HorsesAss.Org

I realize this is kind of old, but the house GOP Budget is called the “all-priorities budget.” I don’t need to go into the specifics: every out of power caucus presents an unrealistic budget that gets ignored. Then they run on, “our budget doesn’t cut education as drastically as their budget. Then never mention that they do that by ignoring all the things they would have had to put back in if they were trying to actually pass a budget. I’m not blaming them for that, if Democrats didn’t control the levers of democracy, their House budget would have tax increases that won’t actually pass, etc. Then not run on the tax increases bit.

But what interests me is the branding here. “All-priorities budget” seems like it was focus grouped to sound great. But here’s the thing: governing, especially in times of uncertainty and cuts, is about picking some priorities over others. The branding “all-priorities” implies that they think you can have it all.

Public Policy Polling has released a new poll on presidential politics taken in Washington state. The poll surveyed 1,264 voters (2.76% MOE) from 16th to the 19th of February.

Here are a few highlights. First the big four head-to-head match-ups. PPP writes:

Mitt Romney’s fortunes have really been sinking in PPP’s look ahead to the fall campaign, to the point where he routinely now performs worse against President Obama than the surging Rick Santorum does. Indeed, in Washington state, Romney not only trails Santorum with general election voters, but also Ron Paul.

• Obama 52%, Santorum 40%
• Obama 53%, Romney 38%
• Obama 55%, Gingrich 35%
• Obama 51%, Paul 38%

To put these numbers into context, Washington went for Kerry over Bush, 52.8% to 45.6% in 2004, and Obama over McCain, 57.7% to 40.5% in 2008.

Obama has a net positive job approval: 51% approve, 45% disapprove.

The four Republican candidates have terrible favorables:

• Santorum 36% favorable, 51% unfavorable
• Romney 27% favorable, 63% unfavorable
• Gingrich 19% favorable, 69% unfavorable
• Paul 31% favorable, 55% unfavorable

I think we can safely say that Washington isn’t turning red any time soon. I’ll be posting new poll analyses soon.

Seeing the first gubernatorial poll where Inslee isn’t behind is certainly heartening news. I don’t know if it’s an outlier at this point or if the race has tightened up recently. In any event, for the thousandth time, I’m going to point out that we’re not simply passive observers.

As people who’ve been reading this blog for a while know, I’m a big proponent of getting out and doing what you can for candidates. For citizens volunteering. Knocking on doors and having conversations will be more persuasive than whatever ads get TiVoed passed or mailings that go straight into the recycle bin. And calling people reminding them to vote will push the numbers up.

So, I know I’ll volunteer throughout the campaign. And I hope some of you do the same.

– Peter Gleick

– This is sort of a win? Maybe? The state can violate your bodily autonomy only on your abdomen and not in your vagina. Yay?

– 100% accurate Oscar picks.

– I think Social Security is stronger than its critics would have you believe, but I appreciate Chad’s take on what the payroll tax holiday might mean for the program.

– I’d also missed that the right wing is freaking out over the phrase freedom of worship.

You know that nut-job uncle of yours who keeps forwarding shit to your email about how Obama is a Muslim trying to take away our guns and hand America over to the UN? Yeah…that guy?

Now suppose you engaged in an economic game with him beginning in the early 1960s. You each would invest $1,000 in the stock market. But he would do so only during the terms of Republican Presidents. You would do so only during the terms of Democratic presidents. Who’d be ahead today?

Clearly your Uncle would be wiping your socialist ass with the help of Republican Presidents and their laissez-faire, free market, capitalist policies. Right?

Um…not so much:

Uncle Billy-Bob: $2,087
You: $10,920

(And Billy-Bob has almost five extra years of investment on you. )

Any questions?

This is the kind of activist judicial ruling that will cause Rick Santorum to foam at the…um, the caudal portion of his alimentary canal.

Moments ago, Judge Jeffery White of the District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause….

