Shirley Sherrod

POSTED BY JHW22

I am livid. So livid I can't possibly formulate a proper post. So instead I will write free-form and hope it all makes sense when I am finished -- even to me.

Breitbart uses film editing as his weapon.
Fox News uses distortion as their weapon.

The left-wing media like the Huffington Post and groups like the NAACP see the weapon and throw their hands up.
The Department of Agriculture and the White House throw their hands up.

We are at the mercy of the right-wing media when they can use their constant hate, lies and fear-mongering to extort the citizens, the media and the government to do dance as if bullets are being fired at our feet.

Shirley Sherrod is the personal victim of the right-wing's lies and the left-wing's capitulation.
We are all victims of the aftermath.

I want Shirley Sherrod reinstated by President Obama and apologized to by ANYONE who perpetuated the lie about her. Yet, even when the truth is out, people will believe the lie and think the truth is the lie. It will be too late. And the people who will hold on to the lie are dangerous people. They are the ones who thrive on right-wing weaponry and chaos.

Now Fox is acting as if they had nothing to do with this and are going to pull the wool over their own viewers' eyes. And people will believe that lie, too.

Part of me keeps saying, please let this be a Rosa Parks moment. Please tell me that we will all learn from this and stop the cycle of destructive rhetoric and fear-based reaction. Please tell me that this honorable woman will be an example of how we should ALL learn from our personal struggles and see people as people. Let the destruction of her reputation result in a phoenix moment for her. Let her rise from the damage as the person we refer to when we say, "I beat back my personal '-isms' and rose above them." Let Shirley Sherrod be the person who forces us to beat back the cowardice and discuss racism in America.

And let's beg of our friends and family to THINK before they allow thirty-eight seconds to define a person or a story.

Here's Shirley Sherrod's entire speech.
Here is Rachel Maddow's thorough take on the chaos.
Here is the story unfolding on CNN.


EDITOR'S UPDATE (7/21/10, 2:45pm): ColorOfChange.org is petitioning President Obama to reinstate Shirley Sherrod. It only takes a minute to fill out a form and do the right thing.

Cartoon of the Day

I Refudiate that Wee Wee'd Up Remark

POSTED BY JHW22

Let's compare made up phrases, shall we?

When President Obama used the phrase "wee wee'd up" the intertubes went crazy analyzing what that expression meant although I knew exactly what he meant. To me it was perfectly clear that he was mocking the "Much Ado About Nothing" drama that arises when parties feign offense or cry out end of the world fears as frivolous opposition. It's like the baby-toe-as-little-piggy running wee wee wee all the way home.

Notice when Obama used the line, he was in the midst of making an audience laugh. Notice the smile on his face. Notice the tone of mocking. He was making fun of the ridiculous by using a word that was ridiculous. That's actually pretty clever.

Now, when Sarah Palin used the word "refudiate" the intertubes went crazy calling her out for using a word that doesn't exist. To me, and everyone else, it was clear that Sarah Palin just didn't know what the hell she was doing and made up a word out of pure stupidity. Of course she tried to cover it up by reminding Americans of the "wee wee'd up" comment and comparing herself to Shakespeare.

Notice when Sarah Palin used her fake word she was actually insulting an entire religion by asking good Muslim-Americans to turn their back on a place to practice their faith because of terrorists who attacked that faith as well as the Twin Towers. She actually suggested that a place of community and faith is harmful to Americans AS she harmed the English language.

So I am all for making up words. I am all for confusing words and spelling words incorrectly. But what I am not for is doing so while you "stab hearts" of good Americans who have the right to practice their religious beliefs in America.

Sarah, the pain you cause is "too raw, too real" and I reject you "in the interest of healing". Although, I will hang on to "refudiate" as a constant reminder of your hatred, bigotry and ignorance, also, too.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe For The English Language...

... here comes the Mama Grizzly calling for Obama to "refudiate" the NAACP's Tea Party resolution.

Somewhere in the heavens, Noah Webster just handed the Merriams a gun and asked to be shot in the face.

UPDATE (5:25pm): Looks like she's also tweeting to ask all "peaceful Muslims" to "refudiate" a mosque at Ground Zero.

Finally, someone in the Palin camp realized that "refudiate" isn't a word, and Mama Grizzly deleted the tweet, then compared herself to Shakespeare.



But Sarah, if you want to celebrate your bastardization of the English language, why did you delete your tweet?  Or perhaps I should ask, "Why did you refudiate it?"

Comparisons and Calls for Anger -- FAIL

POSTED BY JHW22

We could have the world's best political historians debate and we could never properly compare any two presidents. And I don't want to. Obama is Obama. 2010 is 2010. Can we learn from history? Yes. But we can never duplicate it or any person from it. Apples and oranges.

I think Obama is the same leader he was at the DNC in 2004. I believed in his red states/blue states speech and I believed in his Inauguration speech when he said he would be everyone's president. We may throw around insults like "enemy" about the Republicans and we may mock them and despise them. But I am really grateful I voted for a president who remembers that he is their president, too. He remembers that all Americans have a stake -- his ethics and behavior reflect that understanding.
I want him to get tough at times, sure, but he never was that man and isn't that man and yet he has still accomplished a great deal, as has this Congress. Him getting angry isn't THE solution, nor is it A solution. Cooler heads prevail and I want a president who has the coolest head in the country.

