I remember my first ever Easter egg hunt. I scoured the lawn and didn't find a single egg. My basket was totally empty. And as I trudged back in all my sadness, I happened upon one purple egg stuck in some deep grass. It just happened to be the egg with the "winner" note inside that earned the basket full of the best goodies. How quickly fortunes change.
- In case you thought John Derbyshire didn't have his defenders on the right for the disgustingly racist screed that got him canned by the National Review, here's a piece from a minion of the late Breitbart. See, we should actually be thanking Derbyshire for exposing the fact that everyone's still just a little bit racist. Really.
- Jezebel, on the Christian right's attempts to defeat anti-bullying legislation:
I hate to break it to Christian groups, but if your kid's straightness is so flimsy that it depends on his ability to punch the kids who can't throw a spiral pass in gym class, your kid is probably going to start secretly dating an older man named Bruce or Lance once he gets to college. Rejecting anti-bullying laws is akin to codifying repression and shame. And that's a pretty crappy way to live.
- AMERICAblog Gay would like folks to take a moment and email Landmark Theatres at Q1Landmark@gmail.com to urge them to show a (gay) marriage equality documentary at their cinemas nationwide. Make sure you include where you're from. You can read more about it here.
- The latest front in the war on spam: describes the online strategy of the re-election campaign:
The Obama campaign is by far the most aggressive in trying to reach voters online, so far spending more on Internet advertising than on television, radio and telemarketing combined. And the president’s campaign has spent five times more on online ads — jumping from $2.3 million to $12.3 million — than at this point four years ago, when he was running against Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, federal disclosure records show.
- This is from a few days ago, but it's no less crucial. False equivalence in the media has long driven many of us nuts. John Cole had perhaps the best take on the subject, back some three years ago:
I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.
Cole is spot on, but the high broderists in the media have this slavish devotion to stenography and the suggestion that any failure is automatically the fault of both parties. At the AP lunch, President Obama took that idea to task in no minced words:
I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and an equivalence is presented — which reinforces I think people’s cynicism about Washington generally. [The debate over deficit reduction] is not one of those situations where there’s an equivalence. I’ve got some of the most liberal Democrats in Congress who were prepared to make significant changes to entitlements that go against their political interests, and who said they were willing to do it. And we couldn’t get a Republican to stand up and say, we’ll raise some revenue, or even to suggest that we won’t give more tax cuts to people who don’t need them.
This is an absolutely crucial point. For better or for worse, President Obama has made every single good-faith effort to negotiate and compromise with the Republican Party. Since 2010 especially, that favor has rarely if ever been returned. That would be more tolerable if the media were more willing to report the truth about these negotiations, instead of playing stenographer for the talking points of both sides. But as it stands now, the media figures who obsess over bipartisanship actually prevent bipartisanship from happening when they provide cover to the Republican Party's extremists while giving no plaudits the only side that is willing to make any concessions.