Friday Morning Reads
Posted: December 7, 2012 Filed under: just because, misogyny, morning reads, The Media SUCKS, We are so F'd | Tags: death penalty, innoence project, Jim Demint, legalize pot, marriage equality, opportunistic asshole, Ross Douthat is a hack, Washington State 40 Comments
Good Morning!!
I’ve been getting a real kick out of watching Washington state’s big legislative changes. First, marriage equality has come to the most NE of the lower 50 states. It’s been a pleasure to see the happy faces of long time couples who finally have some public recognition of their love and commitment. Governor Chris Gregoire signed the bill into law and the licenses are flowing!
Gov. Chris Gregoire has signed into law a measure that legalizes same-sex marriage in Washington state, which now joins several other states that allow gay and lesbian couples to wed.
Gregoire and Secretary of State Sam Reed certified the election on Wednesday afternoon, as they were joined by couples who plan to wed and community activists who worked on the campaign supporting gay marriage. The law doesn’t take effect until Thursday, when gay and lesbian couples can start picking up their wedding certificates and licenses at county auditors’ offices. King County, the state’s largest and home to Seattle, and Thurston County, home to the state capital of Olympia, will open the earliest, at 12:01 a.m. Thursday, to start issuing marriage licenses.
In Seattle, Kelly Middleton and her partner Amanda Dollente got in line to wait for their license at 4 p.m. Wednesday.
“We knew it was going to happen, but it’s still surreal,” said Dollente, 29.
By 10 p.m., dozens of people had joined the queue and the mood was festive.
Volunteers distributed roses and a group of men and women serenaded the waiting line to the tune of “Going to the Chapel.”
Asked whether the middle-of-the-night marriage license roll-out was necessary, King County Executive Dow Constantine said, “People who have been waiting all these years to have their rights recognized should not have to wait one minute longer.”
Because the state has a three-day waiting period, the earliest that weddings can take place is Sunday. Same-sex couples who previously were married in another state that allows gay marriage, like Massachusetts, will not have to get remarried in Washington state. Their marriages will be valid here as soon as the law takes effect.
“This is a very important and historic day in the great state of Washington,” Gregoire said before signing the measure that officially certified the election results. “For many years now we’ve said one more step, one more step. And this is our last step for marriage equality in the state of Washington.”
Photojournalist Meryl Schenker took this picture very early this morning in Washington state, in the first hours when same-sex couples could get marriage licenses. Meryl writes:
One month after Washington State voters approved the state’s marriage equality law in Ref. 74, same-sex couples get marriage licenses for the first time on December 6th, 2012. At around 1:30am, Larry Duncan, 56, left, and Randy Shepherd, 48, from North Bend, Wash. got their marriage license. The two plan to wed on December 9th, the first day it is possible for them to wed in a church in Washington State. They have been together for 11 years. Originally from Dallas, Texas, they moved here 7 years ago because it’s more gay friendly. Randy is a computer programer and Larry is a retired psychology nurse.
The crowds of happy people lighting joints under Seattle’s Space Needle early Thursday morning with nary a police officer in sight bespoke the new reality: Marijuana is legal under Washington state law.
Hundreds gathered at Seattle Center for a New Year’s Eve-style countdown to 12 a.m., when the legalization measure passed by voters last month took effect. When the clock struck, they cheered and sparked up in unison.
A few dozen people gathered on a sidewalk outside the north Seattle headquarters of the annual Hempfest celebration and did the same, offering joints to reporters and blowing smoke into television news cameras.
“I feel like a kid in a candy store!” shouted Hempfest volunteer Darby Hageman. “It’s all becoming real now!”
Washington and Colorado became the first states to vote to decriminalize and regulate the possession of an ounce or less of marijuana by adults over 21. Both measures call for setting up state licensing schemes for pot growers, processors and retail stores. Colorado’s law is set to take effect by Jan. 5.
Well, here I sit in the wonderful city of New Orleans trapped by the likes of Crazy Bobby Jindal who wants the christian creation myth taught as science, has now created a situation where there will be only one bed for gun shot victims at LSU med center, and is in the process of ruining everything that was functional about our public schools, our higher education system, and our health care delivery system. It’s hard not want to sell the kathouse and head out.
Exactly, what is it that jerks like Jindal have swallowed to make them so wedded to insane, dated, and completely untrue magical thinking. Why does the press continue to expand the dialogue to include the expressions of folks that just plain lie and spread hate? It’s gone way beyond a difference of opinion to a war on sane, rational thought. For your consideration, NYT hack Ross Douthat whose views on women are worthy of a Salem Witch Trial. I’ve some what avoided discussing his column but it just won’t die a good and necessary death. Evidently, Douthat believes that women that don’t stay home and spit those babies out of the vag are decadent. How do idiots like this get space in any major newspaper? Here’s a response to the hooplah he created with his Sunday Column.
Likewise for readers who regard any talk about the moral weight of reproductive choices as a subtle attempt to reimpose the patriarchy: Can it really be that having achieved so much independence and autonomy and professional success, today’s Western women have no moral interest in seeing that as many women are born into the possibility of similar opportunities tomorrow? Is the feminist revolution such a fragile thing that it requires outright population decline to fulfill its goals, and is female advancement really incompatible with the goal of a modestly above-replacement birthrate? Indeed, isn’t it just possible that a modern culture that celebrated the moral component of childrearing more fully would end up serving certain feminist ends, rather than undermining them — by making public policy more friendly to work-life balance, by putting more cultural pressure on men to be involved fathers rather than slackers and deadbeat dads, and so on?
Okay, enough rhetorical questions. It’s the nature of social conservatives to be cranky about contemporary trends, often to a fault. But it’s also the nature of decadent societies to deny that the category of “decadence” exists. And what Yglesias calls nuttiness still looks like moral common sense to me — a view of intergenerational obligation that human flourishing depends on, and whose disappearance threatens to sacrifice essential goods and relationships on the altar of more transient forms of satisfaction.
So, my next question is why is this all women’s fault? Also, who the hell thinks American’s lower birthrate is a problem anyway? Here’s the original piece if you can stand to read the ignorance. It’s true we don’t value children in our society but to talk about tripping women into having more of them when we don’t nurture and protect the children we have today is just insanity.
We have to celebrate the fact that Jim Demint is chasing more money in the private sector and hooking up with the faux research compiled these days bye the Heritage Foundation. At least the foundation and Demint are being honest about the fact that it’s all about spreading the lies that benefit their donor class. Is he really looking for a new pulpit or just a bigger pay check? Can the Heritage Foundation even fake being a ‘think tank’ any more since Demint’s ability to contribute anything other than dogma and political cronies is questionable.
