Category: politics

Although this map isn’t colored to show Red States vs Blue States, it’s clear Republicans gather seats from regions of much fewer votes.

Conservatives and libertarians who claim early years of American independence as golden age of liberty can only do so by ignoring slavery.

David Boaz:

I am particularly struck by libertarians and conservatives who celebrate the freedom of early America, and deplore our decline from those halcyon days, without bothering to mention the existence of slavery.

Glenn Beck as a fraud: A man who only embraces conservatism and the tea party movement as a means to furthering his significant personal wealth and career as a successful TV goon.

Bob Cesca:

My reoccurring reaction is generally twofold. One: he’s exhausting to watch because just as I’m wrapping my head around one line of googly-eyed horseshit, he belts out another ridiculous, melodramatic or dangerous line, and before I know it, I’m faced with a log-jam of crazy, forcing me to scramble for either an oxygen mask or a stiff drink. And, two: why pay attention to the television equivalent of an escaped mental patient screaming gibberish on the median strip at a busy intersection?

But to underestimate Glenn Beck as just some sort of random extra from Cuckoo’s Nest, as I admittedly have done, is a mistake as it barely scratches the surface of what his scam is all about. A schizoid raving street loon tends to command attention purely for the freak show curiosity of passers by, yet the nonsense is rarely taken seriously. This isn’t the case with Glenn Beck.

Several million people every day take his word for it. They’re suckered into buying the ruse. And it’s bad for America.

Ronald Reagan’s covert war budgeteering:

Between 1981 and 1990, Afghanistan’s opium production grew 10-fold – from 250 tonnes to 2,000 tonnes. After just two years of covert CIA support for the Afghan guerrillas, the US attorney general announced in 1981 that Pakistan was already the source of 60% of the American heroin supply.

The Bush and Cheney follow through:

After five years of the US occupation, Afghanistan’s drug production had swollen to unprecedented proportions. In August 2007, the UN reported that the country’s record opium crop covered almost 20,000 hectares, an area larger than all the coca fields in Latin America. From a modest 185 tonnes at the start of American intervention in 2001, Afghanistan now produced 8,200 tonnes of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country’s GDP and 93% of global heroin supply.

Afghanistan: a thoroughly ravaged country with over one million dead, five million refugees, 10-20 million landmines still in place, an infrastructure in ruins, an economy in tatters, and well-armed tribal warlords. Let’s war.

Six of the ten richest counties are around Washington DC.

— 500 tycoons each worth about a billion;
— 7,200 really rich between 100 – 500 million;
— 24,887 worth a measly ten to fifty million;
— 183,900 worth $2 million to $10 million.

Thomas Jefferson warned that our capitol should be moved every generation or so. You didn’t know that?

He worried that an ’embedded class’ would infiltrate every office and hallway, every politician and bureaucrat, a perpetual Versailles. To prevent incrustation, Jefferson suggested the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court must occasionally re-locate, build new facilities, hire new staff, and repel all followers. Now that’s a jobs engine!

Oh see how we gather the news, gather the news, oh how we gather the news…

Yves Smith:

So the latest troubling sighting is efforts to turn ‘democracy’ into a suspect word. While it may seem loopy to raise this as a concern, ‘liberal’ was not all that long ago seen in the US as a positive, or at worst, descriptive term.

Now liberal is so discredited that The Position Formerly Known As Liberal has either crept with its tail between its legs to the center, but still maintains that it is liberal, or is now called ‘progressive’, but that too is rapidly losing positive brand association, since pretty much everyone has figured out that Progressive = The Position Formerly Known As Liberal. So don’t kid yourself that cherished concepts like democracy are immune to reimaging.

Alexander Hamilton:

“All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people.

“The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact.

“The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the Second….

“Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy…. It is admitted that you cannot have a good executive upon a democratic plan.”

