• In 2006 the homicide rate in Indianapolis skyrocketed. In 2007 we accidentally elected a new Republican mayor, in no small measure because of the furor over the previous year’s murder rate.
We’re off to a record-breaking summer, as they say in the ad biz, up 60% from last year, poised to smash that record season. So much so that the local teleprompter readers have not been able to ignore it, the way they’ve ignored the rest of Mayor Gomer’s record. Indianapolis’ murder rate per 100,000 residents is now higher than Chicago’s.
It was my Poor Wife who’s pointed this out to me, my own memory being what scientists call “shitty”: during 2006 the climb to the new Homicide record was followed like the progress of a moon landing. Every station had a Homicide Graphic to go along with the daily count, which was announced, well, at least daily.
Today record-keeping has gotten a little sloppy. There’s no denying the problem, not when they’re finding multiple murders on a daily basis. But the scoreboards have been taken down.
Back then the issue was the city’s deep hole over police and fire pensions. The force was reduced. Democrat-Republican Mayor Bart Petersmythe signed onto a local option tax—set up by the state legislature—to pay down the debt. The proto-Teabag Republicans screamed about tax hikes. Right up to the day their man Gomer was elected. He’s kept it around to pay for other things.
Today the issue is the number of cops on the street; Indianapolis has about 75% of the force suggested for a city its size. The (Democrat-Republican controlled) City-County Council wanted to use $6 million earmarked for streets for a one-year effort to increase the number of new officers. Mayor Gomer vetoed it, and last night the Council failed to override that veto.
Meanwhile, the Gomer Plan, which was to simply shuffle assignments around and hope for some good numbers, gets touted as an actual Plan by the locals. He was on all four networks last night with a plan that would increase the number of Academy recruits in 2016. This was repeatedly referred to, on two channels I saw, as “in a couple years.” We not only need recall elections in this town, we need the right to recall news teams.
• Meanwhile, I got to catch some footage of Lance Armstrong entering some mountain bike race, and thanks so much. This on a channel, one of four, which can’t be bothered to mention that the Tour de France, the major event in what’s left of professional cycling after Juan Pelota, is presently entering its second week.
And I don’t blame them for ignoring it, because Americans who made that goon into a national hero don’t care anymore. But covering Armstrong entering a race somewhere was like breaking the story that a tertiary-syphilitic Al Capone had taken up home brewing.
• Speaking of which, I caught up with a woman on the Trail this morning who was decked out in yellow, and, just as I feared, it was some of that Armstrong “charity” finery. I wanted to ask her if she’d like to swap it for my Aaron Hernandez jersey.
• Last week USAToday ("The Nation's High School Newspaper") asked whether fans would ever forgive cycling for the Armstrong/Strongarm/doping era. They interviewed a couple of team managers who said, essentially, “Of course.” Then Team Sky dropped an entire field of professionals the first day in the mountains, and that social media thing exploded in accusations.
Team Sky got roughed up the following day, all except team leader/sure bet Chris Froome, which caused me not to twitter “I guess they’ve learned how to look like they’re not juiced.” So much for the question. If you fucking cheat you’re a fucking cheater. This is why fucking cheaters should be exposed, no matter how much money they have to throw around. Nobody who paid any attention at the time thought that Armstrong (and, yes, much of the rest of the sport) was clean.
• Which just put me in mind of Bashful John McCain, demanding some more of that US unilaterally magical action in every Middle Eastern country save one. Being exposed as a liar doesn’t make you right.
Showing posts with label The News From Tit Town. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The News From Tit Town. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 9
Friday, May 10
From Transparent To Transparency
Besides, it's bad form to correct a project while it's being investigated by the Feds for land fraud.
