Here’s the predictable map breakdown of counties voting for and nay on gay marriage.  The one county in Eastern Washington that came out in favor in the one centered with the college town of Pullman.

So, what you’re watching on the day of the Big Jubilee of Gay Marriage in Washington State… Or Something I’m watching — the Rural Gay Marriage rate in Washington State, ala Eastern Washington.  Yakima, for instance?

If any same-sex couples plan to wed in Yakima County after such unions become legal Dec. 6, they haven’t shown much interest to the Auditor’s Office.
While other county auditor offices, such as King County, have received enough interest to open for extra hours when the new law takes effect, Yakima County Auditor Corky Mattingly said her office has no such plans.
Mattingly said her office has received one phone call specific to same-sex marriage so far.
It’s also not something the county plans to keep tabs on, although such licenses are public record.
“We won’t be tracking how many same-gender couples get licenses,” Mattingly said. “We treat them just like any other couple.”

Hm de hm hm.  Compare that, of course, with...

From JFK:  The Man ant the Myth, Victor Lasky, 1963.  The bias is certainly against Kennedy, and Lasky is unable to see anything good out of Kennedy.  Also it should be pointed out in partisan terms, Johnson wasn’t the boogey man and could be shuttled aside against the real enemy of Kennedy.  Thus, this:

The break that Johnson had been waiting for came on Tuesday.  In routine fashion, Kennedy headquarters had sent wires to various delegations requesting an audience for Jack.  This was the sort of miscalculation which Kennedy had feared.  Johnson replied with a telegram suggesting a joint caucus of the Texas and Massachusetts delegations and a debate on the major issues.  Kennedy declined the honor and assumed the debate was off. Lyndon assumed no such thing and announced that Texas would hold an important business meeting at 2:15 pm, and the delegations would expect Kennedy and the Massachusetts delegation in the grand ballroom of the Biltmore.  The spider was spinning his web.  […]

At 2:45 pm, Lyndon rode in with his boys from the Cattle Country.  Dressed in tv blues, he was all set for his showdown.  Unlimbering his oratorical artillery, Lyndon asked whether anyone who could speak for Kennedy knew where the Senator was.  The Senator was upstairs in Apartment Q, not knowing what to do.  The phone rang.  It was Governor Hollings.  “You’re going down to that debate, aren’t you?” Hollings asked.  Jack said he didn’t think so.  “You’d better get down there,” drawled the South Carolinian.  “I’m watching that commentator on TV and he’ll ruin you if you don’t.”
It was 3:12 pm before the author of that book on political courage arrived in the jam-packed ballroom.  And Lyndon was right glad to welcome him.  Lyndon, in presenting his colleague, said he was “a man of unusually high character,”  ” a great intellect” as well as “a dedicated and devoted public servant.”  Lyndon sounded very sincere.
As he rose to speak, Kennedy’s trembling legs made his trousers flutter, and beads of sweat tumbled from his upper lip.  He made a set speech about the need for developing natural resources, facing up to new problems, and so forth.  We stand, he said, on the Razor Edge of Decision.  Against Kennedy’s conciliatory remarks, Lyndon unloosed a barrage of sarcasm, the likes of which have rarely been heard in a face-to-face encounter.  Johnson pistol-whipped his guest unmercifully.  He repeatedly drew attention to Kennedy’s voting record and Senate absenteeism.  He questioned Kennedy’s devotion to the former and reminded his audience that he was for rural telephones long before some people had ever seen an outhouse. And he brought up the religious issue, an action that did not appear to appeal to Kennedy.  “I think, Jack, we Protestants proved in West Virginia that we’ll vote for a Catholic,” he bawled.  “What we want is some of the Catholic states to prove that they’ll vote for a Protestant.”
With each sharp shaft — and they were coming quickly — the Johnson loaded room hooted and cheered.  The back of Kennedy’s neck began to redden, though his face remained expressionless.  His hands trembled as he appeared to be making notes on the back of an envelope.
And, bellowed Johnson, where were certain people during all those quorum calls on the civil rights bills?  “There were 45 roll calls on civil rights in recent months,” he observed.  “Lyndon Johnson answered every one of them.”  But, he added, there were some people who would like to be President who failed to set much of a record.  “I know Senators who missed as many as 34 of those roll calls,” he thundered.
Bobby whispered in to brother Jack’s ear.  Kennedy’s face remained expressionless.  And when Johnson finally concluded, Kennedy arose and made jokes.  “The Senator wasn’t specific in his remarks about voting on civil rights legislation,” said Kennedy.  So I presume he was talking about some other candidate.  Then, accompanied by brother Bobby, Jack Kennedy hurriedly rushed out of the Texans’ den of iniquity.   Superman had more than met his match in Big Daddy.
“Flogged and whimpering, Kennedy bit it off and departed,” reported Murray Kempton  from the battle scene.  “This is the posture to be expected of all Booth Tarkington adolescents.  The Kennedy boys are essentially punks.  As he himself said to this repository of the affectations of politicians yesterday, this is the way weak people act.  There are men and there are boys.  Lyndon Johnson, say what you will, is a man; Jack Kennedy is a boy.  No matter what anyone else might say, Lyndon placed Jack across his knee and spanked that shrunken bottom. […]”

