Back during the Clinton Administration Republicans hounded Clinton and eventually Impeached him in the House…
For a Blow Job.
They wasted 4 years of the Congresses’ time, ignoring looming threats which directly led to terrorist success on 911 to do damage to a legitimately elected President.
The seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee today called on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Joe Sestak’s suggestion that he was offered a White House job in exchange for dropping his (ultimately successful) challenge to Sen. Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Darrell Issa, who has been pressing this issue for months, called for a special prosecutor in April. He alleges that the White House may have violated anti-bribery provisions of the federal criminal code as well as prohibitions on government officials interfering in elections and using federal jobs for a political purpose if it made the offer. Read the rest of this entry »
Two interesting articles here – the first, from Slate, has to do with the Sno’ Ho’ and the Tea Party’s view of how President Obama is handling International Affairs –
Sarah Palin thinks Barack Obama is a wimp. She’s been going around to Tea Party rallies, invoking the spirit of revolutionary Boston and castigating Obama for failing to exalt American power and punish our adversaries. She seems blissfully unaware that the imperial arrogance she’s preaching isn’t how the American founders behaved. It’s how the British behaved, and why they lost. Palin represents everything the original Tea Party was against.
Two months ago, the modern Tea Party held its national convention in Tennessee. There, Palin ridiculed Obama for “reaching out to hostile regimes, writing personal letters to dangerous dictators and apologizing for America.” “We need a strong national defense,” she demanded. “We must spend less time courting our adversaries.”
Last week, at a tax-day rally in Boston, she resumed her attack. Tea Party activists “will never apologize for being American,” she snarked. Our military power is “a force for good throughout this world, and that is nothing to apologize for.” She even implied a divine right to fossil fuel. “God knows we have the resources,” she told the crowd. “He created them for our use right here in America.”
What the Sno’ Ho’ is promoting here is exactly the sort of Plastic Patriotism put into action by the Bushit Administration. It hearkens back to Raygun’s bombing of Libya which, when considered cynically accomplished not much more than… Read the rest of this entry »
The type of folks who strap a bomb aboud their waist to blow up themselves along with a bunch of other people don’t really care about anyone else being vaporized in retaliation. A Nuclear Reduction Treaty, like basic logic – is way beyond either their comprehension, or within their disparate reality.
Two, the United States alone has nearly 10,000 nuclear weapons. Less than 1% of that would render said “rouge” states to green glass, uninhabitable for centuries.
What are we going to do with the other 9,900?
We are fighting a different type of war today, and it is likely to continue for at least a generation.
As a descendant of one of the 3/5th people in the Original Constitution, and the group of folks denied Constitutional Rights for 100 years after the 14th Amendment – you will have to excuse me for giving the side-eye to conservatives standing up talking as if they somehow own the description “Real Americans”.
Indeed, historically conservative movements such as fascism have fueled their adherents fervor by uber-nationalism focused around the definition of who was a “real citizen”. Adolph Hitler’s definition of Germans excluded whole swaths of the population, including – but not limited to Jews.
What we have here with the Tea Bagger sect of conservatism in the United States is the same sort of toxic plastic patriotism.
If you are going to make a big deal about the Pledge in a speech, and especially the History of America – then it behooves you to get a few things right…
Unless you are addressing some really ignorant conservatives whose knowledge of the Constitution, and American History is tenuous at best.
This particular Republican clown, Representative Todd Akin of gets a number of things wrong – starting with the Pilgrims creating the Constitution. The Constitution was based on “The Virginia Plan” based around Virginia’s bicameral legislature and three branches of Government (Locke) and “The New Jersey Plan” which created the structure of the Senate providing each state an equal vote. And while the Pilgrims were supposed to start a colony in Virginia…
They missed Virginia by better than 400 miles. Rep. Adkin was trying to reference The Mayflower Compact, which is amusing – in that it enforced the same religious bigotry, the Pilgrims had fled Europe to escape. Which was roundly rejected in the Constitution. And while the Mayflower Compact was the first governing agreement by white people in what would eventually become the United States – it was hardly the first Constitution. That would have been the Iroquois Constitution predating the Mayflower Compact by 400-600 years. The US Constitution is believed to have absorbed at least three important principles from the Iroquois Constitution – The Iroquois constitution banned the forced entry of private homes by a tribal government, protected freedom of political and religious expression, and imposed the impeachment of corrupt leaders…
All while the Pilgrims were still burning “Witches” at the stake. The other feature of the Iroquois Constitution was protection and participation by women – something the US Constitution wouldn’t get around to for another 140 years.
Lastly, if one is to make a big deal about the Pledge – it’s a really good idea to have memorized the words, besides just the “Under God” added by the Knights of Columbus in 1954…
You know..like… Not choking on the word “Justice”.
