music video posts.)
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There’s an irony to this picture the NYTimes misses, preferring to blame consumers for eating junk instead of noticing that we instead prefer to eat what Madison Avenue nutritionists have selected for us. Why else would schools liken fruit to junk food to entice kids to eat healthy?
The Times also neglects to mention that if all Americans ate only healthy food, even our breadbasket nation would have trouble filling our shopping carts.
More shit that will never be fixed until one of two things happens: government begins to take regulation seriously again, or consumers educate themselves to the point where distrust of corporate advertising is automatic.
In the meantime, Michele Obama pushing vegetables constitutes the most valuable thing a First Lady has done since Lady Bird Johnson obliterated the blight of highway billboards. That was a very real problem that was coarsening our nation. I don’t think young people can really imagine how cluttered roadsides used to be. I tried to find a picture but couldn’t, but there used to be stretches of highway so billboard congested you couldn’t see the scenery.
It was very ugly and getting rid of them really did make a difference.
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I did not know that the Rev. Marciel “child molester/serial father” Maciel had an order for women, Regnum Christi, that was even more twisted than his Legionnaires for Christ (the biggest collection of male pedophiles this side of NAMBLA).
The Vatican investigation of the consecrated women is the latest step in its crackdown on the Legionaries of Christ, founded by the Rev. Marciel Maciel in Mexico in 1941. Dogged for decades by allegations he sexually abused seminarians, no action was taken until 2006, when the Vatican sanctioned Maciel and ordered him to a lifetime of penance and prayer – though it did not say for what.
Only after his death in 2008 did the order admit publicly that he had fathered children and that the abuse allegations were true, spurring the Vatican investigation. In a May 1 announcement, the Vatican said it was taking over the order and would rewrite its constitutions. A little-noticed line of that directive also announced an investigation into Regnum Christi’s consecrated members.
Such inquiries have been carried out only rarely, including the probe of U.S. seminaries after the sex abuse scandal exploded in 2002. While there have been no sex abuse allegations within Regnum Christi, the problems uncovered in the Legion – abuse of authority, suppression of dissent and a power structure built on unswerving obedience – are also rampant in consecrated life.
Too many twists and turns for me to count, but this obscure auxiliary looks to be the fall women for the Catholic church’s most reliable source of male pedophiles. The WaPost kindly refrains from mentioning Maciel until page two, leading with the women who truly appear to be nothing more than victims of Maciel’s perverted vision of Jesus in Furs.
Regnum Christi is a cult, just like Terry Jones’ little fucktarded Florida church is a cult, just like Scientology is a cult, just like Mormonism is a cult, just like Christianity was Emperor Justinian’s revenge on us all.
Cults have rules and they’re not there to set you free:
Members were told how to eat a piece of bread (tear off small pieces; never bite into it) and an orange (with a knife and fork). They were told how many movies they could see a year (six, selected for content); what television programs they could watch (news, debates, some sporting events, no drama or music shows); and to refrain from reading in the bathroom. Mail and e-mail were screened. Women who made mistakes were often publicly humiliated.
Without a word of criticism from the Vatican so long as the Rev. Maciel was alive and fundraising. You did know he was a world-class fundraiser, didn’t you?
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Sixty-seven years in prison for killing the pervert who raped her one-year-old daughter.
No, Alonzo Jones was not executed humanely and for that maybe Laquita Calhoun should have been sentenced to doing community service for six months.
Maybe. Or maybe Pope Natzinger should canonize Alonzo Jones as a saint, he having lived and died just like a Legionnaire of Christ (with all the official punishment falling on the woman who trusted him).
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Is anyone truly innocent if the government decides they’re not?
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Via Jenny from Canada in yesterday’s comments, the dark side of Shirley Sherrod. Complicated, n’est-ce pas?
Otoh, in a gamed marketplace where you have to compete with bottom feeders, only the compromised tend to survive. If there was ever a full accounting for our economic crimes, a staggering number of Americans would be running around with shaved heads.
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Maybe it’s just me, but I’m seeing the word “Myths” in headlines all over the place today. Not sure if the media pounding the “myth” beat is a good or a bad thing, but since the media’s doing it I’ll assume it’s just prep for Karl Rove’s big ad rollout.
Sorry, I guess I’ve just seen too much meme-priming from our corporate media not to be immediately distrustful when I seen “coincidences” like this one.
The revenue that could be derived from taxing the über-rich is not a myth:
A 15 percent “wealth tax” on all personal assets over $1 billion would this year raise $145.5 billion, more than enough to cover the entire $140 billion budget shortfall America’s 50 states are facing in the current fiscal year.
– Sam Pizzigati
Good luck reading that story in your Sunday morning newspaper.
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MN:
Bachmann gets $5k each from Sean Hannity and Mrs. Hannity
School board jacks levy with 24% hike in this most Bridgefail of Pawlenty worlds
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Etc.:
Dawn Turner Trice on books (a very nice elegy for dead tree publishing)
Vick plugged Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner, The Book of Night Women, in his blog, which attracted the racist knuckledraggers (see Vick’s comment)
David Corn on Mark Twain’s testimony before Congress
Strife perpetuated in the Middle East, Israel not being afraid of keeping the shit going so long as they’re on top (prompting another Gaza blockade running ship to set sail) (Juan Cole on the West Bank)
I did not know that Michael Gerson is Mark Shield’s substitute sparring partner on the Newshour now (that sucks big time, Gerson being an even more shameless Bushwhore than David Brooks)
My respect for the Quran is based on political expediency and a desire for world peace (privately I am a PZista)
The anti-piracy racket’s bottom line
When I was a kid, the very best cartoon show was Rocky & Bullwinkle, and the best part of their show were the Fractured Fairy Tales
Richard Belzer just says now
Hard-ons still stay no
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Robert W. Nissen, R.I.P.
A way of life that’s gone forever thanks to the financial industry’s greed. Nissen finished at the top of his industry, yet his resume would easily fit on one page (with a one-page addendum of awards, no doubt).
