Shorter Victorates Thermopylae Davisopolous Hansitotle:
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
When Glenn Reynolds does those Instapolls that he does, they’re Instahosted at pollcode.com. In other words, we have discovered a wormhole to an alternate universe where Instapundit allows comments…
Instapundit
February 25, 2009INSTA-POLL: So the Tea Party Movement is well underway. And I think there’s a lot to be said for the notion of demonstrating over passing the biggest spending bill in history without even reading it. If that’s not a reason for protest, what is? But should there be further goals? It’s a viral, grassroots movement, so it’s a matter for discussion, not direction. But here are some alternatives — and please discuss in the comments.
What should be the goal of the Tea Party movement?
- A balanced budget amendment.
- An amendment to limit spending to a percentage of GDP.
- Making members of Congress read the next big bill before voting.
- Something else (discuss in comments).
As Reynolds typed the phrase, “It’s a viral, grassroots movement,” he was saying something that he knew not to be true, intending that the readers of his blog receive false information. The Tea Party thing is being flogged into existence by entities including FreedomWorks, a standard-issue wingnut-welfare foundation with a specialty in online marketing campaigns; the Heartland Institute, a majorly-funded, Chicago-based junk science mill most notorious for its anti-environmental and pro-tobacco work; chumps like these people, and what seems to be a complex admixture between the right’s own transporter-accident copy of the bald cyberfuturist Seth Godin, the Twitter king Eric Odom, and his employer-until-four-weeks-ago, The Sam Adams Alliance.
From Adam Sullivan on February 25, 2009 at 10:29 am.
Get congress to meet outside of DC. Different city each time. Make them easier for you to get to and harder for lobbyists to get to.
Someone’s been reading Heinlein. Problem right off the bat: Ideas that start with a verb in the imperative (“Get…”), or with a phrase like “they should” or “someone ought to,” are probably not crafted with great care.
Also, ‘Adam Sullivan’ sounds like somebody’s name, i.e. the name that a person would have. His younger brother Dylan has a band, and his sister Nicole is considering business school. I grabbed a few of these comments on Wednesday, by the way, with meticulous randomness.
The Sam Adams Alliance is another Chicago-located wingnut foundation, apparently made of compacted, bricked money, that’s with-it about the Facebook, the Twitter, and the free blog hosting on WordPress, and hip to the trolling and policing Wikipedia using multiple throwaway identities. Also ‘citizen journalism‘ — that’s one of those hot, new, up-and-coming grassroots things where you can get people to work for free to get your grassroots message out.
If it’s unclear which of those projects are Odom’s and which are from the Sam Adams Alliance, it’s not because they didn’t explain it to us before deleting that page for some reason; it’s because you can never believe anything these right-wing PR people say, because they lie like Flight of the Bumblebee on the Sousaphone.
Anyway, the Exiled piece linked way up there, on the phrase ‘flogged into existence,’ proposes that Santelli’s spaz on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was not spontaneous, and was instead choreographed in advance. Evidencing this is the fact that one of the instantly-appearing ‘grassroots’ websites turned out to have been registered by Odom, while another was registered six months ago by a promising local stuntster on the staff of a local right-wing talk radio host.
But hey. Fish will swim, cats will meow, and wingnuts will form activist groups with bunting–draped front ends and a rolling con game in the back. It is their way.
From Eric on February 25, 2009 at 10:29 am.
Why don’t I see public hangings listed?
It being their way, this particular effort — the Tea Party scheme — recalls Reynolds’s nominally bipartisan Porkbusters project, which was abandoned at the apparent peak of its influence for puzzle-confuse reason of why-duh?, and lives on only as a rubric under which Reynolds can investigate certain spending while researching excuses for other kinds.
From JZ on February 25, 2009 at 10:28 am.
Term limits. 1 term and your out. for good.
My 1 term is up and my out? For bad!
