Hump Day/Evening Open Thread

Last thread is getting kind of full. The Klown has been working overtime bringing you the latest and greatest from the crazy world of politics. I just can’t get into it these days. I’ve been on vacation for two weeks and will be the rest of this week. The summer schedule is very light this year so far.

I’ve been reworking my diet and getting a bunch of exercise. Trying to shift my lifestyle as it were. I guess that’s what people do in their 40s. I’ve been loving it, honestly.

I’ve been spending a lot of time walking & biking and in my kitchen playing with my new gadgets (a breadmaker, a dutch oven, a steamer, and some new knives & cutting boards) and playing with all the yummy produce I’m getting at my local farmer’s market. Today, for example, I made two braided loaves of bread, one rosemary-lemon-gruyere, and one beer-cheddar. I also made a kick-ass apple cole slaw that had zero mayonnaise in it. I still can’t believe I can make braided loaves of bread. I feel all domestic goddessy. Screw the 1950s. I’m all about the 1850s. I even made jam. Twice. Canned a jar, too.

So life is good and I thought I’d check in. Hi! Mostly I just wanted to turn Myiq and others here onto this new sister singer-songwriter duo I found. Here’s their breakout video.

Hope you enjoy! They’re from Indy, and they’re kicking off a summer tour this Saturday here at the Old National Theatre. I might check them out. Who am I kidding? I WILL check them out. AT $15 a pop, who wouldn’t? What are you up to?

This is an open-tastic thread.

Book Club: Interview with Anita Finlay

And she’s taking your questions as well!

Last week I sent Ms. Finlay some questions and she graciously agreed to answer them. As a researcher and English major in college, I am always interested in backstory, so most of my questions centered around that. I find that can always flesh out another layer in the meaning of a book, and I certainly think that’s true here. Here are the questions and her answers:

Why did you decide to write the book?

In January of 2008, I was developing a solo performance piece as a tribute to my mom but as I watched the primaries unfold, I was reminded of my own painful upbringing.  The sexist, demeaning treatment Hillary Clinton received from pundits, “journalists,” and in the blogosphere had alarming parallels to the domestic abuse of women, and to my own mother, that were all too familiar.  The bile in my throat could no longer be contained. I had to put my other work on the back burner and write about what I saw as an injustice to all of us.

Whether or not someone supported Hillary Clinton, I wanted Dirty Words on Clean Skin to function as a cautionary tale, sharing how mass media is able to shape and shift the narrative to exert a dangerous influence over our electoral process.

The book contains an extraordinary amount of documented research. How did you do your research?

During the primary season, I became a first-time blogger using the alias “Ani.”  That seemed apropos since it was a nickname my mom had given me.  I offered up a new article every other day for sites like No Quarter, one of the few that supported Hillary in 2008, and had gathered a lot of research during that period, printing out buckets of news articles and columns.  When I started piecing the book together a year later, I had gathered enough printed material to fill the New York City phonebook and had to whittle it down from there.

The following year, with my “phone book” nearby, I parked myself on the couch with my laptop.  Our cat, Caruso, curled up next to me with his paw on my thigh, encouraging me to write.  He sat patiently, day after day and never once walked across my keyboard.  He has more patience than I do.  I Googled to find and check a lot of the quotes I used.  I was surprised by how much I held in my memory.  A few key words would unearth information from the depths.  All the research was done there.  I never left my house and even with my slight frame, I sat on that sofa for so long, I wore a hole in the cushions.

How long did it take you to pull all the quotes together? And did you enjoy the research process?

It took a couple of years.  The book was challenging to write owing to a number of factors.  First, I had never attempted to do anything like this, so I learned how to write a book by writing a book.  Also, since I wrote it in the first person as something of an embedded citizen journalist, if you will, I had to strike the right balance between having enough of me in the story so you would trust me as a narrator, but then I had to get out of the way and let the facts speak for themselves.

As far as enjoying the process, the grotesque misogyny I witnessed enraged me enough to chew through the furniture, so I also had to write the book three times to write it once, if that makes sense.  It’s an entertaining read that may be painful in parts as far as reliving the details of what occurred, however, it was crucial that the book not only be impeccably researched but civil in tone, since I wanted to reach people who had no idea of the truth of the events of the 2008 primaries, and the brainwashing that still exists today.

Due to the false narratives about Hillary Clinton and a number of powerful women, I knew that if any of the media culprits I called out on the carpet could find a flaw in my research, they would be more than happy to throw out the whole thing.  I couldn’t allow that to happen. I mention this because there were certain events I did not include in the book since I couldn’t find written documentation to back them up – even though those of us working on the campaign knew they happened.  315 footnotes later, the case was made…

But what I did and do enjoy most is noodling with a paragraph until I like it.  I find the process of writing most satisfying.  The pen is mightier than the sword – in the long run, anyway.

The book contains a thread of your personal narrative in it. Why did you decide to include these personal narrative elements? Was there an emotional aspect to doing so?

It wasn’t my first choice to do this and I knew it would make it an unusual and also riskier non-fiction piece, in terms of trying to get it published.  The personal narrative was important to include for three reasons.  First, I wanted the reader to understand that I am not part of the literati and that I am as far outside the beltway as you can get, so I wasn’t part of the prevailing noise machine.

I also needed to share a short chapter of my family background to illustrate the parallels that inform the thesis of the book – that domestic abuse played out on a national level and had a devastating effect on those of us out here on the ground. Many view Hillary Clinton as an icon, one of the most powerful women in the world and therefore, a cardboard cutout in another stratosphere, to whom many cannot relate on a human level.  I needed to find a way to tell the story so that the reader would give a damn about how she was treated. Drawing parallels between the personal and political humanized both of us – and all of her supporters.

Finally, since I’m not a reporter with some big name, including that human element added to people’s trust in me and gave me a particular type of street cred someone viewing this from the outside looking in would not have.

And yes, it was emotional to include the personal (which I did as briefly as possible), but I stuck to my guns by including it, even though literary agents warned me not to.  I felt being honest about every aspect of my life and reactions would help people who were not as involved get why the events of the last five years mattered so much to so many.

Can you explain the process of taking the book from the idea stage to the publishing page? For example, how long did it take to write the book? How did you find a publisher? What was the editing process? How long did it take to publish once it was completed?

Writing it took longer than I thought because of the difficulty of sculpting the double narrative I was determined to use.  I also had to keep walking away from the material to gain perspective.  By 2011, I could finally pull in all the pundits’ and DNC’s vile quotes without my head exploding!  And Lord knows I could have kept noodling with the words forever – but that was likely more foot dragging due to fear of signing my real name to this than anything else.  Since I’ve been a working actor for many years, I was afraid of the possible repercussions.  I decided standing up for myself mattered more.  Finally, I just made myself be done with it.

Since I’ve already shared my concept for the book, this is a good place to credit my consulting editor, Benée Knauer.  In 2010, she was the literary editor at an agency I pitched.  She liked the concept of the book, so I gave her my first draft, which had all the raw bones, but was not organized properly.  I hired her to do an editorial analysis.  She read the draft several times and gave me a 20 page “report” on what she felt the strengths or problems were.  We then had a 4-hour conference call going through her notes and hashing out my ideas.  By the end of it, my tongue was hanging out.  I was so drained and hungry that I was chewing peanut M&Ms just to keep coherent.  If there was a chapter she wasn’t quite getting, I’d tell her what I was trying to do and she would say, “Serve it up!”  And I did.

