The Washington Post offers tips on how to keep your EV battery running in frigid temperatures. The link at the end of this graf is supposed to be a "gift link" (from me, Marie Burns, the giftor!), meaning that non-subscribers can read the article. Hope it works: https://wapo.st/3u8Z705
Sunday
Nov022014
The Commentariat -- Nov. 3, 2014
Internal links, defunct video removed.
E. J. Dionne: "There should be no doubt that Republicans immediately saw [in Obama] the threat of what Sarah Palin came to call the 'hopey-changey stuff' and set out from the start to foil Obama and disappoint his optimistic expectations of harmony.... Obama remains the steward of the aspirations he awakened." ...
... CW: Dionne is right; in a country that has always looked to the future, Republicans set out to destroy hope. At the same time, they have been doing their best to actually destroy or circumscribe the futures of most Americans. In a just world, the parties would be competing to find ways to make life better for most Americans. But we live in Right Wing World, where everything is upside down.
Noam Scheiber of the New Republic does a mea culpa on his thesis -- produced in book form -- that the Obama administration botched the recovery. Thanks to P. D. Pepe for the link.
Greg Sargent: "A new batch of polls released over the weekend confirm that a GOP takeover of the Senate is now very likely. The major forecasts are putting the odds of that happening at 70 percent and higher. Yet even though it has not happened yet, the argument among Republicans over the meaning of their Senate takeover is underway. The differing interpretations capture the fault lines that will complicate the GOP quest to use their majority to prove they can govern in the run-up to the 2016 election." ...
... Sebastian Payne & Robert Costa of the Washington Post: Ted "Cruz's desire to turn his party further right in the coming months is one of the challenges already facing [Mitch] McConnell should Republicans regain the Senate, with tea party leaders inside and outside the Capitol spoiling for a number of hard-line moves." ...
... Alexander Burns of Politico: "With growing confidence as Election Day approaches, Republican leaders are preparing to argue that broad GOP gains in the House and Senate would represent a top-to-bottom validation of their party's mainline wing.... National Republicans managed this year to snuff out every bomb-throwing insurgent who tried to wrest a Senate nod away from one of their favored candidates."
Paul Krugman: "... business leaders often give remarkably bad economic advice, especially in troubled times.... Why?The answer, to quote the title of a paper I published many years ago, is that a country is not a company. National economic policy, even in small countries, needs to take into account kinds of feedback that rarely matter in business life." ...
... CW: This is why I laughed out loud at Maureen Dowd's column yesterday on Howard Schultz, the C.E.O. of Starbucks. Schultz figures that starting & running a successful company, along with a few visits to veterans (& having a WashPo reporter "co-author" a "slender volume" about it), make him presidential material. When Dowd asks him if he has presidential ambitions, Schultz replies, “'I have an interest in trying to make a difference.... I don't know where that's going to lead.' He believes that 'the country is longing for leadership and for truth with a capital T.'" Dowd doesn't argue with that. Oh, barf. Here's a better piece on President Schultz, which karoli of Crooks & Liars wrote in 2012.
Liz Sly of the Washington Post: "The Obama administration's Syria strategy suffered a major setback Sunday after fighters linked to al-Qaeda routed U.S.-backed rebels from their main northern strongholds, capturing significant quantities of weaponry, triggering widespread defections and ending hopes that Washington will readily find Syrian partners in its war against the Islamic State." CW: Remember, this is precisely what Obama has feared all along, & what Hillary Clinton & Leon Panetta (and many Republicans -- John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Mitt Romney, etc., etc. -- vehemently urged him to do. Panetta's whole book tour was a critique of Obama's failure to arm Syrian "moderates." ...
... MEANWHILE. Michael Gordon & Eric Schmitt of the New York Times: "Iraqi security forces, backed by American-led air power and hundreds of advisers, are planning to mount a major spring offensive against Islamic State fighters who have poured into the country from Syria, a campaign that is likely to face an array of logistical and political challenges."
Once a Chickenshit, Always a Chickenshit. Bernie Becker of the Hill: "James Baker, a former secretary of State [under Bush I], didn't seem troubled during an interview on Sunday by recent anonymous comments from Obama administration officials knocking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.... Baker said that Netanyahu -- then a senior Israeli official on foreign policy -- had said that 'American policy in the Middle East is based on lies and distortions' during the George H.W. Bush administration. 'I barred him from the State Department,' Baker said. 'That may not be widely known.'"