His imminent departure to head a well-financed organization with significant heft in conservative circles will allow him to oppose even more loudly a big budget deal that includes higher tax revenues sought by President Obama. Mr. DeMint has been a loud Republican critic of a deal proffered by House Speaker John A. Boehner to address the impending fiscal crisis by generating at least $800 billion in new tax revenue.
“I’m leaving the Senate now, but I’m not leaving the fight,” Mr. DeMint said in a statement. “I’ve decided to join the Heritage Foundation at a time when the conservative movement needs strong leadership in the battle of ideas.”
In a parting shot — or perhaps warning flare — Mr. DeMint on Thursday suggested to Rush Limbaugh that Mr. Boehner might need to watch his back. When asked if Mr. Boehner was forcing him out, Mr. DeMint replied, “It might work a little bit the other way, Rush.”
The job switch should have substantial financial benefits for Mr. DeMint, whose 2010 net worth, $65,000, was among the lowest in the Senate. Edwin J. Feulner, the current head of the foundation, in 2010 earned $1,098,612 in total compensation.
A hero to many Republicans for his campaign fund-raising abilities, Mr. DeMint frustrated Senate colleagues by eagerly backing Republican candidates like Sharron Angle of Nevada, Ken Buck of Colorado and Christine O’Donnell of Delaware in 2010, and Richard Mourdock of Indiana and Todd Akin of Missouri this year, contenders who proved too conservative to be elected statewide. Those losses set back Mr. DeMint’s effort to bring the fiery conservatism of the House to the Senate, though he did have a hand in electing Senators Mike Lee of Utah, Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, who takes office next month.
“The truth is that Jim DeMint’s philosophy on everything from Medicare to women’s reproductive rights, as embodied by his handpicked candidates for Congress, has been rejected by voters,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who headed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee this year. Privately, so as not to inflame him, several Republicans also said Mr. DeMint’s departure would produce few tears among them.
Here’s a story that will let you know just how twisted the US justice system can be. This is from The Guardian because–you know–the US media can’t possibly question our infallibility or exceptionalism. Once again, the Louisiana justice system failed its duties. Fortunately, DNA testing has freed him. Thibodeauz was joined by others freed by the Innocence Project. He’s the young white man in the white T shirt in the picture below.
Every morning Damon Thibodeaux wakes up in his temporary digs in Minneapolis and wonders when his newfound freedom is going to come crashing down. “You think you’re going to wake up and find it was just a dream,” he says.
When he stepped out of Angola jail in Louisiana several guards were at the gate to wish him well, addressing him for the first time in 16 years as “Mr Thibodeaux”. “No offence,” he said, “but I hope I never see you again.”
He walked out as the 300th prisoner in the US to be freed as a result of DNA testing and one of 18 exonerated from death row. With the help of science he has been proved innocent of a crime for which the state of Louisiana spent 15 years trying to kill him.
For those years Thibodeaux was in a cell 1.8 metres by 3 metres for 23 hours a day. His only luxury was a morning coffee, made using a handkerchief as a filter with coffee bought from the prison shop; his only consolation was reading reading the Bible; his only exercise pacing up and down for an hour a day in a the “exercise yard”– a metal cage slightly larger than his cell.
Like most death rows in the United States, the prisoners in Angola are treated as living dead things: they are going to be executed so why bother rehabilitating
them? He watched as two of his fellow inmates were taken away to the death chamber, trying unsuccessfully not to dwell on his own impending execution. “It was like, one day they may be coming for you. At any time, a judge can sign an order and they can come and take you and kill you.”
At the lowest point, he says he felt such hopelessness that he considered dropping all his appeals and giving up. He would become a “volunteer” – one of those prisoners who are assumed positively to want to die but so often simply lack the will to live. He read the Bible some more, shared his fears with other prisoners through the bars and found a new resolution. “I came to terms with the fact that I was going to die for something I didn’t do. Truthfully, we’re all going to die anyway; it made it a lot easier.”
With little hope, he pressed on with his appeals and, almost imperceptibly at first, fortune’s wheel began to turn. A lawyer assigned to his post-conviction appeal became concerned by his case, and she in turn enlisted the help of the Innocence Project in New York, a national group devoted to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing.
Also drawn into the fray were a pair of Minneapolis-based lawyers from the commercial firm Fredrikson & Byron. In his day job Steven Kaplan works on mergers and acquisitions, not rape and murder, but he threw himself at the Thibodeaux case pro bono.
As soon as Kaplan began reading the legal papers relating to Thibodeaux’s death sentence, he was astonished. He had never worked on a capital case before and, like most people unversed in the finer details of the death penalty in America, had assumed that the judicial process must have adhered to the very highest legal standards. After all, a man’s life was at stake.
“When I read the transcript of the trial for the first time, I thought to myself that the high school mock trial team that I coached of 15- to 17-year-olds would have run rings around the lawyers in that courtroom,” said Kaplan. “We put more energy into a $50,000 contract dispute than went into the defence at the Damon Thibodeaux trial.”
The sequence of events that put Thibodeaux on to death row began on 19 July 1996. He was 22 and worked as a deckhand on Mississippi river barges.
Two weeks earlier he had moved back to New Orleans, where his mother and sister lived, to help out with his sister’s wedding. He started hanging out with the Champagne family, distant relatives, who had a flat in a neighbouring suburb.
He spent 19 July at the Champagne home with the father, CJ, mother, Dawn, and 14-year-old daughter, Crystal. At about 5pm Crystal asked Thibodeaux to go with her to the local Winn-Dixie supermarket but he was busy mending CJ’s watch. She left the house on her own at 5.15pm.
When she was not back more than an hour later her mother became alarmed and they began a search, Thibodeaux joining the effort. They called the police and searched through the night and through the following day.
It was not until after 6pm on 20 July that Thibodeaux went back to his mother’s house and lay down to rest. He was just falling asleep when police arrived and asked him to come with them.
That was at 7.32pm. At 7.40pm Crystal’s body was found on the banks of the Mississippi, about five miles from the Champagnes’ home. The news was transmitted to the detectives quizzing Thibodeaux and instantly a routine missing-person interview became a homicide interrogation.
So, I’ve really overrun my usual self-imposed limit today of shares but some of these stories really frosted my cupcakes. I really worry about our country. Today’s reads showed that there are places where things are hopeful and places where things just aren’t right.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads
Posted: December 6, 2012 Filed under: 2012 elections, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Academy Awards, Benghazi attacks, blue states, consumer demand, Dinesh D'Souza, Earth at night, Gerald Molan, health insurance industry, Jared Bernstein, Joel Kotkin, Medicare age increase, NASA, red states, secession, supply side fairy tales, taxes, taxing the rich, unemployment 31 Comments
Good Morning!
