1st Republic 14th Star

Ill informed supporters try to defend Tea Baggers

2010-01-02T16:34:00.003-05:00

From Media Matters:

Fox spent weeks promoting apparent tea party scam

TPM Media's Zachary Roth reported earlier in the week that the political action committee that organized the Tea Party Express -- Our Country Deserves Better PAC -- funneled almost two-thirds of its spending from July to November back to the political consulting firm from which it was spawned, Russo, Marsh, and Associates. More than $850,000 of the money the supposedly grassroots PAC collected went to the firm of GOP political operatives who ran it.

For those who may have forgotten, the Tea Party Express was the faux-grassroots operation that Fox News hopped aboard in late August, after the network's promotion of the health care town hall meeting disruptions but before they started flogging the 9-12 protest. (It's so hard to keep Fox's political activism straight!) It was a nationwide bus tour organized by a political action committee whose mission is to oppose President Obama and other Democrats; with a pedigree like that, how could Fox resist?

Fox News heavily promoted the Tea Party Express; the Our Country Deserves Better PAC even used Fox's promotion in a fundraising email. Then Fox's Griff Jenkins hit the trail with the Express, following that bus around the country, throwing journalistic integrity aside as he declared its riders "the America that Washington forgot."

But somehow, Jenkins missed out on the real story: how loyal tea-party-goers were separated from their hard-earned cash, which was funneled to fat cat Republican political consultants. Russo, Marsh, and Associates salutes you, Fox News. They could have scammed the tea partiers without you, but it probably wouldn't have been nearly as lucrative.

-----

Commenter Bilbo_dies objected to some comments that suggested that the Tea Party activists are not too bright:

Oh please don't go there.
Even though there are some on the right who are light on their education, you have to understand that they are not all "dumb country hicks".

All you have to do is look at people like Dick Chenney. He is an extremely intelligent man who has decided he knows more than anyone else about how the country should be run.

Some people are going to be led, no matter what. If you want to make a difference work on pointing out the falsehoods that the media spends so much time disseminating.

My replies:

I disagree. I've seen on the news one too many misinformed idiots at Tea Party events saying "keep the government's hands off my Medicaid!" and "Where's the birth certificate" and "he's a Muslim" and "how do we beat the bitch" to give them credit for intelligence, awareness of current events, or good intentions.

-----

When someone refuses to acknowledge commonly accepted and easily verifiable facts because they don't fit in with his bigoted narrative, he's not disagreeing in good faith or unintentionally uninformed -- he's willfully ignorant.

In fact, the Tea Party types LIKE being stupid. They sneer at educated people as "liberal elites."

-----

Another commenter, rrastro, disagreed with me:

that is a claim that is difficult to defend. The one person (yes I know small sample) did not like being ignorant and spent time and money to alleviate his ignorance via education.

Many people sneer at liberal elites because they dislike being told that small government is stupid and the only reason things are expensive is profit.

My reply:

Look, these fools regard "liberal elitism" as correcting them when they falsely claim a gathering of 50 thousand people was "really" 2 million.

To them "liberal media" means asking a sitting governor and candidate for vice president what newspapers she reads. It was a "trap" by the "liberal media" that they asked a question so complex that the candidate couldn't comprehend or answer it.

(As I've said before, I refuse to believe that Sarah Palin wrote a book on the grounds that it's apparent that she doesn't even READ them.)

If the tea party members and "conservative activists" think people like me are condescending and scornful of their opinions and points of view, they're right -- it's because they've EARNED it.

Will Ted Nugent be Dixie Chicked?

2009-12-30T18:31:00.002-05:00

Ted Nugent tells Royal Flush magazine:

"I think that Barack Hussein Obama should be put in jail. It is clear that Barack Hussein Obama is a communist.

"Mao Tse Tung lives and his name is Barack Hussein Obama. This country should be ashamed. I wanna throw up."

When can I expect this type of media hue and cry?

I think we all know the answer. Nugent will either be ignored or praised and amplified. Why? Because IOKIYAR.

Amen. Times ten.

2009-12-30T14:04:00.005-05:00

Spot. On.

