Angel Of Death
by digby
They don’t use Hitler images, so I guess this in bounds:
I don’t know what to say about this except that it’s filled with lies and distortions. You’ll have to make your own judgments about the images and content.
Just don’t call these people the Taliban. They are Americans, after all, which means they can’t be compared. And anyway they haven’t executed anyone since Dr. George Tiller. (And that’s just one guy recently so it hardly counts at all.)
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GOP Wisdom
by digby
A Republican explains our problems and their solutions:
YOU are the government! You are God’s minister to punish evil and reward good conduct. But, too many Christians have refused the figurative “sword” or the power that in this great country, this little experiment in democracy as a republic, is supposed to be held by YOU. You are the one God has ordained to run the country, but you haven’t even participated … That is also why we have penalties for societal good things like marriage (the income tax “marriage penalty”) and for 45 years we have rewarded having children out of wedlock instead of helping incentivise such women to finish their education. It is why we have a death tax that says you were too successful so we must take 55% away and give to the government. It is why people have in the past been threatened with removal from low-rent government housing for saving too much money for a down payment on a home. We punish good behavior too often and reward potentially hurtful conduct. It is also why we passed a Wall Street bailout to reward uncontrolled and irresponsible greed. It is also why TARP has not already been repealed, since it would mean admitting that maybe those who voted for it, including Republican leaders, had made a mistake. So, as unpleasant as it may be, far too many of the employers, We the PEOPLE, have been lazy and apathetic which has caused we the people to get what we deserve. But it is high time the people of this country started deserving better. It is time that the PEOPLE as rulers in this land started exercising the God-given power in this country by voting, by serving on jury duty, filling appointed positions when called upon, by supporting the best candidates, and even by running for office. It is high time that we gave God something to smile about again.
That’s Louis Gohmert, a member of the House of Representatives.
You really should read the whole thing. It’s quite an interesting history lesson. I particularly liked this part:
One of the founders’ proudest accomplishments was a government that had so many checks and balances that it would be difficult to overstep governing boundaries. Since they did not trust the hired help to restrict themselves in making laws only as directed by the people who hired them, they created not one body of representatives, but two.
The second body would not be merely be socially elite figures, but would have full power to stop the larger body from making laws it did not agree with. In fact, the second body, we know to be the Senate, would be SELECTED by the state governments to insure that the larger body didn’t go off on a tangent and pass laws that would take away the states’ authority which was ultimately protected in the 10th Amendment.
If a federal senator ever did try to take away a state’s rights, that senator could be, would be, hauled back to the state and replaced by someone who was not complicit in big federal government usurpation. The founders’ idea was to keep as much power locally as possible while still allowing enough power at the federal level to increase chances of protecting all the states from enemies, both foreign and domestic.
It’s really not fair to look at Angle/O’Donnell/Miller et al as something new. We already have a bunch of these unusual people in the congress. It’s just reaching critical mass.
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They Can See East Germany From Their House
by digby
So I watched the mindblowing Youtube of Joe Miller’s Matrix thugs treating the press like protesters in Communist East Germany (obviously at Miller’s bidding, seeing as he admires the their policies so much) and couldn’t shake the idea that it reminded me of something.
And then it hit me:
Sarah Palin & company spent several days in Homer filming her “Sarah Palin’s Uh-laska” show. (Eyes rolled).
On the public dock, private security patted down private citizens. The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizure from their government. Private security searching private citizens in a public place, doesn’t fall under that category. It’s a bit more hinky.
Whether it was TLC or the Palins who contracted security, under what authority did they operate in a public location? Were they looking for weapons? Well, now there’s a Second Amendment issue.
This is Alaska, we carry guns. You can open-carry or acquire a concealed weapons permit from the state. If you are a law abiding citizen, you don’t even need a permit. Sarah Palin recently endorsed Alaska Tea Party Candidate Joe Miller for US Senate. His supporters carried assault rifles in last month’s Golden Days Parade in Fairbanks. If weapons are good enough for a public parade, weapons should be fine at a public dock.