He is working his ass off against every conceivable and inconceivable hurdle and hasn't let up. Some may think he is a slacker because we don't see him 24/7. But I also don't want an actor on TV trying to say the thing that will make 300 million dramatic Americans feel better. I want him to focus on his job and not placating those who will just find one more thing they want him to make them feel better about. He's the president, not a bully, nor our therapist, nor our friend. His job is to get policies that help, not to say the right thing.

I feel for anyone out of a job and especially when they are being made out to be the problem by people in government who should be following the president's lead. They should remember that they represent all Americans. He isn't going to make them see that if he acts the way they do.

Mark Williams Booted From National Tea Party Federation

They're a "federation" now?  What am I, watching an old Star Trek repeat?

‘We, in the last 24 hours, have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote,’ [federation spokesman David] Webb said of the blog post by Williams that satirized a fictional letter from what he called ‘Colored People’ to President Abraham Lincoln.

Webb called the blog post ‘clearly offensive.’

And as Oliver Willis notes, they'd have a lot more credibility on this matter had they expelled Williams over the last few months of hate speech bullshit spewing from this guy's mouth. Did it really necessitate a sick letter as a final nail in the coffin?

Also, if there is no room in the Tea Party for the likes of a Mark Williams, why are conservatives and Tea Party folk going apeshit over the NAACP's resolution to denounce any form of racism in their group? Seems like a no-brainer, and yet those with no brain are doing the "I'm offended" dance.

Mexico

posted by Armadillo Joe

I mentioned something a few posts back that may have seemed like a non-sequiter, about political instability in Mexico. It was just a passing comment, sure, but I think this, along with the clean-up of The Gulf, will be the major story of the next few years, maybe decades, because I think Mexico could be on the verge of socio-political collapse. The drug cartels basically run the show down there, and they're ramping up the violence (via HuffPost):

Mexico Drug War Sees First Ever Car Bomb

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — The first successful car bombing by a drug cartel brings a new dimension of terror to a Mexican border region already shocked by random street battles, bodies dangling from bridges and highway checkpoints mounted by heavily armed criminals.

[...]

Mexican cartels – armed with billions of dollars and networks of informers among corrupt police forces – have long demonstrated their ability to target the highest-ranking security officials and government officials.

Last month, cartel gunmen killed 12 federal police in the western state of Michoacan. A jailed suspect later described the carefully planned ambush to police, making it clear the gang knew exactly where the police patrol was going to be and when.

And in another first, suspected cartel gunmen assassinated two candidates during campaigning last month for local and state elections, including the leading contender for governor of the northern border state of Tamaulipas. Never before had drug gangs killed such a high-ranking electoral candidate.

And you'll never guess where they're getting so much of the weaponry they use to be the de facto ruling party in Mexico:

Mexican drug cartels' newest weapon: Cold War-era grenades made in U.S.

MEXICO CITY -- Grenades made in the United States and sent to Central America during the Cold War have resurfaced as terrifying new weapons in almost weekly attacks by Mexican drug cartels.

Sent a generation ago to battle communist revolutionaries in the jungles of Central America, U.S. grenades are being diverted from dusty old armories and sold to criminal mafias, who are using them to destabilize the Mexican government and terrorize civilians, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials.

The spirit of Saint Ronnie lives on! A generation after he launched his War on American civil liberties Drugs, at the same time he sent U.S. weapons and arms south to thwart pesky commies in Central America (remember Iran-Contra?), that very same War on American civil liberties Drugs has over the last 30 years driven demand so high in our bloated, self-indulgent country that the Mexican cartels making money running this stuff across our borders have become wealthy.

Very wealthy. As in, amounts of money usually bantered about when discussing things like sovereign wealth funds. But for that money to have any buying power in the real world, it must be clean.

American banks to the rescue. How much money are we talking about? A lot...

Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history -- a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.

Yes, Virginia, that is a lot of buying power. Enough buying power to maybe even pick up a whole government or two. Take a whole lot of drugs to make that kind of dough. And that's just through one bank in America. But don't you worry your pretty little head about it, right? The G-Men will swoop in and punish the wrong-doers... unless they are, you know, too big to fail...

No big U.S. bank -- Wells Fargo included -- has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Justice Department settles criminal charges by using deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again.

‘No Capacity to Regulate’

Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory.

Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets, says Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator for 14 years and a consultant to international banks and brokerage firms on money laundering.

The theory is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for big banks, Blum says.

“There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure,” Blum says. “They seem to be willing to do anything that improves their bottom line, until they’re caught.”

One of the definitions of government is the monopoly on violence and the threat of violence for coercive ends. The drug cartels are reaching a level of power and influence through their own use of extra-governmental violence that they appear likely to succeed in replacing the apparatus of the state of Mexico in all but name. And once the drug cartels neuter the Mexican government altogether and violence on our southern border spills across into our own country, to say nothing of the political refugees fleeing the ensuing anarchy, we'll have people like this to welcome them:

Neo Nazi Leads Vigilante Arizona Border Patrol: 'We'll Kill Them'

Arizona's controversial new immigration law has been hailed by many on the far right. But to some, like neo-Nazi J.T. Ready, the new bill is too weak. So he and some fascist buddies are roaming the desert looking for Mexicans!

[...]

37-year-old Jason "J.T." Ready, and his group America First, are full on National Socialists and are sick of Mexican "narco terrorists" crossing the border into their state.

[...]

what does J.T. Ready say he and his pals will do if they see Mexicans trying to cross illegally into Arizona? "We'll Kill Them."

And that's why we should all be very worried about what's happening right now in Mexico.

Must Reads

Chris Kelly: Laura Ingraham's New Book Could Be Better

John Cole: Apart From Better Sanitation and Medicine and Education and Irrigation and Public Health and Roads and a Freshwater System and Baths and Public Order… What Have the Romans Done for Us?

