Remember Reagan?

The truth is that I don’t, really. I remember being afraid we would die in a nuclear war he started. I remember thinking that there’s no way he’d let Genesis air that video more than once. I vaguely remember him being shot. I don’t have a sense of what it was like for adults. To what extent did people know he was suffering from Alzheimer’s? I mean, obviously, no one said it. I can’t even remember if we had a word for it, then.

But I don’t have a sense of how public the fact that he couldn’t do his job was. Any my impressions and again, based on me being a child, is that it wasn’t apparent at least, not until his second term.

I have been thinking a lot about my dad, lately, seventy-one years old. He’s not senile or anything. He’s just an older version of himself. He worries a lot about dying. If you talk to him too late at night, he sometimes isn’t very with it, though I am not either, so fair enough.

Everything else aside, conflicts of interest, whatever, if my dad were president and there were a way for me to sit in on his every meeting to make sure I knew what was said, I would. Especially if I saw my dad surrounding himself with some of his friends. And my dad and I are on the same side politically! I think my dad would mostly support and advocate things I liked.

But I’d be in there because I don’t think he could cut it and I know he wouldn’t dare tell me I couldn’t be.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot over the past day or so–from which direction the push to have Ivanka sitting in on meetings is coming. What it means about Trump’s ability to do the job. What that means for us.

It’s Hard Not to be Down

The other day we caught part of Kevin James’ new sitcom and then we watched the debates and some doofus congressman was complaining that Clinton too much like his bitch wife/mother.

Kevin James’s sitcom is also about a man trying to live with a bitch wife.

The only reason I can see that someone would continue to live with a woman he hates is that he does like the way she takes care of him. In other words, I don’t believe the slash in “bitch wife/mother” is as differentiating as we might hope.

The assumption is that you get to bring someone into your household who will meet all your needs in exchange for…what? That’s the part that confuses me. You bring this woman into your house and…is it just housing? You give her a place to live, a little money, social status, and in exchange, she’s supposed to meet all your needs and give you the illusion that she does in a state of ultimate bliss?

And I get that there are religious worldviews in this country that try to raise women to want only that, to expect only that. And to fear being the bitch.

But usually, if someone comes into your house and improves your life 100%, it’s because they’re getting something out of it, not because you deserve it.

I’m being somewhat inarticulate, but what I mean is that it seems like a lot of men think they “deserve” a certain kind of woman and then resent and hate the real person who can’t meet that ideal. But I’m fascinated how “deserve” blinds them to the fact that, if they got the perfect wife/mother who made them feel good all the time and met all their needs, clearly, that would be someone with an agenda that might not match up with the dude’s. Like, expecting that kind of woman sets you up to be disappointed in normal women and taken advantage of by the women who can maintain the illusion of pulling it off.

And then, once they grow hateful and resentful of their wives, why stay?

Do these guys never look at their guy friends in relationships with women that function and are between two regular people and wish they had that? Like, why are you stuck in a dynamic you hate? Why don’t they just leave their wives and find someone who’ll be kinder to them?

Watching that Kevin James sitcom, I didn’t feel like “Ha ha ha, we’ve all been there with the cute but unreasonable harridan who runs our lives and does things to us and our households we don’t like but isn’t it funny how we deal with it?” I felt like, dude, get a therapist and a divorce lawyer and buy a chair you like to sit in and sit in it.

I couldn’t watch it. It wasn’t funny. It felt like propaganda to reinforce to men that relationships are miserable and you should expect misery and propagate misery in order to maintain some balance.

But looking at Trump… clearly, his appeal in part is that he knows how to make people who feel like they deserve something they’ve not gotten feel like this is their opportunity for revenge.

And I wonder how many people out there are motivated by that. I’m frightened that it’s a lot.

Nobody Likes Me. Everybody Hates Me. Guess I’ll Go Eat Worms.

Oh lord, yesterday. Let me sum it up like this. In Nashville, there’s a junkyard with a batshit mean dog guarding it. That dog has been there for years, bit a bunch of people, and it’s a menace. But the junkyard is safe.