Maybe it wasn’t about guns. Maybe it was about cameras. In that case, it’s a First Amendment issue. Whether Palin had a problem with the First Amendment, the Second Amendment or the Fourth Amendment, she contradicted her entourage’s actions at the Homer dock.
Risking accusations of being all “Wee-Wee’d Up”, one Homer woman made a sign in her shed. She then took the 30-foot-by-3-foot banner out to the boat harbor. It said “WORST GOVERNOR EVER”. Kathleen Gustafson is a teacher married to a local commercial fisherman. She felt like Sarah Palin had let the state down by becoming a dollar-chasing celebrity and ignoring the oath of office she’d sworn on a Bible.
[…]Saturday morning, Billy Sullivan helped Kathleen tape the banner up on his place of business at the top of the boat ramp. Then here she came. Sarah.
She couldn’t just walk by. Only a few fishermen and tourists would have seen the banner, but Sarah had to stop and protest….
Billy Sullivan caught much of the interchange on his cell phone camera. The back of her security guard’s head and Todd Palin attempted to block Billy’s view…
In what has become typical tragic irony, Sarah initially claimed to support Kathleen’s First Amendment Rights. But as soon as Billy Sullivan walked toward the dock, one of Palin’s entourage tore down the sign to great applause from her group.
Todd Palin approached Billy (who owns a business called Dockside Fish and buys halibut on that dock) and asked him to get out of the Discovery crew’s shot. “You just can’t get enough of her, can you?” he asked. An Alaska State Trooper told Billy he should call the Homer Police Department and report the trespassing and destruction of property.
I lived in Alaska for a long time. I’m married to an Alaskan and some of my best friends are Alaskans. This isn’t an Alaskan thing. It’s a teabagger thing. They are authoritarians. They have no respect for others’ individual rights, only their own.
Here’s how the head Miller thug sees the issue (backed up by the campaign, I might add)
Fulton said that as a security guard he is familiar with state law, and he believes he has the legal authority to police “private events” no matter where might take place. He refused to answer how exactly a member of the public attending Miller’s town hall meeting at a public school was supposed to know it was a private event, but said the Joe Miller sign outside was the giveaway.
The meeting was open to the public. There were no names taken at the door. Reporters were not asked to apply for credentials.[It was even publicized on Twitter and Facebook — ed]
“This is a simple trespassing issue,” Fulton insisted, but no one else trespassing in the hallway with Hopfinger was detained. Fulton said Hopfinger was special because he showed those signs of “violence.” Friends of Hopfinger said the reporter has been known to lose his temper and yell at people on occasion, but he’s a bit florid, visibly out of shape, and no apparent threat in scuffle. Some of his friends joke that his wife could probably take him in a fight.
Fulton agreed with Hopfinger that there were a lot of people in the hallway. Some of them might have been other reporters, he said.
“I think we told them (all) to leave,” Fulton said. “It’s not a public (place) if it’s leased. It was a private event … because it’s a private event, and we’ve taken over the school.”
Fulton said he felt no obligation to explain to Hopfinger how a reporter doing his job — asking questions of a political candidate — could be trespassing at a public school during a public event.
“I don’t educate the public,” he said.
Fulton said he told Hopfinger to leave. Hopfinger didn’t leave. So he banged him into a wall and cuffed him. End of story.
There you have it. Imagine what would have happened if nobody had cameras.
Update: So it turns out that what Miller was reprimanded for was using borough computers to cheat on an online political poll and then covering it up. The guy’s a judge.
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A Reporter Said She Looked Asian
by digby
Let’s face it — she’s a racist fundamentalist and a moron. There’s really nothing more to be said. If she wins it’s because a majority of Nevadans would rather be represented by a racist, fundamentalist moron than Harry Reid:
“So that’s what we want is a secure and sovereign nation and, you know, I don’t know that all of you are Latino. Some of you look a little more Asian to me. I don’t know that. [Note: it’s the Hispanic Student Union. The whole room is Hispanic teenagers.] What we know, what we know about ourselves is that we are a melting pot in this country. My grandchildren are evidence of that. I’m evidence of that. I’ve been called the first Asian legislator in our Nevada State Assembly.”
