I assume everyone is watching Massachusetts as anxiously as I am?
I’m somewhat desperately — is “desperately” too strong? Maybe. But maybe not — hoping that Martha Coakley wins the election today, because although the Democrats certainly can pass health care reform no matter who wins today, they might not if Scott Brown wins.
But if Scott Brown wins — as seems likely — I can see a silver lining. I don’t think a far-right tea-bagger type is likely to win a regular election in Massachusetts, so if Brown wins, he’s almost certainly a one-termer. In contrast, Martha Coakley — who has been exactly the sort of prosecutor I loathe, the sort who doesn’t give a damn about keeping innocent people in prison as long as her conviction record looks good — would probably be in the Senate until the day she dies.
(Related: The reason the Dems are in such deep shit today is mostly the economy and the usual mid-term problems. “To reinforce this point, try and list the times when the economy was in a downturn, but approval of the governing party was in an upswing. Outside of post-election honeymoons and the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, you simply are not going to find any examples. At all.”)
Yep, I’m watching close for sure. I even called my daughter (who lives near Boston) and asked her how she was going to vote. She said that she wasn’t sure, that she hadn’t researched the issues enough. We had about a 20-minute conversation. I didn’t tell her “Vote for Brown”, mind you – that wouldn’t work. But as we kicked the healthcare issue around she appeared quite wary of a vast increase in government control. One remark she made was “O.K., let’s say I trust Obama – not that I necessarily do, but just suppose that I do. What happens if someone like George Bush gets elected the next time around?” From that and other remarks I have hope she’ll do the right thing. She’s a smart young woman (B.S. in EE).
She also mentioned where AG Coakley said that she thought that Schilling was a Yankee fan. She’s a huge Red Sox fan and makes a few games each year. That remark and the one about disparaging campaigning outside of Fenway Park got huge coverage in the Boston/Massachusetts media. The Red Sox are part of the culture in Massachusetts far more than almost any other sports team in any other area in the U.S. The gaffes depict her as astonishingly out of touch and contemptous of the ordinary person. But the bottom line is that this election is seen locally as a referendum on health care in particular and Pres. Obama’s policies in general.
If State Sen. Scott Brown wins the Administration will have to get the Senate bill pushed through the House. That may not be easy. There’s a lot of stuff in there that a number of Democrats won’t want to vote for, especially when they consider that OMG A Republican Won In Massachusetts. The House bill only passed by the slimmest of margins.
I don’t think a far-right tea-bagger type is likely to win a regular election in Massachusetts,
Neither do I. In fact, I don’t think such a person could win a special election, either. Fortunately there’s no such candidate in the field.
BTW – you have often stated that groups of people should be called what they want to be called, and that deliberately disparaging and/or offensive names should not be used. You even called me on the carpet once when we were discussing the butterfly ballot issue that came up during the Bush-Gore campaign and I referred to the state of “Floriduh”.
“Tea-bagger”, as you may recall from a thread quite some time ago on this blog, is a derogatory term deliberately chosen because of it’s double-entrende reference to a certain disgusting sexual practice. “Tea Party member” or “Tea Partier” is the term the group itself uses, and it finds “tea-bagger” quite offensive. I call on you to practice what you preach.
Indeed. I did a little research and found exit polls from the 2008 election. Apparently only 9% of the electorate at that time found health care to be an issue influencing their vote. The economy was about 53% and the war was about 20% (IIRC on that one …). I’ve also seen polls that indicate that anywhere from 75% to 85% of people are satisfied with their health care.
I would say that the reason the Democrats are in such deep shit today is because they are not addressing the main concerns of the electorate and are spending too much time fixing what the vast majority doesn’t think is broken. I think the Democratic party leadership has made the mistake of thinking that people voted for Pres. Obama because they agreed with the Democratic Party agenda, instead of understanding that he was elected because he was a) not George Bush (i.e., young and articulate), b) the economy went in the dumper a couple of weeks after the Republican Convention (before that it was close to a 50-50 split in the polls), and c) he was black and it was a chance to make history. “He’s going to fix healthcare” was not on the list.