So, the guy who ran the junkyard gave the dog to another local business–let’s say a coffee shop–where the people who had lived in the neighborhood for a million years recognized the dog, saw it was keeping the coffee shop safe, and were like “Okay, be careful. The dog’s in the coffee shop now.” But a bunch of people who either moved into the neighborhood recently or didn’t know about the junkyard dog somehow are shocked and alarmed to find out that there’s a dog in the coffee shop that’s mean as fuck.

And they’ve been yelling at me and other folks about why we’re not covering the “news” of the dog’s most recent bad behavior in the coffee shop. So, I tried to explain–the dog has been an asshole; that’s why he’s a good guard dog; his behavior is a known issue and, as of yet, people still believe the benefits of the dog outweigh the drawbacks.

I would almost go so far as to say that it would very rarely rise to “news” that the dog is a menace, since he’s doing what he’s known to do and what people want him to do.

I find it irritating that the dog is being used in this manner and I think the dog is dangerous. But I completely understand why people want the dog in the coffee shop. I might, in certain circumstances, find it comforting that the dog is in the coffee shop myself.

I’m not on the side of “Get the dog out of the coffee shop.” I’m just trying to explain to people who are like “Oh my god, why aren’t you covering the fact that the dog in the coffee shop nipped at someone last week?!” why I can’t get worked up enough about the dog’s behavior to be freshly outraged.

And once the “Get the dog out of the coffee shop” people figured that out?! Well, fuck my whole day. But that only happened after the dog’s supporters were pissed at me.

Anyway, even Satanists have sectarian pissing matches, it turns out. So, whatever.

Dennis Hastert

I’ve got nothing, really. I just keep thinking about his victim, brother to his protege. The gaping maw you must have in place of a soul that lets you hurt and hurt and hurt and have it never affect you.

The sky is big. It stretches in a big curve away from you and the land is so flat, so thin. How many things happened to us all under that sky stretching away? I feel like so much of my Illinois childhood is, in retrospect, young people trying to show that something was going off the rails for them, while adults turned and turned and turned away, finding it easier to see anything else.

No wonder the sky recoils from that place, really.

“Too Sure It was Loved”

I can’t get over these three paragraphs by Matt Taibbi:

The triumvirate of big media, big donors and big political parties has until now successfully excluded every challenge to its authority. But like every aristocracy, it eventually got lazy and profligate, too sure it was loved by the people. It’s now shocked that voters in depressed ex-factory towns won’t keep pulling the lever for “conservative principles,” or that union members bitten a dozen times over by a trade deal won’t just keep voting Democratic on cue.

Trump isn’t the first rich guy to run for office. But he is the first to realize the weakness in the system, which is that the watchdogs in the political media can’t resist a car wreck. The more he insults the press, the more they cover him: He’s pulling 33 times as much coverage on the major networks as his next-closest GOP competitor, and twice as much as Hillary.

Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.

This, I think, too, is also what Ron Ramsey gets. It’s why he’s working so hard to entrench Republican power. He knows that the powerful are lazy and decadent and that it annoys the less powerful.

I’m worried Trump could win, but I agree with Taibbi that it is, in part, because he understood the system the way a con artist does and exploits the system’s weaknesses like a con artist can. And I’m genuinely not sure that there’s anyone who will learn how to plug the holes from this experience.

Friday?

I have no idea what days it is, really. I’m depressed about this state and what it means to be a woman in it. But I don’t see any easy fixes. The Democrats don’t really exist. There’s no legitimate opposition. No reason for them to temper their actions.

Two things made me feel incredibly old this week. One is Kim Kardashian, in that I see everyone having opinions on her in her various states of nakedness and I thought she looked cute and like she was having fun. You know when you feel like a grandma? It’s when you see a shiny, naked lady being all sexy and your first thought is, “Oh, she looks so cute.”