The IEDC was the public/private partnership (on the standard model: public money and private deals) Daniels got the Legislature to replace the fusty old Commerce Department with, either because existing regulations would have slowed down his henchmen plucking the thing like a chicken, or because none of 'em thought of sticking "Freedom" in the title somewhere. The IEDC had a three-pronged mission: 1) make it sound like Mitch Daniels was ushering in an era of New Economic Leadership instead of Old Shady Dealings; 2) to hold the funnel while tax abatements and development funds found their proper mark, and to hold the microphone while the beneficiaries thanked Mitch Daniels for Indiana's great business climate; and 3) to exaggerate the Jobs created by such Creative Jobs Creation Events by at least a thousandfold. And as a result of the new law, Hoosiers will now be able to get a look at (2).
Pence had already brought back the Commerce Department without eliminating its doppelgänger, apparently on the grounds that you don't fire the cook until you've counted the knives. The original bill also would have required the IEDC to report specific job numbers for each company being suckled, but that requirement was dropped from the final bill after objections. From the IEDC.
Earlier this year the General Assembly effectively killed Daniels' Coal Gasification Plant deal (which, irony of ironies, had been eagerly supported by the General Assembly at the time) by reneging on its promise to make the project profitable in perpetuity. This caused our "partner" in the deal, Leucadia National, to announce that, under the circumstances, the project just didn't look profitable to them any more.
For some reason, no one mentioned the 600,000 jobs that will be lost.
Friday, January 18
Back Home Again
INDIANA inaugurated Mike "Choirboy" Pence its fiftieth governor earlier this week--apparently we had to--and while I can pretty much swear I'll have nothing nice to say about the man from here on out, I will grant that he gave every impression of a man who was wearing a tuxedo for the second time in his life.
I've lived here most of my life--in my defense, I am congenitally indolent--and Mike Pence is the sort of man I've been expecting to have to survive the governorship of for most of the last forty years. He's a religious huckster with no other discernible qualities. He was essentially ushered into the Governor's mansion by his predecessor--who gave then Lt. Governor Becky "GED" Skillman the same chronic and asymptomatic disease Mark Souder's wife came down with right after Souder was caught dipping into the office help and needed to spend more time with the family--so that Pence wouldn't either a) come back to Indiana and challenge Dick Lugar in last year's primary or b) come back to Indiana and wait out Lugar's last term.
Pence had been the #3 Republican in the House, in case that tells you anything you didn't already know about Republicans in the House, but quit his post after the 2010 elections because the party wasn't mixing enough Religious with its Mania anymore, and said that would be his final term. It's possible, I suppose, that he was self-aware enough to realize that the Jesus game had been played out a couple years earlier. It's possible that he had fixed his eye on the governor's job all along. (Skillman would'a put up less fight than an Italian quartermaster brigade, but running roughshod over the sitting Lt. Governor, who happened to be a woman, might have given some people the wrong impression about the Republican party's gender politics.) The talk at the time was that Pence was planning his own Presidential run, perhaps as a stalking horse for Herman Cain, at a time when Daniels was still milking his own non-candidacy. Then, suddenly, the whole thing arrived like Athena. Or the 2000 candidacy of George W. Bush. Pence suddenly wanted to be governor, Skillman suddenly wanted to be barely ambulatory, and Daniels wanted to tote up some more "campaign" contributions.
Pence's campaign for governor basically consisted of him assuring concerned Hoosiers that he was a practicing heterosexual. As a result he managed to win by 70,000 votes in a state Mitt "Remember Me?" Romney won by a quarter million.
Pence was, of course, hamstrung by the requirement that he continue the pretense that Mitch Daniels had solved all of Indiana's economic problems, with his magic formula (this often felt like something he was required to say because voters believed it, not because he did). So Pence was left to promise to fix the future. Especially with a 10% tax cut.
Which is already chafing the incoming veto-proof Republican General Assembly, which now finds itself walking the line between the Double Super Plus Robust financial shape Daniels left the state in, and what might be called the reality of being a broke shithole that's done no maintenance on anything but Mitch Daniels' image the past eight years.
