In Honor of the Delaware GOP Senate Nominee
by digby
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"what digby sez..."
Month: September 2010
Synthesizing The Lunacy
by digby
I was very cavalier about this when I first posted in a year ago. I said it was a fantasy. (Not that I thought they couldn’t come back — I just had no idea the Tea Party would be able to elect so many nuts.)But it’s turned out to be very real:
Taking the stage, Bachmann thanked Schlafly, calling her an inspiration as a mother who transitioned into conservative politics, and said she considered the conference “a farewell party for ACORN!” The community organization group, she said, was the first, not the last, weak link in the liberal establishment.
“Defunding the left is going to be so easy,” said Bachmann, “and it’s going to solve so many of our problems.” She praised James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles, the people behind the ACORN sting. “Hannah and James used Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ — that’s the community organizer’s bible — against ACORN! Brilliant!”
Bachmann touched on the priorities of Republicans if they retook Congress in 2010, to “pass repealer bill after repealer bill,” to prevent the creation of a one-world currency, and to pull the government back from the “36 percent of private business profits” that she claimed it now controlled. And she said Michigan residents were “depressed enough” without Gitmo prisoners being relocated to state facilities where they could inspire more terrorists.
“This is where they learn conversion to Islam!” said Bachmann. “In the prisons!”
I have been wondering since 9/11 when the wingnuts would get around to really digging into that “Black Muslim” connection and they still haven’t managed to really nail it down, although they’ve been getting closer.
Cal Thomas edges even closer:
We are doing a poor job of fighting the terrorists at home if we continue to allow Muslim immigrants, especially from Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, into America. We won’t win this war if we permit the uncontrolled construction of mosques, as well as Islamic schools, some of which already have sown the seeds from which future terrorists will be cultivated. We won’t win this war if we continue to permit the large-scale conversion to Islam of prison inmates, many of whom become radicalized and upon release enlist in al-Qaida’s army.
That synthesizes the religiously intolerant, xenophobic, racism of the right wing in one short paragraph.
And these people are on the verge of taking over one of the two political parties of the most powerful nation in the world.
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The Teabag Canary
by digby
As we watch one of the two American political parties being formally taken over by the far right fringe, it’s worthwhile to recall that this has been building for a while. You’ll recall that back in 2007, the nativist talk radio freaks stopped comprehensive immigration reform in its tracks:
Comments by Republican senators on Thursday suggested that they were feeling the heat from conservative critics of the bill, who object to provisions offering legal status. The Republican whip, Trent Lott of Mississippi, who supports the bill, said: “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”
At some point, Mr. Lott said, Senate Republican leaders may try to rein in “younger guys who are huffing and puffing against the bill.”
Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, welcomed the president’s support for more spending on border security, but said, “There’s no reason why we should be forced to tie amnesty to it.”
Trent Lott’s out of politics. DeMint may be the new Senate GOP leader if his teabag candidates can pull it off in November. Some of us tried to warn them …
Oh, and by the way, the teabagger won the nomination for Castle’s House seat over the establishment candidate in Delaware tonight too. Here’s one his more memorable quotes:
“The exact phrase ‘separation of church and state’ came out of Adolf Hitler’s mouth. That’s where it comes from. The next time your liberal friends talk about separation of church and state, ask them why they’re Nazis.”
But no one can accuse us of being shrill, so that’s good.
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The Original Idiot
by digby
Before there were teabaggers, there was George:
In his new book, A Journey, Mr Blair writes that the former US president was confused by the presence of Guy Verhofstadt at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa.
“He didn’t know or recognise Guy, whose advice he listened to with considerable astonishment,” Mr Blair writes. “He then turned to me and whispered, ‘Who is this guy?’ ‘He is the prime minister of Belgium,’ I said.
“Belgium? George said, clearly aghast at the possible full extent of his stupidity. ‘Belgium is not part of the G8’.”
Mr Blair explained to Mr Bush that Mr Verhofstadt was there as “president of Europe”. Belgium held the presidency of the EU council at the time.
Mr Bush responded: “You got the Belgians running Europe?” before shaking his head, “now aghast at our stupidity”, Mr Blair writes.
That’s what they now call “common sense conservatism.” And anyway fuck a bunch of Europeans. What do they have to do with anything? Besides, it’s been proven that it doesn’t matter how stupid the American president is. He can get away with anything:
Elsewhere in the book Mr Blair claims that the president held an uncomplicated view of international affairs.
“George had immense simplicity in how he saw the world. Right or wrong it led to decisive leadership.
I’m still fairly stunned that the Republicans are recovering so soon after having inflicted that moron on the world, but it looks like many Americans much preferred idiot leadership. I’m sure whatever other halfwit they put up will be able to successfully carry on his legacy.
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Your Libertarian Future
by digby
“I’m against legislating morality. I mean, I’m for having crimes and having laws against things that are violent crimes but things that are non-violent shouldn’t be against the law.”
Sounds good. If someone kills you with poison food or steals all your money, you can always sue, right? Oh wait …
Check out this hair raising story from Taibbi, to see what it’s going to be like under our Libertarian overlords. It will be free, very free.
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We Make Them Do It
by digby
Look here! My old pal Dday has moved far beyond these humble pages and is hanging in very exalted intellectual circles these days. He has a very impressive essay featured in the this month’s Democracy in which he responds to Michael Tomasky’s “Against Despair”.