Justin Elliott, et al., of ProPublica, in Salon: The Red Cross's Sandy disaster relief effort was, well, a disaster. (P.S. So was its Katrina effort.) CW: If the Red Cross got a fraction of the scrutiny Republicans give the Obama administration, no one would ever contribute a dime to the so-called charity. I haven't given them money in decades because I think they're a scammer outfit.
Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: Kenneth Tate, the armed Center for Disease Control guard who accompanied President Obama on an elevator at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, can't figure out why the CDC contractor fired him. Also, it turns out Tate did not have a criminal record, as previously reported; he "had been arrested several times, including on charges of robbery and assault, but never convicted." CW: Based on Schmidt's report, it seems the contractor fired Tate (& his son!) because of Secret Service screw-ups.
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd.
Steve M.: "Frank Bruni, the master of competently written know-nothing-ism, laments in today's column that the campaigns run by this year's candidates offer no 'visionary plan' for solving the big problems we have.... Bruni is the ideal pundit for our times. Nothing is ever just the fault of Republicans. Whenever anything bad is being done in politics, either Democrats do it or both sides do it." ...
... Charles Pierce on the Sunday shows. "Before we begin, let's stop and pay homage to ol' Panchito himself, Frank Bruni, of The New York Times, who may have written the beau ideal of what Jay Rosen calls journalism's 'View From Nowhere,' something I was taught against my better judgment in journalism school and which now, confronted with a party gone mad from three decades of a prion disease, is something that is worse than inadequate. It is actively dangerous to the craft itself and, therefore, to the politics of the country." ...
... AND Al Hunt of Bloomberg News complains that the midterm elections have been "about everything except a governing agenda." CW: So? But why should candidates be bothered with developing policy platforms if the media won't even cover them? (A number of Republican candidates found policy of so little import that they just cut & pasted their policy agendas from the proposals of candidates in earlier races. If Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed [or his intern] hadn't scoured the campaign literature for plagiarism, no one would have been the wiser.) ...
... Thomas Frank returns to Kansas, where he finds he is the ONLY REPORTER "who had bothered to come and hear [independent candidate for U.S. Senate Greg Orman]'s "plans for wind energy and broadband on the prairie." MEANWHILE, Orman's opponent, Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, "has been able to call in an unlimited amount of Republican supporting fire, parading all manner of right-wing superstars through the state: Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, all of them here to tell us how highly they think of their dear buddy Pat and maybe rescue Republican dreams to control the Senate. On Friday, it was New Jersey governor Chris Christie's turn -- his third tour of duty for Roberts -- and I got to gape at the Roberts caravan when it pulled up, speakers blaring Kid Rock, into a vast and vacant field outside a NASCAR racetrack in Kansas City, Kansas.... Reader, it was a Republican cornucopia." And plenty of reporters. CW: A perfect example of the media's collective preference for parades over policy.
David Carr of the New York Times contrasts brand-sponsored "journalism" with the non-profit Texas Tribune, which is funded by corporations & foundations, who get no say about the content.
November Elections
I have got a simple message: we've got to vote.... Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.... Ukraine just went through an election, and they have got a war going on, and they had about a 60 percent turnout. There is no excuse for us to just give away our power. -- President Obama, at a rally for Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf. Voter participation in U.S. midterms usually hovers around 40 percent.
Kevin Bohn & Brian Rokus of CNN: "Vice President Joe Biden isn't buying the growing consensus heading into Election Day that Republicans are poised to take control of the Senate. 'I don't agree with the oddsmakers,' Biden [told] ... CNN Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger. 'I predict we're gonna ... keep the Senate.' But even if Republicans do win the chamber for the first time in nearly a decade, Biden didn't seem to think the victory would have much impact on the administration's priorities."
Rachel Maddow in the Washington Post: "This year, the closing argument from the Republican side is a whole bunch of ghastly fantasies: Ebola, the Islamic State, vague but nefarious aspersions about stolen elections and a whole bunch of terrifying fantasies about our border with Mexico..... Congress thinks it's more advantageous to run ads about how scary the Islamic State is than to face the real threat of actually taking a vote on what to do about that threat." ...
... Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker: "When does Ebola look like a gift? Apparently, when you are a Republican candidate for the Senate who sees it as a handy pretext for bringing up immigration politics while scaring people into voting for you.... While fears of Ebola ... clouded the campaign..., real dangers seemed to slip from view.... Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman, who became a gun-control advocate after she was wounded in a shooting in which six people died, toured the country in the run-up to the elections, calling for tighter legislation in order to help save lives. Not a single candidate joined her."
