Climb aboard the Republican crazy train, boys and girls -- we're going to Loonie Land! We're going to the Fox Fun House Hall of Mirrors where everything gets distorted to look Muslim, or Communist, or Fascist. Yes indeed the logo of the Nuclear Security Summit, can, if you squint your eyes and take another deep one from the paper bag of glue, looks like a crescent -- or if you're one of those sane elitist liberals, like an orbiting electron in the classical model of an atom.
But we're not sane are we? We're ConSERvatives and it's fun to be CRAZY! It's fun to sabotage any attempt to make the world a safer, saner place, it's fun to sabotage everything the voters (corrupted by socialism no doubt) do to restore sanity.
Yes, the latest attempt in the Logo Wars, to find crescents in everything Obama does and says started in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post"Now he's a crescent loon" and migrated to Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, which showed an array of Islamic national flags on Wednesday with the 2010 Nuclear Summit logo -- not that they're suggesting anything. They're just suggesting that since Obama is suspiciously "reaching out" to Muslims and thus is suspected of being a Muslim and since some Muslims are black -- well you decide for yourselves. We're not going to tell you what's true and what isn't. You decide.
I mean you'll note that Obama has pulled the plug on another mission to the moon and the moon you know, sometimes. . . well you get the picture -- not that we're suggesting anything, but looking at Space Shuttle mission patches you'll notice crescents all over the place and of course the shuttle orbits over Muslim countries constantly. Could be that Obama converted the Space Agency to Islam back in 1990! How sinister is that? Of course since nuclear arms reduction was a particular dream of Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush, Murdoch may have wanted to pull back on the theme that arms control only weakens the nation when Democrats do it, or he may have been embarrassed by Insanity Hannity's being caught in a lie about what Obama's nuclear position actually is -- or perhaps he knows in his wrinkled Australian heart that it's just easier to get away with a totally insane innuendo than to play with dangerous facts. Nobody ever went broke after all, by underestimating the stupidity, gullibility and indeed the raw insanity of the American public.
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. -- James Joyce
There are some laws which everyone, no matter how powerful, no matter their nationality, must obey. I’m thinking of the laws of physics: gravity, the laws of thermodynamics and the like. No one gets a pass, at least not for long, not without exacting a price. Yes, we can fly to the moon, but it takes an enormous amount of energy to slip these surly bonds of earth, and we always come back.
There are similar laws which operate on the metaphysical plane--I call them spiritual laws but for the non-religious, how about “Eternal Laws.” Just as no one escapes the laws of gravity and thermodynamics, no one escapes Eternal Laws, either.
Religious texts of all faiths are full of them, and they serve as both a warning and guide to those of us here on earth. They know no nationality or creed but instead are truly universal. Just as the laws of gravity apply equally to a child on a playground or a multibillion-dollar rocket aimed at the moon, so do these Eternal Laws apply to great nations and individuals alike.
One of these is the Law of Karma. In the Judeo-Christian tradition this law is expressed as “the sins of the father.” There are dozens of verses in the Old and New Testament expressing the idea that what goes around, comes around. For example, from Numbers 14:18:
‘The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.’
I repeat: No one gets a pass, at least not for long, not without exacting a price.
A related law is the Law of Truth. Nothing remains secret forever. Eventually the truth is revealed, if not today or tomorrow, then in a year, 10 years, 50 years. In the New Testament we see this expressed in Luke 8:17:
For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.
There are similar ideas in the Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other religious texts. In short: Repent ye sinners or pay the price. The longer you wait, the worse it will be.
America has been dodging Eternal Laws. We are wont to do this every now and then, for example our failure to atone for our genocide of native peoples. Little surprise that these chickens came home to roost in 1973. We have a lot of karmic debt which has gone unpaid, and the interest is adding up.
The latest is our reluctance to address the biggest moral failing this nation has faced since the days of slavery. We have swept our rush to war under the rug, ignored our imprisonment and torture of hundreds of innocent people. We have refused to acknowledge the use of ginned up confessions to justify our slaughter in a foreign land. We have chosen to believe that the shredding of civil liberties here at home is necessary in the interest of “national security” because we are emotionally lazy and perhaps still a little shell-shocked.
This week a new revelation popped up and, surprise surprise, we slapped it away. It came in the form of this story:
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
These people were tortured. They were labeled “the worst of the worst.” They were in legal limbo, denied contact with their families, lawyers, etc. And did I mention they were tortured?
So far a Google News search of “Wilkerson, Guantanamo, Bush, Cheney” has revealed nothing from our mainstream national media on this story. Lefty blogs, Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic, foreign media like Arab News and Asian Tribune have covered it. CNN, the Associated Press, New York Times? Not so much.
So it appears our media is reluctant to look under that rock. Our government, of course, has refused to look into the sins of the past administration. And our church leaders? The Catholic Church is too busy dealing with the consequences of its own failure to adhere to the Law of Truth. Lefty evangelical Jim Wallis is doing battle with clown Glenn Beck right now; he has chosen a media circus sideshow over addressing a true moral dilemma.
So here we are.
We need a national accountability moment, a “time of repentance” if you will, where all is revealed once and for all. Will we get it? Yes, of course we will: it’s an Eternal Law that this moment will come. The question is, will that time be of our choosing or the universe’s? The universe is a harsh task mistress. It would be better for us to address this issue ourselves. But if we don’t have the courage, well, there are universal laws at play here. The debt will be paid -- with interest.