The New York Times has added more fodder for the Republicans’ Benghazi attacks. James Risen Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt report that: U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ Hands.
The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.
Of course there’s no evidence that this had anything to do with the Benghazi attacks, but I’m sure that won’t stop Senators McNasty, Huckleberry Closetcase, and their new pal Senator Kelley Ayotte from pretending otherwise.
No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that killed four Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September.
But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried about the consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan militants, concerns that have not previously been reported. The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government.
Also at the NYT, Jared Bernstein once again explains why politicians (and the media) in the Village need to stop obsessing on taxes and start focusing in increasing employment and, along with it, consumer demand.
WITH the budget-and-tax showdown dominating headlines, most Americans probably missed an even more ominous story: according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office, America’s underlying growth rate — that is, the best the economy could do, under optimal conditions, without driving up inflation — has slowed from just under 4 percent a year in 2000 to just under 2 percent today.
Why does this matter? For one thing, the combination of a lower underlying growth rate, which you could think of as the economy’s speed limit, and a less equitable distribution of that growth was a reason middle-income households did so badly and poverty went up in the 2000s.
During the 1990s, in contrast, stronger demand for goods and services led to much faster job growth and the last real gains experienced by middle- and lower-income households. Faster growth in those years also spun off a lot more government revenues, which interacted with slightly higher tax rates to take the budget from deficit to surplus.
Read the whole thing and fantasize what we could be doing if we had smarter leadership in DC.
Back in Republican la-la land, Joel Kotkin at Forbes claims that blue states are committing suicide by supporting raising tax rates on the rich.
With their enthusiastic backing of President Obama and the Democratic Party on Election Day, the bluest parts of America may have embraced a program utterly at odds with their economic self-interest. The almost uniform support of blue states’ congressional representatives for the administration’s campaign for tax “fairness” represents a kind of bizarre economic suicide pact.
Any move to raise taxes on the rich — defined as households making over $250,000 annually — strikes directly at the economies of these states, which depend heavily on the earnings of high-income professionals, entrepreneurs and technical workers. In fact, when you examine which states, and metropolitan areas, have the highest concentrations of such people, it turns out they are overwhelmingly located in the bluest states and regions.
Really? Then how come we did so much better under the Clinton tax rates in the ’90s? After all, that’s all that is happening–except that the first $250,000 of these poor rich people’s money will still be taxed at the Bush rates. But that’s not how Kotkin sees it.
The people whose wallets will be drained in the new war on “the rich” are high-earning, but hardly plutocratic professionals like engineers, doctors, lawyers, small business owners and the like. Once seen as the bastion of the middle class, and exemplars of upward mobility, these people are emerging as the modern day “kulaks,” the affluent peasants ruthlessly targeted by Stalin in the early 1930s.
OMB!! “Wallets…drained!” “Stalin!” Let’s all freak out!
The ironic geography of the Democratic drive can be seen most clearly by examining the distribution of the classes now targeted by the coming purge. The top 10 states with the largest percentage of “rich” households under the Obama formula include true blue bastions Washington, D.C., which has the highest concentration of big earners, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, California and Hawaii. The only historic “swing state” in the top six is Virginia, due largely to the presence of the affluent suburbs of the capital. These same states, according to the Tax Foundation, would benefit the most from an extension of the much-lambasted Bush tax cuts.
Hey Joel, maybe it’s not all about taxes, even though that’s all that seems to matter to you. Maybe some blue state folks think the whole economy would benefit if more people got back to work, earned some money and spent it–as suggested by Jared Bernstein in yesterday’s NYT (see above).
As Zandar notes, Kotkin then goes on to show how Republicans can use the home mortgage deduction and other methods to punish the blue state richies for voting for Obama.
– Keep the tax rate on capital gains the same.
– Raise income taxes on the top income bracket for 2013, those making $398,350 and up (single filers, married joint filers, or head of household).
– Means-test, or eliminate entirely, the mortgage interest deduction (which benefits taxpayers in areas with the highest real estate values and mortgages – i.e., Hawaii, D.C., New York, California and Connecticut).
– Means-test or eliminate entirely the federal deduction of state and local taxes, which is disproportionately utilized by those in high-tax blue states: “In 2005, taxpayers in California and New York together made up 20 percent of those claiming the deduction and accounted for 30 percent of its value. Itemizers in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California claimed on average over $12,000 per household.”
Talk about a sore loser! Kotkin must be really bitter about Romney’s failure to get those blue state dopes to vote for him.
Meanwhile all those Romney voters in the red states are dreaming about seceding from the union. But if they did, asks The Nation, “Who’d Pay for Their Massive Government Handouts?”
In the wake of Obama’s victory, citizens in several states submitted petitions to secede from the United States. It is something of an irony that the very states seeking secession from “big government”—like Louisiana and Alabama—have been among the top beneficiaries of that selfsame government. Put bluntly, the government would be far smaller without them, and they would seriously struggle far more without it. Indeed, were they to become independent, most would be failed states in need of a bailout. Only this time their benefactor would be not the federal government but the International Monetary Fund, of which the United States is the principal donor. Louisiana and Alabama would go the way of Greece and Spain.
Oh, the irony of it all! And here’s another irony for Republicans to chew on. From TPM: Why Insurers Are Wary Of Raising The Medicare Age
House Republican leaders want to avoid the fiscal cliff with a proposal that would gradually raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67. Democrats are broadly reluctant to cut benefits, but President Obama was willing to accept the policy last year in failed deficit reduction talks with House Speaker John Boehner, and top Democrats have left the door open to including that measure in a grand budget bargain.
It may seem counter-intuitive: why would an industry threatened by government insurance not want it to shrink?
The reason: hiking the Medicare eligibility age would throw seniors aged 65 and 66 off Medicare and into the private market, forcing insurers, who will soon be required to cover all consumers regardless of health status, to care for a sicker, more expensive crop of patients.
“The risk pool issue is important,” the insurance industry source said. “[I]f you add more older and sicker people to the pool, that’s definitely going to have any impact on premiums.”
The policy would save the federal government $113 billion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But it achieves that by raising the cost of private insurance: the Kaiser Family Foundation projected that a Medicare age of 67 would raise costs for under-65 patients by an average of $141 in 2014. (In practice it would be phased in.)
Duh!
And even more Republican stupidity: Right wing nutcases are all bent out of shape because their favorite crazy propaganda movie didn’t get any Oscar nominations.
Gerald Molan, the director of the extremely anti-Obama movie, 2016: Obama’s America , is mad that his and Dinesh D’Souza’s film [“2016”] wasn’t on the shortlist of documentaries nominated for an Academy Award.
“The action confirms my opinion that the bias against anything from a conservative point of view is dead on arrival in Hollywood circles,” he complained to the Hollywood Reporter.
