strange to think that in the great shipwreck that is the Republican Party, there are many of a certain narrow demographic who will flounder toward that leaky straw named Noonan. win one for the gipper!
The funniest thing, if I'm catching Noonan's drift -- and drift is the right word because it's almost like the vagueness itself is the point -- she seems to believe she's addressing young voters. Who are uninformed. But who are reading an opinion piece. In the Wall Street Journal. I mean, if that's her target audience, the only way a young person is going to see this is if she thrusts it into the hands of the DoorDash guy delivering her takeout, and insists he read it if he wants a tip.
I'm one of those people that the more you tell them that they can't do something the more they're going to want to do it. As you can imagine, follow up on this has worked out with various degrees of success. A lot of it depends on who is trying to convince me. If it's your typical Republican in a leadership role my instinctive response to anything they say would be " Ha Ha no fuck you!"
Turn out from the kids has been up the last couple of cycles and evidently so far this year initial response from them has been pretty good. " Pretty sure there's a lot of " Ha Ha no fuck you" connected to that. A couple years ago my daughter said something like" Anybody too cool to vote is just an asshole."
I can't imagine JD Vance appealing to anybody under 40 years old.Bump that up to 68 with Noonan .
I hate it that I get the urge too shove Nooners down some steps.
As well demonstrated, I'm a defective human being. And due to my defects, I've been smelling the GOP's lets ambivalence about democracy* since the 80s. They just couldn't fully hide their love of right wing authoritarians -- what used to be called dictators. (I suppose the Founding Fathers' OG democracy which was little more than a system for an oligarchy to make decisions of state would be about as much democracy as the GOP would accept.)
So, you know, what's been happening of late isn't so disappointing.BTW, anyone who doesn't think a SCOTUS to the right of the one that decided Shelby County isn't going to sign off on that independent state legislature thing...
And by boring old rant about the Pulitzers: They're not just rigged but double rigged. The award o one means little in any way good so, you know, Noonan got one. Feh.
You really need a bigger readership, Roy, even if only to shine a laser beam on operatives like Noonan. Anyway, to add to your links, the one below is another terrific if incredibly depressing article from Jane Meyer that shows how voting itself is fast becoming moot, even if you get past all the obstacles to do so. David Pepper, the author of the book mentioned, "The Laboratories of Autocracy," is quoted extensively so [TRIGGER WARNING] don't read the book or the article unless you like being suicidal. It's a fine mess we're in.
As the designated mule for our precinct I have to practice depositing a bunch of phony ballots at the local dropbox. It's getting tougher with all the D'Souza-drones watching.
I think this is a real challenge for any voter-education effort: Informing people about the barriers the Republicans have erected to impede voting can inadvertently persuade them that voting's a huge pain in the ass and not worth all the trouble. Like with Wisconsin's vote ID law, you've got to go through all the requirements (University of Wisconsin ID won't work, students have to ask for a separate "voting" ID instead) without being TOO discouraging.
About that voter ID law, I remember Wisco Republicans being so sure this would deliver all the elections to them, since then the Dems have won all statewide offices and Biden won the state in 2020. Voter suppression is half the story, the other half is good people working to overcome the barriers. It's always a close call which side will win, but we're not defenseless.
Lets tap the breaks a couple times before rushing to judgement. The WSJ editorial page has one demographic. Perhaps The Divine Ms. N. wants her audience of lockstep conservatives to step back for a moment and rethink their prejudices. She's being coy about it. (That's her trademark. She read somewhere, that's how ladies make a point.) Remember how we were always told to just give Rush Limbaugh's show a try? Maybe Peggs is hinting for her audience to look into some alternate sources of discourse about this grand old republic. She's the ally we never thought we had, working from within the very heart of the system to bring it down.
Speaking of voting, WaPo has a Ruth Marcus piece "The Tragedy of Chief Justice Roberts." Oh, cry, cry if it makes you feel better, set it all down in a tear-stained letter, you anti-democracy life-long opponent of the common man! He's lost control of the Court he steered into voter suppression! Whatever will he do? (More speeches about how "legitimate" the Court is, dontcha know.) Marcus, in a very long piece that is 15 years too late, admits that Roberts, whatever restraints he might want to apply to his run-away fascist Court now, played fast and loose with the rules and gave us Dark Money Elections and stripped down voting rights (not to mention abandoning women to the dictates of Republican legislators whose knowledge of human biology is somewhere south of an E.coli's). But "tragedy"? Oh, "that this too too mortal flesh would melt" or "is this a dagger I see before me?" No, more, "I coulda been a contender except now I'll go down as the leader of the worst Supreme Court since Dred Scott." Not tragedy, not even farce. Pathos, Ms. Marcus, pure pathos.