I went back to the laptop (and the groove in my couch), reworked the chapters, beefed up the research, cleaned up the timeline, brought the book up through the beginning of the 2012 election cycle and sent her back the finished product for a final read and cite check.  At the same time, I had queried a bunch of literary agents and gotten some serious interest.  In the end, they demanded too many changes, and wanted the personal stuff taken out – which I think (as you have noted) is what gives the book more weight.  In the end, I decided to hold my original vision and self-publish.  From the time of that decision to the actual printing was about four months of pre-marketing, photo licensing, hiring someone to design my website and cover book design (both done by the wonderful Kelly Rice of TreeFrog Marketing), hiring a publicist and embracing social media to get the word out there.

I had no idea what I was doing and, to borrow the words of Robin Williams, I felt like I was “riding a psychotic horse toward a burning stable.”

Anything else you might like to add?

The book is now on the curriculum at Pasadena City College and I am looking to get the book into other colleges. It has been accepted to the Clinton Presidential Library and was #1 on Women in Politics books on Amazon for 16 weeks.  I’ve done over a hundred radio interviews at venues large and small around the nation and am now a regular commentator on both The Jerry Doyle Show (#3 in syndication around the country) and America’s Radio News Network.  I’m now a contributor to Epic Times, an independent news site that will have its official launch in the next couple of weeks.  I’ve also had the privilege of speaking to some wonderful groups like MENSA, NOW-NY, USC, NAPW and the Women’s Leadership Forum and co-host a weekly blog radio show with John Smart – Finlay & Smart Talk.

By the way, Dirty Words on Clean Skin is dedicated to my mom and I have now started on my next book – which is more about our journey together.

Writing Dirty Words on Clean Skin turned into the adventure of my life and I’m so grateful for the kind support of my husband, my friends and my blogger family, who championed these efforts all along the way.

Thank you, Anna, for taking such an interest in my process and my work.

If you have any questions for her about the book, please feel free to ask them in comments. She’ll be hanging around our humble little blogging hole for a bit this afternoon and will be happy to respond!

If you read the book, or dusted off your copy per my request last week, also feel free to offer up your opinion of the book, etc.

Please visit Anita Finlay and subscribe to her blog at http://www.anitafinlay.com

Like Anita Finlay, Author on Facebook.

Follow @AnitaFinlay on Twitter

Book Club: Dirty Words on Clean Skin

When Anita Finlay published her first book in 2012, Dirty Words on Clean Skin, I immediately ordered the hard copy  Because I was in the midst of my first semester teaching for a new college, I wasn’t able to give it the attention it deserved. I skimmed it pretty thoroughly, but in the heat of the 2012 election, I did not absorb it as much as I should have. Recently I acquired a Kindle version and I’ve been reading it slowly and carefully, giving it the full attention it deserves. Just over halfway through, I can report that it is an astoundingly thorough record of exactly what happened during the 2008 Democratic primary.

Many of us where there in the heat of that campaign, and many of us had new political identities forged in that fire. I had been a lifelong Democrat, giving my time to volunteer in every election from 1992, when I was first able to vote in national elections, until that campaign. I gave my first political donation to Hillary Clinton’s campaign as the spring unfolded and the campaign really got nasty. I got involved in active campaigning, making a few cold calls and participating in neighborhood visits in my small Indiana town as the Indiana primary approached. A four-year lurker on websites like Daily Kos and MyDD, I also began commenting in earnest. Since then life has not been the same.

Now I am a political independent. The Democratic party which Barack Obama helms bears very little resemblance to the Democratic party of which I was a constituent for some 20 years prior to the primary and election campaigns of 2008. But it wasn’t just Obama’s ascendancy that changed my mind about politics. While his name has become shorthand for so much that is wrong with the Democratic party and its adherents, he isn’t the sole reason I abandoned my political affiliation to forge a new one. And that is why reading Finlay’s book is all the more important.

In it she painstakingly documents the various rings in the circus that comprise Democratic party politics. With regard to the media, so much that has become legend in PUMA-aligned circles is documented, but so is so much else. Chris Matthews constant bleating of tingles and ex-wives is, of course, there, but so are lesser known quotes that ultimately shaped the national narrative around that campaign. But also represented are stories from everyday Democratic Party voters, from the low-information hipsters to urban DINKS, to the arrogance and disdain of Obama’s well-organized Boyz. It was, in fact, the combination of many of these threads within the Democratic party that turned me off it for good. Most are simply people not worth working with, and their ideas of progress are anything but progressive.

February was an important month in the primary, and just going by memory, it seemed until recently that the campaign was pretty much over by super-Tuesday. But that is a false narrative, as Finlay reminds us in Chapter 7. Obama may have won Iowa in the first contest, but Hillary took New York, California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Arizona on that fateful day. Five of those are Big Blue states. I was, quite frankly, shocked re-reading facts like these. I had to admit that the false narrative of the Obama campaign, aided and abetted by the press, had worked even on me, a true skeptic.

Little reminders like this aren’t the only reason for reading the book. Perhaps my favorite part is how Finlay deftly weaves her own story in the book, starting with her early life and the influences that shaped who she was. She is an extremely likeable person and her experiences, I suspect, are shared by many women in the nation today. Starting with her father and mother, she takes risks sharing personal information about what shaped her in life and how the campaigns of 2008 shook loose in her the desire to reach her full potential, to stop listening to the niggling doubts that are sewn into the framework of most women today.

In addition to the painful reminders of 2008 and all the horrid stuff that went down that year, stuff most of us would like to forget, is the heart of so many of us exposed in her personal story. The tension created by these two strains of narrative is, in a word, marvelous, and makes putting the book down at once both difficult and necessary.

This is not a book one can read in a sitting, no matter how fast one reads. Giving it short shrift will not allow it to serve its purpose in penetrating the mind or the psyche. If you were one who bought the book and didn’t carefully read it as I did, I would invite you to take it up again and take your time. Even if you did, it’s worth a refresher. Dirty Words on Clean Skin is well worth the effort either way. As I said at the beginning, I’m just over halfway through, so I hope you’ll join me in finishing the book this week. Next week we’ll have another post that will feature an interview with the author, Anita Finlay. So get out your copy and dust it off, or get it for your Kindle app on whatever device you use (see this link). We’ve got some talking–and remembering–to do.

Late Night Open Thread

It could be worse. Prohibition might have stuck.

This is an open thread. You know what to do.

Bromance Politics

As the Scandal Circus, a.k.a The Greatest Show on Earth, heats up, Obama’s bromance partners are out in force trying (fruitlessly, it might be noted) to shore up his left flank. Here’s Jeffrey Toolbin, explaining away the IRS scandal:

In light of this, it might be useful to ask: Did the I.R.S. actually do anything wrong?

