Why Libertarianpalooza Failed

Dear "Tax Is Slavery",

Confession time.  I am probably the HUGEST fan of your Deathmetal Libertarian band in the world!

How big a fan, you ask?

Well last year I was blasting your patriotic, American anthem,"Tax Money Cruelly Expropriated From Patriotic Americans" so often my neighbors threatened to call the cops if I didn't stop!

Fucking snowflakes can't handle the truth!

So -- true story -- I cranked up "First Amendment Bitches!" as loud as it would go and let 'em have it until the cops came.

Our message is getting out there!

Anyway, I was soooo psyched at the chance to see you live last summer when you toured [town name withheld], but honestly I couldn't stand the idea of going to some park paid for by tax money cruelly expropriated from patriotic Americans, or patrolled by cops who salaries are paid for with tax money cruelly expropriated from patriotic Americans, so I had to miss out.

Sad!

But then I heard your band came back through my town this winter.

Yay!

But then I realized how wrong wrong it would be -- how it would just totally shit on the whole spirit of "Tax Is Slavery" -- to use a bunch of roads and bridges and traffic lights paid for by tax money cruelly expropriated from patriotic Americans, and plowed by government employees hired with tax money cruelly expropriated from patriotic Americans (using equipment paid for by tax money cruelly expropriated from patriotic Americans) just so I could get to a venue that's been inspected for fire safety and structural soundness and hygienic food-handling by even more government employees who were hired with tax money cruelly expropriated from patriotic Americans.

So that's out too.

But I'm sure someday we'll figure it all out.

Until then, yours in Freedom,

Name withheld.

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Quit Trying to Appeal to Republican's Love of Country

They have none. 

Quit trying to appeal to Republican's compassion.

They have none. 

Quit trying to appeal to Republican's reverence for the Constitution.

They have none.

Quit trying to appeal to Republican's love of Democracy.

They have none.

Quit trying to appeal to Republican's sense of decency.

They have none. 

Quit trying to appeal to Republican's sense of fairness.

They have none. 

Quit trying to appeal to Republican's Christian faith.

They have none. 

Quit trying to appeal to Republicans. 

Period.

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Professional Left Podcast #532

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within." 

--   Cicero

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Links:

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The Left Was Right All Along, Part Infinity

From a notorious degenerate Liberal blogger and three-time Twitter jail recidivist more than a decade ago:

The "Independent" Granfalloon

Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":

"...a proud and meaningless association of human beings"

Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.

Consider that if you defined “independent” as someone who, broadly speaking, supported a Liberal agenda (not the imaginary, shadow-puppets-made-out-of-Rush-Limbaugh-stool-samples “Liberal agenda” that Conservatives have been using to scare stupid people into committing economic suicide for 30 years, but the real Liberal agenda) but was not welded to a particular candidate, or even to a particular party, then that would describe me pretty well.

But I'm also quite sure that a fair chunk of the the 5% of the voting public which -- just 24 hours before the 2004 Presidential elections -- still couldn't quite make up their minds whether to vote for Kerry/Edwards, or the lying, feeble-minded frat boy (and his homicidal regent) who had fucked up everything he had ever touched ...consider themselves "independents".

Rebel nuns who might just think that letting a rape victim have access to abortion services would not be the end of the world?

Independents.

Snake-handling queer-hating Leviticans who think the GOP is too gutless because it won’t advocate rounding up Teh Gay and putting them in camps?

Independents.

Bunker-dwelling survivalists?

Independents.

Pimple-faced 30-something John Galt wannabees who masturbate themselves blind to “Atlas Shrugged” because that hot chick in accounting won’t give them a second look, but won’t she be sorry when Objectivists stop the engine of the world and people like her will have to stand in line to offer their vajay-jays to the alpha studs wealth producers!

Independents.

Klansmen who want to smoke a little weed?

Independents.

America's compulsive political middle-children who have been taught so thoroughly to compromise their way out of any conflict that they will travel a 1,000 miles just to find a fence to straddle?

The opinionless little ciphers who just want to make sure they line up with a winner?

The moral cowards wouldn’t pick a side with a gun pressed to their heads, because of the terror of then being committed to actually doing something instead of snarking their way through life declaring "Well, ya know, bote sides are juss a buncha crooks anyway!" about every situation regardless of context and circumstances?

If asked, I guarantee you all virtually of those people would tell you that they think of themselves as “independent”.

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their lives and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

From Politico today:

An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter

Rachel Bitecofer’s radical new theory predicted the midterms spot-on. So who’s going to win 2020?

What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats' big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?

To the political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, all of that is almost certainly true, and that has made her one of the most intriguing new figures in political forecasting this year.

If she’s right, it wouldn’t just blow up the conventional wisdom; it would mean that much of the lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters—is superfluous, an army of bit players with little influence over the outcome. Actually, worse than superfluous: That whole industry of experts is generally wrong.

The classic view is that the pool of American voters is basically fixed: About 55 percent of eligible voters are likely to go to the polls, and the winner is determined by the 15 percent or so of “swing voters” who flit between the parties. So a general election campaign amounts to a long effort to pull those voters in to your side.

