Archie Bunker was a typical Republican voter. In fact, Archie
Bunker is the only kind of voter who still supports the Republican
Party. Everyone else in America has wised up to the GOP's game.
Would you believe that today there are so many people on the Internet who speak of "the wisdom of Archie Bunker"? Archie Bunker was the creation of ultra-liberals Norman Lear and Carroll O'Connor who brought to life this cartoon character to demonstrate to all Americans how stupid Right-Wing Conservatives are? The entire show was a parody of Archie Bunker's Far Right Reactionary ideas.
Norman Lear and Carroll O'Connor would be astounded to know that so many of the lame-brained concepts which they had Archie Bunker utter are now considered by many viewers to be "words of wisdom". But, maybe not. Lear and O'Connor had a pretty good understanding of how stupid millions of Americans are. After all, the narrow ignorance of Americans was the basis on which they created this Right-Wing cartoon character, Archie Bunker.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Repeal The Second Amendment
Today, Sunday morning, at 10 AM, Dr. George Tiller was brutally gunned down while serving as an usher at his Wichita, Kansas church, by a lunatic with a handgun. Today, Dr. Tiller became the Second Amendment's latest victim.
How many more good Americans must die before we enact sensible nationwide gun control regulations, so that madmen can no longer get their hands on deadly weapons?
To the extent that the Second Amendment stands as a barrier to sensible gun control, this Amendment continues to destroy too many innocent lives. The time has come to start saving lives by repealing the Second Amendment and taking guns out of the hands of the criminally insane.
And, where are all those Right-Wing Conservative "Spinmeisters" who were complaining a few weeks ago about Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano warning the nation to beware of our own violent home-grown domestic terrorists? As of today, domestic terrorism in the USA is as alive and well and thriving as ever.
How many more good Americans must die before we enact sensible nationwide gun control regulations, so that madmen can no longer get their hands on deadly weapons?
To the extent that the Second Amendment stands as a barrier to sensible gun control, this Amendment continues to destroy too many innocent lives. The time has come to start saving lives by repealing the Second Amendment and taking guns out of the hands of the criminally insane.
And, where are all those Right-Wing Conservative "Spinmeisters" who were complaining a few weeks ago about Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano warning the nation to beware of our own violent home-grown domestic terrorists? As of today, domestic terrorism in the USA is as alive and well and thriving as ever.
Richard Clarke Blasts Dick Cheney
Washington Post - Sunday, May 31, 2009 - By Richard A. Clarke:
Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.
The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse; The Detainee Shell Game; The Tough Question of What Not to Disclose
"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."
I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.
Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."
I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.
Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.
I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.
The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book, "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks -- a request Duelfer refused. (A recent report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president's office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the administration from eventually invading Iraq -- a move many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.
On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda was right.
Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures -- such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times -- would be the most effective.
Finally, on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. FISA did need some modification, but it also allowed for the quick issuance of court orders, as when President Clinton took stepped-up defensive measures in late 1999 under the heightened threat of the new millennium.
Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.
"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities," Cheney said in his recent speech. But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.
Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is the author of "Against All Enemies" and "Your Government Failed You."
Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.
The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse; The Detainee Shell Game; The Tough Question of What Not to Disclose
"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."
I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.
Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."
I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.
Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.
I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.
The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book, "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks -- a request Duelfer refused. (A recent report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president's office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the administration from eventually invading Iraq -- a move many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.
On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda was right.
Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures -- such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times -- would be the most effective.
Finally, on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. FISA did need some modification, but it also allowed for the quick issuance of court orders, as when President Clinton took stepped-up defensive measures in late 1999 under the heightened threat of the new millennium.
Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.
"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities," Cheney said in his recent speech. But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.
Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is the author of "Against All Enemies" and "Your Government Failed You."
Frank Rich Blasts Dick Cheney
Who Is To Blame For The Next Attack?
By FRANK RICH - New York Times - OP ED Columnist
Published: May 30, 2009
AFTER watching the farce surrounding Dick Cheney’s coming-out party this month, you have to wonder: Which will reach Washington first, change or the terrorists? If change doesn’t arrive soon, terrorists may well rush in where the capital’s fools now tread.
The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.
Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.
The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch. “No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do,” Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama’s “half measures” were leaving Americans “half exposed.” The new president, he said, is unraveling “the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11.” In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama’s fault. A new ad shouting “We told you so!” awaits only the updated video.
The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party — Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney — have variously cemented the G.O.P.’s brand as a whites-only men’s club by revoking Colin Powell’s membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a “reverse racist.” Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama’s. The only card left to play is 9/11.
Yet even before Cheney spoke, Congressional Democrats were quaking in fear, purporting with straight faces that the transfer of detainees to “supermax” American prisons constituted a serious security threat. Many of the same senators who signed on to the Iraq war resolution in the fall of 2002 joined the 90-to-6 majority that put a hold on Obama’s Gitmo closure plans.
The déjà vu in the news media was more chilling. Rather than vet the substance of Cheney’s fulmination, talking heads instead hyped the split-screen “dueling speeches” gimmick of the back-to-back Obama-Cheney scheduling. Time magazine’s political Web site Photoshopped Cheney and Obama’s faces atop prize fighters’ bodies.
Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men’s ideas. Cheney’s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama’s law-professor nuance. “On policy grounds, you’ve got a real legitimate fight here,” David Gregory insisted on “Meet the Press” as he regurgitated the former vice president’s argument (“You can’t compromise on these matters”) and questioned whether the president could “really bring” his brand of pragmatism “to the issue of the war on terror.”
One New York Daily News columnist summed up Cheney’s supposed TKO this way: “The key to Cheney’s powerful performance: facts, facts, facts.” But the facts, as usual, were wrong.
At the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau, the reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel detailed 10 whoppers. With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney’s boast that his administration had “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.” In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.
You can find a link to the complete Landay-Strobel accounting of Cheney’s errors in the online version of this column. The failure of much of the press to match their effort has a troubling historical antecedent. These are the same two journalists who, reporting for what was then Knight Ridder, uncovered much of the deceit in the Bush-Cheney case for the Iraq war in the crucial weeks before Congress gave the invasion the green light.
On Sept. 6, 2002, Landay and Strobel reported that there was no known new intelligence indicating that “the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs.” It was two days later that The Times ran its now notorious front-page account of Saddam Hussein’s “quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.” In the months that followed, as the Bush White House kept beating the drum for Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds to little challenge from most news organizations, Landay and Strobel reported on the “lack of hard evidence” of Iraqi weapons and the infighting among intelligence agencies. Their scoops were largely ignored by the big papers and networks as America hurtled toward fiasco.
Another reporter who was ahead of the pack in unmasking Bush-Cheney propaganda is the author Ron Suskind. In his 2006 book on the American intelligence matrix, “The One Percent Doctrine,” Suskind wrote about a fully operational and potentially catastrophic post-9/11 Qaeda assault on America that actually was aborted in the Bush years: a hydrogen cyanide attack planned for the New York City subways. It was halted 45 days before zero hour — but not because we stopped it. Al-Zawahri had called it off.
When Bush and Cheney learned of the cancellation later on from conventional intelligence, they were baffled as to why. The answer: Al-Zawahri had decided that a rush-hour New York subway attack was not enough of an encore to top 9/11. Al Qaeda’s “special event” strategy, Suskind wrote, requires the creation of “an upward arc of rising and terrible expectation” that is “multiplied by time passing.” The event that fits that bill after 9/11 must involve some kind of nuclear weapon.
“What are the lessons of this period?” Suskind asked when we spoke last week. “If you draw the wrong lessons, you end up embracing the wrong answers.” They are certainly not the lessons cited by Cheney. Waterboarding hasn’t and isn’t going to save us from anything. The ticking time-bomb debate rekindled by Cheney’s speech may be entertaining on “24” or cable-news food fights, but is a detour from the actual perils before the country. “What we’re dealing with is a patient foe who thinks in decades while we tend to think more in news cycles,” Suskind said. “We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-based discussion.”
The reality is that while the Bush administration was bogged down in Iraq and being played by Pervez Musharraf, the likelihood of Qaeda gaining access to nuclear weapons in a Taliban-saturated Pakistan was increasing by the day. We know that in the month before 9/11, bin Laden and al-Zawahri met with the Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. That was the real link between 9/11 and nuclear terror that the Bush administration let metastasize while it squandered American resources on a fictional link between 9/11 and a “nuclear” Saddam.
And where are we now? On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, David Sanger reported in The Times that military and nuclear experts agree that if “a real-life crisis” breaks out in Pakistan “it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan’s weapons were — or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists.”
Pakistan is the time bomb. But with a push from Cheney, abetted by too many Democrats and too many compliant journalists, we have been distracted into drawing the wrong lessons, embracing the wrong answers. We are even wasting time worrying that detainees might escape from tomb-sized concrete cells in Colorado.
What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to “build the thing we don’t have — human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won’t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds — which we’ve botched — must be corrected and corrected quickly. That’s what wins the battle, not going medieval.” It’s not for nothing, after all, that Powell, Gen. David Petraeus and Robert Gates, the secretary of defense — among other military minds — agree with Obama, not Cheney, about torture and Gitmo.
The harrowing truth remains unchanged from what it was before Cheney emerged from his bunker to set Washington atwitter. The Bush administration did not make us safer either before or after 9/11. Obama is not making us less safe. If there’s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone’s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.
By FRANK RICH - New York Times - OP ED Columnist
Published: May 30, 2009
AFTER watching the farce surrounding Dick Cheney’s coming-out party this month, you have to wonder: Which will reach Washington first, change or the terrorists? If change doesn’t arrive soon, terrorists may well rush in where the capital’s fools now tread.
The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.
Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.
The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch. “No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do,” Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama’s “half measures” were leaving Americans “half exposed.” The new president, he said, is unraveling “the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11.” In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama’s fault. A new ad shouting “We told you so!” awaits only the updated video.
The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party — Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney — have variously cemented the G.O.P.’s brand as a whites-only men’s club by revoking Colin Powell’s membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a “reverse racist.” Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama’s. The only card left to play is 9/11.
Yet even before Cheney spoke, Congressional Democrats were quaking in fear, purporting with straight faces that the transfer of detainees to “supermax” American prisons constituted a serious security threat. Many of the same senators who signed on to the Iraq war resolution in the fall of 2002 joined the 90-to-6 majority that put a hold on Obama’s Gitmo closure plans.
The déjà vu in the news media was more chilling. Rather than vet the substance of Cheney’s fulmination, talking heads instead hyped the split-screen “dueling speeches” gimmick of the back-to-back Obama-Cheney scheduling. Time magazine’s political Web site Photoshopped Cheney and Obama’s faces atop prize fighters’ bodies.
Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men’s ideas. Cheney’s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama’s law-professor nuance. “On policy grounds, you’ve got a real legitimate fight here,” David Gregory insisted on “Meet the Press” as he regurgitated the former vice president’s argument (“You can’t compromise on these matters”) and questioned whether the president could “really bring” his brand of pragmatism “to the issue of the war on terror.”
One New York Daily News columnist summed up Cheney’s supposed TKO this way: “The key to Cheney’s powerful performance: facts, facts, facts.” But the facts, as usual, were wrong.
At the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau, the reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel detailed 10 whoppers. With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney’s boast that his administration had “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.” In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.
You can find a link to the complete Landay-Strobel accounting of Cheney’s errors in the online version of this column. The failure of much of the press to match their effort has a troubling historical antecedent. These are the same two journalists who, reporting for what was then Knight Ridder, uncovered much of the deceit in the Bush-Cheney case for the Iraq war in the crucial weeks before Congress gave the invasion the green light.