We can't cut taxes any further without white suburbanites noticing something is up with education. We don't have anything left to sell, though I probably shouldn't say that out loud. Pence's first budget includes the 10% cut, increases education spending, and winds up with a couple billion to add to our "surplus". Which apparently means he found Mitch's old blueprints in a drawer somewhere.
Ain't gonna happen. And Evangelical Mike has between now and next year to okay putting the state's We're Not Recognizing Anybody Else's Homo Marriage Constitutional amendment on the ballot. And this year ain't his first choice.
Like I said: this is the governor I've been preparing myself for since the Nixon administration. But in the interim the country elected Reagan, Hoosiers elected Evan Bayh, and Mitch Daniels became a respected Republican intellectual. Hell, I can do eight years of Pence standing on my head.
I've lived here most of my life--in my defense, I am congenitally indolent--and Mike Pence is the sort of man I've been expecting to have to survive the governorship of for most of the last forty years. He's a religious huckster with no other discernible qualities. He was essentially ushered into the Governor's mansion by his predecessor--who gave then Lt. Governor Becky "GED" Skillman the same chronic and asymptomatic disease Mark Souder's wife came down with right after Souder was caught dipping into the office help and needed to spend more time with the family--so that Pence wouldn't either a) come back to Indiana and challenge Dick Lugar in last year's primary or b) come back to Indiana and wait out Lugar's last term.
Pence had been the #3 Republican in the House, in case that tells you anything you didn't already know about Republicans in the House, but quit his post after the 2010 elections because the party wasn't mixing enough Religious with its Mania anymore, and said that would be his final term. It's possible, I suppose, that he was self-aware enough to realize that the Jesus game had been played out a couple years earlier. It's possible that he had fixed his eye on the governor's job all along. (Skillman would'a put up less fight than an Italian quartermaster brigade, but running roughshod over the sitting Lt. Governor, who happened to be a woman, might have given some people the wrong impression about the Republican party's gender politics.) The talk at the time was that Pence was planning his own Presidential run, perhaps as a stalking horse for Herman Cain, at a time when Daniels was still milking his own non-candidacy. Then, suddenly, the whole thing arrived like Athena. Or the 2000 candidacy of George W. Bush. Pence suddenly wanted to be governor, Skillman suddenly wanted to be barely ambulatory, and Daniels wanted to tote up some more "campaign" contributions.
Pence's campaign for governor basically consisted of him assuring concerned Hoosiers that he was a practicing heterosexual. As a result he managed to win by 70,000 votes in a state Mitt "Remember Me?" Romney won by a quarter million.
Pence was, of course, hamstrung by the requirement that he continue the pretense that Mitch Daniels had solved all of Indiana's economic problems, with his magic formula (this often felt like something he was required to say because voters believed it, not because he did). So Pence was left to promise to fix the future. Especially with a 10% tax cut.
Which is already chafing the incoming veto-proof Republican General Assembly, which now finds itself walking the line between the Double Super Plus Robust financial shape Daniels left the state in, and what might be called the reality of being a broke shithole that's done no maintenance on anything but Mitch Daniels' image the past eight years.
We can't cut taxes any further without white suburbanites noticing something is up with education. We don't have anything left to sell, though I probably shouldn't say that out loud. Pence's first budget includes the 10% cut, increases education spending, and winds up with a couple billion to add to our "surplus". Which apparently means he found Mitch's old blueprints in a drawer somewhere.
Ain't gonna happen. And Evangelical Mike has between now and next year to okay putting the state's We're Not Recognizing Anybody Else's Homo Marriage Constitutional amendment on the ballot. And this year ain't his first choice.
Like I said: this is the governor I've been preparing myself for since the Nixon administration. But in the interim the country elected Reagan, Hoosiers elected Evan Bayh, and Mitch Daniels became a respected Republican intellectual. Hell, I can do eight years of Pence standing on my head.
Tuesday, January 1
Proof That The Mayans Just Had Their Timing A Little Off
THE woman I passed this morning in the flour aisle at Kroger who was singing along with Cher's "Dark Lady".