Bitecofer has a nickname for this view. She calls it, with disdain, the “Chuck Todd theory of American politics”: “The idea that there is this informed, engaged American population that is watching these political events and watching their elected leaders and assessing their behavior and making a judgment.”

“And it is just not true.”
...

“If you think of independents as a fixed pool of voters that change preferences,” she says, “well, that has implications for how you campaign after them. But if you are talking about the preference of independents changing because the pool of independents changes, well that is a different fucking banana.”

In 2012, Bitecofer points out, Obama actually lost independents while winning the election, and in Ohio, he lost them by 10 points, but still carried the crucial swing state. There are just simply more Democrats in much of the country, and if they are activated by a belief that, say, the Republican presidential nominee is a heartless plutocrat who thinks 47 percent of the population can be written off as grifters and that corporations are people, and the Democrat gets just a handful of those true independents, then it becomes impossible for Republicans to win...

Applause for this, plus two crucial corrections.

First, this is not "An Unsettling New Theory".  This is what certain disreputable Liberals have been saying for literally decades, and for our trouble we've been shoved further and further into media Coventry precisely because we threaten the Beltway media's "lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters."

Second, this will definitely not "blow up the conventional wisdom" despite the fact that "it would mean that much of the lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters—is superfluous, an army of bit players with little influence over the outcome. Actually, worse than superfluous: That whole industry of experts is generally wrong."  This is because the conventional political wisdom of the American punditocracy has never been based on facts, history and observable reality.

As a notorious degenerate Liberal blogger and three-time Twitter jail recidivist wrote a couple of month ago ("Today in Both Sides Do It: Heresy in the Time of Ptolemy, Blasphemy in the Time of Brooks ") the Beltway media already comfortably thrives in a constant state of pathological denial because they are not journalists.  They are the bishops and cardinals of a suffocating and radically false theology, complete with its own orthodoxies, rituals and icons.

A High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It, which preaches the satanic horror of The Extremes on Both Sides, worships the Imaginary Center, and reposes confidently in the certainty that one day soon (although that day and hour no one knows exactly, not even the angels of heaven, but only to Broder in Heaven) the Blessed Independents shall rise up to save us all.

It is also a church which ruthlessly wields its enormous institutional power to reward the faithful and punish heretics and blasphemers like us. 

So stop huffing the ether-soaked rag of Edward R. Murrow nostalgia and praying for the press to "do their job" because enforcing the dogma of Both Siderism in the face of overwhelming evidence that Both Siderism is a toxic lie Is Their Job.

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Benghazi Now. Benghazi Tomorrow. Benghazi Forever.

As long as the GOP has one, filthy finger on one lever of power anywhere, officially sanctioned fraud, corruption, vengeance and show trials will never end.

From The New York Times:

Republicans in Senate Press On With Investigation Into Hunter Biden

The Treasury Department complied with a request from Senate Republicans for documents related to Hunter Biden’s ties to a Ukrainian energy company, according to a Senate Democrat.

WASHINGTON — In the wake of the Senate acquitting President Trump in an impeachment trial over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Republican senators are pressing ahead with their probes into the finances of Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
... 

“Applying a blatant double standard, Trump administration agencies like the Treasury Department are rapidly complying with Senate Republican requests — no subpoenas necessary — and producing ‘evidence’ of questionable origin,” Ashley Schapitl, the spokeswoman, said in a written statement. “The administration told House Democrats to go pound sand when their oversight authority was mandatory while voluntarily cooperating with the Senate Republicans’ sideshow at lightning speed.”...

No mad dog has ever become less mad by being let off the leash, and no fascist's thirst for tyranny has ever been slaked by appeasement.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

On Speaking Murrican

Before turning his full attention to promoting Bloody Bill Kristol's super-awesome podcast, MSNBC's Brian Williams huddled up with retired, Blue Dog Conserva-Dem Joe Donnelly (because who better!) to complain that Democrats need to learn to Speak American.

Donnelly:  When we're in Michigan we need to talk about jobs and we need to talk about the future. When we're in places like Florida, we need to talk about climate change, about the environment. These are the things that Donald Trump can't touch us on, is the opportunity to make sure that tariffs go away, so we don't have our farmers in a place where bankruptcies are going up 20%, that we don't have the debt exploding. We talk about these meat and potato things, about the fact that if you have cancer, we were the party that brought you the opportunity to have health care. And Donald Trump is trying to take it away.

Williams:  Hillary Clinton goes into coal country, says we're going to close your mine but don't worry, we're going to get you green jobs, which of course never materialized. Donald Trump, make of this what you will, runs on a pro-coal platform, carries Joe Manchin's state of West Virginia by 42 points. Are you teaching democrats how to speak American?

Donnelly:  I hope that's what we're trying to do, is to tell them look, you cannot talk about changing your lives without providing hope and a plan and aspiration and a chance for success. That coal miner at the end of the day has children at the table who are counting on him or her to come through for them. And so as you say, and it's a great way to put it, Brian, we need to talk American to all the Americans, not just those on either coast.