It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that the movie is based on a pack of lies and right wing conspiracy theories, could it?
To cleanse your palate of right wing and DC craziness, try watching this video from NASA that show views of the Earth from space. Here’s a still shot:
So what are you reading and blogging about today? I’ve been a little out of the loop for the past couple of days, so I look forward to clicking on your links!
Tuesday Reads: Delusional Republicans, Complicit Media, and Lots More
Posted: December 4, 2012 Filed under: 2012 elections, Congress, Fiscal Cliff, Homeless, hunger, Medicare, morning reads, Republican Tax Fetishists, Romney-Ryan Budget Plan, Social Security, Surreality, The Bonus Class, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Cenk Uygur, CNN, David Oliver Relin, Erin Burnett, Greg Mortenson, Jeffrey Hillman, John Boehner, Lawrence DePrimo, Michael Bloomberg, Michael Grunwald, Republican tantrums, Rick Santorum, Suicide, Three Cups of Tea, Wolf Blitzer 25 Comments
Good Morning!!
Yesterday the House Republicans made a so-called “counteroffer” to President Obama’s initial proposal for avoiding the fiscal cliff that basically consists of the Romney/Ryan plan that voters already rejected. The plan called for cutting Medicare by raising the eligibility age to 67, cutting Social Security by change the COLA, and supposedly “raising revenues” without raising rates on the rich–with specifics to be determined next year.
The White House rejected the offer immediately as basically a joke and will not be making a counteroffer, according to CNN’s Jessica Yellin.
Senior administration officials said the offer House Speaker John Boehner submitted to the White House on Monday wasn’t serious enough to merit a counter-proposal from the administration. So the president’s team plans to wait for the GOP to come around on the idea of raising tax rates or let the nation go over the fiscal cliff.
In a statement Monday White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer blasted the Republican plan, arguing it “does not meet the test of balance. In fact, it actually promises to lower rates for the wealthy and sticks the middle class with the bill.”
Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Republicans have gone over the rainbow and have lost touch with reality. They simply can’t accept that they lost the election, and they just aren’t in “Kansas” anymore.
The talk in DC is that the Republicans have talked about a “doomsday plan,” actually another tantrum in which they metaphorically throw themselves down on the House floor screaming and kicking until they get their way. According to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl:
Republicans are seriously considering a Doomsday Plan if fiscal cliff talks collapse entirely. It’s quite simple: House Republicans would allow a vote on extending the Bush middle class tax cuts (the bill passed in August by the Senate) and offer the President nothing more: no extension of the debt ceiling, nothing on unemployment, nothing on closing loopholes. Congress would recess for the holidays and the president would face a big battle early in the year over the debt ceiling.
Two senior Republican elected officials tell me this doomsday plan is becoming the most likely scenario. A top GOP House leadership aide confirms the plan is under consideration, but says Speaker Boehner has made no decision on whether to pursue it.
Under one variation of this Doomsday Plan, House Republicans would allow a vote on extending only the middle class tax cuts and Republicans, to express disapproval at the failure to extend all tax cuts, would vote “present” on the bill, allowing it to pass entirely on Democratic votes.
It’s a mystery what Republicans think they would gain by doing this, so I guess the childish temper tantrum metaphor continues to fit.
What bothers me even more than the Republicans’ nonsensical refusal to accept reality is that the media has apparently decided to go over the rainbow too and pretend that the childish tantrums make some kind of sense. During the presidential campaign, I got the feeling that corporate “journalists” were beginning to face up to reality when they began actually admitting that Mitt Romney’s was telling bald-faced lies with regularity. But no–they’re returned to the default position of pretending that “both sides do it.” A few days ago, Michael Grunwald wrote a great piece about this at Time’s Swampland blog: Fiscal Cliff Fictions: Let’s All Agree to Pretend the GOP Isn’t Full of It.
It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.
This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.
I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s defiance of reality–its denial of climate science, its simultaneous denunciations of Medicare cuts and government health care, its insistence that debt-exploding tax cuts will somehow reduce the debt—so I often get accused of partisanship. But it’s simply a fact that Republicans controlled Washington during the fiscally irresponsible era when President Clinton’s budget surpluses were transformed into the trillion-dollar deficit that President Bush bequeathed to President Obama. (The deficit is now shrinking.) It’s simply a fact that the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default on its obligations. The press can’t figure out how to weave those facts into the current narrative without sounding like it’s taking sides, so it simply pretends that yesterday never happened.
Dakinikat has written about this repeatedly, of course, but it’s nice to see it in the corporate media for a change.
Speaking of media madness, I don’t watch CNN much anymore but it seems like any time I click by the channel one of two people is on the air–Wolf Blitzer or Erin Burnett. Do they even have any other reporters working there in the afternoon an evening?
What’s the deal with having Erin Burnett covering serious news stories, even foreign policy stories? Burnett’s background is as co-anchor of a show on CNBC as an adviser to Donald Trump on Celebrity Apprentice! She recently “interviewed” Julian Assange and failed to ask him even one significant question.
Unfortunately, I don’t get Current TV, but apparently Cenk Uygur has been criticizing Burnett relentlessly for the past couple of years. Most recently, he accused her of ‘Guarding The Fortress’ By Abetting Gutting Of Medicare. From Mediaite:
“Erin Burnett is someone that represents the rich, powerful, the establishment, in my opinion,” Cenk said, “and you can see it in her CNN reports all the time.”
Cenk set up a clip from Burnett’s show, in which Rep. [Peter] DeFazio explains how deficit reduction can be achieved without gutting Medicare benefits. “Listen to her be incredibly incredulous about this,” he said, before playing a few snippets from OutFront.
“(President Obama) has said ‘Yes, I support raising the age on Medicare from 65 to 67,” Burnett says. “Simpson-Bowles talked about raising the age. Most people do, and say that’s really going to be the only way to get out of this. You really think we don’t have to make real changes, or is that just, I understand your constituents don’t want you to say anything…”
The implication is that DeFazio is opposing the change on nakedly political grounds, and not the merits of the policy.
“That doesn’t deal with the cost of prescription drugs,” Rep. Defazio replied, “and with overpriced and unnecessary medical care.”
“Fair,” Burnett interjects, as the clip cuts ahead to Burnett saying “Interesting point, but I still find it a little bit hard to believe. when you say we don’t have to make substantive change to a program that’s going to consume all of our federal spending if we keep going the way we’re going, we do need to make substantial changes. It’s going to hurt.”
See what I mean? As Dakinkat has said, CNN is trying to compete with Fox News, though not very successfully. But why are they doing it when their ratings keep falling? And why don’t they hire some real reporters?
