Hey, Check Out Book-Banning Becky!

 

Was it really just the beginning of this year that conservatives were all over the place whining about how cancel-culture was ruining Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head? And now, GOP VA gubernatorial hopeful Glenn Youngkin is hoping to win his race by featuring the "powerful story" of....

A book-banner, Laura Murphy. Her nearly-college age son was assigned a book in his AP English class which he totally could have opted out of reading, but because it gave him bad dreams (so the story goes) she wanted to have a talk with, uh. The manager of books, I guess. Which is all around a really weird reaction to a Pulitzer prize winning novel that is often read in high school classrooms, but probably wasn't really written for young Blake.  Or at least, not specifically, and maybe that's what really ground Ms. Murphy's gears. 

Now, the lad was hardly scarred for life by the book, but I don't know. Having his mommy tell everyone he was reduced to night terrors to promote a political agenda feels like he may have other issues in his life. But let's say the book truly did disturb him--what is a parent to do?

How about: talk to your kid? See, this is what bothers me about the whole "anti-CRT" movement as well while we're here. You are raising kids to be adults that will live in a real world where bad things happen. Schools can provide a place of physical safety, but they can't always protect from emotional discomfort. Of course, history and literature have tragic and uncomfortable aspects. But if a parent wants to guide their kid, instead of limiting exposure to difficult topics, how about--talking to them! 

But back to the irony--well, there isn't any, really. Youngkin is just reaching for culture war content in the hopes that it nails the race down for him. Sure, you could infer that there's something a little hypocritical about conservatives decrying cancel culture and complaining about woke snowflakes who need safe spaces, when actually, conservatives are fine with cancelling content that makes them uncomfortable and impinges on the safe spaces of white privilege. But that would just be critical thinking on your part.

The culture war wants nothing to do with that, thank you. And unfortunately, an ad where McAuliffe is the bad guy for not sparing young Blake and his concerned mom from the horrors of the icky book might even be sadly effective. I think it's pitiful, because this tells you nothing about Youngkin--other than he thinks this is a winning message, but as policy, it amounts to "Something something schools, something something, I'll let parents pick what books we don't teach."  Which honestly doesn't seem ideal at all. 

Mr. Trump's Tragedy Tour

Travel pool was told Trump’s hospital visit was closed to pool because this is “about victims...not a photo op.” But it took the WH just a couple hours to release its own video highlights and photos. https://t.co/rPHYrsrJeP

— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) August 7, 2019

Although there were people who did not want President Trump to visit either Dayton or El Paso because of a sense that he would make things worse, it always helps to consider that Trump can be on at least reasonably good behavior if there is some promise that it will pay off for him later. As in, he can later say he did something presidential by showing up. His photos from the consolation episode of his presidency are Very Good, even if some of his comments and tweets today were Very Not Good.

Being presidential all the time (or even just basically decent) isn't as easy as some people have made it look, apparently.

This will probably be followed up by being more horrible than usual, because this is another thing I have observed about Trump--when asked to not be terrible, he sort of saves his terribleness up. He is also probably not going to do anything about gun control or domestic terrorism (of the white supremacist variety--I do think he has plans for Antifa, which he pronounces rather exotically, I think). I would love to be proven wrong. My title is harsh but I don't think it's undeserved.

The people surrounding Trump are also very special pieces of work.

Civility!

Full video of GOP candidate Scott Wagner threatening Gov. Tom Wolf: "You better put a catcher's mask on your face because I'm going to stomp all over your face with golf spikes." pic.twitter.com/Whh6TdsOXz

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) October 12, 2018

Ok, Ok, I'm not brand new here, and I get that this ad might be calculatedly stupid just so that it will go viral. But in a climate where many GOP figures are bemoaning the lack of civility, this "cleats in the face" approach is refreshingly...poorly timed.

McNugget of Truth?





Yeah, this did get deleted, and somebody is surely going to get fired, but I bet they thought it was worth it at the time.