And the other is that I listened to the new Azalea Banks album and I liked it. I found it a little strange sounding and I couldn’t quite understand half of what she was saying, but my feet tapped. I don’t know exactly how to explain it. But it was the first piece of music I heard that was obviously marketed to adults which I found just felt weird about listening to because she sounds so young.

I still listened to it a bunch. But it was weird. I mean, I’m glad there’s youth culture and I’m also really glad I don’t have to keep up with it. I can just be interested in what I’m interested in and ignore the rest.

Obamacare and Cattle Cars

I think it’s time to be done treating this guy like he’s purposefully saying outrageous things that he doesn’t believe for the sake of publicity. And it’s past time for demanding apologies out of him unless we’re fine with them being disingenuous.

Dude believes what he’s saying. Dude wants what he’s saying to be upsetting to other people. Dude likes using other people’s discomfort and unhappiness as a way to feel powerful. And dude likes feeling powerful. He straight-up believes that he is a moral man adrift in an immoral hell, surrounded by lesser immoral beings whose suffering is deserved, because of their immorality. It is, from his perspective, his job to increase the suffering of lesser immoral beings until they shape up and become disciplined and moral like him.

I will give it up to the Tennessee Republicans in that they have done as good a job as they can with a colleague of marginalizing him. (What Hardaway’s excuse is, I haven’t a clue.) But he needs to be put in his place hard, and publicly, by someone who can make him hurt and who he can’t best. And whoever does that needs to be aware that he will then be scheming against him or her for the rest of the time he’s in office, which is, apparently, going to be forever.

We treat him like a joke, but I advise you to go back and reread my second paragraph here. The scariest thing to me about him is that the best alternative for the people he knows in real life (or encounters in real life) is for him to have a large public platform where he can get his jollies hurting and upsetting people out where everyone can see it and he can get national attention for it.

I really wonder what happens when a man like him still has those impulses and doesn’t have the spotlight to both feed the impulses and keep them in check. And I’m afraid/certain we’re going to find out.

The To-Do List Shrinks Itself

I’m not going to give a talk on Allen on Wednesday. Long story short, I’m not welcome because I’m a reporter (?!). I feel so bad for the woman who asked me. She’s so upset and embarrassed. But, hey, who hasn’t worked for a large bureaucracy that makes strange decisions over your head?

Still, bah, that sucks.

Campfield

You know my every opinion on him. This is the perfect picture of him. To me, it captures something exactly true about him. Here he is, in his element. That’s what this is all for, ever second of it, for these moments.

The Tennessee Democrats Depress Me

This is so depressing:

But he said the lack of viable alternatives to Herron, a former state senator and congressional candidate who was just elected to the chairmanship in January, makes it difficult to go in another direction.

“I don’t know what our options are,” Cheek said. “I’m not going to vote to just hold an election in January and have a jump ball. If that makes me an ally of Roy’s, I guess I am. It’s really a matter of whether or not something like that makes sense, and to me it really doesn’t.”

The chair has never faced an unopposed election, so the idea that there aren’t any viable alternatives is a slap in the face to all the people who ran and didn’t get elected. Wade Munday wasn’t a non-viable candidate. Dave Garrison wasn’t a non-viable candidate.

You can’t get one or the other of them to take another bite at the apple?

Because, I’ll say this, if we don’t have any up-and-coming folks ready to take on leadership positions, forget being twenty years in the wilderness. We’re looking at a more biblical forty.

Here’s the only thing that can save the Democratic party in this state–black politicians. Black politicians are going to have to just say that the way the party is set up right now, not only can’t they win most white majority districts, they’re not set up to help black Democratic politicians run and govern effectively in their districts and, since they’re the Democrats who are winning, they’re the Democrats who get to reshape the TNDP to meet their needs.

Then we can flush these old farts out and get some new farts.

The TNDP’s Woman Problem

I admit, I’d pretty much given up on writing about the TNDP’s inability to find and support female candidates because, you know, when the house is on fire you don’t really worry about the plumbing being shitty.