Top Ten Worst Things about the Bush Decade; or, the Rise of the New Oligarchs, by Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute

December 22, 2009

By spring of 2000, Texas governor George W. Bush was wrapping up the Republican nomination for president, and he went on to dominate the rest of the decade. If Dickens proclaimed of the 1790s revolutionary era in France that it was the best of times and the worst of times, the reactionary Bush era was just the worst of times. I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs. Just as the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union allowed the emergence of a class of lawless 'Oligarchs' in Russia, so Neoliberal tax policies and deregulation produced American equivalents. (For more on the analogy, see Michael Hudson.) We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class. At about 1.3 million adults, it is not too large to have some cohesive interests, and its corporations, lobbyists, and other institutions allow it to intervene systematically in politics. It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth and is heading toward 50, i.e. toward a Banana Republic. Thus, we have a gutted fairness doctrine and the end of anti-trust concerns in ownership of mass media, allowing a multi-billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to buy up major media properties and to establish a cable television channel which is nothing but oligarch propaganda. They established 'think tanks' like the American Enterprise Institute, which hires only staff that are useful agents of the interests of the very wealthy, and which produce studies denying global climate change or lying about the situation in Iraq. Bush-Cheney were not simply purveyors of wrong-headed ideas. They were the agents of the one percent, and their policies make perfect sense if seen as attempts to advance the interests of this narrow class of persons. It is the class that owns our mass media, that pays for the political campaigns of 'our' (their) representatives, that gives us the Bushes and Cheneys and Palins because they are useful to them, and that blocks progressive reform and legislation with the vast war chest funneled to them by deep tax cuts that allow them to use essential public resources, infrastructure and facilities gratis while making the middle class pay for them.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth (surely a quarter of the privately held wealth is enough for the one percent?) It isn't about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided.

10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it. The Reagan and Bush cuts in tax rates on the wealthy have created a dangerous little alien inside our supposedly democratic society, of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as 'analysts' or 'economists' or 'journalists'). The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn't want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy.

9. Health and food insecurity increased for ordinary Americans. Health care costs skyrocketed. Most Americans in the work force who have health care are covered via their employers. 'From 1999 to 2009 health insurance premiums increased 132%" for the companies paying most of the costs of coverage to their employees. Euromonitor adds, "Average private health insurance premiums for a family of four in 1999 were US$5,485 per annum or 7.2% of household disposable income. 2008 premiums were estimated at US$12,973 per annum or 14.8% of average household disposable income." By Bush's last year in office, food insecurity among American families was at a 14-year high. About 49 million Americans, one in six of us, worried about having enough food to eat at some points in that year, and resorted to soup lines, food stamps, or dietary shortcuts. Some 16 million, according to the NYT, suffered from '“very low food security,” meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.' Hundreds of thousands of children are going hungry in the richest country in the world. From being a proud, wealthy people, our social superiors reduced us to the estate of third-world peasants, so as to make sure their bonuses were bigger.

8. The environment became more polluted. The Bush administration was the worst on record on environmental issues. Carbon emissions grew unchecked, and the threat of climate change accelerated. In fact, Bush muzzled government climate scientists and had their reports rewritten by lawyers from Big Oil.

7. The imperial presidency was ensconced in ways it will be difficult to pare back. But note that its powers were never used against the oligarchs (unlike the case in Putin's Russia), but rather deployed to ensure the continued destruction of the labor movement and the political bargaining power of workers and the middle class, and to harass and disrupt peace, rights and environmental movements. A part of this process was the abrogation of fourth amendment protections against arbitrary search, seizure and snooping into people's mail and effects, and of other key constitutional rights under vague and unconstitutional rubrics such as 'providing material aid to terrorists,'(rights which seem unlikely ever to be restored).

6. The Katrina flood and the destruction of much of historic African-American New Orleans, and the massive failure of the Bush administration to come to the aid of one of America's great cities. The administration's unconcern about the unsound dam infrastructure, about climate change, and about the fate of the victims are all a wake-up call for what all of us have in store from the small social class that Bush served.

5. The Bush administration's post-2002 mishandling of Afghanistan, where the Taliban had been overthrown successfully in 2001 and were universally despised. The Bush administration's attempt to assert itself with a big troop presence in the Pashtun provinces, its use of search and destroy tactics and missile strikes, its neglect of civilian reconstruction, and its failure to finish off al-Qaeda, allowed an insurgency gradually to grow. It should have been nipped in the bud, but was not. Once an insurgency becomes well established, it is defeated militarily only about 20 percent of the time. Eight years later, the Neoconservative thrust into Central Asia (in search of hydrocarbon leverage, or in a geopolitical pissing match with Russia and China?) of the early years of this decade has bequeathed us yet another war, this time one that could destabilize neighboring Pakistan-- the world's sole Muslim nuclear power.

4. The Iraq War, in which the US illegally launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, displaced 4 million (over a million abroad), destroyed entire cities such as Fallujah, set off a Sunni-Shiite civil war, allowed Baghdad to be ethnically cleansed of its Sunnis, practiced systematic and widespread torture before the eyes of the Muslim Middle East and the world, and immeasurably strengthened Iran's hand in the Middle East. All this on false pretexts such as 'weapons of mass destruction' or 'democratization,' for the sake of opening the Iraqi oil markets to US hydrocarbon firms-- a significant faction of the oligarchic class. Cost to the US in American military life: 4,373 dead as of Dec 15 and 31,603 wounded in combat. The true totals of war-related dead and injured are higher, since 30,000 troops who were only diagnosed with brain injuries on their return to the US are not counted in the statistics, according to Michael Munk. The cost of the Iraq War when everything is taken into account will likely be $3 trillion.