Have you heard that former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has begun blogging at right wing conspiracy site World Net Daily? According to Raw Story, Santorum’s first post is about a supposed UN conspiracy involving Harry Reid.
In keeping with the WND tradition of promoting various fringe conspiracies, Santorum’s debut column claimed that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has an objective of “ceding our sovereignty to the United Nations.”
Santorum warned that a United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities treaty adopted in 2006 “has much darker and more troubling implications” than to simply improve the treatment of disabled people in other countries.
The staunchly anti-abortion Republican worried that the treaty would “put the government, acting under U.N. authority, in the position to determine for all children with disabilities what is best for them.”
And taking that thought to its absurd conclusion, Santorum suggested that the U.N. treaty would have meant the death of his daughter, who has a rare genetic disorder.
Sigh…
In more serious news, a very sad story this morning: David Oliver Relin, co-author of the book Three Cups of Tea, has committed suicide. Last year I wrote about a 60 Minutes report on the other co-author Greg Mortenson’s fabricated stories in the book. Relin was very disturbed by the revelations and had become deeply depressed, according to the NYT.
David Oliver Relin, a journalist and adventurer who achieved acclaim as co-author of the best seller “Three Cups of Tea” (2006) and then suffered emotionally and financially as basic facts in the book were called into question, died Nov. 15 in Multnomah County, Ore. He was 49.
His family said Mr. Relin “suffered from depression” and took his own life. The family, speaking through Mr. Relin’s agent, Jin Auh, was unwilling to give further details, but said a police statement would be released this week.
In the 1990s, Mr. Relin established himself as a journalist with an interest in telling “humanitarian” stories about people in need in articles about child soldiers and about his travels in Vietnam.
“He felt his causes passionately,” said Lee Kravitz, the former editor of Parade who hired Mr. Relin at various magazines over the years. “He especially cared about young people. I always assigned him to stories that would inspire people to take action to improve their lives.”
Relin obviously had no idea that his co-author Greg Mortenson was a fabulist.
And another sad story from the Times: Homeless Man Is Grateful for Officer’s Gift of Boots. But He Again Is Barefoot. You probably heard about the police officer who recently took pity on a homeless man whose feet were freezing and bought him a pair of $100 boots. Unfortunately the boots put the man’s life at risk.
After Officer Lawrence DePrimo knelt beside a barefoot man on a bitterly cold November night in Times Square, giving him a pair of boots, a photo of his random act of good will quickly took on a life of its own — becoming a symbol for a million acts of kindness that go unnoticed every day and a reminder that even in this tough, often anonymous city, people can still look out for one another.
Officer DePrimo was celebrated on front pages and morning talk shows, the Police Department came away with a burnished image and millions got a smile from a nice story.
But the unnamed homeless man was living in another, more painful reality.
His name is Jeffrey Hillman, and on Sunday night, he was once again wandering the streets — this time on the Upper West Side — with no shoes.
The $100 pair of boots that Officer DePrimo had bought for him at a Skechers store on Nov. 14 were nowhere to be seen.
“Those shoes are hidden. They are worth a lot of money,” Mr. Hillman said in an interview on Broadway in the 70s. “I could lose my life.”
Meanwhile, years of Republican rule in New York City have led to skyrocketing homelessness in the city. From Alternet: How One GOP Plutocrat Helped Make 20,000 Kids Homeless
There are 20,000 kids sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City, according to the city’s latest estimate, a number that does not include homeless kids who are not sleeping in shelters because their families have been turned away. Up to 65 percent of families who apply for shelter don’t get in , and their options can be grim.
“Some end up sleeping in subway trains,” Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless, tells AlterNet. “Some go to hospital emergency rooms or laundromats. Women are going back to their batterers or staying in unsafe apartments.”
Families that make it into shelters are taking longer to leave and move into stable, permanent housing. Asked by reporters why families were staying 30% longer than even last year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “… it is a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.”
Man, that’s cold. Bloomberg could probably help all those homeless kids with money out of his own pocket and not even notice it, but instead he has banned gifts of food to the homeless even after Hurricane Sandy!
The edict, issued last March by Mayor Bloomberg, is part of a larger move by the city’s Department of Homeless Services (DHS) that dictates serving sizes and other nutritional requirements. These include limits on calorie contents, minimum fiber amounts and condiment recomendations [sic]….
Mayor Bloomberg’s clampdown on food donations can be seen as a greater restriction on New Yorker’s freedom to eat or drink what they want. He banned the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces last September, baby formula to new mothers in local hospitals last July, smoking in parks and open spaces in May 2011, implemented a plan in January 2010 to cut the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant food, forced fast food restaurants to post calorie content in October 2007, and forbid restaurants from using trans fats in cooking oils in 2006.
Real human beings are cold and hungry, and Bloomberg is worried about calorie control and nutritional requirements!
Uh-oh. This post has gotten way too long and I’m way to late in putting it up, so I’ll end on this down note. I hope you’ll have some more upbeat stories to share in the comments.
Monday Reads: Esoteric Interests
Posted: December 3, 2012 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Asperger's disorder, autism specrtum disorder, God's Doodle, Hillary Clinton, Killer bag lady, Lois Lang, Medici Family grave, Meryl Streep, Virginia Woolf 22 Comments
Good Morning!
I’m going to try to put some interesting reads up this morning just because the political theater surrounding the budget discussions has gotten to me. So, here are some things to read that are a little more esoteric. Most of these things have little hints of hidden secrets that are just tantalizing to me and hopefully a few of you too.
The Atlantic‘s Benjamin Schwartz has a feature article on ‘The Education of Virginia Woolf’ that you literature fans may want to read.
Taken as a whole, Woolf’s essays are probably the most intense paean to reading—an activity pursued not for a purpose but for love—ever written in English. Her assessment of “the man who loves reading” (in contrast to “the man who loves learning”) fit both herself as an essayist and her audience:
A reader must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill … the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading. The true reader is a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open-minded and communicative, to whom reading is more of the nature of brisk exercise in the open air than of sheltered study.
That passage, from Woolf’s essay “Hours in a Library,” a title she borrowed from a multivolume collection of her father’s essays, recalls Stephen’s passion for reading, walking, and climbing. She invoked her father again in “The Leaning Tower,” an essay adapted from a wartime lecture she gave in 1940 to the Workers’ Education Association, in which she conflated her expansive concept of amateurism with her hopeful, democratic vision of the reading life:
Let us bear in mind a piece of advice that an eminent Victorian who was also an eminent pedestrian once gave to walkers: “Whenever you see a board up with ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted,’ trespass at once.” Let us trespass at once. Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground … It is thus that English literature will survive this war … if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and how to write, how to preserve and how to create.
The American Psychiatric Association’s new diagnostic manual will be published in May with some interesting changes.
