Another one of those days when I can’t decide whether I hate Republicans or the media more. Corporatized Republicans because they just can’t stop lying about everything, and the media because they won’t stop treating the divided Republicans like a legitimate political party with actual policies that extend beyond fuck Obama and obstructing the party he rode in on.

Sadly, our contemporary political practices evolved in a moral vacuum, a vacuum created when the living, breathing, everyday morality of our private, personal lives was withdrawn from public life. When love and friendship are thought to be private matters with no role in public life, what’s left behind in the public sphere? Stick figures and statistics.

In a paradoxical twist, we fill the inhuman vacuum of public life with ever more grotesque private life caricatures. Trafficking in the private lives of politicians and other celebrities in many ways dominates “public life” that was supposed to be coldly rational.

Another consequence, one addressed by American thinker Marietta Kies a century before contemporary feminism’s “ethics of care”:  unless the so-called public sphere of commerce and politics is invested with values of empathy and caring (Kies called it grace), freedom’s just another word for stealing what you can. Just about anything (including selfishness and greed) can – in the barren public sphere – pose as a value, as the right wing has happily discovered.

More from Glenn W. Smith here. More on Republicans acting badly from The Triumph of Conservative Philanthropy, John Batchelor, PZ Myers, Attaturk, Eric Boehlert, and Joe Coscarelli, and more on bad media from Jamison Foser, Josh Marshall, DougJ, Blue Texan, and Ed Kohler.

Wrap up with TBogg who nails some feces to the RNC door.

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Digby with yet another story about yet another ten-year-old being tasered.

Other than North Korea, Somalia or the Congo, I’m having trouble thinking of another country with law enforcement as fucked up as ours.

You do not taser children.

Ever.

But apparently there’s nothing stopping you from buying and/or raping a Native American woman.

Just like nobody tried to stop Jesuits from sexually abusing children in Washington state.

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Honduras.

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Kudos to Maureen Reed for refusing to abide.

The harder DFL activists try to tell me that their endorsement process is saving Minnesota from billionaire candidates, the wealthier their candidates seem to get.

The endorsement process is a party-rupturing abomination and no other caucus state allows an endorsement process to taint their candidate selection process.

Charlieq has some good insight into the bogus process known as the DFL endorsement race. Phoenix Woman looks at southern Minnesota and Max Sparber assesses the governor’s race, while Andy Birkey and Chris Steller write on Michele Bachmann.

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Shit, it’s hard to say this isn’t aggregating but I find myself with left over links, and here they are:

Banks losing documents accidentally or on purpose?

Crapping on those who stay and keep rural American running

I like Jonathan Tasini, I just don’t understand why it’s Blue America’s job to pick New York’s Senatorial candidates

Screwing advertisers

McDonald’s boycott coming up next?

PETA porn (it’s hard not to think that they hate all non-vegans)

Subway grinders

Public sector jobs YES

Scott Horton with a short post while Glenn Greenwald goes long on Gitmo deaths

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As if you needed proof, there is no Obama ecstasy.

Not anymore.

Another very special column from Katherine Kersten this morning. Keywords include:

oil oozing
glare with disgust
sticky handprints
shill

But that’s  just Kersten’s description of some nasty ad running against Michele Bachmann. Here are the words Katherine uses to describe Bachmann’s enemies:

smear machine (fueled by huge sums of cash)
Public Enemy No. 1
cabal of Democratic activists
the Left’s cross hairs
zealots
despise
clubby group of millionaires
scorched-earth tactics
smear ads
twist the facts
trumped-up charges
left-wing activists
George Soros-funded Democracy Alliance

Bachmann herself?

a woman who flaunts feminist orthodoxy and dares to advocate limited government, free markets and traditional marriage

And that’s just page one of three online pages of bile, conjecture and calumny from a columnist who’s best summed up by her last five column titles:

Today’s column? All about how Michele Bachmann = Marilyn Musgrave, a defeated Republican Representative from Colorado who, like Bachmann, voted for war and the machinery of war, but consistently voted no on anything that would make the lives of our troops a little safer or better.

