Month: March 2012

This cartoon just ran in the New Tribune in Rome, Georgia. Update:

John Bailey of the Rome News-Tribune emailed (and commented below) to clarify that the cartoon was not published in their paper — "Our editorial department killed it," he explained — but was published elsewhere. The RNT does frequently print Rome resident Mike Lester's work.

Zandar at Angry Black Lady Chronicles vents:

You’ve got the African-American President is a 70's pimp angle, the Sandra Fluke is a whore angle, the "evil light-skinned brother" angle, the white girl subservient to the black man angle, a complete misrepresentation of Ms. Fluke’s statements to boot and it’s all rolled up into one big insulting awful package of pure hatred for black people, women, and human beings with working souls. It's actually impressive, in the same way ebola-tipped bullets fired into crowds of baby sloths is impressive: just overwhelmingly, unremittingly awful on multiple levels.

My concern about the November election is that with unaccountable Super PACS run by billionaires, a recovering economy, a Republican candidate who once agreed with Obama on universal healthcare and has no credible economic strategy at this point, will combine to create on the most negative campaigns since … well the current primary.

If McCain refused to play the race card, against Palin's wishes, Romney's surrogates will not be so squeamish. (The sad Breitbart video is an opening shot across the bows.) And this may also extend to the Super PAC left. Romney's Mormonism is an easy target – too easy not to exploit by somebody with enough money. I suspect we're all going to have to take multiple showers once this is over.

Yesterday, Ben Smith unearthed the college tape Breitbart promised would damage the president:

Bell was the first black tenured professor at the school, and a pioneer of "critical race theory," which insisted, controversially, on reading issues of race and power into legal scholarship. His protest that spring was occasioned by Harvard's denial of tenure to a black woman professor, Regina Austin, at a time when only three of the law school's professors were black and only five women. He told Harvard he would take a leave of absence — a kind of academic strike — "until a woman of color is offered and accepted a tenured position on this faculty," and he launched a hunger strike to dramatize his point.

The full tape is here. Buzzfeed also helpfully compiled videos of Bell speeches. Breitbart.com claims that "this video is a smoking gun showing that Barack Obama not only associated with radicals, he was their advocate." Weigel examines the "controversy" from 10,000 feet:

Maybe you're underwhelmed by this. It's understandable! The video doesn't actually do much to prove that Obama is a dangerous radical. But it's supposed to prove that the media ignores any connection that might make Obama look radical. That's where the "VetThePrez" hashtag comes in. The Breitbartverse will shame the media — or at the very least, Fox — into publishing stories it might have deemed un-newsworthy.

He follows up here. How Joe Gandelman understands the video:

American politics now revolves around the small battles and mini issues — even battles that are synthetic battles, hyped up to be battles by partisans but of no interest to the average American. These battles can drive up website hits, they can drive up ratings on ideological political shows, they can boost the profile and/or speaking fees of those who push these synthetic battles and involve pushing partisans’ hot buttons.

But the average person will look at this and say: Who cares? So what? And why did you waste my time?

Gingrich is third in Alabama.

Not in the animal kingdom:

Homosexual behavior has been documented in hundreds of animal species, but the  same does not hold for gay-bashing. For starters, few animals are exclusively gay. Two female Japanese macaques might have playful sex with each other on Tuesday, then mate with males on Wednesday. Pairs of male elephants sometimes form years-long companionships that include sexual activity, while their heterosexual couplings tend to be one-night stands. For these and many other species, sexual preferences seem to be fluid rather than binary: Gay sex doesn’t make them gay, and straight sex doesn’t make them straight. In these cases, the concept of homophobia simply doesn’t apply.

(Photo: Female penguin 'Schumi' (L) watches male penguin pair 'Sechs Punkt' (Six Point) and 'Schraegstrich' (Slash) cuddling on February 11, 2005 at the Bremerhaven zoo, where three male homosexual penguin couples live. Although the zoo imported four female penguins from a Swedish zoo last January, the males still don't show any interest in them. By David Hecker /AFP /Getty Images.)

Pareene goes out on a limb: "Now Rick Santorum is the 2016 GOP nomination frontrunner." Weigel backs him up:

It's true because the runner-up of the last Republican primary always starts off with an advantage. McCain 2008. Dole 1996. Bush 1988. Reagan 1976. Romney looked like the candidate most likely to break the trend, but no longer.