……………………….

From Robert A Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson:  The Passage of Power, 2012.  Caro is constructing a narrative where Johnson falls mightily from the perch of power up to the time he becomes President — Kennedy serving here as a foil of a strong political figure he underestimate but who then cuts him up, and thus we get this:

It was only a form telegram, but when Johnson received it, he seized upon it as the opening he had been waiting for: the opening that could, even at this late moment, change everything — a chance to trap Kennedy into a debate.  “I want to get on the same podium with Jack,” he told Irv Hoff.  “I’ll destroy him.”
Connally, Reedy, and Busby, when they were called in, were unanimously enthusiastic: “one major error” by Kennedy, Connally felt, and the Kennedy bandwagon, which he believed was not yet on completely firm ground anyway, would be overturned.  […]

As he took his seat on the stage, Kennedy wasn’t at ease — a reporter noticed his leg shaking under his trousers — but no one  seeing only his face would have known it.  And when he rose to speak, looking at the ballroom that, as one Texas reporter wrote, “Johnson had packed full of his folks,” Kennedy said with a smile that he was glad the vote for the nominated wasn’t taken there.  “I doubt whether there is any great groundswell for Kennedy in the Texas delegation,” he said.  The audience chuckled at that, and laughed when, after promising to campaign for Johnson if Johnson won the nomination, he said, “And if I am nominated, I am confident that Senator Johnson will take me by the hand and lead me through the length and breadth of Texas.”  He said he wasn’t going to argue with Johnson on the issues — “because I don’t think Senator Johnson and I disagree on the great issues that are facing us” — and said he admired him for his work as Majority Speaker.  […]  When Kennedy sat down at the end of his opening statement, there was quite a bit of rather warm applause.
Johnson started off on Phil Graham’s “high road.” although it was an arm-waving blustering journey […]  He had gotten a Civil Rights Bill through the Senate, he said, but not every Senator had been present to help him.  “Six days and nights we had 24 hour sessions,” he said, shouting every word.  “Lyndon Johnson answered every one of the fifty quorum calls.  Some men who would be president answered none.”  He had voted in forty-five roll calls, he said.  “Some Senators missed 34.”  A Texas legislator, George Nokes, leaned over and whispered loudly to the other people in the aisle, “Lyndon sure bear-trapped him, didn’t he?”
After a brief, whispered conference with his brother, Kennedy rose to reply.  Johnson’s face had been grim as he spoke.  On Kennedy’s face was a grin.  Senator Johnson had criticized some Senators, he said, but he had not identified those he was talking about, so “I assume he was talking about some other candidate, not me.”  The grin broadened.  “I want to commend him for a wonderful record answering quorum calls,” he said.
People in the audience started to chuckle, and then others started to laugh, and a wave of laughter swept over the hall.  Turning to Johnson, Kennedy shook his hand for the photographers, and walked out of the hall, his little band following him.
Watching Johnson as Kennedy spoke, Arthur Schlesinger saw his face change.  “Johnson felt that Kennedy had the drop on him,” he was to say.  That was what the Texas delegation thought, too — even those who, like Jim Wright, had been Johnson’s “eager disciples.”  Wright, a very tough politician — […] was to recall decades later […] “By the time he ended, he had our admiration — begrudging but admiration.”  In fact, in describing the debate, Wright bestowed on Kennedy what was, for a Texan, the highest accolade possible.  Jack Kennedy, he was to recall, had reminded him that afternoon of the legendary Texas Ranger who was sent in 1906 to a city down on the Rio Grande border […] “only one Ranger?” “only one riot” […]