Williams:  Former Indiana Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly, thank you, Senator, for joining us tonight and taking our questions.

You know what, Brian?  We Democrats speak American just fine.  In fact, if you'd like to drop around Springfield sometime, I'd be more than happy to deconstruct your failings as a journalist in some genuine, Midwest, heartland idiomatic American right to your face.  Sure, I'm definitely gonna use some words you've never heard from the sycophants on your cable news panels (unless you eavesdrop on them in the Green Room) but I promise you the gist of them will be perfectly clear.

And speaking of speaking American, when Hillary Clinton went to coal country she absolutely spoke to the people there as Americans.  As Adult American, with families and deep roots in their communities who are facing the implacable reality of being at the bitter end of a dying industry.  And in genuine, Midwest heartland American she offered them a vision of a different future.  A better future.

When Trump went to coal country he brayed at them like idiot children, promising everyone a pony, and a cookie, and great health care that would cover everyone for a fraction of what it costs now, and to turn back the clock to 1950 when Coal and Jim Crow were King.  So maybe the problem is that, in the specific example you're using, the voters in question have let Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity take a daily dump in their skulls for so long that they are no longer competent to make adult decisions.

Oh and by the way, if you trouble yourself to listen to any Democratic candidate's stump speeches, or any of their town halls, all of them are talking pretty plainly and clearly and Americanly about jobs and college and health care and clean water and air and a better future for our kids.  But of course acknowledging that would blow all the fuses on the "Snooty coastal elites don't know how to talk to Real Murricans!" line of ersatz homespun horseshit you pass off as journalism, so as we say here in the middle of Middle America, how about just taking a flying fuck at the moon instead?

Behold, a Tip Jar!

You Can't Spell "Coalition"...

...without "Fuck every counterrevolutionary lowlife in this shitty party who isn't us!".

At a pre-caucus party, a Bernie supporter did a call and response.

“When I say ‘Fuck,’ you say ‘Warren!’”

“Fuck,” he yelled. “Warren,” the audience answered back.

He did the same for the other candidates. JFC.https://t.co/A2UcfYYPxE

— marisa kabas (@MarisaKabas) February 6, 2020

Behold, a Tip Jar!

David Brooks Castigates President Hillary, House Speaker Nancy and Senate Majority Leader Chuck...

...for squandering their unlimited political power.

Normally, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times needs an entire week of straining and pushing and struggling to poop out 800 words of his brand of wish-book, Both Siderist anti-journalism which then scuttles away to live behind the Times' paywall.  But now, thanks to Twitter, you can enjoy Mr. Brooks' trademark, clueless claptrap for free and in 280 character pill-form:

Instead of spending the past 3 years on Mueller and impeachment suppose Trump opponents had spent the time on an infrastructure bill or early childhood education? More good would have been done.

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) February 5, 2020

David Brooks may be galatically awful at the most basic elements of journalism, but he genuinely excels at that uniquely Conservative knack for blithely ignoring observable reality when it conflicts with his asinine opinions.

First, consider that for two out of the last three years, the entire federal government was 100% in the hands of Mr. Brooks' Republican Party during which time they were free to pass an infrastructure bill or an early childhood education bill or a "Give Every MAGA Meathead a Free Pony" bill or any other bill they damn well pleased.  They would've sailed through both houses and President Stupid would've signed it and showed it off on teevee like a two year old who has learned to go boom-boom in the potty like a big boy.

And what has Mr. Brooks' Republican Party been up to since the Democrats took control of one half of one branch of the federal government?

House Democrats have passed nearly 400 bills. Trump and Republicans are ignoring them.

Legislative paralysis gripped Capitol Hill well before impeachment started.

...
This has led to House Democrats decrying McConnell’s so-called “legislative graveyard,” a moniker the Senate majority leader has proudly adopted. McConnell calls himself the “grim reaper” of Democratic legislation he derides as socialist, but many of the bills that never see the Senate floor are bipartisan issues, like a universal background check bill, net neutrality, and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

“From raising the minimum wage to ensuring equal pay, we have passed legislation to raise wages. And we have passed legislation to protect and expand health coverage and bring down prescription drug prices,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in a statement to Vox. “We continue to urge Senator McConnell to take up our bills, many of which are bipartisan.”

McConnell is focused on transforming the federal judiciary instead, with the Senate confirming over 150 of Trump’s nominees to the federal bench. And he has refused to bring Democratic bills to the Senate floor in part to protect vulnerable Republican senators from having to take tough votes that could divide the GOP ahead of the 2020 election. Still, some Senate Republicans fear inaction could make them just as vulnerable...

For those of you who many be new here, I've been writing the despicable Mr. Brooks for 15 years now and, yes, he has always been just this fucking awful.

And, yes, the New York Times has inexplicably continued paying him a king's ransom for being just this fucking awful on their op-ed page every week during all of that time.

And, yes, his Beltway colleagues have praised him and feted him and held him up as a role-model of professional rectitude during all of that time.

All of which should tell you all you need to know about why the Americans political press is so irreparable fucked-in-the-head.

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