Teabonics
by digby
I can’t vouch for these signs — for all I know they are all photo-shopped. But if they are real, they certainly do provide for some smug and superior snickering for the liberal elite snobs like us.
As someone who makes public spelling and punctuation errors every day of my life, I’m in no position to gloat and I’m not. But this one truly is amazing for the sheer scale of its arrogance:
There’s not a lot of self-awareness with this crew.
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Sovereign Revolutionaries
by digby
I guess that whole election thing is just too much trouble. These folks seem to want to “restore” America to the 1600s:
The FBI is warning police across the country that an anti-government group’s call to remove governors from office could provoke violence.
The group called the Guardians of the free Republics wants to “restore America” by peacefully dismantling parts of the government, according to its Web site. It sent letters to governors demanding they leave office or be removed.
Investigators do not see threats of violence in the group’s message, but fear the broad call for removal of top state officials could lead others to act out violently. At least two states beefed up security in response.
[…]
The FBI associated the letter with “sovereign citizens,” most of whom believe they are free from all duties of a U.S. citizen, like paying taxes or needing a government license to drive. A small number of these people are armed and resort to violence, according to the intelligence report.
Yeah. It’s just a little bit odd that they’ve only now decided to start demanding that people leave office in three days don’t you think? Was this kind of thing going on while Bush was president? I don’t recall anything like this. It seems pretty clear that it’s the election of the Kenyan usurper and his communist colleagues in the congress that’s spurred this latest outbreak of “sovereignty” fetishists. (They’re always around, but they only get active and find new recruits when the Democrats threaten the constitution by winning an election.)
BTW, what this about?
In the past year, federal agents have seen an increase in “chatter” from an array of domestic extremist groups, which can include radical self-styled militias, white separatists or extreme civil libertarians and sovereign citizens.
What’s an “extreme civil libertarian?” I’m guessing that they are talking about gun owners buying up huge numbers of gun and ammo because I don’t see any fourth amendment “extremists” organizing against unlawful search and seizure or first amendment advocates planning armed revolution. Unless you count the ACLU as among the domestic extremists, I’m thinking “extreme civil libertarian” is a loaded term and I’d rather not see it used in this context. If there are paranoid gun nuts out there, let’s not confuse them with people who believe there should be strict adherence to the bill of rights. They’re just plain old civil libertarians and law abiding citizens who use the courts to adjudicate these matters.
Update: Think Progress has more on Guardians of Free Republics. Seems they’re popular with the Resistnet crowd — the “netroots” of the teabag movement.
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Kitchen Sink Reform
by digby
Following up on my post from yesterday about the financial reform bill, it seems worthwhile to address Paul Krugman’s column today in which he argues for more regulation rather than a breakage of the big bank monopoly. I actually agree that we should go back to a strict regulatory scheme as well, but I have been persuaded by recent events (see Barney Frank’s staffer problem, for example)that the problem of capture is so extreme that regulation won’t ever be enough to fix this problem (at least until we somehow solve the bigger problem of money’s influence in politics.)
I’m with dday: we need to throw the kitchen sink at this problem:
I do not believe it’s so clear-cut that the banks cannot be stopped on this one. But even if it was, that’s not a good enough reason not to pursue every avenue to bring stability to the financial system. That includes the kind of leverage limits and resolution authority Krugman favors, consumer financial protection like Elizabeth Warren has proposed, AND actions that would truly end too big to fail.
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Digging Deeper
by digby
They’re going here on Good Friday? Really?
A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — which have included reports about Pope Benedict XVI’s oversight role in two cases — to the persecution of the Jews, sharply raising the volume in the Vatican’s counterattack. The remarks, on the day Christians mark the crucifixion, underscored how much the Catholic Church has felt under attack from recent news reports and criticism over how it has handled charges of child molestation against priests in the past, and sought to focus attention on the church as the central victim. In recent weeks, Vatican officials and many bishops have angrily denounced news reports that Benedict failed to act strongly enough against pedophile priests, once as archbishop of Munich and Friesing in 1980 and once as a leader of a powerful Vatican congregation in the 1990s. Benedict sat looking downward when the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, who holds the office of preacher of the papal household, delivered his remarks in the traditional prayer service in St. Peter’s Basilica. Wearing the brown cassock of a Franciscan, Father Cantalamessa took note that Easter and Passover were falling during the same week this year, saying he was led to think of the Jews. “They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” he said. Father Cantalamessa quoted from what he said was a letter from an unnamed Jewish friend. “I am following the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole word,” he said the friend wrote. “The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”
That takes some real chutzpah all right. This is from just 10 years ago:
Defying warnings from some theologians that the unprecedented apology would undermine the church’s authority, the 79-year-old pontiff asked God to forgive the persecution of the Jews. “We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood.”
