Live Painting

What an honor it was to be at an event like today! The city of San Jose dedicated a street after @BarackObama and asked me to do live a painting. 🎨 It was an awesome day, thank you Mayor @sliccardo and senator @DaveCortese for having me ✌🏾@BarackObama @ChelseaClinton pic.twitter.com/fOSu1budZq

— Tyler Gordon (@tygordonsworld) August 23, 2021

afternoon all

Get the poster here

Steve Benen: …. as it turns out, Bush’s approval rating the summer before his re-election bid isn’t much different than President Obama’s current approval rating. Bush had a few months to see his support grow; Obama has a year.

And why did Bush’s support grow from the mid-40s to the low-50s? Chait argued, persuasively, that voters starting seeing the president “within the context of a partisan choice,” and decided they liked him more after taking a look at the wealthy Massachusetts challenger with an awkward personality and who was often accused of flip-flopping.

Ahem.

…. If Republicans were a popular party with a popular agenda, this would be a very different story. Likewise, if Obama were a poor campaigner facing a charismatic GOP frontrunner, I’d a different set of expectations. But I’ve seen a lot of Obama political obituaries, and at this point, none of them have proven persuasive to me.

Full post here

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Videos from Cannes:

gosh, why isn’t fox reporting this stuff!?

digby? i think i love you.

Digby: …it started off well, calling out the Governor on his union breaking goals. But then he … proceeded to denigrate the protesters as fools….

I’m so glad we have Jon Stewart around to reduce all political activities of ordinary people into a clown show. It makes it much easier to maintain our ironic distance. Silly people making noises in public is really beneath all smart liberals … the only respectable way for people to engage in politics is to let Jon Stewart explain it all to us in our special coded hipster humor…

… he’s telling liberals that it’s more important to behave in a dignified, fair fashion than to stand up for your beliefs in a way that could be perceived as unseemly or one-sided. That makes you as bad as the other side.

Except, of course, it really doesn’t. It’s really about what you’re fighting for. Tea partiers were trying to stop the federal government from reforming our health care system so that middle class workers will not go broke or die if they get sick. The Wisconsin protesters are trying to stop the Republican governor from making it illegal for them to belong to a union so that they can live a decent middle class life …

…. I’m sorry that people are misbehaving and failing to have the Oxford style debate that Stewart seems to think we should have … calls for “civility” are usually just a way to shut people up … this is why Colbert’s satire is so much more effective and, frankly, much braver. His satire is firmly aimed at the right, so he cannot take both sides. That’s why it works – it takes a position. By contrast, I’m increasingly not finding Jon’s church-lady finger wagging all that funny….

Read the full post here (also includes clips from the Daily Show)

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I loved this post so much, I almost hugged my monitor 😳 – it summed up everything I feel about Stewart, the kid who reckons he’s cool because he sneers at anyone who shows some real passion about a cause. Of course I loved him when he targeted Bush, but that’s because I thought he actually stood for what is right. I get it now, he just sneers at everyone – it’s the cool thing to do.

Stewart would, most probably, sneer at this man’s passion too:

State Rep Gordon Hintz – from Crooks and Liars

good luck tomorrow, gordon!

President Obama with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown

oh….gordon