The now familiar term “Asperger’s disorder” is being dropped. And abnormally bad and frequent temper tantrums will be given a scientific-sounding diagnosis called DMDD. But “dyslexia” and other learning disorders remain.
The revisions come in the first major rewrite in nearly 20 years of the diagnostic guide used by the nation’s psychiatrists. Changes were approved Saturday.
…
One of the most hotly argued changes was how to define the various ranges of autism. Some advocates opposed the idea of dropping the specific diagnosis for Asperger’s disorder. People with that disorder often have high intelligence and vast knowledge on narrow subjects but lack social skills. Some who have the condition embrace their quirkiness and vow to continue to use the label.
And some Asperger’s families opposed any change, fearing their kids would lose a diagnosis and no longer be eligible for special services.
But the revision will not affect their education services, experts say.
The new manual adds the term “autism spectrum disorder,” which already is used by many experts in the field. Asperger’s disorder will be dropped and incorporated under that umbrella diagnosis. The new category will include kids with severe autism, who often don’t talk or interact, as well as those with milder forms.
So, for all of you that appreciate some real life thriller and spy drama, Salon has “James Bond and the killer bag lady” for your reading pleasure. The suspect is Lois Lang. Even her name sounds like something that should be in the movies!
On the morning of Nov. 19, 1985, a wild-eyed and disheveled homeless woman entered the reception room at the legendary Wall Street firm of Deak-Perera. Carrying a backpack with an aluminum baseball bat sticking out of the top, her face partially hidden by shocks of greasy, gray-streaked hair falling out from under a wool cap, she demanded to speak with the firm’s 80-year-old founder and president, Nicholas Deak.
The 44-year-old drifter’s name was Lois Lang. She had arrived at Port Authority that morning, the final stop on a month-long cross-country Greyhound journey that began in Seattle. Deak-Perera’s receptionist, Frances Lauder, told the woman that Deak was out. Lang became agitated and accused Lauder of lying. Trying to defuse the situation, the receptionist led the unkempt woman down the hallway and showed her Deak’s empty office. “I’ll be in touch,” Lang said, and left for a coffee shop around the corner. From her seat by a window, she kept close watch on 29 Broadway, an art deco skyscraper diagonal from the Bowling Green Bull.
Deak-Perera had been headquartered on the building’s 20th and 21st floors since the late 1960s. Nick Deak, known as “the James Bond of money,” founded the company in 1947 with the financial backing of the CIA. For more than three decades the company had functioned as an unofficial arm of the intelligence agency and was a key asset in the execution of U.S. Cold War foreign policy. From humble beginnings as a spook front and flower import business, the firm grew to become the largest currency and precious metals firm in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world. But on this day in November, the offices were half-empty and employees few. Deak-Perera had been decimated the year before by a federal investigation into its ties to organized crime syndicates from Buenos Aires to Manila. Deak’s former CIA associates did nothing to interfere with the public takedown. Deak-Perera declared bankruptcy in December 1984, setting off panicked and sometimes violent runs on its offices in Latin America and Asia.
Lois Lang had been watching 29 Broadway for two hours when a limousine dropped off Deak and his son Leslie at the building’s revolving-door rear entrance. They took the elevator to the 21st floor, where Lauder informed Deak about the odd visitor. Deak merely shrugged and was settling into his office when he heard a commotion in the reception room. Lang had returned. Frances Lauder let out a fearful “Oh—” shortened by two bangs from a .38 revolver. The first bullet missed. The second struck the secretary between the eyes and exited out the back of her skull.
So, those of you that know me also know that my Saturday night ritual consists of a good red wine, some great music, and a long soak in a hot tub with my latest edition of The Economist. I got more than I bargained for with this article which was a review of a book. And I REALLLLLLYYYYY quote:
The penis
Cross to bare
Anatomy of a seminal work
Dec 1st 2012 | from the print edition
Behind the figleaf
God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis. By Tom Hickman. Square Peg; 234 pages; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
THE problem with penises, as Richard Rudgley, a British anthropologist, admitted on a television programme some years ago, is that once you start noticing them, you “tend to see willies pretty much everywhere”. They are manifest in skyscrapers, depicted in art and loom large in literature. They pop up on the walls of schoolyards across the world, and on the walls of temples both modern and ancient. The Greeks and Japanese rendered them on statues that stood at street corners. Hindus worship the lingam in temples across the land. Even the cross on which Jesus was hung is considered by some to be a representation of male genitalia.
Yet the penis has also been shamed into hiding through the ages. One night in 415BC, Athens’s street-corner statues were dismembered en masse. Stone penises were still causing anxiety in the late 20th century, when the Victoria and Albert Museum in London pulled out of storage a stone figleaf in case a member of the royal family wanted to see its 18-foot (5.5-metre) replica of Michelangelo’s “David”. Nothing, save the vagina, which is neither as easy nor as childishly satisfying to scrawl on a wall, manages to be so sacred and so profane at once. This paradox makes it an object of fascination.
Yes, since I put up a picture of Freud I just had to follow-up with something phallic. I leave the discussion to you.
So, what would one of my esoteric posts be without a mention of a historic grave. This time it’s the Tomb of a Renaissance Warrior that may have run awry of his famous Medici Family. This guy’s been dug up a lot so the story is a little twisted.
A noble-but-brutal Renaissance warrior who fell to a battle wound may not have died exactly as historians had believed, according to a new investigation of the man’s bones.
Italian researchers opened the tomb of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, or Giovanni of the Black Bands, this week to investigate the real cause of his death. Giovanni was born in 1498 into the wealthy and influential Medici family, a lineage that produced three Popes and two regent queens of France, among many other nobles (Another branch of the family, the Medicis of Milan, boasted a fourth Pope). He worked as a mercenary military captain for Pope Leo X (one of the Medici family’s Popes), and fought many a successful skirmish in his name. When Pope Leo X died in 1521, Giovanni altered his uniform to include black mourning bands, earning him his nickname.
Giovanni was wounded in battle in 1526; reportedly, his leg was amputated and he died several days later of infection. However, the new investigation of the Giovanni remains reveals that it was not his leg that was sawn off, but his foot. Nor is there any damage to the man’s thigh, where the shot supposedly hit.
Giovanni’s grave has been opened five times already, including an investigation in 1945. This confirmation of the man’s actual wound has created a medical mystery.
“Giovanni was wounded in the right leg (maybe above the knee) but was amputee[d] [at the] foot,” Marco Ferri, a spokesman for the Superintendent of Fine Arts of Florentine Museums, wrote in an email to LiveScience. “Why? The surgeon was not a good doctor or the news [that] reached us [is] not accurate.”