Remember “It’s the economy, stupid”? Still true, still true.
Ted Kennedy was tolerated and re-elected in Massachusetts because his name was Kennedy, there was some sympathy for his personal issues given that he’d had all 3 of his brothers murdered, and because he’d garnered through seniority and otherwise a lot of clout in Washington that the Commonwealth had benefited from. Martha Coakley has none of these attributes, but she campaigned like she did. Major, major miscalculation. I’m trying to figure out how the Mass. Democratic party thought she was their best candidate. All I can think of is that they didn’t take into account her attributes as a candidate at all. They simply assumed she’d be elected and decided to pick someone they figured would be compliant to the party’s legislative agenda.
The last time that Massachusetts elected a Republican Senator I voted for him. That would be Ed Brooke, the first black senator since the Reconstruction era. It was 1972, I was just shy of my 20th birthday and lived in Boston. But even though it’s been all Democrats since then (he lost in 1978 because he’d hidden assets from his wife during their divorce proceedings and it came out after 1972) the Commonwealth has elected it’s share of Republican Governors. The Republican party has had a lot of problems in Massachusetts but it’s never been dead.
given that he’d had all 3 of his brothers murdered
This could perhaps be phrased better. I didn’t think much of Mr. Kennedy but I’m pretty sure he didn’t initiate the murders of his siblings.
I can’t see how Amp can support Coakley, someone so politically corrupt that she sat quiet while the Amiraults rotted in jail, long after the scale of that miscarriage of justice had become evident.
I assume the support is with both nostrils held firmly shut. Coakley might be a terrible Democrat, but she’s still a Democrat and will still toe the line on important issues in the Senate. While Brown positions himself as a Republican outsider to court the moderate vote in Mass., he still follows his own party line on national health-care reform, despite supporting similar reforms in Mass.
edit: as for the Tea-Bagger thing, I think the term is used because it was popularized by the tea-partiers themselves. Besides that, this isn’t wikipedia, no need for NPOV. I don’t think Amp has any problem using derogatory terms for political ideologies, just race/sexual/social classes.
Re: Tea-bagger. If it bothers you personally, Ron, then I’ll stop using the term. SiF is right, I don’t see an equivalency there; but as a matter of being polite, I don’t mind dropping the term.
Robert, I have to correct you. Coakley was a lot worse than someone who “sat quiet”; she actively worked to keep innocent people in jail. But as much as I hate her — and I really, really find her the most loathsome form of scum — that’s an emotional reaction. Logically, what matters most is how she’ll vote, not who she is.
I believe that passing health care reform will save tens of thousands of lives every year; I also believe that that status quo will lead to the country (not just the government) being bankrupted. That’s the higher priority here. Substantial policy outcomes matter more to me than a candidate’s particular histories.
Ron, when you suggest that Scott Brown is no “teabagger,” it’s not clear to me what your meaning is. Do you mean:
1) He is no “tea-bagger,” that is, you’re saying that regardless of Brown’s policy positions, because that term is invalid he cannot be a “tea-bagger”?
Or do you mean:
2) He is no “tea partier,” that is, he doesn’t share the policy views generally held by tea partiers?
i haven’t seen anyone miss a gimmie like this since bill buckner. given that it could torpedo HCR and transform the obama presidency, its really a spectacular miss. unbelievable even.
So Hitler runs as a Democrat and promises to vote for HCR, versus Gandhi the Republican, and you gotta vote Adolf? I’m pretty partisan myself but I think I’d have a hard time pulling the lever for Brown if the biographies are reversed. And actively working to keep an innocent person in jail is about the most monstrous use of state power I can think of; is it your opinion that the Democratic party is such a machine entity that even people as toxic as Coakley will be neutralized by the party’s control over them?
There is no reason that I know of to associate Brown with the Tea Party movement; he has a legislative track record in MA which places him as a socially moderate fiscal conservative.
