While some may quibble with the Manhattan Declaration's historical accuracy, no one can dispute its inherent historicness. In addition, the declaration is also noteworthy for its futureness, envisioning a time when religious institutions will be forced to do really, really bad things by "soft despots." The signers vow that they will follow Martin Luther King Jr. in disobeying any law that would require their institutions to "bless immoral sexual partnerships" or "participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act." The day that those soft despots force the nation's churches to engage in embryo-destructive research will be a dark one indeed, and we owe our gratitude to these courageous religious leaders who are willing to face imprisonment or even loss of tax exempt status for resistance to such immoral hypothetical laws.
Thus does the Manhattan Declaration join the lofty ranks of other proud historic-futuristic declarations like the Declaration of Independence, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation (which while not technically a declaration has been awarded the designation of honorary declaration in light of its declarative qualities). Thank you, Christian leaders, for overlooking your petty theological squabbles to unify against our common enemies: desperate women, homosexuals, and all those judges, politicians, and newspeople who facilitate their immoral practices.
Witness history and sanity unravel in happy unison at my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.
]]>But now, as reported in the headline of the ever relevant Drudge Report, Obama is back to his old bowing games, shaming the nation with his obsessive genuflection. Here he is with Japan's Emperor Akihito, bowing almost to the ground like a shogun-era peasant before a guy whose dad bombed Pearl Harbor. Then he followed up the deep bow by jigglin' his noggin' like a drunken bobble-head to the Empress. These people don't even have an economy anymore!
President Obama, I deplore you! Stop this bowing immediately! Shake their hands, bear-hug them, grasp them by the buttocks and give them Eskimo kisses. You can even do the scary terrorist fist bump thing that you do with Michelle, but DO NOT BOW!
PS Those readers who have not already framed and memorized my original scathing editorial can find it here: http://dagblog.com/politics/obama-must-stop-bowing-585.
Members of the right-wing media love to tell their audiences about how they've been abused and censored by vicious liberal attackers. Bill O'Reilly insisted that he had been "libeled" and his civil rights "violated" when the L.A. Times and the Denver Post disputed his reports, calling the criticism "far left fascism." Michael Savage complained that he had been repeatedly attacked by the "homosexual, fascist website" Media Matters, the "brownshirts of our time." Glenn Beck bravely vowed that he was not afraid of liberal persecution, "What they have to do is break my legs. What they have to do is silence me. What they have to do is Sarah Palin me."
Often, the accusations include some kind of conspiracy. O'Reilly theorized that Media Matters was a tool of billionaire George Soros. Michael Savage claimed that it belonged to Hillary Clinton. Glenn Beck feared a coterie of secretive "czars" in the Obama administration.
And Lou Dobbs, who gained notoriety by pushing the "birther" theory that Obama was born in Kenya, claimed in a GQ interview that the administration was out to get him too:
They are coordinating with a number of groups, including the Center for American Progress. The usual suspects. To carry out constant and absolutely insidious and sordid attacks on me. And the reason they're doing so, I'm the leading independent voice, and I am critical on their policies and intent, on unconditional amnesty, and leaving the borders and ports unsecure.
Yet he vowed to soldier on...
But I will not be intimidated, and I understand that. Therefore they're trying to intimidate my network and my owners.
Evidently, Dobbs will not be soldiering on with CNN any longer. So ends a long and illustrious career with the network in angry paranoia. See ya later, Lou. Don't let the fascist liberal door hit you on the way out.
For more on Dobbs' battle with the CNN, check out NPR's What's Behind Lou Dobbs' Leaving CNN.
More fascist violations of commentators' civil rights at my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.
]]>Stupid question: If the House health care bill is adopted, shouldn't I opt for the cheapest plan that I can find?
Who cares about the deductible, the benefits cap, or the allowable procedures? Since the health care bill prohibits insurance companies from rejecting customers based on preexisting positions, couldn't I buy the "Kia" plan and upgrade to a "Cadillac" if I were to get sick?
