A time for choosing blah, blah, blah
by digby
The wingnuts are all kvelling over the 50th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s televised speech for barry Goldwater back in 1964 which launched his political career.
You can watch it if you want to:
I think what strikes me about it is the fact that the modern conservative movement has changed so little over all these years. This is their schtick, it’s always been their schtick and that’s that.
Mitch gets punchy
by digby
What in the world is this about?
Apparently they decided Mitch needed to soften up his image. Or something.
Just think, that ad cost money. And it’s costing a lot more to put on the air.
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Americans have to start being honest with themselves
by digby
You’ve probably already read the shocking story in the New York Times about the thousands of Nazis the United States protected and hid all the way up until the 1990s. If not, go read it. I only mention it here to point out that this was done even as the United States was seen as a beacon of freedom and justice to the world. As we were telling ourselves how moral and upright our role in WWII had made us. We did great things — we handled the Nuremberg trials with great dignity and spent vast sums to help rebuild Europe and Japan. But we also protected and hid Nazis for cynical reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with freedom and justice.
America is a very contradictory nation and always has been. We’re the slave holders who simultaneously declared that “all men are created equal” after all. We stole land and committed genocide even as we created a great immigrant nation with immigrants and refugees from all over the world. As Americans it’s really important that we recognize all this about ourselves.
When I hear Clinton going on about how we need to tell better “stories about ourselves” I despair. She’s talking about the myths of America and that’s not what we need. Our vast power means we need to be honest with ourselves and strive to do better not bullshit ourselves into believing we’ve been perfect.
We were hiding Nazis until the 1990s.
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How money wins elections
by digby
So who spends more money getting elected has an effect on the outcome of a political race? Whodduh thunk?
Not to worry though. Most of that is Soros money that’s going to fund lefty bloggers.
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QOTD: Sarah Palin
by digby
I know, I know, she’s a has been loser so who cares what she thinks? But she’s such a perfect representation of a particular kind of wingnut that I have to document it:
There’s no convincing scientific evidence for man-made climate change. The climate has always been changing. Climate change is to this century what eugenics was to the last century. It’s hysteria, and a lot of it’s junk science. And when it’s as discredited as eugenics, y’know a lot of people are going to look foolish and heartless.
I’m pretty sure she didn’t come up with that all by herself. She heard somebody make that comparison somewhere and ran with it. But for someone from Alaska, of all places, to chalk up the massive changes that are taking place in the environment up there to “shit happens” is just depressing. And this from a woman who made her reputation as a maverick reformer who took on the oil industry.
Also too, note her lugubrious appeals to help the poor folks who need cars and trucks. As if they there’s no way we can have transportation without burning massive amounts of fossil fuel. But then she evidently tools around Anchorage these days in a stretch Hummer so I suppose that’s all she knows.
Lots of progress on race over the past century. For white people especially.
by digby
Dara Lind at Vox has a fascinating story today about how “race” was once understood in America. Let’s just say it was a lot more complicated than it is today. Even when I was growing up there was a ton of “ethnic” humor and stereotyping about “Eyetalians” and “Polacks” (and, of course, the usual hideous stuff that persists to this day.) The world of my father seemed to be organized around much finer differences of ethnic and racial identities to a much greater extent than they are today.
The article features an interactive map which shows how each state categorized their population at the turn of the 20th century. Here’s a handy list of the various ways it was understood back then:
Lind explains:
The hierarchy of the table reflects the conventional wisdom of the time — eugenics and social Darwinism hypothesized that the Nordic races were the most evolved, that southern and eastern Europeans were less so, and that non-Europeans (who are barely worth a mention on the immigration map) were the “lowest,” least-evolved peoples.
There wasn’t universal agreement on what the races actually were, but the federal government appears to have used “Nordic, Celtic, Slavic and Iberic” regularly to categorize the immigrants coming into America. A medical journal article published about a decade after this map expresses concern about the “preponderance of the Iberic and Slavic races” among recent immigrants, because of “their poorer physical and mental equipment, and their radically different ideals and standards of living as compared with the Celtic and Teutonic races.”
