CPAC

I have been reading and watching some of the news coming out of this year's wingnut conference known as CPAC with much enjoyment. TPM has a nice slideshow that gives you just a taste of the craziness. These bumperstickers show just what I have said time and time again, Republicans promote and prey on stupid. I'm not even sure what the 'Every Disaster is a Change' one means. This one has me a bit baffled as well. There is a National Organization for Marriage? Something like that might actually be pretty cool. I would love to see a group offer couples access to free family counseling. However, NOM seems to be all about fighting the evil gays that want to get married. I find it to be some great entertainment that most conservatives seem to think the threat to marriage isn't the high divorce rates, but rather other people wanting to get married.

What really gets me is some of the crazy shit that is said.

“This is probably too strong,” said Doug Haney, the city attorney in Carmel, Ind. and a Republican precinct committeeman, “but Hitler also gave great speeches.”

And it wasn't just nobody precinct committeemen saying crazy shit, but national figures as well.

“The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be dead,” said Huckabee, “but a Union of American Socialist Republics is being born.” Democrats, according to Huckabee, were packing 40 years of pet projects like “health care rationing” into spending bills. “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”

It really amazes me that Republicans can actually get away with saying shit like that. The Democrats certainly have their share of crazies, but more often than not they get pushed to the fringe of the party, not embraced by its base Kucinich, Dennis.

John Cole Does It Better

I mentioned the Republican party preying on the stupidity of the public a couple of posts down when it came to volcano monitoring. John Cole does a better job of pointing out how stupid Jindal's attack was than I did.

It seems to me that the latter, making sure volcanoes do not blow up on your citizenry, would be something that even Ron Paul would think is a government job.

Random Thought

Perhaps it is just me getting old, grumpy and out of touch, but I find the whole Twitter revolution taking the nation by storm to be pretty god damned stupid.

Jindal

I'm always impressed at how the Republican party preys on stupidity. There are a number of examples, climate change is a farce, tax cuts can fix everything, blah blah blah. Last night in a speech that even conservatives thought was pretty awful, Jindal attacked stimulus money going to volcano monitoring.

Now if you weren't familiar with the program or with it's history you might join Jindal's outrage over this program. I'll let Nate Silver clear things up.

The USGS and PHIVOLCS estimate that their forecasts saved at least 5,000 lives
and perhaps as many as 20,000.

And

In addition to the many lives saved, property worth hundreds of millions of
dollars was protected from damage or destruction in the eruption. When aircraft
and other equipment at the U.S. bases were flown to safe areas or covered,
losses of at least $200 to 275 million were averted. Philippine and other
commercial airlines prevented at least another $50 to 100 million in damage to
aircraft by taking similar actions.

Overnight Music

Oren Lavie - Her Morning Elegance


I'm posting this more for the video than the song, although I dig the song as well. The video though, makes me wish that there was a channel on the teevee that played music with an emphasis on their videos. A good name for such a channel would be Music Television or something like that.

The Wrestler

I hated this movie. Other than giving Mickey Rourke a pass back into Hollywood I just could find any purpose to the film. I get that it was a story about the life of a broken down man, but other than that what? Maybe my feelings come from too many film classes in college, but I doubt very seriously that that was all that the writer and director of The Wrestler wanted to do.

I thought Rourke did a good job, but I thought the role was really rather limiting. There wasn't much depth to the character and when you rely, as The Wrestler did, on an actor to move the film forward I just feel that you have to have something more than 'hey look at the broken down old man.'

I thought Marisa Tomei's role was probably even weaker. Did the awards ceremony last night the presenter (can't remember who) talked about how strong of a character she was, showed there was no shame in being a stripper, blah blah blah. That sounded like an interesting role to watch, but it certainly wasn't a part of The Wrestler. An actor can only do so much and the writer of The Wrestler didn't give her much to do. Frankly, I thought Tomei was little more than a prop in the film.

If the film was just supposed to be about a broken down old man, it succeeded. Similar movies have been made before. Leaving Las Vegas is a perfect example. The difference between the two was that there was depth to the Cage's character. We got to see why he was broken and we got to see why his life might be better if he pulled out of his tailspin. With The Wrestler it was simply, hey look this guy has a shitty life and cue the credits.

Who cares about voter registration rights?

Apparently not conservatives.

KELLY: He said they [the department] has a special responsibility in addressing racial ills. That -- that strikes fear down the spines of many conservatives in this country, because they don't want the Justice Department taking us back to the day when they get heavily involved in things like affirmative action, and things like voter registration rights. [...]

If any conservative wonders why the GOP has such trouble connecting with and winning the votes of minorities they only need to look at dumb ass comments like the above. I remember when John McCain was supposed to do super awesome with the Latino vote because he supported the immigration bill that came through the pipes before the primary took off. Of course in order to win the primary McCain had to say on multiple occasions that he would no longer support such a bill. The media seemed to forget all about that, but I doubt the Latino population did. God and Guns isn't going to win minority votes for the GOP, they are actually going to have to do some work for them. Oh and it probably will have to be something more than just tax cuts.