SiF, the term “tea-baggers” to describe the members of the Tea Party movement was invented by it’s opponents and is resented by it’s supporters (once they found out what it meant …). They find it offensive and did by no means popularize it. See this link. Some local groups did initially call themselves the Tea Bag Party after the initial move to send tea bags to their legislators to protest raising taxes, but that’s as far as that went on their part. They’ve never referred to themselves as “tea baggers”.
Certainly there is broad agreement among Tea Party movement supporters and State Sen. Brown’s positions. But there are a number of differences as well, and he does not count himself a Tea Party member as far as I can see. This link outlines some differences, especially with regards to things like abortion and changing the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions at the federal level. He’s right of center but he’s hardly “far right”. If he plays the next couple of years smart he may well have a long run in that seat.
Manju, give Billy Buck a break. He’s taken enough $hit for that ground ball. His teammates could have done a number of things to make that play moot but didn’t. My God, the man had to move out of Massachusetts because of death threats.
It’s worth noting that there isn’t any question of whether he can be elected in (liberal) Massachusetts; he’s been elected to the House or Senate there every election since 1998. (And in local races since 1992.)
Logically, what matters most is how she’ll vote, not who she is.
Me, I figure that how someone will vote flows quite a bit from who they are. Someone who will emphasize state control over someone’s very life at the expense of justice is the last person I’d trust to vote on anything.
I have no idea who Billy Buck is.
No time to research Brown’s positions today, sorry. I acknowledge that I could be in error about how right-wing he is.
(Just out of curiosity, what’s his position on marriage equality, if you know?)
Robert, certainly there are limits to my logic; I’m not so black-and-white so that I’d vote for Democrat Hitler over Republican Ghandi (not that the Republicans would welcome Ghandi into their party, of coruse). However, Coakley, bad as she is, is no Hitler; and Brown is no Ghandi.
Well, Robert, I must say that Massachusetts is by no means homogenous. Getting elected from a given district and getting elected statewide in Mass. are two different things. Boston and it’s close in suburbs are quite liberal, the immediately contiguous suburbs are moderate/centrist and the outlying suburbs and non-urbanized part of the state are conservative.
Having said that I still think that Brown fits the mood in Massachusetts a lot more than the Democratic Party or the Administration want to believe.
Good to know that Democrat Hitler will still be looking for work in Amp’s world. I regretted the Hitler comparison as soon as I made it, although not enough to go back and remove it.
(Just out of curiosity, what’s his position on marriage equality, if you know?)
Same as Barack Obama’s. So he’s either a sensible centrist doing what he can, or a hate-filled gay-killing bigot, depending on whether you know he’s a Republican or not. :)
Bill Buckner was a baseball player who played for the Boston Red Sox near the end of his long and close-but-not-quite-Hall-of-Fame career. He still had a good bat, but by this time he no longer had the legs or arm for outfield play and was at 1st base (a pretty c0mmon transition for sluggers towards the end of their career). He was playing 1st base for them in 1986 when they went to the World Series for the 3rd time since World War II. At the time they had not won in 68 years but had come achingly close.
The Red Sox were finally going to do it. They were one out away from winning the World Series. The Mets hit a routine ground ball to Bill Buckner. He bent down – and let it go through his legs. E3. Runs scored, the Red Sox lost the game and lost the Series. Understand that I watched that live on TV. Red Sox fans were shattered. He was quite unfairly blamed by many unthinking fans for having lost the World Series for the Red Sox. He was never able to live it down and quite literally had to move out of Boston. This is all history that any Red Sox fan can quote you from memory – in fact, I would be judged deficient among a fan gathering because I cannot cite the ball/strike count and who hit the ball and who scored. When the Red Sox did win the World Series 18 years later in 2004 commentators actually called him up and asked him if he now thought the weight of losing the World Series was lifted off of his shoulders. Apparently he gave them an appropriately obscene reply. Good for him.