The Rude Pundit: Nevada Senate Candidate Sharron Angle Is a Fucking Retard, Too

David W. Dunlap: 18th-Century Ship Found at Trade Center Site

Jon Perr: Meet the New Republican Alchemists

Peter Beinart: The Tea Party's Immigration Hypocrisy

Elise Foley: Violent Crime Is Down in Arizona, Up in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s County

Matt Taibbi: The Steinbrenner Slobituary

President Obama's Weekly Address - July 17, 2010

Filibustering Recovery & Obstructing Progress

"Some Republican leaders actually treat this unemployment insurance as if it’s a form of welfare. They say it discourages folks from looking for work. Well, I’ve met a lot of folks looking for work these past few years, and I can tell you, I haven’t met any Americans who would rather have an unemployment check than a meaningful job that lets you provide for your family.

...after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, [Republican leaders] finally decided to make their stand on the backs of the unemployed. They’ve got no problem spending money on tax breaks for folks at the top who don’t need them and didn’t even ask for them; but they object to helping folks laid off in this recession who really do need help."

Zbigniew Brzezinski Is One, Smart... SHUT YOUR MOUTH!

...But I'm talkin' 'bout Zbigniew!

A long but very informative and eye-opening clip including discussions about BP, foreign policy based on a moral compass, 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Yep, That's My Moronic Citizenry!

Via Political Wire:

A new Pew Research poll finds that just 34% of Americans know that the federal government's bank bailout program was actually signed into law by President Bush while 47% incorrectly believe it was enacted during the Obama's administration.

I know this news isn't really surprising, but maybe if our attention deficit disorder afflicted population spent just a little more time paying attention to matters of importance instead of Keeping Up with The Kardashians, Jersey Shore, Real Housewives of Orange County or Fox News Channel, we'd all be a lot better off.

But hey, why believe your lying eyes when you can blame the black guy?

Make. It. STOP!

Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin are already looking to bring outsiders into their upcoming marriage -- in the form of a reality TV crew ... this according to a source very familiar with the negotiations.

TMZ has learned the couple has been shopping "multiple reality shows" around town -- some of the ideas involve the couple AND their two-year-old son, Tripp.

We're told the leading concept involves all three people -- and will focus on "parenting issues."

Nothing to see here folks. Just another white trash attempt at financial opportunity, you know, because America is the land of opportunity... unless you're "colored." If I hear Mama Grizzly talk about how the "lamestream media" should leave her cub pack alone, I'm going to put a bullet in my brain.

So... show titles, anyone?

The Wasilla Hillbillies?
Wasilla 99654?
Northern Overexposure?

Nope! No Racism Associated With Tea Party, Right Sarah?

I am eagerly awaiting Sarah Palin and the rest of the Tea Party to jettison Mark Williams for this disgusting letter. Otherwise, they are all full of shit. Every, single one of them. No excuses. Denounce Williams are forever be branded as racists.

Obama Can't Close The Deal? Yeah... RIght.

You can argue over whether Obama’s achievements are good or bad on the merits. But especially after Thursday’s vote you can’t argue that Obama is not getting things done. To the contrary, he has, as promised, covered the uninsured, tightened regulations, started to wind down the war in Iraq and shifted focus and resources to Afghanistan, injected more competition into the education system and edged closer to a big energy bill.

This quote from Politico's John F. Harris & Jim Vandehei continues the pushback to Eric Alterman's diatribe the other day about how President Obama's current tenure is so disappointing,  "significant accomplishments notwithstanding." And really, if any of our accomplishments are to be cast aside in a futile, report card type of exercise, wouldn't we all be lacking?

Here again, is President Obama's "disappointing" record in just 18 months.

Fierce Urgency of Patience

POSTED BY JHW22

Looking back on the Obama campaign, I think there were two major blunders in their messaging that sounded great at the time but have become a problem for the administration.

1) Thinking that the MLK phrase "The fierce urgency of now" wouldn't confuse the instant-gratification-psychosis of Americans. Many either didn't hear or have forgotten when Obama also said "The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term." And now the fierce urgency (aka impatience) of America is biting the Obama Administration in the butt.

I have a preschooler who asks to do B so I'll say, "Yes, after we finish A". Emotional chaos ensues because he equates "wait" with "no". That is how America is acting toward Obama. If he hasn't accomplished each American's personal agenda by now, they react as if waiting equals never. Add to that the unwillingness of my son or Americans to listen and process, and we face a lot of unnecessary chaos.

As I tell my son, waiting does not mean no, but tantrums make the wait longer and more unbearable.

2) Saying the campaign wasn't about Obama but about US spoke to the me-me-me psychosis of America . He repeatedly reminded Americans of our role in our government. He was absolutely correct and it was something I appreciated. But now, not so much. Now each American thinks they now control each decision, priority and sentence coming out of the governing process. Should we play a role? Definitely. But the phrase "too many cooks in the kitchen" is an understatement when every American thinks that he or she alone can demand and condemn the White House without considering any other American's demands. Three-hundred-million Americans can't all have it their way. Again, it's like my preschooler who wants to play with his friends and his toys until the friends want to play with the same toys.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39772.html

Pawns and Shields

POSTED BY JHW22

It was just over a year ago when I first heard Sarah Palin refer to herself as a “Mama Grizzly”. Today it is her platform. Along with “pink elephants” (do these people not think to check the history of phrases like tea bagging and pink elephants before they use them) Sarah says that “Mama Grizzlies” -- aka pissed off mamas -- will be marching into power to take back America from the socialists she hates. Granted, she never presents better ideas, or any ideas for that matter. What she gives us is an emotional tug as her platform. Being a mom is and has always been her platform. I’m a mom of five -- one a “chosen” special needs baby and one a pregnant teen -- vote for me. She is a mom. She tackled jobs as mayor and governor as a mom to infants under the desk. Wow. What a symbol of feminism. A working mom. She is a mom. And not just any mom: she’s a mama grizzly who protects her young. She’s a mom.

