Month: December 2011

Jon Swift Memorial Roundup

by digby

For those of you spending the evening at home with kids or alone with your champagne, here’s the only thing you need to keep you entertained:

Welcome to a tradition started by the much missed Jon Swift/Al Weisel. He left behind some excellent satire, but was also a nice guy and a strong supporter of small blogs. As Lance Mannion puts it:

Our late and much missed comrade in blogging, journalist and writer Al Weisel, revered and admired across the bandwidth as the “reasonable conservative” blogger Modest Jon Swift, was a champion of the lesser known and little known bloggers working tirelessly in the shadows…

One of his projects was a year-end Blogger Round Up. Al/Jon asked bloggers far and wide, famous and in- and not at all, to submit a link to their favorite post of the past twelve months and then he sorted, compiled, blurbed, hyperlinked and posted them on his popular blog. His round-ups presented readers with a huge banquet table of links to work many of has had missed the first time around and brought those bloggers traffic and, more important, new readers they wouldn’t have otherwise enjoyed.

It may not have been the most heroic endeavor, but it was kind and generous and a lot of us owe our continued presence in the blogging biz to Al.

Click this link to read a collection of fantastic writing from around the blogosphere this year that you may have missed.

And kudos to Hullabaloo Contributor and my pal Batocchio for keeping the tradition alive.

What really drives austerity

by David Atkins

An adviser to Margaret Thatcher explains, in carefully and cautiously couched terms, the real reason for the conservative emphasis on austerity (h/t Tom Sullivan):

As a way of reducing national deficits, austerity is terribly ineffective policy, as it weakens the middle-class tax base and long-term economic growth. But as a way of raking more money out of the middle class and into the pockets of the super-wealthy parasitic brigands, it’s fantastic policy.

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Today’s Hayes

How do you like me now?

Uh oh:

Paging Pam Geller. They’re coming to get us!

Taunting gay robots on the campaign trail

It’s long past time to put an end to robophobia.

Hey baby, show us yer Tax!

Perhaps. But well-bred candidates of a certain class simply don’t go around showing their taxes to just anyone. Why buy the politician if he already owns the cow?

I think people should show up at all his events and whistle and catcall him to show his tax(es).

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Devolution for some of the people

by digby

As always, Adele Stan nails the story when it comes to the connections among the far right fringies. In today’s piece she draws together the strands that bring Ron Paul and the lunatic Christian Reconstructionists together. I urge you to read the whole thing — it’s quite illuminating. Here’s the conclusion:

Ron Paul seeks to shrink the federal government to minimal size not because it intrudes in the lives of individuals, but because it stands in the way of allowing the states and localities to enact laws as they see fit — even laws that govern people’s behavior in their bedrooms.

Here’s what Paul published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell — allegedly one of the authors of his racist, homophobic newsletters — about the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas that struck down the state’s anti-sodomy laws, which prohibited sex between men:

The Court determined that Texas had no right to establish its own standards for private sexual conduct, because gay sodomy is somehow protected under the 14th amendment “right to privacy.” Ridiculous as sodomy laws may be, there clearly is no right to privacy nor sodomy found anywhere in the Constitution. There are, however, states’ rights — rights plainly affirmed in the Ninth and Tenth amendments. Under those amendments, the State of Texas has the right to decide for itself how to regulate social matters like sex, using its own local standards. But rather than applying the real Constitution and declining jurisdiction over a properly state matter, the Court decided to apply the imaginary Constitution and impose its vision on the people of Texas.

This plays neatly into the hands of Paul’s Christian Reconstructionist friends, who seek the destruction of the federal government for the opportunity to implement “God’s law” on earth. Via Warren Throckmorton’s invaluable Web site, comes this quote from the Christian Reconstructionist Bojidar Marinov, who writes of why “theonomists,” as Reconstructionists define themselves, should root for Ron Paul:

The theonomic solution to the problems of sodomy and abortion can not be achieved at the Federal level because at that level liberals outnumber conservatives 20 to 1. And theonomic Christians are almost non-existent at that level. It is only when the socialist state is dismantled and power returned back to the states and the counties that we will be able to successfully deal with the other social and moral issues. As long as sin is protected at the Federal level, our political job as Christians is to dismantle the Federal bureaucracy and return all power to the local communities. Therefore, the great battle is against the socialist state.

Given that, Ron Paul is the man with the best position to work for that goal on the national level.

I continue to wonder why Ron Paul is considered a libertarian. He’s an isolationist Tenther. If that’s your philosophy, then fine. But I think an awful lot of libertarians are missing the bait and switch.

Update: There’s a lot of talk about how all this libertarian white supremacy was just a political pact with the devil 30 years ago, along the lines of the Southern Strategy. That may be true. But it seems that Ron Paul has bought his own hype, if that’s the case.

He could be crusading to end the drug war, for instance, on a moral or philosophical level. But as with his defense of Lawrence as a states’ rights issue, he isn’t. He crusading for it to be devolved to a state by state issue. That is not the same thing.

Poor Little Newtie

by digby

Sam Stein reports that little Newtie is feeling all sorry for himself now that he’s tanking in Iowa after being barraged by 10 million dollars worth of negative ads:

At the Rotary Club, he waxed nostalgic about the old days, recalling — in a sanitized way — how he had run a “positive” campaign to taker over the House based on his “Contract with America.”

“It was a positive, issue-oriented campaign that fall,” he told the Rotarians. He said he had wanted to do the same in the presidential campaign but had been blindsided by how nasty and “cynical” the contest was. “We got off to a bad start,” he said. “I can’t do modern politics.” A tired Gingrich suddenly looked the part of the college professor he once was.

Right. He don’t know nothin’ bout all this negativity. He’s just an old country perfesser — a political Mr Chips, if you will — who got caught in the crossfire of modern political warfare.

Except, of course, he invented the weaponry used against him:

As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that “language matters.” In the video “We are a Majority,” Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: “I wish I could speak like Newt.”

That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.

All those years of practice paid off — for his opponents.

Update: He’s a very sensitive fellow:

The Villagers are all calling it a “Hillary moment.” But when she welled up in New Hampshire they all claimed it was a ruthlessly calculated “Madame DeFarge” moment. Newtie’s just showing his softer side.

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Your last moment of zen

by digby

Now THIS is America:

The Rude Pundit explains:

Yesterday, the Rude Pundit was walking down near Ground Zero, New York City, as one must sometimes do in the course of day-to-day activities, when heard someone over a megaphone say, “Never forget. Never forget,” repeatedly, flatly, almost mournfully. This was on the corner of Broadway and Fulton, across the street from St. Paul’s Chapel, one block from the former World Trade Center twin towers. He turned to see what this was, thinking perhaps another protest.

Instead, he saw four figures. Two men, one with a voice that sounded like a megaphone and a sign that read, “Support Our Heroes,” the other with an American flag. And two people wearing what seemed to be brightly smiling ping-pong ball outfits. And, oh, dear, kind readers, the Rude Pundit is not lying to you when he says that one of the ping-pong balls had a “9” emblazoned on it and the other had an “11.” They also wore caps.

Ah, the people on the street were delighted at the sight. And when they took out their cameras or phones to snap a picture, the entire group stopped and waved at the grinning photographers. Then, the photo op done, the foursome would move on, with the first man continuing his sad wail of “Never forget.” read on…

It’s a good thing those ping pong balls weren’t Muslim, that’s all I can say. That would have been so disrespectful.