The empty rhetoric of agitprop hanging from the withered leafless tree of war like so much Halloween fright night toilet paper. From here on out it will all be about stabs in the back and the unfairness of it all from the likes of Kersten. Eight years was not enough time for the ultras to screw up the world and so they’re stamping their tiny feet and demanding another shot at driving the world into a ditch.

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Spotty picks up on a story from Liberal in the Land of Conservatives, and it’s a good one.

[Gov./presidential aspirant Tim Pawlenty] who recently proclaimed himself as the no-clemency candidate, apparently did join then Senator-elect Coleman and then Republican Party Chair Ron Ebensteiner in trying to obtain a federal pardon for Tom Petters’ associate Frank “I found God in prison” Vennes, who had served time, and was still apparently “on paper,” for money laundering, cocaine distribution, and illegal firearms possession.

Everything is relative, nothing more so than a Republican officeholder’s position on any given issue. Can any of the Republican 2012 candidates make it to the RNC without imploding?

I’m beginning to have my doubts, however much Orrin Hatch reassures us to the contrary.

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It’s started again: the pumping of out-of-state cash into a Minnesota endorsement race. Every fucking DFLer who whined about my kvetching over out-of-state endorsements of Al Franken needs to think about how much they like Matt Entenza shoveling in the donations from Tom Daschle, Terry McAuliffe, John Podesta, Evan Bayh and — oh hell, see the invite for yourself:

Why does Matt Entenza think these people should have a voice in electing Minnesota’s next governor? Aside from fucking with healthcare reform, what have any of those Senators ever done for us? Why should out-of-state money be a factor in a governor’s race?

And if Matt wants to put his wife front and center in his fundraising, maybe the media should be asking more questions about Lois Quam and what exactly she did over at United Health Group to earn all those millions and millions of dollars.

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Good background on Amanda Knox and why you should care.

I’ve yet to read anything that indicates Italian justice is any better than what you get in Texas, other than the fact that Italians don’t have the death penalty.

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Not sure about where you live, but in Minnesota the fastest growing use of food stamps is now in the suburbs.

I’m sympathetic. It’s hard to buy groceries after putting gas in your car to commute from Edina to Woodbury for your temp job.

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I actually read them all and here is the best of today’s NYTimes op-ed pages:

Frank Rich on pushmipullyu escalation

Nick Kristof on our carcinogenic kitchens

Tom Friedman actually making sense about Afghanistan

An editorial on healthcare posturing

James Bradley on how Teddy Roosevelt sowed the seeds for WWII

Sorry, I just couldn’t make myself link to Maureen Dowd, the Katherine Kersten of urban nihilism, or Jared Diamond’s apologetics on behalf of Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron. But I’m impressed at how many “decent” op-eds they had today. A trick, no doubt, before an onslaught of holiday bilge.

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eDGe, the e-textbook.

Sooner, not later, the world will go completely digital.

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13° outside and traffic is fairly light but that’s because the Vikes don’t play until tonight, and that gives the fans all day to do their errands.

Me? At the moment I’m listening to Oscar Peterson doing Stormy Weather and thinking about cooking breakfast. Lately that’s been eggs and nam sausage but seeing as how it’s Sunday I might have to throw in a couple of taters.

No, I’m not changing it although I may spend some time tweaking it over the weekend.

I wanted to switch to Khoi Vinh’s Basic Maths theme, then I saw it cost $45.

I didn’t want to switch that bad, especially since I suspect I would have had to learn a lot more WordPress to use it.

NOW I’m going to go run errands.

Yes, the usual stuff:

red curry paste

shredded turnip

mangos

persimmons

2010 calendars

lithium batteries

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Admit it, you like the change.

UPDATE: Now with falling snow! I did not know this was an option when I picked this theme. Serendipity rocks!

She opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was vehemently against the draft (but called those who evaded it “bums”), and “regarded the feminist movement as utterly without legitimacy.” In her novels, she glorified rape—if it was committed by the right kind of man. Heller quotes her most famous disciple and lover Nathaniel Branden as saying, “What she wanted was a man whose esteem would reduce her to a sex object.”

Oh, and for the last 30 years of her life, she was addicted to amphetamines.