The stories began to come to light on Friday, when the Associated Press reported that a draft report by a Treasury Department inspector general had found that the I.R.S. subjected certain Tea Party-affiliated groups to undue scrutiny. Lois Lerner, head of the I.R.S. tax-exempt-organizations division, said the agency was “apologetic” for what she termed “absolutely inappropriate” actions by lower-level workers.

It’s important to review why the Tea Party groups were petitioning the I.R.S. anyway. They were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be “social welfare,” not political, operations. There are significant advantages to being a 501(c)(4). These groups don’t pay taxes; they don’t have to disclose their donors—unlike traditional political organizations, such as political-action committees. In return for the tax advantage and the secrecy, the 501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates.

If that definition sounds murky—that is, if it’s unclear what 501(c)(4) organizations are allowed to do—that’s because it is murky.

[...]

But let’s be clear on the real scandal here. The columnist Michael Kinsley has often observed that the scandal isn’t what’s illegal—it’s what’s legal. It’s what society chooses not to punish that tells us most about the prevailing ethical standards of the time. Campaign finance operates by shaky, or even nonexistent, rules, and powerful players game the system with impunity. A handful of I.R.S. employees saw this and tried, in a small way, to impose some small sense of order. For that, they’ll likely be ushered into bureaucratic oblivion.

How cute is that? Don’t blame the IRS low-level employees; blame the system. The perpetrators-as-heroes narrative is as old as politics. Nevertheless, the Democrats’ ability to provide “nuance” for their own side is alive and well. Bless their hearts.

But wait! There’s more! Bromance master of the interwebs Josh Marshall has been provided insight into the developing AP wiretapping scandal. See, it’s not really a matter of Nixonian politics, as some would suggest. It’s just his favorite little snuggy-wuggy, the same one that led him to excuse so much of President Bush’s misbehavin’: Surprise! It’s National Security! According to one of his readers:

The AP story on the Justice Department “secretly” obtaining phone records from AP strikes me as an unprofessional effort by the AP to make the Department look bad.

If you read the story your learn that Justice is in fact investigating a leak to the AP. The merits of such am investigation may be debated but for the AP to write this article in this fashion would be like a politician under investigation issuing a press release about the evil investigation against him. Everyone would understand it for what it is.

More important it is clear to anyone who understands what happens in this type of investigation that the Justice Department subpoenaed phone records. Those records came from the phone company not from AP. They relate to dates and times of phone calls not content. Under the law such a subpoena is perfectly proper and under the law Justice and the phone company must notify the party (in this case AP) that records were subpoenaed.

I think AP protests just a bit too much and seeks to smear Justice (knowing full well that many Republicans will jump on this quickly).

And here’s JM’s analysis:

I think there’s still a very live question of whether this was a prudent action on the part of the DOJ, as maximal restraint should always be used when subpoenaing journalistic records. But I do think he’s at least on to something that such an article would definitely have included more and different context if AP weren’t the party at issue and the ‘secretly’ phrasing does perhaps knowingly mislead.

Well, thank goodness they never resort to victim-blaming in the Democratic party, amIrite? All of this is having the desired effect in the trenches, of course. The little guys who fight the real war at places like DailyKos now have some ammo to work with. And they can still put their adoration of Obama above their own professed values. See exhibit A, from bromancer ericlewis0. Here’s a screen shot of the “Tip Jar”:

This is an open thread.

Tuesday Puzzler

Yesterday I ran across a curious item at RealClearPolitics, wherein a reporter questioned Jay Carney about the Gosnell case, specifically President Obama’s stance on abortion survivors. Here’s part of the exchange:

ED HENRY: The president, as a state senator in 2003, voted against a bill that would provide medical care, as I understand, to babies who would be born after a botched abortion like this. The president at the time said he couldn’t support it as a state senator because he felt like any doctor in that situation would take care of a child. When you hear this kind of evidence, it suggests there’s at least one doctor who apparently did not. I understand you can’t deal with the deliberation of the case. But is there some legislative solution, or at least a conversation that needs to happen in Washington because on guns you were just saying we need common-sense reform. We need to save lives. In this case, do we need to be saving lives as well?

JAY CARNEY: Well, again, you’re relating it to a case that I can’t comment on and the president can’t comment on. I would simply say that the president’s position on choice is very clear. His position on the basic principle that, as President Clinton said, abortions ought to be safe, legal and rare is very clear. I just don’t have comment that could shed light on this specific case.

Bolding mine. My mind, which has been trained to critically think by one of America’s finest academic institutions (Indiana University), immediately wondered: why? Why can’t Carney or Obama comment on this case? It’s not like this president has never commented on cases involving law enforcement before, or on pending criminal cases in general. Here’s a short list of such instances when he could and did comment:

1. Henry Louis Gates arrest controversy
2. Trayvon Martin Case
3. Aurora Shooting
4. Sandy Hook Shooting
5. Hadiya Pendleton Murder

That’s five I can recall right off the top of my head. You may remember others, and if you do, post ‘em in comments. What makes this case so special that he can’t comment? It’s certainly a puzzler.

Remember the blog rules. #1 is: It would be irresponsible not to speculate. This is an open thread.

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McConnell, ProgressKentucky, and Kentucky’s Weird Political Dynamics

As a former Louisvillian, I have been watching the McConnell-Progress Kentucky taping scandal unfold with some interest. It is quickly turning into a melodrama of epic proportions, little of which will make it into the national mainstream media because of the ideological bias of that institution. The scandal involves three key players on the left, all of whom have questionable criminal backgrounds, and the peculiar political dynamics inherent in incestuous small-to-medium sized towns.

Louisville is well known among its inhabitants as an incestuous town. From the major power players and the extreme wealth of the East End-Oldham County nexus to the so-called counter-culture of “The Scene” as its participants call it, to the extreme poverty of the West End, the players keep playing in their own backyards, fighting amongst the various factions, and protecting insiders in ways that Shakespeare himself could not resist writing about were he alive today. I like to call it Shakespeare for Hillbillies, though the participants would object that they are from “cosmopolitan” Louisville.

I lived in Louisville for some 20+ years before making the jump to Hoosierland here in Indiana, so I know a lot of which I speak. One of the best parts of moving across the bridge was the ability to leave Louisville’s political scene in the dust. I had no idea what ideological suffocation I felt until it was gone. People like to think of Kentucky these days as part of the Midwestern nexus of GOP power, but the truth is that the Democratic Party has long had a lock on the state. Ernie Fletcher, for example, was the first GOP governor in Kentucky since the year I was born (1971). Louisville in particular is a bastion of Democratic politics.

About a week ago, a non-scandal broke out when David Corn, Mother Jones’ Chief Washington Correspondent, who specializes in leaking opposition research for national Democrats, published the transcripts and audio of a secret recording of an oppo-research meeting of McConnell’s reelection staff. Less than a week later a member of the Executive Committee of Jefferson County Democrats announced to the press that two members of a Democratic superPAC called ProgressKentucky had bragged about recording the meeting from the hallway outside. The liberal national media initially jumped on the case, focusing on the fact that participants in the McConnell meeting had mentioned Ashley Judd’s mental health, a fact she herself mentioned in her own memoir published in 2011. Apparently it’s okay for she, not for thee.

