Amanda Knox should never have been tried in the first place, and the prosecution's allegation of motive was Medieval and misogynistic, literally something out of a 14th Century witch trial. I'm sure it must be as hard to believe that she's finally free after nearly four years - 20% of her life -- but the relief must be epic as well. Great thanks to the Italian legal system, where the appeal is something more of a do-over than here in the U.S. Of course, in Rick Perry's Texas, she'd be executed already:
As one of the prosecutors in the case, Manuela Comodi, no friend of Knox, implied last week in his remarks: were Knox being tried in the United States, she might well be on her way to an execution. The case of Troy Davis, killed by the state of Georgia last month despite the fact that most of the witnesses in his case later recanted their testimony, should linger as the Knox saga is reviewed.
Speaking of Gov. Perry, I don't think the news about the name of the ranch leased by his family means that he's a racist. As our President would say, it's a distracting sideshow. But it does reinforce my prediction that an Obama-Perry duel would look very much like the aged battle for Abolition, and would expect to see rhetoric surrounding the candidates on all sides that mirrored that. I do like the discussion of language that's sprung up around this, like a rather unusual and admirably frank discussion today on The View.
What I do think is that he's a mindless corporatist who, like Bush from Texas before him, thinks the government treasuries are meant for the rich. Which takes us to Wall Street where a very articulate young man, Jesse LaGreca, makes the #occupywallstreet viral video of the day as he takes down Fox News to its face and lays out the real issues:
For example, the ultra-Right Koch Brothers seem to be getting away with having violated the Iran trading embargo. Because they can? Isn't that...treason?
And want to see the opposite of the guy in the above video? Isn't rich, aggrieved, entitled Hank Williams, Jr., born lucky like the Koch Bros albeit with less talent, just the Id of their rightwing Super-Ego:
Ha ha ha his theme song was cut from Monday Night Football tonight and hopefully forever.
He's not declaring his candidacy for President until the final episode of this season's Celebrity Apprentice, which makes sense since the show's rating have gone up every since he started beating the drum for birtherism.
I'm on the fence right now whether Donald Trump's taking brand control of the evil teabagger birther smear is a bad or good thing for America. On one hand, I don't like seeing it back in the news, either reinforcing this misapprehension/prejudice or sparking more belief in weak, hyper-partisan or bigoted minds. However, since Trump is such an outsized figure of ridicule, it might kill it once and for all. Maybe he can make it a task next season -- "Convince the most people of this racist lie."
Today’s installment of “heinous, unacceptable racism disguised as ‘jokes’” features a Republican official on Orange County, California, President Obama, and monkeys in photoshop. GOP official Marilyn Davenport is coming under fire for sending other Republican officials an email depicting President Obama as a chimpanzee, in the arms of chimpanzee “parents,” claiming, “Now you know why– no birth certificate! [sic].” Davenport is sticking to her guns, blaming the media for making too much of a fuss.
Among Davenport’s detractors (including, one would hope, “everyone else”), local news station KCAL caught up with former California Republican chairman Michael Schroder, who correctly posited: “no average person would send this out and feel comfortable with this, that this was just a joke.” Then again, Schroder also notes Davenport doesn’t come into this embarrassment with a clean slate– among the people in Orange County Republican politics she has defended are an official who sent an email with an illustration of the White House covered in watermelons and an official who opposed the installation of grass near beaches on the point that “grass attracts Mexicans.”
As for Trump, he can't say it's true, just sneakily imply that if it's being talked about, there must be something to it:
Opportunistic as always, Donald. But whether or not he leads the GOP field as some polls show, he's got more than his double comb-over working against him. There's that little problem of fiscal responsibility -- he's declared corporate bankruptcy four times.
Of course, none of those led to personal bankruptcy.
Anderson Cooper, God love him, performs journalism on a Republican Texas State Representative birther. Guys like this are either craven or moron -- or both:
The relentless lies of these people. I'm less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt of sincerity each successive time. They're a blight on society.
And, yes, I think if they're still doing this after so much public evidence to the contrary, they're implicitly racist.
They love branding their Democratic and Liberal enemies as "Hitler" while acting like little Goebbels themselves. Hard to say who the worst is, but the current king seems to be Glenn "Protocols of Zion" Beck:
Nazi propaganda called Jews drahtzieher—wire-pullers. They constitute a power above and beyond ordinary government authority. “There is a super-government which is allied to no government, which is free from them all, and yet which has its hand in them all,” Henry Ford wrote in The International Jew.