Click to find out which 20th Century political icon Allen Barra is writing about, then guess which Republican politician is the latest to embrace the birther nonsense, and why she didn’t like going to college in Hawaii.

Then, watch this video to see how long it takes you to figure out which late 20th Century pop masterpiece it is (you won’t figure it out until you see the marquee). Josh Azzarella has stripped out all the dancers and the artist, and replaced the music with an ambiently creepy score. I’m guessing the point is to show us what the world would look like after all the brains have been eaten. Explanation here.

Click this image to find out which country it’s from, and to read some troubling text.

Which Minnesota town now has a 210,000-gallon crude oil reserve just south of town?

Who’s graymailing the U.S. government?

Do you still remember the name of the last Republican Senator to “Baucus” a member of his staff?

Which Jewish historian and philosopher taught us that “it is the great liars who are remembered as the great politicians”?

Which is the latest country to learn that setting off fireworks indoors is a bad idea?

Which is the latest country to experience a murderous outbreak of anti-gay intolerance?

Who’s the latest political analyst to call Obama a sellout?

Who’s the latest politician to earn Mick’s wrath?

Which rotten egg amendment did Sherrod Brown just tell the Republicans to suck on? [includes Al Franken video]

Which health insurer plans on dumping 650,000 clients next year?

Who is this NY State Senator? After listening to her speech I wish she was representing New York in the U.S. Senate. [answer here]

Fifteen questions and I doubt very much anyone got them all right. I know Obama certainly didn’t.

Back to morning posts, on the weekends at least.

Four stories at the Times that caught my eye:

Max Baucus, the execrable blue dog bastard who shoved phony health care reform up our nation’s ass, pushed an attorney he was porking to become the new U.S. Attorney for Montana

Italian court sentences Amanda Knox to 26 years in prison for the murder of Meredith Kercher following a trial that could have been held in Texas

New Harvard doctorate degree in Education Leadership threatens to do to education what the Harvard MBA did to business

Charles Blow on the exploitation of the internet/corporate news by racists

I’m back on green tea but even so I was outraged by these stories, speaking clearly as they do to the fact that not much has changed since the 2008 election. More on Baucus and his former staffer Melodee Hanes from the WaPost, and a picture from the Billings Gazette:

Add to this the rumor that Max Baucus was the real murderer of Meredith Kercher, and I think we may have a shot at electing a real Democrat to represent Montana come 2014.

In the immortal words of Atrios, I got nuthin’. Oh I could probably do something with Judith Warner’s column, but it snowed today and my mind is elsewhere.

Music at the other place later.

Later.

I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Bill Ayers has dumped Obama over Afghanistan. Clarence Page seems to enjoy the irony. If you’re committed to party politics as I am, you don’t dump the President when he’s from your own party. Not unless he tries to nickel and dime regular people just because he gave it all away to Wall Street. [See Floyd Norris on the science of investing]

Workers get screwed, but what goes around (and around) never seems to come around. It sucks, for example, to be living in a state where a presidential aspirant has tightened down the screws and run us deep into debt while going cheap on needed services. And so far as most states go, we’ve got it good. I don’t need the same from a president I was hoping would think big.

Digby picked up on a lovely story about Goldman Sachs that starts out with Lloyd Blankfein’s version of what happened, but then gratifyingly veers into this:

It’s hard to find anyone outside the firm who doesn’t see this as revisionist history. Combine that with further proof of Goldman’s worldview—namely, the huge amount of money its people will earn this year ($16.7 billion has already been set aside for compensation, which could translate into an average of $700,000 per Goldman employee)—and you get rage. Widespread rage. “Complete crap,” says a senior financier, about Goldman not needing the government’s help. “It is a bunch of bullshit,” says a former Goldman Sachs managing director. Even Neel Kashkari, a former Goldman banker, who became an assistant secretary of the Treasury last summer, told The New York Times that “every single Wall Street firm, despite their protest today, every single one benefited from our actions. And when they get up there and say, ‘Well, we didn’t need it,’ that’s bull.”

Factor in Goldman’s political connections—two of the firm’s past four leaders have served as Treasury secretaries, while another source tells me about a G-7 meeting where he counted 24 to 28 out of 32 finance officials in attendance as ex-Goldman men—and you get conspiracy theories on steroids. “this firm is pure evil” is a typical comment whenever a story about Goldman is posted on the Internet, which is almost every day now.

