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Thursday, April 07, 2011

Because all you need to be is a spoiled, whiny five-year-old to be governor of New Jersey
Posted by Jill | 8:20 PM
Sometimes the snark just writes itself:

A New Jersey boy who cried on a YouTube clip that he’s too small to be governor was all smiles as Gov. Chris Christie made him honorary chief executive.

Christie signed a proclamation Wednesday making 5-year-old Jesse Koczon, of Old Bridge, honorary governor for the day and his fraternal twin brother, Brandon, honorary lieutenant governor.

The boys, dressed in collared shirt, ties and trousers, appeared at a news conference with their parents, Jon and Dawn Koczon, Christie and Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno.

Christie, who has four children in elementary through high school, said he “related as a father,” when he saw the video clip of the boy crying.

On the video, Jesse’s mother asks him why he’s upset. Jesse replies, “Cause everyone tells me I’m too small to be the governor of New Jersey.”

Christie responded on Twitter: “Don’t worry Jesse, people gave plenty of reasons why I couldn’t be governor, though being too small wasn’t one of them.”

Christie said Jesse may be a natural for the state’s top job.

Especially now that Chris Christie has demonstrated that throwing a tantrum when you don't get your own way is the most important qualification.

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Thursday, April 30, 2009

A Confederacy of Kvetchers
Posted by Jill | 5:15 AM
The glee of Republican Party conservatives about the departure of Arlen Specter from their ranks because it serves their quest for an ideologically pure party would seem to be counterintuitive. How can you possibly want a party in which there is no dissent from a doctrinaire party line that represents only a 20% (and shrinking) portion of the American electorate? Are they waiting for the Quiverfull babies to grow up and take their place in the ranks of wingnuttia? Isn't that kind of taking for granted the willingness of these child armies to stay in the fold?

Perhaps the reactionaries (I refuse to call them conservatives) that have taken over the Republican Party are simply more comfortable being a minority party. After all, it's difficult to be credible as an aggrieved minority, as the white fundamentalist Christian males who now dominate the GOP seem to feel they are, when your party controls the White House, the Judiciary, and both houses of Congress. Not that this ever stopped them from feeling aggrieved -- during the Bush years, these people felt themselves assaulted on all sides by gay marriage, relentless abortions, uppity Negroes (sic), people who speak Spanish, and other heinous transgressors against the Doctriine of White Male Privilege. The feelings of persecution among these peole have made radio and TV personalities like Rush Limbaugh, Neal Boortz, Glenn Beck, Melanie Morgan, Laura Ingraham, Michael Reagan, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter -- the list goes on and on -- very, very wealthy. What would these people do if they ever did get their dream world of a Christian theocracy in which women are barred from the workplace and instead stay home and clean and cook and pop out babies until they die from sheer exhaustion; in which gays remain in the closet, in which no one has sex outside of marriage (except for things like Rush's underage sex tourism in the Dominican Republic and David Vitter's search for a Pampers Princess in a New Orleans brothel), and in which black people know that their place is to shine the shoes and clean up after the white people? Against what would the gasbags of right wing talk rail during the 24/7 broadcast cycle?

It seems clear now that during all those years that the Republicans were saying that all the left knows is its grievances, they were largely projecting. They always trot out the usual suspects of the left to show how "fringey" the Democrats are, but "Free Mumia!" has never been part of the Democratic Party platform, or anywhere else outside of the same few stray signs that show up at every demonstration. A.N.S.W.E.R. not only doesn't have the stranglehold over the Democratic Party that the "teabaggers" have over the Republicans, this crowd doesn't even have any credibility with the netroots. In fact, the Great Orange Satan himself recently compared the teabaggers to the A.N.S.W.E.R. and Code Pink folks as how NOT to effect the change you want. After all, what would the fringe groups on the left do if Mumia WERE ever freed? Easy: find something else completely irrelevant to the lives of most people for which to agitate. It's no different on the right. What IS different is that the right's fringe now controls the party, whereas despite the frantic vapors in wingnuttia about the highly mainstream Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, the Democrats have never, ever made a place at the table for Code Pink, never mind allowing them to be the voice of the party. On the Republican side however, the entire party apparetus has now allowed itself to be dedicated to the enrichment of Rush Limbaugh.

It's ironic to watch, for those of us who lived through the 1960's and saw the Democrats tarred and feathered for a generation with the brush of being captive to its extremes, after responding to the antiwar movement by nominating Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and then doing everything it could after 1972 to make sure a candidate like George McGovern could never get the nomination again. The Democratic Party never made Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis its standard bearers, nor did it ever regard the Pacifica radio stations as their official broadcast arm. But the Republicans have gone just the opposite direction, allowing the right's most extreme fringe, now including the teabaggers, who are essentially just the black helicopter crowd with more benign signage, to own the party.

Of course if the Republicans were still in power, they'd actually have to do something about the mess that the wastrel they allowed to represent them wrought during his eight years in office. This way their representatives don't get anywhere near policy; their job is simply to keep the rank and file complaining.

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Sunday, October 28, 2007

Hey Clarence, your back won't hurt as much if you take that boulder off your shoulder
Posted by Jill | 2:02 PM
Just because you have a book published doesn't mean anyone wants to read it. And just because someone doesn't want to read hundreds of pages of an accomplished, educated man whining and kvetching about how terrible his life is doesn't make that person a racist.

Clarence Thomas and his friends, who rail against "the entitlement society", seem to think Clarence is entitled to adulation from everyone:

They're calling themselves "Friends of Justice Thomas," and they say that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his bestselling memoir have gotten a bum rap from the "mainstream media."

So, headed by Wendy Long, one of Thomas's former high court law clerks, the friends announced this morning the launch of a website named after Thomas's book, www.mygrandfathersson.com. The site features favorable reviews of the book, which tops the New York Times bestseller list, as well as links to blog entries and video and audio of interviews with Thomas. The site, says Long, is an effort to give readers an alternative to what she characterized as "agenda-driven, ignorant, and in some instances racist attacks on Justice Thomas" by the Times and other media.


I hate to tell these people, but Clarence's Complaint is #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Sorry, Clarence, but I Am America (and So Can You) is #1.

(h/t)

UPDATE: Thomas' devaluation of his Yale law degree isn't something that was done to him by racists, it was done to him by himself. Trey Ellis at HuffPo explains:

George Bush the First's appointment of a black man who was patently unqualified to the highest bench is exactly what affirmative action is not supposed to be about. The point is to open up gatekeepers like elite law schools and medical schools. Once the students graduate, however, they, and every other job applicant has to rise to a certain standard. My sister is a heart surgeon. Nobody is going to let her cut somebody open just to fill a quota. She has to be excellent at what she does. The bar for a lifetime appointment to our highest bench should have been just as high.

My mom went to Yale law school a few years after Thomas, after having graduated Magna Cum Laude from Howard. She was a thirty-five-year-old black mother of two teenaged kids. She knew she was brilliant, the best of the best, and thrilled at debating the other students. She never once said, "Oh, I'm only here because they needed a brown body. I really belong at the DeVry College of Law."

And that's how she raised me. Old school. Yes, racism still exists, she would tell me. So a B+ might do for the white boys, but you have to be that much better. How pathetic is it that Clarence Thomas writes that he graduated from Yale Law School with his head hanging low, convinced that the world knew that his diploma came with an asterisk of inferiority? When my mom's friends graduated they burst out of law school ready to kick ass and take names.

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