Character assassination is nothing new in politics. Recall the relentless attacks last year on Mitt and Ann Romney, from Rosen’s comments that Ann Romney hadn’t “worked a day in her life,” to their tax returns, to Mitt Romney’s “binder full of women.” Just check out some of the more questionable attacks on Obama coming from places like Infowars (no link, sorry). The political landscape is riddled with what rational people call ad hominem attacks. What made this story so special was the status of Mitch McConnell as Minority Leader for the GOP, and the fact that he has been particularly effective at neutralizing some of Democrats’ most beloved agenda items, most notably McCain-Feingold. He is a shrewd and calculating player of the game, and that Democrats cannot abide. Hence the intense push to unseat him.

Much to Corn’s chagrin, I suspect, the case has done nothing but strengthen McConnell in Kentucky. That’s because he knows how to play the game, and got out in front of the story quickly with a narrative of “Nixonian-Watergate style” attacks by state Democrats. The story turned an endangered incumbent suffering from low approval ratings into a sympathetic figure to the less-than-interested voters across the state, voters who, it must be noted, were suspicious of a perceived radical outsider like Ashley Judd from the get-go.

The reason for this is the near-universal condemnation of ProgressKentucky’s legally questionable tactics, and the emerging character portraits of the three key players on the left. These players are: Shawn Reilly, co-founder and leader of ProgressKentucky; Curtis Morrison, a longtime Louisville activist, OccupyLouisville leader, and freelance reporter for the aptly named Insider Louisville who also served as ProgressKentucky’s communications point man until the Twitter feed of PK made racially insensitive remarks about McConnell’s Chinese wife; and Jacob Conway, the Democratic Party finger-pointer who outed the pair. As it turns out, all three have criminal histories that have emerged in the wake of the breaking story, and they are all turning on each other as the FBI continues to investigate.

Most of this has been unearthed via careful and tedious investigative reporting done by Jacob Payne of Page One Kentucky, a political independent who seems to delight in revealing the ridiculousness of Kentucky party politics on both sides of the aisle. In several posts he has uncovered Shawn Reilly’s involvement in the famous murder of a Bellermine University student a few years ago, Curtis Morrison’s trespassing charges, and Jacob Conway’s plea deal to what could have been a charge of embezzlement after $3,000 went missing from his former employer. Those are just the facts, but the details on Reilly’s and Conway’s background in particular are far more lurid, involving lying to the police, a civil law suit, and fleeing subpoenas in the case of Reilly, and  lying to the police and secret escort services in the case of Conway. I invite you to check out the juicy details for yourselves.

Notably the local mainstream press won’t touch these issues, as is their wont in the incestuous fishbowl of party politics that is the town of Louisville. For Louisville’s power players, members of one’s own faction must be protected at all cost, even the cost of one’s own credibility. The irony, as well as the dynamics of Louisville’s political landscape, are best exemplified by Insider Louisville editor Terry Boyd’s quote when asked about Morrison’s involvement in the wake of Conway’s allegations:

“I don’t know what the hell is going on with the Mitch McConnell thing, and I don’t want to know.”

The case has pitted national Democrats, desperate to distance themselves from what they call “amateurs”, against Louisville’s insider Democrats who instinctively operate out of a sense of self-preservation. Nevertheless, for those in the know, the irony of Kentucky’s Democratic operatives outing McConnell for private character assassination talk getting outed and character assassinated themselves publicly is not only juicy, it’s hilarious. Pass the popcorn, please.

Margaret Thatcher, UKs only female Prime Minister, dead at 87

The BBC reports that Lady Margaret Thatcher has died at age 87 of a stroke. The daughter of a grocer, Thatcher served as PM from 1979 to 1991. Reaction across the web was typical, and can be summed up with this graphic (ht Denise):

I was a tweener and a teen in the 1980s and I remember this time pretty well. I started out the decade big fans of both Reagan and Thatcher, but by the end of the decade, I had been poisoned by the constant rhetorical attacks from the left on both of them.

Ironically, very shortly thereafter I became involved in the identity politics of feminism, but led by the left-faction, I dismissed Thatcher’s importance. Maybe it was Sinead O’Connor, of whom I was a big fan at the time, who had a hit with the song Black Boys on Mopeds. It’s a beautiful song that begins like this:

Margaret Thatcher on TV
Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing
It seems strange that she should be offended
The same orders are given by her

It was a reference to the death of Nicholas Bramble, who died after crashing his moped while attempting to avoid police. How Thatcher was responsible for the incidence is still unclear, since police neither contacted her during the high-speed chase, nor informed her of the death after the fact. She did not in anyway order the death of the young man, and he was not engaged in political protest, though he was pursued by police in the mistaken belief he had stolen the moped he was riding. It belonged to him. Shortly thereafter, O’Connor moved to Los Angeles, presumably (and ironically) so her own boy would not be “aware that there’s any such thing as grieving.”

In truth, Lady Margaret Thatcher was human, not perfect. Her tenure, like Reagan’s brought about an economic expansion in the wake of the tough decade of the 1970s. One can argue if it was worth it, because the economic rebound was predicated on enormous military expansion in an effort to win the Cold War. Her early tenure was marked by political protests by Labour activists, but her economic policies proved so successful and popular with voters that she was reelected in 1983 and 1987.

Thatcher was a woman of science and law. Originally a chemist, she later became a barrister, which led to her entry into political life. She was elected to Parliament in 1959 and became known as a firebrand there. After a stint as Secretary of State for Education and Science, she won election as the Leader of the  Opposition of the Conservative Party, the first and only woman to do so. She led her party to dominance in the 1980s and was elected the first and only woman Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979, a mere 20 years after the start of her political career. She served 11 years as Prime Minister.

And so it begins…

We interrupt Myiq’s birthday celebration to announce that David Frum is being, well, David Frum. Which is to say a kool-aid-schwilling Clintonian-deranged swing-hitter whose major job appears to be cock-blocking female candidates and appearing very serious, indeed. Here’s his case against Hillary Clinton, 2016:

Hillary Clinton came second in the nomination fight of 2008. If she were a Republican, that would make her a near-certainty to be nominated in 2016. Five of the past six Republican nominees had finished second in the previous round of primaries. (The sixth was George W. Bush, son of the most recent Republican president.)

Democrats, by contrast, prefer newcomers. Six of their eight nominees since 1972 had never sought national office before.

Obviously, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Democrats chose the next guy in line in 2000 — Vice President Al Gore — and they may well do so again. But speaking from across the aisle, it’s just this one observer’s opinion that Democrats would be poorly served by following the Republican example when President Obama’s term ends.

Hillary Clinton is 14 years older than Barack Obama. A party has never nominated a leader that much older than his immediate predecessor. (The previous record-holder was James Buchanan, 13 years older than Franklin Pierce when the Democrats chose him in 1856. Runner-up: Dwight Eisenhower, 12 years older than his predecessor, Thomas Dewey.)

Parties have good reasons to avoid reaching back to politicians of prior generations. When they do, they bring forward not only the ideas of the past, but also the personalities and the quarrels of the past.

