New leader in the Post-Election Butthurt Sobfest

A few of you may remember my pointing out this Nate Silver post from last week:

[ + ]

So guess who is now whining long and loud?

Elizabeth Warren, via Rebecca Schoenkopf

Here Is Your Gif Of Elizabeth Warren Trying And Failing Not To Laugh At Scott Brown

(bigger here (also, context))

Been a while since we remarked upon the Bush Legacy

Mr. Newell uncovers the real dirt while the MSM pretends W "declined" an "invitation" to attend this year's Republican National Convention.

The Disgraced Former Speaker of the House: an update

From the Department of Hate To Say I Told You So, But I Frickin' Told You So:

Newt Gingrich is preparing to make the transition from forgotten-but-not-gone to gone-and-hopefully-forgotten by dropping his presidential campaign next week. And he’s doing it in good Reagan-and-Bush-era Republican fashion – carrying on about fiscal responsibility while piling up a nice fat budget deficit.

Mr. Gingrich currently has $4.3 million in debt, according to TPM Muckraker – about 20 percent of his Gross Campaign Product, which puts him in Greece territory. He has more debt than any other failed Republican presidential candidate since 1992.

Emph. added. Not that you needed it.

[Added] Interesting tidbit from the quoted TPM Muckraker link:

Tim Pawlenty closed out with $435,542 in debts which was paid off by Mitt Romney affiliates.

Hmmm! There aren't many people blander than ol' Wonder Bread Willard, but that guy who is known only for having a mullet longer than anyone else on the planet, who (Some would say) was scared out of the race by whispers that Mr. Mitch Charisma Daniels might jump in, is certainly on the short list.

Developing ...

Rick Santorum will watch this ad many times! (So he can tell you how shameful it is.)

(alt. video link)

Stay in touch up to date on the Twitter!

(h/t: PB, via email, and HuffPo)

"A Farewell to Newt"

It’s not easy letting him go. Not easy at all. Sort of like swearing off bedtime Ben & Jerry’s: there’s valor and the promise of self-improvement in the sacrifice, but also the sad awareness that the world just got a little less naughty. A little less fun.

No matter. It’s time to cut Newt out of our diets.

He has no nutritional value, certainly not at this point, as he peddles his ludicrous guarantee of $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, a promise that would be made only by someone with his own bottomless strategic reserve of crude.

!!!

I disagree with Frank Bruni's latest column slightly. Later in the piece, he recites the tired old saw beloved by self-flagellating journalists nationwide, that they somehow did wrong by covering the Republican primaries:

If he refuses to quit, we in the news media must quit him. Starve him of his very sustenance: attention. Exert a kind of willpower that we’ve lacked in this primary, which we turned into too much of a circus by encouraging too many clowns.

This is wrong in two ways. First, if only FoxNews and the Moonie Times were reporting on the early GOP campaigns and debates, there'd be no end of howling from the perpetually aggrieved that Teh Liebrul Media wasn't covering their people.

Second, and much more importantly, one of the ways we keep America safe from a President Bachmann, President Cain, President Perry, President Trump, or a President Gingrich is precisely by shining the spotlight on them.

Actually, it's wrong in a third way. The real problem with Teh Media covering the clown show is not that they gave exposure to clowns. It's that they spent months contorting themselves trying to present them as Serious Candidates, With Important Ideas.

But as to the rest, it's a funny column, worth reading.

A look at today's GOP, by Tom Toles

I don't see a permalink for it (yet?) but at the moment, it's the first item shown on the Toles WaPo home page.

[Added] Outtake here.

I was going to make a sex joke about Newt Gingrich and Alabama ...

... but then the section underneath it left me laughing even harder. Or crying. One of those.

(click to see the little horizontal lines that mean "insigificant," full size!)

You don't actually need me to link to the Wikipedia page on Southern Strategy, do you?

(source | via)

Two Graphic Reminders

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Pics swiped from Strong Intelligent Women Choosing Equality & Freedom Instead Of Religion, on Facebook, via Rita Matthews.

GAME CHANGER

(source | h/t: KK)

Take it from someone who lives there

Gershom Gorenberg, who has been living in Israel for about thirty-five years, appears here in a diavlog with Glenn Loury that was recorded on 26 Feb and posted 3 March 2012. These are slightly longer than soundbites, and deserve to be.

First, how many self-identified Republicans know this, do you think?

(alt. video link)

Also, how about them madrasas!!!1!

(alt. video link)

And a parting thought:

(alt. video link)

Beat that, for four words to live by.

I encourage you to watch the whole thing. And, if you're interested, you can read the first chapter of The Unmaking of Israel for free, on Amazon.

Now, Ezra, don't be afraid to tell the truth

We could let the double whos go, but the other blunder?

(embiggen)

Fixt.

You want proof? Okay, fine. Here, via Newell, is a picture of Willard with all of his Michigan friends, plus a few hundred paid attendees.

(original | via)

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Oh, Bloggingheads ...

Presuming that at least one of them (Conn, for sure) thinks "yes!!!1!," I can only say, what, have we given up on Our Savior already?

Above: Last week's presumptive GOP nominee,
Rick Santorum, giving some hot man-on-cone action

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Pic. sources: screen shot of Bhtv home page as of this moment (video here)
and someone on canv.as

Line of the Day: 2012-02-26

Lends a whole new meaning
to "bully pulpit," doesn't it?Said a few years ago, admittedly:

“Forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils.”
    -- Roger Williams

If I were susceptible to conspiracy theories, I could easily imagine that Rick Santorum is on Mitt Romney's payroll, to help Willard walk back his claim of being "severely conservative" come the general election.