So if that’s how she defines herself, why can’t we talk about her choices as a mom? Why, if we talk about her as a mom, does she twist it into we are talking about her kids? Tricky move, Palin. You see, she sets herself up as a mom so that we can’t challenge her without being accused of going after her family. It’s because she uses her children as pawns and shields.

The first time I recall the “Mama Grizzly” reference was when David Letterman made a wide-arching joke about Bristol Palin. At the time, Bristol was an adult making the circuit telling her story about getting pregnant while an unmarried teen. Everyone who heard the joke KNEW it was about Bristol. But Sarah Palin decided to warp the joke to mean it was about her 14-year-old daughter, Willow, and rape. So what she did was plant the idea of her young daughter getting raped in the minds of Americans. David Letterman didn’t make me think of Willow being raped, but Sarah did. Why? So she could have a public feud with a talk show host. That’s all. It wasn’t about young women and rape (just look into the Wasilla policy that charged women for their own rape kits while she was mayor). But because the issue was so touchy, we couldn’t make too big of a deal about Sarah’s use of Willow as a pawn and a shield without appearing as if we condoned the rape of girls.

Now, it’s true that every politician parades their families in front of cameras to show their family values. Palin is no different there. So having her children at the announcement of her as McCain’s running mate wasn’t a big deal. Trying to hide her daughter’s bump – not a big deal. But when internet sites started focusing on the Alaska scuttlebutt of Bristol’s pregnancy, what did Mama Grizzly do? She told the world her daughter was an unmarried teen. Considering what the right-wing media did to Jamie Lynn Spears (younger sister of Britney, who got pregnant as a teen and faced the wrath of Fox News) I would think a Mama Grizzly would have declined the McCain offer and considered what the campaign would do to her daughter. But no. She threw her daughter to the wolves! She MADE her daughter a target of gossip and judgment and at the same time criticized anyone who tried discussing the relevancy of this to a “no sex ed in schools” candidate. We couldn’t even mention Sarah’s hypocrisy without being accused of being mean to Bristol. Again, you can’t talk about Sarah as a mother without her twisting it into an assault on her pawn and shield, oops, I mean child.

And then there’s “retard”. And by that, I mean a word. The word retard means to slow or delay. It does not mean Downs Syndrome. It does not mean Trig Palin. I, personally, do not like to use the word “retard” as a pejorative, having worked with special needs kids and knowing the negative connotation behind its use. When Rahm Emanuel used the word, it had NOTHING to do with Trig Palin yet Sarah Palin made it all about her son. When people in her own party used it, she was silent. She politicized her son. She used him as a pawn and shield. And as of this posting all she has publicly done for kids with special needs is make some speeches and small donations. Is that the advocacy she promised? I'd like someone in the "lame-stream media" to ask her about it but no one will because of the pawn and shield game.

But let’s get to the real issue that everyone is afraid to discuss because she made it impossible to do so. The woman who made being a mother one of the top three things that qualifies her to speak for “real Americans” in whatever capacity she’s considering, has not been challenged on what may be THE choice that should define her. I am not talking about her “choice” to have a special needs baby despite the false claims on the right that a liberal would have aborted. I am talking about her “choice” to get on a plane and fly from Texas to Alaska, while in her 40’s, having had two miscarriages and in PRE-TERM LABOR (including leaking amniotic fluid and contractions per her interviews and her auto-biography starting on page 193 of Going Rogue) with a baby known to have Downs Syndrome, without being seen by a doctor.

She awoke early in the morning feeling weird, leaking and having contractions. She was worried enough to call her doctor all the way over in Alaska and pray for the unborn baby. Yet, she didn’t go to a hospital to make sure the baby was safe. Instead she gave a speech and got on a plane.

What kind of “Mama Grizzly” does that? But we aren’t allowed to talk about it because that’s somehow an affront to Trig. No. The affront to Trig was when she decided to risk his life for… for… for I don’t even know what.

So, now that she has released her “Mama Grizzly” video, void of solutions to our problems, can we NOW ask questions about her “choices” as a mom? NOW can we ask her how protective she was being on “The Wild Ride”? Or would that be one more attack on her child? NOW can we ask her why she chose to put her daughters in the national spotlight over controversial issues for political gain?

This isn’t about her kids and it never was. This is about Sarah Palin. And it’s time we reminded her of that and it’s time the media realized that and asked some damn questions.

We aren’t after the pawns and shields.

We’re after the Mama Grizzly.

Quote of the Day

We’ll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn’t been a success.

~ Paul Krugman on his problem with President Obama

Cartoon of the Day

Oops...

Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston are engaged, and they've shared the news on the cover of Us Weekly, seen below. They have not shared the news with Bristol's mom Sarah Palin, who has mocked Levi as "Ricky Hollywood" and poked at his "aspiring porn" career.

Bristol tell the glossy, "It is intimidating and scary just to think about what her reaction is going to be. Hopefully she will jump on board."

