Not in a good mood today. Not because some asshole honked his horn at 6:30 this morning, and not because the handle on my toilet broke at 7:02. And not because I slipped pouring out the tea, putting half of it down the sink drain.
No, I’m feeling surly because I just read George Will’s column twice. I normally don’t read him at all, but his headline was Pawlenty’s time to move. I’m always up for new Bridgefail material, so I read Will. Then realized I hadn’t seen Pawlenty’s name. So I read Will again and there was Timmy, buried six grafs into Will’s column. In a column that bears his name, Pawlenty gets mentioned three times.
Yes, it’s really yet another column about how thin the Republican field is, except GWill’s contrarian spin is that it’s a Republican field rich in pols who were in some narrow respects more experienced than Obama was in 2008. The closest Will comes to talking TPaw is this graf:
Such chest-thumping bluster is not presidential, and it is not Pawlenty’s real persona. He actually is a temperate Midwesterner, socially and fiscally conservative. He is, as were almost half the participants in the 2008 Republican nominating events, an evangelical Christian, well positioned to inherit much of this cohort, which made Huckabee the winner of Iowa’s 2008 caucuses.
Um, sure. Not that GWill cares, but Pawlenty is a Catholic who became an evangelical because his wife was. Not the kind of thing that gives you credibility with voters who are third and fourth generation religious ignoramuses. Never much of a holy roller, Bridgefail’s first political job was on Jon “I swim nekkid with my teenaged daughter’s friends” Grunseth’s ill-fated gubernatorial campaign. (Pawlenty stayed close to the family, and after becoming governor he appointed Grunseth’s ex-wife to a cushy job.)
I think what George Will just told us is that it’s very hard to write about Tim Pawlenty, because there isn’t very much to write about. Once you get past the I-35 bridge falling into the Mississippi River, it’s pretty much all weasel this and weasel that and the polls reflect that.
Not doing GWill any favors, Glenn Kessler factchecked Pawlenty’s announcement speech and found it “weak.” How weak? All the usual back and forth of a factchecker, but despite numerous equivocations, Kessler says Pawlenty didn’t land any punches on Obama. No, that would take facts, something the nouveau right has few of, unfounded assertions being more their stock in trade.
A tip o’ the hat to Rob Levine for steering me to an exciting new Tim Pawlenty website. (Ok, not as exciting as this Jane Corwin website, but give Timmy time.)
2012 will be brutal for the ‘pugs, no doubt about it. In Des Moines, Michele Bachmann will get “beefed-up security” tonight after this Saturday tweet started making the rounds:
While Gingrich was at an event in Orange City on Saturday, an Iowan posted a Twitter message that said: “Just had a pistol in hand n [sic] Newt Gingrich was 20 yards away.”
And when Gingrich paused a 17-city Iowa campaign tour to do a book signing in Minneapolis last week, a prankster dumped a box of glitter confetti on the presidential candidate.
“We didn’t want what happened to Newt to happen to Michele.”
Actually, glitter would go well with Bachmann’s glassy-eyed stare, but Kevin McLaughlin, chair of the Polk Co. Republicans (Iowa’s largest county and well over ten percent of the state’s voters) seems worried.
McLaughlin said beefed-up security is necessary.
“Republicans have a reputation for taking things away from people,” he said. “We’re going to cut spending, and someone’s benefit or someone’s program or someone’s job is going to be lost, and that frightens people. You never know amongst a group like that who is going to want to get even.”
He added that Republicans’ government cost-cutting goals are sometimes misunderstood.
No, I think most folks understand Republicans just fine by now, and that’s why they really do need to beef up their security. Only Republicans are stupid enough to trash the economy and promote gun ownership at the same time, but then again they’re the folks who think concealed weapons belong in bars.
And no, I don’t think they’re going to turn things around by going after the new, more efficient light bulbs. At least not when I’ve got some of those new bulbs that have been on the job for several years without burning out.
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TPM Muckraker points out that the pending criminal indictment of John Edwards is unprecedented.
No, not at all. If you’re at all progressive and you look like you could maybe get elected president, yes, they will find ways to fuck with you. Drugs, mostly. Not actual candidates though. They nail the left’s future leaders way sooner than that. Bust a college kid for pot and you’ve permanently eliminated him/her as a viable political candidate for life, which is why we still have the same ridiculous drug laws we’ve always had.
