Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Scream

Worst president ever.

That is all.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Why is Bush Speaking Tonight?

Bush’s approval rating at 45%. It’s the lowest EVER for a second term president at this point in his term. By a big margin.

Johnson, 1965: 69%
Eisenhower, 1957: 65%
Clinton, 1997: 59%
Nixon, 1973: 57%
Reagan, 1985: 56%
Bush, 2005: 45% .

I think the lowest ever was Nixon at 24% right before he resigned. By contrast, Bill Clinton’s approval rating during the impeachment was 68%. He left office with a 70% approval rating. Clinton’s lowest ever rating was 53% (because of the airstrikes in Kosovo, I think).

Same As It Ever Was

EJ Dionne in today's WaPo on the New McCarthyism:

...the address by Rove, President Bush's most important adviser, provides the outlines of a sophisticated strategy aimed at making liberals and Democrats all look soft on terrorism.


And related -- Repugnicant legislators deliver veiled threat to Major League Baseball if team sale to Soros goes through.

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Durbin

So the guy speaks truth, the Republican noise machine kicks in and distorts his words and changes the subject, and the guy caves. I'm livid. So is Kos and Steve Gilliard. Durbin is an idiot.

Related: Atrios on the demonization game:

...criticize the Democrats for not speaking out on something, and then when they do criticizing them for "politicizing it." The only way to oppose torture is to support it, the only way to oppose the war is to support it. Apparently the only way to have an anti-war movement is not to have one.

A Piece of Work

Last night's Daily Show was brilliant, as usual, as Jon Stewart mocked Bush calling a foreign leader "a piece of work." Video here. Hilarious (and incredibly embarrassing as Bush makes a fool of himself again).

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

I May Be a Doctor...

but I also play one on national TV when I need to kiss up to the radical religious right by diagnosing a patient on the basis of a videotape. Atrios on Dr. Frist:

"I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office,” he said in a lengthy speech in which he quoted medical texts and standards. “She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli.”

Schiavo, it turns out, was completely blind. "The vision centers of her brain were dead."

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Books Re-Released

Two books Neal Stephenson (along with his uncle J. Frederick George) wrote under the psedonym Stephen Bury have been re-released:

Cobweb, a political/terrorism thriller set around the time of the first Iraq war.

Interface, a political shocker about a presidential election.

I enjoyed both. You probably know Stephenson for Snow Crash (great book), Cryptonomicon (couldn't get through it) and the Baroque cycle.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

The Right and Revisionism

With all the revisionism going on about Nixon/Watergate and that asshole Reagan, here's why the right hates the truth.

The right knows that if its historical interpretation of Clintonism can prevail, liberalism as a project can be killed for decades. That is, if they can convince America over the next few crucial years (crucial because historical interpretations of Clintonism are just really beginning) that the Clinton era was not one of prosperity, peace, and a demonstration that government can deliver common goods but was, instead, one of corruption, turpitude, and a fat and happy people discarding moral values for the sake of higher mutual-fund values, they will have won an extremely important argument with serious long-term ramifications.

Texas Ayatollahs

This is just so horrible.

The ayatollahs of Texas passed a law in 2003 that requires that abortions from 16 weeks onward be performed only in hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers. Basically, nearly none actually perform abortions.

So, with no place to get an abortion after 16 weeks, what does a panicky, 17-year-old girl do if she's four months pregnant? Erica Basoria decided to try to induce a miscarriage. When that didn't work, she asked her boyfriend to step on her stomach. A week later she miscarried.

This is all bad enough, but what comes next is fantastically worse: Texas also has a shiny new law criminalizing "fetal murder," and the fact that Basoria wanted a miscarriage in this case doesn't matter. Her boyfriend, Gerardo Flores of Lufkin, has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for his part in this tragic comic opera:

Voting Patterns

New data on voting patterns, family income and race:

For blacks and Hispanics, the cutoff point at which more vote Republican than Democrat is $40,000.

For whites, its $23,700.

This is the “what’s the matter with Kansas” crowd that is voting against its own interests. While so-called moral values can account for some of this, blacks and Hispanics tend to be less secular than whites (even more attuned to the moral values arguments). So that doesn’t explain much.
If white voters voted in the same pattern as black and Hispanic voters, Democrats would win every time. So why don’t they? Why do low to middle income white people vote against their own interests to vote Republican?

My own theory is that Republicans, in their typical divisive manner, have spent the last 30 years using very carefully crafted messages that portray them as the party that protects the interests of white people, while making it clear (in equally coded messages) that Democrats protect the interests of “others.”

Thursday, June 02, 2005

Insanity Reigns

Adopting frozen embryos is madness enough, but the White House endorsing it and the discrimination (must be conservative Christians to adopt -- no gays) that goes along with it? Outrageous.