Category: politics

Oh the ‘bizarreries’ of modern America!
The man gets out of jail and arrives on a stump:

For decades, I have been a militant anti-declinist in terms of America’s place in the world. – Conrad Black

I can see it now. Black & Palin 2012. Fuse penitent wealth with folksy anxiety. Something too classical to ignore. Commiserating with the persecuted. Another frame is Mormon & Pentecost. Or is it Baptist & Taliban? White Fright is so hard to follow. I swear I’ve lost track.

^{anti-declinist}
Well maybe that’s a bumper sticker I could use.

I would like to take this opportunity to say a word about the American spirit in this time of trial.

In the most critical periods of our nation’s history, there have always been those fringes of our society who have sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan, or a convenient scapegoat.

Financial crises could be explained by the presence of too many immigrants or too few greenbacks.

War could be attributed to munitions makers or international bankers.

Peace conferences failed because we were duped by the British or tricked by the French or deceived by the Russians.

It was not the presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe that drove it to communism, it was the sell-out at Yalta. It was not a civil war that removed China from the free world, it was treason in high places. At times these fanatics have achieved a temporary success among those who lack the will or the vision to face unpleasant tasks or unsolved problems.

But in time the basic good sense and stability of the great American consensus has always prevailed.

Conspiracy Theories Speech, November 18, 1961, John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Frank Rich at NYTimes:

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the ‘death panel’ warm-up acts of last summer.

Yasha Levine, “The tea parties are AstroTurf — fake grassroots.”

Tea Party Flacks Are Drill, Baby, Drill Messengers Too
The Roots of Stalin in the Tea Party Movement

“Beck is a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox of racial and ethnic confrontation,” says Bob Herbert at the NYTimes.

America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure.

On the anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington he will stand in the shadows of giants — Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you think is more representative of this nation?

Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.

Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

King: “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter.”

Beck: “I think the president is a racist.”

Charles H. Smith:

“Did the Roman Empire have corporations?”

Based on my admittedly incomplete reading of Gibbons and a survey of Pompeii I am currently reading, I believe the answer is no.

Yes, the Republic and later, the Empire, had ruling Elites and politically influential families who controlled immense wealth, but… Did the Empire flourish without accountability and personal responsibility?

In other words, were the Elites which controlled the Empire never held personally accountable? If so then, they may well have functioned as the equivalent of today’s corporations.

What the long history the Roman Empire suggests is that individuals who failed paid a price. In today’s Corporate Empire, the Elite individuals running the corporations can despoil, bribe, embezzle, cheat and collude and they completely evade accountability.

This is yet more evidence that the U.S. is a de facto Corporate State which benefits the Power Elites who have partnered private gain with global reach.

NY Daily News headline:
Rush, Newt get rich by selling hate

‘Not that self-promoting panderers such as Gingrich and Limbaugh and their ilk take responsibly for fanning bigotry… shameless hatespewing…profit from misery…’

Backscatter x-ray scanners found in airports have also been sold to US and other governments.

So what’s in your car?

Mike Masnick points out, “A decade ago, the Supreme Court ruled that using thermal imaging to scan someone’s house (say, for potential marijuana growing) was a search, and thus subject to the 4th Amendment requirement for a warrant.”

Surveillance is booming. It’s a tricky issue we’ll take years to manage, first by discovering if we’re thinking about the society we want and if we have the power to get there.

Counting the lives nearby each prisoner, the cost of our crude society is astounding. Of course we must react to violence and for victims, but that’s not whole story. Yes, we can fix this, because ostriches are not.

“You know, when I talk about a war and a battle and soldiers we have to take up our…our cry for freedom. And we can do it right now at the battle box… I mean at the ballot box.”

GOP nominee Sharon Angle is running against Harry Reid in Nevada:

“And these programs that you mentioned — that Obama has going with Reid and Pelosi pushing them forward — are all entitlement programs built to make government our God.

“And that’s really what’s happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We’re supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government.

“And I knew that all along when I started praying over a year ago over it. And this just seemed to be the battle that I needed to go to war with. And I need warriors to stand beside me. You know, this is a war of ideology, a war of thoughts and of faith. And we need people to really stand for faith and trust, not hope and change.”

Obama. The full quote is on page 261:

“Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from their neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political wings shift in an ugly direction.”

The editors at The Economist:

The internet, obviously, began with a promise of anonymity, not surveillance.

It was a place where nobody knew you were a dog, a technological incarnation of the Central Park Rambles. It took many years, and many embarrassing posts and emails, for people to realise that beneath the digital Rambles lurked a panopticon.