One particular quarrel that a Hillary Clinton nomination would bring forward is the quarrel over the ethical standards of the Clinton White House — and, maybe even more, of the Clintons’ post-White House careers. Relying on Hillary Clinton’s annual financial disclosure reports, CNN reported last year that former President Bill Clinton had earned $89 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House in 2001. Many of these earnings came from foreign sources. In 2011 alone, the former president earned $6.1 million from 16 speeches in 11 foreign countries.

[...]

Yet the biggest risk to Democrats from a Hillary Clinton nomination is not that it would be generationally backward-looking — or that it would reopen embarrassing ethical disputes — but that it would short-circuit the necessary work of party renewal.

To recap, Frum is opposed to Hillary running because:

a) Hillary is not new enough

b) Hillary is too old

c) Bill makes too much money all over the world

D) Hillary is too old

Fuck David Frum. A Russert-style heart attack is too good for him, but judging by his pictures he’s working on it nonetheless. Eat more steak, Davy. Lots more. Fucktard, wish-casting, scum of the earth asshole. And that’s how I REALLY feel.

What about you? This is an open thread.

Lazy Monday Reading Roundup Open Thread

What Myiq2xu will look like in a few hours.

Snow day here in the Midwest. We got 6 inches of snow here in Indianapolis last night, but it’s melting already. My class is cancelled, so I’ve been reading around the intertubes to see what’s up. Found a few stories for ya.

First up is this bizarre case of a Mississippi state law maker who everyone agrees was an awesome, upbeat lady, but who they say may have killed herself at–get this–a former lawmakers home. Spidey senses definitely tingling on this one.

Mississippi Bureau of Investigation officials are looking into the death of state Rep. Jessica Upshaw, who was found at a residence in Simpson County on Sunday.

The 53-year-old Republican lawmaker from Diamondhead in Hancock County died of a gunshot wound to the head, Simpson County Sheriff told WLBT-TV.

“It appeared to be self-inflicted,” he said.

[...]

“She’s always been a very strong, quiet leader for the Gulf Coast and was one of the smartest people I ever met,” DeLano said. “I’d give her a bill, she would read it and could tell whether it was the same bill introduced five years ago.”Upshaw, an attorney, was known for her ability to read extremely fast. She could zip through a lengthy legislative bill and know its particulars in minutes.

[...]

Currie said Upshaw was excited to see her grandson. “She has a new grandchild —she was so proud. … I know she has a lot she wanted to live for.

The Associated Press is so skeptical it put “kills herself” in quotation marks in the headline.

In other news, Cyprus has a new deal. Tyler Cowen warns:

1. Output on the island could easily decline by 25% or more, and I don’t think that will involve much subsequent mean-reversion.  There will be a deflationary shock, an uncertainty shock, an “austerity shock,” a credit contraction shock, and a few other negative shocks as well.  The Cypriot government will not be fiscally well situated to support the safety net or automatic stabilizers.

2. It’s never a good sign when a deal is structured so that no one has to vote on it.  (Correction: various European legislatures may be voting on it, but no one in Cyprus.)

3. The deal itself still doesn’t cough up all the money, but rather relies on subsequent tax increases and privatizations to come up with at least another billion euros.  Believe it or not, the numbers don’t add up.

4. “This was not a good weekend for Russian billionaires.”

5. I wonder if the two main banks even have the money they claim they do.  Who tells the truth going into a deal like this?

Lots of other stuff going on, too. Rob Portman’s son came out, and Claire McGaskill came out in favor of gay marriage and quoted the Bible. Kelsey Grammer and Matt Lauer are continuing their quest for image rehabilitation. Also, Geo. Zimmerman’s brother is not helping his case, but that’s really no reason for the left to employ the Guilt-by-Association fallacy.

What’s up in your world today? I’m making Marsala-Mushroom beef stew and grading.

Irony-jawed Angels

Joanne Bamberger is one of those Vichy feminists so often to be found on the left side of the political spectrum. She can be found variously posting stuff to HuffPo, her blog, PunditMom, or speaking before Netroots Nation on the wonders of political activism via Twitter. She lives in Washington D.C. and works from home now that she’s a mom, and spends her time wearing her badge of woman-momdon to further the causes of Democrats. Like most Vichy feminists, she is not in the habit of questioning her ideals or her allegiances.

Which is why she has caught herself in the newest, latest, greatest of catfights among upper-crust feminists of the world. There is an old saying about monkeys in trees looking up, and all they see is assholes. So it is with life, thus so it is with women. Bamberger is naturally upset that the niche she’s carved out for herself is being threatened by women with higher attainment than her. Those damn monkeys at the top, you see, want to make changes to workforces that don’t apply to her, but may indeed cause her to be judged.

Enter Sheryl Sandberg, that nepotistic, privileged bitch, and Marissa Mayer, the ungrateful CEO of Yahoo, who are shaking up things up for the comfortably pajama-clad mommy-blogger. But not just her, you see, but for all women, who are entitled to highly successful careers, even if they have to wear their pajamas at home to do it.

Sandberg, who is the COO of Facebook (and, it should be noted, Mark Zuckerberg’s sister), has just published a book, which, if Bamberger had anything to do with it, would be titled Lazy Women and the Bosses Who Pay Them.  As it is, the book is actually called Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, which is about women making different choices that might, you know, actually lead to leadership positions. Stuff like, stop gossiping at the water cooler and go gossip with the boss like the big boys do.  And, of course, Yes, you will have to work late–a lot–if you want to make Vice President.

Mayer, for her part, had the unmitigated gall to have a baby and only take two weeks off, and as if that weren’t enough to set women back to the 1890s, she followed it up by eliminating telecommuting positions at Yahoo. How dare she! Expecting people to show up at work in the age of computers? Oh, hell no, boss, I’ve got a puking kid to cuddle. He pukes every. single. day. I’ll meet my deadlines after, thank you very much.

This is all very ironic, I think, considering where first and second wave feminists were actually coming from, and considering the major rhetorical error Bamberger makes in her USA Today editorial. In it, she says:

The message coming from these C-suite moms is less about empowerment and accountability than it is about guilt. Guilt for women wanting to work remotely in order to manage their lives and provide for their families. Guilt for not acting with more ambition. Guilt for daring to put their children and spouses on equal footing with their careers.

Guilt is never a good motivator. Mayer and Sandberg, even if they have good intentions, are setting back the cause of working mothers. Sandberg’s argument, that equality in the workplace just requires women to pull themselves up by the Louboutin straps (though she does acknowledge the need for a shift in national policy for working families) is just as damaging as Mayer’s office-only work proclamation that sends us back to the pre-Internet era of power suits with floppy bow ties.

Oh my, we can’t have the floppy bow-ties back, now can we? And why in the world would you want power suits, when there’s, like, pajamas, for reals?

The major rhetorical error Bamberger makes is excoriating these women for dispensing advice or creating policy that, whether or not it was intended to, makes her feel guilty. You can’t shame people in the left’s world, anymore, unless they are dirty Republicans, white men, or wealthy C-suite women. Well, I guess stay-at-homes moms who don’t earn a paycheck for their labor are also fair game, but I digress. My point is that she goes on to use–you guessed it–guilt to try to shame these women into silence. Typical Vichy feminist maneuver. Like, shut up! You’re harshing my stay-at-home buzz, bitches!

Here’s her guilt-wrapped critique:

Do you have bitch-fatigue?

