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May 22, 2010

Just Build The Danged Fence!



 

so we can solve our illegal immigration problems, right John?

FENCE BUILDING, FUCK YEAH!

What’s that now?

According to the independent, non-partisan citizen watchdog group, Taxpayers for Common Sense. In a recent report, it is estimated that the cost of building and maintaining the fence will cost an astronomical “$300 million to $1.7 billion per mile, depending on materials.” [Fact Sheet: Border Fence Cost Out of Bounds]

$300M to $1.7B per mile?!? My small-government tea-party outrage says no, but my fear of “the others” is saying yes.

Yep, and keep in mind, those figures don’t factor in:

  • Fluctuating fuel, labor and materials prices, exacerbated by the use of private contractors.
  • The high costs of purchasing land from private owners and fighting lawsuits challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s waiver of nearly 40 environmental and regulatory laws. Though CBP added $0.8 million per mile for land acquisition costs in their most recent estimates, this figure is likely low considering the more than 100 cases challenging the DHS awards currently before the courts.
  • Environmental mitigation. The $50 million Congress added to DHS’ 2009 budget for “regulatory and environmental requirements” is a drop in the bucket. Taxpayers often end up with the bill for long-term environmental impacts when the government is exempted by legal waivers.

So with our debt going forward we can’t afford this AND the war on terror AND our other commitments, right?

only if it involves keeping “illegals” out of the country. Who needs to worry about a budget deficit then, when you’re willing to spend more in enforcement than could be gained from true comprehensive immigration reform.

But if it keeps me safe, and …

…we really want to be all Arizonans now, as Sarah Palin alluded to this past weekend?

Build baby build!

Naw. Debt baby debt!

conversation courtesy of: THE INTERSECTION | MADNESS & REALITY: What John McCain’s “Just build the danged fence,” campaign ad fails to tell you

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May 19, 2010

How the First Black President’s Approach to Race Is Transforming What It Means to Be White | News & Politics | AlterNet



 

Very interesting article that I think helps explain the rampant Tea Partyism.

How the First Black President’s Approach to Race Is Transforming What It Means to Be White | News & Politics | AlterNet

By displaying all these tropes of traditional whiteness, Obama’s candidacy disrupted the very idea of whiteness. Suddenly whiteness was no longer about educational achievement, family stability or the command of spoken English. One might argue that the folksy interventions of Sarah Palin were a desperate attempt to reclaim and redefine whiteness as a gun-toting ordinariness that eschews traditional and elite markers of achievement.

Obama’s whiteness in this sense is frightening and strange for those invested in believing that racial categories are stable, meaningful and essential. Those who yearn for a postracial America hoped Obama had transcended blackness, but the real threat he poses to the American racial order is that he disrupts whiteness, because whiteness has been the identity that defines citizenship, access to privilege and the power to define national history.

In 1998 Toni Morrison wrote that Bill Clinton was the first “black president” because he “displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” Ten years later the man who truly became America’s first black president displayed few of these tropes. Instead he was a scholarly, worldly, health food-eating man from Hawaii. In this sense, Obama was the white candidate in 2008, and a substantial portion of white voters preferred Obama’s version of whiteness to that of McCain and Palin.

Which brings us back to Obama’s Census choice. Despite his legitimate claims on whiteness, he chose to call himself black. As historian Nell Painter documents in her new book The History of White People, white identity was a heavily policed and protected border for most of American history. A person born to an African parent and a white parent could be legally enslaved in America until 1865. From 1877 until 1965 that person would have been subject to segregation in public accommodations, schools, housing and employment. In 1896 the Supreme Court established the doctrine of separate but equal in the case of Homer Plessy, a New Orleans Creole of color whose ancestry was only a small fraction African. President Obama’s Census self-identification was a moment of solidarity with these black people and a recognition that the legal and historical realities of race are definitive, that he would have been subject to all the same legal restrictions had he been born at another time. So in April, Obama did as he has done repeatedly in his adult life: he embraced blackness, with all its disprivilege, tumultuous history and disquieting symbolism. He did not deny his white parentage, but he acknowledged that in America, for those who also have African heritage, having a white parent has never meant becoming white.

.

Link

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May 1, 2010

Where IS The Sacrifice?

Filed under: Democrats, Iraq, Politics, Republicans — Tags: , , , , , — webadmin @ 5:32 am


 
great piece here about the warped perspective of the average American. Can also apply to the Tea Partiers and the NIMBYs

Never Have So Many Done So Little

…And there will be more attacks on U.S. soil. And there will be more deaths throughout the Middle East. And the political situation in the Middle East will remain a mess. New terrorists will be born to replace the ones killed. The U.S. pulls troops from Iraq and puts them in Afghanistan, and the cycle continues. And it’s very likely more of these troops will be sent to Iran at some point. The military-industrial complex is in a feeding frenzy, and President Barack Obama has yet to show a great deal of interest in pulling them from the trough.