On Sept. 6, 2002, Landay and Strobel reported that there was no known new intelligence indicating that “the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs.” It was two days later that The Times ran its now notorious front-page account of Saddam Hussein’s “quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.” In the months that followed, as the Bush White House kept beating the drum for Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds to little challenge from most news organizations, Landay and Strobel reported on the “lack of hard evidence” of Iraqi weapons and the infighting among intelligence agencies. Their scoops were largely ignored by the big papers and networks as America hurtled toward fiasco.
Another reporter who was ahead of the pack in unmasking Bush-Cheney propaganda is the author Ron Suskind. In his 2006 book on the American intelligence matrix, “The One Percent Doctrine,” Suskind wrote about a fully operational and potentially catastrophic post-9/11 Qaeda assault on America that actually was aborted in the Bush years: a hydrogen cyanide attack planned for the New York City subways. It was halted 45 days before zero hour — but not because we stopped it. Al-Zawahri had called it off.
When Bush and Cheney learned of the cancellation later on from conventional intelligence, they were baffled as to why. The answer: Al-Zawahri had decided that a rush-hour New York subway attack was not enough of an encore to top 9/11. Al Qaeda’s “special event” strategy, Suskind wrote, requires the creation of “an upward arc of rising and terrible expectation” that is “multiplied by time passing.” The event that fits that bill after 9/11 must involve some kind of nuclear weapon.
“What are the lessons of this period?” Suskind asked when we spoke last week. “If you draw the wrong lessons, you end up embracing the wrong answers.” They are certainly not the lessons cited by Cheney. Waterboarding hasn’t and isn’t going to save us from anything. The ticking time-bomb debate rekindled by Cheney’s speech may be entertaining on “24” or cable-news food fights, but is a detour from the actual perils before the country. “What we’re dealing with is a patient foe who thinks in decades while we tend to think more in news cycles,” Suskind said. “We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-based discussion.”
The reality is that while the Bush administration was bogged down in Iraq and being played by Pervez Musharraf, the likelihood of Qaeda gaining access to nuclear weapons in a Taliban-saturated Pakistan was increasing by the day. We know that in the month before 9/11, bin Laden and al-Zawahri met with the Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. That was the real link between 9/11 and nuclear terror that the Bush administration let metastasize while it squandered American resources on a fictional link between 9/11 and a “nuclear” Saddam.
And where are we now? On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, David Sanger reported in The Times that military and nuclear experts agree that if “a real-life crisis” breaks out in Pakistan “it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan’s weapons were — or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists.”
Pakistan is the time bomb. But with a push from Cheney, abetted by too many Democrats and too many compliant journalists, we have been distracted into drawing the wrong lessons, embracing the wrong answers. We are even wasting time worrying that detainees might escape from tomb-sized concrete cells in Colorado.
What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to “build the thing we don’t have — human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won’t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds — which we’ve botched — must be corrected and corrected quickly. That’s what wins the battle, not going medieval.” It’s not for nothing, after all, that Powell, Gen. David Petraeus and Robert Gates, the secretary of defense — among other military minds — agree with Obama, not Cheney, about torture and Gitmo.
The harrowing truth remains unchanged from what it was before Cheney emerged from his bunker to set Washington atwitter. The Bush administration did not make us safer either before or after 9/11. Obama is not making us less safe. If there’s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone’s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.
Eating Crow
My Dear Right-Wing Conservative Propaganda Spewers:
May I send you a plate of Crow to Eat when you celebrate Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation to the Supreme Court?
May I send you a plate of Crow to Eat when you celebrate Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation to the Supreme Court?
Saturday, May 30, 2009
The FCC's New Diversity Committee
Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham are the Lord Haw Haw, Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose of today.
The sooner President Obama can knock these Un-American propagandists off the air the better off our whole country will be.
Somehow, during World War II we didn't provide media outlets for Sally, Rose and Haw Haw to do their broadcasts from Inside the USA. Why are today's "Conservative" media traitors being provided with domestic outlets for their radioactive political subversion?
The sooner President Obama can knock these Un-American propagandists off the air the better off our whole country will be.
Somehow, during World War II we didn't provide media outlets for Sally, Rose and Haw Haw to do their broadcasts from Inside the USA. Why are today's "Conservative" media traitors being provided with domestic outlets for their radioactive political subversion?
The USA Was Never a Christian Nation
We were Never a Christian nation -- except to the extent that all the different Christian sects were at each other's throats fighting one another over bitter sectarian disagreements throughout the Colonial period.
By the time we formed a new nation, our Founding Fathers had had enough of all these divisive religious battles among the various Christian denominations. That is why our Bill of Rights, from the inception of the USA, provided for religious freedom and separation of church and state -- for the benefit of all.
President Obama is a Constitutional scholar who knows what he's talking about.
What is Newt Gingrich -- an ideological Right-Wing Windbag? Newt is dead wrong when he says that the United States was "founded as a Christian nation".
John Adams may indeed have said: "Our Constitution was made for a Moral and Religious people." However, "Moral" and "Religious" do not necessarily go hand in hand. In fact, they are often quite the opposite.
In the early twentieth century, there was a very popular American song, entitled: "But He Goes to Church on Sunday". The song then went on to spell out what he did on the other six days of the week.
That songwriter understood full well that "Moral" and "Religious" can be far from the same thing. His huge audience, too, was fully aware of the difference.
Newt Gingrich may believe that atheists and agnostics cannot be "Moral." However, Newt Gingrich is no John Adams.
I'd love to see Newt Gingrich run against Obama in 2012. Newt would get even less votes than Sarah Palin would.
By the time we formed a new nation, our Founding Fathers had had enough of all these divisive religious battles among the various Christian denominations. That is why our Bill of Rights, from the inception of the USA, provided for religious freedom and separation of church and state -- for the benefit of all.
President Obama is a Constitutional scholar who knows what he's talking about.
What is Newt Gingrich -- an ideological Right-Wing Windbag? Newt is dead wrong when he says that the United States was "founded as a Christian nation".
John Adams may indeed have said: "Our Constitution was made for a Moral and Religious people." However, "Moral" and "Religious" do not necessarily go hand in hand. In fact, they are often quite the opposite.
In the early twentieth century, there was a very popular American song, entitled: "But He Goes to Church on Sunday". The song then went on to spell out what he did on the other six days of the week.
That songwriter understood full well that "Moral" and "Religious" can be far from the same thing. His huge audience, too, was fully aware of the difference.
Newt Gingrich may believe that atheists and agnostics cannot be "Moral." However, Newt Gingrich is no John Adams.
I'd love to see Newt Gingrich run against Obama in 2012. Newt would get even less votes than Sarah Palin would.
Michelle Obama's Three Biggest Problems
Michelle Obama has three problems. She is a Woman, she is Black, and she has a Brain. Hopefully, in time, she will find a way to overcome these three formidable obstacles.
US Taxpayers will Recoup from GM
U.S. Hopes To Recoup GM Outlay In 5 Years
The United States would recover most of its planned $50 billion investment in General Motors within five years, according to a preliminary Treasury Department estimate that foresees the company, now on the brink of bankruptcy, rebounding over that time to become a strapping global competitor.
(By Peter Whoriskey, The Washington Post) -- May 30, 2009
Yes, My Conservative Friends, US Taxpayers will Recoup the Bailout Money to GM that was funded by tax dollars -- during President Obama's Second Term.
The United States would recover most of its planned $50 billion investment in General Motors within five years, according to a preliminary Treasury Department estimate that foresees the company, now on the brink of bankruptcy, rebounding over that time to become a strapping global competitor.
(By Peter Whoriskey, The Washington Post) -- May 30, 2009
Yes, My Conservative Friends, US Taxpayers will Recoup the Bailout Money to GM that was funded by tax dollars -- during President Obama's Second Term.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Judge Sotomayor Is Far More Qualified than is Chief Justice "Robot" Roberts
Judge Sonia Sotomayor is far more qualified to be on the Supreme Court than is Chief Justice John Roberts — “America’s Dishonest Umpire”.
At his confirmation hearing, Chief Justice Roberts said that “judges are like umpires, simply calling balls and strikes, but not defining the strike zone”. Roberts has said that judges don’t make the rules of law, but merely interpret them.
However, in the four years that Roberts has been on the Supreme Court, he has ruled in every single case in favor of the power structure — in favor of employers over employees, prosecutors over defendants, corporations over consumers — totally, unanimously, 100% — without exception.
If an “impartial umpire” ever called every single pitch in favor of the Home Team and against the Visitors, most people would undoubtedly conclude that this umpire was “on the take”, that this umpire was “bribed”, that this umpire was the opposite of impartial, that this umpire was voting his own personal prejudices and totally not trying to honestly apply the rules of the game.
How does Chief Justice Roberts’ record on the Supreme Court compare to his confirmation hearing rhetoric?
Judge Sotomayor does not rule in exactly the same way in every single case, regardless of the facts of the particular situation. She applies the law to the facts of each specific case. Judge Sotomayor is much more of an “umpire”, and far more qualified to be on the Supreme Court, than is Chief Justice “Robot” Roberts.
At his confirmation hearing, Chief Justice Roberts said that “judges are like umpires, simply calling balls and strikes, but not defining the strike zone”. Roberts has said that judges don’t make the rules of law, but merely interpret them.
However, in the four years that Roberts has been on the Supreme Court, he has ruled in every single case in favor of the power structure — in favor of employers over employees, prosecutors over defendants, corporations over consumers — totally, unanimously, 100% — without exception.
If an “impartial umpire” ever called every single pitch in favor of the Home Team and against the Visitors, most people would undoubtedly conclude that this umpire was “on the take”, that this umpire was “bribed”, that this umpire was the opposite of impartial, that this umpire was voting his own personal prejudices and totally not trying to honestly apply the rules of the game.
How does Chief Justice Roberts’ record on the Supreme Court compare to his confirmation hearing rhetoric?
Judge Sotomayor does not rule in exactly the same way in every single case, regardless of the facts of the particular situation. She applies the law to the facts of each specific case. Judge Sotomayor is much more of an “umpire”, and far more qualified to be on the Supreme Court, than is Chief Justice “Robot” Roberts.
Chief Justice John Roberts -- "America's Dishonest Umpire"
Is Chief Justice Roberts a Highly Partial and Totally Dishonest Umpire?
Chief Justice Roberts has said that “judges are like umpires, simply calling balls and strikes, but not defining the strike zone”. Roberts has said that judges don’t make the rules of law, but merely interpret them.
However, in the four years that Roberts has been on the Supreme Court, he has ruled in every single case in favor of the power structure — in favor of employers over employees, prosecutors over defendants, corporations over consumers — totally, unanimously, 100% — without exception.
If an “impartial umpire” ever ruled his every single call in favor of the Home Team and against the Visitors, most people would undoubtedly conclude that this umpire was “on the take”, that this umpire was “bribed”, that his umpire was the opposite of impartial, that his umpire was voting his personal prejudices and totally not trying to honestly apply the rules of the game.
How does Chief Justice Roberts’ record on the Supreme Court compare to his confirmation hearing rhetoric?
Chief Justice Roberts has said that “judges are like umpires, simply calling balls and strikes, but not defining the strike zone”. Roberts has said that judges don’t make the rules of law, but merely interpret them.
However, in the four years that Roberts has been on the Supreme Court, he has ruled in every single case in favor of the power structure — in favor of employers over employees, prosecutors over defendants, corporations over consumers — totally, unanimously, 100% — without exception.
If an “impartial umpire” ever ruled his every single call in favor of the Home Team and against the Visitors, most people would undoubtedly conclude that this umpire was “on the take”, that this umpire was “bribed”, that his umpire was the opposite of impartial, that his umpire was voting his personal prejudices and totally not trying to honestly apply the rules of the game.
How does Chief Justice Roberts’ record on the Supreme Court compare to his confirmation hearing rhetoric?
