I've wondered about Rodin's famous sculpture. Is he engaged in deep thought or sitting around wasting time? And why isn't he wearing pants? I ask the same of myself. Here we comment on well, mostly politics. Or we may just sit! If you like it, tell a friend. If not, tell us, but please read the GROUND RULES before you do.
Don't you just love it when a plan comes together! For teetering Republicans who promised to stand with Mitch McConnell in lockstep opposition to financial reform, that tall grass, those hills . . . look pretty inviting. Their timing is impeccable, too, promising to shore up the Wall Street bankers on the very day Goldman Sachs is charged by the SEC with defrauding investors, including Main Street pension funds. The Democrats, for once, were quick to produce an ad connecting the dots between Mitch McConnell, propagandist Frank Luntz, and Wall Street banks that are fiercely opposing financial regulation. And the taxpayers have yet to be made whole for the TARP bailout. These people are shameless.
How long did the lying punk with the bad complexion think he’d get a free pass for his self-promotion for corporate dollars, doing GOP business on the side? The Frank Luntz memos from his group, the (lyin') “Word Doctors,” have finally come back to bite him in the ass. Keep in mind, this little punk with rosacea makes a living telling politicians how to LIE on a grand scale. First it was the LIES about healthcare (hundreds of them), next Luntz is at it again with financial regulatory reform. And the punk is arrogant enough in his perceived ability to manipulate public opinion with lies that he outlines it all in informative memos (look them up -- they're in PDF format.)
This time, the Democrats pushed back against the punk’s toxic games. Republicans are nothing if not robotic. When it comes to repeating the Luntz talking points they march in lockstep. By putting words/LIES in Mitch McConnell’s mouth, Luntz incensed not only Democrats who have been working all year toward regulating derivatives and establishing a financial consumer protection agency, but also Mitch McConnell’s hometown newspaper. It exposed the Republican leader’s dalliances with Wall Street bankers with (for a red state paper) unusual but welcome ferocity:
“McConnell's statements are perfectly calibrated to inflame the public. He insists the bill would “allow endless taxpayer-funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks.” Their resemblance to the truth is another matter.
We have read that the Republicans have a plan for financial reform, but McConnell isn't talking up any solutions, just trashing the other side's ideas with no respect for the truth.
The provision to which McConnell particularly objects creates an orderly process for letting “too big to fail” banks fail, at the industry's expense, without taking down the entire economy.
The losers would be the management and shareholders, not the taxpayers. So onerous would this process be for failing financial institutions, says (Va. Sen.) Warner, that it would serve as a deterrent to reckless decision-making.
The high-stakes gamblers on Wall Street, luxuriating again in big bonuses, don't want any new oversight or regulation. Why would they, knowing that the government would have to bail them out again if their trading of worthless financial instruments goes bust and threatens to bring on the next Great Depression?
McConnell, unabashedly courting Wall Street bankers for political money, is happy to scratch their backs if they'll scratch his.”
You’ve gone to that well once too often, punk. Despite the Luntzes of this world, eventually, yes eventually . . . the truth will out.
It comes as no surprise that Bill-O “the Clown” O’Really is a consistent LIAR. Lying is an essential prerequisite for hosting ANY program at Fox. The problem Boss Murdoch has with Bill-O is YA GOTTA BE GOOD AT IT! Murdoch has been after O’Really’s ass for some time –- it’s one thing to have too many pea brains with oversized egos bouncing off the padded walls at Fox; but when one tries going rogue . . . Aarghh!
It got so that Keith Olbermann had to come to Bill-O’s defense –- where else could he mine so much clownish material?! (See below.) But first, Bill-O’s caught with his head way up his ass and he’s too skeert to accept the video evidence and admit he’s full of shit. Let’s face it, Bill-O, when Neil Cavuto starts putting on “objective journalist” airs to knock you down a peg or two or three or more, you’ve got to be scraping the humiliation bottom of the barrel.
Hmm . . . I smell a catfight brewing at Fox-y. Look out for the Pigman’s pussy cat, Clown-boy. Meeow.
The Teabaggers claim millions will be in attendance. The correct number is thousands. Most mainstream media, including MSNBC, either colluded with the Teabaggers yesterday to inflate their Boston Common Palin rally numbers or were too lazy to check. (Tebaggers claimed 10,000 -– the number was 5,000 at best, even to the untrained eye looking at the overhead crowd shot.) When Bill Maher told Chris Matthews he should stop paying so much attention to an idiot like Sarah Palin, Matthews used the false inflated figure to justify the coverage. Only Keith Olbermann cared enough to correct his colleagues’ sloppy reporting.
There is an interesting New York Times article that says Teabaggers are about 18% of the population and predominantly right wing Republicans. That sounds about right. We all know the type: white, obnoxious, selfish, right wing, schoolyard bully, with a sense of privileged entitlement to their Medicare and Social Security. Education?! Perhaps the Institute for Advanced Eugenics, or home schooling. This finding is particularly hilarious, given the Times’ past reporting of the Teabaggers’ major sources of information, e.g., Fox “News,” and conspiracist demagogues Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. Educated people do not get their news from such sources. Entertainment, perhaps; news and hard information, never.
Teabaggers claim to be against high taxation; “Taxed Enoung Already” -- that’s just a slogan in search of meaning within a gaggle of disorganized groups whose members do not believe they’re overly taxed. Teabaggers are hypocrites. You won’t hear this enough. It’s a truth that needs to be said and repeated over and over again.
Teabaggers are uncomfortable around people of different cultures, lifestyles, and race. They HATE the party that gave them their entitlements, and HATE President Obama for trying to extend it to other Americans who were left out. They don’t seem to care that the Democratic Party has fought tooth and nail over the decades to preserve their benefits from Republican attempts to dismantle them. They’re confident they can buy enough Republican votes to preserve their entitlements while shafting the rest of the country and future generations. Teabaggers are in no mood to share.