My local Tea Party is gearing up for another froth and drool session on tax day although at least half of them know by now they won't be paying Federal Income Taxes this time or at least less than they paid the year before. You can be damned sure there won't be any of the local Billionaires (there are quite a few) amongst the cracker crumbs.
The Dow is over 11,000 as I write this, investor optimism boosted by earnings reports and economic data. Inflation remains contained at one tenth of one percent, despite the solemn assurances of Weimar style runaway. Retail sales continue to climb more than expected as the economic expansion continues.
"The amount of diesel fuel bought using credit cards at U.S. truck stops increased in March to the highest level in more than a year, indicating the recovery is broadening beyond manufacturing "
says Bloomberg and truck tonnage, which accounts for 68 percent of freight transported in the U.S., increased on a year-over-year basis in February for a third straight month, as truckers benefit from inventory rebuilding, increased exports and stronger sales.
It's getting harder not to call this a recovery, but it would certainly be hard to associate the news with the kind of implosion into economic chaos a Marxist economy and tyrannical Pol Pot killing fields some of the more extreme viewpoints have been forecasting.
"Bleak is the New Black"
writes Newsweek, but it's in the context of the increasing disparity between the sound and fury and the tale told by economic data.
"America is coming back stronger, better, and faster than nearly anyone expected—and faster than most of its international rivals."
and at present, the Dow is up over 70% in the last year. As to whether we would have turned around earlier if there had been no bailout, no stimulus package and a program of austerity, tax cuts for billionaires and continued deregulation as the Republicans demanded after 1929 -- it seems harder still to believe that we would be talking about recovery as anything but a cruel joke just now. Even so, despair, panic, and even hysteria are the stock in trade of the Fox News doomers and gloomers - the same folks who blamed pessimistic Liberals for "talking down" the solid economy of the Bush years. No, certainly a continued, uninterrupted recovery is hardly a sure thing, but more balanced Republican observers may be beginning to wish the fear mongering Murdoch would reign in his dogs a bit tighter before American voters realize that the last thing the Republicans seem to want is what they want: a recovery.
“Scientists using a remote-controlled submarine have discovered the deepest known volcanic vent and say the superheated waters inside could contain undiscovered marine species and perhaps even clues to the origin of life on earth.” So begins THIS ARTICLEthat describes an exciting new chapter in oceanographic exploration.
Amid the daily strife and negative aspects of life, I love when an amazing, intriguing discovery takes place that makes us wonder at the incredible vastness of our world.
Even the most jaded characters will have to admit this one is pretty amazing and provides yet more opportunities to discover the intricacies of how our earth was formed and how it functions and perhaps a few new species.
"The deep sea is full of surprises," a statement posted to the expedition's Web site said. "We may find species unlike any seen before. The Cayman Trough may be like (Arthur) Conan Doyle's 'Lost World,'" a novel that imagines an area populated by prehistoric monsters hidden deep in the Amazon.”
I loved the movie, The Abyss and the idea of lifeforms we never imagined sharing our planet.
"We know more about the surface of the Moon and Mars than we do about our own planet because two-thirds of our planet is covered by ocean making it very hard to explore."
Copley said it has been theorized that life may have originated in similar environments early in the Earth's history — in part because the microorganisms found in deep-sea vents appear close to some of the Earth's most ancient organisms.
There is so much more we need to learn about our planet and the creatures that inhabit it. For as much as we think we already know, I'm glad there are still mysteries to solve. Wouldn’t it be boring if we knew everything?
"We've only seen a tiny fraction of the deep sea floor so there are undoubtedly many more vents and other amazing things to discover."
When I was a wee but precocious dino, I recall observing my fellow students closely. I noticed a few things, which I here put in terms drawn from an adult sensibility and intellect, that have stuck with me all these years:
1. People’s character takes a set very early in life: the kids to whose speech, actions, and attitudes I attended seemed like little adults already. Some were cynical and jaded even at eight, ten or twelve years old, some were mostly innocent and cheerful, some were dishonest, some curious, some shy, some assertive, etc. It wasn’t too hard to imagine what sorts of adults they might become. Whatever innate factors and external influences make us who we are had already endowed them with recognizable personality traits. As Wordsworth and then Freud said, “The child is father of the man.” It’s certainly true of me: by the time I was around eight, I was pretty much who I am now. – bookish, eccentric, moody, a bit shy but also honest and charitable towards others; unambitious; interested in philosophy, literature and languages; always on the outside of things and events looking in, and preferring it that way. (And, of course, a khaki-hued predatory dinosaur.)
2. For the average bloke and blokette, “Truth” seems to be what Nietzsche says it is in his 1873 essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn): a species of error – or perhaps today we would prefer the Foucauldian term “discourse” – that has become useful in terms of comfort and power relations. When a teacher puts kids in small groups and gives them some question to work on or a problem to solve, the cleverest one can blurt out the answer right away and it probably won’t make a significant impression on the others: to them, what matters isn’t the answer but rather the social process of arriving at the answer. In Nietzsche’s terms, they aren’t interested in Truth; they are instead trying to make friends, to belong, to demonstrate their power to the group, and so forth. Truth is only the means to such ends, not their goal.
You are welcome to make of these observations what you will, or nothing at all, with regard to the wider political concerns that we so often take up at the ZONE.