That last comment, about her being called the first Asian legislator? I have no idea what she is talking about
UPDATE: The Angle campaign says she made that remark about being the first Asian legislator because “a reporter thought she looked Asian.” OK.
Seriously, this woman shouldn’t be allowed to drive much less be allowed to serve in the US Senate.
Keep in mind that besides the total idiocy of the comment itself, at the same event she claimed that her racist ad didn’t necessarily feature Latinos:
Angle: I think that you’re misinterpreting those commercials. I’m not sure that those are Latinos in that commercial. What it is, is a fence and there are people coming across that fence. What we know is that our northern border is where the terrorists came through. That’s the most porous border that we have. We cannot allow terrorists; we cannot allow anyone to come across our border if we don’t know why they’re coming. So we have to secure all of our borders and that’s what that was about, is border security. Not just our southern border, but our coastal border and our northern border.
So maybe she was talking about Chinese Commies or Malaysian terrorists coming over the border from Canada? Either way you look at it, whether she can tell the difference or not, she’s very, very worried about the non-white hordes taking over America.
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Dirty Money, Dirty Lies
by digby
Greg Sargent makes trouble by pointing out the obvious fact that those nice All-American citizens Karl Rove and the Chamber of Commerce are not only bankrolling the Republican Party with foreign money (which we all know can’t possibly be true and even if it is nobody cares) they are using their mega-millions to spread outright lies:
Last week I noted that the ads that have been bankrolled by Karl Rove’s groups and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce against Senate Dem candidates across the country have been widely debunked by independent fact-checkers for their multiple falsehoods and distortions. Turns out the same is true of the Chamber’s ads against House Democrats. These Chamber ads, which are running or have run in multiple districts across the country, contain many claims that are demonstrable distortions or have been repeatedly debunked as false by independent fact-checkers. This is the side of this story that continues to unfold under the media radar. Much of the media focus has been on the high-profile Beltway spat between these groups and the White House and Dems over their undisclosed donors. But the ads themselves are not receiving anywhere near the high-profile media scrutiny that Dem claims about the Chamber have — even though they constitute a massive national campaign flooding airwaves in multiple races that could tip the balance of power in Congress.
Read on for the details.
I don’t now if we will ever be able to tally up the numbers spent in this campaign and we certainly will never know the names of all those who bankrolled it. But the scale of this corporate intervention into politics is unprecedented and their willingness to just lie outright — with no fear reprisals — is fairly amazing. American politics are, in effect, a financial free-for-all now and I would guess they will stay that way for at least another 20 years until the Roberts Court can turn over (and even then, under liberals, the principle of stare decisis will undoubtedly be rediscovered.)
What the hell are we going to do about this?
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Wear Purple On Wednesday
by digby
I love purple and will happily join in:
It’s been decided! On October 20th, 2010, we will wear purple in honor of the LGBT youth who have committed suicide in recent weeks/months due to homophobic abuse in their homes and schools.
PURPLE represents Spirit on the LGBTQ flag and that’s exactly what we’d like all of you to have with you: spirit. Please know that times will get better and that you will meet people who will love you and respect you for who you are, no matter your sexuality.
Please wear purple on October 20th. Tell your family, friends, co-workers, neighbors and schools.
RIP
Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase, Asher Brown, Cody J. Barker, Harrison Chase Brown, Caleb Nolt, Billy Lucas, Jeanine Blanchette, and Chantal Dube.Spread The Message. It is important that all this hate be stopped
Purple was also the color of the suffragists, so it has a long history of being used as a public identifier for civil rights. (I suspect it may have been a slap in the face to the royalists originally, but I don’t know that.)
In any case, this is an easy thing to do and would certainly make any gay teenagers you might know feel a sense of solidarity to see random people wearing purple for this cause.
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Bring On The Smelling Salts
by digby
..Rand Paul, the pot smoking libertarian Tea Partier is now rending his garments like a typical social conservative Christian and condemning Jack Conway for being insensitive to his religion. (And once again the liberal intelligentsia is abandoning Conway because he’s made an ad that they feel in “inappropriate.”)
