Chris Christie to New York and New Jersey drivers: You Shall Not Pass!!!

Why do I create these lame shoops?

BECAUSE SOMEONE HAS TO.


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EDIT:

Alternatively,

Is the Pope Catholic?

From the NYT: 

Francis has regularly attracted huge crowds in Vatican City, and almost overnight he has emerged as a major figure on the global stage, surprising many Catholics with hisnonjudgmental tone on issues like homosexuality and divorce, and his focus on the plight of the world’s poor. He has also been unpredictable, telephoning ordinary people who have written him letters, embracing a badly disfigured man at St. Peter’s, and making unannounced visits in Rome.He proved unpredictable again on Wednesday, when he went off script to include atheists in his call for peace, rare for a Catholic leader.“I invite even nonbelievers to desire peace,” he said. “Let us all unite, either with prayer or with desire, but everyone, for peace.”

Fox News must be flipping s#$%.  I would go check, but I don't want to spoil such a wonderful day looking at that page.

In the words of Tiny Tim: "A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, every one!" -
and Peace to All Good People.

Blessing of Peace from the Ayatollah. Wait, what?

No, not that Ayatollah.

Ali Khamenei, also known as the Ayatollah of difficult-to-pronounce-yet-amusing-names has apparently given the public nod to the US-Iran peace deal.  More than that, "decider-in-Sharif" (zing!) has gone above-and-beyond in supporting the deal, even against the more hard-line Iranian conservatives (read: the really crazy people).

From Max Fisher at the Washpo:

What makes this letter significant is not just that Khamenei is blessing the deal, but that he's giving Rouhani some political cover in Tehran. This suggests, and is surely meant to broadcast as much, that Khamenei not only supports the deal so far but that he supports it sufficiently that he's willing to publicly pressure Iranian hard-liners to get behind it.

.... 

As Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution told me recently, "Khamenei does have, as best as any outsider can tell, all of the power he needs to force this through the system, to overcome the opposition of the hardliners. But. We've never seen Khamenei actually overrule the hard-liners on an issue of this kind of importance." 

Awesome!  So it sounds like the deal will survive the Iranian version of our Neoconservatives and Republicans.  Now we'll see if Obama can do the same.

I'm curious though; who is the dark authority who can quell the chicken-hawks?  Do we need to start baking cookies for Roger Ailes?


And what kind of cookies does Roger Ailes eat? 
I have my money on chocolate-chip and brimstone.



One last thing: the award for political understatement of the year goes to Max Fisher for this whopper (from the article above): 

"It can be easy for Americans to forget that Iranian politics are complicated and noisy."

It is also easy for Fisher to forget how much Americans have ever known about Iranian politics: almost nothing.

A Sign of The (Tehran) Times

I've been trying to check the Tehran Times to get the Iranian perspective on the recent nuclear/sactions deal.  Seems like an import point of view, right?

No dice.

Got this when checking the website:

Either they're really busy, or someone is not happy with their website.

A Sea Slug Mindfuck

...literally:

If you're an aficionado of sea slugs, you're probably used to weird and cringe-worthy sex acts. When two of these hermaphrodite animals penetrate each other at the same time like an R-rated yin-yang symbol, you won't bat an eyelid. When several of them link up in a long mating chain, you'll have seen it all before. When one amputates its disposable penis after sex only to uncoil a spare, your only reaction will be, "Meh."
Still, when two sea slugs penetrate each other in the head while having sex, even the most jaded expert might do a double-take.

From Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science. 

The scientist who discovered this whopper now has all the cocktail party gold he or she will ever need.

The Best Hope for America

"Crazy, am I, Mr. Boehner? We'll see whether I'm crazy or not, after we hit the Debt Ceiling"
- Ted Cruz

... is that the Republicans shoot themselves in the foot.  

An NYT headline: G.O.P.’s Hopes to Take Senate Are Dimming.

The Washington Post: "After four national crises, what has the GOP gained?". The Wallstreet Journal: *crickets*. Fox News: Book: RFK stole JFK's brain after assassination (No, I'm not linking to that.) NRO: "Get Wise, GOP." (Then they go on to rail again Washington's dysfunction... funny how something is dysfunctional when it's not going your way.) The NRO also rants about Obama not negotiating on saving the credit and creed of America, which they supported, but also included McConnell: ‘We Have a Math Problem in the Senate’ which is hardly a shout out for GOP representatives.

 

The simple fact of the matter is that the GOP was expecting to take control of the Senate next election.  They were expecting to get even more seats in the House; the numbers were stacked again the Democrats in terms of what seats are up for election.