I do. If it’s not Bobby Jindal or Ron Paul, it’s the lame-asses on the right or stupid-asses on the left. Then there’s Donald Trump & Bill Maher, both categories unto themselves. Maybe we should all just have more unsafe sex. That would certainly lift the national mood.

Note what all these people, or authors of the articles have in common? They’re all dudes. Unlike the very enlightened dudes that hang out at The Crawdad Hole (and God bless them, every one), the dudes in the media or who dominate culture & politics are just a big bitching yawn-fest these days.

But there is a cure for your blues! If you want to laugh, or just need some comic-book style action in your life, head on over to The League of Historical Bitches, where a cell of resurrected Bitches take on the vampire squid who run Ghouldman Suchs and watch as Soledun O’Murphy gets the real axe at CNN. Here’s a taste to whet your whistle:

Floyd Blankenfiend was the first to lose his head. He’d first lost his hand when he tried to reach for the panic button under the conference room table, but Annie Oakley had made short work of that. Before he could reach the button, she’d leveled her Smith & Wesson revolver–modified in the League’s labs to shoot armor piercing silver bullets–and shot right through his hand, leg, and the floor. He’d have been fine if at that moment his face hadn’t split open into a mass of slimy tentacles with a toothy proboscis sticking out.

Read more…  It’s a far-cry from your usual bitch-fare. And there’s more to come in the story. Episode 2 is coming in just two weeks! In episode 2 you’ll learn:

1. Just who brought these crazy bitches back to life, and why? And how?
2. What else did Sojourner Truth say on CNN? And how did Eleanor Roosevelt take control of the studio?
3. Who made Carrie Nation’s long dress such a functional fighting garment?
4. What is SASS Lab?
5. Who will the bitches attack next? Golem Journalists? Zombie Academicians?

The League of Historical Bitches: Because bitches get shit done. This is an open thread.

Requiescat in pace: Mayor Ed Koch Dead at 88

Via the NYT:

Edward I. Koch, the master showman of City Hall, who parlayed shrewd political instincts and plenty of chutzpah into three tumultuous terms as mayor of New York with all the tenacity, zest and combativeness that personified his city of golden dreams, died Friday morning at age 88.

Mr. Koch’s spokesman, George Arzt, said the former mayor died at 2 a.m. from congestive heart failure. He was being treated at New York-Presbyterian Columbia Hospital.

[...]

Mr. Koch’s 12-year mayoralty encompassed the fiscal austerity of the late 1970s and the racial conflicts and municipal corruption scandals of the 1980s, an era of almost continuous discord that found Mr. Koch at the vortex of a maelstrom day after day.

But out among the people or facing a news media circus in the Blue Room at City Hall, he was a feisty, slippery egoist who could not be pinned down by questioners and who could outtalk anybody in the authentic voice of New York: as opinionated as a Flatbush cabby, as loud as the scrums on 42nd Street, as pugnacious as a West Side reform Democrat mother.

“I’m the sort of person who will never get ulcers,” the mayor — eyebrows devilishly up, grinning wickedly at his own wit — enlightened the reporters at his $475 rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village on Inauguration Day in 1978. “Why? Because I say exactly what I think. I’m the sort of person who might give other people ulcers.”

His political odyssey took him from independent-minded liberal to pragmatic conservative, from street-corner hustings with a little band of reform Democrats in Greenwich Village to the pinnacle of power as New York City’s 105th mayor from Jan. 1, 1978, to Dec. 31, 1989. Along the way, he ousted the Tammany boss Carmine G. De Sapio and served two years as a councilman and nine more in Congress representing, with distinction, the East Side of Manhattan.

With his trademark — “How’m I doin?” — Mr. Koch stood at subway entrances on countless mornings wringing the hands and votes of constituents, who elected him 21 times in 26 years, with only three defeats: a forgettable 1962 State Assembly race; a memorable 1982 primary in a race for governor won by Mario M. Cuomo; and a last Koch hurrah, a Democratic primary in 1989 won by David N. Dinkins, who would be his one-term successor.

I always liked Koch, for exactly the reasons stated in the article: he was a hard talking man with a heart. Maybe not a perfect man, but a fine one, for sure. RIP, Mayor.

Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be feminists…

In News from Train Wrecks (apologies to HelenK), I give you Alisa Valdes, author of the just released memoir The Feminist & The Cowboy. The book is the story of how a hyper-masculine dude tamed all Valdes’ feminist-sewn issues with distrust and self-hatred. Except maybe not:

The book, which features a cover image of a woman’s bare legs tossed high with a cowboy hat perched atop one foot, has been heavily marketed to the anti-feminist crowd, even earning a plug from Christina Hoff Sommers, who called it a “riveting tale about how a brilliant, strong-minded woman liberated herself from a dreary, male-bashing, reality-denying feminism.”

But now the author, Alisa Valdes, a prolific romance novelist, alleges that the man who taught her to “submit,” and to enjoy it, turned out — after she wrote this love letter of a book about him — to be an abuser.

Yesterday, Valdes published a blog post claiming that after she turned in the manuscript for “The Feminist and the Cowboy: An Unlikely Love Story,” said cowboy became emotionally and physically abusive, and during one fight “simply dragged me down the hall to the bedroom, bent me over, and took me, telling me as he did so that I must never forget who was in charge.”

[...]

The deleted blog post is an excruciatingly painful read. It tells of an unplanned pregnancy that causes the cowboy to leave her, a miscarriage and then a reconciliation. What follows are several scenes of brutal violence, including one in which she allegedly jumps from the cowboy’s moving truck because she’s afraid he will kill her (“he’d hinted at it”).

Via The American Conservative, we get some of the actual text of Valdes’ now-deleted post (but none of the juicy parts):

I believe very firmly that the truth is the only currency a writer has, and that if there is any hope of redeeming this book and making it meaningful it lies in the full story of my relationship with the cowboy and not just in the candy-coated version that appears in the book.

[...]

The book was true, when I wrote it. But life changed. I didn’t try to fool anyone, or to exploit anything. Rather, I believed in a man who didn’t deserve it. I fell for the incredible charm and manipulations such men are capable of. I failed to see what women who are wiser than I was are clearly seeing as they read my book — that this man was “a jerk,” as one reviewer said. I didn’t know. Worst of all, I wrote about my love and my flexibility and compromises in so glowing and beautiful a way as to secure a book deal from a wonderful publisher, an elite publisher, and now the same publisher is treating me like I have the plague, all because, I feel, I have saved my own life. I didn’t set out to deceive them. No one wanted the fairy tale more than I did! Ironically, being “punished” by the publisher feels a bit like the abusive emotional stonewalling the cowboy would do to me when I didn’t knuckle under and do what HE needed me to do for HIS needs…it’s familiar territory, only now it’s being done to me by a progressive woman in New York. I’m not a commodity. I’m not an object. I’m not a thing to be sold. I am a human being, a writer, an artist, a work in progress, and real life is messy sometimes, especially when it comes to love and abuse. I am deeply wounded by the stonewalling from my editor, as wounded as I ever was when the cowboy did it to me…

Thus, I had to come out of my hibernation module to declare that it’s not a lack of complimentarian rhetoric or feminism itself that’s the problem, Ms. Valdes. The problem, my dear, is you. I haven’t even read the book, but I can tell from your words here, and what I’ve read of the reaction to your book and your reaction to the reaction that, while you claim to seek and love the truth, you never actually ask the hard questions to find it. You suffer from the same problem so many women in my generation and younger do. Question everything! Except for what I agree with. Don’t you know a good critical thinker always starts questioning their own assumptions first? No, clearly you did not.