The fact is that Rand Paul, once a hardcore libertarian, condemned religion and certainly didn’t believe in social conservatism. Tens of thousands of libertarians sent him money just this year believing that’s the kind of Tea Partier he was. Now, like the rest of them he’s changed his tune and he’s become a Church Lady Bible thumper, excoriating Conway for saying the word “hell” at a political picnic. This is a bullshit game and Conway has every right to call him out as a hypocrite.
This race in Kentucky is a vicious dogfight that very possibly may end up being the only chance the Democrats have to hold the Senate. The Teabaggers and other right wing deviants are running disgusting ads all over the country ripping Democrats to shreds and appealing to basest instincts of the voters. (Check this one out if you want to see something bad — and he’s already winning his race!)
But the good news is that if we can help Rand Paul drag down Conway and give the villagers an “even the liberals” narrative for Paul to use as his sanctimonious fainting couch, at least on the morning after the election, when the US Congress is taken over by antediluvian throwbacks, we’ll all be able to say that we didn’t stoop to their level. I’m sure that will be very comforting.
When this new progressive movement started, one of its tenets was that if progressive candidates would take risks, would be aggressive against the Republicans, would shake up the establishment and stop being the milquetoast campaigners that had turned the Democratic party into an embarrassment — we would get their backs. Some of them believed us and they went outside the normal cautious “don’t make trouble” approach and came out swinging. It’s risky, and sometimes it misses. But taking risks is what we asked them to do and that’s what we signed up for.
We have two weeks to go and some of these races are very, very tight. They may all lose, some might win, we just don’t know. This is an ugly election — one of the worst I’ve ever seen — financed by billionaires who are very happy to let the GOP run completely wild as long as it takes care of the owners. But it isn’t ugly because the Democrats have been hurling mud. It’s ugly because this ugly political movement is fighting as dirty as candidates can fight. Some Democrats aren’t rolling over and playing dead. The least we can do is have their backs as we promised we would.
You can donate to Conway’s campaign here.
Update: Here’s Theda Skopkol:
I have a real problem with all the prissy condemnations coming from liberal commentators about Conway’s ad on Rand Paul’s youthful playing with contempt for Christianity. People are acting as if it is some kind of political sin to point out to ordinary Kentucky voters the kind of stuff about Paul’s extremist libertarian views that everyone in the punditry already knows. This does not amount to saying that Christian belief is a “requirement for public office” as one site huffs. It is a matter of letting regular voters who themselves care deeply about Christian belief know that Paul is basically playing them. No different really than letting folks who care about Social Security and Medicare know that Paul is playing them,
One reason that Dems do not seem to be able to play hardball — in a viciously hardball political world — is that Dems often lack conviction or the will to be eloquently honest (for example, on taxes). But an equal problem is that when someone does play hardball, the rest of the prissy liberal Mugwumps tut-tut them about it. I say, go for it, Jack Conway. Does anyone doubt that Paul and his supporters would have used similar publicly documented material against Conway (or even less material)?
Update II : Markos has more
Update III: Sarah Posner thinks it didn’t go far enough
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Tom Holland Is Shrill
by digby
Joe Sudbay reports that Gubernatorial candidate Sam Brownback has an Aliban-Tay Problem:
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Holland on Thursday called on his Republican opponent, Sam Brownback, to denounce Lou Engle, a controversial anti-homosexual minister, whom Holland compared to Fred Phelps.
“I am calling on Sam Brownback to formally denounce Lou Engle — not just `some’ of his statements — but his entire message of violence, hate and bigotry.
“Lou Engle sounds a lot like Fred Phelps,” Holland said referring to the anti-homosexual preacher known for his protests at the funerals of soldiers killed in war. “But the difference is unlike Fred Phelps, Lou Engle lived with Sam Brownback in Washington, D.C.,” Holland said.
Brownback can’t and won’t denounce Engle…
Brownback/Engle: Making Kansas the next Uganda?
It’s very rude of Holland to draw attention to Brownback’s fundamentalist faith and close relationship with someone who was intimately involved with the leadership of Uganda (“the first purpose driven nation”) and its laws which made homosexuality a capital crime. After all, you can’t compare such things to really terrible people who … kill homosexuals.
