US POLITICS: AMERICANS, PLEASE WELCOME YOUR NEW PRESIDENT... SCOTT BROWN!

glad youve been standing up for the lil guy recently tracer

?

i honestly have no idea what that means max :(

but for the record, gail collins is a supercilious nitwit who is so enraptured by her own place in versailles that she uses her "politics" column to alternately make fun of regular people and moan about how boring all discussion of policy is

lol i just meant thats the second time youve called out someone for being 'condescending' on these threads

collins has been hilar recently!

i mean again, "hilar" has a low bar in the nyt op eds page

i don't think that's a fair description of collins at all. it is sort of a fair description of dowd at her worst (which is a lot of the time). collins is a whole other thing, she knows and cares plenty about policy, but she also obviously knows that "policy" a lot of the time has only a glancing relationship to politics -- which is really the point of that column. she, krugman and herbert are the good guys on that page, afaic. (ok, kristof too most of the time.)

yeah dowd is a whole other level of nitwittery

I can't ever take Mo seriously after her shenanigans against the Clintons.

The other night my labor activist pal said of the Senate bill, "I hope the angel Moroni fucks Harry Reid up the ass, unlubed."

every once in a while dowd writes something pointed and coherent. but it's a rarity, and most of the time she's caught up in trying to make idiotic puns and what she seems to think of as cutting, catty one-liners. what's even worse is you can tell her writing "style" sometimes influences friedman, like they're engaged in misguided-wordplay one-upsmanship.

xp:
isn't that what mormons hope for when they die?

Hitchens called Reid "that Mormon mediocrity" in 2006. Prescient!

stephen lynch already voted for the health care bill. i dont see what he thinks is going to happen if he changes his mind and votes against a slightly worse version--people are going to realize he was against it all along?

100% confused by this line of thinking - he voted for one, doesn't like a worse one: he's obligated to like the thing that isn't the thing he voted for?

"can I have a ham sandwich"
"sure thing sir, here is your tuna sandwich"
"I don't like tuna where is my ham"
"stop being a hypocrite"

100% confused by this line of thinking - he voted for one, doesn't like a worse one: he's obligated to like the thing that isn't the thing he voted for?

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Thursday, January 21, 2010 9:50 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah id buy this except that lynch isnt objecting to the bill, hes objecting to its cost--which is... the same

GOOD LORD, THAT'S A LOT OF MONEY

(movie quotes aside, the point still stands; if you agree to X at a particular price and someone gives you something less than X, you probably don't want to spend the same amount of money on it)

i guess im reading that quote as being abt his political chances in november vis-a-vis the bill? lynch is a conservative democrat so i cant imagine that he prefers the house bill...

the tuna costs the same as the ham, are you sure you don't want it?

also we shouldnt really be talking about the differences btw the house bill and the senate bill, we should be talking about the differences between the senate bill and the modified senate bill that the house would have to approve which are... miniscule, mostly

especially now that labor has give the house the go-ahead

midterm campaign slogan:

Democrats -- We're the Best You Can Get, Even Now

i thought that was always their slogan?

I was gonna say!

but it gets funnier as they get worse and worse.

if you agree to X at a particular price and someone gives you something less than X, you probably don't want to spend the same amount of money on it

What if that thing is Ebola or Nickelback?

sigh

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122805666

govt for sale, as it should be.

the tuna costs the same as the ham, are you sure you don't want it?

real talk, I will shill for any network that hires darraghmac as a color commentator on American politics. that is just the extent of the lols he brings. any network heads who check this thread please take note

she knows and cares plenty about policy

* boggles *

tracer i honestly have no idea what your problem with gail collins is. ideology-wise, she's basically an outraged liberal feminist. and she was also a political reporter and columnist for years and years before she ever went to the times. but whatever anyway.

collins columns in 2010:

jan 6 - byron dorgan is someone i have barely heard of, why is he important now?

jan 8 - washington wizards handgun scandal and tiger woods. also, twitter

jan 14 - coakley is a bad, unlikeable candidate. also, senate rules are unfair

jan 15 - massachusetts voters are voting emotionally, i thought those days were over

jan 20 - voters are crazy

i have left out some giuliani and palin material but please set me straight if there were policy issues that i somehow missed in there

i am amazed you can detect any ideology in her at all beyond "la di da, this politics game sure is nuts! byeeeeeeeeee"

lol you are making her sound like a psuedonym for me

perhaps you'd prefer to listen to Chris Matthews talk about the Great Significance of horse-race politics

i like the tuna analogies upthread, b/c we all know what smells like tuna & how the Democrats have been acting lately so ...

stupid Senate rules are policy-related, btw

LOL: mikemadden Why stop at just spending? SCOTUS should have ruled that corporations can actually run for office. 30 minutes ago from UberTwitter

I look forward to voting for President Wal-Mart and Vice President General Motors.

again, collins writes about the gaps between politics and policy and the way they interact. that's a sort of important part of how things work or don't and why. it's a natural thing for political writers to write about. she treats a lot of it like it's frivolous because a lot of it is frivolous and trivial and distracting from what's actually going on -- which is usually sort of the core point of her columns -- that rome's burning back there somewhere. if you don't like her flippant tone, fine, but matt taibbi's flippant too -- that doesn't mean either of them isn't smart or serious.

I'm not sure where to stick this, but SCOTUS just gutted McCain-Feingold.

Have you guys read Jennifer Government? It feels like that's where we're currently headed.

xp: max posted that upthread

See, if we just get rid of the Gail Collinses and get more Tim Russert's Kids, things will be perfect!

http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/likefatherlikespawn.jpg

in a way i think the scotus ruling just sort of makes it all official. instead of corporate whores we can elect corporate spouses.

time to move to Amsterdam

tipsy what you call "gaps between politics and policy" i call speculative mindreading of the electorate - which is a lot easier than research and analysis

matt taibbi writes long articles stuffed with reporting - his tone is colorful but it's not flippant, it's outraged

i think the only thing that could possibly outrage collins is.. frankly i have no idea what would ruffle her imperturbable wry grin

there are different kinds of outrage. not all of them use exclamation points. but, for example, in one column you mentioned about senate rules:

There are 100 members of the Senate. But as Brown is currently reminding us, because of the filibuster rule, it takes only 41 to stop any bill from passing.

U.S. population: 307,006,550.

Population for the 20 least-populated states: 31,434,822.

That means that in the Senate, all it takes to stop legislation is one guy plus 40 senators representing 10.2 percent of the country.

People, think about what we went through to elect a new president — a year and a half of campaigning, three dozen debates, $1.6 billion in donations. Then the voters sent a clear, unmistakable message. Which can be totally ignored because of a parliamentary rule that allows the representatives of slightly more than 10 percent of the population to call the shots.

Why isn’t 90 percent of the country marching on the Capitol with teapots and funny hats, waving signs about the filibuster?

SCOTUS ruling totally predictable, sadly

i think i have an answer, tipsy! because the 40 republicans in the senate don't actually come from the 20 least populated states - this scenario exists only in her mind

maybe collins could actually try writing about reality instead of typing novels

by the way, if she thinks that US voters sent a clear, unmistakable message in electing barack obama, what does she think the voters of massachusetts did?

ah here it is - national angst is causing people to ignore the issues and just react to candidates’ personalities

she truly is indispensable!

i think i have an answer, tipsy! because the 40 republicans in the senate don't actually come from the 20 least populated states - this scenario exists only in her mind

maybe collins could actually try writing about reality instead of typing novels

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, January 21, 2010 11:18 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

thats not her point tracer