Giovanni’s bones rest with those of his wife, Maria Salviati in two zinc boxes in the crypt of the Medici Chapels in Florence. The man’s tibia and fibula, the bones of the lower leg, were found sawed off from the amputation. There was no damage to the femur (thigh bone).
BFFs? We can dream. But Meryl Streep and Hillary Clinton looked pretty chummy on Saturday night.
The Oscar-winning actress and the Secretary of State met up at the Kennedy Center Honors gala, held at the State Department.
According to the AP, Streep used her iPhone to snap a photo of the two powerful women.
Earlier this year, Streep compared herself to the former First Lady.
“I find a lot of similarities,” Streep said when introducing Clinton at the Women in the World Summit. “We’re roughly the same age, we both have two brothers — mine are annoying — we both grew up in middle-class homes with spirited, big-hearted mothers who encouraged us to do something valuable and interesting with our lives. We both went from public high schools to distinguished women’s colleges … We both went on to graduate school at Yale.”
How about Meryl playing Hillary in a Biopic? It could work!!!
So, that’s a little something different for you to read while getting your Monday going.
I’d like to end with a great big thank you for those of you that helped me pay our annual bills this month. We have to pay a little extra to get the blog to look this way and to have enough room to store things and move around. Thanks a lot for all your support and comments! I think we have one of the best blogging communities on the internet and I adore you all!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads
Posted: November 30, 2012 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: crazy Ken Cuccinelli, Fox Faux Wars, Republicans, witch hunts 35 Comments
Good Morning!!!
Well, the brain of Fox Propaganda network is all on wars these days. First, there’s a “war on white men” and of course, women–those emasculating bitchy feminists–are in charge of it all. The Colbert Report has a nice send up of this side splitter.
Women are far more interested in getting married than men, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center .
But who’s fault is the discrepancy? Last night, Stephen Colbert teamed up with his buddy at Fox News, Suzanne Venker, to explain why the sisters are doing it to themselves.
With biting irony, Colbert praises Venker’s argument, which claims that since the sexual revolution “men haven’t changed much …. but women have changed dramatically. In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive.”
Plus, as Colbert can testify firsthand, men want to work out of the house, pushing paper for the Man while crammed into a tiny cubicle.
“What man wants the woman to provide the money while the man stays home to do what? Witness his child take the first steps? I’ve witnessed people walk before, and frankly babies aren’t that good at it,” said Colbert.
And yes, it’s time for Bill O’Reilly to reignite the War on Xmas. If only it were true! It would be great to go to the store without having your senses assaulted by songs, sales, and crap related to national Crass Consumerism Season, wouldn’t it? Yes, atheists are stopping xmas celebrations all over the country!! It’s a huge atheist conspiracy!!! Plus, O’Reilly doesn’t understand the first amendment issues surrounding it at all since christianity is just a philosophy! Tear down those philosophical nativity scenes in front of all those churches, gawddammit!
Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly was more than happy to bloviate about the topic on Wednesday’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” getting into a near shouting match with David Silverman, president of American Atheists.At first, things started out cordial between the two as they discussed “this year’s Christmas controversy situation.”
“You’re an atheist, a nonbeliever, and I respect that, that’s fine. I don’t look down on you,” O’Reilly told Silverman. But later, after Silverman attempted to define what O’Reilly cared about, the caustic commentator characterized Silverman’s point of view as “insane” before flat out calling him a “fascist.”
Interestingly enough, during the course of the interview, O’Reilly also said, “It is a fact that Christianity is not a religion. It is a philosophy.”
So there you have it. Bill O’Reilly calls the leader of an atheist organization a “fascist” over “philosophical”—but not religious—differences.
Yes, it’s an atheist, fascist, philosophical kinda conspiratorial war thing!
So, just when you think the crazy can’t get any crazier … you find out that it’s DEMON sex that makes one gay! Wow! Isn’t scientific inquiry wonderful? Out, out damn demons! Quit making all people gay with your bad, bad demon sex!
The reigning scientific consensus on sexual orientation is that it’s an inherited, biological trait, but that’s just because scientists don’t know how to party. A far sexier explanation has been offered up by Christian magazine Charisma, which conducted its own investigation into the origins of homosexuality to reveal the real culprit: sex with demons.
“Can demons engage in sexual behaviors with humans?” the magazine asks. Why yes, they can! At least according to the article’s primary source, a former stripper-turned-ministry leader named Contessa Adams. Adams shares her decades-long struggle with demon sex, sparing no horrible, sexy detail …
Hey, just tell your parents a Demon made you do it!!!
So, more irrelevant Republicans are making pronouncements about fiscal policy. Newt Gingrich thinks the Congressional Republicans should not negotiate with the President since Republicans are the majority. Is it just me or are Republicans just really bad at math? Seventeen Republican Congressmen out the door in 2 years and we say hello to Speaker Pelosi again. All it takes is 25 House Republicans right now to wake up and care about the country.
“One of the things I would say to House Republicans is to get a grip,” Gingrich said in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.
“They are the majority. They’re not the minority,” he said, enunciating the words as if explaining the concept to someone who did not understand it. “They don’t need to cave in to Obama; they don’t need to form a ‘Surrender Caucus.’”
“So my number one bit of advice to the congressional Republicans is simple: Back out of of all of this negotiating with Obama. The president is overwhelmingly dominant in the news media. You start setting up the definition of success finding an agreement with Obama, you just gave Obama the ability to say to you, ‘Not good enough,’” Gingrich said.
The onetime presidential hopeful ridiculed the idea of the fiscal cliff, saying it was a manufactured crisis.
Rushie Limbaugh–who makes tons of money off of stupid–tells the Republicans to just walk away too. I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t know that the deal cut by republicans that caused the fiscal cliff deadline hurts them worse than it hurts the dems. Tax rates go back up to the Clinton years and we get a big ol’ fat cut in military spending. Hey, I’m just fine with that. The question is why are Mr. Limpballs and the Newt? Perhaps its because they’re part of the right wing outrage entertainment business and they’re probably out shorting US equities as I write this.
Would somebody explain to me how the people who elected Obama, who support Obama, who love Obama in the media, in the universities, who write the history, are going to write anything critical of the guy no matter what happens? Even if there is a second term recession, you’re gonna need a telescope to find it reported, just like you need a telescope to find Oprah’s network now. It won’t be reported as a recession. So what is the leverage that the Republicans have? To my mind the only leverage they’ve got is to walk away from this, to stop playing, to stop talking, to stop playing this game.