UPDATE: McDonald's Corp maintains they were hacked, but regardless, I would understand.

This Ad Was a Little Too Easy

I know all the "Children of the Corn", "Children of the Con", "Children of the Klan" mockups are brilliant, but I think there's something just unsettling about the way all his kids by Wife#1 decided they were "millennials for Trump". Uh huh. But not Tiffany. And not anyone without Donald Trump, we presume, on the birth certificate. 

(I could have fit in #thefuturebelongstomeh, but that was a bit much.)

Stick with Demon Sheep

Carly Fiorina makes a joke about Obama eating dog meat and then chews on a Milkbone. From the kind of political instincts that approved of an ad that has gone down in political advertising history for its sheer bizarreness, comes a spot that should make her seem more loose and likeable.

It doesn't. Maybe it would take an awful lot of work to change the established impression we already have of her.

From an Empty Chair to a Cardboard Cut-out

There's more than a few "something creepy"'s about this ad purporting to show a disillusioned Obama supporter (the actress here is actually a GOP staffer).  For one thing, Republicans are again displaying a Fauxbama--they basically erase his actual record and accomplishments and put up a mock figure they are more comfortable (I guess) dealing with. But what they're also doing is creating a fake Obama supporter, and I'm not sure how well that will sit with people who did support President Obama in 2008.

The resemblance of this ad to the break-up of a romantic relationship implies that people did support Obama      in 2008 because they "fell in love with him", not because they simply thought his ideas were better or that the Republicans couldn't be trusted to clean up the messes they made.  There may have been a certain starry-eyed quality about the support Obama got in 2008--but implying that Obama supporters made the choice based on feeling alone is kind of off-putting. I think voters can figure out that the president is not our boyfriend.

Also, there's a lot of people out there who had "that talk" with a partner and are probably getting flashbacks right now. And they might be hearing it the way I did--

"Sorry, Barack. I'm leaving you for a rich guy."

I guess what I'm saying is--tone deaf, much?


(X-posted at Rumproast.)

Romney Campaign's Ad Taken Down--Probably Good for Them.

I never got to see the ad before it was taken down (copyrights, how do they f-ing work, amirite?), actually, but part of the basis of the ad was President Obama's brief singing of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together".

Think about this. The Romney campaign dropped an "attack ad" that reminds people that Obama is cool, charming, and can sing.

The original clip went like this:



Note--he was on-tune, and the singing was brief.  People applauded, and wanted a little more. The video went viral, and people bought the ringtone. So when Romney tunelessly belted out "America, the Beautiful" on the campaign trail shortly afterwards, some people kind of assumed he was saying "Hey, look at me, I'll be a singing fool, too."  You know, like people do.

The contrast is what makes the "Firms" ad work in the way the awkwardly-titled "Political Payoffs and Middle Class Layoffs" couldn't possible. Romney's choice of a patriotic song isn't being derided, so much as the juxtaposition of his adoption of patriotism being hollow when played against business practices that haven't built up this country so much as--undermined the middle class via....layoffs.

Yeah. Romney might want to stay away from talking about layoffs--he's pretty well identified with them.

But also--"I am so in love with you..." as a torch song to Obama's donors? Hmm. Romney doesn't want us to know about his big-dollar bundlers: while Obama was pretty successful with small-dollar donors--and even people whose investment was no more than their vote benefited from Obama's policies.

It seems like the Romney campaign inadvertently made an ad that might encourage people that the USA and the Obama Administration should "stay together" another four years.  So maybe the take-down was actually not a bad thing for the Romney campaign so much as a warning not to respond in haste.

(Although with all the money being thrown at his campaign by fellow $illionaires, maybe his campaign can afford to make crappy ads in job-lots and just throw them out there. In which case, they needn't mind me--at least it's one thing he can do to stimulate the economy.)

Um, poor....toys?

This anti-abortion ad is from a billboard in Toronto. I do not know if, in the history of women's reproduction, any female-bodied person has ever thought about the toys when contemplating hir options.