This one is stranger than usual from Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas is known for his silence on the court, going years without asking a single question of the Attorney’s presenting cases before the Supreme Court. Now we find up it is because he has already made up his mind before hearing the oral arguments…
Thomas – who hasn’t asked a lawyer a question during arguments in nearly four years – said he and the other eight justices virtually always know where they stand on a case by reading legal briefs before oral arguments.
“So why do you beat up on people if you already know? I don’t know, because I don’t beat up on ‘em. I refuse to participate. I don’t like it, so I don’t do it,” Thomas said during an appearance before law students at the University of Alabama.
Thomas didn’t name names, but fellow conservative Justice Antonin Scalia is generally considered the court’s most aggressive questioner during oral arguments. President Barack Obama’s lone nominee so far, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, isn’t afraid to ask questions either.
Thomas scoffed at the idea that the justices try to use questions to influence the opinions of fellow members of the court.
“All nine of us are in the same building,” he said. “If we want to sway each other we know where we are. We don’t need oral arguments to do that. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Just another good reason to hope for several Court retirements during Obama’s First Term…
This is absolutely the most awesome piece I’ve seen written in a long time. What it discusses is how we, as a nation got to the point where stupidity is a virtue, and boorishness is accepted as the norm. I’ll only publish the first paragraph, so follow the link to read the rest of this powerful piece.
Hat Tip to HuffPo, and hats off to Caroline Myss for this one –
There is such a thing as a crime against the soul of a nation. A person or a political party can deliberately incite actions that diminish the strength, the integrity, and the overall well-being of a nation’s inner core. America’s soul is in a fragile state. It has suffered severe violations over the course of this past decade and to lesser degrees, in previous decades. Through the years, the essential integrity of America has been eroded for various reasons but never was it so violated as during the Bush administration. The endless lies, the deceitful years of propaganda that flowed from the West Wing that fed the media, the bogus reasons for setting the Middle East on fire, and converting this country into a corporate state for personal gain are crimes that shattered the soul of this nation more deeply than we have even begun to realize — if we ever will. The consequences of puncturing the soul of a nation are witnessed in countless ways. For example, there is a decline in the integrity of leadership and a growing apathy on the part of the public to care about keeping watch over its leaders. The nation ceases to produce statesmen or stateswomen. The best the public can do is to send semi-qualified individuals to Washington whose capacity to hold to their promises collapse within minutes of unpacking in their new offices. As for the old guard, they are worn out good old boys mixed in with a few new and not-so-new women on the block, who continue to fall into their same old patterns of deal making and breaking. But nothing of great significance ever happens unless motivated by a catastrophe. Any truly positive ideas for change baffle the Congress. What could this be, they wonder? But of all the crimes covertly and overtly committed by the Bush administration against the soul of America, none is as vile as the deliberate efforts they poured into turning American against American. We see that in the near hatred between the Republicans and Democrats, between liberals and conservatives, between free-thinkers and evangelicals that continues to fester. This crime was a strategic one, a well thought out plan to fragment the people of this nation in a type of contemporary replay of the Civil War. And sadly, the Republicans succeeded. Thank you, Karl Rove. The result is that the soul of America is exhausted, wounded, mistrusting, suspicious, fearful — and compromised. This is not a soul that can rebuild a country, not if you know anything about the laws of nature and the fundamentals of healing…
This is an example of how certain belief sets are propagandized and engineered on an issue, in this case supporting racism –
This is the result of the frequent application of propaganda to misinform, and to form belief sets in the populace in direct opposition to plainly available evidence to the contrary –
From proto-fascism to the tipping point
According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two are pretty solidly behind us — and the third should be of particular interest to progressives right now. Read the rest of this entry »
WASHINGTON — The national Republican Party has mailed a fundraising appeal suggesting Democrats might use an overhaul of the health care system to deny medical treatment to Republicans.
A questionnaire accompanying the appeal says the government could check voting registration records, “prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system.”
It asks, “Does this possibility concern you?”
Katie Wright, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said the question was “inartfully worded.”
But she said people should worry because government officials would have access to personal financial and medical data.
“The RNC doesn’t try to scare people,” said Wright. “We’re just trying to get the facts out on health care. And that’s what we do every day.”
Obama would deny Health Care based on Party Affiliation?
Politics and Technology Blog has come up with a new one – a recruiting poster for paid political bloggers for the right…
Mercenaries
That’s right – folks paid to spam the blogsphere.
There’s a company called Advantage Consultants that’s offering up “professional blog warriors” to “flood the zone” with comments. In short, astro-turf trolls for the blogsphere.
Click to zoom on their ad at right, but here’s the text:
Are you ready for a blog attack? Get ahead of your opponent with Professional Blog Warriors.
Be prepared to “flood the zone” with comments from professionals who are ready to put your talking points on the blogosphere 24/7.
Whether it’s defense or offense, Advantage Consultants has a dedicated team of experienced blog warriors ready to advance your candidate or campaign.
Why wait for the attack? Launch your attack with a battery of blog and forum comments aimed at all media and blog sites in your district.
Contact us today and let us show you the Advantage in professional blog warfare.
