Scozzafavaed in NY23

That’s it? An hour? That’s all we get back?

Fuckers. They took more than that from us last spring, you know they did.

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You’ve no doubt heard by now that the ass-biting purists on the right have hounded Dede Scozzafava out of the NY23 race. (video)

Frank Rich explains:

Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman doesn’t even live in the district. When he appeared before the editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days ago, he “showed no grasp” of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman complained that he should have received the questions in advance — blissfully unaware that they had been asked by the paper in an editorial on the morning of his visit.

Last week it turned out that Hoffman’s prime attribute to the radical right — as a take-no-prisoners fiscal conservative — was bogus. In fact he’s on the finance committee of a hospital that happily helped itself to a $479,000 federal earmark. Then again, without the federal government largess that the tea party crowd so deplores, New York’s 23rd would be a Siberia of joblessness. The biggest local employer is the pork-dependent military base, Fort Drum.

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure.

Purity is for losers and losers are for party purity.

TBogg, plus winning all the “big” fights.

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Birch Bayh is a winner.

Fucker. But you can’t call the women faculty at DePaul winners. Judas priests, hell no.

Etc.:

Dick Cheney’s taxpayer funded lawyer

Sheriff Joe Arpaio being investigated by FBI

Head coal lobbyist looking at perjury charges?

Mary Beth Buchanan stepping down to run for Congress

Beck bends time and space to concoct a winning theory for Palin ‘012

Levi: I have ‘huge’ things on Palin (video)

Plouffe tells a lot (but not all)

Strike force seizures

Christianists drive Witch School out of town

Death panels myth won’t die

Neither will the JFK stories

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Dept. of Shit?, No:

When Obama became president, the financial crisis and the bank bailout that followed completely disoriented many Republicans and many in the mainstream media as well. Newsweek’s recent cover headline, “We are all socialists now,” overlooked one salient fact: Most socialists opposed the bailout. They opposed the Bush administration’s trillion-dollar-plus corporate giveaway, not because they objected to the government acting to preserve financial stability, but because they took issue with doling out billions to banks without a serious restructuring of the financial system. Democratic socialists (and other progressives) favor regulatory reform that would compel financial institutions to lend responsibly to consumers and to invest in productive enterprises that create jobs. To this day, mega-banks continue to risk our collective economic well-being by speculating in exotic, non-transparent financial instruments that do not foster productive economic activity….

For the most part, Republicans and their media allies don’t understand what socialism represents. To most, socialist policies are synonymous with any expansion in government spending (although many capitalist nations funnel more of their gross domestic product through the public sector than the U.S. does). This past February, Fox TV host Glenn Beck informed us that Canada must be a socialist country because it has a universal health care system. That would be news to Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party, which has occasionally held power at the provincial level but has never won a federal election.

As leaders of the largest socialist organization in the U.S. and one that is the official affiliate of Socialist International, to boot, we will gladly tell the world that Obama is not a socialist.

The Democratic Socialists of America. I was never a member, but I used to subscribe to their magazine. I still subscribe to their beliefs, especially on those rare occasions when they win a legislative battle. Usually in committee, then killed on the floor by amendments.

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How Goldman Sachs secretly bet on the housing crash.

They’re just too easy to hate.

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Netroots doing their job.

Attack them on the issues, attack them on their job performance.

Just don’t fuck with their primaries. Let the locals pick, then distribute your money accordingly.

If you do it right, you slow the pendulum and lessen the chances of backlash.

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Six rotting bodies isn’t a bad metaphor for American law enforcement. Oppression without safety and crime without consequences, but property has never been safer.

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Why the Vikings lost last week (and didn’t sleep too well this week).

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