Clearly, the Republicans need to make a Big Fucking Deal about this and push a Constitutional amendment defining Marriage as between one Man and one Women.

Yeah…let’s hope so.

Gosh…we have been deprived of Republican Reality TeeVee lately. Well…a debate started a few minutes ago. I’ll try live blogging it if I can find a stream on the intertubes or radio.

Go to town with your own commentary in the thread.

5:12: Got it…you can stream the debate here.

5:14: As I tune in, Romney and Santorum are doing the opening bickering shtick.

5:15: First words out of Newt’s mouth: “When I was speaker, we balanced the budget.”

5:17: Ron Paul earns the title Jedi Diphthong Master.

5:20: Rick: Just think what the teabaggers can do with Santorum!

5:25: Lost my feed while Mitt was talking about how conservative he was as MA Gov.

5:26: Rick Santorum puts on that “disgusted face”, usually reserved for sex-related matters, as he talks about Mitt Romney asking for and getting Olympics earmark money.

5:34: Pardon our brief live blogging interruption. My computer decided to die. All better now.

5:42: Yay for companies going bankrupt!!!!

5:46: The candidates and the audience tries to bully John. Newt Gingrich goes in to “indignant mode.” “Barack Obama voted to kill babies!”

5:51: Ron Paul: “The pill cannot be blamed for the immorality of our society.”

5:55: Newt: “Whenever the government provides services, they have the power of tyranny.” What the fuck?!?

5:57: Ron Paul goes into incoherent babble mode for a few seconds.

5:58: The audience is sure doing a lot of booing…not always clear who they are booing or why.

6:01: Mitt, if he becomes president, vows to throw tons of young people off their parent’s insurance, throw millions of poor people off of insurance, and make insurance unaffordable for millions of people with preexisting conditions. Nice.

6:31: *Snicker* Santorum said “feckless.”

6:34: Rick Santorum creates his own version of “the axis of evil”. The Santorum version is Syria and Iran.

6:36: Santorum: “A second Obama term will result in a cataclysm in the Middle East!!!!”

6:38: *Snicker* Mitt said “feckless.”

6:39: Mitt and Santorum are talking about the terrible news coming out of the Middle East. WTF? Nothing beats “bad news out of the Middle East” like, 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers, hundreds of thousands dead Iraqi’s, and zero weapons of mass destruction.

6:41: Santorum, “Politics is a team sport, folks.” Newt’s thinking, “marriage, too!”

6:55: Santorum implies that Mitt is “beating the tar out of him” with money. Ummm…Rick, that isn’t “tar.”

You won’t have Buddy to kick around any more:

Frustrated and largely ignored, Buddy Roemer is ending his bid for the Republican nomination and will instead seek the presidency on a third-party ticket.

Let’s get real…America is not prepared for a “President Buddy.”

It’s been a while since I’ve done a good solid metacommentary piece, and I’ve been meaning to get back into it here. So even though this isn’t local, and plenty of liberal blogs made fun of this days ago, I’m going to give this crap a try.

What are women for?

Go fuck yourself. Jesus, I’m not even past the title and I’m just saying, “go fuck yourself.” This could be a long one.

In a simpler time Sigmund Freud struggled to understand what women want. Today the significant battle is over what women are for. None of our culture warriors are anywhere close to settling the matter. The prevailing answer is the non-answer, a Newt-worthy challenge to the premise that insists the real purpose of women is nothing in particular.

Maybe because it’s only a question a jackass would ask. Maybe, and I know this will sound silly, the billions of women are individual, autonomous humans and not “for” anyone or anything.

Also, did Freud live in a simpler time? Didn’t he live through the first World War? Oh, hey there’s a good chance you’ll have children who die before adolescence. Everyone is on cocaine. Simpler, simpler times!

Such an answer may or may not be a landmark in the progress of the human race, but it is anathema to most conservatives of any political party, and for that reason conservative folkways, prejudices, and ideals are once again on trial.