Nicholas Confessore & Derek Willis of the New York Times: "A stealthy coterie of difficult-to-trace outside groups is slipping tens of millions of dollars of attacks ads and negative automated telephone calls into the final days of the midterm campaign, helping fuel an unprecedented surge of last-minute spending on Senate races."
Nate Cohn of the New York Times: Even if they win the close races, 2014 won't be "as good as it seems for the Republicans." Cohn explains why. ...
... Michael McDonald in the Huffington Post: "... my take on the early vote data -- where there are enough statistics to be informative -- is that the Republican sweep screaming in the headlines is overblown. Senate control is up for grabs and Democrats have a decent chance to defy the polls. I expect that the election will be so close that we won't know who won until all ballots are counted and the vote is certified several days following the election, not to mention highly probable run-off elections in Georgia and Louisiana." Via Greg Sargent. ...
Campbell Robertson & Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times: Control of the Senate may be decided in runoff elections in Georgia & Louisiana.
Rachel Blade of Politico: "A record number of rogue Christian pastors are endorsing candidates from the pulpit this election cycle, using Sunday sermons to defiantly flout tax rules. Their message to the IRS: Sue me. But the tax agency is doing anything but.... IRS Commissioner John Koskinen in an interview last month with Tax Analysts suggested the IRS isn't planning to crack down on churches anytime soon.... It's another sign of the tax agency turned upside down by the tea party targeting controversy. Although the IRS is under fire from the right for being heavy-hand with conservative tax-exempt entities, it's also getting hit from the left for failing to enforce decade-old rules governing churches and politics."
David Schanzer & Jay Sullivan argue in a New York Times op-ed that the U.S. should pass a Constitutional amendment to increase House terms to four years & change Senate terms to four or six years, thus cancelling the midterms. CW: Schanzer is a professor of public policy. Does he have any idea how difficult it is to change the Constitution? Not gonna happen, gentlemen.
California. Claire Tragesor of KPBS: "Just days before Tuesday's election in the tight race for San Diego's 52nd Congressional District seat, a second former staffer [-- Navy veteran Justin Harper, 25 --] for Republican candidate Carl DeMaio is accusing him of sexual harassment.... DeMaio has denied sexual harassment allegations made by another former campaign staffer, Todd Bosnich.... A 10News/U-T San Diego poll released Sunday shows DeMaio and [first-term Rep. Scott] Peters [D] in a statistical tie -- 46 percent for DeMaio, 45 percent for Peters and 11 percent undecided."
Connecticut. Christopher Keating of the Hartford Courant: "Independent candidate Joseph Visconti abruptly dropped out of the race for governor on Sunday and endorsed Republican challenger Tom Foley. The surprise move -- only two days before the election -- could provide a boost to Foley in a race that recent polls have put at a dead heat. Visconti made the announcement during a joint campaign appearance with Foley at the local Republican headquarters in Brookfield.... Visconti said he made his decision at 4 p.m. Saturday after seeing a poll by Public Policy Polling of North Carolina that showed [Gov. Dannel] Malloy [D] ahead by 3 percentage points with Visconti in third place at 6 percent."
Iowa. CW: Apparently Republicans, the great defenders of women's rights & chiefs of the PC police, are all upset by Tom Harkin's "sexist" remark about Joni Ernst. Puh-leze. Contrary to Ernst's claim that Harkin would never have said this if she were "Jon Ernst," plenty of pundits (Charles Pierce) have commented on Scott Brown's attractiveness. That few have made "sexist" comments about handsome male Republicans probably reflects the fact that the majority of male GOP candidates are remarkably unattractive.
New Hampshire. Jon Swaine of the Guardian: "Hillary Clinton defended Democrats' focus on women's rights on Sunday, as she returned to her old redoubt of New Hampshire to help the party keep hold of a crucial US Senate seat and maintain the state's all-female congressional delegation.... Appearing at a rally in Nashua alongside Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Clinton attacked Shaheen's opponent, Scott Brown, for past votes opposing legislation that would guarantee women equal pay and coverage for contraception in their health insurance."
