My cousin was in DC on Sunday:
"Talked to a cashier at a gas station outside of DC and she said she knew there were over one million there. I said that that was not correct and that the estimates were in the 60 thousand range. She got very huffy and said that the Real America would be back in 2010 and they'd be fighting 'as needed' to make it happen. I smiled and said, 'not a chance in hell sweetheart' and left. My blood pressure was up all the way to the West VA border!"Thers: Deja Vu All Over Again
A glitch in the Matrix, or a temporal loop back to the 1990s? The WSJ Opinion section opines:John Cole: Maybe They Are On To SomethingObama and AcornShoot me.
Is there a case for a special prosecutor?
President and Prince of Darkness Sept. 16: The Huffington Post's Frank Schaeffer tries to help Rachel Maddow make sense of a bewildering new poll showing a surprising number of New Jersey Republicans believe President Obama is the anti-Christ.The newest wingnut endeavor:
Rep. Jack Kingston’s (R-Ga.) has rapidly signed up 99 co-sponsors for his Czar Accountability and Reform Act of 2009, which I wrote about last week. All but one of them are Republicans: the member of the majority party backing Kingston’s crusade to prevent presidential advisers who haven’t been approved by the Senate from collecting salaries is Rep. William Clay (D-Mo.).From wikipedia:
Also according to wikipedia, this:
Turdblossom wasn’t the only nickname Karl Rove had. Another nickname for him was “Domestic Policy Czar.”
I understand that consistency is not the Republican strongpoint. But would it have really hurt for them to wait a year before going batshit insane? Even most of America still remembers the last eight years, but they are going to the full monty with the nonsense anyway. I mean seriously, what is left for them to do? How do you top the last couple of months? Release a competing budget with no numbers?
Oh, nevermind.
(via)
*** Update ***
If the Republicans really were concerned with fiscal responsibility, they would stop making up so much shit that someone has to be employed full time by the White House refuting their lies.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
TNC and Joe Klein both have good pieces up about the racist angle in Republican attacks on Obama. TNC makes the point that what angers the right most is that “Barack Obama, bourgeois in every way that bourgeois is right and just, will not dance.” Klein makes the point that it may not be white-on-black racism per se so much as it is generalized xenophobia and paranoia that animates the birther crowd.
My opinion is that it’s obviously no coincidence that the first time a president was heckled from the House floor it was a white southerner heckling the first black president. And if Joe Wilson doesn’t laugh at racist jokes, that may be because he takes racism very seriously, to paraphrase the great Jake Gittes.
But there’s another angle on this that I haven’t seen discussed. Klein, in particular, should be familiar with it from covering Clinton, though I doubt he’d admit it (pundit’s code and all that). It’s that personally destroying your opponent is an important part of Republican politics. I’m not making a value judgement here, but it’s a fact that these days at least, Republicans are much more aggressive about dehumanizing Democrats than vice versa. Have you ever seen a Democratic presidential ad as personal and free of issues as McCain’s “Celebrity” ad? And, in the end, what Obama went through last fall was pretty mild compared with what Clinton, Gore, and Kerry got hit with, and with with what Obama is being hit with now.
With Clinton in particular, the notion that he was the first black president because Republicans treated him like a black man is right on target. Racism is about viewing others as less than human. And so was Clenis-hunting. I remember having a talk with a Republican acquaintance of mine who told me that “Kerry and Gore are just weird people, like aliens, they’re not really humans.” The politics of personal destruction and the politics of racially-based debasement are striking similar.
- from the comments:
Mike G
On the right bullying holds a special exalted position. This is a movement that adores bullies, that cheers their bullying slogans at conventions, that longs for a bully mean enough to put the weaklings back in their place forever, that has lionized bullies from Joe McCarthy to Westbrook Pegler to Bill O’Reilly to George Allen to Michelle Malkin, a pundit with the appearance of a Bratz doll but the soul of Chucky.—Thomas Frank
If you have much familiarity with Rethug fundamentalist churches, you’ll find a deep-seated viciousness and intellectual violence woven into their ideology, and a powerful appetite for stories about killing, hating and punishment.
I confess a gap in my education about this right wing populist trope called "producerism" and it's utterly fascinating. I urge you to read this whole article by Michelle Goldberg which elegantly expands and explains the concept I rather crudely attempted to address in my earlier post today.Mullins: Tea Party Protesters Protest D.C. Metro Service
Here's an excerpt:Today's grassroots right is by all appearances as socially conservative as ever, but its tone and its rhetoric are profoundly different than they were even a year ago. For the last 15 years, the right-wing populism has been substantially electrified by sexual anxiety. Now it's charged with racial anxiety. By all accounts, there were more confederate flags than crosses at last weekend's anti-Obama rally in Washington, DC. Glenn Beck has become a far more influential figure on the right than, say, James Dobson, and he's much more interested in race than in sexual deviancy. For the first time in at least a decade, middle class whites have been galvanized by the fear that their taxes are benefiting lazy, shiftless others. The messianic, imperialistic, hubristic side of the right has gone into retreat, and a cramped, mean and paranoid style has come to the fore.Yes. The crosses are gone, replaced by the confederate flag and paeans to John Galt. And the repression of the poor put-upon majority Christians is replaced by the poor put-upon majority white people. Same people, different symbols.
To some extent, a newfound suspicion of government was probably inevitable as soon as Democrats took power. At the same time, with the implosion of the Christian right's leadership and the last year's cornucopia of GOP sex scandals, the party needed to take a break from incessant moralizing, and required a new ideology to take the place of family values cant. The belief system analysts sometimes call "producerism" served nicely. Producerism sees society as divided between productive workers -- laborers, small businessmen and the like -- and the parasites who live off them. Those parasites exist at both the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy -- they are both financiers and welfare bums -- and their larceny is enabled by the government they control.
Producerism has often been a trope of right-wing movements, especially during times of economic distress, when many people sense they're getting screwed. Its racist (and often anti-Semitic) potential is obvious, so it gels well with the climate of Dixiecrat racial angst occasioned by the election of our first black president. The result is the return of the repressed.
We are living in some fascinating times aren't we?
Protesters who attended Saturday’s Tea Party rally in Washington found a new reason to be upset: Apparently they are unhappy with the level of service provided by the subway system.
Rep. Kevin Brady called for a government investigation into whether the government-run subway system adequately prepared for this weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services.
Seriously.
The Texas Republican on Wednesday released a letter he sent to Washington’s Metro system complaining that the taxpayer-funded subway system was unable to properly transport protesters to the rally to protest government spending and expansion.
“These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration,” Brady wrote. “These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them.”
A spokesman for Brady says that “there weren’t enough cars and there weren’t enough trains.” Brady tweeted as much from the Saturday march. “METRO did not prepare for Tea Party March! More stories. People couldn’t get on, missed start of march. I will demand answers from Metro,” he wrote on Twitter.
Brady says in his letter to Metro that overcrowding forced an 80-year-old woman and elderly veterans in wheelchairs to pay for cabs. He concludes that it “appears that Metro added no additional capacity to its regular weekend schedule.”
No comments:
Post a Comment