As with Porkbusters, behind the Tea Party scam is the old and irresoluble right-wing message that government is always spending too much money, except the military is a thing on which infinite money should be spent by government. The first part of this equation has proven to be a winning avenue of persuasion, with its natural appeal to Joe Taxpayer and the laurels of prudence that the persuaders can display on their heads as they decry waste and lament the human costs of government social engineering, and so forth.
But if Jonah Goldberg is right about anything — and unless we’re talking Spicy Baconator or Angry Whopper I’m not saying that he is — it’s that in Liberal Fascism, one can see the intermingling diversity of socialisms, fascisms, and proto-libertarian leave-me-aloneist philosophies that flourished in the years between the World Wars, before the present binary distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ began to be projected back over history. And as it happened, the thing that most decided the pole of the binary that one would end up inhabiting once the dust had settled from the war wasn’t an identification with the left or the right, per se, or one’s position on the interventionist/isolationist question, but one’s reaction to Roosevelt and the sudden explosion of government spending (and ‘statism’) during the New Deal.
From Bill Wyatt on February 25, 2009 at 10:27 am.
Constitutional limitations on taxation, spending and budgeting (to require all present and future spending to be “on budget”. The constitutional budget and spending provisions should include a requirement that any final tax, budget or spending bill be posted to the internet in final form for general public inspection not less than 10 business days prior to a final vote. They should also include a line item veto for the executive, enforcement by taxpayer suit and a requirement that all final tax, spending and budget votes be “on the record”.
That’s actually not dumb, except in most particulars.
…And in the notion that a sweepingly broad Constitutional amendment can be secured by standing in clumps of dozens with signs that say ‘Teabag the Liberal Dems.’ But it’s not a poisonous burp.
From dossier on February 25, 2009 at 10:27 am.
Extreme focus on corruption in congress: Dodd, Frank, Burris, Pelosi, Rangel, etc. and any Republicans that behave unethically as well.
Ah, there we go. Anyone see any ethical lapses by Republicans? Heh heh, me neither. Now how about that Jumbo Jet Pelosi and her island of tuna slavery…
I’ve kept thinking since I realized it that the time between the founding of ‘conservatism’ as an intellectual tradition (in 1953 with Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind) and the rebellion of conservative intellectuals against the ‘pseudo-conservatives’ of the American right [point cough cough] was minus-four years.
Seriously, and still in tangent from the New Deal topic, the term ‘pseudoconservatives’ is associated with a famous Richard Hofstadter essay, although this guy says that Theodor Adorno used it first, in 1950. I say Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology, in 1949. Viereck was not only a conservative, but literally invented the term ‘conservatism’ in its modern usage. His own attempt toward an intellectual history, Conservative Thinkers from John Adams to Winston Churchill, also supplies the very nice calumny, “pluto-cranks.”
From TarAndFeather on February 25, 2009 at 10:26 am.
No Taxation for Nationalization!
[cough point point cough]
[Back later with Pt II, featuring bad evil Nazis!]
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Greg Sargent has the goods:
Top Dems Planning Amped Up Efforts To Elevate Rush As GOP’s Public Face
Top Democratic operatives are planning a stepped up campaign to promote Rush Limbaugh as the public face of the GOP — an effort that will include recruiting Dem governors to make this case on talk shows, getting elected officials to pen Op eds arguing it, and running more ads pushing it, a senior Democratic operative says.
Key leadership staff in the House and Senate, and in all the political committees, have been encouraged by senior Dem operatives to push this message wherever possible, the operative says.
“I’m encouraging everybody to go out and say this,” Paul Begala, the well-known Dem strategist, just told me by phone. “I’m hot for this. Let’s get this out every way we can.”
Begala is emerging as a major cheerleader and public face for this effort, though he says he’s not formally directing it. He described the effort as “organic” right now, though senior Democrats are discussing ways to formalize it.
They won’t have to work very hard. After all, Republicans keep falling over themselves to kiss Rush’s ass on just about every occasion. As GOP Rep. Phil Gingrey wrote to ditthead nation:
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and other conservative giants are the voices of the conservative movement’s conscience. Everyday, millions and millions of Americans—myself included—turn on their radios and televisions to listen to what they have to say, and we are inspired by their words and by their determination.