Washington State. Chris McGreal of the Guardian: "Washington state voters appear ready to go where their politicians fear to tread and impose greater gun controls in the face of a well-funded campaign by the National Rifle Association and a rival spoiler measure on Tuesday's ballot. Opinion polls suggest a clear majority in favour of requiring background checks on all firearms sales in Washington state including at gun shows and through private advertising."
Wisconsin. Betsy Woodruff of Slate: Republicans think Gov. Scott Walker's race for re-election is "the most important election in America."
Beyond the Beltway
Jack Gillum & Joan Lowy of the AP: "The U.S. government agreed to a police request to restrict more than 37 square miles of airspace surrounding Ferguson, Missouri, for 12 days in August for safety, but audio recordings show that local authorities privately acknowledged the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests.... The conversations contradict claims by the St. Louis County Police Department, which responded to demonstrations following the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, that the restriction was solely for safety and had nothing to do with preventing media from witnessing the violence or the police response." ...
... Caroline Bankoff of New York: "The AP's report on the no-fly zone is hardly the first time that the police have been accused of violating the First Amendment rights of reporters trying to cover the events in Ferguson, but the apparent participation of the federal officials at the FAA makes this one especially troubling."
Presidential Election
Alexander Bolton of the Hill: In Detroit & elsewhere, Rand Paul courts the black vote. CW: Of course this is a cynical ploy, but I give Paul points for guts. Also, unlike Paul Ryan, Rand Paul seems to really believe in the initiatives he's pushing that will help blacks; Ryan, by contrast, is using his new-found interest in "helping" the poor to further his cruel Ayn Rand-inspired ideology of leaving the poor behind.
News Ledes
NPR: "Tom Magliozzi, one of public radio's most popular personalities, died on Monday of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 77 years old. Tom and his brother, Ray, became famous as 'Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers' on the weekly NPR show Car Talk. They bantered, told jokes, laughed and sometimes even gave pretty good advice to listeners who called in with their car troubles."
Bangor Daily News: "Attorneys for nurse Kaci Hickox and the state have agreed that the temporary court order issued Friday by a Maine District Court judge will remain in place until 11:59 p.m. Monday, Nov. 10, when the 21-day incubation period for Ebola expires. Judge Charles C. LaVeriere signed the order Monday morning."
Oregonian: "Brittany Maynard, who moved to Oregon to use the Death with Dignity act, died Saturday in her home in Portland, the nonprofit Compassion & Choices confirmed Sunday. Maynard, 29, was diagnosed with a grade four glioblastoma, a highly malignant and aggressive form of brain tumor. After being told she had six months to live, she moved to Portland from California this summer."
AP: "Israeli officials are pushing forward with plans to build new apartments in an east Jerusalem settlement after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's endorsement last week. Jerusalem's Planning and Building Committee said Monday it approved construction of 500 housing units in Ramat Shlomo, a week after Netanyahu gave his blessing for the plans."
Share Article
Comments for this entry have been disabled. Additional comments may not be added to this entry at this time.
Reader Comments (18)
Want something new to make you sick? Subscribe to Netflix? Interested in art and theft? Go watch "The Art of the Steal" doc about the political and Pew theft of the Barnes collection which may be the very best collection of post impression art in the world.
Guaranteed to cleanse your mind of all thoughts of the GOP so you concentrate on just plain old injustice in this world.
Thanks for the recommendation, Haley. When I looked it up on Netflix noticed that a film starring Kurt Russell has the same title, but just below it is the documentary you refer to. I'm quite interested since the architectural firm that redesigned the Barnes––Tod Williams Billie Tsien––is the firm(based in New York) that my son was part of for years before he moved to Germany.
The suggestion that we change the constitution re: the House and Senate term limits makes such good sense that it won't happen. The Senate term is already six years–-the change should be four or eight years as cited in the article. The only drawback here is we seem to get so many nitwits in the House so for them to serve longer than they do now––oh, silly me, I forget how our populace keeps voting them back in so it wouldn't matter anyway.
As the race issue appears big time again in the race for Congress, I get reminded over and over again of the the most absurd piece of the puzzle. It tells me everything about the human race's view of race.
Obama is black!!!!! He was born in that country Africa. He is Muslim.
Oh and BTW the thing that never gets mentioned is that his mother was white. The grandparents who raised him were white. The only thing that matters is the dark color of his skin. If you have dark skin you are a problem. End of story.