3. The great $12 trillion Bank Robberry, in which unscrupulous bankers and financiers were deregulated and given free rein to create worthless derivatives, sell impossible mortgages to uninformed marks who could not understand their complicated terms, and then to roll this garbage up into securities re-sold like the
Cheshire cat, with a big visible smile of asserted value hanging in the air even as their actual worth disappeared into thin air. Having allowed the one-percent oligarchs to capture most of the increase of the country's wealth in recent decades, Bush and Paulsen now initiated the surrender to them of nearly a further entire year's gross domestic product of the US, stealing it from the rest of us by deficit budget financing that will have the effect of deflating our savings and property values and relative value of our currency against other world currencies. That is, we are to be further beggared for sake of the super-rich. And while the banks and bankers are held harmless, the hardworking Americans who have lost and will lose their homes are extended virtually no help. While 500,000 American children will go hungry at least some of the time this year, the Oligarchs at Goldman, Sachs, will get millions in bonuses, on the backs of the ordinary taxpayers. It seems likely to me that the creation of a pool of vast excess liquidity for the super-rich by the Reagan-Cheney tax cuts was what impelled them to develop the derivatives, since they had too much capital for ordinary investment purposes and were restlessly seeking new gaming tables. The conclusion is that until we get our gini coefficient back into some sort of synch, we are likely at risk for further such meltdowns.

2. The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington by al-Qaeda, an organization that stemmed from the Reagan administration's anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s and which decided that, having defeated one superpower, it could take down the other. Al-Qaeda's largely Arab volunteer fighters had confronted the Soviets over their occupation of a major Muslim country, Afghanistan. Bin Laden was himself a Neoliberal Oligarch, but he broke with the Gulf consensus of seeking a US security umbrella, thus creating a fissure within his powerful social class. Al-Qaeda viewed the US as only a slightly less objectionable occupier, though they were willing to make an atliance of convenience in the 1980s. But they were increasingly enraged and galvanized to strike, they said, by the post-Gulf-War sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children, the debilitating Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, and the establishment of US bases in the holy Arabian Peninsula (with its oil riches that Bin Laden believed were being looted for pennies by the West, aided by a supine and corrupt Saudi dynasty). Al-Qaeda was a small fringe crackpot group of murderous conspiracy theorists, since most of what they considered an American 'occupation' of Muslims was no such thing. The leasing of Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia was comparable to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? They intended to make themselves look like a world-historical force, and the US new Oligarchs, who no longer had the international Communist conspiracy with which to scare the American public into letting them have their way, were happy to buy in to the hyping of al-Qaeda, as well. But the catastrophe was not only the attacks, deadly and horrific though they were, but the alacrity with which Americans surrendered their birthright of yeoman liberties to a Bonapartist regime that ran roughshod over law, the constitution, the Congress, and anyone, such as Ambassador Joe Wilson, who dared oppose it.

1. The constitutional coup of 2000, in which Bush was declared the winner of an election he had lost, with the deployment of the most ugly racial and other low tricks in the ballot counting and the intervention of a partisan and far right-wing Supreme Court (itself drawn from or serving the oligarchs), and which gave us the worst president in the history of the union, who proceeded to drive the country off a cliff for the succeeding 8 years. And that is because he was not our president, but theirs.

End/ (Not Continued)

2009-12-26T19:07:00.003-05:00

From Crooks and Liars:

Seems that Sarah Palin isn't the only right-winger out there trying to convince the world that the "death panels" actually exist. Indeed, as Media Matters notes, there's a whole bandwidth of wingnuts out there trying to revive the notion.

One of these is the Troll Who Lives Under the Bridge And Sucks Your Toes, aka Dick Morris, who was on The O'Reilly Factor earlier this week with fill-in host Monica Crowley:

Morris: Look, Monica, it's one thing to load a big bill with pork. That's what the stimulus package was. But to load a health-care bill, where Americans are seriously worried that this is gonna destroy the health care their parents get, that this is gonna lead to government-imposed euthanasia, where they'll say, 'No, you can't have this annual mammogram, because I know it might save your life, but it costs too much.' 'No, you can't have this drug for colon cancer, because the drug we're going to let you take isn't as good as this one, but we can't afford it.' When we come to those kind of euthanasia-like decisions, to learn that the reason the Senate approved this was some little bitty payoff that went on to some insurance company that gave you a campaign contribution -- that kind of tawdry stuff for this kind of magnitude of deformity on the system is enough to drive people crazy -- me included.

