Republicans Prepare For The Election of 1860

"...The GOP is still reeling from the fact that they lost a national election to the first viable African-American candidate in history. That’s not racist, per se, it’s about the same as not wanting to lose a one-on-one basketball game to a girl, or having your foreign co-worker know more about Jazz than you do. There’s a certain way we people expect the world to work and while an African-American president was inevitable, nobody wants to be on deck as the first loser..."

Jason Johnson
Stopping The Man of Steele

Apologize Maybe; Admit Never

"The era of apologizing for Republican mistakes of the past is now officially over. It is done. The time for trying to fix or focus on the past has ended. The era of Republican navel-gazing is over. We have turned the corner on regret, recrimination, self-pity and self-doubt. Now is the hour to focus all of our energies on winning the future."

Michael Steele
Republican National Committee Chairperson
Read more...

How Bad Is European Socialism?

I've had a lot of people tell me about the evils of "European-style socialism." Most have never been to Europe and don't know anybody who lives in Europe. I've never been to Europe, but have good friends who live there. Since they have lived in the US, they can speak credibly when comparing the US to European countries. I ran across an article in the April 29, 2009 NY Times Sunday magazine comparing living in the US to living in Holland. It provides some interesting insights for us to ponder...


"Picture me, if you will, as I settle at my desk to begin my workday, and feel free to use a Vermeer image as your template. The pale-yellow light that gives Dutch paintings their special glow suffuses the room. The interior is simple, with high walls and beams across the ceiling. The view through the windows of the 17th-century house in which I have my apartment is of similarly gabled buildings lining the other side of one of Amsterdam’s oldest canals. Only instead of a plump maid or a raffish soldier at the center of the canvas, you should substitute a sleep-rumpled writer squinting at a laptop.

For 18 months now I’ve been playing the part of the American in Holland, alternately settling into or bristling against the European way of life. Many of the features of that life are enriching. History echoes from every edifice as you move through your day. The bicycle is not a means of recreation but a genuine form of transportation. A nearby movie house sells not popcorn but demitasses of espresso and glasses of Dutch gin from behind a wood-paneled bar, which somehow makes you feel sane and adult and enfolded in civilization.

Then there are the features of European life that grate on an American sensibility, like the three-inch leeway that drivers deign to grant you on the highway, or the cling film you get from the supermarket, which clings only to itself. But such annoyances pale in comparison to one other. For the first few months I was haunted by a number: 52. It reverberated in my head; I felt myself a prisoner trying to escape its bars. For it represents the rate at which the income I earn, as a writer and as the director of an institute, is to be taxed. To be plain: more than half of my modest haul, I learned on arrival, was to be swallowed by the Dutch welfare state. Nothing in my time here has made me feel so much like an American as my reaction to this number. I am politically left of center in most ways, but from the time 52 entered my brain, I felt a chorus of voices rise up within my soul, none of which I knew I had internalized, each a ghostly simulacrum of a right-wing, supply-side icon: Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Rush Limbaugh. The grim words this chorus chanted in defense of my hard-earned income I recognized as copied from Charlton Heston’s N.R.A. rallying cry about prying his gun from his cold, dead hands.

And yet as the months rolled along, I found the defiant anger softening by intervals, thanks to a succession of little events and awarenesses..."

Russell Shorto
Read more of "Going Dutch"
NY Times

Hannity & Ventura; Gilligan & The Skipper

Shaun Hannity puckers up to Jesse Ventura and takes a lickin' but keeps on babbling.

Black & White Issues

"I've never had a fire burning inside me like I do for that mongrel thug."
Stormfront posting
April 29, 2009

WASHINGTON — While the inauguration of the first black president has lessened racial tensions for most Americans, it has set off a wave of violence on the white supremacist fringe, with anti-hate groups attributing six recent killings — including the ambush in April of three Pittsburgh police officers and the fatal shootings in April of two Florida sheriff's deputies — in part to anger over President Barack Obama's election.

Coming to a neighborhood near you...racially tinged, anti-Obama demonstrations...conservative politicians and pundits for employing talking points that supremacists rally around...reports of government-sponsored "re-education camps"...claims that Obama is a socialist...

