Bob Dylan - Only A Pawn In Their Game (by rgdoub)
Bruce Springsteen at Charlottesville Obama For America Rally (by BruceSpringsteen)
Foreign policy debate hindered by media insistance on McCain credibility (by adalrich00)
Noam Chomsky confronted by right wing twat (by odysseylifepath)
Rep Marcia Fudge defends UN Ambassador Susan Rice from attacks by Sen McCain (by CAPcongress)
Obama To GOP On Susan Rice: “If They Want To Go After Somebody, They Should Go After Me” (by Adalrich William)
Where Did the Debt Come From? (by seeprogress)
“Papa” John Schnatter, Papa John’s founder and CEO, is back in the headlines once more for his assertion that there’s no way on God’s green Earth he can afford to provide health care for a portion of his employees, as mandated by the Affordable Care Act. Now, Schnatter hasn’t been hurting for…
All of this is important because it explains in no small part how those on the right lost. In no small part they lost because they created a Barack Obama who bore no resemblance to one whom anybody else recognized; by choosing to run against this illusory Obama, they lost credibility. For 40 years I’ve believed, as recently as a lunch conversation a week ago with my friend and American Prospect colleague John Powers, that conservatives are correct when they argue this is a center-right country. I still believe that for much of these four decades that’s been the case, that the underlying sensibility of the country is moderately conservative. The enormity of what happened 72 hours ago—in macro terms and micro, from Obama’s re-election to a more Democratic Senate to passage of marriage-equality and marijuana-legalization propositions to, most significantly, the shattering defeat of big money—is that this no longer is necessarily the case. This isn’t to say that the public voted for big government or even “progressivism,” whatever that is; but it did vote for a world in which numbers add up, even as Fox News’ apparatchiks frantically search for a new math by which less is more and more is less. The Obama Years have represented for the right a strategic assault on the Daniel Patrick Moynihan maxim about opinions not being facts and about not being entitled to confuse the two: Oh yeah? said the America in the Next Seat. Watch us. While “facts” perjure themselves sometimes, however, math testifies under oath. The center-right country hasn’t become a left country or even center-left; it may not even be center-center. Rather in the face of fantasists of various toxicity from Akin to Murdoch, from Joe Walsh to Allen West, the country voted for a different kind of apex: the real-real, in all its American pluralism; and for the rest of the trip, those who can’t or won’t grasp that calculus may find themselves on a different flight altogether, finally stranded in a different place.
President Barack Obama was re-elected despite attempts by Republicans to paint him as an angry, socialist liberal, African-American infringing on religious rights.
For the first time in US history, gay marriage was legalised by popular vote in three states. And in another first for the country, two states legalised marijuana for recreational use.
It was also a good day for the political representation of women in the US as 20 - the highest ever number - were elected to the senate.
Similarly, the fact that so many Republicans this week think that all Hispanics care about is amnesty, all women want is abortions (and lots of them) and all teenagers want is to sit on their couches and smoke tons of weed legally, that tells you everything you need to know about the hopeless, anachronistic cluelessness of the modern Republican Party. A lot of these people, believe it or not, would respond positively, or at least with genuine curiosity, to the traditional conservative message of self-reliance and fiscal responsibility.
But modern Republicans will never be able to spread that message effectively, because they have so much of their own collective identity wrapped up in the belief that they’re surrounded by free-loading, job-averse parasites who not only want to smoke weed and have recreational abortions all day long, but want hardworking white Christians like them to pay the tab. Their whole belief system, which is really an endless effort at congratulating themselves for how hard they work compared to everyone else (by the way, the average “illegal,” as Rush calls them, does more real work in 24 hours than people like Rush and me do in a year), is inherently insulting to everyone outside the tent – and you can’t win votes when you’re calling people lazy, stoned moochers.
It’s hard to say whether it’s good or bad that the Rushes of the world are too clueless to realize that it’s their attitude, not their policies, that is screwing them most with minority voters. If they were self-aware at all, Mitt Romney would probably be president right now. So I guess we should be grateful that the light doesn’t look like it will ever go on. But wow, is their angst tough to listen to.
Rachel Maddow on Obama’s Re-election (by Tumwatl)