Uh... I don't know if Mama Grizzly is going to be so pleased. And all I can say is... HAAHAHAHAAHAAHAAAAAA!!!

ADDING... There are those who think this is one small step in the Rehabilitation of Sarah Palin's Image for an eventual run in 2012. I don't necessarily doubt that, but one has to be a complete moron not to see right through it. How can Sarah be happy for her daughter if she's completely trashed Bristol's future husband in the public eye nonstop? But then again, judging by Sarah's following, there are plenty of morons out there to be had.

Limbaugh Just Can't Help Himself

Rush just can't hide the fact that he's a racist scumbag. Even in speaking of the death Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, he makes it about race.



I suppose to Limbaugh, paying an athlete to play for your team is some sort of redistribution of wealth... unless the athlete is white, of course.

(H/T Jason Linkins)

Quote of the Day

"Laura Ingraham is a highly successful political pundit, radio host, author and public speaker, but she's never said anything funny in her life. I'm not saying that as a knock. She also hasn't free styled a rap or yodeled or done birdcalls. It's simply not part of her act. Which is to be a horribly angry hurt unpleasant person.

She radiates wounded joylessness and her voice makes animals miscarry."

~ Chris Kelly wondering about Ingraham's decision to write her "parody" book, The Obama Diaries.

Jeff Sessions Is A Douche

Ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) had asked for the delay on behalf of committee Republicans, who claimed they needed the extra week to read through Kagan’s written responses to their questions.

...[Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick] Leahy said he would defend Sessions’ right to request the delays, but noted that he did not want Republicans to further delay votes on the nominees.

George Steinbrenner Dies at 80

NY TIMES: George Steinbrenner, who bought a declining Yankees team in 1973, promised to stay out of its daily affairs and then, in an often tumultuous reign, placed his formidable stamp on 7 World Series championship teams, 11 pennant winners and a sporting world powerhouse valued at perhaps $1.6 billion, died Tuesday morning. He was 80 and lived in Tampa, Fla.

Batshit Brewer's Beheading Bull

How do these people actually make it to elected office?

Arizona Governor and Immigration fear monger Jan Brewer has gone so far off the deep end, I suppose it doesn't matter to her that anything that she says, like law enforcement finding decapitated bodies in the desert, or that most illegal immigrants who cross the border are drug mules, or Phoenix having the 2nd highest kidnapping rate in the world, or the majority of law enforcement officers are killed by illegal immigrants, can be researched and found to be entirely false.

Two months ago, the Arizona Republic published an exhaustive report that found that, according to statistics from the FBI and Arizona police agencies, crime in Arizona border towns has been "essentially flat for the past decade.

...FBI statistics show violent crime rates in all of the border states are lower than they were a decade ago -- yet Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) reports that the violence is "the worst I have ever seen."

Leave it to the Maverick to get in on the act.

Bob Sheppard Dies at 99

NY TIMES: Bob Sheppard, whose elegant intonation as the public-address announcer at Yankee Stadium for more than half a century personified the image of Yankees grandeur, died Sunday at his home in Baldwin, on Long Island. He was 99.

Must Reads

Markos Moulitsas: Why I Am Blacklisted by MSNBC

Paul Krugman: Arguments From Authority

Joe Conason: Facing Extinction: The "Responsible Republican"

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Wall Street Not Giving to Dems: Good Riddance

Bob Herbert: Restoring a Hallowed Vision

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More Like This, Please

Mark Haines doesn't take any bullshit Jones Act talking points from a parroting conservative talking head. I only wish more of the television media models would take the time to know their shit and call bullshit when they hear it.



"Let me just get the facts on the table and then you can make up your own." BOOM!  Haines can be a bit of a douche more than occasionally, but you have to give credit where credit is due.

(H/T Digby)

While We're On The Subject

posted by Armadillo Joe

I'm working on a series of posts that expand upon my previous dissertation on the overlapping system failures we are currently experiencing as a nation, as a civilization and as a species. My next one will expound upon the concept of money and how our perversion of the basic concept has brought us to the illogical, disintegrating world we find ourselves in today.

But that's for a little later. For now, I've found two posts that sum up as succinctly as I have ever seen, exactly why left versus right in this country is not an even match.

I have this argument all the time with my squishy centrist friends. And those of you who think of yourselves as centrists, I mean you... with all due respect of course, but nevertheless squishy.

These squishy centrists (and their patron saint David F. Brooks) seem to view the American political spectrum as a fairly evenly balanced see-saw with a red team (the "R"s) and a blue team (the "D"s) each ideally working upon a level playing field with a set of agreed-upon rules (as with all sports - including the contact variety), acting in good faith as citizens to make for a better America for all Americans, merely with different views on how best to do that within the bounds of those agreed-upon rules; thus making the pursuit of some kind of balance between the two sides something of an ideal for the good of the nation, an ideal frequently thwarted by extremist ideologues on each side who are too far out on the fringe of the see-saw (and reinforced by their equally-matched and thoroughly mirror-image echo chambers) to participate in the Grand Balancing Act which the vast middle of American society craves. Thus when we on The Left take a side on an issue that seems to this squishy middle to be stereotypically "doctrinaire left" and thus paralyzing to this give-and-take, they feel justified in characterizing it as just another impediment (100% equally as bad and 100% one-to-one comparable to anything coming from The Right) to achieving that magical balance because a nation founded on compromise requires give-and-take from both sides to make progress.

I think that is as fair an assessment as I can give their viewpoint, free of snark and condescension. And Matthew Yglesias sums up why this is naive:

the 2006 and 2008 elections haven’t changed the structural imbalance between left and right in American politics.