Repeal The Second Amendment
The Second Amendment Must be Repealed.
The Second Amendment puts guns into the hands of too many criminals, and results in too many murders of too many innocent civilians.
The thousands of innocent victims of the Second Amendment are crying out from their graves for Repeal of the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment puts guns into the hands of too many criminals, and results in too many murders of too many innocent civilians.
The thousands of innocent victims of the Second Amendment are crying out from their graves for Repeal of the Second Amendment.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Pat Buchanan, Mike Huckabee and Sonia Sotomayor
Republicans seem determined to commit political suicide and become the Whig Party of the 21st century. Asinine statements by the likes of Pat Buchanan baselessly trashing the intelligence of Judge Sotomayor (or "Maria", as her dear personal friend, Mike Huckabee, likes to call her) will speed the GOP along its chosen path to self-destruction. Damn the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead!
Will GOP Wage "Scorched Earth" Against Judge Sotomayor?
Anything the Republican Party can do to continue committing political suicide -- such as waging a "Scorched Earth" battle against Judge Sotomayor's Supreme Court confirmation -- would be extremely welcome by most Americans. To the Ramparts, GOP! Hoist your battle flags.
Republicans Powell, Lincoln and Specter
As long as Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Coulter and Cheney remain the spokespersons of the Conservative movement, Conservatives will continue to earn the contempt of the rest of the country, and Republicans will become the Whig Party of the 21st century.
Why is an American hero like Colin Powell wasting his time with the Republican Party? That party is beyond redemption. If Lincoln were alive today, he would be drummed out of the party, too. Except that Honest Abe would be smart enough to flee the party on his own. Arlen Specter has seen what a lost cause the GOP has become and, hopefully, Colin Powell will soon reach the same conclusion.
Why is an American hero like Colin Powell wasting his time with the Republican Party? That party is beyond redemption. If Lincoln were alive today, he would be drummed out of the party, too. Except that Honest Abe would be smart enough to flee the party on his own. Arlen Specter has seen what a lost cause the GOP has become and, hopefully, Colin Powell will soon reach the same conclusion.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
ANGRY FOR GOD Thinks the Name of this Site is Appalling
Dear ANGRY FOR GOD:
Unfortunately, Conservatives are in bed with some very strange bedfellows. Admittedly, there are many decent, well-intentioned,
family oriented Conservatives -- Jews and Christians -- like yourself.
However, once these good folks let Bombasticators like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Dick Cheney be their spokespersons, they have sold their souls to the Devil.
What about Ann Coulter? Ann has said that John Edwards is a "faggott", liberals are "Godless", and Jews need to be "perfected" -- the way she is. Naturally, we call Ann Coulter "The Perfect One". If Conservatives allow people like Ann Coulter to be their spokespersons, how can Conservatives expect to be treated with anything but contempt by the rest of the country?
God must be very angry with you, ANGRY FOR GOD, for allowing yourself to associate with those people. What's more, you have invoked God's name to defend and support these Extremist Right-Wing Radical Blow-Hards. Wouldn't you agree that what you are doing would be considered by many normal folks to be blasphemy?
Unfortunately, Conservatives are in bed with some very strange bedfellows. Admittedly, there are many decent, well-intentioned,
family oriented Conservatives -- Jews and Christians -- like yourself.
However, once these good folks let Bombasticators like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Dick Cheney be their spokespersons, they have sold their souls to the Devil.
What about Ann Coulter? Ann has said that John Edwards is a "faggott", liberals are "Godless", and Jews need to be "perfected" -- the way she is. Naturally, we call Ann Coulter "The Perfect One". If Conservatives allow people like Ann Coulter to be their spokespersons, how can Conservatives expect to be treated with anything but contempt by the rest of the country?
God must be very angry with you, ANGRY FOR GOD, for allowing yourself to associate with those people. What's more, you have invoked God's name to defend and support these Extremist Right-Wing Radical Blow-Hards. Wouldn't you agree that what you are doing would be considered by many normal folks to be blasphemy?
More Right-Wing Supreme Court Baloney
What do you do, scrape through the bottoms of garbage cans for these scuzzy articles, and then circulate them around to everyone?
What a piece of Right-Wing Propaganda Horse Dung this article is.
Do you truly believe that Bush v. Gore, which Justice Scalia rammed through the Supreme Court, reflects strict constructionism and the original intent of the framers? What malarkey!! That was the decision in which the five Supreme Court conservatives used the Constitution's Equal Protection of the Laws clause to override the Florida Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes in Florida in 2000 and Appoint George Bush as president. Something like that had never happened before, and those five Supreme thieves realized how outrageous their theft of the election was by stating, in this opinion, that it was a one of a kind decision and could never be used as a precedent for any other case.
Some other "strict construction" cases included Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld "separate but equal" stating that racial segregation was legal in interstate passenger railroad trains; Dred Scott (1857), which held that slaves were property and that a runaway slave named Dred Scott must be returned to his owner; and all those decisions in 1933 and 1934 in which the conservative Supreme Court voided so much of the social and recovery legislation of Roosevelt's New Deal.
Most of these decisions were by a vote of 5 to 4. Do you really believe the majority was reflecting the true intent of the framers and the minority was not? Or, were the Justices on each side voting for their own personal political and social beliefs and framing their legal arguments to match their personal beliefs?
And, if those are the decisions that result from "strict constructionism", is that what most Americans really want the law to be today? When Mr. Dooley used to say "The Law is an Arse", he probably had in mind these decisions and others like them.
On the other hand, Chief Justice Earl Warren was roundly criticized for quoting at length from Gunnar Myrdal's sociology book, "An American Dilemma", in his landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which finally outlawed racial segregation in the United States. Myrdal's book was not a legal precedent. But Warren was ready to quote whatever was necessary to support the right decision and overturn all the insidious precedents which until then had upheld segregation. If Warren had been forced to follow precedent, the primary existing precedent was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and this country would still be segregated today.
Take Marbury v. Madison (1803), one of the Supreme Court's most revered and respected landmark decisions. In that historic opinion, the great Chief Justice John Marshall held that our courts have the power to nullify laws of Congress on the ground that they are unconstitutional. No such power is specifically given to the courts in the U. S. Constitution. A "strict constructionist" could never have found in the Constitution a power to rule laws of Congress unconstitutional. Yet, Chief Justice Marshall found that such a power was implied in the other powers set forth in the Constitution. Would today's "strict constructionists" now wish to overturn Marbury v. Madison and hold that courts can no longer rule laws of Congress unconstitutional because no such power is specifically spelled out in the Constitution?
How is what Warren did in Brown any different from what Marshall did in Marbury?
Let us consider, by contrast, a "strict constructionist" Justice who theoretically follows the law as written, rather than his personal political beliefs. As Jeffrey Toobin has recently noted, after four years on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts’ record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.
Does this sound like a Justice who is sincerely trying to apply the law to the facts of each case, or are these the party-line hack decisions of a Right-Wing ideologue masquerading as an honest arbiter? Roberts’ service on the Court, which is likely to continue for decades, offers an enduring and faithful reflection of the failed and faded Bush Presidency.
Your Conservative buddies also dislike many other recent Supreme Court decisions which have expanded individual rights, including One Man-One Vote, legalization of abortion, the Miranda Rules, legal rights for Gitmo detainees, overturning sodomy laws as applied to consenting adult homosexuals, outlawing state laws banning contraception, etc.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is totally correct. She can use German court decisions, Gunnar Myrdal's book, or anything else that is necessary to bolster the correct decision.
The reason your Conservative pals are so opposed to Justice Ginsburg's approach is because they liked those other decisions -- Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, New Deal destroyers, Bush v. Gore, etc. Their only regret is that these "precedents" are no longer the law of the land.
What a piece of Right-Wing Propaganda Horse Dung this article is.
Do you truly believe that Bush v. Gore, which Justice Scalia rammed through the Supreme Court, reflects strict constructionism and the original intent of the framers? What malarkey!! That was the decision in which the five Supreme Court conservatives used the Constitution's Equal Protection of the Laws clause to override the Florida Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes in Florida in 2000 and Appoint George Bush as president. Something like that had never happened before, and those five Supreme thieves realized how outrageous their theft of the election was by stating, in this opinion, that it was a one of a kind decision and could never be used as a precedent for any other case.
Some other "strict construction" cases included Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld "separate but equal" stating that racial segregation was legal in interstate passenger railroad trains; Dred Scott (1857), which held that slaves were property and that a runaway slave named Dred Scott must be returned to his owner; and all those decisions in 1933 and 1934 in which the conservative Supreme Court voided so much of the social and recovery legislation of Roosevelt's New Deal.
Most of these decisions were by a vote of 5 to 4. Do you really believe the majority was reflecting the true intent of the framers and the minority was not? Or, were the Justices on each side voting for their own personal political and social beliefs and framing their legal arguments to match their personal beliefs?
And, if those are the decisions that result from "strict constructionism", is that what most Americans really want the law to be today? When Mr. Dooley used to say "The Law is an Arse", he probably had in mind these decisions and others like them.
On the other hand, Chief Justice Earl Warren was roundly criticized for quoting at length from Gunnar Myrdal's sociology book, "An American Dilemma", in his landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which finally outlawed racial segregation in the United States. Myrdal's book was not a legal precedent. But Warren was ready to quote whatever was necessary to support the right decision and overturn all the insidious precedents which until then had upheld segregation. If Warren had been forced to follow precedent, the primary existing precedent was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and this country would still be segregated today.
Take Marbury v. Madison (1803), one of the Supreme Court's most revered and respected landmark decisions. In that historic opinion, the great Chief Justice John Marshall held that our courts have the power to nullify laws of Congress on the ground that they are unconstitutional. No such power is specifically given to the courts in the U. S. Constitution. A "strict constructionist" could never have found in the Constitution a power to rule laws of Congress unconstitutional. Yet, Chief Justice Marshall found that such a power was implied in the other powers set forth in the Constitution. Would today's "strict constructionists" now wish to overturn Marbury v. Madison and hold that courts can no longer rule laws of Congress unconstitutional because no such power is specifically spelled out in the Constitution?
How is what Warren did in Brown any different from what Marshall did in Marbury?
Let us consider, by contrast, a "strict constructionist" Justice who theoretically follows the law as written, rather than his personal political beliefs. As Jeffrey Toobin has recently noted, after four years on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts’ record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.
Does this sound like a Justice who is sincerely trying to apply the law to the facts of each case, or are these the party-line hack decisions of a Right-Wing ideologue masquerading as an honest arbiter? Roberts’ service on the Court, which is likely to continue for decades, offers an enduring and faithful reflection of the failed and faded Bush Presidency.
Your Conservative buddies also dislike many other recent Supreme Court decisions which have expanded individual rights, including One Man-One Vote, legalization of abortion, the Miranda Rules, legal rights for Gitmo detainees, overturning sodomy laws as applied to consenting adult homosexuals, outlawing state laws banning contraception, etc.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is totally correct. She can use German court decisions, Gunnar Myrdal's book, or anything else that is necessary to bolster the correct decision.
The reason your Conservative pals are so opposed to Justice Ginsburg's approach is because they liked those other decisions -- Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, New Deal destroyers, Bush v. Gore, etc. Their only regret is that these "precedents" are no longer the law of the land.
Monday, May 25, 2009
GOP Tin Soldiers Attack Colin Powell, A Real Soldier
The following article by Mike Lupica Says It All:
GOP led by Toy Soldiers - Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh - Insulting Heroes like Powell
By Mike Lupica - New York Daily News - Monday, May 25th 2009
Powell says Cheney, Limbaugh are Republican Party Poopers
This was at 166th St. and Boston Road in the Bronx Sunday morning. This was an hour before Powell would appear on "Face the Nation" to discuss comments made about him by former Vice President Dick Cheney, whose most famous moment carrying a gun came when shooting a lawyer once instead of quail.