Oh, PLEASE. Morris is describing the CURRENT health system.

It's today's health insurance companies that use preexisting conditions and other technicalities to deny coverage to people who need it. It's today's insurers who charge outrageous premiums and include high deductibles as part of the coverage. It's today's insurers that make actuarial calculations about how soon a patient will die in deciding whether to tie his claims up in red tape, hoping that he'll die before they have to pay.

"Death panels?" The actual death panels are the boards of directors and executives of today's health insurance companies.

Only when we stop treating health care like a commodity and treat it like any other service -- police, fire, water filtration, roads, schools -- will people start getting the care they deserve. And when that happens, it will be over Dick Morris' objections and the objections of others like him, who are interested ONLY in "I've got mine" and profit as the sole motivator.

Oh, stop the bullshit

2009-12-22T21:58:00.003-05:00

from Crooks and Liars:

VELSHI: "Twenty-two (sic) U.S. soldiers serving in northern Iraq have just gotten two new orders from their general. Rule one, don't get pregnant. Rule two, don't get another soldier pregnant. Break those rules and you will get court-martialed. The general, Anthony Cucolo, e-mailed CNN explaining his decision, telling us -- quote -- "I need every soldier I have got, especially since we are facing a drawdown of forces during our mission."

LISA BLOOM, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: In my view, this is patently unconstitutional, Ali. There's a long line of U.S. Supreme Court cases that says that the right to be a parent is a fundamental constitutional right. That means it's a right of the highest order and worthy of the highest protection.

What bullshit.

These people, whether senators or "this is insane stuff" bloggers, habe NO IDEA what they're talking about.

That means you too, John Amato.

What General Cucolo did is not unconstitutional. It's not gender bias. It's not "insane stuff."

This is a simple matter of personnel readiness in a combat theater.

There are standing general orders against having sex in combat theaters. If you do it and get caught, you can be subject to non-judicial punishment or court martial.

Banning pregnancy in combat theaters is no different.

If a soldier in a combat theater gets pregnant she has to leave. That negatively affects cohesion and morale. A large number of soldiers have to devote themselves to out processing the soldier, transporting her from the combat theater, obtaining a replacement, getting the replacement trained, getting the replacement transported to the unit, and getting the replacement integrated into the unit. All of this degrades morale, cohesion and esprit de corps.

Telling soldiers not to get pregnant in combat, and not to make each other pregnant is merely an extension of the no sex in a combat theater general order, and is designed to conserve fighting strength. It doesn't degrade women, it doesn't deprive women of their rights, it doesn't subject women who are sexually assaulted and become pregnant to prosecution, and it doesn't let men who make women pregnant of the hook.

General Cucolo's order is a matter of well thought out common sense. It's designed to treat women THE SAME as men, and people need to quit treating him and the Army as though they are stupid or are treating women as something less than human.

Spare me your sanctimony McCain

2009-12-20T20:55:00.002-05:00

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ripped into the president on Sunday for abandoning his pledge to foster bipartisanship in Washington, accusing Obama of creating a more toxic political environment than that which existed during the Clinton administration.

"In some ways, of course, yeah," McCain told Fox News Sunday when asked if the Obama White House was more partisan than Bill Clinton's. "At least under Hillarycare they tried to seriously negotiate with Republicans. There has been no effort that I know of -- of serious across the table negotiations -- such as I have engaged in with other administrations. And that was the commitment that the president made."

Bull. Shit.

Barack Obama has compromised time after time after time in his quest to include Republicans in his policy initiatives. He craved ONE Republican vote for the stimulus and ONE Republican vote for health care reform so he could call the "bipartisan."

What has he gotten for his quest to attain "bipartisanship" for its own sake?

This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. and This.

If anyone's being "too partisan" it's not Obama. His problem is that he's not partisan ENOUGH. Guys like McCain know it. And that that's why they'll continue to roll Obama on every action he tries to take.

Republicans ROUTINELY accuse Obama of treason, socialism, Nazism, not being an American, stealing elections, and thuggery. None of this -- NONE -- can be substantiated.

So fuck you John McCain and your bullshit calls for Obama to be less partisan. Maybe you and your ilk should treat him with respect, since he's been more than respectful of you.

Orrin Hatch's memory loss

2009-12-05T05:45:00.002-05:00

A couple of nights ago, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) on the Senate floor, condemning the Democratic health care reform bill. He went on to accuse Democrats of displaying "the arrogance of power" in trying to pass it before the pending recess.