Teabaggers cling to a misplaced sense of white upper- to upper-middle-class entitlement –- the poor, African Americans and Latinos, citizens all, do not deserve what they have because, for Teabaggers, being poor is being indigent and lazy in their eyes. Teabaggers brush off the internal contradiction that they get back from the government much more than they paid into the system. Critical thinking is not their forte. Destruction, obstruction, hatred, mindless opposition, is. They are PROUD hypocrites or, as one T-shirt proclaimed, “PROUD RIGHT WING EXTREMIST(s).”
Teabaggers do not care that those who are younger and pay into the system as they did, are just as entitled to future benefits as they are to their benefits NOW. If they profess to care, it’s an abstract rationalization having to do with spiraling deficits. Tough grits for the younger generations, as long as the Teabaggers get to keep theirs untouched by government reform. If anything, the fact that younger generations will get shafted in the Teabaggers’ egocentric paradigm, only validates their back-to-high schoolyard bully rallies.
Teabaggers are selfish, brainwashed by decades of right wing propaganda, brutish, angry and racist by nature. If they believe in God, it must be the evangelical capitalist and avenging variety. Or they must not take religion very seriously. Teabaggers do not believe in climate change. Their role models likely include Massey mine company CEO Don Blankenship, whose rabid anti-government, anti-union right wing Republican views fits right in with the Teabagger profile. Most of all, Teabaggers cannot grasp the concept that Social Security and Medicare are social contracts between American citizens and their government that should be collectively honored and constructively remedied.
Teabaggers are LOATHSOME excuses for carbon-based life forms.
President Obama ordered a sweeping review of coal mine safety directing Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and her team to “work with the Justice Department to ensure that every tool in the federal government is available in this investigation” so that such disasters never happen again. “Owners responsible for conditions in the Upper Big Branch mine should be held accountable for decisions they made and preventive measures they failed to take.”
The President emphasized that while the investigation is ongoing, “we do know that this tragedy was triggered by a failure at the Upper Big Branch mine -- a failure first and foremost of management, but also a failure of oversight and a failure of laws so riddled with loopholes that they allow unsafe conditions to continue.” He pledged to hold accountable “safety violators LIKE MASSEY [that] have still been able to find ways to put their bottom line before the safety of their workers -- filing endless appeals instead of paying fines and fixing safety problems.” Noting that for a long time the mine safety agency was stacked with former mine executives and industry players, i.e. cronies of Republican Party donor and Massey CEO Don Blankenship, President Obama added, the agency “is now run, I’m proud to say, by former miners and health safety experts like Joe Main and Kevin Stricklin.”
The President concluded: “we all understand that underground coal mining is, by its very nature, dangerous. Every miner and every mining family understands this. But we know what can cause mine explosions, and we know how to prevent them. I REFUSE TO ACCEPT ANY NUMBER OF MINER DEATHS AS SIMPLY A COST OF BUSINESS.”
YES! Thank you, Mr. President, for listening to the voices clamoring for JUSTICE for coal miners from predator criminal mining CEOs like Don Blankenship. HIS cost of staying employed, let alone staying out of jail, has just gone up exponentially.
McCain deserves to lose his easy primary race the way he’s been acting. The once respected war hero is running scared from a challenge by right wing talk radio host nonentity JD Hayworth. Despite being ahead in the polls, having a money advantage, and counting on the Republican star power of Sarah Palin and Scott Brown, Gramps insists, amazingly, he never considered himself a “maverick.” He must think his voters don’t watch Jon Stewart:
What’s puzzling is, why would he run away from “maverick”? Isn’t his former independent image an asset with the Teabaggers? One can only speculate that some political consultant trying to earn his or her keep convinced Gramps that “maverick” must be code for “alien” or the “other” as in “not one of us.”
This series of uplifting Hayworth ads must have really messed with McCain’s head:
Mother Superior Jump the Gun. Forty years after the Beatles’ breakup, the Vatican says “never mind” to its decades-old condemnation of the group. Said the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano:
“It's true they took drugs; swept up by their success, they lived dissolute and uninhibited lives. [You must mean pederast priests?] They even said they were more famous than Jesus. But, listening to their songs, all of this seems distant and meaningless. Their beautiful melodies, which changed forever pop music and still gives us emotions, live on like precious jewels.”
Ringo Starr was not impressed:
Waiting for Benedict. The Vatican has issued a directive that requires bishops to report sexual abuse to the police. Wow. There’s a novel concept. Here we are, well into the 21st century, and the Vatican must be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th.
Teabaggers and Oklahoma Legislators Plot Sedition. They want to “create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.” State senator Randy Brogodon, who is running for governor, said the Teabaggers spoke to him and he believes the Second Amendment authorizes such a militia. I must have missed the part where the Constitution gives citizens the right to take arms against the government.
What are the crazies afraid of? Is it the healthcare law? Is it the President’s birthright? Perhaps they need a refresher in civics –- the Constitution provides for three branches of government, elections, the right to keep and bear arms, etc, etc. To hear Gerhardt describe it, they’re just a law abiding gathering of armed citizens. His idea is to start 20 or 30 such state militias so that there will be no need for action against the feds. In other words, they plan to intimidate the federal government and citizens who do not agree with this lunacy with the threat of armed violence in order to make the feds bend to their demands. In a word: SEDITION.
There is historic precedent for this. A similar thing occurred on the eve of the Civil War when the party in power was accused of diverting improperly obtained federal funds to Southern states “to arm militias for an insurrection against the government over the slavery issue.” (Lincoln for President – Bruce Chadwick) Somehow, healthcare reform, majority vote rule, the stimulus bill, and the financial bailout do not rise to the level of unconstitutional secession. Not for most reasonable people.