Wearing the purple vestments of lenten mourning, the Pope sought pardon for seven categories of sin: general sins; sins in the service of truth; sins against Christian unity; against the Jews; against respect for love, peace and cultures; against the dignity of women and minorities; and against human rights.
Ethnic groups had endured “contempt for their cultures and religious traditions”. Women were “all too often humiliated and marginalised”. Trust in wealth and power had obscured the church’s responsibility to the poor and oppressed.
There was no reference to homosexuals, who had asked to be included for suffering theocratic violence. The Pope did not identify guilty individuals or name the crusades, the Inquisition or the Holocaust, but the references were clear.
Five Vatican cardinals and two bishops confessed sins on behalf of the church during the ceremony. Cardinal Edward Cassidy recalled the “sufferings of the people of Israel” asked divine pardon for the “sins committed by not a few [Catholics] against the people of the covenant”.
Several Jewish leaders praised the sermon as historic and significant but Israel’s chief rabbi said he was deeply frustrated by the Pope’s failure to mention the Holocaust, and described the service as “a severely warped view of history”.
Rabbi Israel Meir Lau joined other Israelis in expressing hope that the pope had omitted acknowledging the church’s passivity during the Holocaust only because he was planning a specific apology during next week’s pilgrimage to the holy land.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the congregation of the doctrine of the faith, confessed to the sins of the congregation’s predecessor, the Inquisition. “Even men of the church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the Gospel,” he said…
Fine. To sin is human and forgiveness divine and all that. To then compare critics of the church’s cover up of its epidemic of child molestation to anti-semitism just ten years later (on Good Friday!) is verging on farce.
Here’s just a little reminder of the history that makes this comparison particularly distasteful:
The Crusades
Pope Urban II, anxious to assert Rome’s authority in the east, sent a military expedition in 1095 to reconquer the holy land. The crusaders ravaged the countries they passed through and massacred the Muslim, Jewish and even Christian population of Jerusalem after capturing it in 1099. After 200 years of conflict Muslim armies drove them out for good, but the crusaders’ symbol of the red cross remains provocative.
The Inquisition
The attempt to combat suspected apostates, Jews and Muslims at the time of the Reformation spawned tribunals in Europe and the new world that tortured and executed thousands. Ecclesiastical queasiness about flowing blood led to the use of racks, thumbscrews and red-hot metal instead of blades; 2,000 people were burned at the stake during the tenure of Spain’s first grand inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada.
The Holocaust
Pope Pius XII never publicly condemned the Nazis’ persecution of Jews, even when they were being rounded up and deported from Rome. His silence is partly blamed for the failure of Germany’s Catholics to resist Hitler. Anti-Jewish Catholic doctrines such as the claim that the Jews murdered Christ were said to have ideologically underpinned nazism. Vatican officials allegedly helped Nazis escape Europe after the war.
It’s really not in good taste for a powerful church with that history to compare criticism of itself to the persecution of the Jews. Coming from a church which taught for years on easter that “the Jews killed Jesus” to do it on Good Friday is especially rich — just ask Mel Gibson about that.
In fairness, they have been working on it:
February 6, 2008
A Catholic Good Friday prayer from the pre-Vatican II Tridentine Mass will no longer ask that God “remove the veil from the hearts” of Jews, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said yesterday.
It will also drop an allusion to Jewish “blindness” and forgo a passage asking that Jews “be delivered from their darkness.” A new prayer, released Monday by the Vatican, still asks that Jews “acknowledge Jesus Christ.”
Baby steps folks …
I suspect that the Church hierarchy is becoming defiant now because of earlier skepticism about that decision by Pope John Paul to ask for forgiveness for these sins back in 2000. Conservatives in the church were very concerned that it would open a floodgate of requests for apologies. (What did they know and when did they know it ….)