I should mention that by the first point, I don’t mean to negate the observation made by Baudelaire and others that most of what humanity has accomplished has been done not because of our nature but rather in spite of it. We have the capacity to change our ways and our thinking (we are not, to use the modern metaphor, hard-wired), to go against nature – it’s just that it’s usually difficult to do that, and much easier not to bother trying. By the second point, I infer only the difficulty of changing people’s minds, of disabusing them of error, and so forth -- not the absolute impossibility of the task. We want to return to the safety of the cave, as in the Platonic parable that in part underwrites Nietzsche’s Über Wahrheit und Lüge – to return to our perceptual, intellectual, and moral comfort zones along with our fellows instead of really thinking things through and doing what honors our own potential and does right by others.
But what do I know? I have a brain about the size of a walnut in a three-foot-long noggin (including the toothsome snout), so perhaps others will have much smarter things to say….
I never thought the Confederacy would take health insurance reform lying down; accept it any more than they willingly endured integration, voting rights for women or their former slaves, equal rights and opportunities for "cullids" and Jee-Yews and anything else that interfered with good, old fashioned, plantation feudalism. They're against anything those Yankees do even if in the long run insurance companies will profit from it and undoubtedly show their gratitude to the Gucci shod rebels in Tallahassee and other red state Capitals.
Even though the ten thousand or so of my county's uninsured residents that now overwhelm the capacity of community outpatient clinics and emergency rooms are a liability and expense to me similar to uninsured motorists, the former are victims of Northern aggression while the latter do need to be forced to have liability insurance. Why? Well because a Yankee Democrat proposed it and Democrats did some of what the public elected them to do.
OK, it's not quite a volley of cannon fire at Fort Sumter yet, but that was then and today's attacks on the concept that the government has any function beyond shocking and awing third world countries and keeping the slaves in line are more insidious. What else would you call slipping a rider into an innocuous and popular Life Insurance bill that declares the new Federal Health Insurance legislation unconstitutional. I know, I know, that's hardly the job of the Florida Legislature, the same distinguished body of statesmen who last year balked at adding an exclusion to a bill outlawing the observation of and participation in animal sex if it was for purposes of animal husbandry, because -- wait for this -- some Representatives thought animal husbandry referred to women marrying animals. But the spirit of Southern freedom isn't about the government standing up for freedom, it's about leaving us alone in our fantasy of primitive self sufficiency where we can do as we please and damn everyone else.
Likewise the protection against being discriminated against by health insurers and protection against the public's indirect funding of health care for the uninsured must be about
"defending the rights of individuals"
as Rep. Ryan Nelson, R-Apopka told those assembled representatives of Florida Crackers, Swamp rats and toothless road-kill eaters called the Florida House of Representatives.
"every person within this state is and shall be free from governmental intrusion" in selecting health insurance coverage,
says the amendment. What nasty things might escape from that Pandora's box should this thing be passed into law! After all, keeping companies from dropping you when sick or weaseling out of legitimate claims by stalling until you die or your daughter dies is "intrusion." isn't it? Making you take responsibility for staying off the welfare rolls and clogging up the hospitals or walking around spreading TB is just egregious "intrusion." Let's give absolute immunity from the law to insurers and all in the name of individual freedom. Massa knows what's best and what's best is that you only shop at the company store.
What's more, the Florida Attorney General shall have the power to sue the Federal Government on behalf of any neo-Confederate who thinks I have to pay when his diseased ilk inflate the local hospital operating costs because he doesn't believe in health insurance - sue at the Taxpayer's expense, of course.
I don't like slippery slope arguments and I'm not saying that this will lead to revolts against mandatory car insurance or boat insurance or any kind of required liability insurance, but the principle is indeed the same: "Damn Gummint cain't tell us what to do" even if that government is elected to do what it's doing by a majority of voters who presumably still have the right to decide such things: a right not inferior to the right of corporations to do as they please. The principle is the same: government is about what we the people want, not what we the voters want. Upside down elitism and corporate feudalism at it's purest.
Yes, I'm surrounded by people who tell me that the 1861 revolt, or "the War of Northern Aggression," was about "freedom" without any sense of irony and they feel likewise about almost anything that requires any funding, except of course farm subsidies and special tax breaks for Exxon Mobil. Their revolt is about the same kind of "freedom" I guess. Sometimes that's my freedom, not theirs, since they're concerned about my heirs' inheritance taxes while theirs won't pay any, and a couple of percent more on my income taxes while more than half of them won't pay any this year or ever have incomes anywhere near the top 10%. Of course their freedom to go about uninsured Makes my outrageous health insurance premiums more outrageous, but it's the thought that counts, isn't it?
Being called a socialist is the gravest, most wounding insult in America. Everyone and Glenn Beck knows that socialism is pure evil.
Or so Americans are led to believe, just in case they would get into their heads some dangerous ideas about social justice, equality and other such silliness. As it happens -- and not surprisingly so -- socialism, as defined by Tea Partiers and right-wingers, is none of those things they believe it is.
Bill Quigley, Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, looks at the 9 most pervasive American myths about socialism and debunks them, one by one, below (via ICH).
Myth #1. The US government is involved in class warfare attacking the rich to lift up the poor.
There is a class war going on all right. But it is the rich against the rest of us and the rich are winning. The gap between the rich and everyone else is wider in the US than any of the 30 other countries surveyed. In fact, the top 10% in the US have a higher annual income than any other country. And the poorest 10% in the US are below the average of the other OECD countries. The rich in the U.S. have been rapidly leaving the middle class and poor behind since the 1980s.
Myth #2. The US already has the greatest health care system in the world.
Infant mortality in the US is 4th worst among OECD countries – better only than Mexico, Turkey and the Slovak Republic.
Myth #3. There is less poverty in the US than anywhere.