[...] I would characterize this (imbalance) [...] like this: Fox is much more conservative than MSNBC is liberal, and it has a much larger audience. Conservative talk radio continues to dwarf anything that exists on the left. Business has a “privileged position” in America’s version of interest-group pluralism, and labor unions are weaker than ever. A large proportion of poor people are non-citizens who can’t vote, and those who can vote have not only less money but much less social and cultural capital and thus the political system is almost entirely unresponsive to their needs.

These aren’t “excuses” for bad behavior by elected officials, but they’re reasons that progressives don’t get what we want out of the political system.

And then, of course, driftglass knocks it out of the park as to the real causes:

Over in the Better Universe, people have multiple, distinctive ideologies that both compete and cooperate with each other (in business, this is called "cooptition") and from which they can form governing coalitions to solve problems.

Here, we have a Democratic Party that can be budged incrementally in the direction of rational and humane problem-solving as long the crisis is immediate and scary and then only as long as we Constantly Scream At Them and beat them on the soles of their feet. Even then, after they get our nickels and dimes and sweat and votes, we get 1/4 of a loaf, a lot of chin music, and the back of Rahm Emanuel's hand.

On the Right we have American Fascism, right out in the open, being energetically championed by people who are unhinged, despicable, impervious to reason and ridiculously well-funded.

Those are the choices: A Democratic Party which depends on us for everything they have, which is still shot through with decent, honorable, hard-working men and women, and which nonetheless still treats us like a smelly hobo to whom they occasionally feel obliged to toss a bone...and a Republican Party now wholly captive to outright psychotics and which sees us as internal enemies to be wiped out.

To me, the reasons for this are simple, and a certain Mr. Lincoln summed it up in the darkening days before the Civil War:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. [...]

[...] what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.

Does that attitude seem familiar to any readers? Please, do read the whole speech. Our national discourse (and one party in particular) has been so thoroughly Dixie-fied, particularly since LBJ gave black people the vote in The South, that it could have been written last week.

Back soon...

President Obama's Weekly Address - July 10, 2010

Help for Vets with PTSD

When Will The Madness End?!

Ho. Ly. Shit.

“Speaking Up: The Sarah Palin Story,” is one in a series of biographies aimed at 9- to 12-year-old readers. Others feature 2007 Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and U2 frontman Bono.

Reviews anyone? Here's one from our very own Armadillo Joe:

"May McCain rot in hell for injecting that virus into America's body politic."

(H/T GottaLaff)

Taxing Points

Posted by JHW22

I heard Michelle "I'm an independent" Bernard on NPR this afternoon. She called small businesses America's back bone while calling big corporations the engine. I am guessing that Bush tax cut expiration is going to be THE talking point for the rest of the year. Of course, they'll forget to mention that only about 2% of small businesses will be affected by that expiration AND they'll ignore the point that those losing the Bush tax cuts are the same people who have been most benefited by the bailouts AND they'll forget to mention that those tax cuts added to the deficit. Bring on the taxing points, er, I mean talking points.

Pat Buchanan Has To Go

It's amazing to me that the racist views of Pat Buchanan can be aired on a regular basis on MSNBC, but if Markos Moulitsas sends an arguably nasty tweet to the thin-skinned whiner, Joe Scarborough, he's banned from the network.

Pat Buchanan has to go.  To even go to the lengths of tacitly agreeing with Rush Limbaugh's psychotic rants shows the mentality that is ruining the dialogue in this country.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Fightin' Words

Cleveland Cavaliers' majority owner Dan Gilbert is not amused.

"The good news is that the ownership team and the rest of the hard-working, loyal, and driven staff over here at your hometown Cavaliers have not betrayed you nor NEVER will betray you.

...You simply don't deserve this kind of cowardly betrayal.

I PERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT THE CLEVELAND CAVALIERS WILL WIN AN NBA CHAMPIONSHIP BEFORE THE SELF-TITLED FORMER ‘KING’ WINS ONE.

You can take it to the bank."

Read the complete open letter to Cavs fans here.

LeBron To Miami!

Glad that's over.  Now I can sleep.

Camp Can Be Rough

I can't wait until my daughter is old enough to send to summer camp so I can receive letters like this:



Of course, she won't have to worry about the p-nus rash problem, so it'll be a cakewalk.

When You Are Pregnant, Make Lemonade!

Uh, it's time for Sharron Angle to shut the fuck up now.

And You May FInd Yourself...

posted by Armadillo Joe

*What follows is a rather lengthy post. It began as a rant about our fawning, house-broken media personalities (taking Taibbi on the Lara Logan/Rolling Stone flap as a jumping-off point), which quickly evolved into a long-form elucidation on the wide-spread break down of civilization we currently find ourselves living in. I will be returning to the many points of this post in the coming days, stretching them and expanding on various ideas I glossed over to get to my main point, which is, I think, to fasten your seatbelts and be ready for what's next. Thank you for reading and comments are always welcome.

Been thinking about the future a lot of late. A whole lot. So much to consider, it seems, in the face of catastrophic climate change, the never-ending gusher in The Gulf, the systematic dismantling of the very structures of governance by corporate and Old Money elites and the continued complicity of those we elected if not to thwart altogether at least to stymie them somewhat...

At times it seems like too much.

And I ask myself "How did we get here? How can we fix it? Is it even fixable?"