Dear GOD, people! What about THE TOYS? Does no one ever think about the TOYS?

I have to to admit, consulting with inanimate objects about my bodily autonomy never actually occurred to me before. It's an interesting bit of anthropomorphizing, but....oh, how do I put this?

FAIL.

I think the hard work against Romney has already been done--unaired Kennedy attack ad:

Via Politico.  Oh, and the story that goes with it is pretty effective stuff, too:

“The way the company was rescued was with a federal bailout of $10 million,” the ad says. “The rest of us had to absorb the loss … Romney? He and others made $4 million in this deal. … Mitt Romney: Maybe he’s just against government when it helps working men and women.”



The facts of the Bain & Co. turnaround are a little more complicated, but a Boston Globe report from 1994 confirms that Bain saw several million dollars in loans forgiven by the FDIC, which had taken over Bain’s failed creditor, the Bank of New England.

Romney aides pushed back strongly on the Democratic charge that Bain & Co. received anything like a TARP-style “bailout.” While the FDIC is a government agency, it is funded by deposit insurance payments rather than taxes. The agency agreed to reduce Bain & Co.’s liability to the Bank of New England, but didn’t pump new funds into the flagging firm. Other Bain creditors also took a haircut in order to avert the company’s collapse.

This has already been sort of brought up by fellow GOP primary candidate Newt Gingrich, who has challenged Mitt Romney to "give back all the money he's earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain".  I'm not sure how effective that challenge will be in the GOP primary, but it will no doubt be used against Romney if he wins the nomination--which leads me to wonder if that was something of a long-range calculation on Gingrich's part.  The two good charges Gingrich has levelled at Romney: that he would have been a career politician if Kennedy hadn't beaten him and that his business involved "vulture capitalism" at its most predatory, are effective swipes at Romney's pose as an experienced businessperson and outsider to government whose private sector know-how will improve the economy.  They work for Gingrich in the short run by undermining what Romney is pitching as his strength--but they also work as a time bomb against Romney in the general election where public sentiment will not favor a person who displayed a talent at profiting off of firing people and bankrupting companies. That undercuts the claim that has been made all along that Romney is simply more electable.
I can't resist suggesting that the claim re: electability has been....Newtralized? (If I believed in Hell....yeah, I'd be going to Hell for that one....)  With an assist from Ted Kennedy. (Politics....bedfellows....strangeness.  Yadda, yadda, yadda.)

Joe Sestak has a pretty funny new ad--Belle.

It's funny because it's true!

Sure, some people might get a little tetchy because it likens the deregulation impetus of Club for Growth capitalism uber alles types and rampant collusion between pols and Wall Street to dog litter. But there is a very good reason for this.

Joe Sestak does not own a bull.

The bail-out of the banks was a hard thing for politicians to vote for--the consequences would have been worse. As it is, TARP cost way less than the sticker-price. The stimulus basically worked, too, if modestly, as its scope was kind of modest. It's possible for the government to take steps to intervene in a crisis for a postive result. What can't be allowed to continue is the moral hazard of a system where deregulated financial institutions basically make their own rules, and the taxpayers are obligated to back them up to preserve our economy.

We had the S & L crisis at basically the terminus of the Reagan/Bush years. That was a bail-out. Then we have today--

Is our capitalists learning? Can we clean up the mess for good?

Stirring the Base: Everyone Loses

This is courtesy of Steve Benen and Bill Simmon, who I think have arrived at the most meaningful reason for reasonable people to get their asses up and vote:



This year has had too damn many crazies in the running for me--people who aren't just counter to my own liberal values but seem anathema to sound, functional government. There are theocrats and borderline anarchists; people who believe that a woman's body should be regulated, but businesses shouldn't. If you want to show dissatisfaction with a broken system, start by voting against people who would break it further--ideologues who don't believe in government, facts, reality or honesty, people who shy away from simple questions and run their campaigns like a fly-by-night boiler room short-con.

