The party of ideas

Posted on 29 October 2008 by Terry Chay

I was reading this article which makes reference to something I just had to look up.

Ahh, yes! The unlicensed monkey with the plunger telling me that a 3% increase in the marginal tax rate is somehow equivalent to collective ownership. Oh so amusing…

Graphic and text from SadlyNo: Obama’s proposed hike of the top marginal rate to 39.6 percent doesn’t represent the highest it’s ever been, not by a long shot. Joe the Plumber might be interested to learn that, in fact, when the top marginal rate was lots and lots higher, America did all sorts of cool shit, like win two world wars, invent the Internet and play golf on the Moon.

Now it may be that Joe the Plumber, John McCain and Sarah Palin don’t like kicking Nazi ass, cheap porn, and Tang. But real Americans do, even if they sometimes forget how we got to do and have those things. It took tax money to achieve the national greatness we all know and love. Conversely, when we stopped taxing rich people, lots of terrible crap happened

Favorite comment:

I’m worried about being taxed more under Obama, because I was planning on winning the lottery in the next couple years.

Defending Montana

Posted on 28 October 2008 by Terry Chay

For the last three years, a number of people of both parties have ridiculed the 50 State Strategy adopted by Howard Dean and Barrack Obama.

Recently, the Republican National Committee just spent half a million defending McCain in Montana. Montana! And remember, that’s money put there because the McCain campaign is outspent because of fundraising limits. Remember when, not more than a few years ago, it was taken as a given that the Republican campaign had much more money than the Democratic one?

Some people need to own up and admit they were wrong about campaign strategy. The Democratic Party has been in denial about this ever since Clinton and the party suffered for two decades. If the Republican Party doesn’t changed their time in the wilderness will be much longer.

Leaving you with a photo of a terrorist fist bump training camp taken by Joe Raedle of Getty:

Favorite comment: “Black secret service agent, black car, black candidate hitting a small, white child who is grimmacing in terror. What next America? The negrofication of America has begun.”

Hmm, looking at the picture, it looks like I’m going to have to add the Wall Street Journal to the list of liberal rags.

The economy is not an Ayn Rand novel

Posted on 24 October 2008 by Terry Chay

We were up all night at my house working on the school newspaper. It was my house because I was the only person in the entire high school who had a copy of Pagemaker and a laser printer.

The other editors started to complain about which things would be caught by our faculty advisor this time and we would be forced to change. One of them started calling her the “Fat Raging Bovine” or FRB for short. At that moment, I had a gap in the layout that no amount of finagling could cause me to get rid of. I filled the tiny space in with a line drawing of a bull overlaid with the text “FRB” crossed out.

We laughed, and moved onto the next page.

I never did get around to removing it.

I’ll get to the economy stupid after the jump.

Campaign manager humor

Posted on 23 October 2008 by Terry Chay

Mike Murphy was once the chief political strategist of John McCain’s campaign. He recently posted some zingers about Palin’s wardrobe malfunction. Here is one:

Q: What’s the difference between a Pit Bull and a Hockey Mom? A: You can feed a pit-bull for 483 years with 150 grand.

(List of “Wasilla Main Street” shops.)

On Proposition 8

Posted on 22 October 2008 by Terry Chay

In my state Propsition 8 will try to amend the constitution to eliminate gay marriage. It will most likely pass.

I would normally use this as a launching pad into the utter stupidity of direct democracy. It is a shame that I can vote on propositions that can pass with a slim majority and have the force of a constitutional amendment.

But then others might say that, of course I’d have this view against Prop 8, I’m from the only part of the state that is opposed to the measure or some other assorted ad hominem.

In reality, I think that this shows how far I’ve come.

Teh Gay after the jump

To that seven-year old Muslim-American kid

Posted on 20 October 2008 by Terry Chay

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America. I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards–Purple Heart, Bronze Star–showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. —Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama on Meet the Press

Revisiting Saddleback

Posted on 16 October 2008 by Terry Chay

I haven’t watched any the presidential debates because I sort of like my LCD television set and don’t want to damage it just yet by throwing things at it. Plus, other people do a more amusing analysis by counting tongue juts and generating word clouds.

This explains why I’m furiously googling what the hell a “Joe-the-Plumber” is (not that it mattered).

It also explains why I base my opinion on word-based transcripts and not strange body language.

And it occurred to me just how different the transcripts on McCain’s end seemed between this and the Saddleback Forums. You remember that? It was the debate at a evangelical Christian megachurch in which to be fair the same questions would be asked of both candidates with the latter being in a “cone of silence” which McCain won handily.

On comparing Saddleback to the debates after the jump

Paul Krugman wins the Nobel Prize

Posted on 13 October 2008 by Terry Chay

It has always amazed me the competency gap between the liberal columnists and the conservative and moderate ones on the New York Times. The gap widened today as New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, has won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

For the last four years on this blog I’ve been quoting him profusely.

Congratulations!

(Here is an column he wrote three years ago about the housing bubble that was pilloried by the right wing echo chamber.)

Bring Tina Fey to Michigan!

Posted on 8 October 2008 by Terry Chay

Last week, McCain pulled out of Michigan, the state parties’ reactions there is highly amusing…

The Republican party there is apparently petitioning for Sarah Palin to visit Michigan in an attempt to prevent McCain from giving up on them.

The Democratic party there decided to “help” their brothers out by petitioning to bring actress Tina Fey to Michigan.

Tina Fey/Sarah Palin CNN video after the jump

What we’re being protected from

Posted on 8 October 2008 by Terry Chay

The commenters on Balloon Juice get funny when they get angry.

For instance, this article where John concludes, “And let me be clear, once again, the [Dirty Fucking Hippies I derided and mocked as delusional] were right.” In this case, it turns out the terrorist surveillance watchlist is being abused in the exact same ways they were abused in the sixties.

But the kicker is when a commenter writes:

But that’s not the worst of it. What’s really bad is that our law enforcement can’t take this terrorist watch list seriously. If cops are going in to monitor Quakers and Sierra Club meetings, the list isn’t worth a damn. What are we being protected from? Hiking and oatmeal?

Yep, that’s what I’m afraid of—hiking and oatmeal!