Until she saw the gun in my hand.
Tuesday, November 6
In A Nutshell, Appropriately
JIM Shella, the Dean (Broder) of Indiana political reporters, asked last night about the prospects for the Donnelly-Mourdock race sez Donnelly's in the driver's seat, adding:
A race we thought was about Lugar Republicans turns out to be about another group: women.
So, congratulations, Sisters! You've proven to be of equal value to a storyline. At this rate, in another twenty or thirty years, who knows? Political reporters might actually begin asking questions that speak to your interests, instead of accidentally being on hand when one of your white male overlords accidentally steps on his dick.
Friday, March 23
Dick Doesn't Live Here Anymore
I MAY have mentioned here that my only rooting interest in the vaunted Teabagger Challenge to 109-term Indiana Senator Richard "Nixon's Favorite Mayor, and Peggy Eaton's Favorite Dinner Guest" Lugar was for a stage collapse during a debate. I was lying; I knew that Lugar would be too smart to debate Indiana state treasurer and flaky white biscuit Richard Mourdock. He's made about every other stupid move he possibly could, though.
For one thing, taking the man seriously. Mourdock's only qualification for his present job is that he's as mazed as the people who give him money. (It's Mourdock, by the way, who is nominally responsible for Indiana's $300 million lost-and-found game with public funds, aka The Precise Amount the Mitch "CEO" Daniels Administration Cut From Public Education "Because We Didn't Have It".)
Lord only knows what sort of war chest Lugar's been sitting on for the past sixty years; some of it must be in pieces-of-eight. He's never had a serious electoral challenge from a Democrat, because Indiana (not that Jim Jontz wasn't a good guy). Hell, he once ran unopposed, except by the Libertarian/Free Silver coalition. Every six years he'd turn loose of something like sixty bucks to put up a few Glamour Shots ads, touting his positive attitude, his Eagle Scout merit badges, and nothing about Nixon, reminding Hoosiers how lucky they were to have a real statesman in their corner, a brave internationalist in the fight against everybody else's nuclear arsenal, and a Senator who didn't demean himself by taking committee chairmanships that were important to his state, or saving its military bases, like all those other guys did.
But then the Senate hurt Evan Bayh's feelings, and in the resultant battle to find another Republican to replace him, the Teabagger candidate and recipient of Federal agricultural largessStanley Myron Handleman Marlin Stutzman got his feathers mussed by Dan "The Beige Carpetbag" Coats. (Never fear; all Stutzman had to do was wait for the next Republican sex scandal to create an opening, in this case Mark Souder's 3rd District seat.) So, on the grounds that all superannuated white guys look alike, the Teabaggers announced their intention to go after the treasonous Lugar, who has only voted their way 93% of the time since the Long Depression.
What grounds Lugar had for taking this seriously I don't know; fer chrissakes, Dan Coats beat their guy in 2010, and he was a professional lobbyist and gratuity collector who didn't even live in the state.
Then again, as it turns out, neither does Lugar.
Lugar began running ads--incessantly--calling Mourdock a mud-slinger, thereby wisely drawing attention to whatever well the Teabaggers were shouting this stuff down. There's a real cautionary tale here. Or maybe a couple. First and foremost, if you're going to hold public office for eight or ten generations, it's probably best not to fill your staffing needs with an in-house inbreeding system. What this new generation of Lugarites is up to is anyone's guess, but turning Everybody's Kindly Old Great-Grandpa into a political shit-slinger has had the appropriate results; Lugar now looks like his colostomy bag exploded.
Mourdock began with the usual crap. "Obama's Favorite Republican!" "Lugar Doesn't Support Hoosiers' Second Amendment Rights To Gun Down Abortionists!" Lugar responded with ads insisting he hates Barack Hussein Obama as much as anybody, and, my personal favorite, that he voted for a Balanced Budget Amendment seventeen times. Okay, so his people are at least savvy enough to know that Irony is going right over the primary voter's head.