Peggy is more and more like the late Queen Margaret, a holy relic of a distant Era whose only connection to the present is that she exists. She's a great example of how the human mind can simply block unacceptable reality (if you have enough money to insulate yourself from the offensive parts). She has a column simply because she is in The Club, but it is a window into the fading WASP world that used to run the Republican Party. It's like listening to Blanche DuBois talk about walking the precinct. If you asked her, she'd bob and weave like the pro she was, but she'd eventually admit that invalidating elections that Republicans lose is a necessary evil to save The Republic from the chaos of Democracy. This is what the Republican Party has been since Teapot Dome, they're just getting stupider about it.
Here in Kansas, they made the mistake of passing no-excuse-needed absentee voting. I guess they figured there aren't enough people on the left here to matter. All you need to vote absentee is the desire.
So much as I love standing in line with a bunch of unwashed yokels - which I freely admit discouraged me more than once from exercising my franchise - I do it all online/by mail these days. I've already voted AND checked the website to verify my ballot was accepted.
I do wish a few of those unofficial GOP voter checkers would come visit me, though. Do not doubt for a minute that I'll turn the hose on them.
On the one hand, go fuck yourself, Pegs - the GOP has done everything in its power to alienate the voters from the government, acting less as if it was "by, for and of the people", and more like the White House is an alien mothership landed to impose their strange evil will on the free people of America. Then there's the conservative assault on education and critical thinking, useful in duping rubes that the splashing they feel is just gentle rain from above, but kinda a drawback in a democracy. When you actively keep the electorate from BEING "thoughtful and informed", fed instead on lies and "optics", you (to paraphrase Lenny Bruce) cripple democracy then denounce it for limping.
On the other hand, if the American people are really so willfully blind that they'll vote for toxic mango swamp debris like Walker, Oz, Mastriano, Lake, and, locally, Zeldin, my misanthropy cuts in and says we pretty much deserve what we get. Not as if we weren't warned.
So Krazy Aunt Pegs thinks voters who aren't sufficiently informed should show "humility" and, for the sake of the nation, not vote? Cool. Has she seen the citizenry who turn out for Trump rallies? Is she familiar with Lauren Boebert and M.T. Greene? Tell ya what, Peg. We'll have our dummies sit this one out, and you have yours. Sound good?
I am reminded of a high school teacher from France who tried to explain the Vichy government to us. She was old enough to have adult memories of it, and she discussed the collaborators with wincing and a sorrow that I did not fathom at 15. But Petain, she really wanted to forgive Petain. He was so ancient, she stressed, too old to be fully aware of the world, easy to dupe, and he must have thought if he went along with the Nazis he could mitigate the very worst of it all, make things easier on France. I thought of that teacher here, of Noonan strategizing Jesus, this country is about to take a billy club to the skull from my team -- unless I step out in front and point the victims to an offramp. Simply don't participate, Democrats! That way you can avoid so much riotous conflict! That's how deep Team-R loyalty goes I guess. There's no way to change sides if you're Republican, you simply choose between being the Fascist who says Please Let Us Have All the Power and the Fascist who's excited to swing the club when Please doesn't work. And she'll comfort herself she tried. She really tried.
Another thought I had was of the crisis of student IDs not being accepted to vote in my college town in the early 90s. The law said they counted, but us kids all wanted the Green, if I recall, so poll workers loyal to the incumbent mayor (a tinpot dictator) were checking our driver's licenses, and if they didn't match, sending us to court, where a judge had to look at a tuition bill (who had one handy??) and then individually certify us and send us back. A surprise 4-hour process, minimum. I'm sure things have changed since then, it was a different era, etc etc PUNCHLINE: I just looked up the town, and our early 90s mayor is STILL the fucking mayor SO MAYBE NOT.
Glad you were here to interpret this. Yes, in case you are just too wrapped up in trivial matters of trying to make your nickel stretch, don't stress further about voting, really. Others will make the choices for you, and then you won't have to worry about making ends meet. Just surrender to a life of wage enslavement and consumer subservience. Well, enjoy!
The fact that this demented old fool has a forum on the WSJ is another QED for the complete bankruptcy of the reactionary/fascist movement.
strange to think that in the great shipwreck that is the Republican Party, there are many of a certain narrow demographic who will flounder toward that leaky straw named Noonan. win one for the gipper!