NORML is hoping that this is about to change. Apparently marijuana is up for a schedule status review, and sliding it down from Schedule I to II would strip the Feds of their right to mess with more lenient state laws. This would be a less confrontational more incremental path to legalization, and it wouldn’t happen until Obama’s second term in office so yeah, maybe.
Because what this country really needs is more balkanization: abortions in some states, but not all; pot for some in some states, for everybody in others but jail time in the rest. Leading people to vote with their feet so that the red states get redder, and the blue states get higher.
No, that won’t work. That’s the system we’ve got now, and making it more legal (but not all the way legal) won’t make it better.
Otoh, I don’t mind seeing the Obama administration treating state legislatures like they were a bunch of pot-smoking hippies. Hippies who, btw, undertip the pizza delivery kid.
Meanwhile, a 69-year-old man was just sent to prison for growing two marijuana plants for his wife who has cancer.
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Jonathan Turley sums up Obama’s Mideast peace initiative brilliantly:
Poll-ar Opposites: Majority of Israelis Support Obama While Majority of Congress Supports Netanyahu.
You could spend a whole day thinking about that and it wouldn’t be time misspent. Greg Sargent gave it a column, and it’s worth reading.
See also, Judenrein.
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Perhaps the dumbest “health” report ever in today’s NYTimes: Less Active at Work, Americans Have Packed on Pounds.
Duh. I didn’t know it took a team of researchers to figure out that making cars burns more calories than running a cash register. In my own case, I was shocked (shocked!) to discover that blogging burns fewer calories than building tractor tires.
Granted, humans evolved significantly since I worked in a tire factory in the 1970s when not everyone I worked with had five fingers on each hand, but even then us slope-browed, knuckle-dragging factory workers had long noted that pieceworkers who switched to forkloader jobs seemed to get fatter almost over night.
But the “cure” is already in progress. Remember that desk job you used to have? Well it didn’t burn half as many calories as flipping burgers. And if things keep going downhill for you, the news is even better. When’s the last time you saw a really fat person pushing a shopping cart down the street?
Poverty cures obesity, and it’s one cure we’ve got pawlenty of.
In other news of the sad:
ChiTrib no duh hed: Officials admit: ‘We failed’ caged boy
Beck reduced to hucksterism (just like any other televangelist)
Catholic scholars criticize Boehner, Pope BillO denounces them as immoral [PZ with more on that Catholic study blaming hippies for pederastic priests]
Fucking with Elizabeth Warren (easy to do when you’re a weasel-faced lying sack of shit) (the animated GIF version) (Steve Benen’s take)
TBogg is mean to Sarah Palin
Teaching Skousenism to our school kids
Back in the pink, David Brauer reveals Bradlee Dean fired from his radio gig before going Old Testament at the lege (it was the little things: racist jokes, sophomoric humor, accusing the president of treason….)
Rick Scott update
Scott Walker update
Rick Scott Walker fanbase update
Ed Schultz caught being Ed Schultz (apologies did ensue but who really cares? talk radio is garbage no matter who’s doing the talking)
One semi-positive trend to report. I’m seeing fewer and fewer stories about cops gone wild. Is it possible that long-tail coverage from online sites is finally putting more pressure on cops to clean up their act? Or is there another reason why we’re hearing less about bad cops?
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Maybe we need a law that acknowledges that only crazy people commit mass murder, and that when they do, it’s totally OK to texecute them.
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Etc.:
Phonehenge
Windows 8 rollout starts receding into the distance….
News media starts to pick up on the difference between malware and viruses (viruses are what PCs get, malware is something EVERYONE’s exposed to) (and yes, there are a bunch of “news” stories out there claiming Macs are getting viruses now which is both false and stupid)
I haven’t even seen The Hangover 2 yet, but I laughed out loud at a still of the Mike Tyson tattoo on Ed Helms (only in cuckoo la-la lawyer land would this not be parody)
Another reason to read Avedon Carol: I didn’t know that Roseanne gave Josh Whedon his first writing gig
Jonathan on climate change (it’s real, it’s coming and yes, Al Gore is fat)
Driftglass with a rimshot
Nick Coleman on the lege wrapping up, and the tears from Republican moderates forced to eat their babies (what is it about modern Republicanism? give them a one-vote margin and they turn into Caligula)
2012 RNC to be held in Germany?
Why food writing got better
Why patent/copyright law keeps getting worse [Tom the Dancing Bug with more]
On being a hero [this video talks a LOT about evil, but amazingly fails to mention Virginia Foxx]
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The new Firefox update is a winner. Pages load much better now which means website designers will have to figure out new ways of thwarting reader access to their content.