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Drop Zone Liberty
by digby
Freedom, teabagger style:
The editor of the Alaska Dispatch website was arrested by U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller’s private security guards Sunday as the editor attempted to interview Miller on camera at the end of a public event in an Anchorage school. Tony Hopfinger was handcuffed by the guards and detained in a hallway at Central Middle School until Anchorage police came and told the guards to release him. Hopfinger has not been charged but the owner of the Drop Zone, private security firm that’s been providing Miller’s security, accused Hopfinger of trespassing at the public event, a “town hall” meeting sponsored by the Miller campaign. The owner, William Fulton, also said Hopfinger assaulted a man by shoving him. Anchorage Police who responded to the call said they would leave it up to the District Attorney’s office to decide whether to prosecute. Hopfinger, who was holding a small video camera, said he was attempting to get Miller to answer questions about why he was disciplined when he worked as a part-time attorney at the Fairbanks North Star Borough. He said he pushed the man away after he was surrounded by Miller supporters and security guards and felt threatened. Fulton said the man who was shoved was not hurt.
Joe Miller is such a stickler about the constitution there must be a right for political candidates to arrest citizens to keep them from asking questions in there somewhere, right?
I keep hearing that the problem with these Tea Partiers is that they are just average citizens who don’t have any experience. Joe Miller is a lawyer and a magistrate who went to Yale Law. I think he knows very well what he’s doing.
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Survival of the Richest
by digby
Man, Chris Wallace really, really wants to make my old age nasty, brutish and short. (Sadly, at my age, my chances of becoming a millionaire are almost a high as my chances of becoming an Olympic gold medal ice dancer.)
WALLACE: “So now, as a non-career politician, as the anti-Barbara Boxer, you tell me specifically what are you going to do to cut the billions, the trillions, of dollars in entitlements?”
FIORINA: … See, Chris, I have to — you know, Chris, I have to say, with all due respect, you’re asking a typical political question. […]
WALLACE: Ms. Fiorina, but that’s where the money is. The money is in Medicare. The money is in Social Security. We’ve got the baby boomers coming. There is going to be a huge explosion of entitlement spending, and you call it a political question when I ask you to name one single entitlement expenditure you’re willing to cut. FIORINA: Chris, I believe that to deal with entitlement reform, which we must deal with, we ought to put every possible solution up on the table, except we should be very clear that we are not going to cut benefits to those nearing retirement or those in retirement. But having said all of that, for years and years, career politicians, frankly, of both parties have said, Oh, no, the only way to cut spending is to deal with entitlements. It’s the political third rail. And then they never get about the business of cutting out waste and inefficiency. They never get to the point of banning earmarks. WALLACE: But we’ve been talking about waste, fraud and inefficiency — FIORINA: Exactly. Exactly.
WALLACE: — for 30 years. I covered Ronald Reagan in 1980 when he talked about it. There isn’t that kind of money in waste, fraud, and inefficiency. FIORINA: But you know what, Chris? The budget just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And every year as it gets bigger, particularly in the last two, there is more waste, fraud and inefficiency. And you’re right, nobody ever gets around to it. It’s why voters in California and, I believe, a lot of voters all across the country are tired of career politicians. […] WALLACE: I’m going to try — I’m going to try one last time and if you don’t want to answer it, Ms. Fiorina, you don’t have to. […] You’re not willing to put forward a single benefit — I’m not even talking about the people that are 60 or, let alone, 65 or 70. I’m talking about people under 55. You’re not willing to say there’s a single benefit eligibility for Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security that you’re willing to say, Yeah, I would cut that? FIORINA: blah, blah, blah, conversation, bipartisan, yadda yadda yadda.
Granted, Fiorina is a typical Republican putz and she loves to talk about cutting spending and eliminating the deficit and yet has no answers for how we’re supposed to do it. But the arrogant and wealthy Wallace’s lies, distortions and arrogant insistence that “that’s where the money is” and that people are gonna have to pony up is just sickening.
Sadly, his point of view isn’t a FOX phenomenon. It’s beltway conventional wisdom.
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