Stickybuffalo.com

As long as I’m asking rhetorical questions and making futile pleas, I’d like to add one more. Please stop doing shit like this:

Jeff Darcy phones it in (like much of the media)

Seriously, I know it’s hopeless to call for anything else but that doesn’t change the fact that this is fucking bullshit.

“Congress” is not the cause of America’s debt-ceiling time bomb. Republicans in Congress are.

In its official editorial on debt politics, The Economist does everything it can to pick at Democrats on this issue, and then having made those token efforts acknowledges that “…Mr Obama and his party seem a model of fiscal statesmanship compared with their Republican opponents.” Their generally conservative-leaning Lexington columnist goes further, calling this whole farce

a problem entirely of the Republicans’ own making. The reason for this crisis is that instead of just raising the debt ceiling in the customary way so that the government can pay the bills Congress has already run up, the Republicans decided to point a pistol at the American economy and threaten to pull the trigger if they did not get the spending cuts they wanted.

Seriously, what the fuck are the Democrats supposed to do, here? (more…)

Evidence continues to mount that post-census redistricting will not be the armageddon which some of us thought it would be, for all that the new map still looks discouraging.

God fucking dammit, is it or is it not about high time someone fucking messed with Texas already?

So, that’s something of a relief. Of course, redistricting is still a complicated mess, and even long-serving, historically “safe” members of congress can find themselves no longer to voters’ tastes after things shake out; just ask Jim Leach.

My own congressman, the unashamedly-liberal Dennis Kucinich, has apparently given thought to this situation and decided to explore “taking his talents” elsewhere, much like another controversial Clevelander who bailed out on the Forest City and, though much-criticised for the move, now seems to be thriving.

Thus far, though, Dennis seems to be meeting with much less enthusiasm from prospective new “fanbases” than LeBron James did. (more…)

What a weird, weird week this was. I think it’s worth writing a summary of the bizarre incidents just for a record.

In Libya, the ongoing “unrest” in the Arab world has come close to making a believer out of me. Colonel Kadaffy is apparently still in power in part of the country, but by no means all (unfortunately he still controls plenty of weapons for attacking the Libyan people).

It is, in any event, debatable how in control the man is of his own faculties, given his increasingly-bizarre rantings. Early in the week he seemed to be taking a page from John Boehner by dismissing large protests as the work of “agents” and therefore not representing any genuine expression of popular discontent. By the end of the week, however, he was forging ahead with conspiracy theories involving bin Laden slipping drugs to the unwary.

And this really should have been quite enough surreality for one week, by itself, but reactionaries here in America struggled mightily to keep pace. (more…)