Funny, nobody's offered me a dime
"It's standard operating procedure" to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that "at least half the bloggers that are out there" on the Republican side "are getting remuneration in some way beyond ad sales."
In California, where former eBay executive Meg Whitman beat businessman Steve Poizner in a bitterly fought primary battle in the campaign for governor, it sometimes seemed as if there was a bidding war for bloggers.
Every so often, Daddy Paul gets it right -- this time calling out his fellow GOPers for their hypocrisy, cowardice, hate and Islamaphobia
Many fellow conservatives say they understand the property rights and 1st Amendment issues and don't want a legal ban on building the mosque. They just want everybody to be "sensitive" and force, through public pressure, cancellation of the mosque construction.
This sentiment seems to confirm that Islam itself is to be made the issue, and radical religious Islamic views were the only reasons for 9/11. If it became known that 9/11 resulted in part from a desire to retaliate against what many Muslims saw as American aggression and occupation, the need to demonize Islam would be difficult if not impossible....
It is repeatedly said that 64% of the people, after listening to the political demagogues, don't want the mosque to be built. What would we do if 75% of the people insist that no more Catholic churches be built in New York City? The point being is that majorities can become oppressors of minority rights as well as individual dictators. Statistics of support is irrelevant when it comes to the purpose of government in a free society--protecting liberty. [...]
This is all about hate and Islamaphobia.
You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension. A dimension of sound. A dimension of sight. A dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both style and substance of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone...
A couple of weeks ago, the first part of this "series" looked at the platforms of the first 20 years or so of the Republican Party and how it differed remarkably from the agenda, values and demeanor of today's Republican Party. Today, we pick up the theme...
Imagine if you will, a national Republican candidate running on the following platform:
In the fuss over whether to build an Islamic center a couple of blocks away from Ground Zero, one of the most smug -- and, so far as I can tell, as yet unchallenged -- arguments is that there are no Christian churches in Muslim nations. (Skip, for now, the bizarre implication that we should give up freedom of religion because other nations don't have freedom of religion.) The Christian superiority and persecution exaggerations can get pretty wild:
Go to any Christian country and carry a Koran in public. Nothing will happen to you. Try carrying a Bible openly in any Islamic country - you will be arrested, and may be executed. There is no comparison.
OK, let's stop for just a moment to challenge the first part of that statement by noting that hate crimes in the United States against people of Middle-Eastern descent increased from 354 attacks in 2000 to 1,501 attacks in 2001. Thanks to the ignorance of American bigots, non-Muslims and non-Arabs were caught up n the anti-Islamic fever, including several Sikh men attacked for wearing their religiously mandated turban. The bigots don't always miss: 45% of students and 37% of Arab Americans of the Muslim faith report being targeted by discrimination. Then there's the conservative leaders who said this past week that "no more mosques, period" in the U.S." He also said he thought we should kick American Muslims out of the country and send them to Muslim nations. And there's this from last week:
About a dozen right-wing Christians, carrying placards and yelling "Islam is a lie," angrily confronted worshippers outside a Fairfield Avenue mosque Friday.
"Jesus hates Muslims," they screamed at worshippers arriving at the Masjid An-Noor mosque to prepare for the holy month of Ramadan. One protester shoved a placard at a group of young children leaving the mosque. "Murderers," he shouted.
Oh yeah, being muslim in America: Good times, good times....
But back to the garbage about there not being Christian churches in Islamic nations: Join me now on a photographic refutation.
How much unemployment can we pin on Obama?
"Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
Eisenhower's Republican Party has come a long way in the last half-century, and what was once considered fringe stupidity has become far more common. And with Social Security celebrating its 75th anniversary, there's a renewed effort to shine a light on the GOP's willingness to gut this bedrock American institution, if not eliminate it altogether.
The Radical Reckless Right continues to kill that side of the spectrum
Put aside the fact that this is a spectacularly stupid idea that could only be supported by economic illiterates. That hardly matters, because the cosponsors admit they have no chance of passing it anyway. They just want some publicity.
A frequent contributor to Andrew Breitbart's websites said he believes that the September 11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing were inside jobs, and suggested he'll feel "comfort" when President Obama is killed.
The blogger was one of the stars of TV's Law and Order show.
Progressivism is a "cancer" in America: so says Glenn Beck, and so agrees Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin. Ryan says his goal is to "indict the entire vision of progressivism" which he says is "a complete affront of the whole idea of this country."
He says he wants to "flush out progressives" and that he knows about them because he grew up in Janesville, WI, "just 35 miles from Madison," as if progressivism is, and has been, some secret cult that he's now revealing to us and from which he must save us. He's on this (ahem) courageous mission "so people can actually see what this ideology means" and "how it attacks the American idea." Just how un-American is it? Ryan tells us that "this stuff came from the German intellectuals to Madison" and that the "Austrians" were its "founders."
In a speech he gave last January, Ryan said
....there was the Wisconsin Deal. In my home state, the University of Wisconsin was an early hotbed of progressivism, whose goal was to reorder society along lines other than those of the Constitution.
Let us now count the ways in which Ryan is wrong.
It seems Americans are concerned with effective -- not bigger or smaller -- government
Oh! But it's so "un-American" to speak ill of our corporate masters!
The treatment of workers by American corporations has been worse -- far more treacherous -- than most of the population realizes. There was no need for so many men and women to be forced out of their jobs in the downturn known as the great recession.
The painful weakness of the MSM
GOP member of congress hits back against GOP's anti-Obama racism and lies
These people make me pray there IS a Hell. Never mind the "pee pee miracle," they should burn for that hair and that beard.
The Wall Street Journal on the Bush tax cuts: allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire will hurt only those people earning more than $300,000 per year; keeping the Bush tax cuts will force people earning $60-150,000 to pay more.