You can understand why any organization would worry about such a thing, I suppose. But this isn’t just any organization, it’s a church. And this is a sex scandal involving children. It is a horrible, horrible moral failing, as big as anything we’ve ever seen from religious leaders. Their God may forgive them for all this but I’ve never heard that anyone believes He’s susceptible to spin or stonewalling. Meanwhile, secular authorities have a right to deal with this in any case, but especially after it’s been proven that the church not only failed for decade after decade not only to protect the kids in its care, it actively covered these crimes up. No amount of outraged victimization or slick damage control is going to fix that.
Tristero weighs in:
Wow
by tristero
A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — which have included reports about Pope Benedict XVI’s oversight role in two cases — to the persecution of the Jews…
Did I read that properly? That can’t be true. There must be some misunderstanding:
Father Cantalamessa took note that Easter and Passover were falling during the same week this year, saying he was led to think of the Jews. “They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” he said.
Who the fuck approved this shit?
Comparing the well-earned disgust the entire world rightly feels over the system-wide rape of women and children by Catholic priests to the demented bigotry of Anti-Semitism is way, way, WAY beyond offensive.
I say this as someone whose deep respect for a wide spectrum of religious belief, and of Catholics especially, is a matter of long public record . Note to Vatican:
Cut it out, you stupid assholes. You are managing to accomplish the impossible: making the awful situation YOU refused to deal with a whole lot worse. Back off. NOW.
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Removing The Core
by digby
Karl’s getting a little bit nervous:
My advice to them is to keep their distance from any single party and instead influence both parties on debt, spending and an over-reaching federal government. Allowing third-party movements to co-opt the tea partiers’ good name, which is happening in Nevada, will only serve to elect opponents of the tea party philosophy of low-taxes and fiscal restraint. It could also discredit the tea party movement.
A small fraction of the tea partiers’ leadership are ambitious individuals who haven’t been able to hold office in either the GOP or Democratic Party. Some are from fringe groups like the John Birch Society or the remnants of the LaRouchies. Others see the tea party movement as a recruiting pool for volunteers for Ron Paul’s next presidential bid.
If tea party groups are to maximize their influence on policy, they must now begin the difficult task of disassociating themselves from cranks and conspiracy nuts. This includes 9/11 deniers, “birthers” who insist Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and militia supporters espousing something vaguely close to armed rebellion.
He omits the Freedomworks/FOX effect for obvious reasons. But the fact is that there will be no purging of the crazies until they shut up Beck and Limbaugh — and that isn’t happening any time soon. And I’m fairly sure Karl couldn’t give a damn.
It’s the third party thing that really has him worried. He was around during the Perot years and he knows very well that the teabaggers are the latest permutation of the “angry white male” (and the women who love them) faction — the base of the Republican Party. If they go third party it is very likely the Democrats will win in spite of themselves.
If crazy birthers and truthers and Jesus militia members agreed to only vote Republican, he’d be perfectly happy to have them in the fold. He knows very well they’ll settle right down and become good little robots once the Republicans are safely in charge. But they get uppity when the Big Boyz are out of power and start doing silly things like run third party candidates and screw up the whole plan. They’re hard to control when they get all het up over the hippies and the blacks ruining everything.
I’m thinking that if they can’t get them under control we might see something like a Jim DeMint candidacy. It might be the only way they can keep them in the tent.
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Just There For The Buffet
by digby
In case you missed it:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Larger Truths
by digby
Another AG says no criminal wrongdoing:
California Attorney General Jerry Brown determined Thursday that ACORN broke no criminal laws, after reviewing videotapes that sparked a recent political firestorm.
Brown’s office said it would not pursue charges against the now-defunct community organizing group. But it said ACORN engaged in inappropriate behavior that may prompt other state agencies to take a look, such as dumping 500 pages of confidential records into the trash and failing to file a state tax return.
“A few ACORN members exhibited terrible judgment and highly inappropriate behavior in videotapes obtained in the investigation,” Brown said in a statement. “But they didn’t commit prosecutable crimes in California.”
[…]
Rather than give advice on prostituting underage girls, human trafficking and cheating on taxes, the attorney general’s office found ACORN members at times caught on to the scheme and called the police in the portions of the videos that were cut.
“Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor,” Brown said.
To obtain the full tapes, Brown’s office agreed not to prosecute conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the pimp and prostitute in the video, even though the report found they likely violated state privacy laws.
First of all, we know that O’Keefe didn’t always “pose as a pimp,” so the story perpetuates this false claim, which most people undoubtedly thinks means he was in those offices dressed in that ridiculous get-up — which makes the workers look even stupider.