I'm incredulous over this -- Hatch predicted that if Republicans had 60 votes and control of all three branches of government, they could "get this country under control":

"This will become one more example of the arrogance of power being exerted since the Democrats secured a 60-vote majority in the United States Senate and took over the House and the White House. I dream some day of having the Republicans have 60 votes. I’ll tell you one thing, I think we would finally have the total responsibility to get this country under control and I believe we would. But we never come close to that. There are essentially no checks and balances found in Washington today just an arrogance of power with one party ramming through unpopular and devastating proposals on after the other."

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

The Republicans DID control both houses of Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court.

What did this get us? Stolen elections. Attacked by terrorists because of the administration's neglect. Discretionary wars. A rigged justice system. Warrantless searches. Detention without charges. Extraordinary rendition. Exploding budget deficits. Republicans in the House of Representatives as sexual predators. Republicans in the Senate having sex with prostitutes and cruising men's rooms for sex. Republicans in the Senate having affairs with staff members and then paying them off.

These guys didn't do ANYTHING right.

I understand that current Republican talking points include acting like Obama's been president for the last nine years, and so is responsible for causing these problems. But you'd have to be delusional if, like Hatch, you actually seem to believe the lies you're telling.

Quote of the Day

2009-11-26T23:00:00.003-05:00

I just spotted this on Digby's Hullabaloo. It's definitely the quote of the date:

From commenter Jim Hansen, in response to a column by Paul Krugman.

With all of the comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, young people are beginning to think that the allied powers defeated Nazi Germany because Germany had too much health care.

Dana Perino -- ungrateful, lying AND stupid

2009-11-25T15:24:00.003-05:00

Perino: "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term." From the November 24 edition of Fox News' Hannity:

Dana does know that George W. Bush's term started on JANUARY 20, 2001, right?

Which President was it who received and ignored the August, 2001 presidential daily briefing "Bin laden determined to strike in US?" Oh, yeah, that was Bush too.

Dana, I know you don't know a damned thing about history, but your boss didn't get sworn in on September 12, 2001.

And while I'm thinking of it, the US WAS attacked by terrorists AFTER 9-11.

In addition to that, we don't get attacked as much within the United States because thanks to Bush we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan -- we moved our targets closer to the terrorist bases. They don't have to buy plane tickets anymore, because they can walk right up to us.

In addition to THAT, don't forget that President Obama just nominated Dana to the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Simple tact might indicate that you don't criticize the guy who just nominated you to a post in his administration. At a minimum, you ought not to LIE about him.

Neal Boortz has no balls, no balls at all

2009-11-23T17:45:00.004-05:00

Boortz stays classy: "Never known anyone named 'Blanche' who had any balls at all"

Neal, if you don't know a Blanche with balls, then clearly you're not aware of US history:

Blanche Kelso Bruce:

A Senator from Mississippi; born in slavery near Farmville, Prince Edward County, Va., March 1, 1841; was tutored by his master's son; left his master at the beginning of the Civil War; taught school in Hannibal, Mo.; after the war became a planter in Mississippi; member of the Mississippi Levee Board; sheriff and tax collector of Bolivar County 1872-1875; elected as a Republican to the United States Senate and served from March 4, 1875, to March 3, 1881; was the first African American to serve a full term in the United States Senate; appointed Register of the Treasury by President James Garfield 1881; recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia 1891-1893; again Register of the Treasury from 1897 until his death in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 1898; interment in Woodlawn Cemetery.

Hmmm -- a former slave involved in politics in Reconstruction-era Mississippi. Trust me, Boortz -- this Blanche's balls were WAY bigger than yours.

This is a "moderate" Republican?

2009-11-22T15:48:00.003-05:00

Sen. Lamar Alexander Calls Medicaid A "Ghetto"

Alexander will probably be reprimanded by his Republican colleagues for saying "Democratic governor of Tennessee" instead of "Democrat governor."

And if you wonder whether Alexander is making a racist remark, my view is it may be more veiled than the "call me Harold" TV ad the Republican party ran in support of Alexander's fellow Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, but it's racism just the same.

And mind you, Alexander is supposed to be one of the reasonable, "moderate" Republicans.

Sean Hannity -- lying as usual

2009-11-22T12:46:00.001-05:00

Hannity, filmmaker wrongly claim Gore's statement that British judge's decision on An Inconvenient Truth favored him is "absolutely false"

The direct quotes from the British judge's decision clearly, explicitly state that the facts are on the side of An Inconvenient Truth.

If you're on the other side of the argument, all you can do is deny that the decision says what it says.

Think Martin Short as the chain smoking lawyer Nathan Thurm trying to defend the tobacco companies on SNL in the mid 80s.

Think Rupert Murdoch claiming he never said Obama made a racist comment.

Think Lou Dobbs denying that he ever said illegal immigrants were responsible for an explosion of leprosy in the US.