Are those even words? I feel like each of those words are words, but together, I don’t think any of them are, strictly speaking.

Rick Santorum may be easing up on the rhetorical throttle as his fortunes seem on the upswing, but everyone else feels their civilization is in peril, and the bile rises accordingly. On birth control, the Catholic Church is portrayed as the extremist fringe of its own faithful. On abortion, activists labor to extort Komen for the Cure.

Rick Santorum is still as much a jackass as ever, the Catholic hierarchy is out of step with its membership. And the Komen debacle was only about abortion insofar as they decided to make Planned Parenthood’s cancer screenings about abortion. If that’s the sign of civilization in peril, well good news, civilization isn’t in peril.

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observes, Republicans are being excoriated for voting against the Violence Against Women Act, for pushing transvaginal ultrasounds, and for holding an all-male hearing on birth control. Conservatives are even being reviled for “slut-shaming” sexy CPAC attendees. “Is there no one in the upper echelon of the GOP establishment,” Hayes wonders, “who can explain to them how all this looks when strung together?”

And, they’re all quite bad on their own. They wouldn’t get excoriated if they acted like women deserve respect and should be allowed to make their own choices. This isn’t a perception problem, it’s a human decency problem.

Alas, Carly Fiorina is not quite upper echelon. But before liberals ritually invoke the glass ceiling, they might want to conduct an agonizing reappraisal of their own. If the conservative movement’s nominal unity is actually belied by a stunning range of right-wing views on the status and purpose of women (and believe me, it is), the left’s alleged philosophical uniformity on the woman question is a complete fabrication — despite the fanatical discipline and norm-enforcement of much of the liberal cultural establishment.

Is the rest of this going to be an honest, thoughtful look at sexism in the Democratic party? If so, Meg Whitman might have been the better choice there. A writer who appreciates crafting a piece might then circle back to the time that she was called a whore. As a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008, and someone who has tried to call out sexism in my own party, I would actually appreciate that effort. And while the Daily Caller isn’t really the best place to write that, it’s still a legit story. Or I’m wrong about all that and more nonsense:

The purpose of lifting the left’s Potemkin skirts is not to score tits for tats. Anyone serious about thinking through the role of women in today’s civilization is doing worthless work unless they take the controversies on the right hand in hand with the unsuccessfully suppressed tensions on the opposite side of the spectrum, where disagreements far more volatile in their profundity roil respectable liberalism.

OK, well that paragraph certainly feels like it’s only there to push up the word count. But is that a reference to Potemkin villages? The implication that nobody in the Democratic party actually is a woman? That they’re just fake women? Whaaaat?

Left opinion is no longer defined by the comfortably careworn liberal consensus that Sandra Day O’Connor conveyed in the abortive plurality decision of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. There, the metaphysical trouble kicked up by the elective killing of fetuses was relegated to the realm of life’s cosmic mysteries — a place liberals contemptuously deride as beneath human dignity when referenced in terms of the suffering of the crucified Christ. No judge, O’Connor and company concluded, could judge what it so much as meant to end fetal life.

I’m starting a band called “Abortive Plurality.” Also, is a Reagan appointee who was often the swing vote on the Supreme Court part of “the comfortably careworn liberal consensus” or is she a Potemkin skirt?

Lurking beneath this procedural non-judgmentalism was a stubbornly conspicuous judgmental end. Roe couldn’t be overturned, the plurality argued, because Americans might think the Supreme Court was bending to public pressure. The court’s solution was to bend to the public reality that millions of women had altered what it meant to be a woman — and what status that meaning conferred — by having or supporting abortions. On the bogus theory that all linear change is progress, the plurality embraced the immoderate view that a descent into barbarism is impossible.

I’m pretty sure the point of that argument wasn’t that we should all be barbarians.

Continued on Page 2 >>

Oh fuck, fine. I’ll press on.