But the average American need not worry of these wars, both current and potential. Because in the end, it is the military and their families that are expected to make sacrifices. The rest of us, well, we can just enjoy our day at the mall.

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April 21, 2010

THE greatest segment in recorded TV History!



 

Link

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March 20, 2010

Healthcare Reform: Thoughts on the Tea Party and Tavis Smiley from @profblmkelley and @harrislacewell



 

@profblmkelley: Tea people are acting like healthcare is for black people only. Tavis is acting like health care excludes black people. They all hate Obama.

@profblmkelley: These slurs highlight the larger sentiment of why they oppose healthcare. They think that “the other” will benefit.

@harrislacewell: Yep @profblmkelley It’s an indication of American individualism becoming selfish tribalism. But interestingly so is the Smiley mess.

————–

@MotherJones: TeaParty Heckle Dems w Racist, Homophobic Slurs http://bit.ly/ar7yS1

“A lot of us have been saying for a long time that much of this is not about health care at all. And I think that a lot of people out there today demonstrated this,” Clyburn said at the Capitol Vistors Center after the speech, where protesters continued to shout “vote no” at the passing members of Congress. Rather, he explained, the protesters’ opposition was in reaction “to extend a basic fundamental right to people who are less powerful.”

When asked whether he felt apprehensive as a result of the racist attacks, Clyburn replied: “As I said to one heckler, I’m the hardest person in the world to intimidate.”

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February 22, 2010

“The GOP’s “small government” tea party fraud” by Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com



 

There’s a major political fraud underway:  the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the ”tea party” movement.  The Party that spat contempt at Paul during the Bush years and was diametrically opposed to most of his platform now pretends to share his views.  Standard-issue Republicans and Ron Paul libertarians are as incompatible as two factions can be — recall that the most celebrated right-wing moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was when Rudy Giuliani all but accused Paul of being an America-hating Terrorist-lover for daring to suggest that America’s conduct might contribute to Islamic radicalism — yet the Republicans, aided by the media, are pretending that this is one unified, harmonious, “small government” political movement.

The Right is petrified that this fraud will be exposed and is thus bending over backwards to sustain the myth.  Paul was not only invited to be a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference but also won its presidential straw poll.  Sarah Palin endorsed Ron Paul’s son in the Kentucky Senate race.  National Review is lavishly praising Paul, while Ann Coulter “felt compelled [in her CPAC speech] to give a shout out to Paul-mania, saying she agreed with everything he stands for outside of foreign policy — a statement met with cheers.”  Glenn Beck — who literally cheered for the Wall Street bailout and Bush’s endlessly expanding surveillance state — now parades around as though he shares the libertarians’ contempt for them.  Red State’s Erick Erickson, defending the new so-called conservative “manifesto,” touts the need for Congress to be confined to the express powers of Article I, Section 8, all while lauding a GOP Congress that supported countless intrusive laws — from federalized restrictions on assisted suicide, marriage, gambling, abortion and drugs to intervention in Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life state court proceeding — nowhere to be found in that Constitutional clause.  With the GOP out of power, Fox News suddenly started featuring anti-government libertarians such as John Stossel and Reason Magazine commentators, whereas, when Bush was in power, there was no government power too expanded or limitless for Fox propagandists to praise.

This is what Republicans always do.  When in power, they massively expand the power of the state in every realm.  Deficit spending and the national debt skyrocket.  The National Security State is bloated beyond description through wars and occupations, while no limits are tolerated on the Surveillance State.  Then, when out of power, they suddenly pretend to re-discover their “small government principles.”  The very same Republicans who spent the 1990s vehemently opposing Bill Clinton’s Terrorism-justified attempts to expand government surveillance and executive authority then, once in power, presided over the largest expansion in history of those very same powers.  The last eight years of Republican rule was characterized by nothing other than endlessly expanded government power, even as they insisted — both before they were empowered and again now — that they are the standard-bearers of government restraint.

What makes this deceit particularly urgent for them now is that their only hope for re-branding and re-empowerment lies in a movement — the tea partiers — that has been (largely though not exclusively) dominated by libertarians, Paul followers, and other assorted idiosyncratic factions who are hostile to the GOP’s actual approach to governing.  This is a huge wedge waiting to be exposed — to explode — as the modern GOP establishment and the actual ”small-government” libertarians that fuel the tea party are fundamentally incompatible.  Right-wing mavens like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and National Review are suddenly feigning great respect for Ron Paul and like-minded activists because they’re eager that the sham will be maintained:  the blatant sham that the modern GOP and its movement conservatives are a coherent vehicle for those who believe in small government principles.  The only evidence of a passionate movement urging GOP resurgence is from people whose views are antithetical to that Party.  That’s the dirty secret which right-wing polemicists are desperately trying to keep suppressed. Credit to Mike Huckabee for acknowledging this core incompatibility by saying he would not attend CPAC because of its “increasing libertarianism.”