Noam Scheiber reconsiders: In his book he argued that Obama "fumbled the recovery"––he now tells us what he got wrong.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120084/what-my-book-got-wrong-about-obama-summers-geithner-recovery
Last night when PBS's wonderful Sunday night fare would have its five minute advertisement break I jumped over to Fox to see what they were up to. It appeared that they had a panel of like minded foxes and were doing a whole segment on the evils of the AFCA featuring REAL LIVE persons who were extolling the terrible troubles this damn Obamacare has caused, will cause, to millions––yes, millions of unhappy people are pissed because..."he said [Obama] we could keep our doctors"–––and so forth and so on.
@Marvin Schwalb: I'm having some work done on my house, & since it's election season, the clerks & workers I meet (all white men) initiate conversations about the election. What has struck me about the GOP scaremongering is this: while it's obvious intent is to frighten people into voting for Republicans, its purpose for & effect on ordinary (white) people is to give them an excuse for their natural racist tendencies. These men wouldn't say they dislike Hispanics & blacks, but they now have & use the excuse to say that Africans are bringing Ebola (& other unspecified diseases) into the U.S. & Mexicans are bringing in tuberculosis. So nix to immigration.
(Oddly, none has mentioned Asians, who have by far the highest rate of TB infection in the U.S. I guess ethnic-Asian TB rates are not mentioned on Fox "News," maybe because Rupert Murdoch was until recently married to an ethnic Chinese.)
Marie
What is with this "leadership" meme? President Obama is as much a leader as Bush before him, Clinton and all the others before him. This is just another weapon in the arsenal the right uses to destroy this man and his accomplishments, and the country along with it. They put that word out there and the media latch onto it like a teat without bothering to define what leadership is. Oh, right, leadership is anything Barack Obama is not.
Creepy to browse through the comments to Charles Blow's column today. This country has never had to confront the extent of the damage caused by slavery and segregation, and now the screamers are screaming the righties' favorite expression, "playing the race card." If the race card were actually played, it would crush the population of this country as if it were the celestial monolith from "2001."
"Baker said that Netanyahu – then a senior Israeli official on foreign policy – had said that 'American policy in the Middle East is based on lies and distortions' during the George H.W. Bush administration."
Broken clocks. Right?
Jack,
Unfortunately we won't be visited by the last monolith from 2001 which, at least in my interpretation (everyone has their own), heralds a leap forward for humanity.
Republicans would have us move back in time to before the appearance of the first monolith when we were primitive apes killing each other with bones in fights over water holes.
The Right in this country signifies, and proudly so, the apotheosis of ignorance and fear.
If you wrote a book about the rise of a political party whose goal was to spread fear and loathing and hatred in the interests of power and greed, no one would publish it. It would be too unbelievable, and yet, what we see everyday outstrips fiction by miles.
Tomorrow, when the apes take over the senate, the first thing McConnell will do is pass out bones for use in pummeling his enemies. The fires of savagery will burn brightly and the apes will be praying to their own Lord of the Flies to help them hunt down anyone who stands in the way of their march away from civilization, knowledge, wisdom, and humanity.
John Oliver on the midterm elections and, mostly, state and local elections... oh, yeah, and ALEC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIMgfBZrrZ8
@CW: Marie; TB loaded Asians are not in the same workforce set as us blue collar whiteys. Mexicans with babies scare us to death because they work harder than us. Afro-Americans scare us to death because; well, because without them who could the rich defend us from?
JJG,
African Americans may not scare everyone, but the sure scare Bill O'Reilly. He said so. And, according to Loofah Boy, they scare the crap out of Republicans who "don't get black people".
Of course the reverse carries no weight. If a black person said "I just don't get old, white Republicans. I mean, why do they hate us so much?", it would be not be acceptable. You see, white Republicans like Bill O'Reilly don't have to explain why they fear black Americans. Everyone should just "get it", right? Doesn't everyone? C'mon. You know how "they" are....fucking scary, right? Know what I'm sayin'?
And when you're scared, it's perfectly okay to lurch about and lash out with deadly weapons, or a deadly law, or maybe both, because Black People!
But if black people expressed a lack of understanding about whites, that's racism. Why? Already told you! Black people. That's why.
Others have more than adequately pitchforked Frank Bruni's insuffereably obtuse both-sides-are-to-blame dung droppings. But I still have to ask how do these people even have jobs?