Liberals, of course, generally and characteristically deny that abortion is barbaric. But the Casey decision substituted a progressive passivity for that very active moral claim. Today, the left is increasingly torn between old-school modern liberals who think like O’Connor and new-school postmodern liberals who find their cognitive elders in thrall to a haute-bourgeois conventionality that the deep premises of their own thought seem to strip of authority.

I. Well. Huh? You know. Um, use an editor next time.

So postmodern Cynthia Nixon, who used to be straight but now isn’t, tells The New York Times Sunday Magazine exactly what establishment liberals don’t want to hear when it comes to the sexual politics of women — “you don’t get to define my gayness for me.” As Laurie Essig understated it in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Such talk is heresy among some people in the gay advocacy and the reaction was both immediate and predictable.” Nixon was swiftly accused by the left’s cultural policemen of “aiding and abetting bigots and bashers.”

I’m not sure what makes Cynthia Nixon postmodern, but whatever. She and the gay rights advocates all want the same thing (gay rights), so hell of a rift. She can define her sexuality however she wants, like any adult.

The piece forgot to define what the other side wants for her. Maybe say why it’s heresy instead of just quoting someone who says that it is. Then we can see for ourselves if these disagreements are actual disagreements on the left, and maybe how to resolve them.

Lip service is often paid to the impression that the point of empowering women is to empower them to do whatever they want, but much of the left stops well short of the more radical implications of that easy answer. The left’s culture of celebration is hamstrung by the very assertions of should and shouldn’t that contemporary women have inevitably come to make — as the ongoing debate over the advisability of marriage reveals. Reihan Salam has hinted that typically left-wing implications of academic theories like “erotic capital,” including mainstreaming prostitution, point in directions quite at odds with the dominant but failing framework of liberal sexual politics.

I don’t know what erotic capital means, but how about this: women do what you like. If you want to get married, great! If you want to stay single, great! If you’re for monogamy, great! If you want to still see other people while you’re in a relationship, great! If you want children, great! If you don’t, great! You know, like women are autonomous humans who know what’s best for themselves.

To the growing discomfort of many, that framework hasn’t come anywhere close to answering even the most basic questions about what women are for — despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. A few inherently meaningful implications about what women are for flow naturally from this wise and enduring consensus, but no faction of conservatives or liberals has figured out how to fully grasp, translate, and reconcile them in the context of our political life.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT? Anyway, how about using ironically in a way that’s guaranteed to piss me off and then finish up with nonsense:

Ironically, one of the best places to look for a way out of the impasse is the strain of left feminism that insists an inherently unique female “voice” actually exists. That’s a claim about nature. Much good would come from a broader recognition that women have a privileged relationship with the natural world. That’s a relationship which must receive its social due — if masculinity in its inherent and imitative varieties (including imitation by quasi-feminized males of quasi-masculinized females!) is not to conquer the world.

Please join us tonight for an evening of Politics under the influence at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally.

We meet every Tuesday at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. We start at 8:00pm, but some of us show up even earlier.

Yesterday, SeattlePI.com’s Joel Connelly (who sometimes stops by DL) summarized the Republican war on women. The Partisans have their own take on it:

Can’t make it to Seattle? There is also a meeting tonight of the Tri-Cities chapter. And Wednesday evening, the Burien chapter meets.

With 227 chapters of Living Liberally, including twelve in Washington state and six more in Oregon, chances are excellent there’s one near you.

– The wealthy aren’t like you and me.

– You guys, the urbaniest hell hole of all urban hell holes.

– If we’re getting a couple new sports teams, this would be the thing to do. Of course they would be existing teams rather than expansion teams so you’re not starting from scratch. And the NBA and NHL don’t, as far as I know, have the same sort of history of fan involvement as soccer, so I don’t know what the challenges would look like.

– Austerity doesn’t look so great.

– If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that Darrell Isa is basically the MLK of hating women.

– As an expat Knicks fan, it’s nice to see the team doing well. On the other hand, the Lin puns have to stop.