The rise of right wing extremism in this country is real. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks these things, says there has been a 240% increase in anti-government groups, militias, and organizations this year alone. To the extent Republicans, at the state and national level, right wing hate radio and Fox “News” encourage the militias and Teabaggers, they should be held responsible for any violence that results.
Can the Teabaggers Be Any More Ignorant? They follow an idiot carney crier who profited off their dwindling funds by $12 million this year. If that’s not an obscene transfer of wealth from the needy to the slothful I don’t know what is. Sister Sarah incites, inflames, and laughs all the way to the bank. They fall prey to cynical Republicans whose hubris and arrogance knows no bounds. Frank “Goebbels” Luntz, the bad-complexioned propagandist who does all the thinking for Republicans is back at it, putting talking points in Mitch McConnell’s mouth. Time Magazine did a great job deconstructing McConnell’s words side-by-side with the Luntz propaganda memo to defeat financial reform on behalf of their corporate puppet masters. Can’t McConnell think for himself? Does he need a little punk of a self-important political consultant with rosacea to tell him what to say? After all, he is the Senate Republican leader.
Mitch McConnell is shameless. After soliciting contributions from Wall Street bankers, McConnell took to the Senate floor to oppose any and all Democratic attempts to impose strict regulatory reforms on financial institutions so that the Bush financial meltdown will not happen again. Paul Krugman called “Orwellian” McConnell’s charge that re-regulation would lead to another “too big to fail” bailout, as the regulation explicitly forbids future bailouts. McConnell was cynically playing to ignorant Teabaggers for support in propping up the Wall Street status quo with the slogan “too big to fail.” The Luntz-McConnell-Wall Street calculation is the Teabaggers are really REALLY stupid corporate tools. They might be right. Cynical, as always -- but right. Polls show that most Teabaggers watch Fox “News.”
Fire and Indict. If corporations are considered “persons” for purposes of buying elections and literally getting away with murder, why can’t CEOs be criminally charged for the corporation’s crimes? Or can he? It seems nervous shareholders are calling for Massey CEO Don Blankenship to be fired. They see bad things (for them) coming in the wake of the worst mining disaster in decades, which claimed 29 deaths and could have been avoided. Those of us who believe in calling a spade a spade call Don Blankenship a murderer. Period.
Not With OUR Tax Dollars! Students at California State University, Stanislaus found a speaker’s contract in a school dumpster detailing Sister Sarah’s demands for speaking at the university: First-class Lear jet; deluxe hotel suite; pre-screened questions; and, of course, bendable straws. The students and a state legislator want full disclosure from the university on who is paying the right wing Diva’s hefty $100,000 speaking fee -- they charge documents have been shredded -- at a time college students are struggling to pay ever-rising tuition costs with draconian state cutbacks in education. Attorney General Jerry Brown (like old wine, he gets better with age) has pledged to investigate.
The old Republican slogan “Party of Lincoln” has been a laugher for decades but is so ludicrous today that it’s been retired for all intents and purposes. When Lincoln ran for president, his anti-slavery views were so strong that his handlers urged him to keep quiet about it so he could pick up support in states bordering the South. He was vilified by the Southern press and savaged as a monkey by Southern cartoonists for being a friend to African Americans, much as President Obama is portrayed in racist Teabagger signs and that infamous NY Post (Rupert “Fox” Murdoch) editorial cartoon.
Last week, Virginia governor Bob McDonnell deliberately manufactured a controversy by declaring “Confederate History Month” without mentioning the evils of slavery or the minor detail that Virginia held captive some 500,000 slaves who, former governor Doug Wilder (an African American) noted, were not “happy” campers in McDonnell’s Confederate utopia. McDonnell called on Virginians to “understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.” This understanding, in his revisionist mind is to portray the Civil War as a war for “independence” that “should not be forgotten” but “understood and remembered, both in the context of the time in which it took place, but also in the context of the time in which we live.” [Emphasis mine.]
Unreconstructed Southerners (that is, white wingnuts who are not moderate to liberal Northern transplants or descendants of slaves) are constantly relitigating the constitutionality of what they call the “War of Northern Aggression” –- historians properly refer to it as the “Civil War” or the “War Between the States.” Governor McDonnell’s “context” gives amateur Southern revisionist historians a blank check and more, Virginia’s official blessing to relitigate their Confederate past.
The first official salvo came from Texas in which Governor Rick Perry openly called for secession and used the anti-government lingo of the Teabaggers (tyranny, takeover) to incite the crazies. Then the right wing revisionists took control of the social studies curriculum in Texas, placing Jefferson Davis on a par with Abraham Lincoln, which is prima facie offensive and an outrageous absurdity. This is one of many outrages committed by the Texas Board of Education and right wing members not trained in history or education.
Second, is the glaring omission of slavery from the governor’s initial declaration, a slap in the face to every African American and a clear signal to regional nativists, for whom the Confederacy symbolizes a principled stand against the Northern industrial elites, that the governor “gets it.” These right wing Southerners have voted for Republicans from the moment Goldwater conservatives purged the party of most moderates allowing for the few remaining Rockefeller liberals to wither on the vine, while the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts drove Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in a mass migration and major realignment of the parties.
“There goes the South,” declared President Lyndon Johnson prophetically. Tricky Dick Nixon banked on his “Southern Strategy” to win the presidency for Republicans four years later. Ronald Reagan consolidated the party’s bond with the unreconstructed South by kicking off his campaign from Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the murder of three civil rights workers, then welcoming the rise of the Religious (Southern Baptist) Right.