Hatred of Wall Street is driving a lot of grief Bernanke’s way. The cries to audit the Fed are growing louder and James Kenneth Galbraith explains how that would work. [more Galbraith]

But meanwhile, back in Iowa, capitalism is working just fine.

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Franken gets backhanded by Politico for . . . well, it’s hard to say. I’m not sure they could explain it either, at least not without offending thirty GOoPer senators.

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Via Vick, former William F. Buckley Jr. acolyte, historian and religious writer Garry Wills writes that he feels betrayed by Obama’s decision to escalate in Afghanistan.

I’m not so thrilled about it myself. The only way in which this does not totally suck is if you put it into context, with Erik Prince front and center. I don’t think we’re anywhere near having a handle on how corruptly these wars were prosecuted. A Prince is being thrown to the wolves while bureaucrats scurry away.

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There’s a new report out on how Republicans behaved badly under Bush, but they’re still behaving badly so I guess I don’t get what the hubbub is over. The bitter enders are lashing out and, frankly, I don’t blame them.

Everyone’s talking about how many seats the Republicans will gain in 2010. I don’t think “everyone”’s got a clue as to how many more hits the Republicans will take between now and then. Lisa Baron’s new book alone will keep a lot of Republican voters home.

My Burning Bush, Baron’s memoir of her days as the spokeswoman for Ralph Reed — the former Christian Coalition leader and the man Time called “The Right Hand of God” — is being shopped around the New York publishing houses. And it promises to embarrass more than one figure in America’s conservative movement.

In one excerpt, Baron addresses the claims that Reed was behind a smear campaign against Sen. John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries that implied the Arizona senator had had a love-child with a black woman.

“How would I know?” Baron writes, according to the New York Daily News. “”I was too busy giving [George W. Bush's future press secretary] Ari Fleischer [oral sex] in a Greenville hotel room.”

Huckabee, who scared me a bit, is out.

But the Dems real ace in the hole is Zombie Ronald Reagan who has been reanimated to bring victory to the Republican party in 2010 on the crest of the new ice age that for once and for all proved that Al Gore is full of it.

That’s not a joke. Or maybe it is, but either way the Republican party is still a joke, DC is a joke, David Vitter is a joke, and the culture of punishment is a joke.

But worst of all? I’m starting to think that Obama’s a joke. And I was starting to think that even before I learned that we already have 104,000 DOD contractors in Afghanistan.

104,000.

Helluva war.

And one hell of an administration.

Haaretz is excited.

But not so excited they forgot to mention that Marc’s father was “released from federal prison last year after serving a nearly five-year sentence for wire and bank fraud.” Former Iowa Congressman Ed Mezvinsky’s sins, of course, should not be visited upon the son.

But maybe someone should ask Marc Mezvinsky just what kind of job he has with Goldman Sachs.

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Whiskey Fire and James Wolcott on Black Friday. Thanks to Vick and Amy picking up the tab when we went to dinner that night, I think I got through the day with only one expenditure: lunch.

A Vick Burger if you must know. No, not a reacharound joke, but an actual menu item at the Sunrise Café in Yellow Springs. Mine came with gorgonzola cheese, hummus, black beans and other things that elude my memory less than a week after the ingestion.

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All I have to say about the White House party crashers is that this is in the finest of American traditions, and that the Villagers were the ones who showed their true colors as they sniffed over the social climbing aspect.

Even after reading Anne Applebaum I’m having trouble understanding how reality TV mirrors the court of Catherine the Great. I worry that whatever social malady George Will has may be spreading to the other Postettes.

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A minor flap over a remark from Chuck Grassley that won’t hurt him a bit in Iowa, but take heart. The Des Moines Register, the newspaper that singlehandedly kept Roxanne Conlin from becoming Governor in 1982, has written a very nice profile of the Gloria Steinem pal who just might knock off Grassley next fall.