Of particular interest is the story of Francis Townsend, the grassroots activist usually credited with the enactment of social security. Turns out he was a dirty, hippie blogger of his day. And he was shrill. Very shrill.
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Full Service Astroturf
by digby
It’s amazing what having billionaire backing can do for a movement. Here’s Adele Stan on the organizing prowess of the Tea Party:
Twice in the course of the last two and a half weeks, the right has drawn thousands of its activists to Washington, D.C., a town once known as a liberal’s paradise, overtaking the National Mall, and its surrounding restaurants and coffee shops. This weekend features not only FreedomWorks’ 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington and its blogger conference, but a September 11 rally by a more far-right group, Unite in Action, and an organizing conference directed Ralph Reed, the GOP campaign consultant and former Christian Coalition executive director who was implicated (but never charged) in the Jack Abramoff bribery scandal. Two weekends ago, Glenn Beck’s rally filled the Mall with as many as 300,000 Tea Partiers. What is the progressive counterpart to these activities? Not much.
She doesn’t mention how useful it was for Beck to enlist the preachers in the tea party crusade for this purpose, but getting the churches on board provides a whole other organizing structure.
Maybe this stuff is going on on the progressive side, but if it is I’m unaware of it. As Stan points out, the October 2nd march has the potential to draw a lot of people, but as far as we know, there’s none of the attendant training and organizing. And needless to say, we don’t have billionaires underwriting the lodging and transportation so people without a lot of extra money can attend.
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More Preserves, Please!
by tristero
“More preserves please”: That’s what I originally thought Kevin Drum meant in this headline, and I was looking forward to learning something about canning, which I’m very interested in. But nooo… He sends us here, to a defense of BHA and BHT.
For the record let me state that given the existing food supply system in the United States, I completely agree that BHA and BHT are terribly important to protect the public’s health.
And that, dear friends, is the reason why – once I learned how our food is manufactured – I have done everything in my power to sever as many ties as I can between the American industrial food system and my family.
Perhaps I should explain. It’s actually quite simple.
All I want is a delicious meal. But the main focus of American food factories is to manufacture stuff that’s easy for them to make, store, distribute, and sell. Beyond that, they’re primarily interested in preventing their consumers from getting sick, or worse. Oh, sure, it has to taste pretty good, but that’s a bloody bore and a hassle to do with fresh ingredients and nearly impossible to do with any consistency on a huge scale. So, to make it as easy as possible, they spike mediocre ingredients with a bunch of chemicals to create the illusion that it’s actually made from fresh, vine-ripened, and humanely treated chicken nugget starter cultures (genetically modified so they grow their own batter!), and yeah, the best of it don’t taste too bad.
Fuck all that. All I want is a good tasting meal! I couldn’t care less whether these companies make a profit. I have no interest in helping them avoid lawsuits by voluntarily ingesting poison-preventing additives about which I know nothing. And I have even less interest in researching whether those additives have their own health consequences (or don’t). I don’t care. All I want to do is eat good food.
Let me put it another way. Who wants to eat something so fucking old it’s gotta be pumped with extra shit to make sure you don’t throw up? Who knows what else has been done to it, what else has been added, where it’s been, what corners have been cut? If all I want is something that tastes good – of course the food I eat shouldn’t make me sick, for goodness sakes! – why do I need to worry about any of this?
I don’t. Nobody does.
Everyone makes their own tradeoffs. Is it time consuming to cook my own food? Indeed it is. Is it expensive? Compared to feeding your family certain industrially manufactured preparations, it is.
For myself, I find it a complete waste of time to research which additives are safe, and which aren’t – and keep up with the latest discoveries and changes of opinions. If you eat food you prepare yourself, you don’t have to bother worrying whether or not HFCS is bad or merely empty calories – or what the latest study of BHA found out about its effects on rats. It’s all beside the point. As for cost, I’m solidly middle-class and I have the usual difficult financial choices to make that the middle-class does today. But really, my kid will go to a decent school whether I spend a little extra on organic eggs. The main hardship from eating well that I have to contend I really can’t afford to save up for one of these, and that breaks my heart, but if truth be told, at the rate I’d be able to save if I survived on cat food, I’d finally get one around the time of my 213th birthday.
As they say, ymmv, But the way I see it, whether the substances that American food companies want to add to your diet are very cancerous at high doses – or not – really isn’t the crucial issue. The real issue is whether these chemicals are required in order for me to eat delicious food. They aren’t, I don’t need ’em, I don’t want ’em. The end.
Whatever They’re Paying Their Publicist, It’s Nowhere Near Enough
by tristero
Man, now, that’s some world-class flacking! If I had BP’s pr agent, I’d be bigger than Elvis. Hell, I’d be bigger than… than… Justin Bieber!
Or maybe you think New York Times articles with headlines like Gulf May Avoid Direst Predictions After Oil Spill just spontaneously write themselves. Or, or… haha, no! Nobody could be that naive! Who in their right mind could possibly believe that this article actually represents the best efforts of serious reporters trying to ferret out the truth?
What’s that? Did you say, “Hey! You never know!” As if it could be true that the effects of the BP explosion and underwater leak aren’t really that bad? Wow…
Well, yes, I guess so: Y’ never know.
(smirk)
A Great Liberal Hero
by tristero
Her name is Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey and her achievements are extraordinary.
Remember this, people:
Should some jerk try to convince you that “government isn’t the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” just mention Dr. Kelsey and her work at FDA.