Governor McDonnell’s Reaganesque “wink and a nod” to the new Confederates with his declaration was no innocent mistake. He wanted to highlight what was “most significant” to Virginia and “promote tourism in the state.” Obviously, slavery was not “most significant” to McDonnell and those of his ilk (because he knows full well that a majority of Virginians do not share his sentiment), and promoting tourism for a war that took 600,000 lives and ripped this country apart means no regrets, no excuses. Most important, there is in all of this a cold political calculation on McDonnell’s part. Virginia has no second terms for governor, so the ambitious McDonnell is unfettered by the restraint of actually having to serve his constituents. McDonnell has presidential (or, initially, vice presidential) aspirations and he is speaking to a wider constituency outside Virginia to the south and west of its borders. McDonnell’s fellow wingnut attorney general Kenneth Cuccinelli is angling for the governorship by joining in a frivolous lawsuit of Republican state AGs against the healthcare law. Virginia’s headlong plunge back to our ugly segregationist past continues apace with McDonnell’s requirement to have the state’s estimated 300,000 disenfranchised non-violent convicted felons write an essay in order to get their Constitutionally guaranteed voting rights back.
Unreconstructed Southerners understand this -- on a basic level, at least. Some, such as the Sons of the Confederacy, are old enough to remember separate but equal, perhaps even a lynching or two. They sneer at the “political correctness” of the Northern elites, and resent objections to flying the Confederate flag or celebrating Confederate history as they would have it, in its proper “context,” which omits slavery as insignificant while embracing “independence” from “Northern aggression.” They understand Governor McDonnell’s drippy, insincere apology was a necessity in the current state of the nation. That is, according to their bizarre worldview, an African American non-citizen president from Illinois -- the “Land of Lincoln” -- illegitimately occupies the White House. Significantly, despite the governor’s calculated apology, the original text with the words “independence” and “context” remains unchanged. These are code words for racism and sectionalism. Neo-Confederates understand this.
As the Little Don John Gotti Jr. said on 60 Minutes when asked how he could justify murder: “I can’t justify murder, but I can make a good case for it. Wanna hear it?”
Thanks to Rick Perry, Bob McDonnell, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, the Republican Party leadership, Southern state AGs (especially those running for governor), and the Teabaggers, we’re hearing their best case for a new Confederacy. Incidentally, to hear some of these people is to live day in and day out with a cornucopia of hideous accents. Some, like Sarah Palin’s, are truly hideous. Others, but for the hideous people uttering the words, would have been charming in another context. That may not be fair to the idea of a genteel South, but that too is mostly myth, considering its history.
The Southern drawl is the predominant Republican accent. It pours from the mouths of Mitch McConnell, Bob McDonnell, Rick Perry, Eric Cantor, Bill McCollum, George W. Bush (worse because it’s faux), Jim DeMint, and weepy Tom Coburn. It’s enough to drive retiring GOP Senator George Voinovich to exasperation. It has become the soundtrack of reaction, racism, hatred, obstruction, right wing extremism, and sectionalism.
Worst of all, is Sarah Palin’s twang. It grates like nails on a blackboard. Does anybody know what the hell that is? Other Alaskans don’t sound anywhere as grotesque as Palin. (New Rule, Bill Maher: Anyone who pronounces “nuclear” phonetically, NOO-KEE-LAR, should be automatically barred from public speaking.) Couple that with the vomiting nasality, the hard Rs, the mispronunciation of all names foreign – EYE-RAN, EYE-RACK – and we have linguistic genocide. Headlining the GOP’s shindig in Louisiana, Palin used a bunch of meaningless slogans as an excuse to butcher the English language, carrying the GOP’s anti-Science banner. She said America does not need “this snake-oil science stuff” and dismissed climate change as “Gore-Gate.”
Putting it all in context, former RNC Chairman and current governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, who calls himself “an overweight redneck with a funny accent” made it perfectly clear that Neo-Confederates and GOP Teabagger storm troopers understood McDonnell’s message. In a stunning display of retrograde Old South thinking and insensitivity, Barbour reinforced the Bob McDonnell non-apology by dismissing the notion McDonnell was “insensitive” as “just a nit” that is “trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly” because “it goes without saying” that slavery is a bad thing. No, Mr. Barbour. It does not go withouth saying in any declaration celebrating Confederate history, official or not, when this, the greatest abomination in American history was the cause for the Civil War, our bloodiest conflict. There’s revisionism and then there’s obscenity. What you and McDonnell said and did falls within the latter category.
The time has come for a rebranding of the Republican Party. I have a couple of suggestions. Instead of GOP, why not rename the Republicans’ call letters the NCP (New Confederate Party). Better still, there may yet be purpose to Michael Steele’s castrated reign as RNC Chairman. He should pass a resolution officially changing the name of the Republican Party to the Tea Party.
President Obama slapped down Sarah Palin at the same time he gave her a boost simply by mentioning her name. The President could easily have said, “I’m not going to dignify that kind of ignorant nonsense with a reply.” That would be the measured response to a ditz who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But he was carefully deliberate in mentioning Palin’s name before saying she’s a ditz who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
There’s presidential politics afoot here. President Obama is playing Sister Sarah the idiot like a violin, enhancing her presidential prospects, getting into her ambitious little head too. This after the President deliberatively diminished Mitt Romney’s presidential fortunes by praising Romneycare in Massachusetts, from which Romney has been desperately trying to run away and hide.
Fox “News” has long touted its Nielsen ratings dominance over the competition to reinforce and perpetuate the wingnut delusion that they live in a right wing nation, instead of Rupert Murdoch’s house of cards. Except for one small detail: Fox ratings are a fraud. Murdoch is in bed with Nielsen. What’s more -– this is for you Fox viewers and Beck followers out there, because it’s fun to make your heads explode with truth you can’t handle -- Murdoch is in bed with Communist China.