And time and again when confronted with these questions, I conclude that we can't fix things and likely won't. Some would accuse me of being pessimistic for saying something like that, of giving up the fight and letting the bad guys win, but I think sometimes letting the patient die is the only option, so that others may live. It's what makes any discussion of left/right or Democrat/Republican or liberal/conservative so bloody difficult: the old consensus definitions are breaking down and new ones are yet to emerge. I'd argue some (if not most) of that confusion is by design, though I don't think this is anything new to human history. The only part that makes it seem new is technology and the speed enabled by that technology. Sixty+ years ago, Orwell's vision of an eagerly violent ADD citizenry was scary pseudo science fiction. Today, the tea-bagging flash mobs of hate (h/t John Cole) that have emerged since the inauguration are proof that what he saw in the cynical manipulation of the German public was no mere aberration, an abomination brought about by the singular genius of a small group of evil men, but was a latent tendency in all of us, teased out by an unfortunate convergence of historical circumstances, some very bad luck and what Hanna Arendt called the "banality of evil."

Do I overstate my case? Not really. America's been torturing people openly, disappearing whomever "the government" labels an enemy combatant, sentencing people to indefinite detention without a trial, 'no-fly' lists restricting freedom of movement with no recourse to a fair hearing and 'free-speech zones' efficiently keeping those in power from ever having to hear dissatisfaction with the results of their policies, broadly spying and warrentlessly wire-tapping domestic targets, searching and seizing the property of anyone virtually guilty of pre-crime, brutally suppressing public dissent and equipping law enforcement with tortuous compliance weapons, all of this for almost a decade (longer, actually, since the War on Drugs laid the groundwork for the overt militarization of law enforcement we have suffered since the Cheney Regime) and all this criminality abetted by a pliant, cowed corporate media helping to pile onto anyone who raised a peep about any of it, dismissing them as unserious, dirty fucking hippies who hate America.

How else to evaluate what is happening right now in Arizona, and will soon happen in the various other copycat states in the coming months and years? How will that situation ever get any better, especially as America's bottomless appetite for illicit drugs finances the drug cartel's destabilization of the entire government of Mexico, and refugees flow across the border? To say nothing of the effects of climate change and overdevelopment on the American side of the border depleting the remaining water resources in the SouthWest and an open shooting war over water rights becoming ever more likely.

The early days of the next era of human civilization are upon us, folks, and the transition, like most transitions, will be violent and the causes misdiagnosed by very many different people until the overall shape and texture of the whole event becomes too obvious to deny or ignore. Even then, some will deny plain facts (we're still arguing about FDR and the Civil War, fercrissake). That it will take decades means many of our contemporaries will never understand the early stages of that to which they bore witness.

That sentence will require some explanation.

All of these various seemingly disconnected news stories are in fact one Very Big Story, which is that another widespread social, political and economic upheaval is upon us. And the ruling orders are well and truly scared of how all that will turn out for them, since the last three or four haven't ended very well for them. The last upheaval gave us two consecutive world wars and ended four centuries of Western European dominance of global affairs. What will this one bring about? Who can say, really? But an examination of what caused the last two or three dislocations and how they shaped subsequent events, how they indeed became the subsequent events themselves, is informative.

Measured across different time scales, ever since Western Civilization emerged from the chaos of the post-Roman Dark Ages, the different factors under-girding the stability of the international order (a stability created by a host of factors ranging from political alliances to shared ideology to trade policy to climate to technology to the underlying energy regimen to the various agreements among the myriad factions of the ruling classes) in any given era have all upended periodically. Often the wave periods of these oscillations (or factors or forces or movements) across time, as well as the geographic dispersion of them, are spread out enough that the whole system doesn't crash all at once. Sometimes, though, they are not spread out enough in time or space and the results are like a chain reaction, a contagion culminating in global catastrophe, and a new order emerges from the ashes of the old. Throughout the last 700 or 900 years, the stability of the existing order in any given locale has rarely lasted more than 50 or 75 years without some major disruption (sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but never eternal -- even in China), so in very many ways we are overdue for an upheaval here in the West. World War 2 was a long time ago.

Friedrich Hegel had a name for these oscillating periods of stability and chaos throughout history, his "Hegelian Dialectic", and the components were thus: a thesis creates its own antithesis, they struggle and a new synthesis emerges which becomes the new thesis and hence another antithesis and so the cycle repeats.

And thus, in that new synthesis the seeds of its eventual collapse are sown. In America, our country was born of such a synthesis as the political cultures of the North and South compromised on slavery in order to forge a new nation, and an uneasy new thesis moved us forward. Four score and seven years later, the American Civil War was fought to again settle on another idealistic synthesis that died with the end of Reconstruction and was followed by the bloated, cynical consensus of Gilded Age capitalism, which was itself first exploded by the First World War, then sunk utterly by its own failures with the Great Depression.

Meanwhile in Europe, the American Revolution had touched off wave after destructive wave of revolutionary fervor (1789, the entirety of the Napoleonic Wars, 1848, 1870, 1914), the power of the old ruling order of inherited title (which had held Europe together for 800 years) continually eroded and cracked and never remade fully whole again throughout the 19th Century, until the tottering framework of aristocratic Europe was smashed and scorched away fully and forever in the cauldron of the First World War, an upheaval so vast and so violent that it eventually pulled in this country from across the Atlantic Ocean. The inter-war period was largely a global power vacuum filled by rising fascism, communism and the inertia of a disintegrating Pax Britannia, the lone Great Power to keep its crown and even then only as a figurehead, while the global economic order eventually imploded under its own ponderous weight, resulting in the Great Depression.