I don't get why more people don't see the grift-factor in the background of this Tea Party nonsense. I really don't get why there should be an "enthusiasm gap" when there is so much to enthusiastically reject!

Daniel Webster and the Devilish Details

There was some hand-wringing over the past week about whether US. Rep. Alan Grayson's last ad, which compared his opponent, Daniel Webster to the Taliban. Was it out of context? Did it got to far?

Well, this ad gives us "The Facts":




When a candidate has connections like this , the best offense is the truth. The problem with Grayson's first ad is it did fudge a little to try and show what the truth is--but that actually doesn't change that this year in particular, I think we are seeing more of there Christian Reconstructionist types like Webster. And that starts with "C" and that rhymes with "T", and that stands for Theocracy.

And I hate Theocracy. I like that Grayson swings back and calls it like he sees it, too.

Classified info and the understudy Bozo. No, she's not like me.

That right there is slicker than greased Jello. But I know the difference. I'm not her. My resume doesn't have schools I didn't go to on it. When I say I dabbled in witchcraft, I mean I was a solitary practitioner of a religion based in part on nature and pagan myths with reading material that ranged from the kind of Raven Silverwolf/Scott Cunningham "pop-Wicca" to the Israel Regardie and Aleister Crowley type stuff. I never confused it with Satanism. And my dad was not a Bozo.

(Although hers was an understudy of the popular painted children's favorite. I'm not going to say a thing. I just have personal issues regarding clowns, and I am working on them. One day at a time....)

Also, I don't have much of a security clearance. As in, I am like most of the American public who are polibloggers--the almost next to the last to know things. But according to this cool find from her primary debate in the 2006 GOP primary for Senate, she claimed she had some classified information about China. Okay--classified? Oh, and did I mention her primary opponent was Chinese-American? Because that's kind of important. But she heard it from some folks who are missionaries who are totally, like, as good as spies? And she wished she didn't know the terrible, terrible things she knows?

No, none of us are Christine O'Donnell. Except maybe Allen West. Since he has the security clearance. And maybe Sharron Angle. Because who's got the juice? Or maybe Tommy Flanagan and his wife....Morgan Fairchild. Yeah, that's the ticket. (Link provided for the youngin's.)

I don't usually play GOP ads unless they are utter train wrecks, but--"I'm you?"


Really?

:Be an Ally and a Friend

Recent events, like the suicides of Tyler Clementi and Seth Walsh remind us of how very serious the problem of feeling isolated, picked-on and unsupported can be for gay young people.

I want to believe most people don't actually suck, and are like the people in this ad. I think schools and workplaces should be safe from gender/orientation-based judgements. I think people should be seen for who they are and what they do, and not random perceptions drawn from stereotypes and ignorance.

I know that's a lot. But that what I hope is our future.

Alan Grayson's campaign shows one way to do it:

Sometimes calling out your opponent for what he is is the best thing to do--this is a good ad for that. I doubt there's a context that improves any of it. I think the guy considering women biblically inferior and mandatorially subservient is pretty awful--huh?

I look forward to more Alan Grayson in Congress. He's blunt, funny and smart. And also looks a little like Captain Marvel as done by Alex Ross. So he has a lot going for him, amirite?

In an election year full of crazies, isn't it nice to know some are incumbents?

Of course, I mean nice sarcastically, as in "not very nice or reassuring at all." Which is why I'm linking to this campaign ad for Billy Kennedy, who is running against NC Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, who I'm sure I've had the occasion to blog about before:



Is it harsh to call her "crazy"?* Yes. Because the truth hurts.

(h/t Digby)

*Although the drawback is that the word "crazy" has disablist connotations. I'm not sure if there's a good way to call her an "asshole" in a campaign ad, which would be more accurate on giving it a good think. I get that the use of "crazy" here is "sharing a viewpoint strongly at odds with objective reality", but the word can be off-putting.