By the point that article was written, the government was beginning to respond to fears like the ones the authors expressed — by moving toward widespread restrictions on immigration. (Asian immigrants had been excluded since the 19th century, but the US government didn’t put global immigration restrictions in place until the early 1920s.) Under the strict quota system set by the Immigration Act of 1924, only 164,667 immigrants would be allowed to come into the US per year — fewer than settled in the state of Pennsylvania alone in the year 1903.
It’s tempting to point this out as a sign of our incredible progress as a civilization but to my way of thinking it doesn’t really prove much. We have simplified our racial categories to make all those Europeans and Slavs equals which is nice. For white people. Unfortunately, all those “others” are still …. “others.”
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If you want an abusive Daddy-in-chief for president, Chris Christie’s your man
by digby
I don’t know if it’s possible to convey just how loathesome I find Chris Christie and how horrifying it will be for me if somehow this misogynist creep becomes president. I have rarely in my life come across a politician with a personality that gets under my skin like this guy does:
After a heated weekend of sparring between a quarantined nurse and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the nurse is being discharged, the state’s Department of Health said in a statement Monday morning…
While in Florida campaigning for Republican Gov. Rick Scott, Christie stood by New Jersey’s quarantine policy.
“I know she didn’t want to be there. No one ever wants to be in the hospital, I suspect, and so I understand that,” he told reporters. “But the fact is I have a much greater, bigger responsibility to the people and the public, and so I think when she has time to reflect she will understand that as well.”
No, she is not a silly bimbo who didn’t understand her situation and “upon reflection” will understand that Daddy Knew Best. She is a medical professional, an epidemiology specialist, who knows very well that Chris Christie is completely ignorant about protecting the public from this disease and had no business spending several days talking about her as if she was a spoiled child who needed to go to bed without her supper. He betrayed his ignorance by repeatedly saying she was “ill” and hoping that she “recovered” even tough she has tested negative and has no symptoms at all. (It was assumed that he meant she had Ebola but looking more closely at his comments it’s possible that he was saying she was having a mental breakdown. That’s what gaslighting pigs like Christie commonly do…)
Judging from what I read around the internet this week-end, the right-wingers think Christie’s jackboots are awesome. He can lock up nurses in FEMA camps all day long on a whim and it’s fine with them. All it takes for their little authoritarian skirts to show is a little tough guy action toward a woman and they’re on board.
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Hypothetical support for a hypothetical
by Tom Sullivan
The headline from the Colorado Independent caught my attention more than the story (which I already knew): O’Keefe uncovers hypothetical support for hypothetical voter fraud.
The story itself is a week old. The Project Veritas filmmaker (no longer on probation), baited staffers from lefty organizations in Colorado with hypotheticals about committing voter fraud. The object? To get them to say something embarrassing enough on video to prove … something about voter fraud:
Left out of the reel are the many accounts reported by Mother Jones of campaign folks shutting down O’Keefe’s hypothetical voting-fraud schemes or even calling the police when his team refused to disengage. Ultimately, in fact, nearly all of the fraud in the video is hypothetical.
All of it, in fact, except for O’Keefe.
The object of these propaganda efforts is to lead viewers to infer that in-person voter fraud is being committed undetected somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. The same way Bush-Cheney spokesmen repeatedly juxtaposed Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda in public statements until over two-thirds of Americans falsely believed Saddam was connected to the 9/11 attacks.
One of O’Keefe’s most celebrated cases of hypothetical voter fraud took place at a Washington, D.C. polling place on Primary Day in 2012. A Veritas operative presented himself as Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General, but ran out of the place before signing the roll book. That is, he walked right up to the line — put his toes on the line, figuratively — but for reasons unknown would not demonstrate how easy it is for anyone to get away with committing an actual felony punishable by up to five years in jail and a $10,000 fine.
Go figure.
And they wonder why people are afraid
by digby
They aren’t afraid of ISIS or Ebola. They’re afraid because these are the people at the head of the two major political parties in America:
Good God …
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