“Really, it didn’t come off as we had expected it to,” Jake Jacobson says.  […] “He got cured once and for all of getting into a debate with Jack Kennedy,” Irv Hoff says.

One item off of Jim Demint’s  Senate career that sticks in mind, as he wheedled and pumped up his “Tea Party” endorsements and pac money contributions… Sharron Angle had juice with Jim Demint.

Angle, who has hammered Reid for cutting deals in Washington, goes on to say that the Tea Party movement gives her “juice,” or clout, and offers to share it with Ashjian. “That’s really all I can offer you, is whatever juice I have, you have as well,” she says. “You want to see DeMint, I have juice with him….I go to Washington, D.C. and want to see Jim DeMint, he’s right there for me. I want to see Tom Coburn, he’s right there for me. I want to see Mitch McConnell, he’s there.”

This was mostly hoo-hum stuff — she’s trying to get a third party spoiler to back out by arguing her coming influence with power-brokers such as Jim Demint.  Nonetheless, what sold it into the “crazy train” sphere was the phrasing — “I’ll have Jim Demint Juice”.  Yes.  Jim Demint Juice.  Exactly what you want.  Naturally Harry Reid pounced on this “juice” talk and released this ad.  “Made with real Demint”.

And now he’s quitting the Senate to head the Heritage Foundation.  Reportedly the reason is that he doesn’t like being in the Minority.  Or, to put it another way… doesn’t have enough Juice after all.  He has to go elsewhere to get more juice.

From The National Review’s “Now What?”, hand-wringing after the election.  Jay Nordlinger “Against the Tide” — this is from a mish of his article online and a slightly variation that is in the print edition.

When Hillary Clinton said “It takes a village,” a lot of conservatives objected. The full saying is, “It takes a village to raise a child.” One can certainly understand the objections. But, in an important sense, it does take a village to raise a child. Children are shaped by everything around them: in the home and outside it.
 Way back in the mid-1980s, Tipper Gore wrote a book called Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. Tipper and her husband were dabbling in a kind of social conservatism at the time. They dropped it quick — because all the cool cats, such as Frank Zappa (I remember him specifically), mocked and reviled them. Social conservatism is not the way to rise in the Democratic party. They rose.
Who runs the village?  What are the forces that shape men and women?  Well, we could name education, IK through graduate school.  The movies.  Popular music.  Entertainment television.  The news media.  In all of these areas, the Left holds sway.  Where does the Right hold sway?  Country music, talk radio, NASCAR, it’s hard to go on.

From Michael Knox Beran’s article on how Obama won 8 of the nation’s ten richest counties and what this means for the whole “Country Club” thing, “Obama’s Coddled Elites“:

And why should they keep track of them (deficits, tax dollars), when the most respectable oracles of the coastal suburbs — the New York Times, PBS, Diane Sawyer, Andrea Mitchell, David Letterman, et alia — readily assure you that under President Obama “it’s all swell”?

Too busy going back to the well of Clinton — Lewinsky jokes and Bush Dumb jokes is that last one, methinks.