GOP officials aren't buying right-wing media's ACORN attacks

2009-11-19T17:52:00.001-05:00

With his prospect of winning the 23rd Congressional District race now almost zero, Conservative Party candidate Douglas L. Hoffman suggested Wednesday in a letter that “ACORN, the unions and the Democratic Party” “tampered” with results to deny him victory.

Jerry O. Eaton, Jefferson County Republican elections commissioner, called Mr. Hoffman's assertion “absolutely false.”

“No one has touched those ballots or has access to those ballots except board of elections staff - and in a bipartisan manner,” he said.

First, Hoffman's masters, including Sean Hannity, will never forgive him for saying "Democratic Party" instead of "Democrat Party."

Second, Hoffman is WAY off base. The worst thing anyone can accuse ACORN of is correctly identifying suspect voter registration forms and pointing them out to election officials. Why anyone would object to that or call it corrupt, except as a cheap political tactic, is beyond me -- ACORN's actions are actually PRESERVING the integrity of the election process.

If Hoffman wants to see REAL voter fraud, he needs to turn his eyes to the Republican party's machinations, including Florida in 2000, Alabama in 2002, and Ohio and several other states in 2004. He needs to bone up on the New Hampshire case in which Republicans illegally blocked the phone lines of Democratic election workers, preventing voters from calling to obtain rides to the polls. He needs to read about how a bunch of corrupt businessmen rigged the electricity grid AND the recall process in California to topple the democratically elected ("democrat elected?") governor and replaced him with a Republican who was friendly to them.

Hoffman clearly has no future electoral prospects. His tactless comments in the wake of Scozzafava's withdrawal show him to be devoid of grace and class. He has no one to blame but himself for giving over a solid Republican district to a Democratic candidate for the first time in 150 years or more. He lost, plain and simple. And he has no one to blame but himself.

Birds of a feather...

2009-11-18T21:14:00.002-05:00

O'Reilly says Palin has been "hammered worse than anybody maybe with the exception of Nixon"

O'Reilly and a whole lot of others like him had NO PROBLEM accusing Bill Clinton of being a mass murderer and drug runner and rapist.

They had NO PROBLEM accusing Hillary Clinton of being a killer, too.

They accused Al Gore of being a serial liar, actually making up quotes and attributing them to him in a character assassination the effects of which are still being felt.

They accused John Kerry, a veteran of two tours in Vietnam and a recipient of the Silver Star, Bronze Star Medal with "V" for valor and three Purple Hearts, of being a coward who faked his wounds and lied about his heroism, despite the eyewitness testimony of dozens of people who witnessed his service and insisted that his exploits were real and his awards earned.

They accused Max Cleland, a decorated combat veteran who lost an arm and both legs in a hand grenade accident after he volunteered for one last combat mission even though he was due to head home, of causing his own injuries by being drunk.

They accused Barack Obama of being a KenyanIndonesianMuslimCommunistSocialistTerrorist, and they not so subtly call for his assassination.

Trust me -- when it comes to being "hammered" the treatment Sarah Palin has received pales in comparison. She SHOULD BE called a shallow, ignorant, superficial, uninformed, self-centered habitual liar. Instead she's treated like a real author and a serious candidate for the presidency. She WROTE a book? Hell, she doesn't even READ them!

O'Reilly knows this, of course, but birds of a feather...

Obama administration continues Bush persecution

2009-11-17T20:05:00.002-05:00

Karl Rove and his "associates" conspired to defeat Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, a Democrat, through fraud at the polls.

Then they conspired to jail him through abuse of the judicial system.

Now the Obama administration's Justice Department is defending this miscarriage of justice and trying to return Siegelman to jail.

What worse is that this is the same Justice Department that decided NOT TO continue with the prosecution of Republican Senator Ted Stevens, a man so corrupt that you can see it IN HIS HOUSE.

This is just one more example of the Obama people getting it wrong -- they're defending what should be overturned, whether it be troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, investigations and prosecutions of Bush administration corruption, or these blatant misuses of the Justice Department.

If Obama keeps this up, his supporters are going to desert him in droves, and he'll be well on his way to being a one term president.

Mike Smith gets history wrong

2009-11-07T20:48:00.002-05:00

Mike Smith, former Vermont Secretary of Administration, had an editorial published in yesterday's Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.

This commentary is so unfocused it's hard to know where to begin.

"The key here is the objective the president establishes and his commitment to stick to that objective through both the good and the inevitably bad times. Without an obtainable objective and an unwavering commitment to that objective then probably the best course of action is to bring our troops home from Afghanistan, now."

