Tim F. on The Dave Neiwert Decade
The sad part is that we do not even have to wait to see what happens next. Half a mile from my house a relatively ordinary freeper/stormfronter shot three policemen because he thought Obama would take his guns away.
All these guys need is one martyr to put on their t-shirts and name blogs after. Nobody needs to get shot, although they would love it if someone did. Their intense police state paranoia will be validated enough when a local cop confiscates some bubba’s precious AR-15. Rumors were enough to send several recent crazed shooters over the edge. How many more need just one aggrieved victim of guvmint overreach with a photo and a name?
The second funny thing is that I don’t think that any of these guys have any idea what to do when they have their little revolution. I suppose they hope to take power just by making America ungovernable by anyone else. That works of course, but you need a crippling depression (ergo, anti-stimulus frenzy). You need a credible enemy group to rally against, and demonizing ‘liberals’ (and attendant hate magnets such immigrants, minorities, poor people, rich people who don’t hate the first three groups enough, etc) is just stupid. The word means nothing any more. If a fire-breathing Republican crosses Glenn Beck, the base calls him an Obama-loving liberal. Pick any three guvmint-hating bubbas and one of them will inevitably be more ‘liberal’ than the other two.
Honestly, I would pay good money to watch people who associate book learnin’ with the enemy try and fail to produce a modern-day Federalist Papers. If they do manage something it will be the first book ever written in all caps.
DougJ: Boycotting those who boycott the boycotters
Sargent: Poll: Republicans Totally Alone In Their Embrace Of “Death Panel” ClaimThat’s where all this ends, isn’t it?
Who would have thought that a time would come when conservatives would be boycotting Walmart and Krispy Kreme while flocking to Whole Foods?
(I still say it was dumb of the Whole Foods CEO to trash health care reform, the same way it would be dumb of the commissioner of NASCAR to endorse Cindy Sheehan for Congress or co-write a book with Richard Dawkins.)
Update. I see others are thinking the same thing. Now, to be clear, people can boycott all they want to, but the conservative list of boycotted companies has gotten awfully long.
Yesterday I previewed the new Research 2000 poll for DailyKos, noting it finds an astonishing 57% of Republicans either believes, or isn’t prepared to reject, the claim that Dems would create “death panels” that would make health care decisions based on a patient’s “productivity in society.”
Now the full poll is out, and the findings are even more interesting: They show Republicans are entirely alone in embracing this notion.
While nearly a third of Republicans say they do believe in the death panels, only eight percent of independents believe in them.
And while only a minority of Republicans, 43%, is willinging to say they don’t believe in the death panels, an overwhelming majority of independents, 76%, reject the idea. That’s a spread of 33%.
Dems, of course, are even further away from Republicans on this. But the key finding here is that huge gap between GOP and indy opinion on what constitutes, well, factual reality. It’s yet another data point supporting the notion that the deepening isolation of Republicans is a major political story right now.
Josh Marshall on The Deep Wackadoodle
We're getting more background on that guy with the AR-15 assault rifle outside the Obama event in Phoenix. Turns out it was two guys who knew each other from working on the Ron Paul campaign -- small world, right? And they told the local police ahead of time what they were going to do because they wanted to avoid what happened the last time they did something like this back in their 90s era militia days. There's also a right wing talk radio angle. Read the whole story.
Late Update: One fun extra detail: the guy who planned the whole says he was motivated in part by William Kostric, the guy who brought the gun to event last week in New Hampshire.
Maddow battles Armey on 'Meet the Press' Aug. 17: The Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington weighs in on msnbc's Rachel Maddow's heated debate over health care reform with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey on Sunday's edition of "Meet the Press."
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
You want a simple message to counter dishonest fear mongering? How's this, Republicans want to do away with Medicare. They've always wanted to take it away, and if they get half a chance in the future they'll get rid of it then. It's not hard to find examples of them saying so in their own words since Medicare started.
Ronald Reagan in the 60s: "if you don’t [stop Medicare] ... you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free."
Republican Bob Dole openly bragged in 1996 that he was one of 12 House members who voted against creating Medicare. "I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare ..."
GOP guru Newt Gingrich said of Medicare, "We don't get rid of it in round one because we don't think that's politically smart, we don't think that's the right way to go through a transition, but we believe it's going to wither on the vine." He then went on to propose cutting Medicare by 14% and forcing millions of senior citizens to seek out private HMOs or go without, all to help make sure Medicare would 'wither on the vine.' And it continues right into present day.
Roy Blunt: "You could certainly argue that government should have never have gotten in the health care business, and that might have been the best argument of all, to figure out how people could have had more access to a competitive marketplace."
Former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey reaffirmed this week on MtP that he thinks Medicare is "tryanny" and if that's not worrisome enough, he wants to "phase out" social security too.
Republicans want to do away with Medicare because they're against government healthcare, always have been, always will be. That's a core plank in GOP ideology, they hold it as dear and precious as some hold theology. Just yesterday, when asked about government healthcare, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said the "government is a predator, not a competitor" and went on to note he wouldn't vote for any healthcare reform bill as a matter of conservative principle, even if it has everything he wants in it. So when a Republican talks about "reform," says we must "get the government out of healthcare," pitches convoluted tax schemes and private accounts for the affluent, or spits out terms like "socialized medicine," like a dog whistle they all mean the same thing: getting rid of Medicare.
Forget about grandma being unplugged, grandma won't be able to afford being seen, much less be able to pay for hospital admission. Grandma is on her own. All so that conservative zillionaires and their Republican congressional lackeys can save an extra 0.0145 of their gross, bloated paycheck, the same flat rate we all invest to keep millions of senior citizens alive and healthy today.
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