Well, if hey Left is getting Obama re-elected through its powerful bases in the Hollywood media, what is the Right left with?  They have the important niches in the Military Politico Complex, I think.  Jay Leno, maybe?  Also all military related movies.  Red Dawn and the remake of Red Dawn… from John J Miller’s appreciation of Red Dawn:

The violence of Red Dawn serves a grander purpose than cheap thrills: It means to show that the Second Amendment is in the Constitution for a good reason. Early in the film, the camera lingers on a Chevy truck’s bumper sticker: “They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.” Then the image tilts to the ground, where a Soviet pries a pistol from the cold, dead fingers of a fallen American. It may feel like an ad for the National Rifle Association — recall the late Charlton Heston’s rallying cry at the 2000 NRA convention, “From my cold, dead hands!” In this case, the slogan works as an ironic epitaph. As the story of Red Dawn plays out, however, America’s gun culture allows the Wolverines to fight back.

Red Dawn also fights forward. In 2003, the movie made the news when U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein. The deposed Iraqi dictator was discovered in a location known as “Wolverine Two” in a raid called “Operation Red Dawn.” The code name was the brainchild of Army captain Geoffrey McMurray, then 29 years old. “I think all of us in the military have seen Red Dawn,” he told USA Today. “Operation Red Dawn was so fitting because it was a patriotic, pro-American movie.” Milius applauded the effort, telling the Los Angeles Times that the soldiers who found Hussein “are Wolverines who have grown up and gone to Iraq.” A handful of liberals uttered dutiful harrumphs, noting that in Iraq, Americans were the oppressing invaders and the Iraqi insurgents were the scrappy rebels.

They just refuse to let go — and they’re already mobilizing against the new Red Dawn. In September, Joe Leydon of Variety mocked “a premise arguably even sillier than the original Red Dawn.” He may have a valid point. In the 2012 release, the Soviets are gone, tossed upon the ash heap of history. Their replacements are the North Koreans, whose attempted conquest of the United States requires not just an old-fashioned suspension of disbelief but an indulgence of gobsmacking ignorance.

 More on the implausibility of the Red Dawn redux scenario, here.  And how maybe something can be said for cutting Defense spending out of it.

The new version of Red Dawn, like the original, centers around a foreign invasion of the U.S. The country that manages to invade this time is North Korea, a pariah state with a military budget generously estimated at $9 billion, compared with about $650 billion for the U.S. The North Korean economy is so battered that famines are a regular occurrence. This inadvertently lends the movie’s plot a smidgen of plausibility, since any North Korean invasion of the U.S. probably could be defeated by a misfit band of teenage dropouts.

Originally it was China, but China wouldn’t let it — and the studio needs that market and all — so it’s changed from one implausible scenario to a more implausible one.  Just as well — let’s lose all illusion of “moral in the story” of Military Preparedness.  (No.  That’s what Eliot Abrams claimed.)

From David Sirota’s “Back to Our Future” on 80s pop culture and its political imprint

In 1997, after reports that “Red Dawn” was one of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s favorite films, MGM/United Artists vice president Peter Bart revealed to Variety that when his company first considered the movie’s script, the studio’s CEO “declared in no uncertain terms that he wanted to make the ultimate jingoistic movie.” The studio subsequently recruited Reagan’s recently departed secretary of state, retired general Alexander Haig, to serve on MGM’s corporate board, “consult with [‘Red Dawn’s’] director and inculcate the appropriate ideological tint.” Though the screenplay’s first draft strived to lament the tragedies of war, Bart recounted how the studio “demanded to know why [it] should try to remake ‘Lord of the Flies’ when it could instead try for ‘Rambo.’” […]

For that access, the military began exacting a price. The Pentagon’s focus on juveniles created the heavy hand it was beginning to use to shape popular culture in the 1980s. Increasingly, for filmmakers to gain access to even the most basic military scenery, Pentagon gatekeepers began requiring major plot and dialogue changes so as to guarantee that the military was favorably portrayed. In a Variety story from 1994, the Pentagon’s official Hollywood liaison, Phil Strub, put it bluntly: “The main criteria we use [for approval] is … how could the proposed production benefit the military … could it help in recruiting [and] is it in sync with present policy?” […]

As if that carrot-stick dynamic weren’t coercive enough to aspiring filmmakers, the Pentagon in the 1980s expanded the definition of “cooperation” to include collaboration on screenplays as scripts were being initially drafted. “It saves [writers] time from writing stupid stuff,” said one official in explaining the new process.