Beck’s implication is that there was something sinister in Soros’ support for anti-communist civil society organizations in the former Soviet Union. Further, he sees such support as evidence that Soros will engineer a communist coup here in the United States. This kind of thinking only makes sense within the conspiratorial mind-set of classic anti-Semitism, in which Jews threaten all governments equally. And as a wealthy Jew with a distinct Eastern European accent, Soros is a perfect target for such theories.
You can read The Daily Beast piece and see for yourself how Beck smears Soros. But he's not alone in his prejudiced hate mongering. There's a hate-spewing Jewish woman herself, from Florida, with a radio following, who was slated to be Chief of Staff for a newly-elected Representative - until her words sparked plans for violence:
As you might recall, someone emailed Kaufman's radio station, WFTL, declaring that he or she was planning a violent act against some kind of government building, possibly a school. A phone call to the station yesterday, from a woman identifying herself as the e-mailer's wife, later warned that this man could potentially commit a terrorist act against a public school. That prompted a countywide lock down of all public schools.
The local Fox affiliate since reported that the threat-maker had said he was inspired by none other than Joyce Kaufman, who had received publicity in the last few days for her previous calls for violent action against the government in order to protect citizens from the tyranny of the Obama administration.
...
The negative publicity had centered around video of comments that Kaufman had made at a Tea Party rally this past Independence Day, on how to change a government that has become destructive of the people's rights: "And then the Founding Fathers were ever so brilliant -- and I don't care how this gets painted by the mainstream media, I don't care if this shows up on YouTube, because I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendment rights was they gave a Second Amendment. And if ballots don't work, bullets will."
Pure evil. She'll probably become a Fox commentator now that she gotten her publicity.
"We've got the Democrats worried that Clyburn's getting the shaft because he's not going to have a car, he's not going to have a driver, he's not going to have security, he's not going to have any of the stroke, or the perks," Limbaugh said. "A white, racist leadership of the Democrat party trying to ace out Clyburn." Limbaugh got his information on Clyburn's driver from Martin Frost, who appeared on MSNBC.
...
"Clyburn's new position: driving Ms. Nancy," Limbaugh said. "He's not in the back of the bus, he's in the driver's seat. And she's in the back of the car being chauffeured."
Racist fucks. Rabble-rousing hucksters all. The fact that mainstream media hasn't called them out, that their networks and stations haven't fired them, that the public outcry isn't huge, is what our times are all about. Fake news, faux controversies, Southern strategy in bloom.
Meanwhile the astroturf organization behind the Tea Party, Dick Armey's Freedomworks lobby, wants to bring African-Americans, Hispanics and Jews into the fold. Good luck with fellow teabaggers like this:
We all know that FNC isn't really a news organization but a propaganda organ. But per Kevin Drum, it may be Satan's mouthpiece:
There have been three big conservative outrages that have choked the airwaves over the past couple of weeks. #1 was about a bunch of scary black men, the New Black Panther Party. #2 was about a bunch of scary Muslims who want to build a triumphal mosque on the sacred soil of Ground Zero. #3 was about a vindictive black woman who works for the government and screws the white people she deals with. The running theme here is not just a coincidence.
It's not a coincidence. It's called the GOP's Southern Strategy and it's been around since 1968, courtesy of Richard Milhous Nixon. And, of course, one of his key campaign operatives, Head of Television, was Roger Ailes -- President of Fox News:
The Fox News stoking of reverse-racism fears have reached a new benchmark today. Last week it seemed to peak with a wildly overblown "new Black Panthers" story that the teabagger/Fox watchers loved for how it seemed to neutralize their own racist elements, another extension of the vile Glenn Beck lie that President Obama (half-white) is some sort of reverse racist. Which circle of hell does Beck want to end up in, anyway?
This kind of blood libel leads to blood-letting, but today it led to the firing of a fine civil servant, thanks to a misleadingly edited video propagated, if not actually edited, by evil angry white winger Andrew Breitbart. A known liar, Breitbart's posting led to a Fox News noise storm, and ultimate to the firing of Shirley Sherrod, Agriculture Department's director of rural development in Georgia, by a completely fearful and moronic Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture.