But then this happened. Listen, when two-thirds of the people who suddenly depart a place are young women and the boss is an older man and enough people are concerned that they’re like “Let’s do some exit interviews and make sure everything is on the up and up,” there needs to be a woman on the committee doing the exit interviews. Fine, Mary Patterson isn’t the right person for it, maybe. But there needs to be a woman present.

The fact that Roy Herron can’t see how important that is proves that the house being on fire is inseparable from the shitty plumbing. Perhaps a fire in the fireplace got out of control and no one could draw enough water to put it out before it caught the whole house. I don’t know.

But they are interrelated. The TNDP is a shithole that will not get its act together and will perpetually disappoint Tennessee Democrats because it’s still about protecting the few bases of power that are left, not about expanding opportunities for everyone. The sexism is not separate from that.

There is a God of Politics and She Loves Me

Joe Carr is running against Lamar Alexander. He starts his campaign by citing a battle that happened after the war ended and a battle we lost.

So, what I’m saying is that this should be great.

I’m Sure Obama is Crushed

Aside from the fact that 40% of the money in our state budget comes from the Federal government, if we’re trying to argue that Tennessee is somehow better off without the Feds involved, the way to do it is not to send a note to the President inviting him to “visist [sic] a few historial [sic], natural attractions like Ruby Falls, a true Chattanooga treasure” while he’s in town “celebrting [sic].”

My god, can we not even be petulant assholes competently?

From the Times-Free Press story:

Tennessee has attracted thousands of jobs during the Great Recession through a combination of business-friendly policies and strong tax incentives, but the state’s education system consistently ranks near the bottom of the pack.

Fewer than half of Hamilton County students in grades 3 through 8 can read at their grade level, according to standardized test results.

 

It Happens Every Time

The higher up politicians get, the more it bugs them to have to justify themselves to the riff raff.

But I will give Bill Haslam this–I do think he’s running the state just he’d run a business.

A Dog’s Gonna Bark

It seems to me that, when the overarching theme of someone’s legislative career is that women are lying bitches who need to be kept under tight control, and poor children are so problematic that they need to be starved if they don’t act right, and that gay people are such a menace that gay children need to be humiliated and treated like freaks, a dude has deep issues.

Not deep enough to send up a lot of red flags among his colleagues, but it should have.

So, I’m interested to see what happens when he’s now openly calling said colleagues stupid.

But I wonder what kind of politician does that? You get bills passed by building coalitions. How do you build coalitions with people you’ve called stupid?

My opinion is that he enjoys making people, at the least and to put it mildly, uncomfortable. If he’s got a common enemy with you, then fine, I guess you can just not notice his motivations. But when there’s no common enemy left? Then it’s you he’s gunning for. It’s just his way. It appears to feel good to him.

And that, my friends, after years of observing him, is what scares the shit out of me about him. He knows what he does hurts people and he does it anyway, because it feels good to him. Only now we know it’s not enough for him to go after abstract “women” or “poor children” or “gay people.” He’s willing to be shitty to, say, Glen Casada or his other colleagues.

Should we call that an escalation?

Wait. Is Will Pinkston about to go all Will Pinkston on Beth Harwell?

I have many feelings–contradictory feelings–about this. I like Beth Harwell and I have deeply negative feelings about Will Pinkston, and yet, I’m kind of rooting for someone to point his cage in her direction and throw open the gate.

Quick! Megan Barry, have another Christmas party!

Deny, Delete, Destroy

I feel a bit bad for Governor Haslam, as I’m sure that he didn’t intend for his “Running the state more like a business” strategy to mean that the state would be run more like Enron an hour before the Feds moved in. But here we are, learning that, when the going gets tough, the tough get deleting.

First DCS just left out whole swaths of information that was supposed to be public. And now Tennessee’s Virtual Academy, which was supposed to save us from the horrors of public school-dom, just deleted low grades so that it wasn’t immediately obvious how much they’re not doing what they’ve promised to do.