And so we have Will and Grace and Red Dawn, and I guess it’s the perimeters of what we get elected.

Here’s an editorial of… “Huh”.   GOP Senators Need to Radicalize.  Yes.  Because…

Over the last two years, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid has ruled over the United States Senate like some kind of 19th century potentate.

How?

Reid has single-handedly blocked legislation, prevented the Senate from voting on healthcare repeal

Har de har.

Reid decides what amendments will be offered and by whom, leading to an increase in the number of times the GOP has had to resort to the filibuster.

Har de har.

And vulnerable Democratic Senators that need to be targetted in 2014?  Alaska’s Mark Begich, Arkansas’s Mark Pryor, and Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu (all of course) and, of course…

as well as Minnesota’s Al Franken—the accidental senator who likely won election only because of illegal votes cast by convicted felons.

Har de har … Wait.  What?

Well, there’s this comment…

I lived in MN – if you don’t have first-hand knowledge don’t comment! There was definite voter fraud. About 1,000 felons (still in prison mind you) voted for him and there were more people who voted than were in the princinct. I’d say those two things alone prove voter fraud. He only won by a few hundred votes.
I left the state 3 years ago because it has been ruined by you left-wing communists.

3 years ago the Left-wing Communist Dictator of Minnesota would have been… urm… Tim Pawlenty?

Two more tea party primary pickers out there!  Their ideological crimes in italics.

In Texas, the victory of Sen.-elect Ted Cruz over establishment-backed Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is fueling speculation that Sen. John Cornyn could be in for a primary fight of his own. Cornyn recently penned an editorial calling for spending cuts but didn’t nix tax increases entirely.
But in a state as big and expensive to run in as Texas, it seems unlikely another candidate could duplicate Cruz’s win.
In Kansas, tea party activists are looking for someone to challenge Sen. Pat Roberts, who so far has remained silent on the issue of tax increases.

Hm indeed.

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Claire McCaskill pointed out that she’d met Grover Norquist for the first time backstage, then asked a pretty good question: “Who is he?”

Hm.  Just looking up Doc Hastings to see what the news and commentary are all about with him, what I’m getting is a bunch of conservative sites (Michele Malkin, Pajama Media, “The Right Reason”) railing against an Obama Administration decision involving protecting the habitat for the Spotted Owl.

One:  What is this — 1991?
Two:  As always, the big  news story on Doc Hastings is what animal can be stood for down-sizing.  Or, goes into the loop of counter-intuitive protection by habitat exploitation.

Hastings has his studies — and it goes into circulation as de facts — showing bringing the habitat down will be good for the Owls.
… So it goes.

I’ve heard some positive reviews of the new Lincoln biopic… from people who like this sort of thing — who like forms of slow mo speecifying with reminiscent Ken Burns esque film-making.  It’s “Oscar Bait”, but good Oscar Bait…

Then there’s this dissent.  Making political points and getting over to…

he tension driving the film is between Lincoln’s conviction that the Constitution must be amended to ban slavery before the Confederacy’s surrender, and the countervailing political pressures to negotiate an immediate peace and sacrifice all chance of a 13th Amendment. Lincoln’s argument rests on the status of slaves not as people but as war contraband belonging to the victorious North. The amendment’s enactment, therefore, is depicted not as a triumph of morality but, as the result of clever lawyering, petty patronage and personal will.

The action centers on the governing elites, depicting Lincoln as the ultimate insider. Thus, if you are only going to see one Lincoln biopic this year, I heartily recommend instead Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which—after a brief theatrical run this summer—is now available on DVD. Its fantastical narrative is actually the more truthful in showing how revolutionary change gets accomplished through the militancy and mobilization of outsiders and the oppressed.

Just to make the bottom down approach, I guess.  I suppose they’ll only love a Jefferson biopic if it slides into this realm.

Wake me up when the Chester Arthur biopic comes out.