In any case, the source of the above LOTD is Timothy Egan's latest Opinionator post, "Theocracy and its Discontents." It is well worth reading.

(pic. source)

Wingnut fight!

Probably you already heard about this, but just in case not:

The National Review Online called on Monday for Newt Gingrich to quit the Republican presidential contest and endorse Rick Santorum.

The editors of the conservative magazine said it would be a mistake for Republican voters to nominate someone with “such poor judgment and persistent unpopularity” to be the party’s standard bearer.

But wait. That's not the weird part. Here's the weird part:

“On his own arguments the proper course for him now is to endorse Santorum and exit,” the editors wrote.

Endorse Santorum? What about "poor judgment" and "persistent unpopularity?" On the NRO's editors' own arguments …

Line of the Day: 2012-02-05

So now the Hairpiece has endorsed the Haircut, and not the Harebrained. Sweetheart, get me rewrite!
    -- Charles P. Pierce

Bonus at the link: outstanding caricatures by Donkey Hotey. Lots more on Flickr.

Another look at the cocoon

Remember that part I highlighted from the recent "New Rules" bit I posted last week?

Say it again:

But people in the mainstream don’t know a lot about that world. The worst thing that most people hear is a few seconds of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh when they’re in a taxicab. But if you spend time at Media Matters or the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Watch” blog, and so on, or, if, God help you, you go to a white nationalist conference as I did in Washington in September, you know that these ideas have real currency.

My worry isn’t that Newsweek would approach some right-wing guy and get a quote from him, but that they would do it without knowing just how right-wing he is.

[Links added].

The above is from Katie Ryder's interview of Arthur Goldwag, on the question of the New Hate and whether it's different from or worse than what wingnuts of old wallowed in.

Another statement from Goldwag that's well worth repeating:

... Ryan Lizza, the other week in the New Yorker, wrote about a study showing that in recent years the mainstream right has moved much farther to the right than the left has moved to the left.

And from that article:

Polarization also has affected the two parties differently. The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, “Off Center,” documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthal’s data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, “Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left” and “House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as House Democrats moved to the left.” In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization.

(h/t: KK, via email)

Alinksy!!!1! Exposed!!!eleventy!

I was going back and forth with C about the latest kowtowing to the American Taliban and that made me think of a clip emailed a couple of days ago by Special Agent Z200a.

Χιούμορ είναι αλήθεια:

(alt. video link)

I was and am grateful that FINALLY someone with a platform bigger than mine is talking about this. Not to claim superiority over Mr. Maher, of course, but I've been asking this since late '07, early '08 at the latest. Really. I'm no master of literature or anything, but I've got enough breadth to do a Sunday crossword puzzle, if you see what I'm saying, and the name Alinksy didn't even ring a bell when it first got trotted out, round about the time the Wright and Ayers cards finally went flaccid.

But the thing I really liked about this clip was that twenty-five second bit starting at 1:02 about totebaggers some liberals not realizing (or worse, refusing to believe) that there really, really is a disturbingly large chunk of the population whose world view begins and ends with such craziness. Like Alinksy is Teh Left's secret playbook. Or Obama hates America, because he's like Mao. No, Pol Pot. No, Castro. No, Stalin. No, Hitler. One of them. Or the answer to all of our fiscal woes is to go back on the gold standard and invest the rest in personal generators and automatic weaponry (which Obama stealthily plans to take away, doncha know), strictly intended for hunting defending Teh Constitooshin, of course. And God help you if you let Obama's seekrit FEMA police give your child a vaccine or make him eat green vegetables!!!1! Because Michelle is uppity angry!!!1! Also!!!1!

Believe it. Or don't, and see for yourself: go to The Trustworthy Search Engine and type in any of the above. Or any phrase from current events, or American history (1776-1789, 1860-1861, 1941-1945, and 9/11/2001-5/1  /2003 will work best), that comes to mind. And then wallow for a while. Or just browse around Summa Wingnuttia.

No need to panic. They're still a decided minority,* albeit noisy and redolent. But please, just be aware. They're not amenable to compromise, much less reason, and you'd do well to bear that in mind. Not saying it's time for a purge or anything like that. Just saying that you might be amazed what's in our midst.

--bjk +7. Ἐν οἴνῳ ἀλήθεια.

(Pic. source: The Triadvocate | All Greek to you? Okay, here: 1, 2)

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[Added] Oh crap. Googling around for one of the above links teaches me that once again, I am behind: that consarned Edroso has already been all over this one, too. Days ago!

Welp, if you, too, are just learning about this recent work from Roy, sorry for wasting your time, but glad I'm only the opening act, at least! Intro here, full column here. Go.

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* The Republican primaries have not been considered in making this statistical assertion.

Triptych of the the Day

The Biased Librul Media seems to have forgotten the title, which, as any RealAmerican™ will tell you, must be
The Disgrace of Bill Clinton

(pic. source)

I hate to say I told you so, BUT

When the best you can say about your current status is, hey, at least I did better than Michele Bachmann, I think you don't even have Joementum.

 ← An ad accompanying the article just added to the lulz. If you've spent any time reading political websites this past decade, you'll recognize it as an obvious piece of Newsmax (slogan: "We are 1%! (less wingnutty than WorldNewsDaily)" clickbait. However, I think for once we can all agree on choice (c).