These fault lines began to emerge when Sarah Palin earlier this month delivered the keynote speech to the national tea party conference in Nashville, and stood there spitting out one platitude after the next which Paul-led libertarians despise:  from neoconservative war-loving dogma and veneration of Israel to glorification of “War on Terror” domestic powers and the need of the state to enforce Palin’s own religious and cultural values.  Neocons (who still overwhelmingly dominate the GOP) and Paul-led libertarians are arch enemies, and the social conservatives on whom the GOP depends are barely viewed with greater affection.  Sarah Palin and Ron Paul are about as far apart on most issues as one can get; the “tea party movement” can’t possibly be about supporting each of their worldviews.  Moreover, the GOP leadership is currently promising Wall Street even more loyal subservience than Democrats have given in exchange for support, thus bolstering the government/corporate axis which libertarians find so repugnant.  And Coulter’s manipulative claim that she “agrees with everything [Paul] stands for outside of foreign policy” is laughable; aside from the fact that “foreign policy” is a rather large issue in our political debates (Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia), they were on exactly the opposite sides of the most intense domestic controversies of the Bush era:  torture, military commissions, habeas corpus, Guantanamo, CIA secrecy, telecom immunity, and warrantless eavesdropping.  

Part of why this fraud has been sustainable thus far is that libertarians — like everyone who doesn’t view all politics through the mandated, distorting, suffocating Democrat v. GOP prism — are typically dismissed as loons and nuts, and are thus eager for any means of achieving mainstream acceptance.  Having the GOP embrace them is one way to achieve that (Karl Rove:  some ”see the tea party movement as a recruiting pool for volunteers for Ron Paul’s next presidential bid . . . . The Republican Party and the tea party movement have many common interests”).  Additionally, just as the Paul-faction of libertarians is in basic harmony with many progressives on issues of foreign policy and civil liberties, they do subscribe to the standard GOP rhetoric on domestic spending, social programs and the like.  

But that GOP limited government rhetoric is simply never matched by that Party’s conduct, especially when they wield power.  The very idea that a political party dominated by neocons, warmongers, surveillance fetishists, and privacy-hating social conservatives will be a party of “limited government” is absurd on its face.  There literally is no myth more transparent than the Republican Party’s claim to believe in restrained government power.  For that reason, it’s only a matter of time before the fundamental incompatibility of the “tea party movement” and the political party cynically exploiting it is exposed.

mmmmhmmmm

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February 18, 2010

[Dear Sarah: Say it is so, run for president - Leonard Pitts Jr. - MiamiHerald.com] awesome!

Filed under: Election, George Bush, Politics, Randomness, Republicans — Tags: , , , — webadmin @ 11:40 pm


 

Dear Sarah Palin:

I hear you’re pondering a run for the White House in 2012. Last week, you told Fox news it would be “absurd” to rule it out.

I’m writing to ask that you rule it in. I very badly want you to run for — and win — the Republican nomination for the presidency.

I know you’re waiting for the punch line. Maybe you figure I think you’d be a weak candidate who would pave the way for President Obama’s easy re-election.

That’s not it. No, I want you to run because I believe a Palin candidacy would force upon this country a desperately needed moment of truth. It would require us to finally decide what kind of America we want to be.

Mrs. Palin, you are an avatar of the shameless hypocrisy and cognitive disconnection that have driven our politics for the last decade, a process of stupidification creeping like kudzu over our national life.

As Exhibit A, consider your recent speech at a so-called “tea party” event, wherein you dismissed the president as a “charismatic guy with a teleprompter.” Bad enough you imply that teleprompter use is the mark of an insubstantial man, even though you and every other major politician uses them. But what made the comment truly jaw-dropping is that even as you spoke, you had penned on your left palm, clearly visible, a series of crib notes.

Mrs. Palin, if Obama is an idiot for reading a prepared speech off a teleprompter, what are you for reading notes you’ve inked on your hand like a school kid who failed to study for the big test?

In the Fox interview, you scored Obama for supposedly expecting Americans to “sit down and shut up” and accept his policies. But when asked when the president has ever said that, you couldn’t answer. Obama, you sputtered, has just been condescending with his “general persona.”

I found that a telling moment. See, ultimately what you represent is not conservatism. Heck, I suspect that somewhere, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan are spinning like helicopter rotors at the very idea.

No, you represent the latest iteration of an anti-intellectualism that periodically rises in the American character. There is, historically and persistently, a belief in us that y’all just can’t trust nobody who acts too smart or talks too good — in other words, somebody whose “general persona” indicates they may have once cracked a book or had a thought. Americans tend to believe common sense the exclusive province of humble folks without sheepskins on the wall or big words in their vocabularies.