The story is essentially that Sherrod was telling the story about how she realized her own racism in an experience over twenty years ago when called upon in another position to help some white farmers, and learned to correct her own behavior. The edited version leaves out the realization part, making Sherrod look like she's admitting that she's an unrepentant racist.
The whole charade fell apart when the farmer couple, now older but still alive, came forward to defend Sherrod as having actually been responsible for saving their farm. It's one of those movie-type moments that make you love America and want to stand up and cheer...and hiss outright villains like Breitbart, Fox News and, yes, knee-jerk Tom Vilsack.
Vilsack has to stop defending his decision, which he made without allowing a real investigation, similar to the Fox News campaign that led to the resignation of environmental leader Van Jones from the Obama White House. The Obama Administration has to start standing up to Fox News and the rightwing lie machine again, and definitively. Stop letting them set the agenda. Stop looking like wimps for doing as they say. Fight the hell back -- that's what we want from our leaders anyway.
Looks like Obama's current Supreme Court nominee is causing division in the ranks. She doesn't have much of a record to attack and some (not radical) conservative judges she's worked with like her. But check out that link for the histrionics from the far right, especially blood-on-his-hands anti-abortion leader Randall Terry.
Meanwhile, the GOP Senators seem to think they are debating whether to confirm deceased Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Nice way to further alienate minority support for the party...kind of like arguing settled law that most people like. Except, maybe, racists. Since they have nothing else to do with this hearing, could this be a cynical play to the base?
So GOP Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul -- the Tea Party choice -- was allowed to hang himself by Rachel Maddow on the subject of the five decade old Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race in our USA:
Yes, true libertarians (Libertarians?) don't believe the federal government has the right to regulate anything private. Really. So while this extremist point of view seems reasonable and divorced from racism, it's actually pointing out the relationship between the Tea Party and racism, per Bob Cesca:
However, he obviously supports allowing businesses to engage in racial discrimination with impunity. Evidently, if the government says it's against the law to run a whites-only business, this is a bridge too far for Rand Paul. ...
Rand Paul's extremist position on the Civil Right Act underscores a major flaw in libertarian ideology, and it further cements the connection between the tea party movement and race.
Libertarianism, which both Ron and Rand Paul famously embrace, suggests the free market is a significant and vital component of liberty. Private businesses are capable of accomplishing everything, and government can't interfere or regulate those businesses in any way. The free market will police itself. Just leave it be.
Private industry can pave roads, educate children, put out fires and protect our streets from drunk drivers. It can shuttle our kids to corporate schools and back, it can provide clean water to our homes and they can guarantee our meat and vegetables aren't contaminated with diseases. And by the way, in a nation that's 70 percent white, private businesses can choose to do all of these things for white people only. Private businesses can provide everything we need, but only offer those services to white people.
And these businesses, according to libertarian ideology, can form monopolies if they want to. As we're all painfully aware from the health care debate, monopolies occur even in our current government-regulated system. Imagine what would happen in a totally unregulated free market.
So, in Rand Paul's utopia, not only can Woolworth's prevent black people from sitting at its soda stand if it wants to, but a private, free market police corporation can set up shop in a community, buy up any competing police corporations and announce that it no longer serves black people or Jewish people or Hispanic people or gay people -- any minority segment of the population.
The Libertarians agree with Rand Paul, and accept that racism and segregation is an "unfortunate" evil in their fantasy for our society. While that does not inherently appear to make them racists, it points to their inability to accept a non-free market remedy. And again, Rand Paul may not be a racist himself, but his campaign manager, who was forced to quit for racist images on his MySpace page, and one assumes someone close to Paul, certainly appears to have been one. By his own evidence.
It turns out that Rand has a history of being against, for example, the federal Americans with Disabilities Act as well. And Ezra Klein has a whole list of questions on what Rand and his fellow Libertarians/Tea Partiers would accept:
For instance: Can the federal government set the private sector's minimum wage? Can it tell private businesses not to hire illegal immigrants? Can it tell oil companies what safety systems to build into an offshore drilling platform? Can it tell toy companies to test for lead? Can it tell liquor stores not to sell to minors? These are the sort of questions that Paul needs to be asked now, because the issue is not "area politician believes kooky but harmless thing." It's "area politician espouses extremist philosophy on issue he will be voting on constantly."