Well, Mass. State AG Martha Coakley is just finishing up her concession speech. I’ve never watched Keith Olbermann before in my life. But I was sent a video link showing him describing now Senator-elect Scott Brown in rather highly emotionally derogatory terms. So this seems like a good night to check him out. AP is projecting a Scott win with 52% to 47% and 97% of the vote in (a little more than 2.1 million votes).
Mr. Olbermann seems to be in shock.
A Mr. Chris Matthews noted that when Ted Kennedy won the seat in a special election (to succeed his brother who had been electd to the Presidency) he was seated the day after the election.
Well, the results are in, and, to nobody’s surprise, a lizard won.
Well, this was worth tuning in for. Keith is just about to start foaming at the mouth. Irresponsible, homophobic, racist, sexist, … and then I lost track. He announced before the commerical that he was going to apologize for his remarks on that video segment that someone sent me. It turns out that he was apologizing for having left out “sexist”.
He also seems to think that Sen.-elect Brown is highly unqualified for the Senate separate from the above issues but didn’t explain it. Is this standard for him? Is he always like this? I may have to start watching this guy.
RonF: Nightline just showed the Buckner error. I feel your pain.
What’s up with Keith Olbermann? I mean, he’s obviously got a point of view. But is there any pretense that he’s an objective observer/reporter?
Manju: in what context?
Yeah, he always like that. “homophobic, racist, sexist, ex-nude model, teabagger supporter of violence against women,”; was the full quote I believe. the use of nude model with teabagger was a nice touch.
About the election. they ended the segment with “the dems let the ball go thru their legs”
Manju: damn. The guy just doesn’t deserve that.
Amp:
Apparently he is anti-gay marriage but will at least accept (I can’t find a direct quote to see to what degree) civil unions. He was reported to have voted to put the question of the Massachusetts Supreme Court to ballot with the citizens. The failure of that vote stopped any efforts to overrule the court.
Here’s a Globe story from January 2nd of 2009 on him. Interesting to see what the predictions for his political career were then compared to where he is now. Things have broken for him a bit quicker than the pundits thought.
In researching my answer I found this in Wiki:
I’ve stood in the gym that this event likely took place in. King Philip High School was our big athletic rival. The school was named after the leader of the Native American forces that was the New England natives’ last serious uprising against the English. For all I know he killed a remote ancestor of mine. It had been named that for some time back when I went to school in the area in the late ’60’s, well before more contemporary efforts to acknowledge Native American culture.
Hm. He’s my hometown’s State Senator. Or, was ….
I can undersand why left-liberals think he is a “teabagger” (and Rush Limbaugh is the one who is “mean-spirited”?), homophobe, racist, and sexist, but the other two labels don’t make much sense. He did indeed pose nude, but his genitals can’t be seen. It’s basically like those pictures in Maxim where women are naked and hiding their genitals with their leg or a sheet and covering their breasts with their hands. Why is Olberman so concerned about this? I think he’s insecure about something. Also, I’m sure if a conservative commentator criticized a female politician for posing years ago in the same way Brown did, feminist blogs would be in an uproar over these “sexist” comments.
Finally, the “supporter of violence against women” comment is pretty vague. There are many cases in which supporting violence against women is not a bad thing. For example shooting a female terrorist, guerrilla, or soldier is not immoral. Using force against a female criminal is not necessarily wrong, either. If a woman was attacking me, I would defend myself, most likely using “violence against women” in the process.
@Odoacer: Yes. Rush Limbaugh is the one that’s mean spirited. Unless of course one considers mocking terminally ill people for having a disease and claiming they’re making it up to get attention to be good fun. And less mean spirited than saying nasty things about some random guy’s political views, wrong or not. To any rational person there’s no comparison. To people that want to feel like victims without ever being victims of anything themselves, I suppose claiming they’re morally comparable is useful.
By the way, Brown *is* far right by objective political standards. The Overton window has simply moved so far to the right in this country that anything to the left of Richard Nixon is considered a radical liberal. Coakley would be considered a right winger by objective political standards. (Especially her record on civil liberties.)