A week ago Cheney - whose idea of a foxhole is Fox News - went on "Face the Nation" and said he assumed Powell had left the Republican Party after endorsing Barack Obama. Then Cheney said if he had to choose between Powell and Rush Limbaugh to lead the Republicans, he would go with Limbaugh.
But that really is the current Republican Party, isn't it? Angry old white men like Cheney and Limbaugh talking to each other. Two toy soldiers who enjoy insulting a real one like Powell. Trying to convince the country that if you don't believe in torture, you don't want to keep it safe.
Only here was Powell, who came out of Morris High to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State, telling the real truth about his party Sunday, and about the old men who think they speak for everyone in it. "In every demographic ... the Republican Party is losing," Powell said.
Of course Dick Cheney wants to talk about torture now. It's all he's got. He doesn't want to talk about the soldiers he sent off to die in Iraq. He doesn't want to talk about all the wounded soldiers from that war, or the trips he didn't make to Walter Reed while he was still vice president.
He doesn't want to talk about how the Republicans lost both houses of Congress and finally the White House while he was vice president, as millions left his party on the dead run. And he certainly doesn't want to talk about what kind of country he left to President Obama, and to the rest of us.
So he talks about the potential danger of closing Guantanamo and puts it all on Obama, failing to mention that his own boss, Bush, also wanted to close the place. It is completely gutless of Cheney, and completely predictable. He continues to live in a weird parallel world, accepting no blame or responsibility for Sept. 11, but making it clear that if anything happens again it's all Obama's fault.
In a quiet voice Sunday, Colin Powell pointed out the obvious about Guantanamo to Bob Schieffer: "[Cheney is] disagreeing with President Bush's policy." Then Powell said Obama wasn't closing down Guantanamo to appease the intellectuals of Europe, as Cheney snarkily suggested, "but to reassure people all around the world that we're a country of law."
Understand: Powell is not some kind of perfect American hero; he will always have to live with the appearance he made at the United Nations when he was helping Bush and Cheney sell their intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, reluctantly playing the good soldier to the end.
He is still better than the people to whom he was forced to respond Sunday. He has still led a great American life and served his country more honorably than Cheney ever has or ever will. At the end of his time on television Sunday, on the eve of Memorial Day, he praised the young men and women fighting Cheney's war in Iraq as "another greatest generation."
"This is a time when we reflect on the privileges we've had because we had other citizens put their lives on the line," he said.
Maybe Dick Cheney should do some reflecting, take a good look around this Memorial Day. Or just take in the kind of parade in which he'll never be asked to march. Maybe Cheney could then think about devoting the rest of his life finding ways to help the soldiers he sent off to war, instead of finding ways to keep pinning medals on himself.
It is worth remembering today that guys like Colin Powell, Morris High '54, put their own lives on the line. Cheney always did it with somebody else's.
GOP led by Toy Soldiers - Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh - Insulting Heroes like Powell
By Mike Lupica - New York Daily News - Monday, May 25th 2009
Powell says Cheney, Limbaugh are Republican Party Poopers
This was at 166th St. and Boston Road in the Bronx Sunday morning. This was an hour before Powell would appear on "Face the Nation" to discuss comments made about him by former Vice President Dick Cheney, whose most famous moment carrying a gun came when shooting a lawyer once instead of quail.
A week ago Cheney - whose idea of a foxhole is Fox News - went on "Face the Nation" and said he assumed Powell had left the Republican Party after endorsing Barack Obama. Then Cheney said if he had to choose between Powell and Rush Limbaugh to lead the Republicans, he would go with Limbaugh.
But that really is the current Republican Party, isn't it? Angry old white men like Cheney and Limbaugh talking to each other. Two toy soldiers who enjoy insulting a real one like Powell. Trying to convince the country that if you don't believe in torture, you don't want to keep it safe.
Only here was Powell, who came out of Morris High to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State, telling the real truth about his party Sunday, and about the old men who think they speak for everyone in it. "In every demographic ... the Republican Party is losing," Powell said.
Of course Dick Cheney wants to talk about torture now. It's all he's got. He doesn't want to talk about the soldiers he sent off to die in Iraq. He doesn't want to talk about all the wounded soldiers from that war, or the trips he didn't make to Walter Reed while he was still vice president.
He doesn't want to talk about how the Republicans lost both houses of Congress and finally the White House while he was vice president, as millions left his party on the dead run. And he certainly doesn't want to talk about what kind of country he left to President Obama, and to the rest of us.
So he talks about the potential danger of closing Guantanamo and puts it all on Obama, failing to mention that his own boss, Bush, also wanted to close the place. It is completely gutless of Cheney, and completely predictable. He continues to live in a weird parallel world, accepting no blame or responsibility for Sept. 11, but making it clear that if anything happens again it's all Obama's fault.
In a quiet voice Sunday, Colin Powell pointed out the obvious about Guantanamo to Bob Schieffer: "[Cheney is] disagreeing with President Bush's policy." Then Powell said Obama wasn't closing down Guantanamo to appease the intellectuals of Europe, as Cheney snarkily suggested, "but to reassure people all around the world that we're a country of law."
Understand: Powell is not some kind of perfect American hero; he will always have to live with the appearance he made at the United Nations when he was helping Bush and Cheney sell their intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, reluctantly playing the good soldier to the end.
He is still better than the people to whom he was forced to respond Sunday. He has still led a great American life and served his country more honorably than Cheney ever has or ever will. At the end of his time on television Sunday, on the eve of Memorial Day, he praised the young men and women fighting Cheney's war in Iraq as "another greatest generation."
"This is a time when we reflect on the privileges we've had because we had other citizens put their lives on the line," he said.
Maybe Dick Cheney should do some reflecting, take a good look around this Memorial Day. Or just take in the kind of parade in which he'll never be asked to march. Maybe Cheney could then think about devoting the rest of his life finding ways to help the soldiers he sent off to war, instead of finding ways to keep pinning medals on himself.
It is worth remembering today that guys like Colin Powell, Morris High '54, put their own lives on the line. Cheney always did it with somebody else's.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Obama Is Cleaning Up Bush's Mess
Bush's rating was at its highest right after 9-11 -- about nine months after he first took office. People then didn't realize what a loser Bush was. I realized it -- from Day One.
Bush left this country in such a mess, and in such a deep hole, when he finally, mercifully left office four months ago, that it might take years to clean up Bush's pigsty.
Fortunately, Obama has gotten right down to work, and he's making enormous progress. We still have a long way to go, but Obama has already put the USA on the fast track to recovery.
Bush left this country in such a mess, and in such a deep hole, when he finally, mercifully left office four months ago, that it might take years to clean up Bush's pigsty.
Fortunately, Obama has gotten right down to work, and he's making enormous progress. We still have a long way to go, but Obama has already put the USA on the fast track to recovery.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Liars, Scoundrels and Fools
Anyone who claims that Nancy Pelosi is lying about what happened at her 2002 briefing by the CIA has got to be a liar, a scoundrel, and a fool. As of today, the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who have seen all the evidence and read all the notes, cannot agree on who said what to whom at those briefings. If our Senators and Congressmen, who have seen more complete information than anyone else, do not have a clear picture of what happened at those meetings, then how can anyone else possibly say definitively who is lying and who isn't. Those people who say they know for a fact that Nancy Pelosi is lying must by definition be liars, scoundrels and fools. And, those who believe them, and are swallowing all of their malarkey whole, are even worse. Those people have their noses up the rear ends of liars, scoundrels and fools.
Obama's Approval Rating Is Higher Among Blacks Than Among Whites
I'm sure the black community is very proud that America finally has its first black president, and it's natural that this pride is reflected in a sky-high approval rating among black voters -- to see one of their own holding the highest office in the land.
The rest of America is proud that we now have a Great president in the White House, which is why Obama's approval rating remains so high among everybody else.
How high? Well, just compare Obama's approval rating today against Bush's when Dubya left office. What was that difference? Night and Day.
The rest of America is proud that we now have a Great president in the White House, which is why Obama's approval rating remains so high among everybody else.
How high? Well, just compare Obama's approval rating today against Bush's when Dubya left office. What was that difference? Night and Day.
Nancy Pelosi Has No Further Comments
Good for Pelosi. That's what she should be saying.
She wants to set the Congressional agenda, not let the Republican trolls do it.
There's no doubt in my mind that she is correct about what happened at the 2002 briefing. The CIA, which conducted the briefing, has been unable to produce any notes that refute what Pelosi is saying.
Until either side can produce definitive notes there is nothing to talk about, except "he said, she said". Only a Truth Commission can prove who is right, and I don't think the GOP would benefit from that kind of full-scale investigation.
The Republican Troll Machine thinks they have an issue here, but they don't. I don't think America is ready to let Newt Gingrich start running the show again.
She wants to set the Congressional agenda, not let the Republican trolls do it.
There's no doubt in my mind that she is correct about what happened at the 2002 briefing. The CIA, which conducted the briefing, has been unable to produce any notes that refute what Pelosi is saying.
Until either side can produce definitive notes there is nothing to talk about, except "he said, she said". Only a Truth Commission can prove who is right, and I don't think the GOP would benefit from that kind of full-scale investigation.
The Republican Troll Machine thinks they have an issue here, but they don't. I don't think America is ready to let Newt Gingrich start running the show again.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Is Dick Cheney Lying Again?
If Cheney is lying now, he is lying about whether or not any important or useful information was obtained thru the use of water-boarding. No such information has been released to the public, so we don't know the answer to that question.
We did not use water-boarding in World War II, or in any of our other wars, yet we always managed to obtain the information we needed from enemy POW's, using other methods.
Several key CIA agents have testified recently that there are much better ways than coercion to obtain vital information from enemy combatants. Creating a rapport between the CIA interrogator and the prisoner works much better than the use of coercion in obtaining reliable information.
So, Obama contends that, even if Cheney can ultimately show that water-boarding did in fact produce some useful information, the same information, even more complete and reliable, could have been obtained by using less coercive methods.
Using water-boarding and other coercive methods hurts us by giving the enemy a propaganda and recruiting tool, which Al Quaida has been using effectively. If we don't need to use these methods to obtain reliable information, then why hand the enemy the gift of an anti-American propaganda tool to use against us?
We did not use water-boarding in World War II, or in any of our other wars, yet we always managed to obtain the information we needed from enemy POW's, using other methods.
Several key CIA agents have testified recently that there are much better ways than coercion to obtain vital information from enemy combatants. Creating a rapport between the CIA interrogator and the prisoner works much better than the use of coercion in obtaining reliable information.
So, Obama contends that, even if Cheney can ultimately show that water-boarding did in fact produce some useful information, the same information, even more complete and reliable, could have been obtained by using less coercive methods.
Using water-boarding and other coercive methods hurts us by giving the enemy a propaganda and recruiting tool, which Al Quaida has been using effectively. If we don't need to use these methods to obtain reliable information, then why hand the enemy the gift of an anti-American propaganda tool to use against us?
Dick Cheney and Water-Boarding
I'm not saying that Cheney is right or wrong, or whether he told the truth or lied. I'm simply saying that he made an excellent, powerful presentation of his position.
The next step is to check into the accuracy of what he said, see whether his statements have any validity, and find out if he did lie and, if so, specifically where.
The main bone of contention is whether water-boarding actually did produce useful information and stopped any terrorist plots. Cheney and other right-wingers keep making these claims but, so far, I haven't seen any proof or verification to back up their claims.
Of course, Obama is raising a number of other valid reasons to oppose water-boarding.
But this is the main claim that Conservatives have and, so far, I haven't seen any proof that they are correct even on this point -- that water-boarding actually did thwart some terrorist plots.