Over the course of the day, Rand Paul began walking back his statements on the Civil Rights Act, then running it back, basically skirting the main question he brought up while finally crying uncle -- "I would have voted yes" for the law. "There was a need for federal intervention."
I expect his dogwhistle followers will discount this reversal and in their hearts know Rand is still one of them, but it sure sounds like a same 'ol same 'ol politician to me.
During the interview portion, Fakih was asked whether she thought birth control should be paid for by health insurance, and she said she believed it should because it's costly. "I believe that birth control is just like every other medication even though it's a controlled substance," Fakih said. Woolard handled the night's toughest question, about Arizona's new immigration law. Woolard said she supports the law, which requires police enforcing another law to verify a person's immigration status if there's "reasonable suspicion" that the person is in the country illegally. She said she's against illegal immigration but is also against racial profiling.
She's also getting hit for some less-than-salacious pole dance pix, which seems so silly to me now that housewives all across America are installing these things and doing exercise classes on them.
There was almost no evidence in the loud arena of the storm stirred up on Tuesday when Suns owner Robert Sarver issued a statement saying the team would wear "Los Suns" on their jerseys, to celebrate diversity on Cinco de Mayo but also to protest the immigration bill passed by the Arizona legislature and signed by Gov. Jan Brewer.
"I'm proud of our owner for making this stand but we're not out there to alienate," Nash said. "We want this to be all about love in our community. People, regardless of whether they agree with me or not, we have love for everybody."
The bill has drawn criticism from civil rights groups and others, including President Barack Obama, who called it "misguided."
On Sunday, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R-Miss) defended Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's omission of slavery from his "Confederate History Month" proclamation.
Appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," Barber said that the firestorm of controversy raised by McDonnell's proclamation is "just a nit". "It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly," Barbour claimed.
What's the matter with this element of the South that has convinced itself that the Confederacy was about States Rights rather than preserving the abominable institution of slavery? Ask Newsweek editor/historian Jon Meacham:
Advertently or not, Mr. McDonnell is working in a long and dispiriting tradition. Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia’s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.
If neo-Confederates are interested in history, let’s talk history. Since Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Confederate symbols have tended to be more about white resistance to black advances than about commemoration. In the 1880s and 1890s, after fighting Reconstruction with terrorism and after the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, states began to legalize segregation. For white supremacists, iconography of the “Lost Cause” was central to their fight; Mississippi even grafted the Confederate battle emblem onto its state flag.
But after the Supreme Court allowed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Jim Crow was basically secure. There was less need to rally the troops, and Confederate imagery became associated with the most extreme of the extreme: the Ku Klux Klan.
In the aftermath of World War II, however, the rebel flag and other Confederate symbolism resurfaced as the civil rights movement spread. In 1948, supporters of Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket waved the battle flag at campaign stops.
Then came the school-integration rulings of the 1950s. Georgia changed its flag to include the battle emblem in 1956, and South Carolina hoisted the colors over its Capitol in 1962 as part of its centennial celebrations of the war.
As the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter approaches in 2011, the enduring problem for neo-Confederates endures: anyone who seeks an Edenic Southern past in which the war was principally about states’ rights and not slavery is searching in vain, for the Confederacy and slavery are inextricably and forever linked.
Meanwhile, I would note that apart from contemporary racial issues, something that links the mentality of today’s right to the mentality of the slaveowners and segregation proponents is the white southern political tradition’s very partial and selective embrace of majoritarian democracy. As long as national institutions are substantially controlled by white southerners, the white south is a hotbed of patriotism. But as soon as an non-southern political coalition manages to win an election—as we saw in 1860 and in 2008—then suddenly the symbols of national authority become symbols of tyranny and the constitution is construed as granting conservative areas all kinds of alleged abilities to opt out of national political decisions. Even if you think opposition to the Affordable Care Act has nothing whatsoever to do with race, the underlying political philosophy by which a George W Bush or James Buchanan is a national president but an Abraham Lincoln or a Barack Obama merely a sectional one remains incoherent and pernicious.
The hell with Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) calling Obama "un-American" and the likes of Newt Gingrich calling him "radical." That's all about dehumanizing our President for their own base and anyone they may be able to suck into their know-nothing vortex.
Poor Confederacy. They lost the battle to continue to the subjugation of a kidnapped race.
