One from the heart
by Tom Sullivan
This plainspoken message from the Labour Party doesn’t feel as if it’s been massaged to death by consultants, even if it was. I’m not sure the DNC has the guts to deliver a message as unapologetically progressive as this, or if it has the residual credibility to have it believed if it did. But this one works for me.
Can we get Martin Freeman do one for Democrats in 2016?
Tucker Carlson is very, very upset
by digby
TUCKER CARLSON: The demagoguery around this is really nauseating I will say, echoing George Will’s comments. We’ve always made exceptions for religious minorities. Quakers can become conscientious objectors. So you have a country where religious minorities get to choose which wars they fight in, but not whether to serve cupcakes at a wedding that would violate their religious principles? That’s insane!
And I have to say, all the talk of tolerance that a lot of us took at face value in the ’90s and even last decade — ‘Why can’t we all just get along, you accept me, I’ll accept you,’ — they didn’t mean it at all. These are absolutists, these are jihadis, people who want to make you obey, that don’t brook any opposition to their world view at all. They will crush you.
As one of my editors, one the smartest people in the office Jim Antle said, ‘Today’s social liberals are very much like the stereotype of yesterday’s social conservatives. They set the societal norms, and anyone who deviates from them is punished.’ That is not tolerance! That’s authoritarianism.
Boo fucking hoo.
Here’s an example of conservative tolerance from just last week:
Whiny little self-righteous bitch. “Appalling?” And with such an ironic name, too… Spitalnick? Ironic because you just know she has extreme dick-fright; no chance has this girl ever had a pearl necklace. Spoogeneck? I don’t think so. More like LabiaFace.
That was Tucker Carlson’s brother talking about Bill de Blasio’s press secretary. Here’s what the very sensitive and tolerant Tucker said about that:
In response to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News, Tucker Carlson said, “I just talked to my brother about his response, and he assures me he meant it in the nicest way.”
I ask you: is there anything more pathetic than mean, hypocritical, powerful wingnut conservatives whining about liberal intolerance? Suck it up. It’s embarrassing.
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A surprising statistic
by digby
I did not know this:
As it turns out, with a first-dimension score of -0.391 based upon her entire service in Congress, Hillary Clinton was the 11th most liberal member of the Senate in each of the 107th, 108th, 109th, and 110th Congresses. That places her slightly to the left of Pat Leahy (-0.386), Barbara Mikulski (-0.385) and Dick Durbin (-0.385); clearly to the left of Joe Biden (-0.331) and Harry Reid (-0.289); and well to the left of moderate Democrats like Jon Tester (-0.230), Blanche Lincoln (-0.173), and Claire McCaskill (-0.154).
Some more numbers from the 110th Congress, to further help put things in perspective:
Most liberal Dem
1 Sanders -0.523
11 CLINTON -0.391
Median Dem 33 Biden -0.331
Most conservative Dem 51 B. Nelson -0.035
Most liberal Rep 52 Specter 0.061
Median Rep 76 McConnell 0.409
Most conservative Rep 101 Coburn 0.809Oh, and a certain junior Senator from Illinois, Obama I think his name was? At -0.367, he ranked 23rd in the 110th Congress.
Comparing votes is hardly a perfect way to measure ideology, but it is by far the best method available to bring a measure of quantitative rigor to this inherently subjective topic, and political scientists and statisticians have long relied on DW-NOMINATE for insights about politics and voting behavior. (Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight.com make extensive use of it to power their own results, for example.)
That’s from this post, which discusses at some length how this scoring is done. I don’t know that any of it means much — the Democratic Party doesn’t start off very liberal after all — but perhaps it’s instructive as a starting point.
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