I do find it strange that the people on the conservative side that spent the better part of 8 years actively holding people without charges or trials and torturing them or trying to justify doing it are now demanding they be allowed the moral high ground over Coakley. A woman whose own party hated her. (Obviously, and for good reason.)
Its politics. You create a racially divisive atmosphere to excite the left-wing base and even if it doesn’t work you get to complain about the very racist atmosphere you helped create.
I can understand it too but those arguments are often subtle, like why opposing universal healthcare has a racial subtext. I can understand that, opposing globalization and outsourcing has racial subtext, but when one deploys these arguments the way olbmermann does, its sharptonesque. Krugman, wthe great chronicler of the southern strategy who managed to see no evil dung he dem prez primary, wasn’t much better.
since this rhetoric was deployed against a candidate who once descended into the worst nifongish cult-of-victimization ideology, i’d say this result was poetic justice.
sadly, it threatens to bring down a president who genuinely hovers above such tactics, imo. and that’s sickening, especially considering republican extremism a la the tea parties was a political winner for dems if only the left could abandon their McCarthyism and let the real racism present itself. when your enemy is self-destructing, get out of the way, goddammit! don’t join them in their hysteria, olbermann.
Manju:
Oh, no, I wasn’t talking about Olbermann’s flailing about. That was entertaining in a perverse way and Sen.-elect Brown has been in office for a while and is a big boy. No, I was talking about comparing Buckner to the Democratic Party. Buckner didn’t deserve that.
The Democrats were hoist on their own petard on this. From the Boston Globe:
The Democrats did their damndest to control that seat, but it turns out that Sen.-elect Brown was right – it is the people’s seat. And the Democratic Party’s unapologetic manuevers to tie the seat to their party probably contributed to their loss of it.
If I have the time, I’ll find a .jpg of a time-lapsed Pollster.com average of the entire election. I don’t want to sound snippish, but in actuality it was “close to 50-50” for a week or two following the Republican National Convention only because that was reflecting a typical post-Convention bounce. Obama led throughout the summer, and there was no point at which he really trailed. Among candidates who eventually go on to lose the election by a close margin, actually taking the lead during this post-convention bounce is the norm. Kerry did in 2004, and Gore did in 2000. Even Dukakis in ’88. That the polls showed 50/50, before the collapse of Bear-Stearns – and after the RNC, for a period of about a week or two – really does not mean as much as you think it does.
Of course, you could still agree that Obama’s victory was sounder than you’ve so far been implying, and still argue the basic narrative you’re pushing: the country doesn’t really support Obama’s agenda, Obama won only due to personal characteristics, and the vaguely concern trollish “liberals would do better if they weren’t so liberal”.
Without descending into a pointless tug-of-war where I say “the country is really liberal! Look how it answers on surveys on specific issues!” and you say “the country is really conservative! Look how it answer on general political self-identification questionnaires!”, I’ll just say that the general criticism you have of Obama and the Democrats since 2008 – unpopular incumbent, fresh faced opponent with great personal appeal, knocked off the high horse a bit when forced to fight for controversial legislation – actually also applies every president in the history of history.
(In terms of unpopularity, for instance, I think Carter circa ’80 could definitely give Bush a run for his money. Really, most of the time the White House changes parties, the incumbent is very personally unpopular. Bush is not historically unique in any way, Internet memes aside, and his former supporters do not get a free pass by invoking his name. Funny how his name has been used as a one-word defense by both sides of the political divide: the Left circa 2005, the Right circa 2009. Even after everything, I kinda feel sorry for the guy.)
A couple of corrections here. First, the House bill was more liberal than the Senate bill they’re discussing now. But comparatively, that’s the trivial objection. What’s more important is that second, it’s par the course for Pelosi’s House to keep votes in hand so that only the minimum number of votes are used for passing potentially divisive legislation, and Democrats in vulnerable areas don’t have to stick their necks out. Make of that what you will – I don’t think Republicans in vulnerable areas cower to such as extent – but that five-vote margin is misleading. Immediately after passage in the House, I heard conservatives saying that HCR didn’t have a shot of passing in the Senate, because the Senate is more conservative (in both sense of the word) than the House while also featuring the filibuster. Every part of that is true, except for the main point, as it went on to pass in the Senate by 20 votes. If Pelosi really needed to, she could likely easily have at least matched this margin.