The funniest thing, if I'm catching Noonan's drift -- and drift is the right word because it's almost like the vagueness itself is the point -- she seems to believe she's addressing young voters. Who are uninformed. But who are reading an opinion piece. In the Wall Street Journal. I mean, if that's her target audience, the only way a young person is going to see this is if she thrusts it into the hands of the DoorDash guy delivering her takeout, and insists he read it if he wants a tip.
Ribbon candy is such a nice touch.
I'm one of those people that the more you tell them that they can't do something the more they're going to want to do it. As you can imagine, follow up on this has worked out with various degrees of success. A lot of it depends on who is trying to convince me. If it's your typical Republican in a leadership role my instinctive response to anything they say would be " Ha Ha no fuck you!"
Turn out from the kids has been up the last couple of cycles and evidently so far this year initial response from them has been pretty good. " Pretty sure there's a lot of " Ha Ha no fuck you" connected to that. A couple years ago my daughter said something like" Anybody too cool to vote is just an asshole."
I can't imagine JD Vance appealing to anybody under 40 years old.Bump that up to 68 with Noonan .
I hate it that I get the urge too shove Nooners down some steps.
As well demonstrated, I'm a defective human being. And due to my defects, I've been smelling the GOP's lets ambivalence about democracy* since the 80s. They just couldn't fully hide their love of right wing authoritarians -- what used to be called dictators. (I suppose the Founding Fathers' OG democracy which was little more than a system for an oligarchy to make decisions of state would be about as much democracy as the GOP would accept.)
So, you know, what's been happening of late isn't so disappointing.BTW, anyone who doesn't think a SCOTUS to the right of the one that decided Shelby County isn't going to sign off on that independent state legislature thing...
And by boring old rant about the Pulitzers: They're not just rigged but double rigged. The award o one means little in any way good so, you know, Noonan got one. Feh.
You really need a bigger readership, Roy, even if only to shine a laser beam on operatives like Noonan. Anyway, to add to your links, the one below is another terrific if incredibly depressing article from Jane Meyer that shows how voting itself is fast becoming moot, even if you get past all the obstacles to do so. David Pepper, the author of the book mentioned, "The Laboratories of Autocracy," is quoted extensively so [TRIGGER WARNING] don't read the book or the article unless you like being suicidal. It's a fine mess we're in.
As the designated mule for our precinct I have to practice depositing a bunch of phony ballots at the local dropbox. It's getting tougher with all the D'Souza-drones watching.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/state-legislatures-are-torching-democracy
I think this is a real challenge for any voter-education effort: Informing people about the barriers the Republicans have erected to impede voting can inadvertently persuade them that voting's a huge pain in the ass and not worth all the trouble. Like with Wisconsin's vote ID law, you've got to go through all the requirements (University of Wisconsin ID won't work, students have to ask for a separate "voting" ID instead) without being TOO discouraging.
About that voter ID law, I remember Wisco Republicans being so sure this would deliver all the elections to them, since then the Dems have won all statewide offices and Biden won the state in 2020. Voter suppression is half the story, the other half is good people working to overcome the barriers. It's always a close call which side will win, but we're not defenseless.
Lets tap the breaks a couple times before rushing to judgement. The WSJ editorial page has one demographic. Perhaps The Divine Ms. N. wants her audience of lockstep conservatives to step back for a moment and rethink their prejudices. She's being coy about it. (That's her trademark. She read somewhere, that's how ladies make a point.) Remember how we were always told to just give Rush Limbaugh's show a try? Maybe Peggs is hinting for her audience to look into some alternate sources of discourse about this grand old republic. She's the ally we never thought we had, working from within the very heart of the system to bring it down.
Speaking of voting, WaPo has a Ruth Marcus piece "The Tragedy of Chief Justice Roberts." Oh, cry, cry if it makes you feel better, set it all down in a tear-stained letter, you anti-democracy life-long opponent of the common man! He's lost control of the Court he steered into voter suppression! Whatever will he do? (More speeches about how "legitimate" the Court is, dontcha know.) Marcus, in a very long piece that is 15 years too late, admits that Roberts, whatever restraints he might want to apply to his run-away fascist Court now, played fast and loose with the rules and gave us Dark Money Elections and stripped down voting rights (not to mention abandoning women to the dictates of Republican legislators whose knowledge of human biology is somewhere south of an E.coli's). But "tragedy"? Oh, "that this too too mortal flesh would melt" or "is this a dagger I see before me?" No, more, "I coulda been a contender except now I'll go down as the leader of the worst Supreme Court since Dred Scott." Not tragedy, not even farce. Pathos, Ms. Marcus, pure pathos.