How can the Times, with a straight face, publish such willfuly stoooooopid rubbish? So because Bruni is not sure that Mark Udall's plan for America's future makes him hear heavenly choirs of angels, that means he's no better than the Republican candidate in Iowa who thinks federal officials following the law, albeit one she doesn't like (the ACA), should be arrested and thrown in prison, that states that vote conservative should feel free to ignore any federal laws they don't like, that she stays armed at all times so she can murder anyone she thinks might be trying to impede her right to wear tinfoil hats.
Isn't this a little like saying that because you're not thrilled with the soup at a local restaurant, the chef there is no better than a psychotic whose secret ingredient for your family's next spaghetti dinner is meatballs with mercury?
What the fuck, people!!
And this is one very big reason the savages will take over tomorrow.
I usually refer to the press as either supine or bovine, but articles like this are nothing more or less than stupid. Frank, just go back to your restaurant reviews. Maybe next week you can go to Chez Ernst's and try out those mercury meatballs.
Can't wait for your review.
If you live long enough to write it.
My little conversation today with a member of the "reasonable" opposition in the comments to Charles Blow's column:
Jack Mahoney Brunswick, Maine:
In that the President is half white, one would think that Confederate flag-wavers voting in this election would be ambivalent.
But then again, there's that miscegenation thing.
Scott Matarrese Lexington KY:
The confederate flag is not just a tool for a few crazy racists. It has real historical meaning far beyond that and nothing to do with that.
It is easier to just lump It in the heap with other symbols that are only about hate because its requires no thinking and no grasp of history.
Jack Mahoney Brunswick, Maine:
Please enlighten us as to instances of the good will shown toward African Americans by those who fly the Confederate flag.
Also, you should proofread when you accuse someone of not thinking.
I imagine that should I criticize skinheads I might be lectured about many of the historically positive uses of the swastika. And then I won't be offered any examples to support that statement, either.
However, I'll settle for just the names of a few simple folk who fly a Confederate flag for purely aesthetic reasons.
Thanks.
Well, I am near exhausted by the plethora of lies, subterfuge, and gleeful malevolence on the one side, to say nothing of the panicky pusillanimity on the other.
Good luck to us all who wish for a decent and responsible country and bad luck to those who crave consternation and confusion.
Whatever happens, it's best to remember that infamous assholes who, as Marie implies, wish to drag us all back into the muck of fear and uncertainty, have a limited opportunity to strut their sickness on the national stage.
Our old friend Montaigne reminds us that, while Republicans are like those who happy that there is no passion as contagious as fear, they are also of the ilk who reveal themselves as those who establish their arguments by noise and command, proving the weakness of their reason.
The country has survived other assaults from enemies of reason, compassion, and democracy. We'll survive this one.
I hope.
(Just imagine what would have happened in the Lord of the Flies had Jack's crew of fearful, superstitious ignoramuses had to govern after murdering Piggy and Ralph? See what I mean?)
I, citizen of these United States of America, in order to enshrine our shining exceptionalism of Democracy, as universally-accepted Leader of the Free(dom) World, hereby propose a Constitutional amendment that declares all national elections federal holidays, thereby giving the citizens of this immaculate conception the opportunity to weigh their options, to think long and hard all day until that epiphany takes them down from their undecided fence, and then cast their vote with conviction while basking in the glory of approval of our Founding Fathers by participating in the democratic system we all share together, united as one.
Across the Nation, voting will be followed by bipartisan backyard BBQ parties (vegan options available upon request), with the sound of sizzling sausages, Bud Light cans a'crackin' and the occasional keg stand dedicated to George Washington, all the while high-fiving democracy late into our nighttime stupor, passing out before the elections results are in, but sleeping soundly knowing that this election cycle, we did our duty.
'Merica.
@Jack: No hear back from Scotty from KY? I would love to hear what REAL historical meaning HE means by flying that Confederate flag. The fact that you are still posting at the NYT (I read your comments sometimes) is courageous––you obviously have the stomach for some of the idiotic responses––and, by gum, it's the NYT's––imagine what you'd get at the...fill in the blank.
Don't know the source, but it was in today's Anderson Valley Advertiser:
A corporate CEO, a public union member, and a teabagger sit around a table. In the center of the table is a plate holding 12 cookies. The CEO takes 11 cookies starts eating them. The teabagger appears puzzled. The CEO leans over and wispers in his ear, “look out for that union guy, he wants part of your cookie…”
The teabagger pulls out his gun and shoots the union member. “Damned socialist,” he states proudly. “The CEO worked hard for those cookies.”