Child poverty in the US, at over 20% or one out of every five kids, is double the average of the 30 OECD countries.
Myth #4. The US is generous in its treatment of families with children.
The US ranks in the bottom half of countries in terms of financial benefits for families with children. Over half of the 30 OECD countries pay families with children cash benefits regardless of the income of the family. Some among those countries (e.g. Austria, France and Germany) pay additional benefits if the family is low-income, or one of the parents is unemployed.
Myth #5. The US is very supportive of its workers.
The US gives no paid leave for working mothers having children. Every single one of the other 30 OECD countries has some form of paid leave. The US ranks dead last in this. Over two thirds of the countries give some form of paid paternity leave. The US also gives no paid leave for fathers.
In fact, it is only workers in the US who have no guaranteed days of paid leave at all. Korea is the next lowest to the US and it has a minimum of 8 paid annual days of leave. Most of the other 30 countries require a minimum of 20 days of annual paid leave for their workers.
Myth #6. Poor people have more chance of becoming rich in the US than anywhere else.
Social mobility (how children move up or down the economic ladder in comparison with their parents) in earnings, wages and education tends to be easier in Australia, Canada and Nordic countries like Denmark, Norway, and Finland, than in the US. That means more of the rich stay rich and more of the poor stay poor here in the US.
Myth #7. The US spends generously on public education.
In terms of spending for public education, the US is just about average among the 30 countries of the OECD. Educational achievement of US children, however, is 7th worst in the OECD. On public spending for childcare and early education, the US is in the bottom third.
Myth #8. The US government is redistributing income from the rich to the poor.
There is little redistribution of income by government in the U.S. in part because spending on social benefits like unemployment and family benefits is so low. Of the 30 countries in the OECD, only in Korea is the impact of governmental spending lower.
Myth #9. The US generously gives foreign aid to countries across the world.
The US gives the smallest percentage of aid of any of the developed countries in the OECD. In 2007 the US was tied for last with Greece. In 2008, we were tied for last with Japan.
Despite the opinions of right wing folks, the facts say the US is not on the path towards socialism. But if socialism means the US would go down the path of being more generous with our babies, our children, our working families, our pregnant mothers, and our sisters and brothers across the world, I think we could all appreciate it.
There is a version of this article with footnotes for those interested. Quigley77@gmail.com
For dessert, a reminder from Noam Chomsky about what socialism is and isn't (mostly the latter):
And to round up our already rich meal, a quiz from inquiring minds at Ironic Times who want to know what is so socialist about Obama, exactly:
Which of the following has prompted Republicans to call Barack Obama the “most liberal President in our nation's history?”
A ) Calling for an end to the moratorium on construction of new nuclear plants.
B ) Calling for an end to the moratorium on new offshore drilling.
C ) Reforming healthcare along insurance industry guidelines.
D ) Escalating the war in Afghanistan.
E ) Ignoring abuses of power by his Republican predecessor.
I hope I'm not hammering on this issue too hard, but as I keep hearing the argument that our growing debt is an isolated and dangerous problem only now to be addressed because we have a Democratic president and Democratic is another word for Communist insurgent, I can't be accused of beating a dead horse. No matter how smelly, the horse is still running and in fact, may be moving into first place.
I hope the data shown above will dispel some of the smoke clouds from our cold civil war. Of course data is data and interpretations will vary, but can't we tell that the steepest declines in debt Vs. GDP occurred, like economic expansion, during years when top marginal brackets were over 50% and as high as 90%? Doesn't it appear that the alleged expansion during Reagan's years was really only a manifestation of surging debt ratios? Doesn't it also look like anything one might call growth during W's terms was simply exploding debt which caused so much liquidity, so many dollars flowing into hot air derivatives and overpriced real estate and unregulated, over valued securities that the worst boom/bust cycle since the 1920's blew up in our face? Isn't it obvious that any apparent prosperity under Reagan fell hopelessly short of offsetting his profligacy in running up the debt? Isn't it obvious that the market boom under W. was the result of people like me having more money than they know what to do with and pumping up the markets to the point of the biggest bang in 14.7 billion years?
Isn't it hard, seeing the upward momentum to expect anything the current president could do would cause a 180 degree reversal in the time he's been in office?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?*
No, I'm not that bad off by any means, but there was a time, not long ago, when I bought yachts and sports cars and houses on a whim; gave houses and condos to my kids without the slightest worry and used the Queen Mary the way some people take the bus. I should have worried. I should have heeded the warning I gave my handful of readers: George W. Bush and the Republicans are playing a shell game with the economy. They're the house, we're the rubes and the house always wins.
Of course I was laughed at. I no longer hear from the guffawing gulls who insisted I was further to the left than Chairman Mao, that the market was sound, the war was going to pay for itself, that "Liberals" were not only focusing on the negative, but trying to precipitate a market panic just to make St George the Genius and God's favorite son look bad so they could bring on an era of Socialist/Fascist oppression. They've long since invented a new mythology to hide what they said and did; how I was right and they were wrong.
Of course we Liberals were being quite conservative in worrying about the fact that Reaganesque tax cuts have always done just what they just did again: worrying that trying to finance the most expensive war ( toldya so) we've had by depending on a solidly disproved dogma, by borrowing abroad rather than domestically and firing anyone who suggested fiscal or military foresight, worrying that the light at the end of the tunnel only they could see, was only the fires of fiscal hell.
Debt doesn't matter, Don't you know, St. Ron the Reagan told us so.