The problem is that the Bush administration didn't clearly define the desired end state before entering Afghanistan and Iraq. For years the only assessments we could count on was that things were going great, and if we gave them just six months more, things would be going REALLY great.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have become perfect examples of circular logic. When times are goods we can't leave because they might go bad again. When times are bad we have to stay so we can make them good again. All we know for sure is that we're staying because we can't leave and we're not leaving because we're staying.

It's not enough to simply say "win" or "total victory." The military needs to know what objectives need to be met so that they'll recognize success when they've attained it.

Think of the Civil War. At its lowest ebb, when there were members of the Union who desired a negotiated peace with the Confederacy, Lincoln successfully rebuffed them because everyone had known from the beginning that his only condition for peace was that the Confederacy lay down its arms -- after that everything else was subject to negotiation. The Confederates wouldn't stop fighting in 1863 and 1864, so Lincoln successfully reminded his constituents of the precondition that had been set at the beginning.

Or think of World War II. When some individuals suggested negotiated peace with Germany, Japan and Italy, the Allies successfully rejected that argument because everyone had known from the start of the fighting that the strategic objective to be attained was the UNCONDITIONAL surrender of the Axis powers.

The failure in Vietnam wasn't the military's, whose goals were to stop the North Vietnamese Army from overrunning South Vietnam and to prevent the expansion of the Viet Cong in South Vietnam. The problem was that the political objective -- creating a stable and credible South Vietnamese government allied with the US -- was unachievable. NO ONE believed the South Vietnamese government was capable or honest. If we wanted it, our military could still be in Vietnam achieving its military objectives against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. Because the political objective was not realistic, the military's success didn't matter.

"In fact, they crippled Democrat Hubert Humphrey's presidential bid with their anti-war protests at the 1968 convention."

That's ridiculous. Humphrey's problem was that he wasn't STRONG ENOUGH in his condemnation of the Vietnam war. In the closing days of that campaign, when he finally, slightly, broke with Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy, Humphrey staged an amazing comeback in opinion polls. In fact, he barely lost to Richard Nixon. Since Humphrey's momentum was generated by his anti-Vietnam stance, it seems obvious that if he'd been stronger in this regard, he'd have become president.

"The same can't be said of today's fickle protesters, where morality is absent and politics is all-consuming."

How does Mike Smith figure that today's anti-war protesters have no morals and are interested only in politics? Many of these individuals have been consistent in their opposition, especially to the Iraq war. They've made clear why -- they're protesting a war of discretion against a country that posed no threat to the United States. They're protesting Bush's intentional, lying, conflation of Saddam Hussein with the 9-11 attacks. They're protesting the torture and rendition and detention policies of the Bush administration, not as a question of whether those tactics are successful, but as a question of right and wrong -- the very definition of morality. Contrast that with the "tea party" protesters, who had no problem with Bush's illegal detentions and searches, his torture policy, his data collection that amounts to spying on Americans -- fascism. But they think guaranteed access to health care is a dictaorial plot by the Obama administration. Pardon me if I conclude that these "tea party" protesters are hypocritical and amoral.

I've spent 27 years in uniform (and counting). I did my time in Iraq, a tour for which I volunteered. From my perspective as a soldier and a student of history, Mike Smith is completely off the mark.

Olbermann's health care reform special comment

2009-10-07T23:45:00.003-04:00

I quit watching Countdown a while ago. Keith Olbermann's insistence on continuing to host Richard Wolffe and his possible participation in the MSNBC/Fox News detente caused me to lose appreciation for his point of view.

Well, maybe he's started earning it back. Tonight's entire edition of Countdown was devoted to a special comment on health care reform. Olbermann uses his father's own recent experience with the system to illustrate everything that's wrong with health care in corporate America and what can be done to fix it.

Watch it. Go ahead. All five segments. It's well worth it.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

O'Reilly smears Vermont -- again

2009-09-28T22:51:00.001-04:00

From the September 28 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:

O'Reilly is a stupid putz. Not that the facts matter, but we here in Vermont don't give rapists 40 days in jail for sexually assaulting 13 year olds.

O'Reilly, Nancy Grace, et. al. did Vermont and Judge Edward Cashman a HUGE disservice a few years ago when they lied about Cashman's sentence of a man convicted of sexual assault.

Cashman was upset that the state Corrections Department wouldn't put sexual offenders serving long sentences into treatment that would reduce the chances that they'd re-offend after leaving prison.

To make his point, he gave a convict a short sentence that would qualify him for treatment, instead of the long sentence the guy deserved. A reporter for a local, Republican-owned TV station then took to the air and announced that Judge Cashman had said he "no longer believed in punishment." In fact, Cashman NEVER SAID THAT.

So, the national media flayed Cashman as soft on crime. They mocked Vermont as being rapist-friendly. But back here, in actual Vermont, the state Corrections Department agreed to start making those convicted of long sentences eligible for treatment. At that point, Cashman re-sentenced the defendant to the long prison term he deserved.