How galling it must be for the recidivists to have someone from that race running the country, let alone doing it so well.
It looks like the woodwork is squeaking in the psycho corners of America...and out come the freaks:
"Six Michigan residents, along with two residents of Ohio and a resident of Indiana, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Detroit on charges of seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence," according to the government's press release, which you can read in full below.
...
The Hutaree members allegedly "planned to kill an unidentified member of local law enforcement and then attack the law enforcement officers who gather in Michigan for the funeral."
The indictment continues: "According to the plan, the Hutaree would attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession with Improvised Explosive Devices with Explosively Formed Projectiles, which, according to the indictment, constitute weapons of mass destruction."
That attack, in turn, would spark a more widespread Harper's Ferry-style uprising against the government, according to the "general concept of operations" described in the indictment.
Take look at these revolutionaries. See any Middle Eastern types?:
These "patriots" i.e. terrorists are of the Christian sort, at least that the religion they've twisted just as surely as Al Qaeda twists Islam to justify their violence. I can't say I feel the least bit sorry for the elders, neither the dad nor mom at the top or the gents at the other three corners, or kook #3 in the bottom row. I wonder about the two younger gents remaining, as they may not know the full extent of what they've gotten themselves into. There's another son of the psycho couple on the loose, but I imagine he'll be caught soon. Maybe burn down a barn first? I'm guessing the other son (top row, third from left) will start singing like a canary in return for favorable sentencing.
This is no "isolated incident," as a Tennessee man has just shown:
A Tennessee man authorities say is a white supremacist has pleaded guilty to plotting to kill then-presidential candidate Barack Obama and dozens of other black people in 2008.
...
Authorities have described the two as skinheads who planned a cross-country robbing and killing spree that would end with an attack on Obama.
I particularly like the swastika on the shoulder:
And there's even been an arrest made in a threat against a Republican. A Jewish Republican, to be sure, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA):
A 38-year-old Philadelphia man was charged today with threatening to kill Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) in a profanity-strewn YouTube video that has since been pulled down.
In the video, Norman Leboon says Cantor will "receive my bullets in your office, remember they will be placed in your heads. You and your children are Lucifer's abominations."
With something so close to home maybe help Cantor to see the light and work hard to tone down his party's rhetoric?
After logging some threatening phone calls last week, staffers on Sunday found that someone attempted to shatter one of the floor-to-ceiling windows at their prominently labeled office.
"We are on heightened alert and will be taking extra precaution," Patti Higgins, chairwoman of the Alaska Democratic Party, told me in an interview today. "I'm not going to say I think it was tea partiers or Republicans, but I think the heightened rhetoric out there will encourage people will go out and think it's okay to 'send a message' and be angry."
Higgins said it seemed "coincidental" the incident happened over the weekend, as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was declaring that Republicans should be the party of "Hell no" at a political rally in Nevada. "These are violent words: 'Fire 'em all, take 'em out,' and put together they fit into a pretty cohesive running theme that is fairly violent," Higgins said.
I advise the right to follow the example of the Republican National Committee and take it easy. Sit back, relax and maybe enjoy some topless lesbian bondage simulation.
Juan Williams, Fox commentator, in even-handed NPR fashion, asks the racism question:
On Morning Edition, NPR news analyst Juan Williams told host Renee Montagne that many in the black and Hispanic communities see what they think is a pattern that adds up to a "lack of basic acceptance of the stature that's to be accorded any president."
Among the elements of that perceived pattern:
-- Questions from so-called birthers about whether the president was actually born in the USA (he was; in Hawaii).
-- Objections from some to having the president address schoolchildren.
-- Republican Rep. Joe Wilson's shout of "you lie!" during Obama's address to a joint session of Congress last week.
Anderson Cooper calls out a "Tea Party" leader for calling Obama an "Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief":
"In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on... I wonder if Obama's going to come to come to the defense of the assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard."
I'm sorry but this is outrageous. The story was a classic schoolbus bully incident; it could happen anywhere any time and has happened everywhere at all times with kids of all races, backgrounds and religions. To infer both that it was racially motivated and that this is somehow connected to having a black president is repulsive. I know that is almost de trop with Limbaugh, but sometimes you have to regain a little shock. This man is spewing incendiary racial hatred. He is conjuring up images of lonely whites being besieged by angry violent blacks ... based on an incident that had nothing to do with race at all. And why, by the way, does someone immediately go to the racial angle when looking at such a tape?