Thought experiment: Suppose that there are two insurance companies, one that sells only Kias and one that sells only Cadillacs. Healthy folks buy the Kias; sick folks buy the Cadillacs. When the healthy folks get sick, they upgrade. In this scenario, the Kia dealer makes easy money because it never has to pay out anything. The moment its customers get sick, they upgrade, and then the hefty benefits payments are the Cadillac dealer's problem. Conversely, the Cadillac dealer gets screwed. No matter how high the premiums, benefits for sick people cost more than their premiums, which is why the sick people sign up for the Cadillacs in the first place.
Stupid question #2: If the House health care bill is adopted, shouldn't insurance companies offer the fewest benefits they can?
In becoming a Kia dealer, an insurance company can maximize the number of young, healthy members by offering low premiums, and it can minimize the number of old, sick members by offering paltry benefits.
If that's the case, then every insurance company would eventually become a Kia dealer, and there would be no more Cadillacs for sale. The nation's insurance premiums would go down, but the benefits would be poor. Deductibles would be high, and expensive procedures would be prohibited.
To date, there has been much discussion about the free rider problem, according to which "free riders" game the system by purchasing insurance only after they get sick. The mandatory insurance requirement of the health care bill avoids the free rider problem.
But what about the cheap rider problem, according to which "cheap riders" game the system by purchasing expensive insurance only after they get sick. Is there anything in the health bill to deal with this problem?
I should note that the the "cheap rider" problem may not be all bad. It could certainly bring down health care costs by eliminating expensive, unnecessary procedures. But it could also deny Americans access to expensive, important procedures that we may not want to give up. Worse, it could mean that Americans without a lot of money may forgo essential treatment because of the high deductibles.
I confess to limited understanding of the health care bill, and perhaps someone can explain how the bill avoids this problem. If so, please speak up...
Cross-posted at dagblog.com
The U.N. General Assembly also encouraged President Karzai to press ahead with "strengthening of the rule of law and democratic processes, the fight against corruption (and) the acceleration of justice sector reform" and Pope Benedict XVI to press ahead with "abstaining from pork products, eating matzoh on Passover, rejecting Jesus, and keep wearing the beanie because it's kind of like a yarmulke. Plus the retro look is very cool."
Encouraged by its success in Afghanistan and Vatican City, the U.N. then launched a tour de force of unanimous resolutionizing, including the following declarations:
But the night was not without discord. An attempt to encourage the Afghan candidate Abdullah Abdullah to accept the election results and change "one of his names" was thwarted by a faction of developing nations led by former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who argued that the U.N. should take its "head" out of its "tuchus."
Cross-posted at dagblog.com
But perhaps I should just let them speak for themselves...
Discover everything that you never wanted to know about conservative paranoia at my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.
]]>Though liberals represent the bogeymen in the conservative horror fantasies Frank described in 2004, they were not participants in the pitched political battles that roiled Kansas. Kansas has always been a reliably Republican state; there are no liberals to battle. Instead, the war in Kansas pitted right-wing conservatives against moderate conservatives, "Cons" versus "Mods." According to Frank, the Cons emerged victorious and effectively wrested complete control of Kansas politics.
But elsewhere in the country, the Republican establishment courted the Cons, regarding them as a potent political force against Democrats -- just as the Roman Emperor Valens invited the Visigoths to settle in Roman territory, seeing in them "a splendid recruiting ground for his army." And so, like the Visigoths, the Cons are now sacking the Republican establishment.
]]> The conflict bloodily presented itself during the special congressional election of NY-23. Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, a devotee of paranoid conspiracist Glenn Beck, challenged the moderate Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava. Con leaders like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh enthusiastically endorsed Hoffman and labeled Scozzafava a RINO -- Republican in name only. Limbaugh's taunts were even more vicious and puerile than his usual attacks on Democrats. He accused Scozzafava of "bestiality" for having "screwed every RINO in the country."The result: Scozzafava dropped out of the race. Despite Hoffman's loss, Cons are trumpeting their success against the Mods and preparing 2010 campaigns against Mods like Florida Governor Charlie Christ. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stated, "If you look at what I think is likely to happen next year, you already have Republicans -- some Republicans who are more aligned with the very conservative element of what's happening in New York saying, this is a model for what you'll see throughout the country."