I have a theory that part of what’s going on in this state right now is that we’re living with an unfortunate error in judgement by Republicans. Rather than assume that most Democrats had been operating in good faith, most union leaders, most public workers–you know, most everyone who’s been on their boogeyman list over the years–they really did come to believe that those people were bad and that therefore the things they were doing were bad. And, as a result, whatever their buddies wanted to do that had been thwarted under the decades of Democratic rule must be good ideas unjustly denied.

Now, we’re getting their buddies put into positions of power–say at DCS–and their buddies’ “good” ideas enacted–like the Tennessee Virtual Academy. And their ways of doing things suck, much to the unpleasant surprise of Republicans. After all, they’re the good guys. How can good guys have bad ideas?

I think we’re going to continue to see this kind of shit until Republicans come to realize that even people ostensibly on their side can be doing the wrong thing.

The question then becomes whether Haslam is willing to concede that point and start coming down hard on this crap.

If We’re Not like the Soviet Union, Then What Are We Like?

Friend-of-blog, Mike Turner says, “It’s not the Soviet Union. We’re not a dictatorship. We let our people make their own decisions,” when speaking about Democrats who still will not fucking get their noses out of my vagina.

Mike, I love you, but I’m about three seconds away from setting up a reminder on my calendar so that I can send Charlie Curtiss a vagina status update once a day. Today’s would read “Thursday: My vagina is pissed the fuck off at Charlie Curtiss.” I’m going to guess that’s how tomorrow’s would read, too. Probably going to read that way for the foreseeable future.

So, Mike, you ask him whether he’d prefer to get my vagina status updates via text or email. And we’ll just time how long it will take for it to dawn on him that what goes on in my vagina is none of his business.

Meanwhile, having to report my vagina status to some politician sure does feel pretty fucking Soviet to me.

Representative Jeremy Faison is a Jackass

This:

The sponsors say they’re merely legalizing what is already a pervasive practice.

“Let’s be honest. There’s not a parking lot in Tennessee today that doesn’t have a gun inside the car,” Faison says.

Parking lots with weapons in glove boxes include the grounds of the state capitol. Faison admits to keeping firearms in his vehicle while in Nashville.

“I’m not ashamed of it. I’ll tell anybody that,” he says. “I’ll tell the highway patrol. Listen, that’s just part of life.”

Faison, however, would still be breaking the law even if his legislation passes, at least as written now. While the Cocke County representative says he’s “carried a gun all my life.” He says he’s never sent in the paperwork for his handgun permit.

“One day I’ll probably get caught if I don’t get a permit, and I’ll get in trouble,” he says.

He tells the media that he illegally keeps a gun in his trunk while at the state capitol, a gun for which he does not have a permit. This is a man who feels free to make laws that I have to follow. Fuck him. Under this logic, why isn’t weed legal in Tennessee? Hell, you’re a million times more likely to need weed to cope with driving in downtown Nashville than you ever are to need a gun.

Here’s the thing. There’s just an enormous unbridgeable gap between people who think they need a gun every single place they go because shit could break out at any moment and people who don’t. As much as I appreciate that people who carry would like non-gun people to acknowledge that there are safety issues, I think non-gun people would like some acknowledgement that, if you’re a 36 year old white guy who works in a building that already has armed guards, you’re not actually in that much danger from life. Which means you certainly have time–plenty of safe time–between the moment you decide you want a gun in your car and the moment you should actually put a gun in your car to get the proper permit.

I Could Watch This All Day

I have two words for Campfield now that he’s annoyed Ramsey, “Mae Beavers.”

Cultural Imperialism

We’re publishing this book at work that is about the Oportunidades program in Mexico, which is one of the programs Campfield claims to have based his starve-the-kids legislation on. I haven’t read the book yet, since it doesn’t exist, but I’m curious about the author’s claims that this program has strong ties to the eugenics movement in Mexico.