Then Mourdock's crew trotted out the one about how Lugar hasn't lived here since 1977.
Which is old news, and pretty much settled law; we've gone over this a couple of times since, and the GOP sure wasn't concerned that Dan Coats hadn't lived here since he went to Congress the first time. Except--oh oh!--Lugar's voted twice to require IDs for federal elections (though I suppose he didn't specify accurate IDs). And for the first state in the nation whose Republicans demanded IDs from voters, unless they were running as Republicans for Secretary of State, it doesn't really look all that good that our senior Senator has been listing that house he sold during the Carter administration as his legal voting address ever since. This, naturally, led to immediate demands from the state GOP that Lugar be brought up on felony vote fraud charges.
I mean, get the Presidential Medal of Freedom next time there's a Bush in the Oval Office. But the Marion County Election Board has a Democratic majority, and last week it stripped his registration. This is known as partisan politics.
Then yesterday the Lugar campaign announced that he'd be repaying $4500 wrongly siphoned from taxpayers to pay for hotel rooms in Indiana while the Senate was not in session, going back to 1991, "as far back as records go."
Oh, the other cautionary tale: y'know, if you're really such an all-out moderate, maybe the time to say something when your party goes crackers is when it happens, not thirty years later, when it happens to you.
For one thing, taking the man seriously. Mourdock's only qualification for his present job is that he's as mazed as the people who give him money. (It's Mourdock, by the way, who is nominally responsible for Indiana's $300 million lost-and-found game with public funds, aka The Precise Amount the Mitch "CEO" Daniels Administration Cut From Public Education "Because We Didn't Have It".)
Lord only knows what sort of war chest Lugar's been sitting on for the past sixty years; some of it must be in pieces-of-eight. He's never had a serious electoral challenge from a Democrat, because Indiana (not that Jim Jontz wasn't a good guy). Hell, he once ran unopposed, except by the Libertarian/Free Silver coalition. Every six years he'd turn loose of something like sixty bucks to put up a few Glamour Shots ads, touting his positive attitude, his Eagle Scout merit badges, and nothing about Nixon, reminding Hoosiers how lucky they were to have a real statesman in their corner, a brave internationalist in the fight against everybody else's nuclear arsenal, and a Senator who didn't demean himself by taking committee chairmanships that were important to his state, or saving its military bases, like all those other guys did.
But then the Senate hurt Evan Bayh's feelings, and in the resultant battle to find another Republican to replace him, the Teabagger candidate and recipient of Federal agricultural largess
What grounds Lugar had for taking this seriously I don't know; fer chrissakes, Dan Coats beat their guy in 2010, and he was a professional lobbyist and gratuity collector who didn't even live in the state.
Then again, as it turns out, neither does Lugar.
Lugar began running ads--incessantly--calling Mourdock a mud-slinger, thereby wisely drawing attention to whatever well the Teabaggers were shouting this stuff down. There's a real cautionary tale here. Or maybe a couple. First and foremost, if you're going to hold public office for eight or ten generations, it's probably best not to fill your staffing needs with an in-house inbreeding system. What this new generation of Lugarites is up to is anyone's guess, but turning Everybody's Kindly Old Great-Grandpa into a political shit-slinger has had the appropriate results; Lugar now looks like his colostomy bag exploded.
Mourdock began with the usual crap. "Obama's Favorite Republican!" "Lugar Doesn't Support Hoosiers' Second Amendment Rights To Gun Down Abortionists!" Lugar responded with ads insisting he hates Barack Hussein Obama as much as anybody, and, my personal favorite, that he voted for a Balanced Budget Amendment seventeen times. Okay, so his people are at least savvy enough to know that Irony is going right over the primary voter's head.
Then Mourdock's crew trotted out the one about how Lugar hasn't lived here since 1977.