It’s all revealed in the “lost” Glenn Beck episode. Yes, boys and girls, there is such a thing and it’s a shocker. This is real-life “Conspiracy Theory,” like the Mel Gibson film in which he plays a Glenn Beck type spouting a steady stream of conspiracies who accidentally stumbles upon a real one. In this episode, Beck gets a tip from his pizza man, and makes a startling discovery about his boss, Rupert Murdoch:
“If you are not already rolled up in the fetal position under a table, I don’t know what to tell you. This is serious stuff, and it is one of the reasons I have never feared more for the future of my country. When the biggest media conglomerate in the world is in bed with the world’s biggest communist nation, how much longer can we expect to remain free? And remember, China has us by the short hairs due to all of the U.S. debt they hold.”
But the episode never aired. That’s right, Beckistas, Murdoch squashed it. Does that give your tiny little brains pause? It should. Never mind. Beck did a quick pivot and continued his daily litany of fearmongering and hate speech, this time directed at safer targets, President Obama and the Democrats, inciting the Teabaggers with racist hate speech and incendiary rhetoric. As a result, the threats of violence have grown exponentially and all’s well in the world of mindless fascist followers.
It may be rancid butter, but Beck knows who butters his side of the bread. He doesn’t care about politics, he told Forbes Magazine, it’s all “entertainment.” Glenn Beck is Rupert Murdoch’s high-priced $32 million communist WHORE. A willing communist tool who sold himself to the highest bidder –- ain’t capitalism great?
So this makes the Teabaggers . . . communist stooges. Sounds about right.
Well, the virtual watercooler, at least. It may be just as well that Dylan Ratigan is in New York and Andrea Mitchell in D.C., especially after Ratigan called her “favorite economist” a “con artist” and “The Godfather.” For valid reasons, I might add. Alan Greespan, principal architect of the Bush financial collapse, said by way of explanation that he was right 70% of the time. It’s that 30% we had to worry about.
If “Sully” Sullenberger posted such success rates his airbus might be sitting at the bottom of the Hudson River. Which is pretty much what happened to our economy. Chris Matthews got into the act, adding with a note of glee, “even Ayn Rand would be proud.” Certainly, Mr. Greenspan might be less affluent today but more admired had he stuck with the saxophone. Alas, he succumbed to Ms. Rand’s bewitching charms, her exotic voodoo economics, so here we are. I must say though, Andrea Mitchell is one classy lady. She elegantly sidestepped her husband’s clever evasions by pretending it didn’t happen. Although Dylan Ratigan might consider turning on his heel if he spots Andrea walking his way.
Now, to the meat of the batting order. Ed Schultz has been pinch-hitting a lot of late because of the Top Hats’ disruptive meddling. He’s great. Solid, passionate and genuine. Which has Contessa suddenly flirting with him on-camera. What’s up with that? Ed seems puzzled but plays along. He doesn’t quite know what to make of Ms Brewer -- who does? Keith anchors the team, as always hitting for average and power. (I wonder if the rumor that his comments are pre-screened by Top Hat censors is true; that would certainly explain why Keith on a recent show declared he had nothing to comment about. Back in the days that military censors in Brasil slashed newspaper articles, the defiant press would print recipes or columns of black ink where the censored articles had been laid out. Censorship of any kind has no place in journalism. I hope it’s only a rumor.) Rachel Maddow is still hitting for power and swinging for the fences with regularity. Yet she hit a single on that Pentagon video story (home run for Dylan). I hope her power numbers aren’t declining.
Which brings us back to Chris Matthews. Chris is like the wild closer who fires heat but has control problems. Hardball. Lots of “dusters” as he’ll admit to himself, not to speak of a brushback, something way outside, and CRACK –- extra base hits, as I recall, from Alan Grayson and Howard Dean. They rocked Chris. Manager Joan Walsh had had enough: “Don’t get me going, Chris” she warned before yanking him. Usually Joan lets Chris work himself out of the inning. And mostly, he’ll get back on his game. But seriously, Chris revealed he used to be a Goldwater Republican before “falling in love” with Gene McCarthy. That explains A LOT, Chris!
This is for the Fox “News” brainwashed, who act on the conviction that the information they get from that hate-spewing, violence-inciting propaganda network offers even a kernel of what can be considered the truth. Sometimes, justice delayed is justice denied. California Attorney General Jerry Brown cleared ACORN of any wrongdoing, but not early enough to prevent the organization’s dissolution.
So despicable was the Hannity-Fox “News” caricature of an ACORN employee, a complete fabrication, that he was summarily fired. Where can he get his life and reputation back? Let’s ask Hannity whether he can fork out a little of the “charity” money he’s pocketing and spending on lavish hotel suites and private jets (boy, these wingnuts really love their high-life perks while most Americans struggle with their finances) to make this ACORN employee he trashed, whole.
Then again, justice might yet be had. The right wing punk who succeeded in closing down ACORN with his scurrilous smear, and has copped to a lesser plea for impersonating a phone company worker and entering Senator Mary Landrieu’s offices on false pretenses, has worn out his welcome and burned his bridges except among the fringe of the fringe. This punk and his accomplices are condemned to be toxic waste for life. And that may be enough. After their brief Pyrrhic victory, no one’s catching this garbage on the way down.
“Blood money if you ask me,” declared United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, who grew up in a mining environment, went to the company school, shopped in the company store, and remembers mine whistles blaring out of time, and the rush of blood thorugh his veins as he wondered if it was his father’s shift, or his friend’s father whose turn it was to be down in that hole.
Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey, prides himself on placing profits ahead of safety in his union-busting mining operation which has accumulated more than 3,000 safety violations. To Blankenship, these are the costs of doing business. Of $2.2 million in fines assessed, he is contesting more than $1.4 million, and has delinquent fines totaling $246,320.