The born-again believers are washed clean and born again into a new mythos, one where the Black Satan caused the massive recession which continues to deepen because of government spending that used to be good but now is bad. That means that economists who say that not only has a 1929 reprise been averted, but it's slowly getting better are the new Liberals talking down the economy by talking it up. If you're a TeaParty twit, you need things to be getting worse and indeed they do believe. They need to believe that their taxes went up with Obama and believe they do.
'The market is up, all's well with the world' won't be their Christmas carol again this year. Even though the market is up -- the Teabaggers think it's not and is going down. They insist the recession is deepening, that we have a tyrant in office and they insist their taxes are up when they aren't. They still rage about Death Panels and rally around the Witch of Wasilla like she were Joan of Arc.
That means that a conservative approach to economic realities is once again seditious, once again farleftliberal propaganda and those liberal people from Business Week must be talking up the economy to undermine freedom, prosperity and free enterprise.
"If Obama was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the President." says Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak + Co.
It's just the kind of farleftliberal stuff you might expect from an institutional trading firm in Jew Controlled New York rather than the illiterate hordes sucking up seditious stupidity from the teats of Mother Fox who know better.
"It's a poor sort of memory that works only backwards," said the Queen to Alice,
but of course she wasn't American and couldn't be expected to understand.
* "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," lyrics by Yip Harburg, music by Jay Gorney (1931)
It's remarkable and a bit sad that media outlets like MSNBC or NPR or the New York Times are so easily dismissed by the very people their job it is to expose as charlatans, liars, thieves, hypocrites and enemies of Democracy. There are so many possibilities to disembowel the people who are in turn disemboweling our values and our history and our nationhood and the very stability of our country, but bundled into a package like bad loans and labeled as Liberally biased, the non-Fox media simply give in, afraid to do what anyone who knows how to use Youtube can do they ignore the lies and emulate the deceivers or turn to celebrity gossip.
But of course in a different way, it's just as sad to see people like Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity shown as naked and pathetic as the newly clothed emperor by one of the only news programs with nothing to lose by telling the truth: The Daily Show. I had tears in my eyes Thursday night as the scrolling text of President Obama's Nuclear Position Report was followed by the Foxed up report clothed as a conversation between the very god of hypocrisy and America's own Rasputin. Using someone's own recorded words against him makes it very hard, in theory to drown out the truth with the usual brass band of Obamahate or simply continue to lie and deny with brass balls. why sad? because it doesn't matter, because the people who want to believe won't willingly leave their fantasy faith and view the real, sad world and because there are a lot of them and because they're angry as hell that Democracy overturned their perceived entitlement. As with evolution deniers, no amount of proof is enough even to raise the terrible spectre of doubt. For reasonable people seeing is believing, for Teabaggers, Fox Folk and the vermin who write viral e-mails, it's the other way around.
Yes, indeed, The United States pledges never to make or threaten a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear enemy save for the provision that a chemical or biological attack could exempt an enemy from that pledge, but within seconds we see Gingrich saying that we're endangered because a chemical or biological attack could not provoke a nuclear response. Within seconds we hear Hannity affirm "yes, that's what he said."
It's always quite an experience to see someone look you in the face and lie when you have proof positive that's just what it is. One feels betrayed, embarrassed, angry: one never wants to trust or listen to that person again. But not if you need that lie. Not if your entire life revolves around that lie.
Will MSNBC or CNN or the networks address the Fox crew's responsibility to report the truth? Would they risk running such dramatic proof that their competition is no more honest or reliable than the Legendary Iraqi Defense Minister? What will they say about Fox's assertions that our widely radical president will put us all in danger by reducing our huge stockpile of nukes, some over 40 years old, by a third, or by looking forward to a world without them? Will they, like Jon Stewart simply run clips of Ronald Reagan telling the world that he looks forward to a world without nuclear weapons and that we should reduce the count by one third as a first step? No, they won't. Reagan will remain right and Obama will, by being exactly the same be irrevocably wrong -- and a far left radical liberal trying to weaken our defenses. Truth is irrelevant.
According to Newt Gingrich, President Obama believes that words are a substitute for reality: he's referring to words the President never said, or words that the Hero Reagan also said. His smirking riff, only meant to perfume a pointless smear and to deflect notice that this is precisely what Newt is doing: knowingly lying about the President, creating a false substitute for reality and knowingly trying to enrage people against the elected government. As Roger Ailes said, they're about ratings.
Who in the "Liberal Media" is going to expose him as a seditious insurgent? Who on CNN is going to put together clips of McCain calling himself a Maverick and denying he ever called himself a Maverick? Clips of McCain telling us to avoid extremists like Jerry Falwell and then praising Jerry Falwell? McCain espousing views and then calling Obama an extremist for agreeing? Only an entertainment show, a fake news show. You won't often see such stunning journalism on a real news program or in a real paper or magazine, because it's quick, because it doesn't allow the concocted "balance" of dignifying a baseless lie as "another point of view," because you can't speculate and expatiate and flap your jaws hysterically about it all day and all night. That's not what journalism is any more. Truth isn't even what truth is any more and Journalism isn't journalism, it's entertainment, it's a Roman circus and we're not the lions.
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun Crying like a fire in the sun Look out the saints are comin' through And it's all over now, Baby Blue.