Guys, some advice:
If you want to be the party of hard work and family values, you should probably find someone to be your ideological figurehead who isn’t an admitted drug addict or a suspected sex tourist. Common sense, people.
ABOVE: Mayor Dean Grose
The Mayor of Los Alamitos, the aptly-named Dean Grose, saw a photo of the White House with a watermelon patch and, after blowing snot bubbles all over his city laptop, he pushed the send button. Now he has offered the best excuse ever since George Bush claimed he had nothing to do with the “Mission Accomplished” sign. Grose says he was “unaware of the stereotype that black people like watermelon.” Apparently he thought that the picture was funny because it was showing all the porkumelons in the recently-passed stimulus bill. Or maybe he saw it as a wry commentary that the stimulus bill was so bad that it must have been written by watermelons.
And, of course, if anyone could defend Mayor Grose, it would be “Van Helsing” at Moonbattery, who calls the watermelon patch photo a “harmless joke” and calls a black woman who was offended by it a “fink who ratted [the Mayor] out [and] sacrificed friendship to the motto, ‘Never Fail to Be Offended.'” After all, what’s the point of being someone’s friend if they can’t call you a “nigger”?
Via Roy, I see that Crunchy Con Rod Dreher — a.k.a., the Ned Flanders of blogging — is romanticizing life in the good old, old, old, old days. Like, say, the Dark Ages:
The question, though, is not whether the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad, but whether on balance the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad. I answer in the negative.
For those of you following at home, Dreher just called the Enlightenment a net negative for human civilization. You know, the intellectual movement that spawned major scientific and political advances and gave us such thinkers as Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith and David Hume. That’s a bad thing now. Why? Because of it’s apparently made people happier:
For the libertarian, human happiness is the highest goal, and that happiness is something that the individual is free, within broad limits, to decide for himself. Traditionalism… imposes limits on human choice and liberty… Its telos is not happiness, but virtue. In fact, the traditionalist does not recognize human happiness apart from virtue. A bad man who is content with himself cannot truly be said to be happy, in this view.
Dreher does acknowledge that this view is a “hard sell” for many voters; after all, who’s going to vote for a politician who promises to make people miserable? But in the end, he thinks this return to the Dark Ages may be the only way humanity can save itself from enjoying life:
I suppose that absent a commonly held source of authority from which we can derive binding ideals of virtue, the libertarian ideal is the only workable one for a pluralist community. But I question its durability over time. We are free — but for what?
OK, so obviously Rod doesn’t like drinking, smoking, having sex or listening to that goldurned rock’n’roll the kids are into these days.
And that’s fine! I don’t believe in using the government to force anyone into having a sinful lifestyle if they don’t want one. In fact, I think we have something called “freedom of religion” in this country that guarantees Dreher’s right to self-imposed misery if he so chooses. But what really makes Dreher’s worldview strange isn’t that he wants to live a godly lifestyle, but rather that he wants to force others through the government to live a godly lifestyle as well. This is why he doesn’t just want to roll back the ’60s, but just about every time period in history where witches were allowed to roam the countryside unburned. It’s a weird, weird world he lives in.
The Purple Avenger, a relief blogger for Ace of Spades, has taken on Attorney General Eric Holder over a legal issue, even though the Purple Avenger’s only legal training consists of sitting as a juror on a 45-minute shoplifting trial, skimming a couple of chapters of a John Grisham novel while taking the Greyhound to Chattanooga, and reading part of the Wikipedia entry on the Second Amendment. The masked purple man takes issue with this statement by Holder
I think closing the gun show loophole, the banning of cop-killer bullets and I also think that making the assault weapons ban permanent, would be something that would be permitted under Heller.
To which our Purple Perry Mason of Peoria retorts:
Ahem, the existing law about bullets…27 CFR 478
478.37 Manufacture, importation and sale of armor piercing ammunition. No person shall manufacture or import, and no manufacturer or importer shall sell or deliver, armor piercing ammunition …
If my memory serves correct [sic], this sort of law has been in place since about the time of [sic] Bush V1.0 was in office…which would be just under 20 years ago. Enough time for the AG to familiarize themselves [sic] with it I would presume…unless of course the AG has the mental capacity of a turnip.
