I'm feeling...sequestered.
- The mayoral race in Los Angeles is this upcoming Tuesday, and silly season is here: a Super PAC supporting one of the leading candidates aired an attack ad against the other leading candidate. Which wouldn't be all that notable, except...
Pretty funny stuff. Garcetti may have a musical background, but a great singer, not so much. The added mic feedback is an especially nice touch.
And it would be a pretty standard attack ad - except for one thing - the footage of Garcetti came from a 2011 charity event at the Garden Crest Rehabilitation Center in Silver Lake.
He was singing to Alzheimer's patients.
...
So welcome to silly season in the LA Mayor's race. Where anything can and will be held against a candidate to be used in the court of public opinion - even singing to elderly Alzheimer's patients at Christmas.
- Time to reset the Republican rape comments countdown back to zero:
A leader of a California Republican group may have inadvertently revived the controversial subject of rape and pregnancy.
Before arriving at the state GOP's spring convention here, Celeste Greig told this newspaper that pregnancies by rape are rare "because it's an act of violence, because the body is traumatized."
Greig is the president of the conservative California Republican Assembly, the state's oldest and largest GOP volunteer organization. Ronald Reagan once called it "the conscience of the Republican Party."
Ironically, Greig was in the midst of criticizing former Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin for saying that victims of "legitimate rape" rarely get pregnant because "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." It was a remark that many believe led not only to his defeat in November but also helped tarnish the Republican brand around the country.
So, Greig was disagreeing with Akin, while saying the exact same thing as Akin: namely, that rape traumatizes the body, which inhibits pregnancy. What it goes to show, once again, is that this isn't some minor issue for these people. It's a firmly held belief, and it makes its way to the foreground at many opportunities. They can't help but talk about it.
- Want to read something unbelievable? How about this--a cadre of conservative columnists was paid six figures by the autocratic Malaysian government to write nasty things about a pro-democracy activist there. No, seriously:
The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.
Trevino's subcontractor's included plagiarist Ben Domenech, which just goes to show that no matter what you do, IOKIYAR. As digby says:
(And isn't it just perfect that Ben Domenech shows up in yet another journalism scandal. He's the Zelig of unethical conduct.)
- Greg Sargent's entry yesterday is an absolute must-read. He presents an alternate universe in which Mitt Romney wins and Democrats are being just as obstructionist as Republicans are right now, and then:
This is, of course, a tweaked version of the article that actually did lead the New York Times today, which reported that John Boehner is leaving town without budging from his no-new-revenues stance, to the “cheers” of House Republicans. I’ve simply substituted Reid and Democrats for Boehner and Republicans, and subbed in a fictional position for Democrats — no more spending cuts of any kind, ever; we must only resolve our fiscal problems through tax hikes. This is a rough approximation (in reverse) of the current GOP stance.
I don’t really like playing the “imagine if Dems had done this” game, but I don’t know how else to dramatize this clearly. So try to imagine the widespread press mockery that would be directed at Democrats in this scenario. Try to imagine centrist pundits blaming President Romney for failing to “lead” Democrats out of their position that we must only resolve our problems with tax hikes — and not a penny more in spending cuts. None of this would happen, because Democrats would never adopt this stance.
- tweet of the day:
@ddayen
Ridiculous that Obama hasn't held a Congressman at knife-point yet, demanded sequestration changes #leaderslead
You never know: Ron Fournier just might advocate for that.