He shrugged off the fines, saying “we don't pay much attention to the violation count.” Of course not, as long as you can run a criminally unsafe, union-busting operation that, rather than invest in safety upgrades and maintain the highest workplace OSHA standards, buys judgeships, raises money for Republican obstructionism and deregulation, and underwrites the Teabaggers.
Here is this predator capitalist in his own words. Hateful, outrageous, despicable, bigoted, and ignorant speech is protected by the Constitution. Criminal negligence bordering on murder (as a matter of law and not opinion) are not:
The time has come for the Justice Department to stand up for long-suffering mine workers throughout America, but particularly in West Virginia, and bring this bastard to his knees. And it’s high time the Senate took action on stricter safety legislation for coal workers. The House bill has languished in the Senate too long, first on GWB’s veto threat and then under the heel of Republican union-busting obstruction, just waiting for another tragedy to happen, as long as it’s not on their watch.
Well, it’s happened. The Republicans who passed on it have blood on their hands. Are you satisfied, Republican deregulators? Democrats control the Senate; there are no more excuses not to pass this bill NOW.
Update: Labor Secretary Hilda has appointed a special team of investigators to “evaluate all aspects of the accident, including possible causes and the operator's compliance with federal health and safety standards. The team will issue a formal report on its findings and conclusions.”
It’s a start. It won’t bring back the lives of those miners needlessly lost to Blankenship’s craven criminal neglect, but it may pave the way to justice in this matter and safe, humane working conditions for all mine workers in America.
Well done, to a certain fraternity for its (magical) ability to point a frat house parking sign to a towaway zone. Whatever their motivation, kickbacks or critical thinking, the lads are well on their way to successful careers in the finer arts of politics. Now, if they can just lure the Karl Rove book tour with a faux Rovian-style mailer promising premium parking to any RNC staffer who can produce their “I {heart} Rove”sticker . . .
And Glenn, after you stop sobbing and comparing yourself to Rosa Parks, kindly fork up -
$6,600 in towing expenses + $25 in cab fees X 53 = $1,325 + $6,600, for a grand total of: $7,925.
It's the least you can do for your adoring fans. Then throw in 53 autographed copies of your worthless book, so they don't have to buy it and kick back pofits to the publisher and royalties to you.
How about that reimbursement, Glenn . . . Is it in the mail yet?
Anatomy of a wingnut lie: what Teabaggers and Fox viewers take as news, i.e., garbage in, garbage out. “Guess what passed behind our backs?” trolls missing link militia member Tina Stone on her Facebook page (where else?), whipped into a lather over an internet smear that President Obama plans to resettle Hamas refugees in the U.S. It’s A LIE, twice-over. ‘Nuff said.
If not the Devil, blame the Hippies. In what amounts to an ironic twist on conservatives’ oft-stated but seldom followed “family values” and doctrine of personal responsibility (a euphemism for slashing entitlement programs) Ross Douhat blames the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal on the “permissiveness” of the 70s. Has he considered the fact that the repressive sexual culture of the 50s constrained victims from coming forward, and when they did, the reported abuse was ignored or hushed up? Or that, reaching adulthood in the 60s and 70s the victims finally gathered up the considerable courage to come forward? When circumstances turn inconvenient for conservatives, they are the first to cast off their not so deeply held value of personal responsibility.
More dysfunctional Palin family coverup. Thank some hardnosed digging by Alaskan blogs for this. The rumors of Willow Palin’s vandalism rampage in Wassila ring true, considering the reluctance of sources suddenly to come forward and tell the story they were eager to relate earlier. The Palins’ MO of strong-arming and intimidating witnesses to their potential criminal behavior is all over this one. Oh Sarah, we’ve got John Gotti Jr. on the line; he has a reality show “business”proposition for you. Something about the “Family.”
Wingnut Rx for healthcare reform: first medical test, political affiliation, while insurers tout ways to deny coverage for children with pre-existing conditions.Republican doctor straddles ethics, post sign --“IF YOU VOTED FOR OBAMA SEEK UROLOGICAL CARE ELSEWHERE” -- admits he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, as insurance companies unleash an army of lawyers looking for loopholes to EVADE THE LAW and keep children with pre-existing conditions off the rolls. Still adjusting to the new reality, insurance companies backed down after lots of bad publicity and a letter from HHR Secretary Kathleen Sibelius threatened to impale them. But there still are rats lurking in the gutters of high profit margins, ready to use every care-denying loophole they can find. This is an environment ripe for whistleblowers and persons of conscience who would take down the predators.
Republican obstruction games devastate real people’s lives. Following mental Jim Bunning, senator from KY, who wrongly predicted Justice Ginsburg would be dead from cancer by now, Tom Coburn of AL takes his turn at bat blocking an extension of unemployment benefits. Because he doesn’t have anything better to do, like passing laws that help people. John Kyl continues the GOP game of chicken by speaking out of both sides of his mouth, pledging to block the President’s new SCOTUS nominee before it is even made. In the meantime, the unemployed are denied benefits and flood victims devastated by the record Northeast rainfall go without federal flood insurance. Here’s a new game: on a scale of 1 to 10, how repugnant can Republicans get? DING, DING, DING!
Creative ways a married couple find themselves in ‘Lost.’ Not having watched more than two or three episodes, I’m a dedicated agnostic on the subject. Am I missing something? Hmm . . . This article includes some useful links and ideas for ‘Lost’ fans to make a soft landing when the series ends May 23.
The most craven and irresponsible LIE by Republicans in their constellation of LIES about Democratic policy initiatives and President Obama’s words and birth right, is their systematic rejection of any responsibility for inciting and stoking extremist violence on the right with incendiary rhetoric, from Sarah Palin to Michelle Bachmann and John Boehner, to the right wing propaganda machine on Fox to Limbaugh Inc.’s hate radio monopoly.