I tried to do some research on Campfield’s bill, to see if there were other bills like it at state level, because I have a hard time believing he wrote it. I think he’s advancing it on some group’s behalf. And I’m curious about that group. One of the things that’s obvious from the discussion surrounding it–even the discussions Campfield claims to be having on his blog–is how closely this bill is tied to the idea that there is some set of people who are “right” and other groups of people that have to be either abused or bribed into acting right, because they, intrinsically, are just wrong acting. The teachers, for instance, that Campfield claims have been calling him up in support of the bill because poor people just aren’t good parents.

You see how insidious it is–this idea that you have the standard for what good parenting is and people who fail to achieve it deserve to suffer. Especially because there’s no reporting if these are the parents of children doing poorly or if these parents are hurrying off to work or what. Always the assumption that, since they aren’t like the viewer, they are up to something wrong.

That push to make people act like you, even if–especially if–how they’re doing is working for them, is a wrong against them, is attempting to strip them of something that is recognizably them. You can see how that feeds into a lot of nasty shit.

In Which I Soften to Governor Baby

After my day in WTF? land–and can I just say that I felt so bad because I had coffee with one of my favorite people on the planet, someone it would have been completely inappropriate to tell about what had just happened, and I couldn’t pay a lick of attention to him. I was completely faking being interested while my brain echoed with, “My god! Why were you going to wipe that lump of earwax and plastic on my desk?! In front of me? Why god, why?!?!?!?!?!”s from earlier in the day. Not that god was going to do that, but… ugh… anyway.–I caught the end of Haslam’s State of the State.

Eh, it didn’t suck. His digs at the federal government are annoying and hilarious. But, in general, he said the things I would expect a non-evil Republican to say. And he seemed willing to put some skin in the game and ask the legislature for at least judicial reform to his liking (and against the liking of many of them). I think it’s going to be interesting to watch him position himself for the next election. Last night, he did some moving-to-the-center bits that made me laugh because it means that he thinks the Tea Party is over. Those folks aren’t a cohesive enough unit anymore to need his pandering.

The thing that’s got to be at the back of his mind–and watch for this because I bet it’s at the back of Beth Harwell’s as well–is that this state already has a large, disgruntled voting block with no state wide candidates that represent them. It’s not that hard to stand in front of the state and say, “Listen, you already know who I am. You already know all the ways my political beliefs differ from yours, so I am never going to unpleasantly surprise you. And look how I’ve managed to reign in the worst impulses of my party.” And it’s not that hard to believe that Democrats would respond to that.

Which, of course, then makes it more likely that Democrats will try to position themselves similarly–which is unfortunate–because you know they’ll think voters are responding positively to Haslam and Harwell’s positions and not to the promise of being who they claim to be and reigning in the far right. So, that’s going to suck and be hilarious.

But look for some reaching out to Democratic voters’ concerns. Haslam and Harwell want those votes.

Some assholes can always find a gal willing to put up with them, huh?

My Love for Will Pinkston Grows

Keeping in mind that I love Will Pinkston like you love a Burmese python slithering through the Everglades, munching on small deer and scaring the shit out of the tourists. I love him with a mixture of “Holy fuck? What the hell is he doing?! Why is he doing that?!” and “Please don’t make me get too close to that.”

The Tennessean today has a great and bizarre story about Pinkston getting in some bizarre fight with everyone at Megan Berry’s house.

Things escalated, with each man now blaming the other. Pinkston called the incident a “heated conversation where I cleared the air, and then Bill Freeman left.”

The gist of the conversation included personal insults and expletives. At one point Barry entered the fray to instill calm, and eventually Freeman and his wife decided to leave. At that point, an angry Pinkston turned his focus to outgoing party chairman Chip Forrester. After another few minutes of intense conversation, Forrester said he and his girlfriend also left the party.

Freeman said he didn’t recognize Pinkston when the 40-year-old school board member approached him about his son’s firing. Freeman said his son left the state Finance and Administration Office on his own accord and was not fired. Freeman said Pinkston crossed a line.

“I felt he was a bully,” said Freeman. “The fact is there’s really nothing he could bully me over.”

Pinkston said he approached Freeman for a frank, but polite, conversation about the rumors regarding his son’s former employment with the state.