The next step is to check into the accuracy of what he said, see whether his statements have any validity, and find out if he did lie and, if so, specifically where.
The main bone of contention is whether water-boarding actually did produce useful information and stopped any terrorist plots. Cheney and other right-wingers keep making these claims but, so far, I haven't seen any proof or verification to back up their claims.
Of course, Obama is raising a number of other valid reasons to oppose water-boarding.
But this is the main claim that Conservatives have and, so far, I haven't seen any proof that they are correct even on this point -- that water-boarding actually did thwart some terrorist plots.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Score One for Dick Cheney
I watched Dick Cheney's speech today, and it was superb. It's the
best speech I've ever heard Cheney deliver. In fact, it was
shockingly good, totally unexpected from someone who has been such a
public relations disaster over the past 8 years.
Cheney presented the facts and the issues, and he really drew a line
in the sand. At last, we have a real debate in which people are
talking about actual facts, and about which interrogation methods work
best. At last, there is a debate worth having -- between Cheney and
Obama. This is how our government is supposed to work -- and hardly
ever does.
I'm not saying that Cheney is right and Obama is wrong. I'm simply saying that today Cheney made a very persuasive case for his positions regarding interrogation methods and the closing of Guantanamo.
best speech I've ever heard Cheney deliver. In fact, it was
shockingly good, totally unexpected from someone who has been such a
public relations disaster over the past 8 years.
Cheney presented the facts and the issues, and he really drew a line
in the sand. At last, we have a real debate in which people are
talking about actual facts, and about which interrogation methods work
best. At last, there is a debate worth having -- between Cheney and
Obama. This is how our government is supposed to work -- and hardly
ever does.
I'm not saying that Cheney is right and Obama is wrong. I'm simply saying that today Cheney made a very persuasive case for his positions regarding interrogation methods and the closing of Guantanamo.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Pelosi and the CIA
We're talking about the CIA in 2002 under Bush. This is the same CIA which said that Saddam Hussein had WMD's, which turned out to be non-existent. It also said that Saddam was trying to procure yellow cake uranium from the country of Niger in Africa to help Iraq develop nuclear weapons. When former Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times disproving this allegation, the Bush administration responded by outing his wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent who had been operating in very sensitive areas of nuclear weapons control. Had a Democrat or liberal outed a CIA agent, the cries of "Treason" from the Right-Wing Scream Machine would have been ear-shattering. Unfortunately, Leon Panetta was not in control of the CIA at that time, no matter how much he tries to defend now what the agency did then. In weighing the credibility of Nancy Pelosi against that of the CIA regarding the briefing of 2002, the CIA of 2002 does not appear to have the world's best track record for reliability.
Monday, May 18, 2009
A Truth Commission will Vindicate Pelosi
There will be a Truth Commission and all will come out. Pelosi will not be the loser in that one. Bush and the GOP will once again go down in flames.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
President Obama at Notre Dame
President Obama gave his speech at Notre Dame today, and it was Fantastic. Thunderous applause and rapt attention throughout the address. More and more, Obama is looking like one of the Greatest presidents in US history -- the exact opposite of that dunce Bush who screwed up this country in so many different ways during his tenure.
Obama and Pelosi
If you want to leave your Nancy Pelosi Fantasy Cocoon for a while, and pay a brief visit to the Real World, check out Obama's speech at Notre Dame today.
Before Obama got there, all the talk was about the protesters, the boycotters, etc. The Right-Wing Noise Machine was in full blast. Obama would be booed and hooted because of his positions on abortion and stem cell research.
What happened when Obama got there and made his speech? Thunderous applause and rapt attention for the entire 26 minutes. The six protesters in the hall were politely escorted to the door. When Obama finished, it seemed as though in the 2012 election he will carry 90% of the vote in Notre Dame and win an overwhelming majority in Indiana (a formerly Red state which Obama first turned Blue in 2008).
Barack is a masterful politician in the style of FDR, and he proved it again today. Obama turned this "controversial" Notre Dame
commencement speech into a Democratic political convention.
You can be sure that Nancy Pelosi will also emerge from this current Right-Wing manufactured brouhaha unscathed and triumphant.
Before Obama got there, all the talk was about the protesters, the boycotters, etc. The Right-Wing Noise Machine was in full blast. Obama would be booed and hooted because of his positions on abortion and stem cell research.
What happened when Obama got there and made his speech? Thunderous applause and rapt attention for the entire 26 minutes. The six protesters in the hall were politely escorted to the door. When Obama finished, it seemed as though in the 2012 election he will carry 90% of the vote in Notre Dame and win an overwhelming majority in Indiana (a formerly Red state which Obama first turned Blue in 2008).
Barack is a masterful politician in the style of FDR, and he proved it again today. Obama turned this "controversial" Notre Dame
commencement speech into a Democratic political convention.
You can be sure that Nancy Pelosi will also emerge from this current Right-Wing manufactured brouhaha unscathed and triumphant.
Right-Wing Pelosi Games
Nancy Pelosi would have to become a Republican for me to turn against her. I don't think that's in the cards. Meanwhile, the Right-Wing Noise Machine can continue playing its nonsensical Pelosi games and suckering in the usual brain-dead Righties.
The GOP's Operation Pelosi Will Fail
How can Nancy Pelosi possibly defame the CIA which said that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD's and was actively seeking to buy yellow cake uranium from the country of Niger? This was the Bush CIA. Hasn't it already defamed itself sufficiently? What credibility does the Bush CIA have left?
The Right-Wing Wolf Pack hasn't smelled this much blood since Bill Clinton met Monica Lewinsky. Don't worry. They are on the losing end of Operation Pelosi, too. These Right-Wingers will end up crawling back to their caves with their tails between their legs, in their usual style.
The Right-Wing Wolf Pack hasn't smelled this much blood since Bill Clinton met Monica Lewinsky. Don't worry. They are on the losing end of Operation Pelosi, too. These Right-Wingers will end up crawling back to their caves with their tails between their legs, in their usual style.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Vas You Dere, Charlie?
How come all the people accusing Nancy Pelosi of lying were not there at the 2002 briefing?
The Crime of Holocaust Denial
The Holocaust -- the slaughter of 6-1/2 million innocent Jews in the middle of Europe during the 1940's, virtually all of them civilians or children -- was the Greatest Crime in human history. Santayana said: "Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it." Holocaust Denial is a vicious attempt to get people to forget the Holocaust. That would set the stage for a future generation to repeat the Holocaust. Holocaust Denial is a crime because it helps create the conditions in which such a monstrous slaughter can be carried out again. It is also a slanderous Lie which debases the memory of the 6-1/2 million innocent victims.
After World War II, many German civilians pleaded ignorance, claiming they didn't know the Holocaust was taking place under their own noses. Today's Holocaust deniers can't make that claim. Today's perpetrators know the facts and they know full well what they are doing.
After World War II, many German civilians pleaded ignorance, claiming they didn't know the Holocaust was taking place under their own noses. Today's Holocaust deniers can't make that claim. Today's perpetrators know the facts and they know full well what they are doing.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf Party
The Republicans have played this game once too often. They are like The Boy Who Cried Wolf. They've become the Party of Lies and Distractions. The GOP has reached the point where it now has less credibility than the Boy had.
Changing The Subject
I guess the issue has become what was Nancy Pelosi told by the CIA, and when. The issue no longer is whether water-boarding is torture, is effective, is counter-productive, who did it, who authorized it, etc. Has water-boarding become a propaganda boon and a recruiting tool for Al Quaida, costing American lives instead of saving them? All these questions have now been swept under the rug. The only person we hear about today is Nancy Pelosi. How much water-boarding did Nancy actually do? What about those who did the water-boarding? That's become irrelevant. The Right-Wing Smokescreen Brigade is back in its element now, out in full force, and they sure are managing to change the subject.
The Minnesota Terminator
Norm Coleman should be called The Minnesota Terminator. Norm is effectively terminating his political career in Minnesota -- and Governor Pawlenty's political career, too. Republicans may not win another statewide election in Minnesota for decades to come. Thank you, Norm.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Dijon-Gate Grey Poupon
May 8, 2009
The Honorable Barack H. Obama
President of the United States
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20006
Dear Mr. President:
We applaud you, Mr. President, for exercising your freedom of taste when recently ordering a burger with Dijon mustard. We’re always happy to see people use Dijon mustard to add flair and flavor to their favorite foods. The right to choose condiments freely is quintessentially American and embodies the spirit of our democracy.
So we urge you to respond to “Dijon-gate” by issuing a “pardon” to any American who has ever been criticized for putting a liberal spread of Dijon mustard on a burger or a conservative dollop on a ham & cheese sandwich. These “Pardon Me for Loving Dijon” proclamations will empower the millions of Dijon mustard-loving Americans to ask for their favorite condiment with pride.
Respectfully yours,
The GREY POUPON Team
www.greypoupon.com
The Honorable Barack H. Obama
President of the United States
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20006
Dear Mr. President:
We applaud you, Mr. President, for exercising your freedom of taste when recently ordering a burger with Dijon mustard. We’re always happy to see people use Dijon mustard to add flair and flavor to their favorite foods. The right to choose condiments freely is quintessentially American and embodies the spirit of our democracy.
So we urge you to respond to “Dijon-gate” by issuing a “pardon” to any American who has ever been criticized for putting a liberal spread of Dijon mustard on a burger or a conservative dollop on a ham & cheese sandwich. These “Pardon Me for Loving Dijon” proclamations will empower the millions of Dijon mustard-loving Americans to ask for their favorite condiment with pride.
Respectfully yours,
The GREY POUPON Team
www.greypoupon.com
Conservatives Strike Out Again
Goldman Sachs may be the first bank allowed to repay its $10 billion government loan next week, and JP Morgan Chase looks to be next. As the financial crisis has abated, some banks, most notably Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley have said they can now repay the money and get out from under federal control.
So much for the Conservatives' bleating cries: "How are we, and our children, and our children's children, ever going to repay all this taxpayer bailout money?"
Sign on Conservative Desktops: "The Bull Starts Here!"
So much for the Conservatives' bleating cries: "How are we, and our children, and our children's children, ever going to repay all this taxpayer bailout money?"
Sign on Conservative Desktops: "The Bull Starts Here!"
The Nancy Pelosi Straw Man
The issue is not what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it. The issue is the GOP trying to get itself off the hook for using water-boarding by trying to shift the topic to someone who was not part of the Bush administration and had little or no leverage to stop what the Bush people were doing,. They are trying to shift the topic away from the perpetrators and their authorizers and enablers. If water-boarding is wrong, then the people who did it were the wrongdoers, not someone whom they may or may not have told about it. When Rep. Jane Harmann (D-CA) learned about the water-boarding a year later, she protested, and her protests didn't do one bit of good. She was ignored. Nancy Pelosi was just as irrelevant, as far as the Bush administration was concerned. They didn't even listen to members of their own administration who protested against water-boarding. Shining the spotlight on Nancy Pelosi is simply a Republican ploy to deflect attention away from the real guilty parties. Let's hope the American people aren't dumb enough to let these GOP shysters get away with it.
Wanda Sykes Hit The Target with Rush
I don't think Wanda Sykes was trying to crack jokes about Rush Limbaugh. Rather, she was responding to Rush's countless insane rants using his own kind of language. She wasn't making a joke about Rush's kidneys. She was making a wish,
Pat Buchanan Compares Barack Obama to Michael Corleone
Thank goodness the Democrats have one Michael Corleone to take on all the Mafiosi who call themselves Conservative Republicans. And, Barack is whipping their asses pretty good, isn't he, Pat? I don't think Barack ever through his white grandmother under the bus, except in your demented mind. It sounds like you've been spending too much time under the bus, Pat.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
David Duke = GIGO -- Garbage In, Garbage Out
David Duke has been thrown out of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs are very honest people. They don't like to keep anything that isn't theirs. Now, they're even returning our garbage to us.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The Savage Michael Alan Weiner
Michael Alan Weiner a/k/a Michael Savage has been Banned from England as a hate-monger. I guess Michael Savage really is a Weiner (and a Whiner).