When a wingnut propagandist equates the violence and threats of further violence from right wing militias -- threatening law enforcement in service of the end times, or demanding that governors leave office or be removed –- there is no equivalent threat from the left. When kidnapping, assault, attempted murder, and murder are committed against abortion doctors and clinic workers, as well as arson and bombings, there is no equivalent incidence of violence from the left.
This false equivalence fallacyoccurs “when someone falsely equates an act by one party as being equally egregious to that of another without taking into account the underlying differences which may make the comparison patently invalid.” To amplify on the example of anti-abortion terrorism, at least eight people have been murdered in the U.S, in anti-abortion terrorism. Since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers. There are no equivalent incidents of murder and violence on the left.
Right wingers constantly resort to false equivalence on media outlets. They do so with impunity, because their counterparts on the left have largely been unwilling to refute the lies in the limited time allotted. The fact is, the last time a leftist group engaged in armed, terroristic violence against the government, of the type and threat level posed by right wing militias, was in the 70s, when the group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army came to prominence by abducting Patty Hearst and pulling bank jobs. That was more than 30 years ago.
The wingnuts cannot point to a single instance of organized domestic terror from the left since those days. There is nothing domestically that compares in scope to the threat of anti-government militias and anti-abortion terrorists whose violence, grounded in Christian fundamentalism, often overlaps. Instead, right wing propagandists reach for the lone nutcase example on the left to build up by sheer repetition –- Goebbels’ BIG LIE (repeated often enough) technique –- the false equivalence of a lone madman on the left, such as the Unabomber. From 1978 to 1995, Theodore Kaczynski carried out a series of deadly mail bombings, causing serious injuries to most of his victims and three fatalities.
As heinous as the Unabomber’s crimes were, it is a fallacy to equate them with the same threat level posed by heavily armed anti-government militias. The Unabomer’s despicable attacks were carried out by a single disturbed individual. There is a pattern of this kind of violence that runs through American history. But a far more dangerous and deadly pattern has re-emerged today, since the resurgence of right wing extremist militias in the 90s after Waco and Ruby Ridge, culminating with the Oklahoma City bombing. In scope and severity, this threat to people, government, and institutions from extremist organized groups on the right is far more significant than the "lone wolf" scenario. This is not to diminish or minimize in any way the horrific crimes committed by the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski.
But the nature of the threat from the entire panoply of extremist right groups -- armed militias, nativists, white supremacists, anti-abortion religious fundamentalists -- is different, especially in how individual and collective responsibility is assigned. Right wing propagandists focus on the “lone wolf” madman precisely because it rids them of responsibility for any further, more serious acts of violence that might accrue from their hate speech. It is undeniable that Rush Limbaugh and Fox denizens scream “FIRE!” in a crowded theater on a daily basis. Republicans do it consistently. They LIE consistently. They cannot shirk their responsibility for inciting right wing extremist violence.
Once Republican members of Congress incite the Teabaggers with incendiary rhetoric while Party leadership refuses to rein in its most extreme members -- Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and the drumbeat from hate media Fox and Limbaugh Inc. -- it is disingenuous at best for the GOP and self-appointed Tebagger leaders (it’s not a movement, it’s a rabble) to claim that the violence, vandalism, and hateful rhetoric is just an isolated expression of a few “lone wolves” on the fringes. That won’t wash.
In our recent history, domestic terrorism on the right involving armed and dangerous extremist groups reached its zenith with the tragic Oklahoma City bombing committed by Tim McVeigh and his known accomplice Terry Nichols. The Oklahoma City bombing ranks as the worst case of domestic terrorism in American history. It took the lives of 169 people. It is this kind of threat from the extremist right, that the Department of Homeland Security warned of in a 2009 report. Instead of heeding the report’s findings with sober analysis, the right reacted with hysterical attempts to discredit it while Republicans called for Director Janet Napolitano’s head. They claimed it was biased toward the left, which is absurd, since it had been commissioned by the Bush administration. Facts are facts.
How soon they forget how far they have gone to keep the truth about right wing violent extremism from coming out, and how far they will go to cover up their significant share of responsibility for acts of serious violence that may erupt from extremist groups on the right. What the right wing propaganda machine is doing now, with its constant chorus of false equivalence, is to lay the groundwork aiming to shirk and evade responsibility should more serious right wing extremist violence come to pass in these turbulent times. It has been said before, and it should be repeated: Words have consequences. Grievances against government should be addressed at the ballot box.
The Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, fired back at the growing controversy surrounding Pope Benedict XVI’s inaction in the face of a generations-old sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Holy See to its very core leading into Good Friday and Easter weekend by -- blaming the media. The target of the Vatican’s ire is none other than my favorite newspaper, the venerable New York Times, a.k.a. the Gray Lady. Rather than addressing the truth, the Vatican has decided to manage the crisis with the oldest losing ploy in the world: spin and blame the messenger. Evidently, the Vatican has made a calculation that the best defense to its generational sexual abuse scandal is not a mea cupa followed by internal soul-searching that leads to meaningful reforms of the priesthood, but to attack the media, particularly the Times, for its sharp criticism of the Pope.
Ever the butt of good-natured jokes, from Rolling Stone (“All the News that Fits”) to Jon Stewart, it’s not as if the the Times has butted heads with Titans before (the Pentagon Papers) and lost. The Vatican cannot win this particular fight and should have realized the futility of attacking arguably the world’s most influential newspaper. The fact that the Pope’s apologists have chosen to attack the Times' reporters and columnists by name, in a veiled attempt at intimidation, will not work in a secular world of excommunication-resistant laws.