“It was quite the holiday moment,” Pinkston said. “Freeman has been telling people from all over town that I had his son fired from state government.” Pinkston said he played no role in the matter.

Forrester said he and his girlfriend left the party after Pinkston seemed “out of control.” Several partygoers declined to comment, but acknowledged the incident created a scene.

And then! Then he admits, “he expressed his lingering frustration with Forrester and Freeman for the direction they’ve taken the state party.” Gosh, yes, if only they’d taken the party in the direction some mean hothead thought it should go! What bad things could come of that?! And this is the nice, improved Pinkston. This is Pinkston trying to get along with folks now that he’s on the school board. This is Mr. “It’s for me to find ways to work with people” Pinkston.

I mean, it makes you wonder if Bredesen just kept him in a cage and threw raw steaks at him before or what. Because if this is “trying to be nice,” his regular old self must just be all piss and vinegar.

(The thing that’s most hilarious about this is that the Republicans have redistricted us into a party whose most reliable districts are urban and black. And the white guys all bemoan how the party needs to spend more attention on “outside of Nashville.” Where they hate Democrats. It’s important to realize that these dustups are happening–and more publicly–not because either of these groups of warring white guys has a good idea for what direction to take the party, but because the era of the white dude Democratic party is over. Our parade doesn’t look that way anymore. But at this second, there’s not someone who looks more like the people who actually vote Democratic–black people, women, gay people, young people who live in cities, etc.–who can get the support of the Executive Committee and step up to be Grand Marshall of said parade. So, we have these two factions fighting over who gets to lead a bunch of people who aren’t going to concede parade leadership to them.

My bet is that what happens is this–the TNDP continues  to flounder. They continue to have amusing public shows of ass to the state. And Democratic politicians start to just bypass them as much as possible to get done what can be done with a smaller apparatus.

To switch metaphors, maybe it’s more like two drunks fighting over who gets to drive you home. It’s not unreasonable to shrug your shoulders and hitch a ride with someone sober. Look for Democratic politicians to just get their own rides.)

Random Thoughts

1. Here’s the problem Rocketown has: these are their defenders in the comments. This is now the problem all people who aren’t comfortable around gay people have: you can either get more comfortable, decide that being uncomfortable isn’t worth fighting over, or these are your allies. It becomes a double-problem when your reason for being uncomfortable around homosexuality is that you’re Christian. Because, surely, if you are Christian and you find yourself on the side of the most hateful people in an argument, the ones wanting any excuse to keep hurting people, it must give you great pause. Even when Jesus admonished sinners, he never took a stance that would have left them publicly more vulnerable to harm. That the “Christian” stance is “leave those gay folks out in the cold” is a problem and its the kind of problem that Christians are going to have to wrestle with for themselves. Because, right now, a lot of people–many of whom are also Christian–are protecting people from Christians. Protecting from. If that doesn’t bother you as a Christian, I don’t even know what to say to you.

2. The Roy Herron thing. I think it just basically means that the troubles continue for the Democratic Party. Folks are rightly worried by a guy aligned too closely to Chip. But that the viable response you have to that is a guy too closely aligned to the bad old “Let’s just pretend we’re Republicans Lite” days is also not good. I mean, what does Roy Herron think a Democrat is? On the third hand, it may be that the Democratic Party does end up running some Republican Lites, because they figure out that they can’t win on their primary ballots, but have a shot at winning in the general. (I don’t think this is going to be true for a few more years, though. Republicans need to get a bit more codified.)

3. $900,000 for nothing? Lord almighty. As much as it pains me, you can’t say that voters were wrong to toss Democrats out on their ears. The level of lazy, genial corruption is just staggering.

4. But that kind of lazy, genial corruption is human nature. And a problem Republicans are going to have is keeping their members from indulging in it. If Tennessee threw Democrats out solely because it’s become a more conservative state, then Republican corruption won’t matter. But if Tennessee at any level threw Republicans out because they thought they were going to get more moral people, then Republicans succumbing to the temptations of office is a huge problem for them. And one they should not forget.