On Wisconsin
Something Charles Blow said caught my eye this morning.
Yet Tea Party leaders are still sniping from the sidelines, holding politicians to overreaching promises made when the electorate was still stewing. Judson Phillips, founder of the Tea Party Nation, wrote a post on its Web site this week saying the House speaker, John Boehner, looks “like a fool” and should face a primary challenge in 2012 for not pursuing enough spending cuts this year.
No, despite a big win in the House last fall, the right’s not having one big happy pizza party right now. Wisconsin, a victory lap of tumescently jackbooted proportions, has turned into a facial omelette. Worse, regular Americans aren’t showing sufficient respect, sometimes treating Republicans as rudely as Republicans have treated Democrats! (Using “liberal” as an epithet for the last three decades wasn’t exactly a bridge builder.)
As a kid I was shocked to learn that you couldn’t convert to Hinduism. If you wanted to be a Hindu, you had to live your life well, then hope to be reborn as one. Since I didn’t believe in reincarnation, that made me mad. The fact that my nonbelief in reincarnation would have made me a lousy Hindu didn’t occur to me.
You can’t convert to the Tea Party unless you submit yourself to their thinking entirely. If John Boehner isn’t pure enough, why should you get a pass? Pro-choice? You’re not a teabagger no matter how much you want to cut taxes. Respect for undocumented workers? Don’t caucus with us even if you want to cut entitlements! Tolerance for unions? Surely you must be in the wrong room.
The liberal instinct is to fact check yourself and your sources. Genuine conservatives can take that initial distrust to paranoid lengths. Teabaggers, otoh, embrace anything that reinforces their existing beliefs, no questions asked. They are not part of any historical political movement, unless you count the mutterings of the rabble as an ideology and believe that mobs are focused expressions of political passion.
It’s not enough to be against everything. You have to be for something. What concrete things do Tea partiers believe in? Saying America is wonderful isn’t very meaningful, not when your rhetoric makes it clear you despise the other half of the country.
The Tea party can’t win over America, it can only conquer us. Waking up the middle class by trying to legislate away collective bargaining probably wasn’t the swiftboatest of moves. For the right’s agenda to succeed, the rest of us need to keep sleepwalking down the ramps to the Potterville that awaits us.
When we snooze, we lose. It’s time to wake the fuck up.
Walker prepares to go full hard ass (or not?) even as Wisconsin Republicans start to have second thoughts even as Democratic reps wonder why their key cards don’t work anymore (why let reps in when they wouldn’t let first responders in the door?) (more from Nick Milroy)
A peek at Walker’s guest list (the folks who got in for his speech after they chased the “people” out)
The damages (funny how all that Eyetalian marble survived for hundreds and thousands of years….)
Even Fox employees sometimes question the BS
Just how philanthropic are big donations to cancer research when you’ve got tons of money and cancer of the ass? (and define “direct”)
It’s good to be the owner (what they’ve done to professional sports is pretty much what they’ve done to our economy)
The United States of US (and us alone) [See also The Revolution Will Not Be Licensed] [likewise, The Militia Will Be Armed]
Why is tax revenue from online gambling good when it’s not OK to legalize and tax pot? A sin tax is a sin tax is a sin tax
Isn’t punishment enough? Is it important to understand who or why you’re doing the punishing?
Apparently PZ doesn’t care for David Brooks any more than Driftglass does
Maddow on Kasich (ThinkProgress on Kasichism lessons) (advanced Kasichism)
Florida high court rules that Florida’s governor has the right to refuse free money
A successful evangelical pastor questions fundamentalist beliefs, and reaps . . . well, anyhow the usual haters are plenty steamed [division for disunity's sake]
Didn’t Harry Reid get some kind of bipartisan agreement so he wouldn’t have to fix the filiblusterer problem? (and filiblustering is different from quorum denying how, exactly?) [more]
A reminder for casual readers that just because the left voted for Obama over John “I set the Forrestal on fire” McCain, doesn’t mean we like or appreciate most of the right-appeasing bullshit Obama’s up to
Kucinich still not allowed to meet Bradley “Naked Came the Traitor” Manning (there is no greater treason than embarrassing pantsless generals) (unless it’s wikileaking on the State Dept) [more]
The Frank Buckles rotunda story may be more complicated than just a Boehner blockage, but this AP story only suggests Harry Reid is part of the problem
Matt Taibbi convenes a meeting of the Supreme Court of Assholedom
And ICE became the boss of the internet because….