As Republican Mods drift toward extinction, the Cons have not given up their persecution myths. As one Con writes, "The Republican Party has been hijacked. Conservatives have been driven underground by the RINOs..." (If the current explosion of right-wing paranoia constitutes being driven "underground," imagine what above-ground Cons looks like.) Hoffman even applied the persecution myth to his election loss, accusing Democrats of election fraud in the final hours of voting: "There are reports that they're bringing in the troops and they're bringing in ACORN. I think the Democrats are doing anything they possibly can to steal this election away from the 23rd district." (Hoffman thought that the tires of one of his supporters had been slashed. The culprit turned out to be a broken bottle on the road.)
Democrats, meanwhile, have celebrated Hoffman's loss and the turmoil within the Republican party. But like another Roman Emperor, Democratic revelers are fiddling as Rome burns. While the Cons' political ideology may not be shared by independents and moderate Republican voters, the differences do not mean that they will vote Democrat. American politics is cyclical, and the nation will sooner or later vote the Democrats out of office. If paranoid extremists like Doug Hoffman control the Republican Party at that time, the Bush years will seem like an era of unfettered liberalism.
Discover everything that you never wanted to know about conservative paranoia at my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.
]]>Fortunately for America, FOX News' indefatigable conspiracy hunter has continued to the sniff out the plot, and as of this evening, we have a few more details. First, the emergency will be economic. According to Beck, the U.S. will not be able to pay its mounting debts, and the Treasury will be forced to print money in order to fulfill the nation's obligations, as Germany's Weimar Republic did in the 1920s. The value of the dollar will subsequently collapse, and the U.S. will again emulate the Weimar Republic by introducing a new currency backed by real estate, which the government will obtain in several ways:
Between Fannie and Freddie, the federal government already owns 55 percent of the mortgages in this country. And coupled with all the federal land grabs for parks, polar bears who are crowded but endangered and all the oil we're not drilling for or coal we're not mining, you might be able to base a currency on all that.
But then it gets a bit foggy. Beck predicts that we will need some kind of help to create the new currency, some allies in the endeavor, and he wonders aloud, "Who would the new regime responsible for this new system of currency...after they've destroyed our future and your children's future, who would they have on their side?" Beck then answers his own question. Our new currency buddies will be international all-stars, Russia, China, and Venezuela. The astute viewer can imagine what happens next. Our "helpers" will help themselves to our houses and national parks. That's bad enough for the American people, but it will be disastrous for the poor polar bears:
Do you really think Russia and China will be better protectors of the planet than we have been? Will Russians cordon off 200,000 square miles of extra space for polar bear roaming or will they shoot them in the head to get a barrel of oil that used to belong to you? I know I would. Surely, Ivan will.*
OK, so Beck clearly has some homework to do, but it's coming together. Will he get to the bottom of the plot in time? Will Americans be able to stop the the Obama administration's diabolical plan before it's too late? Stay tuned to Persecution Politics to find out.
* For the young and stupid: Ivan means "evil Russian dude who hates polar bears."
]]>Take Bill Kristol. Kristol is a very conservative man, but he is not a stupid man. Unlike Beck and Limbaugh, who never graduated from college, Kristol received a B.A. (magna cum laude) and Ph.D. from Harvard. Instead of beginning his career as a radio D.J., he taught political science at U. Penn and Harvard's Kennedy School. He has never expressed the kind of paranoia that has become the standard fare of FOX News commentary. But he has no intention of trying to stop it. Kristol believes that the Republican Party's center of gravity lies "with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties," and he praises their effectiveness:
Some will lament this -- but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots...The lesson activists around the country will take from this is that a vigorous, even if somewhat irritated, conservative/populist message seems to be more effective in revitalizing the Republican Party than an attempt to accommodate the wishes of liberal media elites. So the GOP is likely, for the foreseeable future, to be of a conservative mind and in a populist mood. In American politics, there are worse things to be.
In American politics, there are worse things to be. Kristol doesn't tell us what those worse things are, but red-baiting witch-hunters from the 1950's are fairly high on many peoples' lists--the politicians whose paranoid fearmongering tore the country apart until someone finally stood up and said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Conservative leaders of the day surely felt that the "populist mood" benefited their election chances. Eisenhower toured Wisconsin with McCarthy, and it probably helped him to win the Presidency.