The Republicans lost. Now, they still control the House of Representatives but Boehner still runs the show there. But the only leverage that I can see that they’ve got is to back out of this and make sure that whatever happens, they don’t have any fingerprints on it. I know what you’re saying, and you’d be right. You’re saying, “But, Rush, but, Rush, no matter what the Republicans do, they’re gonna get blamed for it.” Yes, totally true. No matter what happens. If there is a reported recession, in fact, it will be said to be the Republicans in the House fault. No matter what happens, that’s going to be said, and no matter what happens, as we sit here now, the American people, the majority of whom, are gonna believe that.
So back out of this and make sure you don’t have any fingerprints on this at all. “But, Rush, but, Rush, aren’t your fingerprints going to be on it if you back out? Couldn’t the case be made that Republicans backing out and letting Obama have his way is, in effect, allowing this transformation to happen, can’t you say there would be fingerprints there?” Yes. But I’m telling you there’s another aspect to this that Obama is attempting to pull off here, and if the Republicans aren’t careful, it’s going to happen. Not only is he not worried about a recession in the second term, ’cause even if there is one, it will not be reported as such.
Part of Obama’s transformation of America is wiping out the Republican Party. And anyone who fails to understand that that is also part of Obama’s agenda at this moment, anybody who fails to understand that is really not paying attention and is too caught up in traditional conventional wisdom about, “Well, it was just another election. Well, yes, Obama won. Yes, we marshaled our forces, but we need to stand for pro-growth policies and all that rotgut.” Yes, we do. There’s no way we’re ever gonna be tied to pro-growth policies if our fingerprints are on this coming disaster.
For the life of me, I cannot in any way shape or form figure out what is wrong with these people. I just see vendettas and personal power grabs. As Harry Reid said yesterday: “I don’t understand John Boehner’s brain”. I swear they all must be sots like Boehner.Even the normally reasonable Republicans seem bonkers these days. I think they’ve all just gone nuts on ODs. They’re not even making sense. Susan Collins has decided that a Secretary of State or UN Ambassador should never go on a Sunday Show because it’s too “political”. John McCain and Lady Lindsey Graham think that giving misinformation on Sunday Shows–like say, Saddam Hussein definitely has massive amounts of WMDS and deserves to have his country invaded because of them--should be removed from consideration for any office.
Here’s a good example of crazy from Senator Jim Inhofe: Benghazi Will ‘Go Down As The Biggest Coverup In History’. Obviously, he’s forgotten the Iran-Contra affair which would have been a whopper had our president not been so damned senile during his last term. Then, there’s Watergate and oh, the crap they made Colin Powell tell the UN about Iraq. But, oh, no …Benghazi is a cover up and the worst.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) on Wednesday made a strong claim about the Obama administration’s handling of the Sept. 11 anniversary terrorist attack on an American compound in Benghazi, Libya, declaring that it was a conspiracy of historic proportions.
“This is gonna go down as the biggest coverup in history,” Inhofe predicted during an appearance on Fox News. “The administration deliberately covered this up and misrepresented what happened in Benghazi.”
He later stood by his claim when pressed by Fox News’ Bill Hemmer.
Does having black people in office make these guys lose their marbles? How do they all seem to have such a tenuous grasp on reality? Is it they see that the 1950s or the 1850s are finally gone? WTF is it with these folks? They LOST. THEY LOST. They lost by A LOT!!!
What can you do with pretzel logic like this? Republican Rep. Chris Gibson says he won’t be bound by anti-tax activist Grover Norquist’s pledge not to support any tax increases because his congressional district number changed. Yup, the pledge only was good for one set of geography and not the new one.
I wish that I was a world famous fantasy or SF author so that you could think this was all satire, or Huxley-like, or some kind of dysfunctional dystopia novel, but it ain’t and I’m not. This is the ONE of TWO political parties that call the policy shots in our country. Nope, Republican office holders have turned our country into the Great Zombie Wasteland. They are all completely delusional.
And, now for yet another result of Fox convincing all the white men of Angry White Menistan to think the country is against them … one more old angry white man shoots a young black teenager.This time its about loud music coming from a car in a convenience store parking lot. He’s going all in for the Stand Your Ground defense. Yes, this is the dysfunctional dystopian American created by the likes of the Southern Strategy, the repeated meme that some foreigner stole the presidency, and there are wars on Xmas, Guns, and White Men. Don’t like some one’s music? Shoot now and say you saw a gun later. Don’t ever think we solved a lot of this with the the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. We’re taking their freedom to stomp us all under their boots. Seventeen year old Jordan Davis is dead because some drunk white dude felt put out by a car stereo in a parking lot.
In what could become another test of Florida’s broad self-defense law, a software developer charged with killing a Jacksonville teenager said he reached for his gun and fired eight rounds only after he was threatened with a shotgun.The suspect, Michael Dunn, 45, of Satellite Beach, was arrested Wednesday on charges of second-degree murder and attempted murder.
Dunn told his lawyer that the victim, Jordan Davis, 17, who was parked at a convenience store in Jacksonville on Friday night with three other teenagers, pointed a shotgun at him through a partly rolled-down window, threatened to kill him and began to open the door. The shooting occurred after a dispute over loud music coming from the teenagers’ sport utility vehicle.
Davis, a junior at a Jacksonville high school who had moved from Georgia two years ago to live with his father, died after being shot twice.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said officers had not found a shotgun in the car.
Dunn and his fiancee, Rhonda Rouer, fled the convenience store in his Volkswagen Jetta after the teenagers left because he was afraid they would return, his lawyer, Robin Lemonidis, said. He did not call the authorities; the police arrested him the next day, finding him because a witness noted his license plate number.
This is what we get when folks like Limpballs, Jim Imhofe, Susan Collins, Bill O’Reilly, the Lady Lindsey, McGrumpy and the lot of those so-called conservatives lie their customers into angry paranoia.
Susan Rice. Eric Holder. Van Jones. Lisa P. Jackson. Valerie Jarrett. Shirley Sherrod.
What do these folks have in common?
They are all black public servants appointed by Obama and witch hunted by Republicans on completely bogus story lines. Sixty Six percent of that list are also women.
How much crazy do we have to put up with? You’d have think the last election would’ve told Republicans something loud and clear but it obviously didn’t. Some people never learn.
Meanwhile, Fox says there is no war on women and Mississippi is one JUDGE away from ensuring women can’t access their constitutional right to abortion. Virginia Republicans are likely to nominate Ken Cuccinelli, Va. Attorney General for Governor next year.
IN THREE YEARS as Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II (R) has demeaned his office by using it as a blatantly partisan bully pulpit to attack Obamacare, illegal immigrants, homosexuals and climate-change scientists. Now he has managed to bully Virginia’s Board of Health into a stance — unprecedented in state history — that could force most of the commonwealth’s 20 or so abortion clinics to close.
The fight is not over yet. Not by a long shot. Some constitutional rights are more equal than other. Two legs good. Three white legs better. What is on your reading and blogging list?
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