World War 2 represented a failure to forge a lasting synthesis in the wake of the previous disruption (WW1), resulting in even greater death and destruction. In the wake of that conflict, during the resulting Cold War, America and a constellation of "free" states appeared to stand off against the USSR and the client states in its gravitational field, purportedly in a global contest of ideologies, but really in a vast, world-wide resource war for petroleum, centering on two opposing theories of political organization. On this side of the Iron Curtain, the elites of Europe and America had two different approaches to the massive social and political dislocations of the previous two centuries. In Europe, the elites placated the masses with a generous welfare state and useful infrastructure, but bamboozled them with myriad political parties to dilute their voting power while giving the illusion of inclusion. In America, the elites dispersed the masses into suburbs and bought them off with material prosperity, then corralled the rest into decaying inner cities. When the resulting social friction could no longer be contained by the received two-party system, they co-opted whatever social unrest they could into their own pet political party (the GOP) by deflecting blame onto the victims of their policies (a process that continues to this day) and squeezed the jumbled remnants of the opposing party into resigned compliance, all the while spending the enormous economic dividends generated by petroleum technology to erect a sprawling national security state, a vast military-industrial complex and an almost monolithic corporate political ecology. Both parties were willing and eager participants in that program, from LBJ's "Guns and Butter" through to the Clinton-era military that W used to blow up the world, all the while cheered by a pliant corporate media.

It was during this time that our current understanding of left versus right was formed. And, as I said at the top of this post, it is precisely why we as a voting public can't have an intelligent discussion about the issues that now face us. The system is blowing itself apart at the seams now, right now, before our very eyes, and though we had an opportunity to head-off catastrophe a generation ago, the inertia of history too great, it seems, to steer ourselves a better course out of the long, dark shadows of our previous imperfect attempts at synthesis.

And so, once again, the signs that another such upheaval is upon us are all around, as the existing ruling classes tighten their grip on power: the extortion money paid by our government to stabilize the banking system, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to stabilize the petroleum supply (and provide the only remaining domestic economic stimulus), even the clamp-down on journalists on our own supposedly free soil in The Gulf region to prevent some de-stabilizing bad news from becoming more widely known about exactly how bad the calamity in The Gulf actually is -- all of them signs that those in power are desperate to maintain it.

Because money, which always functioned as an agreement to facilitate trade (and hence was always mostly imaginary) in service of the needs of actual human beings, has become so much more important in the form of the personal wealth of a privileged few than actual human beings who are suffering and dying for want of the things money can easily provide, that international monetary policy is built around enforcing wealth-protection, not facilitating resource distribution. This has been the case for decades.

Because the earth's resources -- most crucially petroleum -- are all running out while our global economy remains engineered around an antiquated model of an ever-increasing prosperity those resources will soon no longer be able to support.

Because climate change is real and accelerating and irreversible and hundreds of millions of people will be directly affected, soon and forever.

Because wide-spread political destabilization always results from income disparity and ecological destruction this great (they are related), it is contagious and our ruling elites are too myopically focused on their own arcane struggles to notice or care.

Because...

Because...

Because, well...

Oh fuck it. Let's listen to some rock-n-roll music:

yeah, some people had all this shit figured out a long time ago.

Double Rainbowgasm

This is the funniest reaction I've heard to anything in a long time.

Dumbass Quote of the Day

"The Internet's completely over. I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it. All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you." 

~ The Artist Currently Known as Prince, formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince

I loves me some Prince, but this is pretty fucking stupid. I guess I'll just throw out my laptop and party like it's 1999.

Definition of a Wingnut Teabagger

So Sharron Angle wins her primary to run against Harry Reid in Nevada's Senate race, but when confronted with her stance on the issues by the Reid campaign with her own defunct website, she orders a cease and desist letter.  I mean, why should voters know how Angle really feels?

A Guyser of Stupid

Brought to you by Facebook.

What a way to celebrate Independence Day, Sarah.

(H/T HuffPo)

Happy Independence Day

The Michael Steele Quandry

The latest foot in mouth moment for Michael Steele is developing into a very interesting situation. While on the one hand, he once again went against the grain of the entire party he is the supposed chairman, on the other hand, he actually spoke some truth.

To reiterate, Steele said the conflict in Afghanistan “was a war of Obama’s choosing” and “is not something that the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.” Wrong on both counts.

Just to clarify, I didn't necessarily disagree with Steele's notion that history has shown the lack of success in previous Afghanistan occupations, but the thought that Steele would try to lay this solely at President Obama's feet, as if the previous six years before Obama took office never occurred, is absolutely ludicrous.

Now there are calls for his ouster.

"Frankly, I find Steele's remarks totally unacceptable," said [Rep. Tom] Cole (R-Okla.) in a statement Saturday. "He should apologize and resign. He undercut American forces fighting in the field, politicized further a war that two presidents of different parties have deemed in the national interest and embarrassed the party he purports to lead. It is time for him to go -- quickly."

There were criticisms by the usual suspects, Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol included.  So how wrong was Steele if the likes of those two disagreed with him?

Whether he undercut American forces is not ascertainable, but he did undercut his party. While trying to score cheap political points against the President, he managed to turn the GOP rhetoric on its ear, although there are a select few that agree with the RNC chairman.

“Michael Steele should not resign,” [Ron] Paul, a Texas Republican and former Libertarian Party presidential candidate, said today in a statement. “Michael Steele has it right and Republicans should stick by him.”

I don't know if Steele has walked back his comments before or after Paul's support, but walk it back he did, and judging by the reaction Steele has had to previous criticisms, you can tell even he thinks this time he's gone one step too far.