Which is old news, and pretty much settled law; we've gone over this a couple of times since, and the GOP sure wasn't concerned that Dan Coats hadn't lived here since he went to Congress the first time. Except--oh oh!--Lugar's voted twice to require IDs for federal elections (though I suppose he didn't specify accurate IDs). And for the first state in the nation whose Republicans demanded IDs from voters, unless they were running as Republicans for Secretary of State, it doesn't really look all that good that our senior Senator has been listing that house he sold during the Carter administration as his legal voting address ever since. This, naturally, led to immediate demands from the state GOP that Lugar be brought up on felony vote fraud charges.
I mean, get the Presidential Medal of Freedom next time there's a Bush in the Oval Office. But the Marion County Election Board has a Democratic majority, and last week it stripped his registration. This is known as partisan politics.
Then yesterday the Lugar campaign announced that he'd be repaying $4500 wrongly siphoned from taxpayers to pay for hotel rooms in Indiana while the Senate was not in session, going back to 1991, "as far back as records go."
Oh, the other cautionary tale: y'know, if you're really such an all-out moderate, maybe the time to say something when your party goes crackers is when it happens, not thirty years later, when it happens to you.
Monday, April 4
Greetings From Tit Town!*
POSTING may be light last week.
Kevin Drum surveys the Republican Presidential field and spots a tiny contender:
Now nobody knows better than I that you can't chase down every jot and iota from these guys, even if you have nothing better to do; if nothing else there's the Catch-22 thing, where the intelligence required to form shapes into letters and words into sentences would glaze your eyes over ten minutes into The Collected Utterances of Newt Gingrich, and weld them shut in self-defense a quarter-hour after that if you persisted. But, Kev, it really is best to assume that the sky is blue and grass is green and anything you see looking otherwise is Photoshop. Mitch Daniels is a Republican. That's not an accident. As such he has already denounced global warming science, on C-SPAN last year, about the time The Coyness Campaign was shifting into second gear:
Now, the best possible fucking light you can put this in is Daniels pimping for Trans-Global Cupidity, which is at least consistent, and the best use of his talents. But the man was all for reducing carbon emissions when that sounded like a good selling point for his pals at Big Ethanol.
Look, Kev, I've seen the man close up. Consider yourself fortunate. If there was any way Daniels could pretend to be a Birther, a Crusader, or a Right-to-Life bomb-thrower and not scare off Boardroom America or shut off its money spigot, he would. After that "Culture Wars on the back-burner" thing became a national flapdoodle--as it was intended to, Kevin--the Campaigning Non-Campaigner went to Laura Ingraham not to reiterate his call for the religious wing of his wingnutty party to shut up and vote for him, but to tell her, and her massive listening audience, that he was Indiana's most anti-abortion governor, ever. As was also intended, Kevin. Mitch Daniels is never gonna out-Palin Sarah Palin; for one thing, he looks ridiculous when he tries. The man's been a Republican insider since the 70s; he watched the Rise and Co-opting of the Religious Right from his perch on Dick Lugar's shoulder.
And no one else who watched the same thing can mistake where this is headed. Should Daniels win the nomination the religious nuts will get their audience, their baksheesh, and their Attorney General; no one observes the niceties of Mob territories more fully than the Capitalist on the make. And for chrissakes, if you imagine we'd spew one less cubic liter of carbon during a Daniels administration than during a Trump administration you're just writing "Mrs. Kevin Daniels" over and over across your composition book. For the life of me, political insiders are like wine merchants: in order to take one seriously you have to pretend he knows everything about the current crop, and absolutely nothing about anything he doesn't have to sell.
Speaking of which, one of the things I did last week instead of completing a post was catch up (a little) on David Weigel, reporter:
• Teabaggers can't be blamed for any government shutdown.
• Trump's birtherism is uncomfortable for Republicans, who'd hoped the issue "would either 1) go away or 2) come up only in town halls where they could dispatch it." [Curious how "Republicans" want an issue to go away when 58% of them believe in it.]
•Sarah Palin is "horrifically unpopular", but her tweets remind people there's an election coming up.