Richard Cohen's Wise Words
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post today quotes Oscar Levant as saying: "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin". And, referring to Dick Cheney, Cohen states: "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."
Are Socialists the True Christians, and Capitalists Not?
Are you saying that Socialism provides health care for people who can't afford it, but Christianity doesn't? Are you saying then that Socialism is better than Christianity? Or, are you saying that Socialists are true Christians, and capitalists are not?
Monday, May 11, 2009
Wanda Sykes Hits A Home Run
Wanda Sykes was hilarious hosting the National Press Club luncheon for President Obama. Judging by today's screaming and moaning from so many Right-Wing Retards, she really hit home. I never heard of Wanda before, but she sounds like she's headed for big-time stardom now. These days, how can anyone go wrong by attacking Rush Limbaugh -- whether rabbit-punching his kidneys or labeling him the 20th hijacker on 9/11 who missed the plane because he O. D'd. on oxycontin. Rush has turned himself into America's favorite "pinyata."
Right-Wing Christians Vs. Christianity
Right-wing Christians are very much against health care. In that sense, these "Christians" are truly against Christianity. Jesus taught that people should take care of the poor, the meek, the sick, the weak. Providing health care for people who can't afford it is a very Christian thing to do and that's what Obama, as a devout Christian, is trying to achieve. Jesus would certainly approve. Providing health care for people who can afford to pay for it is capitalistic, not particularly Christian. So many other modern industrialized countries have universal health care. That makes those countries more Christian than we are. Fortunately for our home-grown Right-Wing "Christians", the USA is not a Christian country -- it is comprised of people of many different religious beliefs and non-beliefs. However, if the USA were a Christian country, the Right-Wing Christians would be probably be called blasphemers, idolators, heathens and infidels. It's doubtful they would be considered true Christians.
Wise Words Today from Alan M. Dershowitz
"Israelis have been scarred by what happened in Gaza. Israel ended the occupation, removed all of the settlers, and left behind millions of dollars worth of agricultural and other facilities designed to make the Gaza into an economically-viable democracy. Land for peace is what they sought. Instead they got land for rocket attacks against their children, their women and their elderly. No one wants to see a repeat of this trade-off."
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Right-Wing Mustard Gas
I Love the Mustard story. It shows where the minds of Right-Wingers have plopped. Lefties are having loads of laughs over this story, which highlights the stupidity of Right-Wingers, and shows the petty things they obsess over while the country goes to Hell in a hand-basket. By all means, let Limbaugh and Hannity point the way -- and do follow them whithersoever they may lead you -- like the obedient flock of sheep you Righties are. Thank Goodness we finally have Liberals running things in DC again, who at least have their heads screwed on straight.
Pope Benedict on the "Ideological Manipulation of Religion"
Pope Benedict made a great, vitally important statement today, when he said:
"Is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?"
Did the Pope address this comment to Islamic Fundamentalists or to our own home-grown Right-Wing Christian Conservatives?
Both of these worthy groups merit having this Papal Message delivered by Express Mail to their respective Inboxes.
"Is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?"
Did the Pope address this comment to Islamic Fundamentalists or to our own home-grown Right-Wing Christian Conservatives?
Both of these worthy groups merit having this Papal Message delivered by Express Mail to their respective Inboxes.
The Conservative Underground
The Conservative Underground should go Deeper Underground ---- and stay there.
France -- Sean Hannity's New Bogey Man Du Jour
Sean Hannity has found something he dislikes more than Obama -- France. Every time Sean wants to extract snickers and "tut-tuts" from his audience, he mentions France. What is France -- a symbol of elitism in Hannity's pea-brain? Sean talks about the "Socialist Utopia of France". He also apparently has a strong distaste for Dijon mustard. When Obama puts Dijon mustard on a hamburger, that's an example of Obama's European "elitism". What would Sean say if Obama used "French's Mustard"? Apparently, "Pallin' Around with Terrorists" didn't work against Obama. Jeremiah Wright, William Ayres, Tony Rezko -- they are history now. They've all been replaced. Clearly, to mind-challenged Sean Hannity, France is today's New Bogey Man Du Jour.
Limbaugh and Hannity Want Socialism
Destroying capitalism would leave the door open for Socialism. The narrow, right-wing economic ideas of Limbaugh and Hannity, as implemented by Dubya Bush, came very close to wrecking American capitalism. Obama is doing what needs to be done right here, right now to save capitalism. That's what Obama's Stimulus and Spending programs are all about. Therefore, Limbaugh and Hannity are trying to destroy Obama. They are firmly against capitalism and against anyone who is trying to save the system. If we ever get Socialism in this country, it will not be because of Obama. It will be strictly thanks to the Anti-Capitalist Crusades of Limbaugh and Hannity.
Why Is Obama Trying to Save GM?
The main thing Obama is trying to do is bail out the banks so they can start lending again and put people back to work to stop this current torrent of job layoffs.
You can't isolate one item and focus on it, since Obama's is a broad-based, wide-ranging approach.
Most American multi-national companies, whether GM or otherwise, provide employment in Mexico and other foreign countries where they have plants. But GM, Ford, etc. are also huge employers in Michigan and other states, and many related industries, companies and workers depend upon the survival of the American auto industry.
For GM to have 75,000 US employees by 2012 is better than its having none, if the company goes bankrupt. If Obama does nothing, then by 2012 that figure could be none, and there would also be huge job losses in related and dependent industries.
You can't isolate one item and focus on it, since Obama's is a broad-based, wide-ranging approach.
Most American multi-national companies, whether GM or otherwise, provide employment in Mexico and other foreign countries where they have plants. But GM, Ford, etc. are also huge employers in Michigan and other states, and many related industries, companies and workers depend upon the survival of the American auto industry.
For GM to have 75,000 US employees by 2012 is better than its having none, if the company goes bankrupt. If Obama does nothing, then by 2012 that figure could be none, and there would also be huge job losses in related and dependent industries.
Thomas Does Not Want To Preserve the "Original Constitution"
No one is in favor of changing everything in our original Constitution. However, the Founding Fathers themselves said that they were abandoning the Articles of Confederation and adopting a new Constitution in order to form "a more perfect Union". The Founding Fathers were the first ones to recognize that neither the Articles of Constitution nor the Constitution created "a perfect Union", but that the new document simply formed "a more perfect" one.
They knew that, as time went on, some things would have to change. Indeed, Slavery was deliberately left by the Founding Fathers as a matter to be settled in the future, since they couldn't resolve it among themselves.
In more recent years, other issues have arisen -- including One Man One Vote, Desegregation of the South, the right to organize labor unions, abortion, school prayer, affirmative action, burning the American flag, legal rights for Gitmo detainees, and so many more.
Thomas is always on the Conservative side of these issues. It is not because he wants to preserve the "original Constitution". I have tried to show you in my previous response that this is a phony argument since there are quite a few things in the "original Constitution" that no one would want to preserve -- having state legislatures, instead of the people, elect US Senators -- to name but one more. It is, rather, because Thomas has a Right-Wing Conservative viewpoint on so many of today's issues. He votes his political philosophy, not his supposed view that he wants to preserve the "original Constitution".
As you so aptly pointed out, Matt, "why would a black man want to count himself as only 3/5 of a person?"
They knew that, as time went on, some things would have to change. Indeed, Slavery was deliberately left by the Founding Fathers as a matter to be settled in the future, since they couldn't resolve it among themselves.
In more recent years, other issues have arisen -- including One Man One Vote, Desegregation of the South, the right to organize labor unions, abortion, school prayer, affirmative action, burning the American flag, legal rights for Gitmo detainees, and so many more.
Thomas is always on the Conservative side of these issues. It is not because he wants to preserve the "original Constitution". I have tried to show you in my previous response that this is a phony argument since there are quite a few things in the "original Constitution" that no one would want to preserve -- having state legislatures, instead of the people, elect US Senators -- to name but one more. It is, rather, because Thomas has a Right-Wing Conservative viewpoint on so many of today's issues. He votes his political philosophy, not his supposed view that he wants to preserve the "original Constitution".
As you so aptly pointed out, Matt, "why would a black man want to count himself as only 3/5 of a person?"
Saturday, May 9, 2009
How Will We Repay All This Taxpayer Bailout Money?
When our nation starts to prosper again, as it soon will, all the bailout and stimulus money will be repaid very easily -- much more easily than if we had simply allowed our economy to dry up and die, as was happening very rapidly when Obama took office. By Obama's second term, our economy will be thriving, thanks to the programs Obama is instituting now, and he will be able to run the country at a surplus every year, just as Clinton did when he was in office.
Obama is pumping money into the system now, restoring the economy to robust health, and in the near future repaying the money will not be a problem.
All this discussion is reminiscent of what happened when the USA first entered World War II. FDR set forth production goals for planes, ships, tanks, guns, etc., which the Republicans said we could never achieve. In a very short time, however, the USA met and far exceeded FDR's production goals.
Why is it that Republicans always have so little faith in America?
Obama is pumping money into the system now, restoring the economy to robust health, and in the near future repaying the money will not be a problem.
All this discussion is reminiscent of what happened when the USA first entered World War II. FDR set forth production goals for planes, ships, tanks, guns, etc., which the Republicans said we could never achieve. In a very short time, however, the USA met and far exceeded FDR's production goals.
Why is it that Republicans always have so little faith in America?
Clarence Thomas Is a Right-Wing Ideologue in Judicial Robes
Clarence Thomas is not trying to uphold "the original meaning of the Constitution". He is trying to impose his own personal social and political ideas, no matter how he tries to camouflage his Right-Wing views in Conservative legal jargon.
In the original Constitution, there was no provision for the Supreme Court to rule laws of Congress unconstitutional. That power was created for the Supreme Court in an 1803 decision by the first great judicial activist, Chief Justice John Marshall. Does Clarence Thomas want to go back to the "original Constitution" and eliminate the Court's power to rule any laws unconstitutional?
The "original Constitution" allowed slavery and said that a black man counted as only 3/5 of a person. Does Thomas want to revert to those portions of the "original Constitution"?
In 1858, the discredited Dred Scott decision said that, according to the "original Constitution", a slave was property, and a runaway slave had to be returned to his master. Does Thomas want to return to that part of the "original Constitution"?
The "original Constitution" had a very narrowly interpreted interstate commerce clause and, accordingly, many early New Deal laws of 1933 and 1934 were struck down as unconstitutional by the Conservative Supreme Court of the early 30's. Does Thomas want to revert to that narrow interpretation which would allow so much of today's social legislation to be overturned?
For a "non-activist" Justice, Thomas was one of the prime movers in the notorious Bush v. Gore decision of 2000 (probably the Court's worst decision ever, along with Dred Scott), in which the US Supreme Court took away from the Florida Supreme Court the power to set the rules for counting the votes in the State of Florida, thus preventing all of Florida's votes from being counted. As a result, the presidential election of 2000 was decided without all the votes having been counted. Just as in Fascist countries, the president in 2000 was appointed by the Supreme Court, not elected by all the voters.
In other words, this "strict Constitutionalist" can be a very activist Justice when it suits him. His talk about following the "original Constitution" is a smokescreen. Thomas always follows his rock-ribbed Conservative ideology, wherever it might lead him.