Rush Limbaugh and his rush to radio:

Three federal judges have concluded that Bush’s wiretapping violated criminal law, a felony subject to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense. The law really does say that.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

It’s been obvious for more than four years that Bush, Cheney, NSA Director (and former CIA Director) Michael Hayden and many other Bush officials broke the law — committed felonies — in spying on Americans without warrants.

This decision may make it more difficult for the Obama administration to hide behind sweeping secrecy claims in the future, but it won’t negate the fact that we have decided that our leading political officials are completely free to commit crimes while in power and to do so with total impunity.

After the quake, aftershocks prompted hasty evacuations by military transports, with no time for immigration processing:

• Mike Delva, 21, was assigned to help board a young boy whose leg had been amputated, along with the boy’s wheelchair-bound mother. Suddenly, the plane took off.
• Another fellow was in a taxi when the earthquake hit was later placed on a military plane to Miami by a doctor from Texas who had treated him for severe back and leg injuries. He left the plane in a wheelchair.

Among too many others hidden in pockets of the sprawling detention network, these Haitians have been locked up by the INS because they entered the USA without a visa. None have criminal histories.

Illegal? Honey, nothing’s illegal if they don’t catch you!

Wasilla’s municipal debt went from around $1 million when she came in to office, to around $22 million when she left. What about the State of Alaska?

‘The whereabouts of the billions donated remains a mystery to me and all those I have met’, reports Julie Dermansky. ‘Many have received no help at all’.

The search and rescue is over. No one is alive under the rubble. Many are in mortal danger.

Their needs are little different than the day after the earthquake. Our first stop was the Miami University Hospital on the airbase. It has grown in size and fuller than ever.

The situation is deplorable in Haiti. The need on the ground. In the tent cities. Need is the first thing. Makeshift shelters offer little.

“This is a tipping point,” Jeff Anderson said. He’s found the documents he hopes to use in a federal lawsuit against the Vatican itself.

The files show that a Vatican office led by the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, halted a church trial against a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting some 200 boys.

“I came to the stark realization that the problems were really endemic to the clerical culture, and all the problems we are having in the U.S. led back to Rome.”

Since 1983, Anderson and the five other attorneys at his downtown St. Paul firm have sued thousands of Catholic priests, bishops, and dioceses over allegations of sexual abuse by priests and other church leaders.

Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests asserts, “Jeff doesn’t get sole credit, and he wouldn’t claim it, but he was among the very first to see the magnitude of this cover-up and is still among the most dedicated to its undoing.”

The world’s most dangerous drug:

It’s perhaps the biggest threat to the nation’s mental wellbeing, yet it’s freely available on every street – for pennies.

The dealers claim it expands the mind and bolsters the intellect: users experience an initial rush of emotion (often euphoria or rage), followed by what they believe is a state of enhanced awareness. Tragically this “awareness” is a delusion. As they grow increasingly detached from reality, heavy users often exhibit impaired decision-making abilities, becoming paranoid, agitated and quick to anger. In extreme cases they’ve even been known to form mobs and attack people.

Technically it’s called “a newspaper”…

In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive.

To save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often “cut” the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out.

The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later…

With 3000 cases of abuse reported to them between 2000 and 2010, the Church’s doctrinal office elected to proceed with church trials for less than 10%.

Matt Taibbi rightfully rants, “…if someone molested my child and was allowed back in the priesthood, I’d be reaching for an axe.”

So this monster who was known to the highest authorities in the church to be a monster was allowed to die an active priest who was allowed to work with children for 24 years even after he was exposed, until the end of his life.

They’ll use any means necessary to keep their market share and if they have to lie and cheat and deflect and point fingers to keep the racket going, they’ll do it, just like any other sleazeball company.

But I think it’s time we started considering that what the church is is even worse than that. It’s possible we should start wondering if the church is also a criminal organization that in this country, anyway, should be broken up using RICO statutes.