But Eisenhower hated McCarthy and actively worked to undermine him after winning the election. We might also recall a more recent president, George H.W. Bush, who resigned his lifelong NRA membership after an NRA advertisement referred to "jack-booted government thugs," a fascist reference that seems almost quaint by today's standards.
Yet today, we hear nothing but silence from the right side of the aisle, or worse, complicity from politicians who seek to profit directly from the hysteria. As long as conservatives provide a haven for conspiracy theories, the paranoia will continue to boil and heave and devour the party that protects it.
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Stay tuned for more crazy talk in my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.
]]>My colleague's dismay exhibited the wide gap between "merit value" and "market value." Merit value is an amorphous sense of the worth of an employee based on capability, education, seniority, and hard work. Market value is the perceived monetary worth of an employee. Our economy is primarily based on market value. Insofar, as we reward merit value, it is because of cultural reasons and a loose, indirect relationship between merit value and market value: people generally perceive monetary value in the meritorious qualities of capability, education, seniority, and hard work. Yet while this indirect relationship may hold true within a particular field, it varies widely between fields. Thus, the most capable coders are likely be the top paid programmers, but they are unlikely to be paid as well as the most capable salespeople.
]]> The principle of market value infuses even those industries that we might like to think of as merit-based. Book publishers, for instance, pay the highest advances to the authors they believe will most likely generate the highest sales, which is why prominent writers of trashy romances and conservative screeds can get high advances, while brilliant academic historians rarely receive any. Even within the academy, tenure for the sciences is primarily awarded to the professors who can capture the most grant money.Which brings us to bankers. Many investment bankers are intelligent, hard-working, and capable, but like any other employee, those qualities are only indirectly tied to their compensation packages. Bankers make the big bucks because they are extremely close to a lot of money. When an employee conducts transactions worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, then small differences in ability can make a difference of millions of dollars for the employer in a very obvious way. For that reason, it is an easy decision for banking executives to pay massive salaries and bonuses for the top talent. Such monetary considerations travel all the way up to the CEOs, who are perceived to make the largest difference to a bank's profitability.
Of course, the cronyism and short-term thinking prevalent in banking is certainly a related problem, but it is a market value problem of mistaken perception, not a merit value problem. Yet what seems to drive the rage of the anti-Wall Street crowd is not market inefficiency but the myth of merit value: bankers getting compensated far more than they deserve for their work. But our system is based on market value, and while this system is not ideal, we have not been able to invent a better one. The only known alternative to market value is some kind of human judgment of merit. Such judgment inevitably devolves into political bias, which is even less related to merit than market value. From nation-sized communist systems to department-sized bureaucracies, human judgments too often result in higher pay for the most loyal and sycophantic employees, not the most capable.
Because our system relies on market value, the government's current plan to cap executive salaries at companies that received bailouts will do nothing to address income disparities between the rich and poor. It will not affect banks that did not receive bailouts or all the other industries, from law to medicine to Hollywood to all manner of business, where compensation of certain employees towers above that of everyone else in the country. And within a year or two, the government's bailout leverage will dwindle, and it will be back to business as usual among the bankers as well.
Though it may seem like a paradox, if we really want to address income disparity, we need to be honest with ourselves and firmly reject the myth of merit value. That is because as much as merit value appeals to capitalism's critics, the myth of merit value is even more prevalent among the pro-market anti-tax crowd. Conservatives tend to fiercely oppose taxes on the grounds that rich moneymakers deserve their wealth due to their capabilities and work ethics. If we abandon the notion that people deserve all the money that they earn and are instead simply beneficiaries of somewhat arbitrary market forces, then implementing higher taxes on top income brackets will be less controversial. The rich people who are most open to high taxes tend to treat their wealth as a kind of lucky windfall rather than a well-deserved fortune. We need to encourage this attitude towards wealth and stop pretending that financial compensation must be something that it cannot be.
Or for a more cynical take, see Willam K. Wolfrum's How to be a "Swashbuckling Captain of Capitalism" by Patrick Byrne.