Only 30% want Bush's tax cuts to stay in place, including just half of Republicans. What's more:
Despite a tough year for President Obama, the public believes his administration's policies offer a better chance at improving the economy over the policies of his predecessor, former President George W. Bush. According to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center, 46 percent said Obama's path would do more to improve economic conditions in the next few years, compared to 29 percent who said policies put in place by Bush would.
When the facts don't suit the party line, the fact be damned
Earlier this week, two leading economists released a study that "empirically proved" that the government's response to the Great Recession, including the stimulus bill, prevented the loss of "some 8½ million jobs." The study's authors -- former McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder -- concluded that "there is little doubt that in total, the policy response was highly effective."
The Obama administration's auto industry bailout not only worked, it exceeded expectations. Another in a series of highly successful government interventions in the economy.
"any honest reading of history suggests that the federal government has quite an impressive record of rescuing institutions considered too big to fail." Quite right. When the government bailed out Lockheed in 1971, the company thrived and taxpayers profited. The government bailed out Chrysler in 1980, and saw similar results. The government bailed out the railroad industry, and saw it flourish.
In each case, the government spent lots of taxpayer money, used bureaucrats to engineer the revival of an industry, recouped the money, and produced a success story. Conservatives howled in every instance, but as is usually the case, their complaints and dire predictions were wrong.
One remarkably hypocritical Democrat and Stupid Dem Alert! Nelson cites deficit to vote against unemployment benefits but backs budget-busting tax cuts for rich and an attempt to permanently repeal the pro-aristocracy estate tax.
At least a few on the Right are finally acknowledging that Breitbart is a liar. But, dear Rep. Boehner, what happened to Shirley Sherrod is not "unfortunate." Tripping and twisting your ankle is "unfortunate." A fender-bender is "unfortunate." Mistaking the Milwaukee Brewers for a professional baseball team is "unfortunate." What happened to Sherrod was a grotesque, immoral, political act of character assassination for the purposes of fomenting racial division, fear and hatred. Its perpetrator is vile, perverted and worthy of our highest contempt and slightest regard:
last night, the right-wing blogger who instigated this faux controversy questioned the white farmers' honesty and repeated his false racist charges. In interviews with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and CNN, the Iron City, GA couple Roger and Eloise Spooner described Sherrod as a "friend for life" and a "good person" who helped save their farm. Speaking with CNN's John King, right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart challenged Eloise Spooner's "purported" story, accusing King of trusting Sherrod "that the 'farmer's wife' is the farmer's wife"
I remember being a kid and being caught in a lie. It was a little lie, but I wanted to escape punishment so I created a bigger lie to cover. The effort snowballed as I kept upping the ante, adding more and more details and making the fib more and more outrageous in the hope that my accuser would finally think, "Well, no one would make up a story that wildly absurd and expect to be believed, so it must be true. Truth must be stranger than fiction!" It didn't work, of course.
I'm reminded of that episode every time I hear someone claim that President Obama is a socialist or pursuing a socialist agenda. The difference seems to be that some people, in this case, are at least temporarily fooled by the outrageously false tales. My first impulse is angry frustration, but I temper that reaction with the understanding that there are a great many things our educational system fails to teach, and both the definition of socialism and our nation's own political history are among them.
So -- stepping back and taking a deep breath -- let's take a look at how well the "Obama is a socialist" assertion fits with the real world.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) aggressively pressed Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan on whether she believes there are "natural" rights that come from God as opposed to the Constitution. Kagan responded that her job "as a justice is to enforce the Constitution and the laws," not her personal beliefs. That answer clearly miffed Coburn, even though it's the exact same view that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas expressed at his own confirmation hearings.
Well, Arizona's GOP's leadership is at least consistent in its feudal attitude toward its peasants
Mexico's border state governors say they're not stepping foot in Arizona for their annual meeting, so Brewer cancelled the confab. Problem is, she doesn't have that authority.
This sort of thing only makes you look desperate. GOPer King fumbling around trying, pathetically, to save face after his "default mechanism" canard.
But this view was a misperception. Using a new survey dataset on torture collected during the 2008 election, combined with a comprehensive archive of public opinion on torture, we show here that a majority of Americans were opposed to torture throughout the Bush presidency. This stance was true even when respondents were asked about an imminent terrorist attack, even when enhanced interrogation techniques were not called torture, and even when Americans were assured that torture would work to get crucial information. Opposition to torture remained stable and consistent during the entire Bush presidency. Even soldiers serving in Iraq opposed the use of torture in these conditions. As we show in the following, a public majority in favor of torture did not appear until, interestingly, six months into the Obama administration.
Why have so many politicians and journalists so badly misread the strong majorities opposed to torture? A recent survey we commissioned helps shine a light on this question. Psychologists describe a process of misperception--"false consensus"--whereby an individual mistakenly believes that his or her viewpoint represents the public majority. False consensus has a long legacy in social psychological research, but our survey is unique in that it examines, for the first time, how false consensus may have shaped the public debate over torture. Our survey shows that this false consensus pervades the opinions of those who support torture, leading them to significantly overestimate the proportion of the public that agrees with them. Those people opposed to torture, in contrast, have remarkably accurate perceptions of the rest of the public.
Jindal Signs 'Gun-In-Church' Bill, Allowing Congregants To Bring Concealed Weapons To Worship Well, if the wingnuts are going to do this sort of thing, perhaps Jindal is on to something....
Explain to me how this is acceptable
Fact, the world has divided into rich and poor as at no time in our history. The richest 2% own more than half the household wealth in the world. The richest 10% hold 85% of total global assets and the bottom half of humanity owns less than 1% of the wealth in the world. The three richest men in the world have more money than the poorest 48 countries.
Some folks better start praying that there is no Hell.
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