Richard Florida points way to permanent conservative majority

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 2 Comments

Say what you will about the Tea Party; they are all wearing ball caps and sunglasses. Also they participate in a rhetoric of violence.

 

As part of his ongoing research into how much mileage you can get out of one sociological theory, Richard Florida has produced this terrifying examination of statistical conservatism in the United States. Props to “Mirko” Mike Sebba for the link. If you’re excited to see which states are more conservative than others, I urge you to close your eyes and visualize them right now, because you will be exactly right. Mississippi is the only state where more than 50% of respondents in a Gallup poll identified as conservatives, with a gang of mini-ssippis—North Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Dakota and South Carolina, where nobody really followed up on why this happened—close behind. Does that list seem familiar to you? That’s right: they’re the suck states.

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Clarence Thomas goes 5 years without speaking during arguments

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 3 Comments

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, his wife Virginia, and someone with a neck

Come Tuesday, Clarence Thomas will have passed five years on the Supreme Court without asking a question or offering his opinion during oral arguments. That’s unusual. According to the New York Times, “in the 20 years that ended in 2008,* the justices asked an average of 133 questions per hourlong argument, up from about 100 in the 15 years before that.” Antonin Scalia has been known to interrupt petitioners to read aloud from Garfield. Yet Thomas, described as “gregarious” in his personal life, has not spoken from the bench—except to read prepared statements of majority opinion—since 2006. In addition to pointing out the fundamental inadequacies of the nickname “Silent Clar,” such long reticence begs a question: why?

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Trying to make sense out of Jared Lee Loughner

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 3 Comments

By now you may have heard about Jared Lee Loughner, the Arizona man accused of shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other people at a meet-your-congressperson even in Tuscon Saturday. Besides a slough of community college professors only too eager to talk about how weird he was in class, not much is known about Loughner. Or rather, a ton is known about Jared Lee Loughner, but it doesn’t really fit together. For example, he made this YouTube video. It’s constructed around formal syllogisms in which meaning flickers like those things you see on the periphery of your vision when you’re really tired, but it makes no sense at all. There are references to the Gold Standard and the Constitution, but there are also references to “conscience dreaming” and the US government trying to control the structure of English grammar. It doesn’t really hold together as an ideology, because Jared Loughner is a crazy person. That’s bad news for the people trying to triangulate his actions within contemporary American politics, and there are a lot of them. In the aftermath of his senseless attack, both halves of our fractured national discourse are scrambling to make Jared Loughner a charactering in some narrative they’ve been condemning all along.

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Right Network finally gives conservatives something to watch on cable

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 5 Comments

Right Network spokesman Kelsey Grammer, seen here supporting our troops or possibly shooting a sequel to Down Periscope.

First of all, everyone who said I would never figure out a way to work a Down Periscope reference into this blog owes me a Coke. I know you were all saying that. Second of all, thanks to everyone who alerted me to Combat!’s horrible comments problem, by which perfectly innocent remarks about how insightful and probably handsome I am are rejected as spam. It turns out that several clever Viagra salesbots have been submitting comments that are copies of previous comments, only with links to boner pills added in, in an effort to fool my spam blocker. I guess, technically, they did fool it, but they fooled it into putting everyone whose comments got copied on its spam list. The only solution I’ve found thus far is to manually un-spam legitimate comments, which I will continue to do until the spammers give up. I assume that’s only a matter of time, since they’re computer robots and all. But enough of that. Today’s post is not about computer robots; it’s about real Americans like Kelsey Grammer, who is the spokesman for a new cable TV channel for real Americans called Right Network, which will premiere this real summer in America. Spit out your Skoal, ’cause here comes a taste:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_mQPvKXw3U&feature=player_embedded

Obviously, this thing is going to be really good and not exacerbate any existing problems at all.

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Friday links! Reality gap edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment

It’s Friday, which means we’ve come to the end of Week Two of the cessation of American liberty. I don’t want to jinx what has thus far been a remarkably low-key totalizing of government control, but I’m kind of disappointed. I guess I expected to be working in a salt mine by now, or at least be typing this with a brown-shirted ACORN volunteer reading over my shoulder. Where’s my unsupportable tax burden? Where’s my own personal bureaucrat to accompany me to the grocery store and make sure I don’t exercise my right to choose? It’s almost as if the dire predictions of half the country were based on an entirely different reality—one that threatened to come crashing into our dimension, but at the last moment got sick and decided to stay in the astral plane. This week’s link roundup is loosely dedicated to that alternate universe, where the federal government is still trying to put radios in our brains, the country longs for a second chance to vote for McCain-Palin, and all manner of useless celebrities influence our daily lives. Won’t you join me for a glimpse of the world that never was, population: half of us?

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