Of course, that was then. I’m not really disagreeing with your main point here, by the way. I agree that the prospects of HCR not passing is appearing greater now since at any point since early December, and even Pelosi’s considerable vote whipping abilities will probably face a stronger headwind. The first sentence I generally agree with, just noting that your second sentence doesn’t really support the second.
Finally, about the “tea baggers”…
I was under the impression, as was SiF, that the term “teabagger” was invented and used by self-styled Tea Party members themselves, as part of the awkward “conservatives can be cool and edgy too!” cycle that young male right-wingers need to get out of their system now and then. I definitely recall seeing signs calling for representatives to “Tea Bag HRC”, which leaves no doubt in my mind they knew what the term meant.
However, an Internet image does not a representative sample make, and I’ll default to not using the term anymore. I still won’t use the term “Tea Party” (except when I just did a paragraph up), because I think that endorses the idea that the movement is ideologically the descendant of the American Founding Fathers. I’ll agree not to use a term you find insulting, but I won’t do your branding for you.
Any suggestions by anyone for a more neutral term? I think “Tea Movement” sort of gets it, though then we can’t really describe its followers without getting incredibly ungainly with language. (“Tea Movement-ers?” “Tea Movement Conservatives?” Given that “Movement Conservative” is already a political term, the latter sounds like a bad pun or something.)
Pardon me while I completely go off on a tangent but I can’t let this stand…
RonF wrote:
This is so incredibly wrong that I’m stunned that you call yourself a baseball fan.
Bill Buckner did have a long career. He played at least one game in 22 seasons. That is a long time. His career, however, was nowhere close to Hall of Fame worthy. Take a look at this page at Baseball Reference and scroll down to the section entitled “Hall of Fame Statistics”. He isn’t even remotely close to even a likely Hall of Famer and laughably far away from an average Hall of Famer to be considered “close, but not quite.”
I was a big fan of Bill Buckner but I realized (and still do) that, while he was a useful and far better than average player, he was not close to being Hall of Fame worthy.
To continue to correct your objectively false statement, Buckner was not a slugger. The 18 homers he hit in 1986 were a career high. He ended his 22 year career with 174 home runs – an average of just under 8 home runs per season. 8 homers in a season hasn’t been considered to be the output of a slugger since Babe Ruth showed up on the scene.
You also omit the real reason that Buckner’s body could no longer handle the rigors of the outfield. As a young player, Buckner was considered to be a very good outfielder. Unfortunately, he suffered from several ankle injuries from age 26 on. These injuries robbed him of his speed and range making him useless as an outfielder. Buckner, in fact, had not played the outfield on a regular basis since 1977 (with the exception of the Cubs playing him there for 50 games in 1980 for no reason that I can understand).
Buckner garnered 10 votes in his only year on the Hall of Fame ballot. This was 2.1% of total ballots and below the threshold to allow him to remain on the ballot. Rusty Staub (my favorite player of all time) was about equal in value to Buckner and he was able to stay on the ballot for 7 years before falling below the 5% of votes needed to remain on the ballot.
Buckner’s value came from his ability to make contact and his high batting average. He never had much power and he never walked much – the two things that pretty much all sluggers have in common.
Buckner was nowhere close to making the Hall of Fame, he was not a slugger and he was not moved there at the end of his career.
Also:
The ball was hit by Mookie Wilson. I had to look up who scored because my memory failed me. It was the despicable Ray Knight.
A summary of Buckner’s 2004 interview on Boise radio. I can find no reference to an obscenity laden reply in 5 minutes of searching. That’s a shame. I would’ve liked him even more.
Also worth noting: Brown won with a high turnout. I remember in the earliest days of “omg he could actually win” – weeks ago, well under MSM radar – the thinking was that the low turnout would mean that all the angry Republicans came out while all the dispirited Democrats stayed home, and he could squeak it out.