At what point do I give up and admit it's all over? The anti-Obama hate cult permeates every waking hour of my day, from technical seminars between engineers about packet radio networks interrupted by someone handing out disreputable Republican figures showing what a spendthrift radical socialist Obama is, from e-mails and phone calls asking me to participate in tax protests from people who won't have to pay taxes at all this year to the constant snide comments about Obama not saluting to this or apologizing for that. There are e-mailed clips of Gingrich preaching about the "most radical president" e-mailed jokes about him firing "cattle guards" and just about every captious hoax you'll find at Fact Check.org or Snopes.com or UrbanLegends.about.com. The mad blood is pumping like it's 1861, and US Rte 1 as it runs through my county, sports shiny new billboards for gun shops and firearms training.
"But these are real numbers" said a friend I should have thought would question any estimates published by the RNC about what "Obamacare" will cost.
"Real from the same people who predicted the Iraq war would cost nothing?" I replied? He looked puzzled. One doesn't suggest any doubt concerning the Party of God in these parts. One doesn't mention that 47% of American families won't owe any Federal income tax this year to a sign waving teabagger or that Iraq has cost us as much as WWII and isn't nearly over yet, not unless you want to invite hate mail and stuff thrown on your lawn, put your job at risk and have no friends at all. Want to know how Dr. Mudd felt? Just suggest that George W. Bush had anything to do with the policies that allowed Enron to ruin so many people, precipitated the bubble and credit crunch, started the most expensive war we've ever had on false pretenses. I spent years being called a traitor for suggesting that what has come to pass would come to pass, but exoneration is going to have to wait for the second coming.
Local papers have become unreadable and dripping with foamy saliva in their raving about Obama's religious agenda, secular and Islamic and I suspect that like many papers today, the owners thereof are writing some of them to use the power of insane hate to boost circulation.
One doesn't mention that Fox News, the fair and balanced network that is run entirely by and for Republicans, doesn't employ a single Democrat and not only slants stories, it invents them and remains silent when their hoaxes are revealed by every other outlet on earth. The Acorn Hoax, the Climategate hoax, the "Two Planeloads of Democrat Lawyers descend on Wasilla" hoax. People think you're crazy, or worse yet a Liberal -- you know, one of those black clad bearded guys who carry bombs and hate America. No one here will even listen for fear of being branded a liberal and people who call themselves skeptics can't imagine the Republican version of anything might be biased. No one will accept that Obama was elected because of the failure of a long Republican administration and Republican controlled congress.
The fact is that Dwight Eisenhower took equal flack for implementing integration to the horror of people who called him a radical, FDR took worse for Social Security, Johnson for his war on poverty and support of civil rights legislation and of course Medicare. Jefferson was called a tax and spend radical, because in America you can't just be wrong, you have to be the Devil, even the irrefutable facts can be the devil or the work of his hand.
What's the use of opposing it? Could any amount of truth or blather have stopped the civil war or done away with the institution of Slavery? Can anyone save America from the metastatic madness?
Considered the worst mining disaster in 25 years, the death toll in Tuesday’s mine explosion near Whitesville West Virginia has reached 25 fatalities. Thus far, seven bodies have been identified and 18 remain underground. Four persons are still missing.
According to a spokesperson for Massey Energy, the owner of the mine, the rescue mission has been suspended because rising levels of methane gas made further rescue and recovery operations unsafe. The mission will continue after boreholes are drilled to vent the mine of combustible gas.
One deceased miner, Benny Willingham, age 62, was only five weeks away from retirement, according to his sister-in-law, Sheila Prillaman, who said family members only learned of Willingham’s death from a list posted by the company. Prillaman is angry because no company representative contacted the family in person to inform them of their loss.
Don Blankenship, the Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy, confirmed the casualty count with this statement (source):
”Our top priority is the safety of our miners and the well-being of their families.”
For a nation so jaded by corporate spin and the lack of investigative journalism, the statement renders itself invisible to scrutiny. Too bad it takes a tragedy of this magnitude to shed light on an Inconvenient Truth: Massey Energy, the nation’s sixth largest mining concern, is a repeat offender, a notorious scofflaw, and now … mass murderer.
According to federal records, Massey Energy has amassed over 3,000 safety violations (including 57 in the last month alone) for failing to develop and follow a safety plan. Data kept by the Mine Safety and Health Administration show three fatalities at the Upper Big Branch mine in the past 12 years. Last year, Massey paid a record $4.2 million in criminal and civil fines for “willfully violating mandatory safety standards” that led to the deaths of two miners (source).
Mining operators such as Massey Energy thwart new safety rules by overloading the regulatory system with appeals that clog the system and bog down enforcement. Operators employ this tactic to avoid paying fines, evade scrutiny, and stop regulators from shutting down mines for violations that put workers’ lives in risk. To date, the backlog of outstanding appeals has risen to 16,000 cases (source).
Blankenship is the epitome of a corrupt and morally bankrupt plutocrat. As the highest paid coal executive in the land, he has used his fortune to corrupt the system, bust unions, buy politicians, and influence justice. He is infamous for spending $3.5 million to defeat the election of a West Virginia Supreme Court Judge in order to overturn a $50 million fraud verdict against his company (source). These days, it has never been easier for a crook like Blankenship to dodge charges of graft.
How does the energy industry literally get away with murder? Companies such as Massey Energy and Koch Industries spend millions of dollars each year to confound the issues and distract the public by enlisting unwitting citizens to serve as their proxies. Here is Don Blankenship inviting the public to a Labor Day Tea Party event called Friends of America Rally:
Environmental extremists? Corporate America? Destroying your jobs? It is an audacious deception worthy of Grima Wormtongue. Certainly we understand how free markets, union busting, and lower wages put more money in the pockets of Don Blankenship and David Koch. How does the gutting of occupational safety regulations benefit American workers? How do higher allowable levels of arsenic in public drinking water benefit growing children? How does toxic wash from mountaintop removal benefit downstream communities? Our news media covers the Tea Party rabble while our most pressing questions go unanswered.