Republicans believe that President Obama:

• Is a socialist (67%)
• Wants to take away Americans’ right to own guns (61%)
• Is a Muslim (57%)
• Wants to turn over the USA to a one world government (51%); and
• Has done many things that are unconstitutional (55%).

Also large numbers of Republicans believe that President Obama:

• Resents America’s heritage (47%)
• Does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him (40%)
• Was not born in the United States, not eligible to be president (45%)
• Is the “domestic enemy Constitution speaks of (45%)
• Is a racist (42%)
• Will use economic collapse or terror to take dictatorial powers (41%)
• Is doing many of the things that Hitler did (38%).

Fully 24% of Republicans believe that “he may be the Anti-Christ” and 22% believe “he wants the terrorists to win.” Source: Harris Poll Interactive

Wingnuts ! What do we know, what will we do?

Take The Wingnut Quiz !

The author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, John Avlon responds, “Wingnuts are hijacking our politics. This poll should wake-up all Americans about the costs of using fear and hate to pump up hyper-partisanship.

“Wingnuts always forget – patriotism is more important than partisanship.”

And what about organizing Wingnuts?
Secrets of the Tea Party: The Troubling History of Tea Party Leader Dick Armey

In the spring of 2009, groups calling themselves TEA, or Taxed Enough Already, were planning rallies to protest wasteful government spending. By the time Tax Day rolled around, over 300 protests were under way in all 50 states. More than 100,000 people took to the streets, gathered in parks and city centers with signs, slogans and costumes evoking America’s revolutionary past.

They marched on Washington, organized by the man behind the Tea Party. From the base of the Capitol, Dick Armey addressed the crowd with his wife Susan by his side. They were there together, he said, for the future of their grandchildren.

FreedomWorks chairman, former House Majority Leader and retired lobbyist extraordinaire.

Dick Armey is their de facto leader.

Only 65 percent mailed back the 2000 census form. The remainder had to be collected in person at a cost of about $57 per household.

The 2020 Census may look in our records for some form of existing documentation such as databases and archives to count us.

This is the first de facto USA flag, and what the pioneers of Massachusetts truly believed. The 1636 colony agreed they had the right to any flag they wanted. Without exception, they voted to remove the cross. The 1780 Seal of the State of Massachusetts carried the inscription:

Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty

True Slant:

Congressmen spend between 5 and 7 hours a day on the phone begging for money.

And by the way, when you’re a freshmen, you have to fill out sheets of everybody you call, and how much money per hour, and they have coaches that teach you how to get more money from each one of your phone calls, and who to call, and what data points to have on them to tickle them to make them more apt to give you money.

It is out of control.

And it’s legalized.

Gin and Tacos:

I am familiar with the lonely feeling of being in a crowded room and realizing that everyone around you is absolutely out of their goddamn mind.

And I strongly suspect that a lot of conservatives look at the carnival freakshow that is the Tea Party and know exactly what that feels like. The conservative movement has always had an image problem.

Pre-Gingrich and ‘Contract with America’, a conservative conjured up images of old, well-heeled white men in a country club sipping 40 year scotch in cashmere sweaters. The ideological faces of the movement were people like Safire and Buckley, pretentious stuffed shirts who fancied themselves intellectuals. True, there was a lunatic fringe – the Birchers, McCarthy – but mainstream conservatism tried to keep it at arm’s length.

Now the driving intellectual force of a conservative is a gaggle of AM radio nutbars…

The new image of the average conservative has less to do with country clubs than with trailer parks, NASCAR infields, and barely literate adults in histrionics and stupid hats.

The South Dakota legislature has declared, by majority vote:

That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect (sic) world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative. [link]

A former director of national intelligence says:

“We need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable.”

In other words, we need to spy on everyone.

They can’t organize because there is nothing for them to organize.

A: Having a community allows communities to organize.

B: Lack of community prevents communities from organizing.

C: Once people could self-organize. Once there were strong communities which could pressure officials. But no longer.

D: There are no strong, cohesive communities.