So I think the “he’ll never win again, this is a one-off” meme has some heavy hauling to do.
It’s not just the economy either-Obama has embraced Bush’s foreign policy too: http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1907-critical-mass-dem-agenda-opens-right-wing-doors.html
JThompson, what the help is far right by objective political standards Left and right is subjective, defined by the center. And unless you want to make the scope so broad as to be meaningless, when looking for the center, once could consider the state, New England, and the nation. Brown is not not far right in this country by any means.
You cannot judge Brown by Swedish standards. By those, Obama is solid right, maybe far right.
O.K., Jake, you have me there. I actually did know the word “hitter” was more appropriate than “slugger” but got too lazy to edit it. I’ll take the rap on the “near HoF” comment; It comes from not checking myself and from the fact that I live in Chicago where he had long played for the Cubs and was a very popular player. So I guess my rose-colored glasses and a sense of outrage over his treatment colored my memory. As far as the obscene response goes, what I was told was that his initial response was not recorded and that he calmed down and gave a more civilized response which WAS recorded. But that’s anecdotal.
As far as why the Cubs played him in the outfield that year – who knows? Maybe someone got hurt and they had to make a desperation move. Maybe someone thought he was all better. The Cubs have done a lot of crazy $hit over the years.
Robert: yes, it was a high turnout. In comparison with other recent elections in Massachusetts:
2010 Special Election ~ 2,350,000
2008 Presidential ~ 3,020,000
2006 Gubernatorial ~ 2,244,000
2004 Presidential ~ 2,875,000
2002 Gubernatorial ~ 2,195,000
2000 Presidential ~ 2,700,000
That’s pretty good for a special election – it beat out the 2002 and 2006 Gubernatorial ones where all kinds of other offices both State and local were on the ballot and where in 2006 the Commonwealth ended up electing it’s first black governor. And of course the 2004 election featured the Commonwealth’s then-Junior Senator, and the 2008 election was electric throughout the country. So it’s not like people didn’t show up to vote. He’ll come up for election again in a Presidential year, mind you, 2012.
Slyphhead, regarding
I definitely recall seeing signs calling for representatives to “Tea Bag HRC”, which leaves no doubt in my mind they knew what the term meant.
What the Tea Party movement folks were doing in their early days was to put tea bags in envelopes and mail them to public officials as a reference to the Boston Tea Party. That’s what they meant by “tea bag” as a verb. Believe it or not the vast majority of people in this country were not aware of the term “tea bag” as it is used to refer to a particular gay sex practice. I’d guess the majority of them still aren’t. If they had there’s no way in Hell they’d have used it, and the awareness of it that was forced on these folks by sniggering newscasters caused them to drop it.
Tea bagging isn’t a “gay sex practice.” It’s just a sex practice. If anything, I’d say it’s a 66% straight practice, since it’s done by het couples and male couples, but not by female couples.
But you are inadvertently making an argument for the “people honestly don’t know what the term means” view.
Oh dag. I actually ended up watching a number of episodes of that show – my daughter was in high school and her friends would come over to our house to watch it – but I apparently missed that one.
@RonF – every person under the age of 30 knew what the verb “tea bag” means. Besides the SATC reference, it’s pretty much the standard line for jokes about frat-boy pranks on a person (of either gender) who is passed out in their company (at least jokes that don’t go straight to penetrative-rape-humour).
Most of the self-identifying tea-partiers I saw using it as a verb were younger folks going for the obvious double-entendre.
Really, when people call the tea-partiers “tea-baggers”, I don’t think it’s a homoerotic slur, but more laughing at the fact that they took on this label for themselves.
Probably the biggest reason the term came about was this kid:
http://rsiasoco.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/2009-03-18-tea_bag_dems.jpg
Who damned well knew what they meant.
Oh crap.