This "classic" image they created and seemed to fetishize symbolizes the morbid contempt in which they hold those who oppose them, as well as the confusion of their message:
The sign is evil enough, printed and distributed, but the staged photo (see lynch link above) is confusing in that it can be read as a defication on their very own message, i.e. a negation, yet is clearly meant to equate Obama with feces, i.e. shitting on Obama.
Seriously, I don't recall any similar image from the anti-Bush/Cheney demonstrations this decade. But then again, they weren't African Americans, and as Maureen Dowd points out in her Sunday column, guys like Rep. Joe "You Lie" Wilson are implicitly reacting to that:
Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.
But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!
The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.
The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.
And, back to the dissonance of the protest message, it is at once a confusion of political labelling, Obama is a Communist yet a Hitler (who, to inform the educationally-challenged teabaggers, imprisoned and killed Communist). At the heart of this enraged minority is what one TPM reader who went there calls out:
There were small groups huddled around the Glen Beck inspired flags and the usual disaffected white males wandering in groups with the American flag desecrated by being incorporated into clothing. Having been to the exact same location for the Obama Inauguration and other large political events, this was small fry in comparison. However, it was an angry group with a real sense of absolute entitlement. Something not focused on by many. This sense of entitlement that they deserve to be the dominant deciders and that it's being taken away.
As I've written before, I see this as trying to delegitimize a President elected with a larger electoral and popular margin than in two decades, I believe with the ultimate goal of inciting or legitimizing violence against him. My instincts say that if the President is harmed these forces will make sure it comes from a black man to help legitimize the act -- in front of our local Whole Foods today there was the same white youth manning the LaRouche "Obama as Hitler" table but this time with a young African American fellow traveler.
If you have any doubt that these protesters are on the psycho side of American history:
God bless freedom of speech in our United States of America.
Here we go. As Robert Reich says, this soon will all be history, as he makes a clear, brief case for the public option, and against fear:
Meanwhile, one older Southern gentleman thinks our President has to somehow humble himself due to the teabagger summer antics:
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) said today that, because of angry town hallers and the like, President Obama should show "humility" when he speaks to Congress Wednesday night.
"What you're seeing is folks on my side anxious to see what the president has to say tomorrow night," Chambliss said. "I think he's gonna have to express some humility based on what we've seen around the country this August and that's not his inclination."
Let me get this straight: ol' Southern white Republican thinks that our President, who's conducted himself with absolute dignity, has to somehow show humility due to the racist rabblerousers screaming down honest debate with their "death panels" talk and Obama-as-Hitler posters?
Did ol' Saxby ever call on ex-Presidente Bush to show humility after it was revealed that he lied us into a war and didn't prepare properly for the aftermath?
Would Saxby ever expect a white male President to humble himself, or wouldn't that be the very show of weakness all these GOPers decry?
Guess what, Saxby. Your screamers didn't stop the movement to reform. Sure, it'll be less than a full loaf, maybe egregiously so, but it's going to happen, and you and Sen. DeMint and all the Becks and Hannitys in the world won't have stopped it. Reform survived August.
And -- guess what? -- the Dems' plan is half as costly as the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
Saturday in Santa Monica had me running across two separate Lyndon LaRouche activists with Obama-as-Hitler posters hanging from their tables. I told them in no uncertain terms how filthy I found their posters, how offended I was that my kids would see them, and they loved it. They love getting argued with and yelled at. They are that smug.
A couple we know complained at one table, in front of Whole Foods, where the owner is already being tagged as perilously close in philosophy to these LaRouchies, and as she is Chinese-American and he's a naturalized citizen originally from England, they were each told by LaRouche supporters to "go back to their own country." Um, that would be this one.
So the LaRouchies reveal themselves, plain and simple, as racists. LaRouche himself is a known vile anti-Semite (he uses "British" often to code it) and gay-hater. And with Obama he's gone wild with the reverse-thinking comparisons to Hitler. As in, Americans must "quickly and suddenly change the behavior of this president ... for no lesser reason than that your sister might not end up in somebody's gas oven".