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Cross posted at dagblog.com. You can subscribe to all my posts via RSS feed or email.
]]>Now, as TPM's Eric Kleefeld has documented, the consulting firm of James Carville and Stan Greenberg has validated the thesis of my Persecution Politics series: there is a very large, very determined block of conservative voters who have thoroughly embraced paranoid extremism. Based on the results of a series of focus groups, the organization concluded:
The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America...First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a 'secret agenda' to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years.]]> These voters "identify themselves as a minority in this country - a minority whose values are mocked and attacked by a liberal media and class of elites." They believe that these elites "are actively working to advance the downfall of the things that matter most to them in their lives - their faith, their families, their country, and their freedom." In short, they believe themselves to "persecuted."
The sense of persecution, along with egotistical confidence in the validity of their own world view, has fostered an attitude of quasi-religious evangelism. They feel "a responsibility to spread the word, to educate those who do not share their insights, and to take back the country that they love. Their faith in this country and its ideals leave them confident that their numbers will grow, and that they will ultimately defeat Barack Obama and the shadowy forces driving his hidden agenda."
Their hero, of course, is Paranoiac-in-Chief, Glenn Beck "They believe he embodies the best of conservative media - determination to unearth the stories the liberal media tries to bury, love of country, and refusal to be intimidated, even as the liberal media unleashes waves of attacks on his past and his credibility." They even fear for his life, believing "that his willingness to stand up to powerful liberal interests was putting his life, as well as the lives of those working with him, in danger. Of course, his willingness to face this danger head on only adds to his legend."
And their favorite candidate for the next presidential election is, no surprise, Sarah Palin, in whom they see their own reflection: "They see in her the uncompromising personal conviction and integrity that they admired in Bush, but with an authentic conservatism that reflects her personal background. The one point they all agree on is that Palin was a victim of an unprecedented smear campaign. Reflecting in many ways their feelings about themselves as a group, they say Palin was targeted by the liberal media like no other figure in modern history because they both feared her and hated her for her unwavering values and beliefs."
This paranoid Republican base represents "one-in-five voters in the electorate, and nearly two out of every three selfidentified Republicans," which means that current Republican legislators must accommodate them, and the next batch of Republican political candidates will likely be the most extreme that the nation has seen since the 1950s. If you haven't been taking them seriously, you should. The tidal wave of paranoia shows no sign of slacking. With a weak economy and an active Democrat-controlled government, conservatives are rattled and vulnerable to paranoid narratives. The growth of cable news, talk radio, and blogs have produced a right-wing echo chamber in which conservative commentators shout ever louder to make themselves heard over the shrill cries of their colleagues, and listeners measure the plausibility of each new conspiracy theory against a swiftly falling standard. We are witnessing a race to the bottom of a bottomless pit.
Unfortunately for the nation, I expect to have plenty of material to write about for the foreseeable future.
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Stay tuned for more crazy talk in my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.
]]>"I'm sure that Obama does OK on the treadmill and may win a marathon later in his political career if he ever quits smoking, but he just hasn't earned it yet. This award is a slap in the face to all the runners who have spent years training for this marathon."
But a spokesperson for the New York Marathon, who asked not to be named on the grounds that the New York Marathon doesn't have a spokesperson, defended the decision:
"Awarding the victory to President Obama sends a message to the entire world that engaging with the international community is just as important as running 26 miles with your nipples taped through all five New York boroughs, even the Bronx."
A spokesperson for the Sikh Man of the Year award, who may or may not be the same person who spoke for the New York Marathon, also defended that organization's award, declaring:
"We don't know for sure whether or not [President Obama] is a Sikh, but his actions have raised our suspicions. For instance, the White House recently appointed a Large Receptacle Czar who happens to be Sikh. You have to ask yourself, what kind of person surrounds himself with Sikhs?"
The spokesperson may have been referring to William S. Noma, the recently appointed Chief Diversity Officer for Domestic Baskets, Buckets, Barrels, Bins, and Baby Bjorns. Mr. Noma insists that he is a Christian but may have been mistaken for a Sikh because he often wears turbans for reasons of "vanity" and "baldness."