Larison counters:

If Romney loses the general election, the desperation to win the next presidential election will be so great that there will be no enthusiasm for risking another election on someone as provocative as Santorum. Contrary to the conventional assumption that Republicans will react to a Romney loss by rallying around a 2016 candidate perceived to be much more conservative, eight years of Obama will make the party more accepting of candidates that they would have previously rejected. 

Mark Garrison reveals a sensory trick:

While the cold neuters tasty beers, it masks the flaws of flavorless macrobrews. So it’s no surprise that the corporate brewers who make Budweiser, Miller, and Coors fill their ads with images of frosty mugs, snowy peaks, and bikini-clad babes frolicking improbably in fake snow. Coors Light has invested the most in frigidness, famously deploying the dopey gimmick of erecting mountains on its labels that turn blue when the beer is "cold enough"… Since key aromatic compounds cannot volatilize at lower temperatures, they won’t release their scent into the headspace gas above the liquid. Put more plainly, the smell the brewer wants you to experience is muzzled; any fruity or floral character is literally on ice.

(Photo by Flickr user DieselDemon)

Shafer makes the case:

For decades, pundits and politicians complained that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two main political parties. Now that there’s a nickel’s worth of difference, they want to reverse the 50 years of ongoing realignment of the two parties, both of which once contained liberals, moderates and conservatives, into two parties, one of mostly liberals and the other of mostly conservatives.

Felix Salmon argues it can:

His reasoning:

I think Morse misses the great hope of the 99-cent price: it’s low enough that substantially everybody in Matter’s target audience can afford to pay it without any real effect on their wealth or cashflow whatsoever. It’s less than the amount you tip a cab driver, or a bartender; in fact, it’s less than the cost of just about anything you might buy in the physical world. 99 cents is low enough that, for hundreds of thousands of people, worries about value disappear. They pay that on text messages all the time, which have much lower value. Why not pay it for something great, if doing so allows that thing to exist in the first place?

Kevin Drum reframes the debate:

I don't have much of an opinion about Matter because I suspect their delivery mechanism is beside the point. … Basically, if they're able to consistently produce spectacular pieces of journalism that generate a lot of online buzz, they'll succeed. If they can't, they won't. But that would probably be true regardless of what kind of delivery model they choose.

Peter Suderman takes aim: 

Romney has taken to framing his campaign in part around the goals of "less debt" and "smaller government." These are central themes to his candidacy, and yet Romney’s actual proposals remain mysterious at best, unworkable at worst. The former governor has not only refused to say how he would cut federal spending, he’s explicitly ruled out two of the biggest expenditure categories: defense spending and Medicare, where he’s declared that he’ll reverse cuts made by President Obama.

We don’t know how Romney will cut spending. But we know how he won't.

"Kony," the last name of brutal Ugandan warlord Joseph, took over Twitter's trending topics on Tuesday as part of a campaign sparked by the above video. Daniel Solomon is inspired:

KONY 2012 is not about the [Lord's Resistance Army], Joseph Kony, or political violence in northern Uganda. Rather, it’s a story of one man (Jason Russell, Invisible Children’s co-founder and the documentary’s director), scaled up to the story of common humanity (young students, mobilizing their communities in support of justice, human rights, and peace in northern Uganda) and the urgency of active action against LRA atrocities in Central Africa ("This movie expires on December 31, 2012"). Invisible Children’s effectiveness as a grassroots organization stems from this fundamental, narrative pattern: it’s about atrocities, yes, but more than that, it’s about what our mobilization against these atrocities suggests about our common virtues, transnational connections, and moral strength.

Jack McDonald expresses mixed feelings about the campaign:

Joseph Kony deserves to be put in cuffs and dragged before the ICC. Raising the profile of the heinous nature of the guy’s crimes is awesome. The idea that popular opinion can be leveraged with viral marketing to induce foreign military intervention is really, really dangerous. It is immoral to try and sell a sanitised vision of foreign intervention that neglects the fact that people will die as a result. That goes for politicians as much as for Jason Russell.

Musa Okwonga wants activists to pay attention to the political dysfunction in Uganda that enables Kony.