SiF, I’d differ with you on the “Everybody under the age of 30 …” comment. That seems to be an assertion you’d have a hard time proving, and I’m not going to accept it as obvious. I’d also suggest that despite the .jpg you linked to pictures of Tea Party rallies indicate that the under 30 demographic is not exactly a dominant fraction of the Tea Party movement. Again, I bet it’s difficult for you to support that that particular picture was the genesis for the term. Keith Olbermann cited some Fox News commentator during his jeremiad last Tuesday night (apparently he’s been getting a lot of mail).
Interesting that the kid had “freerepublic.com” on his sign. I check that site out regularly and they’re hopping made about the term. Given that and the fact that he apparently fits the “frat boy” demographic I suspect that one of his objectives was to pull their chain, so to speak.
Doug S. – I agree. Strongly. I don’t understand how corporations became inheritors of First Amendment rights.
Via the appointments of Alito and Roberts. Money is political power. Money defeated the threat to its political power.
Regarding Keith Olbermann (sp?), I more or less agree. He has only one setting — over the top outrage — and while that’s great on the occasions when over the top is called for, it’s a bit much at other times.
Full Episodes
That said, I do think there might be better justification for calling Brown sexist than what’s referred to in that video; Brown once sponsored “an amendment to a 2005 bill on emergency contraception that would have let emergency room doctors or nurses turn away rape victims if they had religious objections to providing emergency contraception.” Brown said that was okay, because the rape victims could just get a referral — because we all know that what’s really good for rape victims is having to shop around for medical care for EMERGENCY contraception.
Damn that was funny. What was that with all the changes of eyewear, though? Is that something that Olbermann does?
On the substantive matter; well, on the one hand you have a patient’s right to immediate medical treatment on demand and on the other hand you have a right to freely practice your religion. One is guaranteed in the Constitution. The other isn’t.
Jake, I’m no lawyer but it’s been my understanding that corporations have been treated like individuals for quite some time.
Ron, suppose that a highly religious Bendikan monk, who worked at the DMV as a photographer, said that he couldn’t take driver license photos of women whose hair was uncovered, because he sincerely believes that’s against his religion. Would you say that the issue here is his Constitutional right to freely practice his religion? Would you say it’s unconstitutional to fire him?
The right to freely practice religion isn’t at issue here. At all. The only question was the right of people who refuse to do their job to not face any consequences — so long as they’re a Christian refusing to help a rape victim, that is. No one else’s religious beliefs ever get that kind of legal status, and no one (least of all Christians) suggest that they should.
And as I recall (I’ve barely ever seen the show), Keith O. does sometime dramatically remove and later put back on his glasses. But I could be wrong.
So your questioning statement at comment # 41 was rhetorical? That really wasn’t clear.
It’s my understanding that corporations have been treated like individuals for quite some time. I don’t know why, however, and I’m curious to understand the reasoning.
Benedictine, BTW. And a monk wouldn’t be a photographer at the DMV and they really wouldn’t give a shit what a woman was wearing or not wearing on their hair unless they were in church, and that’s not where the DMV takes it’s photographs. They might not even care if the woman was in church. Monks are a lot cooler than you think.
So, let’s take a real world example that’s actually happened. Some Muslims working as cashiers refuse to handle pork. They won’t touch it, which makes it hard for, say, me to go in there and buy some bacon and ribs. Some won’t even total the order up, while others just won’t touch it. That’s being handled by the chain, Target, by either providing the cashier with gloves or transferring them within the store to other jobs. That seems a reasonable accomodation to me, but I do think the store would be justified in telling them to either do their job or get fired.
Now, if you have a doctor or pharmacist who won’t prescribe/dispense emergency contraception to a patient, then I take the same view. The hospital can have a non-objecting doctor/pharmacist get involved, either on-site (if they have one) or via referral. They’d be justified, in my opinion, in firing the medical personnel, but if they choose to do something else that’s their perogative. That’s between the doctor or pharmacist and the hospital.
But I don’t have a right to force Target to fire that cashier. Nor do I have a right to force the hospital to fire that doctor or pharmacist, nor does the State have a right to cancel or restrict that person’s right to practice their profession.