In the original Constitution, there was no provision for the Supreme Court to rule laws of Congress unconstitutional. That power was created for the Supreme Court in an 1803 decision by the first great judicial activist, Chief Justice John Marshall. Does Clarence Thomas want to go back to the "original Constitution" and eliminate the Court's power to rule any laws unconstitutional?
The "original Constitution" allowed slavery and said that a black man counted as only 3/5 of a person. Does Thomas want to revert to those portions of the "original Constitution"?
In 1858, the discredited Dred Scott decision said that, according to the "original Constitution", a slave was property, and a runaway slave had to be returned to his master. Does Thomas want to return to that part of the "original Constitution"?
The "original Constitution" had a very narrowly interpreted interstate commerce clause and, accordingly, many early New Deal laws of 1933 and 1934 were struck down as unconstitutional by the Conservative Supreme Court of the early 30's. Does Thomas want to revert to that narrow interpretation which would allow so much of today's social legislation to be overturned?
For a "non-activist" Justice, Thomas was one of the prime movers in the notorious Bush v. Gore decision of 2000 (probably the Court's worst decision ever, along with Dred Scott), in which the US Supreme Court took away from the Florida Supreme Court the power to set the rules for counting the votes in the State of Florida, thus preventing all of Florida's votes from being counted. As a result, the presidential election of 2000 was decided without all the votes having been counted. Just as in Fascist countries, the president in 2000 was appointed by the Supreme Court, not elected by all the voters.
In other words, this "strict Constitutionalist" can be a very activist Justice when it suits him. His talk about following the "original Constitution" is a smokescreen. Thomas always follows his rock-ribbed Conservative ideology, wherever it might lead him.
The GOP -- The Party of Old White Aunties
The GOP Has become the Party of Old White Aunties. They are Anti-This, Anti-That, Anti-Everyone, and Anti-Everything. President Obama and his administration are a Perfect Anti-Dote to the GOP.
Texas Religious Fundamentalists Target Public Education Again
Texas Fundamentalists Set Their Sights on Social Studies Standards
BY CLAY BURELL
PUBLISHED MAY 02, 2009 @ 12:55PM PST
"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards."
- Mark Twain, Following the Equator; Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
The Texas fundamentalists on the State Board of Education have shifted their sights, now, from creationism/Intelligent Design in the science standards to Bible-based social studies standards. From the Texas Freedom Network:
The Texas State Board of Education is set to appoint a social studies curriculum “expert” panel that includes absurdly unqualified ideologues who are hostile to public education and argue that laws and public policies should be based on their narrow interpretations of the Bible.
TFN has obtained the names of “experts” appointed by far-right state board members. Those panelists will guide the revision of social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools. They include David Barton of the fundamentalist, Texas-based group WallBuilders, whose degree is in religious education, not the social sciences, and the Rev. Peter Marshall of Peter Marshall Ministries in Massachusetts, who suggests that California wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were divine punishments for tolerance of homosexuality.
It gets worse.
There are a lot of good folks in Texas, so I don't mean this image literally - but you can't help but fantasize that the Texas fundies could all gather in an obscure corner of Texas and, just for that little slice, do, as their governor recently threatened, and secede. They could warp the minds of their young only, and leave the rest of Texas, and the United States, to learn in peace.
BY CLAY BURELL
PUBLISHED MAY 02, 2009 @ 12:55PM PST
"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards."
- Mark Twain, Following the Equator; Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
The Texas fundamentalists on the State Board of Education have shifted their sights, now, from creationism/Intelligent Design in the science standards to Bible-based social studies standards. From the Texas Freedom Network:
The Texas State Board of Education is set to appoint a social studies curriculum “expert” panel that includes absurdly unqualified ideologues who are hostile to public education and argue that laws and public policies should be based on their narrow interpretations of the Bible.
TFN has obtained the names of “experts” appointed by far-right state board members. Those panelists will guide the revision of social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools. They include David Barton of the fundamentalist, Texas-based group WallBuilders, whose degree is in religious education, not the social sciences, and the Rev. Peter Marshall of Peter Marshall Ministries in Massachusetts, who suggests that California wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were divine punishments for tolerance of homosexuality.
It gets worse.
There are a lot of good folks in Texas, so I don't mean this image literally - but you can't help but fantasize that the Texas fundies could all gather in an obscure corner of Texas and, just for that little slice, do, as their governor recently threatened, and secede. They could warp the minds of their young only, and leave the rest of Texas, and the United States, to learn in peace.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Glenn Beck is Today's very own Johnny Ray
Dear Glenn Beck:
When your Party sends a letter of Goodbye,
It’s no Secret you’ll feel Better if you ——- Cry!!!
Glenn — You are today's Johnny Ray of Talk Radio and TV.
When your Party sends a letter of Goodbye,
It’s no Secret you’ll feel Better if you ——- Cry!!!
Glenn — You are today's Johnny Ray of Talk Radio and TV.
Sean Hannity -- Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest!
What a brain-dead, moronic retard Sean Hannity is! Ordering a hamburger with Dijon mustard makes Obama a Frenchman? Hannity is lucky that so many Americans are dumber than he is. Otherwise, he would have no audience at all. Certainly, no one with an IQ over 60 can have any patience with Hannity's stupidity. How offensive Hannity is to any American with a functioning brain cell.
Tea-Hee-Hee Parties
These Right-Wing Tea Parties should be called Tea-Hee-Hee parties —- they’re so laughable. They are a huge waste of good tea.
Obama's Supreme Court Pick
We still have on the Court the two Right-Wing Ringleaders of the notorious Bush v. Gore Election Heist of 2000 -- Scalia and Thomas; plus Dubya's two new Conservative hacks -- Alito and Roberts. What other Neanderthal Horror will the Congressional Right-Wing Dinosaurs try to foist upon the American people now?
Dijon Mustard
The Republicans have become the party of Dijon Mustard, Weak Tea, and Limburger Cheese. Those are their "issues", folks.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Michael Savage Banned In England
Congratulations to Jacqui Smith for banning that maniac Right-Wing bloviator, Michael Savage, from entering Great Britain. Well done, Madame Smith. Now, how can we prevent Michael Savage from entering the USA?
A Humpty Dumpty Country
Without Obama, we would have no economy and no country left -- not after the havoc Bush and his Conservative policies wreaked on America. All The King's Horses and All The King's Men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again. Bush bequeathed to Obama a Humpty Dumpty nation -- broken and beyond repair -- both at home and abroad. Obama is accomplishing the impossible. He is indeed putting Humpty Dumpty together again. I don't know if Obama is the True Messiah or, even, The One. But he sure is a Miracle Man.
Republican Suicide
There has never in my lifetime been a minority party as irresponsible and out-of-control as the Republican Party is today. What used to be the Loyal Opposition is now simply the Party of No. With its media pundits bloviating about Obama putting Dijon mustard on a hamburger, and its Senators lining up in unanimous, mind-numbing opposition to everyone and everything, today's Republican Party seems hell-bent on committing suicide. For the future of the American people, the GOP's self-administered suicide can't come soon enough.
Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?
I'm a Vegetable hoping to become a Mineral. I've given up on the Animal Kingdom.
Dijon Mustard?
If all Right-Wing pundits can talk about is whether President Obama orders a Hamburger with Ketchup or with Dijon Mustard, then clearly the Right-Wing pundits have become pretty Wimpy.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Today's Whig Party
It's hard to believe the Republican Party could have been more inept and incompetent in the first three months of Obama's administration than they were during their pathetic 2008 "Pallin' Around with Terrorists" presidential campaign. But they have been, Blanche, they have been. I wasn't around when the Whig Party collapsed, so this is the first time I've ever watched a major political party implode.
FOX News Pedophiles
Are Hannity, O'Reilly and other pundits at FOX News pedophiles? Is that why they are so concerned that pedophiles be the center of attention of the new federal Hate Crimes bill? Are the FOX pundits all star-struck birds of a feather who want themselves and their Kissin' Cousins to be the main focus of this bill? Are these FOX pundits a pack of puffed-up pedophiles who will take second billing to no one?
African American Ministers Protest Gay Marriage Rights in DC
It's appalling to see African American ministers take such a strong stand against Gay Marriage. Theirs is indeed a "bigoted position." I guess, now that African Americans have won so many civil rights for themselves, they feel they can join the traditional white male majority in taking discriminatory stands against other minorities. Reverend Jeremiah Wright delivered some powerful sermons against "the US of KKK". I doubt if Reverend Wright expected that so many African American ministers would now become members of the "US of KKK" -- as far as Gay Rights are concerned. These DC African American ministers are very reminiscent of the old Southern white ministers who used to preach that the Bible prohibited marriage between blacks and whites -- thus, justifying the South's numerous anti-miscegenation laws. All of these aforementioned ministers -- blacks and whites -- must be reading from the same Bible. I'm glad it isn't my Bible. As for President Obama, he should be leading the fight for Gay Marriage, not civil unions. "Separate But Equal" does not work for Gays any better than it works for any other minority group in our society.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
The Anti-Party
Aside from being anti-gay, anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-health care, anti-union, anti-worker, and anti-stimulus package, what else does the Republican Party have to offer? It has truly become the Anti-Party and we need to develop anti-bodies and anti-dotes before this GNOP virus spreads and destroys our entire body politic. The GNOP is on the verge of wiping out our economic system that used to be called Capitalism before the GNOP got hold of it and choked all the life out of the system.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Limbaughistas and Banana Republicans
Rush Limbaugh calls the Obama Administration Stalinist. Actually, it's the Republican Party that's Stalinist. Republicans are the ones who must faithfully toe the party line, and never deviate from Conservative dogma, as dictated by Party Chairman and Eminent Leader Mao Tse Limbaugh. In case of any deviation, an abject apology must immediately follow to Chairman Limbaugh -- or else it's "Off With His Head." Rush Limbaugh has turned the Republican Party into a Latin American Banana Republic. It's sycophantic members now have all become Limbaughistas and Banana Republicans.
The Republican Party is Becoming the new Dixiecrat Party
The Dixiecrat Party became an "offshoot of the Democrats" in 1948 because that was the year the national Democratic Party, under Harry Truman, stopped tolerating segregation and began pushing Civil Rights legislation. The Southern segregationists bolted from the Democratic Party, formed their own splinter Dixiecrat Party, and nominated Strom Thurmond to run as their presidential candidate. When the Dixiecrat Party folded, after its sorry showing in the 1948 election, these segregationist Ex-Democrats joined the Republican Party -- where they have remained ever since. Today, we see the opposite migration happening under our own eyes. The Republican Party is now turning itself into the Dixiecrat Party -- and will probably end up with the same amount of national following as the Dixiecrats had in 1948.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The New Messiah
Messiahs do not discriminate. If Obama is my Messiah, then he is your Messiah, too, my dear Conservative friend. Remember, His Coming was first recognized and announced by that Holy Trinity -- Saint Beck, Saint Hannity and Saint Limbaugh. Not to mention that vessel of perfected purity, Mary Magdel-ann Coulter. If all of your leaders are proclaiming that Obama is the New Messiah, then who are you, O Unworthy Conservative Sinner, to deny Him?
Limbaugh, Hannity, Wright and White Racism -- The Visible Ceiling
When Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity claim that Reverend Jeremiah Wright's outspoken sermons against white racism and bigotry are themselves a form of racism, Rush and Sean are engaging in the worst kind of lying demagoguery. How do you speak out against white racism if you don't call it by name and label the disease for what it is? For generations, blacks in America were held back by walls of segregation, separate but equal laws, poll taxes, lynchings, second class citizenship, deeply ingrained white racism, etc. They had to overcome a very Visible Ceiling of white laws and white attitudes. Now, in recent years, many of those walls are crumbling, and blacks are making huge economic and social progress in all walks of life -- from the presidency on down. This improvement in the lives of blacks is not a threat to whites. It is an example of one more minority group in our country beginning to share in the same benefits that the majority has always enjoyed. Whites who fear black progress and want to hold back that progress are fools. A rising tide lifts all boats. These are economic and social issues -- not issues of race or skin color. What is good for blacks is good for whites -- and good for all Americans.