Citizens United Makes One for the Ladiez

Wow. I sometimes cross my legs properly and even shave'em--can my liberal ass be a real female? A "feminine" female? With real working lady-parts and everything? Is being a liberal less "feminine"? Am I butch, now? A gender-traitor? Am I a gender-traitor if I think Michele Bachmann is a back-bench bomb-throwing hack of the Newt Gingrich school, and that Ann Coulter is a cultural opportunist?

My not having children is a political act regarding the economy, the environment and the reality that it wasn't the choice for me--and that choice is a valid choice for many other women, also, and a political one for them, and one I'll stand up for.

It's astonishing to me that Michele Bachmann's crazy-ass Constitutional questioning of the authority of the Constitution to allow the Government to do anything was the lead-in--anything not explicitly forbidden is allowed as approved by Congress. She's in the Congress. You'd think she would know that. The puzzled look of one Tim Geithner was the frustration of not knowing one good way to tell a dumbass, "Look, idiot, the Constitution doesn't need something spelled out for all and any contigincies." And maybe chivalry, as in, it's so very hard to tell a nice lady she is so very, very wrong when one is a properly raised young man.

But me, I'm a bitch, so, I'll point out that Michele Bachmann doesn't know what she's talking about. Almost ever. And like a lot of these conservafems, she relies on the soft bigotry of lowered expectations to carry her along, fact and apology-free. If it wasn't for a sense of something like chivalry (that only could exist where the female is the "weaker sex") would the weak, or crazy, or rabid, things some conservative women say, slip through the media filter.

And I'm looking at women like Amy Siskind when I say, gender isn't enough. My support, and the support of any woman as a political candidate, for another begins and ends with whether we think she is the best possible candidate. And a woman who disregards my reproductive rights, or those of my fellow females, doesn't get my vote. One who doesn't appreciate my labors as a worker, my access to benefits, my needs when I retire, does not get my vote. One who doesn't acknowledge science or the facts of history won't get my vote either. It isn't about gender--

It's about reality. I'm happy to see women in political races, but they don't do any of us any good collectively if individually, they just aren't well-prepared, smart, insightful figures.

And I can still be moral and feminine and not a victim as a liberal. I am not a victim of the conservative lie that my body is community property. I am moral without the imposition of the religious right. And I am feminine because I know what it is to be me--and maybe that is just my own subjective understanding of womanhood, but I am a born and self-identified female, and I will tell you conservafems right this minute you don't speak for all of us born and self-identified females, or simply born-females, or simply self-identified females--any one of us might have an experience we can speak from as a woman. And the conservafem viewpoint, from experience, I know doesn't speak for or even acknowledge all of us. So why would I want to support it?

I didn't like this little "Yay--girls can be stupid conservatives too!" advert. The "women" might be passionate, courageous, and whatever--but that doesn't make conservativism any better. If they are acting or speaking from fallacies, or in favor of bad policies, they are every bit as bad as any man who espouses bad ideologies and poor policies.

That would be equality. Female cons are as bad to me as any really bad conservative who was male, by virtue of espousing the same intellectual dishonesty and predictably retrograde viewpoints. I'm not sure who they were trying to "sell" with that spot. Maybe make the conservadudes feel less sexist for supporting the ladies because they are pulchritudinous?

The whole thing makes me want to burn a bra. A really uncomfortable one that pinches and is old, anyway, but still.....

Now that's Old Spice--

H/T to PZ, but seriously, things rugose and eldritch and tentacular are what I am all about, myself:



Now there's a god who....at least smells alright?

There will be no mosques when Rick Scott is governor of Ground Zero.

The truth is that it's going to be a community center with a prayer room, it's blocks away from the WTC Towers, and there's a difference between Islamic extemists and the people who are building Cordoba House.

And Scott's actually running in Florida, and his job won't really have anything to do with this issue.

Is this the kind of thing someone runs on when they have nothing--or what?