For Great Justice!

I read this Krugman post and recognize the title meme, as any geek will. And then it occurs to me that a Nobel Prize winner is making All Your Base references on his blog.

More On Rush Limbaugh

If you haven't seen it yet, the DCCC's Rush Limbaugh apology generator is pretty cute. I think it could use a couple more entries (maybe an outlandish one involving zombies or something).

Part of what we're seeing here is the inability of an out-of-power party to control the media narrative. Lacking a powerful elected leader to be their representative, the Republicans can't really stop us from nudging that position into the hands of an egotistical and stupid talk radio extremist.

We had a similar problem in the '03-'06 years, lacking high-wattage leaders to speak for us, other than John Kerry for a few months, and he wasn't the best at speaking. Of course, the Republicans couldn't do the exact same trick on us -- if they tried to pick on Michael Moore or somebody like that, our party leaders would just run away from him. But the problem was that Republicans had control of the media narrative until external events like Katrina or out-of-control Iraq violence took it away. Remember when John Conyers tried to hold a hearing about Iraq War intelligence, and they wouldn't give him a proper room so he had to hold it in some kind of basement, and even Jon Stewart made fun of how a woman sitting in the background was breast-feeding during the hearing? That's what it looks like when you're out of power.

What's So Wrong About A Cat In A Bong?

Everybody seems to be angry at the stoner from Nebraska who put his kitten inside a large bong a few times while he smoked. The cat was in no danger from fire, as far as I know -- it just got high off of the marijuana. The dude's reason is kind of amusing: apparently he "told deputies 6-month-old Shadow was hyper and he was trying to calm her down." She seems to be mostly fine.

For my part, I don't see what the problem is. Assuming that human biology and cat biology are similar in the relevant respects, Shadow probably just had a good if slightly disorienting time in there and liked the way her cat food tasted afterwards. I mean, what are people so upset about here? Is it that marijuana is a "gateway drug" and the kitten will start snorting coke? That she'll drop out of school and have trouble keeping a job? Giving euphoria-inducing drugs to animals seems a fine thing to do.

Re-Education Through Limbaugh

The strangest thing about the latest round of public apologies after pointing out that Rush Limbaugh isn't the Messiah is that it's unclear to me who exactly is calling the shots. Can it really be the case that the Republican donor class, particularly the high-dollar, DC-centric class, is so wedded to Limbaugh that they can't have him hear a little honest criticism?

That said, while the Limbaugh strategy has a decent chance of working wonders in 2010 and 2012, I doubt it will be useful much longer than that. Just as George W. Bush duped us all with compassionate conservatism, a 2016 Republican candidate will be able to run on the same tired agenda simply by repeating the words "I am not like Rush Limbaugh" at every campaign stop.

Anti-Abortion Terrorism And Raffles

It'd actually be pretty nice if the religious right makes lots of noise about George Tiller in Kathleen Sebelius' confirmation hearings. He's the abortion doctor whom she had dinner with after he won a raffle. It would probably be fine even if she'd invited him for dinner by choice, but in these circumstances all honorable Americans will agree that the customs of raffles must be obeyed.

And then there's the fact that Tiller was shot in both arms by an anti-abortion activist in 1993. This seems like the kind of detail that is good at making its way into a story. Anti-abortion activists have done a pretty good job of not shooting people for the past few years, unlike the 1990s. (Nowadays they're more likely to set clinics on fire and blow stuff up.) If the fundamentalists want to remind people of their doctor-shooting ways, that's an arrangement we can live with.