• Newt Gingrich is horrifically unpopular, but his latest retelling of the Great Government Shutdown of '95 proves that a government shutdown today wouldn't be blamed on Republicans, and, especially, Teabaggers.
• It's, like, totally understandable that a full-fledged lunatic like Michelle Bachman would raise huge amounts of cash from Republicans for a Presidential run, because she's a lot more exciting than Mitt Romney, so this should not be taken as evidence that Republicans would actually support a loon for President. Again.
• According to a poll, Teabaggers are, like, total hypocrites on Defense spending. The obvious conclusion, here, is that Teabaggers are not so powerful that people who just want to avoid paying personal taxes without signing up for an Amway distributorship can't share a party with them in good conscience. (I dunno; you read it and explain the argument to me. Seems to me that if someone says "Government shouldn't spend my tax dollars, except on my favorite projects" the first part of the argument is rendered null and void by common fucking sense. But I was educated in a previous century.)
• Rand Paul is a legislative genius for pulling a one-day parliamentary delay in legislation over an issue no one, including Rand Paul, really believes in except as it scores a one-day gabbing point over a weekend when nobody is paying attention, not that anyone with any sense would. Take that, people who laugh at libertarians.
• The idea of balancing a budget in wartime (as defined by that DOA "Balanced Budget Amendment" which exempts military conflict when so defined by 3/5 of both Houses) is frivolous, as any good Teabagger knows. The idea that 3/5 of the Congress could rubber stamp a war it hadn't actually declared gets a free pass.
Look, just tell me how you come by this entire suite of ideas independently. Or any other way other than taking incoming Republican talking points, deflecting them one or two minutes from True, and publishing the results as reporting. Skip that; just tell me how you come to believe in the existence of something called The Tea Party as anything separate from Republican Bidness as Usual. 'Cause damned if I know.
______________
*My Poor Wife watched Behind the Burly Q over spring break, presumably as part of her Free Pay Channel marathon, and reports that Indianapolis was known as "Tit Town" in that golden era, because it loved it some mammaries. I have never been prouder of my slightly Klan-tinged heritage. Although that really isn't saying much.
Kevin Drum surveys the Republican Presidential field and spots a tiny contender:
But the usual question remains: how does he get through the primaries? When he hops over to Iowa, they'll expect him to denounce sharia law, make jokes about Obama's Kenyan birth, throw himself wholeheartedly into the culture wars, pretend that global warming is a liberal conspiracy, and make dire remarks about the specter of socialism taking over America. In other words, he'll have to act like a public clown, and if he doesn't do it, he'll lose.First, when all about you are shouting Socialist! saying "Statist Big Government Nanny-Stater" in a normal tone of voice isn't proof of reasonableness; it's just trying to attract attention by setting up your tent a little off to the side, and hiring a receptionist with all her front teeth.
Now nobody knows better than I that you can't chase down every jot and iota from these guys, even if you have nothing better to do; if nothing else there's the Catch-22 thing, where the intelligence required to form shapes into letters and words into sentences would glaze your eyes over ten minutes into The Collected Utterances of Newt Gingrich, and weld them shut in self-defense a quarter-hour after that if you persisted. But, Kev, it really is best to assume that the sky is blue and grass is green and anything you see looking otherwise is Photoshop. Mitch Daniels is a Republican. That's not an accident. As such he has already denounced global warming science, on C-SPAN last year, about the time The Coyness Campaign was shifting into second gear:
There’s been nothing but dubious news about the science about this for about a year. Meanwhile we’re still left with a situation that if zealots had their way and the most extreme methods were taken by their own computer models we don’t move the world thermometer at all.
Now, the best possible fucking light you can put this in is Daniels pimping for Trans-Global Cupidity, which is at least consistent, and the best use of his talents. But the man was all for reducing carbon emissions when that sounded like a good selling point for his pals at Big Ethanol.
