Liberal Media Elite

You knew at some point, some Republican airhead would decide they needed to get on Fox News by stoking the outrage over their “disenfranchised votes” due to the alleged (but not proven nor even supported by bad evidence) double counting in the Minnesota Senatorial race.

Not wanting to let some good manufactured outrage go to waste, that’s just what some dimwits are doing in St. Paul. Money quote…

Though the group acknowledged that it had few concrete examples of actual double-counting, its attorney said he believes there “could be hundreds” of double-counted votes. At a late-morning news conference, the group said it would launch a website in hopes of getting other Minnesotans to join them. “My vote was disenfranchised” because of the double-counting, said Scott Walker, a Republican activist from St. Paul. “I am furious about that.”

It is truly heartening to me that the same bullshit tactics that cost Republicans the last two election cycles are still enthusiastically employed by those who have yet to come to grips with the fact that it ain’t 2003 anymore. My liberal brethren…do not get pissed about this stuff. Encourage it. ‘Cause 2010 is just around the corner and the dumber these guys make themselves look the better it will be for us.

Something light to get back in the swing of things:

And as MissLaura at Daily Kos so accurately remarked: “Shoot, at least I bought my own damn pajamas and didn’t get the RNC to buy not just clothes for me but underwear for my kids.”

Of course we should be writing about all the transitionin’ going on, but there are so many trial balloons up in the air right now that it’s more fun to follow Alaska’s Imelda Marcos governor around a little more.

Andrew Sullivan posted this already, but… This is last night in New York:

Natascha has photos—allegedly—of the Uptown Mpls street parties, too…

You may remember a post of mine from this spring. I had less than charitable words for Connecticut. Apparently my sample of about 6 people at apparently the wrong bar was somewhat unscientific. In the district I was in, the last remaining New England Republican House member was given his pink slip.

Jim Himes beats Chris Shays. (That’s wonky link, you have to select the “house” tab and scroll across the district in the far lower left hand corner. But it’s too late to search for a better link.)

It’s been a good great night. This is sort of like sprinkles on the proverbial sundae. Al Franken will be the cherry on top. Here’s to hoping the 9 remaining precincts in MPLS and and what’s left of the Range can do it. Given what’s still out, I like the chances.

Many electoral signs are pointing to at least an Obama victory and even a landslide. But there is no need to get complacent.  None.

Here’s why:

The other day at work somebody had placed some “literature” in the Men’s room printed off from a all guns are good guns (and the more the better) website about why you shouldn’t vote for Obama. I think there was also something about not voting for Obama because he’s not a good Christian or something.

OK. Whatever.

The next day I went to my desk and passed this cubicle. Now, I am a big fan of criminal procedure and arguments about how to apply the 4th amendment, so I also apply the idea of the “plain view doctrine“  to journalism too.  This guy had left his cube with his radio belching out a right-wing AM station and as I glanced in, this is what I saw:

It’s a free country. This guy can say and write whatever crazy gibberish on his desk calendar he wants.

But this is a great example of where this election is at.

This is what we are working against.  I am voting because I love Obama’s ideas and what he stands for. The other reason is to reject people who think like this and what they stand for. These are the people voting for John McCain. These are the people McCain is speaking to.

This is the result of John McCain’s campaign: people who think Obama is a Muslim and a socialist.

There’s nothing wrong or illegal about being either one of those (the way some people behave you might wonder) but those are things that Obama is not. This election IS a referendum on reality. It’s between the people who will believe the garbage in the pictures above and the ones who see the country for what it is.

After 8 years of Bush and his bullies, we need to do whatever it takes to put a stop to this and repudiate it. Even if the polls show a lot of other people already agree with us, it’s not over until the polls close.

This is why we need to do everything we can to make sure we win this election. For every one of us, there is probably one of these guys. Hopefully the election returns will prove me wrong on that.

Get one now. Before watching this. If you don’t need it, I’m voting you off the island.

Fox is reporting that Gov. Sarah Palin is going to vote—on Election Day—in Wasilla, Alaska.