Now it appears that recent events, namely the 'shut-down-the-government-and-almost-sucker-punch-the-US-credit' plan didn't work, there may be a change in the wind.  Moderate republicans are facing the promised primary attacks from more conservative republicans.  Tea Party republicans are facing backlash from their business-constituents.  From the ever-insightful Molly Ball at the Atlantic:

Conservatives have declared war on the GOP.
...“Conservatives are either going to split [from the GOP] or stay home,” Erickson, the influential editor of RedState.com and a Fox News contributor, told me. “They’ll first expend energy in primaries, but if unsuccessful, they’ll bolt.”
...When [Glenn] Beck made his appeal to "defund the GOP," he told his listeners to stop giving money to Republican committees and give to FreedomWorks instead. "We kind of agree," Clancy told me. “Giving to the party committees is wasted money, because they’re just incumbent protection clubs .... Sometimes you have to beat the Republicans before you beat the Democrats. Just because they're 'our guys' doesn't mean they'll be our guys when it counts."
...In the Tea Partiers’ view, the clueless establishment hasn't yet internalized the seriousness of the threat to its supremacy. The grassroots has taken control, and it will have its way or secede. “This is where the wind is blowing,” Deace said. “I don’t think you can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. [Tea Party] People like me are not just taking marching orders anymore—they actually want something in return for a vote.”
It will not be possible, Deace predicted, for the two factions to coexist. “This is going to end in divorce,” he said. “One side is going to win control, one side is going to lose, and the losing side will go do something else. There will not be a reunification.”

This is a disaster of the Republican's own making.  The Tea Party made the current GOP coalition possible; it enabled the GOP to effectively block most of the Democrat's agenda for the last few years.  It has mostly been seen as a useful and benign tool by the GOP elite; funded by it's business elite and spurred to a frothing-anger by the Fox News echo-chamber.  But the cat is out of the bag now, and the Institutional Republicans are now looking on in horror at the monster they created.

A split between these two factions would spell doom at the ballot box for the next two elections.  Short of a political miracle, there is no way the conservative establishment would be able to avoid painful, costly and dragged out primaries, only to face emboldened democrats.  In many districts the Tea Party candidate would win, and possibly lose to a moderate democrat when the district realizes he's better than a lunatic.  Even if this is a seldom occurrence, the wasted advertising and disheartened activists would be a drain on the GOP.

It's a year of schadenfreude for the left.  Watching the crazies we've been trying to sound the alarm about for three years begin to destroy their own party is nothing short of a righteous 'I told you so".  And perhaps there is an element of bias in my desire for the razing of the Republican Party.

But I genuinely want a functional opposition party.  Even if it has views I hold distasteful, the country needs another party with the desire and ability to actually govern.  I would rather Obamacare be repealed than the country hit the debt-ceiling and plunge the world into another recession.  The right has no space to manage this now, and the most effective way for it to regain that would be for it to burn itself to the ground.

This is how the GOP falls, not with a bang but with a fiery, electoral defeat.

There is no possible outcome I can think of for the GOP to fix itself short of massive, widespread electoral defeat.  And for the good of the country I hope it comes soon.

Unions are Why Democrats are Losing the Country.

In response to an NRO article, which I shall avoid naming to give it some rest from the shame.

Apparently, the Democrats will lose in the future because they get all their support from the Unions.

Yes... Unions, the left-wing supporters whose declining political power has been shouted from the rooftops by everyone, this rag included; *they* are the reason for the democrats problems.  

Not that the GOP has fallen off the cliff of insanity.  Not that many see the Democratic party as actually trying.  It can't be that for the remainder of the country, in a battle between two evils they view the Democrats as the Nanny State with good intentions, and the GOP as the party to destroy All Government, that rails against everything ever proposed by the democrats. including the the Republican's own plans when adopted by the democratic. 

Not because the demographic the GOP caters to is increasingly being refined to white, bitter, fundamentalist culture warriors longing for an idealized 50's era world that is less complicated, less brown, and less modern.  The same people who live in a bubble - where Obamacare is a government take-over (Romney and the Heritage Foundation had nothing to do with it), where Ted Cruz and Rush Limbaugh are the authoritative voices in news, and where the GOP is a champion of fiscal responsibility; the deficit has been ballooning under democrats year by year (and not topped, then declined during the last four years).

Face it; the Democrats are winning because of three big reasons; they aren't the republicans, they actually stand for something beyond no-taxes, and the US is changing, as are it's needs.  This is not the Eisenhower administration anymore, much less Taft's.