"Maybe your false friends offer you drugs to vote. Just say no!"
Not me! I tricked 'em! I secretly voted early, then assured them that if they proffered all the statins I need I would sit out the election – genius!
Peggy is more and more like the late Queen Margaret, a holy relic of a distant Era whose only connection to the present is that she exists. She's a great example of how the human mind can simply block unacceptable reality (if you have enough money to insulate yourself from the offensive parts). She has a column simply because she is in The Club, but it is a window into the fading WASP world that used to run the Republican Party. It's like listening to Blanche DuBois talk about walking the precinct. If you asked her, she'd bob and weave like the pro she was, but she'd eventually admit that invalidating elections that Republicans lose is a necessary evil to save The Republic from the chaos of Democracy. This is what the Republican Party has been since Teapot Dome, they're just getting stupider about it.
Here in Kansas, they made the mistake of passing no-excuse-needed absentee voting. I guess they figured there aren't enough people on the left here to matter. All you need to vote absentee is the desire.
So much as I love standing in line with a bunch of unwashed yokels - which I freely admit discouraged me more than once from exercising my franchise - I do it all online/by mail these days. I've already voted AND checked the website to verify my ballot was accepted.
I do wish a few of those unofficial GOP voter checkers would come visit me, though. Do not doubt for a minute that I'll turn the hose on them.
On the one hand, go fuck yourself, Pegs - the GOP has done everything in its power to alienate the voters from the government, acting less as if it was "by, for and of the people", and more like the White House is an alien mothership landed to impose their strange evil will on the free people of America. Then there's the conservative assault on education and critical thinking, useful in duping rubes that the splashing they feel is just gentle rain from above, but kinda a drawback in a democracy. When you actively keep the electorate from BEING "thoughtful and informed", fed instead on lies and "optics", you (to paraphrase Lenny Bruce) cripple democracy then denounce it for limping.
On the other hand, if the American people are really so willfully blind that they'll vote for toxic mango swamp debris like Walker, Oz, Mastriano, Lake, and, locally, Zeldin, my misanthropy cuts in and says we pretty much deserve what we get. Not as if we weren't warned.
So Krazy Aunt Pegs thinks voters who aren't sufficiently informed should show "humility" and, for the sake of the nation, not vote? Cool. Has she seen the citizenry who turn out for Trump rallies? Is she familiar with Lauren Boebert and M.T. Greene? Tell ya what, Peg. We'll have our dummies sit this one out, and you have yours. Sound good?
So many thoughts while reading...
I am reminded of a high school teacher from France who tried to explain the Vichy government to us. She was old enough to have adult memories of it, and she discussed the collaborators with wincing and a sorrow that I did not fathom at 15. But Petain, she really wanted to forgive Petain. He was so ancient, she stressed, too old to be fully aware of the world, easy to dupe, and he must have thought if he went along with the Nazis he could mitigate the very worst of it all, make things easier on France. I thought of that teacher here, of Noonan strategizing Jesus, this country is about to take a billy club to the skull from my team -- unless I step out in front and point the victims to an offramp. Simply don't participate, Democrats! That way you can avoid so much riotous conflict! That's how deep Team-R loyalty goes I guess. There's no way to change sides if you're Republican, you simply choose between being the Fascist who says Please Let Us Have All the Power and the Fascist who's excited to swing the club when Please doesn't work. And she'll comfort herself she tried. She really tried.
Another thought I had was of the crisis of student IDs not being accepted to vote in my college town in the early 90s. The law said they counted, but us kids all wanted the Green, if I recall, so poll workers loyal to the incumbent mayor (a tinpot dictator) were checking our driver's licenses, and if they didn't match, sending us to court, where a judge had to look at a tuition bill (who had one handy??) and then individually certify us and send us back. A surprise 4-hour process, minimum. I'm sure things have changed since then, it was a different era, etc etc PUNCHLINE: I just looked up the town, and our early 90s mayor is STILL the fucking mayor SO MAYBE NOT.
Glad you were here to interpret this. Yes, in case you are just too wrapped up in trivial matters of trying to make your nickel stretch, don't stress further about voting, really. Others will make the choices for you, and then you won't have to worry about making ends meet. Just surrender to a life of wage enslavement and consumer subservience. Well, enjoy!