Click on the poster to get more like it. [via]
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Etc.:
Talk radio uses paid actors as fake callers in (it’s not your chains they’ve been yanking)
I’ve been watching The Last Airbender on Netflix or I would have never understood this Paula Deen GIF (actually, I still don’t understand it but at least I recognized Abba)
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Research for this post done with the Firefox 4 beta. It seems to be ready for full release and I do like the tabs above the URL bar better.
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The Conservative Tradition of Attacking Teachers:
http://real-economics.blogspot.com/2011/03/conservative-tradition-of-attacking.html
Apologies if you’ve linked this already, but if not — some very useful history. A couple of opening paragraphs tips you where the hisotry lesson is heading:
But what is really hard to comprehend is that the conservative attack on education is actually a quite coherent part of conservative ideology. To understand this, you first have to understand that the conservative ideology is intended to create a society based on strict class lines. As Philip E. Agre wrote in his classic August 2004 essay, What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?: “Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.”
Today, conservatives hide their true anti-democratic oligarchic agenda behind the rhetoric of balanced budgets and budget cuts. But, back in the period right after the Civil War, conservatives were much more honest and forthright in explaining why they attacked education and teachers. …
Not having kids, I don’t follow education issues very closely, but Rob Levine does and you can read his stuff at The Cucking Stool blog.
I don’t have kids either. But (a) I pay taxes and (b) kids tend to grow up to be adults, so count me interested in public education.
upon which you would then place toy buildings and roadways allah a Thomas Train play-set.
Blast, the first part of the post deleted on me.
I will try a rewrite and then go back to sleep.
I misread the comment above’s quote: “Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.” to mean “. . . donation of society. . . ” Which sounds about right. Own everything and create an illusion of civilized society. Suppression of education, would be the main element of control, so the masses don’t rise up and kill your ass. An incomplete education is how I see it: Clip them off on spiritual connectivity with bogus religion, where God is even on a throne. Supplant human cooperation with money. And so on. Lay out a big green blanket ["upon which you would then place toy buildings and roadways allah a Thomas Train play-set."]
Alas, it is never the same, I should read the links now and go back to sleep, so I can paid to go to jail.
In case this Wisconsin solidarity image was missed:
http://hearus-now.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/solidarity.jpg
Funny, I moved my tabs back below the links bar.
And I’ve already switched back to 3.6.15 because 4b wasn’t streaming Netflix very well (otoh it was Saturday night….)
“When we snooze, we lose. It’s time to wake the fuck up.”
Really, why sleep if everyone is actually sleepwalking anyway “down the ramps” or not?
Its all right there, not even a race really.
More like a reincarnation on arrival. But actually closer to freebasing without an agenda and enough food for three weeks.
Link for thoughts…I am going to go scribble, and pretend a furlong is a unit of time and humanity has finaly come to the realization that money is never of itself just a unit of force.
Bet on ARRR in the 4th. Section 168 smuggled a few pills into dentention and took the class to the track.
Fight the power. The money yard stick is just a fools tool that never brings, just echos looped fiction as thouigh it was in and of itself.
It aint about the money it is all about the freedom.
Mount up and ride around keep going around the loop.
the link is fun
Stand Pat, Maps Hope, and ARRR.
You just got to love it. Those are the a few of the horses names from the link above if you did not check it out you should. its fun and no shit what’s ya gonna do?
Stand Pat,
Go with; Maps Hope
or get your ARRRRR on?
I shit you not the rest of the field is as follows
HepCat
FelineFellon
FiveDemonBag
LetsGoYankeys
UnBridledWish
OnAReBing