Although it’s not official just yet, that must mean she’s not going to be in Tempe or Flagstaff or Tucson or Phoenix or wherever it is John McCain is going to give his big speech from.

And if she’s planning to be absent… That must mean they’re not expecting that big speech to be one of victory. I mean, Alaska’s Mean-Girl-in-Chief wouldn’t miss her first chance to scrunch up her nose on live television before she has to go run that boring old Senate.

You’re in the voting booth. You know what to do for President. Ditto on the Senate race. House race is a no-brainer. You may not recogize the names for state legislature candidates, but the handy party id probably makes the choice an easy one on the spot.

But then you turn the ballot over. Judges. Lots of them. Soil and Water Conservation district. Egad. I’m what you call a “high-information” voter and I’m usually clueless on these things. To fix that I did my homework this year. I looked at all the contested races for judgeships. I was going to put up a long post with my findings and personal endorsements. But then I saw the endorsement slate from the League of Young Voters PAC. Well, they did their homework, too. And came to many of the same conclusions.

You can find the endorsement slate here. Read up. Don’t dread the back-side of the ballot.

Just off the wires.

Guilty. All Counts.

This makes me happy.

Allow me to introduce the junior Senator from Alaska. Mark Begich.

UPDATE: Bye, Ted. —Matthew

I hadn’t checked out the U.S. Senate race for Minnesota in a while…

That’s, uh… Pretty impressive.

The kings and queens of Japanese culture in Minneapolis are supporting Barry:

The Cajuns are getting into the act. (Rik, c’est pour toi, ça.)

I can’t even go into how mad this makes me. A friend of mine, who has never been a Republican in their lives, got this in the mail today. They were kind enough to let me share it with you.

I don’t have the time and don’t really think I need to go through point by point everything that is wrong with this.

This piece of mail is what the Republican Party of Minnesota is sending on behalf their members with the money their members gave them (Michele Bachmann’s, Norm Coleman’s Arne Carlson’s ALL of the MINNESOTA GOP).

Sorry you’ll have to click on the page numbers to see the actual hit piece. But it was the quickest way to do it.

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

If you felt like I did, you called the MNGOP at 651-222-0022 at told them what you thought of this.

The national GOP (in the form of the NRCC) has pulled all support for Michelle Bachmann. No advertising support. No money. Certainly it’s odd that it’s her latest spewing of shit that got her axed…they seemed happy to put up with it until now…but, you know, better late, etc.

In the days after 9/11, much thrill was made out of the French newspaper Le Monde’s headline, “Nous sommes tous Américains”: We are all Americans. How far we have come. For today, we are all not Americans. Today Rush Limbaugh has said in regard to Gen. Colin Powell’s endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama:

“I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I’ll let you know what I come up with.”

You know, Rush, just because you and your ilk think everything’s all small-minded identity politics and just because you and your ilk are knee-jerk reactionaries doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be. Maybe some of us—maybe most of us, even—have a vision of America that transcends loyalty to a race or a party or an economic class or a region and actually, you know, embraces the idea of a whole country and all of the people contained inside it.

Yes, even the fat, mean, cynical drug addicts have a place.

I understand it’s difficult—if not impossible—for the closed-minded to understand open-mindedness, for the self-satisfied to understand the aspiring. There is an anxiety, a panic that consumes them, because they look at the rupture of their supremacy as a rupture of the country. They believe there is no America without a conservative Republican at the top of things. Everything else is illegitimate, the object of ridicule. This election might very well be a wholesale repudiation of that.

But it will (inshallah) be more than a rejection of something wrong: It may be an affirmation of what America really is all about, in all its splendid complexity and smarts and creativity and commitment to not just one another but to the idea that humans are free and equal, and all that other junk that gives people of goodwill goosebumps.

Maybe that’s why Rush and his ilk are on track to lose: They cannot see what French headline writers plainly can. Maybe that’s why these days they’re slipping from the merely offensive to the outwardly abhorrent. They’re forgetting that nous sommes tous Américains and they can’t take that away from not one of us, no matter how selfish they are, no matter the depths of their chauvinism.