His brother-in-spirit is the Glen Beck, who's website has anti-Semitic and racist "skits." It's time to call bullsh*t on these people for their reactionary ways, the Fox News anti-Americanism. I don't know if this is the dying gasp of the deep dark racist America, the spiritual if not literal descendants of slaveowners, union-busters, Indian slaughterers, lynchers and Jew-killers, or if we'll always have them here in some force.
But America is changing, and my interactions yesterday make it clear that these scumbags want anger, want fear, want blood for it.
Here's Paul Krugman calling out the discourse for what it is:
There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.
Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.
And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.
His examples feature devil Glenn Beck, who lied his ass off for hate violence again today, per Crooks and Liars:
Glenn Beck and his fellow wingnuts -- the ones who have been whipping up hysteria among their right-wing populist followers since Obama's election and before -- essentially announced they have no intention of reflecting on their roles in today's horrifying shooting at the Holocaust Museum in D.C.
They did this by doing what they always do whenever these situations arise: First call it all an "isolated incident" committed by a "lone nutcase" who just happens to be acting out beliefs emanating from their own quadrant. Then, when that fails, blame it on the Left.
Beck offered the following rationale on his Fox News show tonight:
Beck: What they're missing is: The pot in America is boiling. And this is just yet another warning to all Americans of things to come.
Not to be outdone, Rush Limbaugh too declared Von Brunn "has more in common with the marchers and protesters we see at left-wing rallies," according to video just aired on MSNBC.
This afternoon, anti-abortion activist and former Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry went ahead with his second press conference in as many weeks at the National Press Club, the first of which was held in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas. As promised, there were hot wings and Guinness. But there was also an ominous warning that the Obama administration may be making more violent attacks "inevitable."
"It's such a fucking slander on people like me. This guy's political philosophy is more akin to the drivel that you hear on a college campuses that delineates us by group and not by individuality.... It's deeply offensive that you would use this for political gain."
Nothing like a proud, card-carrying right-wing extremist -- especially if your card comes from Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell:
While Republicans who actually rely on votes to keep their jobs rather than, say, radio ads and base fundraising, there's horror over their fellow travelers' race-based smears (via reverse racism claims based on and inflating wildly upon yet another out-of-context quote) in vicious attempts to derail the historic nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court, the loudmouths are doubling and tripling down:
LIMBAUGH: The real question here that needs to be asked -- and nobody on our side, from a columnist to a TV commentator to anybody in our party has the guts to ask: How can a president nominate such a candidate? And how can a party get behind such a candidate? That's what would be asked if somebody were foolish enough to nominate David Duke or pick somebody even less offensive.
That's right, a Latina Federal Judge from the most diverse city in America, who graduated from Princeton and Yale Law School and worked for legendary NYC District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and has sat on the Federal bench longer than anyone currently serving on the Supreme Court had done at the time of their appointment is somehow the moral equivalent of the avowed white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Speaking of which, former Congressman Tom Tancredo, calls the La Raza, essentially the Latino version of the NAACP or B'nai B'rith, "a Latino Ku Klux Klan without the hoods or the nooses" and, regarding the Obama Administration, has "no idea whether they hate white people or not!" So whether or not his long-standing anti- illegal immigrant position has ever had any merit, he's revealed himself for what he truly is, without even knowing it.
Festering Newt Gingrich is getting in on the fundraising action himself, with mass emails going out that seems to nakedly pervert American history to his base-riling, dollar-raising purposes:
"If Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything, we cannot accept that conclusion," he writes. "It is simply un-American. There is no room on the bench of the United States Supreme Court for this worldview."
I don't even think I can untangle to parse that logic. Maybe he tweeted it then put it in an email.
LIDDY: Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.
So if the Hispanic GOP strategists aren't upset enough at their prominent party members' utterances, how about every woman in America?
With the GOP already coming up with strategies to take on Supreme Court nominees the master strategist hasn't chosen, let alone announced yet, one wait and wonders when the boulder will drop, as goes Roadrunner on Coyote, so it will go on the Republicans, please mark my words.
Is life not, all so often, as overdetermined as the sagest Hollywood drama? As the man drawing the mission of going up against the first part-African American President on his first Supreme Court appointment is ranking Republican Judiciary Committee member, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
And this the very committee that rejected him for a Federal prosecutor post years ago as he seemed, at the very least, soft on segregationist judges.