At the 1992 Republican Convention, Vice President Dan Quayle attacked the concept of progressive taxation with this question: “Why should the best people be punished?” His remark affords us a glimpse into a mindset where the richest people are considered “the best people” at the pinnacle of an economic, social, and moral order (source) while the rest of us are mere serfs and vassals for their self-enrichment. What profits the plutocracy is defined as “freedom;” what benefits middle-class America is derisively termed ‘socialism.’
Every time I think the Catholic-priest-molestation scandal can't get any worse -- it does.
On the morning of January 14 in Seattle, Ken Roosa and a small group Alaska Natives stood on the sidewalk outside Seattle University to announce a new lawsuit against the Jesuits, claiming a widespread conspiracy to dump pedophile priests in isolated Native villages where they could abuse children off the radar. "They did it because there was no money there, no power, no police".....
These abusers in Alaska, Wall said, were specifically sent to Alaska "to get them off the grid, where they could do the least amount of damage" to the church's public image.
Read the whole thing (found via PZ Myers, who has plenty to say too). The leaders of the Church cared nothing for the children who had been victimized, nor for those whom they knew full well these creatures would go on to victimize in Alaska, so long as everybody kept quiet. They cared only for the Church's reputation. So it's most appropriate that that reputation is now being slowly and publicly shredded, lawsuit by lawsuit.
Too bad it comes too late for the kids who committed suicide.
Marconi was still a young man when the need for government control of communications became all too obvious. Newsmen using the new wireless telegraph began to jam each others' transmissions accidentally and on purpose and battles were fought over frequency allocations. Someone had to step in with some rules to allow the technology to develop, to prevent it being used as a weapon in restraint of free trade and to make sure that those using the public airwaves would use it without disregard for the public interest.
I can almost hear throats clearing at those last two words, almost see lips forming words like collectivism, socialism, Communism, but without it, the guy with the most money has the podium and the guy who owns all the podiums: press, broadcast and now the Internet, might just as well be the government with all that power. The difference between a fair trial and murder; between a Hockey game and a viking raid (if there is a difference) is the rules, so save your breath. I don't want to hear it.
The FCC was formed for these reasons, but during the last administration, it's been almost exclusively concerned with promoting the interests of power companies who want to use the power lines to get into the internet business, and sometimes to the serious harm of other users of the frequency spectrum. Whether or not this has changed under the Communist/Fascist Antichrist from Kenya seems to matter less than the current posture of the courts. The District of Columbia Federal Appeals Court decided yesterday in favor of Comcast and against the authority of the FCC in it's attempt to mandate "net neutrality."
The new administration has been in favor of equal treatment for all internet users; in favor of a policy that would prevent Comcast, for instance from slowing down and restricting the content they don't like and making content they approve of faster and cheaper. Yes, yes, I know all about free market competition, but I'm talking about the real world here and that's a world where corporations collude rather than compete. It's a world where a small group can control information to the point where no one can compete successfully. As I said, the difference between boxing and assault and battery or even murder is the rules.
It's too soon to make scary assertions about how this will work out, but as restrictions on how much of all media outlets can be owned by one person, real or corporate have been loosened along with restrictions on how much information they can restrict in their own interest, it looks to me like we're once again shooting ourselves in the foot, slow motion style. Our obsessive fantasy of a 'no holds barred' marketplace leading to peace and order, prosperity and a well informed electorate is, along with our phobic horror of phrases like "public interest" may be making corporate demagoguery a more valid vision of the future.
Somehow I've never been able to understand why preventing enormous and hugely profitable insurance corporations from dropping you because you kid was born with a heart defect or not covering your leukemia treatments because you forgot to tell them you had acne in high school makes us no longer a free country -- or perhaps only a "mostly free" country according to the Heritage Foundation.
But more confusing and more difficult to reconcile than quantum mechanics and relativity is the idea that allowing warrantless wiretaps and other unconstitutional government abuses don't have the same effect. Seems that President Ford was comfortable with giving the FBI discretion on whether or not to seek a warrant for probable cause for wiretapping on the advice of his Attorney General William B. Saxbe. That's a long time before the Patriot act that cemented the "almost free" condition into law - a law that the Democrats haven't yet repudiated. Silly of me that this might have interfered with my freedom nearly as much as an extra 2% on what I might make over a net $375,000. Freedom's just another word for profit.
Is it the threat to monopolistic and feudalistic aberrations of free-market Capitalism that make us almost free or is it things like restrictions on civil rights? I think the answer is obvious. Freedom isn't at stake when Exxon-Mobil payed less in income tax last year than a minimum wage worker did, but the minimum wage itself is a threat to freedom and a harbinger of a Communist takeover. But don't ask me to explain. Ask some other millionaire from the kind of "think-tank" funded by the oil cartel.
Because that's exactly who is telling us what freedom means. That's who would rather you didn't think of it in terms of freedom from want, fear, privation - or the FBI rummaging through your life looking for anything they like. There's little profit in privacy -- in your privacy anyway. There is big profit in usury so our freedom hasn't suffered by finance companies that can charge 200% and ask for more, but it's damn near communist tyranny to ask Exxon to pay what my gardener pays.