And by editing the tapes to only show those who went along with the ruse or simply gave dumb advice, they gave the impression that this must have been an organizational policy. If they had shown those who called the cops or tossed the two of them out of the office, it would have put the foolish ones in perspective, right? Wouldn’t want to do that.
This whole episode makes me sick. It was drenched in racist stereotypes from conception and the reaction from the media and the politicians revealed more about this country than those tapes revealed about ACORN.
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Keeping The GOP Well Funded
by digby
Someone sent an email asking why in the hell Orrin Hatch’s absurd abstinence only program is still in a bill that got not one Republican vote. It’s a good question:
A little-noticed provision of the health legislation has rescued federal support for a controversial form of sex education: teaching youths to remain virgins until marriage.
The bill restores $250 million over five years for states to sponsor programs aimed at preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases by focusing exclusively on encouraging children and adolescents to avoid sex. The funding provides at least a partial reprieve for the approach, which faced losing all federal support under President Obama’s first two budgets.
“We’re very happy to see that funding will continue so the important sexual health message of risk avoidance will reach American teens,” said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based lobbying group. “What better place to see such an important health issue addressed than in the health legislation?”
But the funding was condemned by critics, who were stupefied by the eleventh-hour rescue.
“To spend a quarter-billion dollars on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that have already been proven to fail is reckless and irresponsible,” said James Wagoner of the Washington group Advocates for Youth. “When on top of that you add the fact that this puts the health and lives of young people at risk, this becomes outrageous.”
250 million dollars is not chump change and it goes to support some of the most backward, useless conservative programs in the country. They might as well have funded creationism.
Somebody did this, but nobody wants their fingerprints on it.
But the effort came under mounting criticism when independent evaluations concluded that the approach was ineffective, and evidence began to emerge that the long decline in teen pregnancies was reversing.
As part of Obama’s first budget, Congress approved a request for more than $110 million for a new “teenage pregnancy prevention” initiative that would fund only programs that have been “proven effective through rigorous evaluation,” effectively excluding abstinence programs.
The initiative includes $25 million for new, innovative programs that could potentially embrace those encouraging abstinence. A University of Pennsylvania researcher reported last month that a carefully designed, morally neutral abstinence-focused approach can work. But the program does not earmark funding for programs focused on maintaining virginity.
During the health legislation debate in the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) added $50 million in annual funding for five years to states for abstinence programs — a provision that survived the tumultuous process that ensued.
[…]
Critics, however, maintained that there was no reason to continue funding any programs, given the lack of evidence of their effectiveness and speculated that the money survived as part of the effort to win conservative Democratic support for the legislation.
Who was holding out for abstinence only funding? And why aren’t they loudly crowing about their success? More pertinently perhaps, to whom are they quietly crowing?
This is yet another example of using uteruses as a bargaining chip. Abstinence only education is a total waste of money — money that could be used to fund contraception for poor people, provide training for doctors to learn how to do abortions (which many medical schools don’t even teach anymore) or to fund family planning clinics. It’s not as if there wasn’t a better use for the money.
And on a political level it’s so stupid I can’t even fathom what they were thinking. The “abstinence-only” industry is part of the GOP patronage machine, designed to funnel money into the hands of supporters. It’s bad enough that both parties are crawling over each other to get a piece of the Wall Street/defense contractor money. That the Democrats are now voting to defund groups like ACORN and funding Republicans patronage is just frosting on the cake.
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Magic At The Bowl
by digby
The mister and I were lucky enough to have a transcendent boomer experience last night seeing McCartney at the Hollywood Bowl. The old boy’s still got it — three hours without a break or even a sip of water. This was the second encore.
(Warning: fairly decent youtube — not mine — but as bad as cell phone recordings usually are. But if you like Sir Paul you’ll get a good sense of how much fun it was to spend a warm spring night at the bowl in his company.)
He sang the soundtrack to my life. Lot’s of songs on that album.
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The Best Political Bozo On Television
by digby
ERICKSON: This is crazy. What gives the Commerce Department the right to ask me how often I flush my toilet? Or about going to work? I’m not filling out this form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They’re not going on my property. They can’t do that. They don’t have the legal right, and yet they’re trying.
Fine. And when your water mains are inadequate and your roads are overcrowded you can dive into the sewage and swim to work, you moron.
h/t to bb