In a resentful riposte to the Times, Cardinal William J. Levada, current prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, singled out for discredit the reporting of Times senior columnist Laurie Goodstein and others: “I do not have time to deal with the Times’s subsequent almost daily articles by Rachel Donadio and others, much less with Maureen Dowd’s silly parroting of Goodstein’s 'disturbing report.'” Without getting into the weeds of the Times’ excellent reporting, the central question boils down to this: When did Pope Benedict, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, know about the sexual abuse by Fr. Lawrence Murphy, the Milwaukee priest who abused some 200 deaf children in an archdiocesan school from 1950 to 1974, and what did he do about it? It’s not that complicated.
The Vatican’s fiercest critic, Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair, fired a shot across the bow when he wrote:
This grisly little man is not above or outside the law. He is the titular head of a small state. We know more and more of the names of the children who were victims and of the pederasts who were his pets. This is a crime under any law (as well as a sin), and crime demands not sickly private ceremonies of “repentance,” or faux compensation by means of church-financed payoffs, but justice and punishment.
In response to the growing criticism the Church has now doubled down and gone Medieval. Noted Italian exorcist, Fr. Gabriele Amorth, says the press criticism is “prompted by the devil.” Really? And who is the patron saint of pedophiles? Fr. Armoth may be well advised to redirect his unusual skills to exorcising the cancer of pedophile sexual abuse from the Catholic Church, because, as they say, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. This crime is so heinous that the slightest hint of a coverup will be catastrophic for the Church. It is time the Vatican came clean. Enough is enough.
Where is the RNC’s gift that keeps on giving to Democrats? Ever since Bondagegate slithered onto the national scene this week, the usually media happy Chairman Steele has been conspicuous by his absence from any place a microphone or camera may be present.
Is he busy massaging GOP assets at CLUB VOYEUR? Has he been abducted by aliens, or did Tony Perkins’ warriors for Christ drag Steele off to an undisclosed location for an intervention that may last till November? Still, the chances of him voluntarily falling on his sword by Friday are next to nil; he likes his perks too much, he told Perkins. Private jets, lavish hotel suites, bondage parties . . . Oh, and that fundraising thing, not so good.
Was Sarah Palin’s bizarre sartorial faux pas at a McCain rally merely an accident of her execrable taste in clothing? Or was it a calculated choice of campy wear to spark synapses in the wingnuts’ reptilian fascist brains? Sarah Palin has proven her ability to wring every last government dole dollar from her adoring Teabagger fans, but fashion plate she is not. So when she hopped onto the stage to Gramps McCain’s frozen smile sporting a black leather biker jacket, the first thing that came to mind was “WTF?!”
“I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.”
Not to be outdone, wingnut pansy Jonah Goldberg injected his own Freudian version of “Jonah’s Complaint:”
“First, let me just get it out of the way: I think she is a tremendously sexy woman. How this will effect the race, I have no idea, but it’s just got to. It’s not an issue of glamour so much as a kind of Paglian chthonic sexual power. Set in that context, her unabashed embrace of her fecundity and motherhood as a kind of qualification makes a lot of sense…Palin exudes sexual confidence and maternal authority…It makes a lot of men uncomfortable, but that’s because it’s the kind of female power they are most often subject to, and most often fail to successfully resist. I spent much of my life taking orders from women a lot like Sarah Palin — women like my mother and my Iowa public school teachers…When a woman like Sarah Palin says “jump,” I am inclined to deferentially inquire into the requirements of this jump.”
Sorry. I should have warned you to have barf bags at the ready, even if only for dry heaves. I know you were excited, Jonah: It’s “affect” and not “effect.” These panting bloviations aside, Sarah Palin has become the object of black leather fascist fantasies of reptilian wingnut males, a festishist's dream come true, as well as of the women who see in Palin a real “role” model of how to behave around their men-folk.
Fashionista website STYLEITE missed the forest for the trees when, instead of focusing on the politics (OK, it’s not their thing), said “we want to take a moment and ask Sarah, who on earth told you to wear that jacket?” All those Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg Palin wankers out there, that’s who! STYLEITE continued, “Palin’s zipper biker jacket that she paired with a chandelier earring and her token librarian glasses seemed highly inappropriate and, frankly, ugly.” Well yeah, but her target Teabagger/fascist audience isn’t exactly fashion-conscious.
Face it. Conservatives have problems with women, particularly strong women. They are uncomfortable with women’s growing professional assertiveness. Conservatives were bypassed by the feminist movement, which they regard as a liberal plot to emasculate them. Conservatives pay lip service to what they will derisively sneer as “politically correct” conduct between the sexes, which compels them to treat women as equals (but really not so equal) under the law. Until they exit their regulated environments with OSHA regulations and watchdog HR departments and go home to their bunkers, trailers, and suburban enclaves, before heading out to the Teabagger rally, perchance to catch a glimpse of Sarah Palin, where they get to be themselves.
Come to think of it, the GOP elites have had a disturbing flirtation of late with the Party high life and BDSM master-slave sexual inclinations. RNC Chairman Michael Steele is traveling in style: private jet and lavish hotels, and a $2,000 tab charged to the RNC for a GOP party animal’s excellent adventure at a BDSM lesbian bondage theme strip club in West Hollywood. Niiice. Call it the Palindrome: Black leather biker gear for the GOP’s biggest draw, dominatrix Sarah Palin.
Finally there’s David Ito, the career L.A. SEC supervisor who was surfing porn at the office for more than 1,800 times over a 17-day period on his government issue computer at the height of the GW Bush economic collapse. To date, porn warrior Ito has not been disciplined for literally jerking off your 401k. In fact, he received a promotion. Clearly, the SEC is not up to the task of its enhanced responsibilities enforcing expanded financial services regulations. Not as long as Ito, well . . . you know.