Feminism served you while you needed it. Then, when you were staring down the last days of estrogen, you decided you hadn’t quite had it hot enough yet, so you went out and found yourself a mechanical man to ride and wrote off all the bullshit you swallowed along the way to your wild Latina heart and the failures of feminism. Even now you make insulting jokes about “being tamed.”

When confronted with the fact that you lied to yourself and misled yourself and put yourself in danger, you did not take responsibility. You added The Cowboy to pile of blame to be sorted. He may deserve his fair share, but so do you. So do so many women who don’t understand their own biology and who subscribe to some of the coolest, ergo stupidest, shit around.

Feminism is awesome. What today’s women–and publishers–do with it, however, is a fucking tragedy. If you believed it was about man-hating and avoiding marriage–which you clearly want, since you’ve jumped into a relationship with the man you think you’ll “probably spend [your] life with” a mere four months after you ditched The Cowboy–you clearly weren’t subscribing to feminism. You bought a brand, not an ideology. Think deeper, honey, and question more. Because feminism is what we make of it. Right now you’re making it a mess.

(More on the story…)

Holy Frozen Batman!

It happened. Obama was held accountable for something. It’s not much, but it’s something.

President Obama’s 2008 campaign was fined $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission for campaign reporting violations — one of the largest fees ever levied against a presidential campaign, POLITICO has learned.

The fine — laid out in detail in FEC documents that have yet to be made public — arose from an audit of the campaign, which was published in April. POLITICO obtained a copy of the conciliation agreement detailing the fine, which was sent to Sean Cairncross, the chief lawyer for the Republican National Committee, one of the groups that filed complaints about the campaign’s FEC reporting from 2008.

“$375,000 is a huge fine,” said Republican election lawyer Jason Torchinsky. “It may one of their top five- or ten-largest fines.”

But he added, “They’re also the first billion-dollar presidential campaign. Proportionally, it’s not out of line.
[...]

The major sticking point for the FEC appeared to be a series of missing 48-hour notices for nearly 1,300 contributions totaling more than $1.8 million — an issue that lawyers familiar with the commission’s work say the FEC takes seriously. The notices must be filed on contributions of $1,000 or more that are received within the 20-day window of Election Day.

More than half of those contributions were transferred from the Obama Victory Fund,a joint committee between the campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Sources said the fine resulting from the settlement agreement has been paid, with $230,000 coming from the Obama campaign’s coffers and the remainder from the DNC.

The document outlined other violations, such as erroneous contribution dates on some campaign reports. The Obama campaign was also late returning some contributions that exceeded the legal limit.

Like I said, it’s not much, even though the idiots quoted in the article and the author herself makes it sound breathlessly serious. It’s really just putting the whole thing to bed without actually investigating anything, and offering a veneer of credibility to the most corrupt campaign in American history. There’s nothing there about the illegal contributions from foreigners or the fact that many Vile Progs could have and probably did donate more than the maximum allowed because of that little CVS number work around. But at least it’s something.

You’ll have to wait forever for an investigation into caucus manipulations and delegate-stealing, though. This is an open thread.

What War on Women?

More news from the frontline of the War on Women.

(Via)

And this is from the guy that Michael Hirsh of The Atlantic called “The Most Influential Vice President in History.” Looks like it’s working. Here’s the latest 4Chan spoof.

Chillax. The GOP may be okay with women being beaten up, but your Vice President just want to frisk them! And 4Chan just wants to mock them. WTFE. 8)

This is an open thread.

Happy Winter Solstice Open Thread

The winter solstice is the solstice that occurs in winter. It is the time at which the Sun appears at noon at its lowest altitude above the horizon. ^[2] In the Northern Hemisphere this is the Southern solstice, the time at which the Sun is at its southernmost point in the sky, which usually occurs on December 21 to 22 each year.^[3]

The world hasn’t yet ended, but a new season has begun and we’re now spinning toward favor with the sun once again. Hope you’re having a good one. This is an open thread.

Marriage of Memes

Never ones to let a crisis go by these days, the left is still busy capitalizing on the Newton, CT shooting with a multi-layered collection of just the right memes.

Guns out of control: check.

When Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday, December 14, inexplicably bent on ending as many lives as possible, he was carrying a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle and several high-capacity magazines. Sadly, this isn’t the first time the country has had to deal with the aftermath of a horrific shooting spree, nor is it the first time we’ve encountered an AR-15 in this context: only days earlier, it was the weapon of choice for a shooting at an Oregon mall that killed two people. Five months earlier, it was used by James Holmes in an attack that wounded fifty-eight people and killed twelve in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. And several years before that, a man and his teenage accomplice used a Bushmaster AR-15 to terrorize the Washington, DC, area with a series of random shootings.

The big, bad boogie-store, Walmart: check.

Although it is not yet clear where the Bushmaster AR-15 used by Lanza (and registered to his mother) was purchased, the model is familiar to many Walmart shoppers. It’s on sale at about 1,700 Walmart stores nationwide, though the retail chain pulled the weapon from its website early this afternoon.

[...]

The big-box chain at one point sold guns in only about a third of its stores, mainly in remote rural areas where hunting is popular. But in 2011, without much fanfare, Walmart expanded gun sales to half of its 3,982 stores nationwide, including those in more urban areas like Albuquerque and Spokane.

The expansion of gun sales at Walmart came after a five-year slowdown. In 2006, the chain announced that it was rolling gun sales back, citing declining profit margins on the relatively expensive weapons, which even at Walmart can retail for hundreds of dollars. But in 2011, company executives were looking at eight straight quarters of declining sales at stores open for a year or more—the worst slump in Walmart’s history.

Conservatives (which all gun-lovers are) have an irrational fear of our black president, Obama: check.

They must also have noticed that Barack Obama’s inauguration had sparked a rally in gun sales, which have steadily increased every year since 2008. The government isn’t allowed to track firearm sales, but the FBI does release figures on how many retailers ask it to run background checks—a relatively reliable indicator of total gun sales, although likely a lowball estimate, since a person can buy multiple guns on a single background check, and many gun shows aren’t required to perform such checks. In 2007, retailers asked the FBI for just over 11 million background checks; by the end of 2009, 
14 million checks were requested—a 27 per-
cent increase.

Gratuitously hyperbolic activist quote + Union promotion: check.

“This gun thing, it’s really just a nightmare,” says Bertha Lewis, president of the Black Institute, which has been organizing Walmart workers this year to protest wages and working conditions. Given its aggressive gun sales, Walmart’s logo “shouldn’t be a smiley face; it should be an automatic weapon,” she adds.