The usual caveat: I worked on Conlin’s ‘82 campaign. I’ve had next to no contact with her since and am supportive of her based on my work for her earlier campaign, and because she was John Edwards Iowa chair in ‘08. Most of what’s in that profile was new to me, and apparently new to most Iowans.

And no, I don’t have any money to give so don’t bother forwarding this item to her campaign.

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SusanG on Bright-sided.

Ehrenreich seems to be op-edding on a regular basis for the L.A. Times now. Here’s her latest on the new mammogram guidelines and how the feminist movement has strayed. I could comment, but it’s better you hear it from Ehrenreich.

I will say, however, that I’ve put the women’s movement on the same list as Obama, and for much the same reasons.

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Is Maurice Hinchey the new Alan Grayson?

[Digby's take]

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The WaPost picked their Great American Pundit and — no surprise here — his ex-wife is a DC bureaucrat who’s a frequent op-ed contributor to the Post.

No, the Post isn’t even slightly ashamed of how the contest wrapped up, hiding behind the fig leaf of “reader votes.” Reader votes meaning that Kevin Huffman got 4,622 votes to the runner-up’s 4,062 votes. According to the Post.

Never mind that Huffman just happens to sound (and look) more like a WaPost pundit than the other candidates.

Sticky wicket, that. A good choice would have been someone more likely to have espoused opinions contrary to the Post’s, so yeah, that option was never in the cards.

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Garrison Keillor on Christmas and health insurance.

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The death of TV.

Expect possession of a DVR to be made a capitol crime in the very near future.

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A rash of new posts from WINston smITh, including a Leningrad Cowboys video.

If you haven’t seen the Leningrad Cowboys doing Sweet Home Alabama with the Red Army Chorus, your life is incomplete. And the Jah Divizion ain’t bad either.

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I hate to close without saying fuck you to someone, but I seem to be all fuckyou’ed out. This should not be construed as any kind of mellowing, but simply a realignment of bodily humours along less phlegmatic lines.

I’ll cough up a rant for you later, just as soon as I can get one loosened up.

Digby’s quote from a HuffPo article sums up the state of the Palin quite nicely:

As the epigram to Chapter Three, “Drill, Baby, Drill,” Palin assigns the following remarks to the Hall of Fame hoops coach:

Our land is everything to us… I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it–with their lives.

Only the quote wasn’t by John Wooden. It was written by a Native American activist named John Wooden Legs in an essay entitled “Back on the War Ponies,” which appeared in a left-wing anthology, We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of American History, edited by Nathaniel May, Clint Willis, and James W. Loewen.

Not a big deal. Palin will always flub when she tries to be serious because, like most wingnuts, she’s not doing research to inform herself but simply to find stuff that sounds like it supports her already entrenched POV. From Paul Waldman in The American Prospect:

More than anyone else in politics, Palin is tethered firmly to the ground by her constant accumulation of petty grievances. In this habit, you can see the quality her fans love most about her — she’s just like them! Ask her who she is, and she’ll tell you whom she’s mad at.

As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi recently noted, “Complaining about the assholes we interact with on a daily basis is the #1 eternal pastime of the human race,” and Palin seems obsessed with this topic. She can’t stop talking about those she feels have done her wrong, whether it’s cynical campaign aides, derisive bloggers, or that nogoodnik kid who knocked up her daughter. As Levi Johnston told CBS News, “It’s almost funny, that she’s like, 46 years old, and she’s battling a 19-year-old, and I’m winning.”

Feel free to chuckle but Waldman’s real point is one that addresses more than just the dainty point atop Mt. Sarah’s beehived peak.

But as we all know, if you spend too much time perseverating on what a jerk that guy at the office is or how much you can’t stand your next-door neighbor, you end up losing part of yourself to the obsession. This is a particular danger in politics, where we all define ourselves at least in part by our enemies. All politics is tribal, and it’s important to know what, and whom, you’re against. But take it too far, and what you stand for begins to shrink toward nothingness.

I would like my blogging to be about more than just the usual morons but having said that, here are the other Palin links:

Raw Story on Palin ditching bus to fly to book gigs

Palin blasts media for bus tour stories

At this point my greatest fear is that Palin will implode long before her lies about her family are exposed. That would be unfortunate as the truth could set many wingnuts free.