The Limbaugh and Hannity slanders of jeremiah Wright's attacks on the evils of white racism are cynical, demagogic attempts to turn the truth on its head, to claim that those who speak out against racism are racists, and to divert attention from who the real racists are.
The Limbaugh and Hannity slanders of jeremiah Wright's attacks on the evils of white racism are cynical, demagogic attempts to turn the truth on its head, to claim that those who speak out against racism are racists, and to divert attention from who the real racists are.
Limbaugh, David Duke, the Klan, the Confederacy -- Birds of a Feather
Rush Limbaugh’s attempts to tie President Obama to William Ayres, Jeremiah Wright and ACORN have had no adverse effect on Obama at all. However, tie a Republican candidate to Rush Limbaugh, and that candidate is a cooked goose. Limbaugh is the most toxic name on the American political scene today — not Ayres, Wright, ACORN, or anything else. Not even the Swine Flu is as contagious and deadly to a political candidate these days as is an association with Rush Limbaugh.
Maybe that’s because Rush is the spokesman of the new Confederate Party. That’s what the Republican Party should change its name to — the Confederate Party. The GOP has come to embody the racist, secessionist principles of the Old Confederacy. Its electoral support is now concentrated solidly in the Solid South. The rest of the country is fleeing this sinking ship ASAP. When Rush talks about Race in America, we can hear those old Southern plantation owners pontificating over their mint juleps. Rush, David Duke, the Klan, the Confederacy — these Birds of a Feather Flock Together.
Maybe that’s because Rush is the spokesman of the new Confederate Party. That’s what the Republican Party should change its name to — the Confederate Party. The GOP has come to embody the racist, secessionist principles of the Old Confederacy. Its electoral support is now concentrated solidly in the Solid South. The rest of the country is fleeing this sinking ship ASAP. When Rush talks about Race in America, we can hear those old Southern plantation owners pontificating over their mint juleps. Rush, David Duke, the Klan, the Confederacy — these Birds of a Feather Flock Together.
A One Party Country
The economy is improving under Obama. Every week brings more good news, although there is still lots of wreckage left over from Bush's eight years which Obama has to clean up. You can rant all you want. But Conservative policies have been totally discredited by the damage Bush did to America over the past eight years. That's why more and more people aree deserting the GOP and becoming Democrats. Are we becoming a one-party nation? If we are, that's surely because today only one party truly represents America. The other party wants America to fail (Right On, Rush!), and is doing everything it can to bring about that failure. Never fear. The Republican Party will not defeat America -- but it will bring about its own demise.
Rush Limbaugh, David Duke and The Klan
Rush doesn't have to be tied directly to the Klan. Rush is saying all the anti-black, slimy, racist things any Klan leader would say -- and the Klan doesn't have to pay for air time. David Duke can just sit back and applaud Rush from his royal perch in the Grand Klaxon's Box Seat.
Tea Party Dupes
Obama plans to raise taxes on people earning more than $250,000 a year. Conservatives say that a lot of the folks attending the tea parties earn only $30,000 a year. Those people have been duped. They have been played for fools by Fox News and other Right-Wing media flacks. People earning $30,000 a year stand to gain from Obama's policies -- they will pay less in taxes and receive many more benefits. They will have a healthier economy and a more effective government. The Republican Party today consists of the Misleaders and the Misled. Anyone earning $30,000 a year who attended the Tea Parties clearly ranks among the Misled.
The World's Only Christian Muslim
Conservatives are mind-numbingly dumb. They label Obama a Muslim who was born in Kenya and, in the same breath, they blast him for attending a Christian church and listening to the sermons of a radical Christian minister, Jeremiah Wright, for twenty years -- and being married there, and bringing his children to attend those Christian services. What other Muslim has ever attended Christian services for twenty years -- and brought his family with him? (Of course, many Conservatives probably don't consider Black Liberation Theology to be a true Christian faith, but that's another issue). This "logic" is totally accepted, without any questions, by a great many Conservatives. These Conservatives are clearly faith-based, fact-challenged -- and IQ-challenged. No wonder Conservatives have made so many stupid decisions if they are so gullible as to believe fish stories like these.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Klan Spokesman Rush Limbaugh Runs the Welcome Wagon
Democratic racism is ancient history. In the Civil War, the Democrats were the party of secession and the Confederacy. In the 1930's, Democrats were still the party of the Solid South and they did perpetuate Jim Crow laws in the South. FDR fought World War II with a racially segregated military and he did nothing to confront the racism of Southern Democrats. All that changed with Harry Truman. Truman de-segregated the military and fought for strong Civil Rights laws throughout his presidency. However, he could not overcome the Dixiecrats and their filibusters of his proposed legislation. Truman's civil rights bills caused many Southern Democrats to bolt the party in 1948 and form their own Dixiecrat Party supporting Strom Thurmond for the presidency. Somehow, despite a splintered party, Truman was re-elected in 1948 and continued his battle for civil rights legislation. Strom Thurmond, the segregationist who had been the Dixiecrat cnadidate for president, later left the Democrats and joined the Republican Party. By that time, Thurmond had joined a huge migration of racists moving from the Democrats to the Republican Party which had become, and remains, their new home. They even have Klan spokesman Rush Limbaugh operating the Welcome Wagon.
Abu Gharib Guards Appeal Their Convictions Claiming They Were Bush's Scapegoats
Prison guards jailed for abusing inmates at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq are planning to appeal against their convictions on the ground that recently released CIA torture memos prove that they were scapegoats for the Bush Administration.
The photographs of prisoner abuse at the Baghdad jail in 2004 sparked worldwide outrage but the previous administration, from President Bush down, blamed the incident on a few low-ranking “bad apples” who were acting on their own.
The decision by President Obama to release the memos showed that the harsh interrogation tactics were approved and authorised at the highest levels of the White House.
This is one more example of what great "patriots" Bush and Cheney were, and how well they "supported" our troops.
The photographs of prisoner abuse at the Baghdad jail in 2004 sparked worldwide outrage but the previous administration, from President Bush down, blamed the incident on a few low-ranking “bad apples” who were acting on their own.
The decision by President Obama to release the memos showed that the harsh interrogation tactics were approved and authorised at the highest levels of the White House.
This is one more example of what great "patriots" Bush and Cheney were, and how well they "supported" our troops.
Bring It On!
Bring It On. Let the GOP attack Obama's new Supreme Court nominee with all their usual fury, obstinacy and stupidity. The GOP now has one more chance to show the American people why their party is barreling towards extinction. Surely, the Republicans will take full advantage of this new opportunity to demonstrate their obsolescence on a national stage. Obama may not be ready to deliver the knockout punch yet, but he's about to win another big round.
Friday, May 1, 2009
How Did Republicans Become The White Racist Party?
There was a Sea Change in the 1960's and 70's -- under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Since then, the shoe has been on the other foot.
Lyndon Johnson pushed for strong civil rights legislation and, once that legislation was passed, Nixon and Lee Atwater adopted a Southern Strategy. As a result, most white racists switched parties. They changed from D to R.
Nixon and Atwater told the white racists and bigots that they were welcome in the Republican Party, and most of them have found a very comfortable home there ever since.
Lyndon Johnson pushed for strong civil rights legislation and, once that legislation was passed, Nixon and Lee Atwater adopted a Southern Strategy. As a result, most white racists switched parties. They changed from D to R.
Nixon and Atwater told the white racists and bigots that they were welcome in the Republican Party, and most of them have found a very comfortable home there ever since.
The Seeds of Capitalism's Self-Destruction
Marxist theory is based upon the doctrine of dialectical materialism. Marxists believe that Capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. That simple truth is self-evident. Capitalism does indeed contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
In fact, in the USA those Seeds of Self-Destruction have names. Let me name some Names: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Michelle Bachman, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, Dubya Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, every Republican Congressman, virtually every Republican Senator, and so many other Tea Party supporters too numerous to mention.
The above-named Talking Seeds of Self-Destruction are firm believers in Marxist theory. That is the reason they keep calling President Obama a Socialist, a Communist, a Stalinist and a Marxist. They are aware of the destruction inflicted on Capitalism during the past eight years of Right-Wing Conservative Bush policies. They believe that, after eight years of such massive damage to our economic system, Capitalism cannot possibly survive. Therefore, the New Man in the White House, in keeping with Marxist theory, must inevitably be a Socialist or a Communist.
They find it impossible to believe that anyone -- Obama or anyone else -- could possibly save Capitalism following the massive damage their policies have inflicted upon our economic system. They turned over to Obama an economy that was on the verge of a new Great Depression, and they can't believe that anyone would be able to pull our system back from the brink.
So what if Obama is trying to save the banks, start lending flowing again, save America's auto companies, revive the stock market, create new jobs, etc.? He still can't be a Capitalist. He must be a Socialist because they know that they have killed Capitalism and no one can possibly save the system.
Obama wants Universal Health Care? Then he must be a Socialist. Capitalism doesn't provide for that sort of thing.
So, the next time you hear one of those Talking Seeds call Obama a Socialist or a Communist, just remember, they must be Right. After all, they're the ones who killed Capitalism -- and they know it.
That's also why they are doing everything they possibly can to destroy the Obama administration. Now that they have wrecked Capitalism, they are out to destroy anyone who is trying to save the system. Whether it's Rush Limaugh who loudly and clearly wants Obama to fail, or the Republican Party of Unanimous No in Congress -- these Nattering Nabobs of Negativity -- these Talking Seeds of Self-Destruction -- are trying their best to grow into Mighty Oaks so they can cover in total darkness the burial ground of Capitalism they have created.
In fact, in the USA those Seeds of Self-Destruction have names. Let me name some Names: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Michelle Bachman, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, Dubya Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, every Republican Congressman, virtually every Republican Senator, and so many other Tea Party supporters too numerous to mention.
The above-named Talking Seeds of Self-Destruction are firm believers in Marxist theory. That is the reason they keep calling President Obama a Socialist, a Communist, a Stalinist and a Marxist. They are aware of the destruction inflicted on Capitalism during the past eight years of Right-Wing Conservative Bush policies. They believe that, after eight years of such massive damage to our economic system, Capitalism cannot possibly survive. Therefore, the New Man in the White House, in keeping with Marxist theory, must inevitably be a Socialist or a Communist.
They find it impossible to believe that anyone -- Obama or anyone else -- could possibly save Capitalism following the massive damage their policies have inflicted upon our economic system. They turned over to Obama an economy that was on the verge of a new Great Depression, and they can't believe that anyone would be able to pull our system back from the brink.
So what if Obama is trying to save the banks, start lending flowing again, save America's auto companies, revive the stock market, create new jobs, etc.? He still can't be a Capitalist. He must be a Socialist because they know that they have killed Capitalism and no one can possibly save the system.
Obama wants Universal Health Care? Then he must be a Socialist. Capitalism doesn't provide for that sort of thing.
So, the next time you hear one of those Talking Seeds call Obama a Socialist or a Communist, just remember, they must be Right. After all, they're the ones who killed Capitalism -- and they know it.
That's also why they are doing everything they possibly can to destroy the Obama administration. Now that they have wrecked Capitalism, they are out to destroy anyone who is trying to save the system. Whether it's Rush Limaugh who loudly and clearly wants Obama to fail, or the Republican Party of Unanimous No in Congress -- these Nattering Nabobs of Negativity -- these Talking Seeds of Self-Destruction -- are trying their best to grow into Mighty Oaks so they can cover in total darkness the burial ground of Capitalism they have created.
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