Of course, O'Reilly, Grace and company proclaimed that Cashman had cowed in the face of their determined opposition to his softness on crime. In fact, as we here in Vermont know, Cashman had carried his point with the Depatment of Corrections.

Oh, and the now-retired Judge Cashman, a Vietnam veteran whose reputation previous to this case was as a tough, conservative, tough on crime jurist, is still waiting for the reporter at WCAX-TV (Known here as WGOP) to apologize for telling the lie that created the phony, O'Reilly led media furor in the first place.

ABC's Gibson: The New York Times is "liberal"

2009-09-28T22:47:00.000-04:00

From the September 28 edition of ABC's World News:

The New York Times led the bogus Whitewater "scandal" charge against the Clintons. A reporter for the The New York Times is one of the two who lied about Al Gore claiming to have invented the Internet, thus using a lie to brand HIM a liar. Judith Miller became the mouthpiece of the Bush administration during the run up to the Iraq war. Here's how it worked: A Bush administration official would give Miller a piece of information about, say hidden weapons of mass destruction. She'd repeat it verbatim in one of her "news" stories. Administration officials would then take to other media to claim that there were hidden WMD in Iraq, and cite Miller's story as "proof."

The New York Times is liberal? As a liberal, all I can say is "I wish."

PSA -- Protect Insurance Company Profits

2009-09-22T20:13:00.003-04:00

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Dick Morris is lying. What a shock

2009-09-14T23:40:00.003-04:00

Dick Morris: "Nobody on the right wing has criticized Obama over race. There isn't a vestige of that"

How about Limbaugh playing "Barack the Magic Negro?" How about McCain hissing and spitting "THAT one!" during one of their 2008 debates? How about Limbaugh calling Obama a "Halfrican-American?"

How about this?

Said Limbaugh: "It is offensive to the sensibilities of millions of people to hear a member of the state-run media refer to a half-black, half-white human being with no experience running anything of substance referred to as a god. He may be president of the United States, but he's not a god."

Did you ever hear of Limbaugh calling someone an "all white human being?"

How about this?

Georgia Republican Rep. Lynn Westmoreland used the racially-tinged term "uppity" to describe Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama Thursday.

Westmoreland was discussing vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's speech with reporters outside the House chamber and was asked to compare her with Michelle Obama.

"Just from what little I've seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

Asked to clarify that he used the word "uppity," Westmoreland said, "Uppity, yeah."

Did you ever hear of a white person being described as "uppity?" That's a code word white people in the south use to describe blacks.

How about this?

U.S. Rep. Geoff Davis, a Hebron Republican, compared Obama and his message for change similar to a "snake oil salesman" [at a Northern Kentucky Lincoln Day dinner].
He said in his remarks at the GOP dinner that he also recently participated in a "highly classified, national security simulation" with Obama.

"I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button," Davis said. "He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country."

Ever hear of any white MAN of Obama's stature being called "boy?" The term indisputably has a specific, negative racial context.

Morris is lying. Quelle Surprise.

Monica Crowley makes the wrong argument

2009-09-14T23:38:00.002-04:00

Monica Crowley: "The things that we did" to detainees to extract information "happens everyday at an American fraternity"

I'm just so sick of these people. They're addressing the wrong issue.

It DOESN'T MATTER whether torture "worked" when the US did it on foreigners, although there's no reason to think it did.

The reason the US doesn't torture is that we don't want OUR OWN TROOPS to be tortured by our enemies.

If we torture, then anyone we perceive as a threat can justify torturing US military members.

If we don't torture, ideally our enemies will respond by doing the same -- NOT torturing American military members.

If the US doesn't torture, but our enemies do, then we still have the ability to point out THEIR bad acts, while they have nothing similar to point to on our side as a justification. That means we can make them look bad to their potential friends and allies, thus undermining the enemy's ability to keep fighting us.

The reason we do not torture is that "supporting the troops" means we cannot surrender the moral high ground.

When you maintain your ability to process facts and reach rational conclusions, it's clear that whether torture "works" is irrelevant.

Robert Reich -- the Public Option in less that 3 minutes

2009-09-08T19:54:00.003-04:00

Clear, concise and compelling.

Al Franken -- smarter than your Senator

2009-09-08T18:06:00.007-04:00

Al Franken did this at the Minnesota State Fair last weekend. I've seen it before. No matter how many times I've watched him do it, it never gets old.

Democratic Farmer Labor party fundraiser, 2007

Look at about 6:45 in this video of the old David Letterman program on NBC.

Understanding health care reform

2009-09-08T17:58:00.001-04:00

In less than a minute.