When people obsess over the privacy architecture embedded in Facebook, this is what they’re worried about. They worry that they are in a space that deliberately creates the illusion of privacy in order to tempt participants to engage in revealing behaviour, which can then be leveraged for fun and profit by the observers secretly taping the proceedings through one-way mirrors.

We know nothing about the rich. Few if any on the hot seat. We are content with smaller fry I suppose.

New Yorker:

Billionaires David and Charles Koch operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation.

Grassroots democracy brought to you by billionaires.

We DO know our Presidents.

Presidents that did well shared similar policies.

Presidents that did poorly often took the same approach as others that also did poorly.

Escaping New York’s temporary wealth surcharge, Rush Limbaugh sells out.

Brokers predicted the furnishings might get in the way of the sale, but those familiar with the transaction said the Manhattan condominium sold at $11.5 million.

Slideshow at Luxist.

If fear is all you’ve got, America will reject you.

Americans don’t cheer the bully. That’s what distinguishes us as a people. Americans need to stand up to it, as individuals, and not be bullied.

It’s important to note that Republicans today don’t really have a coherent agenda, save opposition. They don’t really have an agenda because everything that should be their agenda has been discredited —tax cuts, foreign wars, small government, government as a business. They’re for austerity in a Depression.

define:cackle
Cry of a hen laying an egg.

define:cackle of rads
Radiation when exposed to lunacy.

Oh well, words are not really important.

Comment A:

Sarah Palin is a person that has had a mediocre education and has been thrust into the limelight by a desperate politician in search of a miracle.

Whenever she goes ‘off-script’ she’s invariably spewing gobbledygook mistaking quantity for quality and encounters a situation where the speed of her brain has been exceeded by the speed of her mouth. When she has these little verbal quirks, they are not ‘misspeaks’ but a product of a limited vocabulary.

Everybody seems focused on the word cackle but what about the usage of the words irony and passé. Irony is a funny contradiction. Passé means out of date. How is disagreement among women ‘ironic’ or ‘passé?

I think she may be speaking in tongue again.

Comment B:

She’s using it in a self-congratulatory way. She and her fellow radicals are cackling all the way to the bank as they promote an agenda in which women and other uppity people are put in their place.

Comment C:

Crucify other women?!

“Out of all the gangsters, serial killers, mass murderers, incompetent & crooked politicians, spies, traitors, and ultra left-wing kooks in all of American history — have you ever wondered who the worst of the worst was?“

First list.
Top Ten Conspiracy Theories

1. Chemtrails —toxic spray from 1000s of New World Order planes.
2. Martial Law —suspend constitution, begin a police state.
3. Concentration Camps —Obama’s brown shirts bring slavery.
4. Foreign Troops on U.S. Soil —contracted occupation forces.
5. Door-to-Door Gun Seizure —New World Order crackdown.
6. 9/11 Plot —perpetual war introduces police state.
7. Population Control —mind-control in food and water.
8. HAARP —more mind control, plus weather and quakes.
9. The Fed —spread of Jewish and banker control.
10. North American Union —total corporate takeover.

OK. Second list.
The Enemies List of the Far Right, ranked from worse to worser to very worst:

—Saul Alinsky —Bill Clinton —Hillary Clinton —Michael Moore —George Soros —Alger Hiss —Al Sharpton —Al Gore —Noam Chomsky —Richard Nixon —Jane Fonda —Harry Reid —Nancy Pelosi —John Wilkes Booth —Margaret Sanger —Aldrich Ames —Timothy McVeigh —Ted Kennedy —Lyndon Johnson —Benedict Arnold —Woodrow Wilson —The Rosenbergs —Franklin Delano Roosevelt —Barack Obama, and THE number one worstest of all time: Jimmy Carter.

“…behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People . . . generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine.”

Dana Milbank, staff writer at the Washington Post, provides an easy-peasy comparison of religious tolerance, then and now.

To help evaluate today’s unkempt rabble-rousing, please take note of the following excerpts penned by George Washington:

I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you… If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and happy people.

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation.

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.

For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens...

…and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree,
and there shall be none to make him afraid.

Public school students are graded and tested all the time. Not so with teachers. Teachers have long been evaluated based on brief, pre-announced visits by principals who offer a confidential and subjective assessment of their skills. How much students are learning is rarely taken into account…

The surest sign of a teacher’s effectiveness is engagement.

Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year.

The best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas.

Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets.

Teachers paid more for experience, education and training, had little bearing on whether they improved their students’ performance.

 

Ignoring deductions from paychecks whether five years or fifty years, the policy of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is that unemployment insurance payments are welfare that’s breeding laziness and lack of productivity across America.

Speaker Gingrich porked more federal ‘welfare’ to his district but Arlington and the Kennedy Space Center.

Party of Lincoln. HA!

Survey says?
Fox News viewers are 65 years and older. –»