Sometimes a mop sink is just a mop sink. Building managers and legislative staffers have sought to reassure some concerned Tennessee lawmakers that recent renovations at the state Capitol did not install special facilities for Muslims to wash their feet before praying.
Whew, that was a close one. Another win for FREEDOM!!!!!
It astounds me that so many on the right think (or portray themselves as thinking) that if small businesses have extra money lying around because of low taxes, they’ll automatically go spend it to hire more people.
Business doesn’t hire more employees just because they have the money to do it. They hire more employees to meet increased demand for their product or service. When the middle- and lower-class citizens don’t have jobs or disposable income, there is little demand. So either the businesses need to unwisely spend money they don’t have to spend just because they have it, or we need to focus on increasing demand.
The GOP is focused on giving money to the rich (Job Creators™) and counting on them to spend the country out of recession and high unemployment. They aren’t doing that. They’re pocketing the money as profit (as any smart business owner would do). So let’s try something else.
Maddow was on her game last night, covering all the ways in which the GOP - instead of adapting their brand to actually appeal to a majority of voters - is spending its time and money trying to rig the system. 2010 gerrymandering, attempts to distribute electoral votes by congressional district, union busting, voter ID/registration laws.
Seriously, watch the whole thing, if you can.
Here are just a few of the conspiracy theories popping up, just today, in my political RSS feed:
- Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) suggests the FBI was blackmailing Petraeus to force him to testify favorably in his Benghazi session with Congress.
- The head of Maine’s GOP has suspicions about Obama winning Maine by 100,000 votes: “In some parts of rural Maine, there were dozens, dozens of black people who came in and voted on Election Day. Everybody has a right to vote, but nobody in town knows anyone who’s black. How did that happen? I don’t know. We’re going to find out….”
- American Family Association hack Bryan Fischer has minorities figured out. Hispanics do not vote Democratic because of the issue of immigration but rather because “they are socialists by nature” who want open borders simply so that they can bring in their families to “benefit from the plunder of the wealth of the United States.”
- Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) suspects the United Nations of trying to take over our gun regulation.
- The Fox News Channel questions the new high jobless numbers, which Fox’s own website attributes to Hurricane Sandy. FNC personalities call the Department of Labor “sketchy”.
- Glenn Beck claims that Obama has intentionally ‘set-up’ General Petraeus in order to discredit the military.
That’s all just this morning in my feed. They’re going all-in on the crazy. But it continues to be all for show. Because also this morning, we find this little tidbit about John McCain, who has been on the war path questioning Benghazi:
John McCain is calling for more information to Congress, but he had a press conference yesterday instead of going to a closed briefing where administration officials were giving more information. Well, Ted Barrett asked John McCain about that, and it was apparently an intense very angry exchange and McCain simply would not comment on it at all.
Four more years of this? Or are they gearing up for impeachment?
We’re never going to have any serious problem solving if one party thinks it’s right all the time, and when data shows they’re not, they claim it’s a conspiracy covering up the fact that they’re right.
When a lot of your advisors are giving anonymous quotes to an article about what a clusterfuck your presidential campaign is less than two months from election day, you may have a problem.
Then again, your problem may simply be you have an uninspiring candidate with no new ideas and few specifics.
In college football, there is the enormous rivalry between the University of Texas and Oklahoma University. UT’s mascot is the longhorn, and at football games throughout the season, you’ll see thousands upon thousands of burnt orange-wearing fans thrusting that easily recognizable longhorn hand sign into the air. It’s the symbol of their mascot, and their school.
OU, however, has a mascot: the Sooners (Sooners were, funny enough, basically cheaters, settlers who claimed Oklahoma land before President Cleveland opened it for settlement). There is no hand symbol I am aware of for the Sooners. But the one I see the most is pictured above: it’s the UT Longhorn symbol, upside-down.
I’ve always thought this a little odd. Where UT students have a self-identifying symbol they can use anywhere, anytime, Sooner kids have a symbol that relies on the existence of their most hated opponent. And they can’t exactly flash that upside-down longhorn when the Sooners play Ole Miss or Kansas. If the University of Texas ceased to exist, the Sooners would seemingly no longer have a sign. If UT changed mascots, and developed a new hand sign, would OU change theirs as well?
This odd opponent-based messaging is exactly what Romney and the GOP seems to be doing. Romney will release no specific details about what he plans to do in regards to taxes, jobs, foreign policy. Instead, they’re building a whole campaign around something Obama said and twisting it: “We DID Build It!” (we’ll put aside that Obama never actually said what they’re claiming he did, so this angle is based on a falsehood) The 2012 GOP Presidential Race doesn’t have a message without Obama. Bush in 2000 claimed he’d put “integrity” back in the White House (well done on that, W), in 2004 said he was the only one to keep us safe (not counting 9/11, of course). Obama in 2008 was the “hope and change”. They had self-defining themes.
But Romney’s message is based on turning Obama’s message upside-down. It’s not a good way to define yourself.
From Bloomberg:
Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign asked Florida Governor Rick Scott to tone down his statements heralding improvements in the state’s economy because they clash with the presumptive Republican nominee’s message that the nation is suffering under President Barack Obama, according to two people familiar with the matter.
What’s unfolding in Florida highlights a dilemma for the Romney campaign: how to allow Republican governors to take credit for economic improvements in their states while faulting Obama’s stewardship of the national economy. Republican governors in Ohio, Virginia, Michigan and Wisconsin also have highlighted improving economies.
Just as I had suspected last Friday, Romney’s attempts to make Obama sound worse than he really is also make the GOP Governors sound worse. And the more nuanced “Our state’s not doing too bad, because of me, but it could be doing better, because of Obama, so elect Mitt Romney and me” does not make a pithy bumper sticker.
Corporate profits over time. That socialist Obama sure does hate private enterprise!
EDIT: It’s funny that I posted this the morning of the 8th, and then later that day Obama gets in “trouble” for saying that the “private sector is doing fine”. I dunno, I’m looking at corporate profits coming close to $2 trillion up there. That’s not “fine”?
Political ranting. Because there isn't enough of that. <--sarcasm