Because, despite their best efforts to win through their various obscenities, we still are America:

So! Michele Bachmann’s comments have raised $438,346.57 (and counting) for her opponent.

Live by the outrage, die by the outrage.

Update: MPR’s reporting he’s up to $620,000. Squee! Also, Michele got a shout-out in Gen. Colin Powell’s post-Meet the Press remarks:



I have no idea how popular Gen. Powell is in the sixth district—if I were to venture a guess, I’d say extremely—nor do I have any idea how his mini-smackdown against Rep. Bachmann will play. But, still, this is all good news, all the way ’round.

So, Rep. Michele Bachmann was on the teevee tonight making a royal jackass out of herself and, if this was any less a tolerant country, people would be burning tires in her front yard right now. Because that’s what she deserves by any objective measure. Michele: You are not the arbiter of patriotism. Get that through your thick goddamn skull right the fuck now. You are a hack, nothing more.

And there are videos being distributed throughout the land where Angry White Working-Class Americans talk about things they don’t have any sort of rational grip on, like socialism and Arabia and Yahweh-only-knows-what-else, and how it’s coming to rape their daughters to death or tax their small businesses to death or convert their sons to homosexuality which, as we all know, leads to death, AND WE’RE MAD.

And so on.

It’s all very boring and terrifying all at once, and rapidly turning into a predictable parody of itself. Kind of like a weak Vonnegut novel when the subject turns to the selfishness and lack of self-awareness of the American people. “Hocus Pocus,” say.

And everyone is acting so coy that now that the left has a decent chance of making huge inroads in this country that it’s shocking and incomprehensible that people should behaving like this!

I hate to call bullshit, but bullshit. The horrorshow of Joe Fuckwad and his Pennsylvania nightmare of a homey Curious George doll named “Hussein Jr.,” that’s not new to the American scene.

Right-wing radio has been breast-feeding these people for twenty years, egging them on to these dizzying heights of rabid stupidity. And we’re not even allowed to call them what they are: stupid fucking bigots. Why? Because they’re “real” Americans from the “Heartland” or some fucking David Brooks bullshit sentimentality that belongs not in politics but on a fucking collectible spoon. They’re a group invented by elites for the elites’ purposes: These are the people who can’t be wrong because they can’t be wrong because they’re so “authentic” and their “narrative” holds up in the focus group, and they’ll buy the books in hardcover and tune in every night. Apparently, the first step on the relatively short path to fascism is just telling people that they’re smart and pretty.

These are the people who have been praised beyond measure in order to whip them into enough of a frenzy that they would part with enough money to make bajillionaires out of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly and Matt Drudge and all the other media monsters who have gleefully strip-mined democracy for a quick buck. The conservative sludge are a useful mass of humanity: a great unwashed who happily become greater and more unwashed, and pay for the privilege.

They’re dupes. I’m saying it now. Dupes. They’ve been had. And it’s time to stop respecting them because the more we respect them for their gullibility, the more gullible they become.

I find it both telling and sad that the right wing has always accused us on the left of corrupting people because of our moral relativity and “I’m okay, you’re okay” philosophy. Yet, that is exactly how the GOP has formed their coalition and won elections all these years. Everyone was the prettiest girl at the dance, everyone the strongest cowboy: There was no lie the Republicans wouldn’t tell in order to score in the back seat of the little red electoral college.

Well, smarty-pants conservatives, what the fuck happens when you tell your constituents they’re the smartest, most perfect Americans and that Americans are the smartest, most perfect people God has ever created?

THEY BECOME CRAZY, THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS. You can’t tell flawed people they’re flawless. Because, instead of dealing with problems, they retreat into the delusion of perfection and go insane (it happens to celebrities all the time).

And so crazy is now what we have from the right, all in thanks to a bunch of businessmen, media moguls and religious leaders who thought they could control a reactionary populist sentiment in order to take financial advantage of it. Well, fuckers, you can’t. No one can. You can’t make a quick buck off of the backs of resentment, not without unleashing a lot of danger. Thanks for the mess, Hannity. Thanks for the sewer, Malkin. Now shut up.

The grown ups have to take care of the mess now.