And the inevitable conclusion-by-clusterfuck-of-memes/bad-argument: check

Other anti-violence activists are disturbed by Walmart’s much-ballyhooed expansion into urban markets like Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, Reno, Detroit and other cities. That, combined with the increased gun sales, could be a recipe for disaster.

The chain says it won’t sell guns at those stores—a condition of approval for a new Walmart in Washington, DC—but Bertha Lewis is wary. Even if that turns out to be true, the guns are likely to be sold at a Walmart somewhere else in the area. “Guns are a scourge in black and brown and low- and moderate-income communities,” Lewis says. “And here comes Walmart with Mr. Smiley Face: ‘Here, here’s a $5 sweater—and, oh, by the way, you can get this gun.’”

Lewis thinks the gun sales will soon be a new front in the activist campaign against Walmart. “You’re going to see it more and more and more as folks organize against Walmart,” she says. “One of their vulnerabilities is their stance on guns. Don’t try to sell me an apple and a gun at the same 
time. Don’t tell me that you’re trying to give fresh fruit and vegetables to people so that they can have a healthy life, and then you turn around and on the next counter you have instruments of death.”

OMG! URGENT! Walmart is opening their gun-selling stores in inner cities! Where black and brown people reside! We can’t allow that because of that, you know, “recipe for disaster.” Note: This reasoning cannot be construed as racist because of the profile of the speaker.

Geez, it’s all so formulaic in politics anymore. No wonder I’m bored. This is an open thread.

“Facts Are Obsolete”

FFS, THIS is why honest, earnest people can’t get anywhere.

A fake study claiming conservative viewers of FOX News were significantly dumber than conservatives who didn’t watch FOX News spread through the internet like wildfire, even though the briefest of attention to the details in this glorified press release should have raised suspicion. The pr guru behind the hoax — our term, not his — said he was surprised by how quickly and broadly the item spread but not by how easily its claims went unquestioned. “Facts are obsolete,” said P. Nichols, the contact given for the press release who claimed Nichols was his last name but refused to confirm his entire name, the name of the Republican PAC he says backed the “study” or any of the people behind the actual report he insisted did truly exist. And no, he wouldn’t send us a copy of it.

Bolding mine. It gets better. And by better I mean a clusterfuck of unholy cleverness.

*The Intelligence Institute does not exist — It was a name created by Nichols and his team to give the “study” they were releasing some credibility. They didn’t even bother to create a fake website as a front for the imaginary group. However, that may change. Nichols said that this study/press release was so effective that now perhaps there was some value to the name of The Intelligence Institute and they might use it for other studies they did or perhaps even create an actual conservative non-profit group.

[...]

*The study did not take four years — Why would the study as described take four years? He couldn’t answer. When asked for specifics, Nichols admitted the people backing the study became actively interested in taking action after the 2010 mid-term elections. I pointed out that was two years ago, making it impossible for the study to have taken four years to do. He said two years would probably be more accurate. “That’s one of those things that if it had been fact-checked by CNN might not make it through,” Nichols cheerfully said.

[...]

*The study was rigged from the start — Nichols himself brought up the fact that the study was designed to reach the conclusion they were looking for: that is, to show that self-identified conservatives who watched FOX News were less smart than conservatives who didn’t. “They told me what they wanted to do and I said I could do it,” he claimed. Nichols said the moderate Republicans behind the PAC supporting this effort wanted to counter the effect of the Tea Party and encourage moderates to come forward. Making people embarrassed to say they watched FOX News (or better yet not watch FOX News at all) might help that goal. So the 5000 people who took part in the study were chosen by Nichols and non-scientists, essentially selected to guarantee the results they were looking for. “We stuck to the rural South,” said Nichols, who admitted they had a hard time finding conservatives in Alabama and other states who didn’t watch FOX News but dug them up to give the study some balance. He insisted the actual study was performed and that the results were genuine, though of course the “scientists” involved accepted the fact that the people being studied would be supplied to them and therefore not be random. Nichols admitted this meant the study would never have passed any sort of peer review panel or be accepted for publication by any journal of note. Still, he repeatedly stated that the study was real and did exist. “I would not have published it were it completely fraudulent,” he said, pointing out that to do so might have crossed some legal boundaries and “nobody wanted to do that.” Hence his claim that the study was actually commissioned and performed, even though it would never meet the most minimal standards for a valid scientific report. The fact that the details Nichols offered up about the study undercut its scientific validity lend some credence to his claim that the study was in fact technically done.

This is not the end, of course. Hidden within this article on the hoax, is another hoax. That first bolded part is a hoax-within-a-hoax. There is no “moderate Republican…PAC” that funded this. $100 says a thereisnospoon progressive type group is behind this, and the “moderate Republican” part is part of the cover story. The second bolded part is a bald faced lie, a built in meme that urban progressives who’ve never been to the rural south believe because they’re told to believe it and want to believe it. Just another little divisive technique employed to the ends of people of the worst character in America.

And this why honest, earnest people can’t get ahead and have lost. Clever idiots like Nichols and thereisnospoon have whole machines feeding misinformation into the information stream. To be honest and earnest these days is to be a chump. And people like it that way. They want it that way. Don’t believe me? Read this.

We’re going to have to develop a taste for the diabolical if we want our country back, which will, of course, defeat the whole point.  When that happens, there will be no more honest, earnest people in this country. It’ll just be a country of people jacking each other around.

The Lies Unravel

It’s all unraveling now, and not a moment too late. In the wake of the media-instigated win for Obama, all the pretty lies the Administration and the press used to cover his sorry ass are beginning to come out. Every day brings new stories that demonstrate the level of cover various organizations provided. Of interest today are two : a Libyan arms scandal and the unemployment situation.

The Libyan arms scandal:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.

No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that killed four Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September.

But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried about the consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan militants, concerns that have not previously been reported. The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government.

Had this been any Republican, this would have been news much earlier, and that news would have been met with calls for Congressional investigates. Because it is the Obama Administration, there’s additional coverage provided in the news itself, as demonstrated by the second paragraph above, and little will happen. IOKIYO. I remember when a similar scandal was huge news accompanied by an entire circus in the 1980s. And I bet that evidence is eventually reported that this is in fact tied to Benghazi.

Regarding unemployment, if you read between the lines, you can tell that Jack Welch was exactly right, despite all the backlash he faced from a hostile progressive media. Gallup’s headline is: U.S. Unadjusted Unemployment Shoots Back Up.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. unemployment, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, was 7.8% for the month of November, up significantly from 7.0% for October. Gallup’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is 8.3%, nearly a one-point increase over October’s rate.

[...]

It is unclear what caused the increase in the unemployment rate in November, although some experts speculate that it was caused by jobs lost as a result of superstorm Sandy. It is also possible that lackluster holiday hiring is to blame.

Of course it’s unclear. Because it’s inconvenient to admit that Holder’s arm-twisting law suit and the California number-fudging were planned actions to help Obama win and they worked. The Sandy scenario is bullshit, because this kind of stuff creates jobs. And don’t believe the hype about uncharacteristically low holiday hiring either, since we’re already in the midst of the biggest holiday sales season ever.

There are more. Every day I watch as the truth of another election lie drops into the media cesspool. It’s always shrouded in protective language, too. It’s a nightmare keeping track. It’s going to be a long four more damn years.