No, Obama is a tyrant and he's made us less free, not for the things he's done or hasn't done to force responsibility on Wall Street, not for failing to undo constitutional infractions or abuses of executive power, not for actually give most of us a tax cut, but for giving some of the protection we've been asking for against financial ruin, against having to choose between feeding our kids or dying of a curable disease.
I'm glad we have people like the Heritage Foundation around to explain things like freedom to us. We might have gone on thinking that being able to vote, to use public facilities, to be served in restaurants and hotels, to buy property wherever we can afford it, to get a job if we're not white or protestant or male or young or to send our kids to school had something to do with being free -- all those things that such grand sounding patriotic spokesmen like the Heritage foundation assure us are nothing of the sort. Without them we might have forgotten how free we were years ago when we had slavery, segregation, race laws, male suffrage, restricted housing, poll taxes and lynching parties. I'm glad they continue to keep up the good fight.
Despite a smudge on my camera lens (it was impossible to see on the LCD screen in broad afternoon sunlight), I'm very proud of this video. The Tea Party Express is either a brilliant piece of surrealist theatre or a massive exercise in cognitive dissonance. Enjoy.
Some people might give them credit for never giving up and of course, like congenital stupidity and genital herpes, the Republicans never really go away.
Yesterday's e-mail viral outbreak flared up with another version of a letter excoriating Barack Obama for such inexcusable acts of treason as not placing a flower at the World Trade Center crater with a sensitive enough wrist action and of course referencing that old groaner, the photo of him singing without his hand on his heart. Both these things and more, insisted the weeping and wailing writer are proof of his Christian hating Islamic faith and his mission to destroy all that is held dear by the pretend conservatives who hang upside down in belfries and eat bugs.
Not that such people actually write these things. Virtually all of the phony celebrity letters libeling and threatening Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton and the Obama family are written by the same, easily recognizable hand, although the attributions change from day to day. The faux outrage and breast beating pretend patriotism are always the same.
The letter I got was attributed to Sherry Hackett, the wife of the famous and raunchy comedian although she didn't write it nor likely did the others it's been "from" in the last 6 months. The person who forwarded it to me was crying for our country or so she says. Actually I think she welcomes any scurrilous and seditious screed that oozes from the Republican cesspool. I think it just hasn't sunk in that far from shoving things down America's throat, democracy has shoved change down theirs.
The desperation seems to call for deliberate denialism and cultivated delusion. If Obama takes off his shoes, that means he's a Muslim and not a Christian was a sentiment presented by a small townTennessee Tea Party organizer along with a picture of a shoeless president. Frankly I wish he were, but even so, it's a statement that could only be applauded by people not likely to be found at a Mensa meeting unless they're simply dishonest exploiters of the traditionally stupid.
For a group whose meetings sometimes draw dozens of people, God willin' and the creek don't rise, it can't be hard to avoid the leaders knowing that it's a tiny minority cult representing a fringe Right element, yet their solution to the problems posed by an electorate that emphatically rejected the Right in the last election is to go further right. The Washington Post quoted David Nance, the founder of the Gibson County Patriots, in Jackson, Tenn as saying
"This effort is to try to get the Republican Party to try to give us more conservative candidates"
and he believes it's working, yet his choice of Stephen Fincher, gospel singer and cotton farmer from Frog Jump, Tennessee for the State's 8th Congressional District seems to have little to do with stated Tea Party goals of reducing the cost of government and eliminating "entitlements" what with Fincher raking in a cool, conservative $200,000.00 per annum in farm subsidies and being financed by others riding the same gravy train. He's pulled down over $2.5 million since 1995. Of course that' just all tea in the harbor and doesn't seem to matter as much as the president with his shoes off or the stories about flag pins and tardy salutes, a too small flag on his campaign jet and the laying down of a flower at the WTC with insufficient wrist action as discussed in the letter Sherry Hackett didn't write.
The shame of it all really is that Barack Obama, with his continuing support of some unpopular Republican policies may be too conservative for Liberals and perhaps even for some centrists while this collection of Beverly Hillbillies wants to tell us he's a Muslim version of Pol Pot while selling a faux populist version of Corporatism.
It's more of a shame we don't seem to have any genuine conservative opinion worth reading these days, and of course if we'd had it earlier, we might not have needed it so badly now.
I'm sorry Mr. Eliot, but for me, April is no more cruel than any other month, particularly in the large part of the world wherein it represents no particular change of season. Yes, the jasmine blooms explosively here in April, but something always fills the wind with fragrant joy even if too many of us have had our cars repossessed, our homes foreclosed on and our assets ravaged by medical bills. Even the tired old Bunny had to walk home this year, or so I hear. But hey -- In Western lands it's no longer open season for pogroms and persecutions and so far, Rupert Murdoch's dogs haven't got round to inventing the war on Easter they truly need to prop up their ridiculous fantasy about a war on Christmas. In April, people can still wish you a Happy Holiday weekend without stirring up one of O'Reilly's passion plays and even our Islamic Jihadist President had himself a sorta Seder, his ears sticking out from his yarmulked head like Mercury's winged helmet.
Still, this Easter, drunken bikini-boaters clogged the waterways with their springy-breaky recklessness and the Sunday morning roads teemed with ridiculously dressed people making their one annual excursion to the Church of their choice, but Captain Homebound in his bathrobe enjoyed his smoked salmon and Blue Mountain coffee at poolside in peace.
I hope yours was just as good.
Has anyone remembered that MLK was shot to death on April 4th? Yes that's cruel, but something did rise from that, didn't it? May something good arise from our troubled times and may everything bad pass your house by this year.