Now before Mr. Rutabaga Head goes all snarky and says Holder has turnips for brains, and before he titles a post “Holder beclowns1 self,” it’s probably a really good idea for a guy wearing purple tights to make absolutely sure that he’s right so that he doesn’t wind up, well, beshitting2 himself.
Oh dear, Mr. Avenger, there’s something brown and foul-smelling running down the leg of your purple tights. I think that’s probably because you didn’t realize that the regulations have a definition of “armor piercing ammunition” which doesn’t include all armor piercing ammunition. It only includes ammunition that can be fired in a handgun. It only includes ammunition of a certain composition and doesn’t include other ammunition that can actually pierce body armor. Oh, and another thing, your stain is getting bigger because the “ban” isn’t really a “ban” either. It only applies to manufacturing and importing ammunition and has no effect on private ownership, use or transfer of armor-piercing bullets.
This is why there have been legislative proposals introduced to close these loopholes and is certainly what Holder was referencing. Here’s Senator Kennedy discussing such a proposal:
On this last issue, at the Judiciary Committee’s meeting on March 6, I offered an amendment to close the loopholes in the federal ban on armor-piercing ammunition. Current law lacks a `performance based’ standard for handgun ammunition that can penetrate body armor. Even more important, there are no restrictions on armor-piercing ammunition used in centerfire rifles. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nineteen law enforcement officers were murdered in the last decade after bullets penetrated their armored vests. Fourteen of these officers were killed by bullets fired from .223 caliber rifles or 7.62 caliber assault weapons–and armor-piercing bullets for these weapons continue to be marketed on web sites today. Because it has no place in our society, I offered an amendment banning all such armor-piercing ammunition. The Committee defeated my amendment by a vote of 10-6, with three members not voting.
Now, Purple, go clean yourself up and put on a clean set of tights, okay?
1I thought “beclown” had jumped the shark sometime ago, even among the juice-box and jammies set.
2 Sadly, No! officially-approved substitute for “beclown.”
Shorter Another Dopewad At Pajamas Media:
Above: Pajamas Media
Welcome to the Punk Presidency
Robert Gibbs’ attack on CNBC’s Rick Santelli is just the latest example of boorish behavior from Obama and his team.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Notes:
1 – The author is Tom Blumer of Bizzyblog, an alternate-reality business blog serving the wingnut community.
It’s the New American Tea Party, comin’ at ya with more new Republican ideas.
A visual representation of TARP and a warning against being lame.
This was sent in by Joe Tex Dozier. Hilarity.
Interesting. They have discovered fail pictures, and have succeeded in posting them haphazardly and in rude sequence, but it seems they have not yet mastered the technology to add the word FAIL to them.
We can help with this.
Well then, we certainly seem fixed here.
…Wait, no, it’s not the guy. You’re supposed to scroll down to a series of photos under the ones of the guy. The ones of wrecker trucks that originated like at Fark.com in like 1997.
Heh.
But in other sadder news, Pittsburgh cancelled their event tomorrow? Why?
Rain.
Look, maybe you are afraid of water. But just so you know, over 200 years ago when the real Tea Party happened, a bunch of really pale ethnically British colonists dressed up like Indians and threw the King’s tea into the harbor. They could have died.
Maybe that’s how you people act up in Pittsburgh. But down in Washington, we roll differently. We might have a drizzle, or it could be a deluge. We’re going right ahead with this, because there ain’t no party like a Washington tea party, because a Washington tea party don’t stop. Even for rain.
A Washington tea party.
A dirty Sanchez don’t stop for rain neither, if you know what I’m saying and I think you do.
Mah homey Mr. Sanchez gonna be up late tonight, dawg.
Shorter Charles Murray
Above: Casus bellcurvi? Never liked those people.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™