Amusing. Incumbent senator Susan Collins (R-ME) holds a fundraiser; Joe Lieberman shows up to support her; Lieberman’s presence so pisses off the netroots that they organize fundraising for her opponent, Tom Allen. Using Lieberman’s support as the selling point, they nearly double the contribution amount that Collins received.

Would’ve been cheaper for her to put up Lieberman in a local hotel and told him not to show his face. With room service, even. It’ll be neat to see if he has this same toxic effect on other people he supports. Ultimately, I’d love to see him lose his lynchpin status in the Senate, because his whole oh-I-might-become-a-Republican-better-listen-to-me act is just goddamned irritating. But even before the elections, maybe people will start to see that trying to keep Lieberman on your side is not such a great thing.

Also: video of Bush after a year-long beating. I could almost feel sorry for him.

<spinn> there’s a container here in our lunch room for a charity, they give meals n such to the homeless
<spinn> they were asking for toothpaste, deodorant, that kinda thing
<spinn> I saw someone had a thing of Axe deodorant in there
<tie> snkkt
<spinn> and seeing in my head a freakin entertaining Axe commercial
<tie> that’d be a good commercial
<SeanQ> eight scantily clad coeds chasing him in a shopping cart
<spinn> scroungy guy with a tooth and a half hikes up three layers of dank hoodies to drag some axe gel over his wiry armpit hairs
<SeanQ> “We have some cans for you to collect, stud!”
<spinn> WHAM tacklehug
<tie> and at the end he looks to camera and goes “Fuckin’ spindle trousers government shithole table grass bacon fuck shit”. ‘cos he’s a crazy homeless guy

I know it’s not much, but I got the A1/IADL archives functional, and you can currently see them here.

I’m going to Starbucks just north of Chicago, and as I walk in the door I notice a wash of orange: there are eight Tibetian monks sitting in a group at two tables. One of them is talking on a cellphone.

And me without a camera.

Glenn Greenwald’s another writer I’ve been liking a lot recently. He has a great illustration of how the winds of opinion have changed:

Glenn Greenwald - Salon

He compares the words of several pundits, what they said recently against what they said years ago when Bush’s ratings were 50% and higher. There’s no real change in how Bush has handled his office since he began, but 2003 Jonah Goldberg’s lavish comparison of Bush to Reagan is in stark contrast to 2007 Jonah Goldberg’s “so you finally caught up, stupid” admonishment of Richard Cohen for noticing what “some of us on the right have been saying for a while: if you hold your head just so and look at Bush from the right angle, he looks an awful lot like a liberal.” Presumably he didn’t think to tilt and squint four years previously, when the beautific light of His presidential Presence made such observation difficult.

I also have no idea who Jonah Goldberg is. But Greenwald also has snippets of Rush Limbaugh doing the same thing, so that’s fun.

I don’t really know who Peggy Noonan is, other than an op-ed writer for the Wall Street Journal, but given firedoglake’s reaction to her recent piece, I’ll assume she’s conservative. She’s saying that Bush has “torn the conservative coalition asunder”. FDL casts this as conservatives distancing themselves from Bush while not admitting they have to sleep in the bed they made, but whatever. Here’s the part that got me:

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic–they “don’t want to do what’s right for America.” His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, “We’re gonna tell the bigots to shut up.” On Fox last weekend he vowed to “push back.” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want “mass deportation.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are “anti-immigrant” and suggested they suffer from “rage” and “national chauvinism.”

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the “Too bad” governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.

I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they’re defensive, and they’re defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill…

What. WHAT. I mean I had a hard time getting together the will to write this entry, because reading this, re-reading this, it just sticks me between high amusement, wall-punching anger, and the uselessness of saying anything at all. I’m really freakin’ indignant about this, I want to go all how dare she about it, which is an unusual place for me to be.

Now. Now it’s a problem, the dehumanizing, the straw man attacks? Years of Democrats being cut-and-runners, of “wanting America to fail”, of “providing comfort to the enemy”, of “not supporting the troops”, of (one of my personal favorites) “calling the troops ‘losers’“. Of course you haven’t had to deal with this, the neocons have mostly been in lockstep for years. But now that people are starting to understand that Bush is a fuckup and it’s not verboten to think of him as less than an emperor king, there’s dissent on this immigration bill. So they pull out the same goddamn guns they’ve been using for liberal opposition for years, turn it on their own base, and this dink is surprised and shocked, shocked by this turn of events.

As I’ve said before, I am more often drawn to the way an argument is conducted, over the subject of the argument itself. And I’ve watched this over and over, these neocons using the same buzzwords, the same bent logic, the same intellectually dishonest reasoning to (somehow effectively!) control the debate in their favor. And now, some conservatives are the target of it, and OH NO NOW BUSH IS A MEANIEHEAD WHEN HE’S BEEN SO GODDAMN WONDERFUL UP TO THIS POINT, HOW CAN THIS BE.

Goddamnit.