Conservative leaders have been especially critical of alleged bias among the award committees. Following Rupert Murdoch's establishment of Jesus Prizes to offer "fair and balanced" alternatives to the Nobel Prizes, other philanthropists have sponsored a number of new prizes with conservative winners:
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Cross posted at dagblog.com. You can subscribe to all my posts via RSS feed or email.
]]>So screams today's Drudge Report headline in a thunderous "xx-large" Arial font. The linked AFP article discusses the possibility that the dollar might lose its place as the preferred global currency, but based on the headline, the reader might be excused for thinking that the nation is about to return to the barter system or else adopt Chinese renminbi.
Indeed, the headline is intentionally misleading. The collapse of the dollar has become an idée fixe among paranoid right-wingers who believe that the government is deliberately killing the dollar in order to make way for a new international currency: the Amero.
]]> The Amero first came to my intention in a New York cab in the summer of 2008. When you take a cab in New York, you can reliably expect that 1) the driver will be a male immigrant, and 2) he will not speak to you except to ask you where you're going. On the few occasions that I've been picked up by white native-born Americans, I've been regaled with conspiracy theories and wacky religious doctrine, so I knew that I was in for some entertainment when my white American driver asked me not only where I was going (a movie theater) but also what I planned to see. He then went on to inform me that he doesn't watch movies any more. He had conspiracy sites on the Internet instead. Warily, I asked him what sort of conspiracies he was into. That's how I found out about the Amero.According to my driver, who seemed very knowledgeable on the subject, the Amero is a joint North American currency, equivalent to the Euro, that will be established along with a North American central government called the North American Union, equivalent to, you guessed it, the European Union. (Apparently, the masterminds aren't very original.) The plan was supposedly hatched by the Federal Reserve Bank, which as "everyone" knows is really a private corporation created in 1913 to protect tycoons like John D. Rockefeller. It has been gradually accumulating power since then, waiting for it's moment to pounce.
That moment has come. The FRB knows full well that we Americans won't willingly give up our sovereignty, so it plans to exacerbate the current financial crisis and encourage the government to respond with deficit spending. When the government is deep in debt (or rather, deeper in debt), the FRB will call in the debts. Unable to pay, the government will be forced to accept the FRB's conditions: the establishment of the Amero and North American Union. The plotters are also planning to build a 16-lane NAFTA superhighway that will bisect the country and deliver goods from Mexico to Canada. (I don't know why this detail is important to plot, but it will surely lead to protests of new highways in middle Ameria.)
When I took that cab ride, G.W. was still president, and people like Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs weren't on my radar. But the Amero was on theirs. You might think of Beck as a diehard Republican, but in fact he owes allegiance to paranoia over party, and he's been pushing the Amero mythology since at least October 2007, when he hosted Jerome Corsi on his CNN program in a segment called "Liberty in Peril: What You Need to Know." Corsi is making headlines these days for pushing the Obama birther conspiracy theory, but in 2007, he wrote a book, The Late Great U.S.A.: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada, that discusses a "secret agenda...to dissolve the United States of America into the North American Union. The [Bush] administration has no intent to secure the border, or to enforce rigorously existing immigration laws." Here's Beck response:
I was with one of the country's leading economists having dinner the other night, and I said, "What point do you start" -- and this guy's an optimist. "At what point do you start worrying about the dollar?" And he said, "Glenn, about six months ago." He said, "It's almost like we`re intentionally destroying the dollar."
Beck also mentioned that nefarious superhighway:
You've got the trans -- the NAFTA superhighway that, again, everybody denies, but you've got it broken up in chunks being built right now. It will deliver goods from China right to Mexico through America into Canada.
Before Beck joined the party, Lou Dobbs, another birther conspiracist, was already pushing the North American Union theory. According to Media Matters, Dobbs discussed the NAU 56 times on his CNN show in 2006-2007, e.g.
It's unofficially known as the North American Union. Some, for some reason, suggest there's no such thing, that there is no plan to merge the United States and Mexico and the United States without the knowledge and approval of the citizens of those three countries. Well, tonight, you're going to find out that there really is such a thing and it's all part of a plan.