I don’t mock those people. They are my parents, my family elders, members of my childhood church. I honor their native good sense, what mom called “mother wit.” But if it is insulting to condescend to them, it is equally insulting to mythologize them.

More to the point, something is wrong when we celebrate mental mediocrity like yours under the misapprehension that competence or, God forbid, intelligence, makes a person one of those “elites” — that’s a curse word now — lacking authenticity, compassion and common sense.

So no, this is not a clash of ideologies, but a clash between intelligence and its opposite. And I am tired of being asked to pretend stupid is a virtue. That’s why I’d welcome the moment of truth your campaign would bring. It would force us to decide once and for all whether we are permanently committed to the path of ignorance, of birthers, truthers and tea party incoherence you represent, or whether we will at last turn back from the cliff toward which we race.

If the latter, wonderful, God bless America. If the former, well, some of us can finally quit hoping the nation will return to its senses and plan accordingly. Either way, we need to know, and your candidacy would tell us. If you love this country, Mrs. Palin, you can do it no greater service.

Run, Sarah, run.

I want Sarah to run … AND win for the good of the country to see that STUPID PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE PUT IN CHARGE OF SHIT.

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January 14, 2010

[Why Neoconservative Pundits Love Jon Stewart -- Daily Intel] good read

Filed under: Jon Stewart, Politics, Republicans, The Daily Show — Tags: — webadmin @ 4:38 am


 

Back in April, when the debate over torture was roaring, Jon Stewart invited Cliff May, a national-security hawk and former spokesman for the Republican Party, to come on The Daily Show and defend waterboarding. May was hesitant. He thought Stewart would paint him as a crazy extremist. The audience would jeer. It would be a disaster. “I was apprehensive about going on, even though I’ve been on TV for a dozen years,” says May. “A lot of my friends told me: ‘Don’t do it. You’re meat going into the sausage factory.’”

But May had a change of heart after soliciting advice from his friend Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. “Kristol told me: ‘You’ll be pleasantly surprised. He doesn’t take cheap shots. Jon is smart. You’ll do just fine.’” Kristol proved to be right. Stewart’s interview of May — a crackling, lengthy debate about where to draw the line between freedom and security — produced one of the most clarifying discussions about torture on television. “Literally, this is the best conversation I’ve had on this subject anywhere,” May told Stewart.

“There is genuine intellectual curiosity,” May told New York. “He’s a staunch liberal, but he’s a thoughtful liberal, and I respect that.” May isn’t the only conservative gushing about Stewart. While the movement professes a disdain for the “liberal media elite,” it has made an exception for the true-blue 46-year-old comedian. “He always gives you a chance to answer, which some people don’t do,” says John Bolton, President Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations and a Fox News contributor, who went on the show last month. “He’s got his perspective, but he’s been fair.” Says Bolton: “In general, a lot of the media, especially on the left, has lost interest in debate and analysis. It has been much more ad hominem. Stewart fundamentally wants to talk about the issues. That’s what I want to do.”

I simply boil it down to this – Cable news (and journalism in general to some extent) has failed us intellectually the way Wall Street and the Federal Government have failed us financially. So in times of exasperation we turn to the comedians – and learn a little something in the process.

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Olbermann Slams Limbaugh And Robertson For Sick Comments http://youtu.be/zPoWOw8Jm5w



 
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Doubt Pat Robertson if you must, that dude can kick your ass with his feet! Allegedly.

Filed under: Politics, Republicans, Televangelists — Tags: , , , , — webadmin @ 1:01 am


 

leg press machineThis has to be the most ridiculous Pat Robertson story ever. I’m only highlighting it to show how ridiculous Robertson coverage can be. Sometimes people should just ignore the guy. All this story is doing is driving up the sales of an energy shake.

To explain how Robertson and his energy shakes got into the news, we start with CBS Sports Online’s SPiN columnist Clay Travis, who wrote on May 22 that he heard from a reader that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s claim that she could leg-press 400 prounds was “nothing” and that Robertson can leg-press 2,000 pounds. Oh and by the way, Robertson is 76 years old.

Travis predicted that Robertson’s gym didn’t even have 44 of those 45-pound weights. Considering my old gym, where I paid way too much membership money, had about 30 of them, for four machines, I was with him on that one.

But alas, Robertson can, according to his spokesman Christopher A. Roslan, leg press 2,000 pounds! Also known as a ton. Which is a lot of weight. A ton can crush and kill a man. I know this because newsprint rolls, at least when I was a kid, weighed about 2,000 pounds and accidents were known to kill.

Only someone who has the Lord on his side can leg-press 2000 lbs. using only a diet shake! So Pat must be right. Either that or he’s the craziest fucking human ever to have a following larger than Charles Manson.

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