Look, Kev, I've seen the man close up. Consider yourself fortunate. If there was any way Daniels could pretend to be a Birther, a Crusader, or a Right-to-Life bomb-thrower and not scare off Boardroom America or shut off its money spigot, he would. After that "Culture Wars on the back-burner" thing became a national flapdoodle--as it was intended to, Kevin--the Campaigning Non-Campaigner went to Laura Ingraham not to reiterate his call for the religious wing of his wingnutty party to shut up and vote for him, but to tell her, and her massive listening audience, that he was Indiana's most anti-abortion governor, ever. As was also intended, Kevin. Mitch Daniels is never gonna out-Palin Sarah Palin; for one thing, he looks ridiculous when he tries. The man's been a Republican insider since the 70s; he watched the Rise and Co-opting of the Religious Right from his perch on Dick Lugar's shoulder.
And no one else who watched the same thing can mistake where this is headed. Should Daniels win the nomination the religious nuts will get their audience, their baksheesh, and their Attorney General; no one observes the niceties of Mob territories more fully than the Capitalist on the make. And for chrissakes, if you imagine we'd spew one less cubic liter of carbon during a Daniels administration than during a Trump administration you're just writing "Mrs. Kevin Daniels" over and over across your composition book. For the life of me, political insiders are like wine merchants: in order to take one seriously you have to pretend he knows everything about the current crop, and absolutely nothing about anything he doesn't have to sell.
Speaking of which, one of the things I did last week instead of completing a post was catch up (a little) on David Weigel, reporter:
• Teabaggers can't be blamed for any government shutdown.
• Trump's birtherism is uncomfortable for Republicans, who'd hoped the issue "would either 1) go away or 2) come up only in town halls where they could dispatch it." [Curious how "Republicans" want an issue to go away when 58% of them believe in it.]
•Sarah Palin is "horrifically unpopular", but her tweets remind people there's an election coming up.
• Newt Gingrich is horrifically unpopular, but his latest retelling of the Great Government Shutdown of '95 proves that a government shutdown today wouldn't be blamed on Republicans, and, especially, Teabaggers.
• It's, like, totally understandable that a full-fledged lunatic like Michelle Bachman would raise huge amounts of cash from Republicans for a Presidential run, because she's a lot more exciting than Mitt Romney, so this should not be taken as evidence that Republicans would actually support a loon for President. Again.
• According to a poll, Teabaggers are, like, total hypocrites on Defense spending. The obvious conclusion, here, is that Teabaggers are not so powerful that people who just want to avoid paying personal taxes without signing up for an Amway distributorship can't share a party with them in good conscience. (I dunno; you read it and explain the argument to me. Seems to me that if someone says "Government shouldn't spend my tax dollars, except on my favorite projects" the first part of the argument is rendered null and void by common fucking sense. But I was educated in a previous century.)
• Rand Paul is a legislative genius for pulling a one-day parliamentary delay in legislation over an issue no one, including Rand Paul, really believes in except as it scores a one-day gabbing point over a weekend when nobody is paying attention, not that anyone with any sense would. Take that, people who laugh at libertarians.
• The idea of balancing a budget in wartime (as defined by that DOA "Balanced Budget Amendment" which exempts military conflict when so defined by 3/5 of both Houses) is frivolous, as any good Teabagger knows. The idea that 3/5 of the Congress could rubber stamp a war it hadn't actually declared gets a free pass.
Look, just tell me how you come by this entire suite of ideas independently. Or any other way other than taking incoming Republican talking points, deflecting them one or two minutes from True, and publishing the results as reporting. Skip that; just tell me how you come to believe in the existence of something called The Tea Party as anything separate from Republican Bidness as Usual. 'Cause damned if I know.
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*My Poor Wife watched Behind the Burly Q over spring break, presumably as part of her Free Pay Channel marathon, and reports that Indianapolis was known as "Tit Town" in that golden era, because it loved it some mammaries. I have never been prouder of my slightly Klan-tinged heritage. Although that really isn't saying much.
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