Dobbs explicitly blamed the Bush administration, but with Democrats
in power, the idea of a secret plan to establish a North America Union
and replace the dollar with a trans-American currency has
gained...um...currency among the right wing, hence the Drudge headline.
So let this blog be your first warning. We're going to hear a lot more about the Amero in coming weeks.
PS As TPM has previously documented, Representative Michele Bachman (R-MN) once suggested that Geithner wants to replace the dollar with a global currency.
Update: Here's precursor from a reader's comment to an article about the dollar's decline.
Incriminally Sane Says:
Folks, looking at the markets around the world, I believe we are DAYS AWAY from an absolute collapse of the dollar and when it happens, you can expect that you will NO LONGER be able to buy ANYTHING with your Dollars, no food, fuel, rent or anything that is exchanged in Americas former currency.......THE DOLLAR.
They will wait for people to move to the streets and the killing starts before they declare Martial Law in America. Then, when things get really ugly, they will integrate the Amero into the system and will charge you $10.00 for one Amero and they will make you believe you are getting a good deal since the Dollar has been devalued to NOTHING.
This has all been planned for much longer than you or I have been alive. Gold, Silver and a system of Barter will be the only way we will be able to make it when this happens.
Good Luck People!
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Stay tuned for more bad currency puns in my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.
]]>Other conservatives, led by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, hastily arranged an alternative set of prizes to combat perceived bias by the Nobel Committee. According to FOX News president Roger Ailes, the new prizes are called "Jesus Prizes" because "everyone looks up to Jesus." The Jesus committee has already selected winners for the 2009 prizes in the following categories:
]]> Literature: Sarah Palin, for her upcoming book, Going Rogue: An American Life. While the book has not been released, the committee expressed confidence that "its literary impact will be enormous."Economics: Rush Limbaugh, for his groundbreaking theory
that Obama had purposefully created economic instability in order to
increase unemployment that would make people more anxious about health
care and help pass a universal health care plan.
Chemistry: Charles B. Thaxton, author of The Mystery of Life's Origin, for his pioneering work in the field of Intelligent Design
Physiology or Medicine:
Rush Limbaugh again, for his courageous resistance Health Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius' swine flu vaccination drive on the grounds that "it's not her role" to tell him what to do.
Physics:
God, for making the universe. God's award will be accepted by His
representative, Dr. James Dobson, and the $1.5M award will be donated
to Dobson's Focus on the Family organization.
Peace:
Joint winners George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for ridding the world of
Saddam Hussein, a "dangerous menace" who the committee said "might one
day have developed Weapons of Mass Destruction."
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]]>Yesterday, the "white persecution" theme bubbled up again when Drudge reported, "WHITE STUDENT BEATEN ON SCHOOL BUS; CROWD CHEERS." The police officer who described the assault as racially motivated later retracted the characterization, but it was too late to stop Rush Limbaugh from representing the incident as an example of "Obama's America":
You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, "Yeah, right on, right on, right on!" And of course, everybody says, "Oh, the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white."]]> The fact that black politicians make up 7.5% of U.S. Representatives, 1% of U.S. Senators, and 2% of state governors does not register in the fantasy of white persecution. Nor does the persistent income gap between whites and blacks: $49K to $30K. The overwhelmingly white right-wing desperately wants to represent itself as persecuted, the facts be damned. Hence Limbaugh's enthusiasm to report the purported race bias on the school-bus. As blogger John Rogers cannily explains:
One of the great secrets of human nature is that the one thing people want more than love, security, sex, chocolate or big-screen TV's is to feel hard done by. Because being hard done by is the shit. Feeling hard done by is the sweetest of drugs. If you're being persecuted - it must mean you're doing the right thing, right? You get the mellow buzz of the moral high ground, but without arrogantly claiming it as your own. You get an instant, supportive community in a big dark scary world of such scope it may well literally be beyond rational human processing. When you are hard done by, you get purpose in a life where otherwise, you'd have to find your own. And when you ride that high, then no amount of logic, no pointing out that in actuality you and your beliefs are at a high point of popularity and influence for the last hundred years - is going to pry that sweet crack-pipe of moral indignation from your hands.
Stay tuned for more black-on-white action in my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.
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