Welcome to your weekend open thread. I hope you’re enjoying your weekend no matter whether you’re at work or play.
Dave Weigel at Slate writes about Think Progress and its success in driving media narratives.
The Union Leader writes up an appearance by Rick Santorum, now a sorta-fledged candidate for president.
Santorum by and large stayed on message but was tripped up a bit when a student asked him if he knew that the choice of his slogan, “Fighting to make America America again,” was borrowed from the “pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes.”
“No I had nothing to do with that,” Santorum said. “I didn’t know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn’t inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that.”
The student, whose name was not immediately available, was referring to the poem “Let America Be America Again.” When asked a short time later what the campaign slogan meant to him, Santorum said, “well, I’m not too sure that’s my campaign slogan, I think it’s on a web site.”
It was also printed on the campaign literature handed out before the speech.
The “student” was Lee Fang of ThinkProgress, according to the Center for Progress Action Fund, which runs the site. He was in New Hampshire, as other ThinkProgress reporters have been in Iowa, with the project that Ben Smith and Ken Vogel wrote about last week. As they did in 2009 during the health care town halls and in 2010 during the midterms, ThinkProgress reporters are toting video cameras to conservative events and asking uncomfortable, newsy questions of Republican candidates and strategists. That video of Herman Cain promising never to appoint a Muslim? That was ThinkProgress. Fang’s not a student (the reporter’s omission, I suspect, because TP reporters do say where they’re from when asked), but an experienced video tracker.
Think Progress has been very successful and that’s why it was targeted by the Chamber of Commerce. It’s a valuable resource and I hope you read it on a regular basis.
Three days after Obama’s speech on his vision for the budget Reoublicans are still whining. This is how stupid our politics have become:
Paul Ryan was reportedly “furious” and complained that the speech “was extremely political, very partisan.”
It’s worth fleshing this out, because there are some important angles to keep in mind.
First, the Republicans’ politics of personal grievance is based solely on their hurt feelings. They’re not saying the president lied or that his numbers don’t add up, but rather, they’re outraged that Obama was a big meanie. That’s kind of pathetic, and it reinforces fears that the House GOP majority is dominated by right-wing lawmakers with temperament of children.
Second, exactly what kind of reaction did Republicans seriously expect? Their fraudulent and callous budget plan, approved yesterday despite bipartisan opposition, eliminates Medicare. It punishes the elderly, the disabled, and low-income families, and rewards millionaires and billionaires. It calls for devastating cuts that would do widespread damage to the middle class and the economy. Were Republicans seriously waiting for Obama to politely pat them on the head and say, “It’s OK, you tried your best. I’ll give you an A for effort”?
Third, why is it Republicans expect one-sided graciousness? They expected a “peace offering” after pushing their own plan that was “deliberately constructed to be as offensive to Democrats as it’s possible to be,” and didn’t even bother with insincere “nods in the direction of bipartisanship.” I’ll never understand why Obama is expected to be conciliatory with those who refuse to do the same.
I don’t really understand what the GOP is going for here. I assume they are going to try to blame Obama when the next shutdown looms but don’t they realize how weak it makes them look to whine continuously about their feelings? Grow some ovaries, boys.