Read more...

"These groups have an out-sized effect based on the way they have been able to mainstream their propaganda and conspiracy theories...The reality is, there is an underworld of people who really believe that armed revolution is absolutely and vitally necessary. To the extent that that sector grows and is energized, they will be more dangerous."

Mark Potok
Southern Poverty Law Center

"I was looking on their website (Southern Poverty Law Center), and noted that their are some 900+ "hate" groups in the US. I was wondering if labeling all these different organizations as HATE groups was a defamation of character? Or on the other hand if all this snooping and investigating was an invasion of privacy by posting all this nonsense about all the groups, in the Hate group catagory, it puts forth a stigmata about all of the groups and steriotypes them into a general view of them all. Now alot of these groups are christian or catholic or islamic orginizations, but not one is Jewish, are jews not racist for proclaming to be the chosen one publicly? Can another race not claim to be Gods children without them being pursecuted and charged with a hate crime? I am serious and I think we at Stormfront should hire lawyers for all the "hate" groups and go together in a class action suit against the SPLC for defamation of these great organizations and the people that make them up. Thanks and I want some good feedback. I think the fact that the JDL is not on the list is proof of the double standards set by the SPLC and the ADL. In pursueing their financial interests in these organizations."

Orion
Stormfront posting
May 4, 2009

"God help you if you're a proud, white, male. That's the true axis of evil. In fact, every time you refuse to let a black man rob your house, rape your wife, and murder your family, you're just not being sensitive to his cultural needs."

Aslag
Stormfront posting
May 4, 2009

It Ain't What It Used To Be

"Today, populism is a kind of sentiment that bursts into view in times like these, but there is no real movement behind it. The public just doesn't mobilize around issues in the way it once did."

Alan Brinkley
Historian



"What both the 1890s and 1930s had in common was an intense class anger, a stark division of the nation into 'bosses' and 'workers.' I don't think this perspective applies to our present crisis."

Jerald Podair
History Professor

GOP -- A One Pizza Party

WASHINGTON — A group of prominent GOP leaders on Saturday launched an effort to improve their party's sagging image, hosting an event at which they did not directly attack President Barack Obama, rarely used the word "Republican" and engaged in a healthy dose of self-criticism.

At a suburban pizza restaurant where they officially unveiled the National Council for a New America, party leaders attempted to portray Republicans as sensitive to the concerns of average Americans and shake off the "Party of No" label that Democrats have tried to affix to the GOP...

The town hall-style event, which drew a crowd of more than 100, also was the latest signal of Cantor's emergence as one of the party's leading voices. He announced the group's creation in a conference call Thursday, even as House Minority Leader John Boehner, of Ohio, was bashing Obama to reporters. Boehner is expected to have limited involvement in the new effort.



"Our party has taken its licks over the last couple of cycles; no one is under any illusions about that,but that's why we're here. It's important for us to re-engage with the people of this country. ... The prescriptions coming out of Washington are not really reflective of the mainstream."

Eric Cantor (R-Virginia)
House Minority Whip

Bush & Cheney Run Down On Ventura Highway

Oh how I miss Government Jesse Ventura. I used to love hearing him speak his mind...I just hated it when his spokespeople retracted his statements the next day. Most of all, I loved him because he was Governor of Minnesota and I live in Wisconsin. Below is an interesting interview with Jesse The Body and Larry King. The former Navy SEAL speaks his mind on Bush, Cheney and the evils of torture.

I was also heartened to know the Ventura, like me, is a big fan of surfing. Unfortunately, he lives were you can actually surf and the only live surfing I've seen is on Lake Michigan near Sheboygan.

As always, it's interesting...

American Grille Controversy On Route 1776

"Of all the various forms of corporate subsidy that the American taxpayer is now being asked to shoulder (bailouts for swaggering investment bankers and in­surers, lifelines for overextended homeowners and the mortgage lenders who took advantage of them), perhaps none evoke such complicated emotions in Washington as the comparatively modest plea of General Motors. This is not simply because of its size, but also because G.M. is bound up with our collective identity, both national and personal. No congressman looks back wistfully at the first batch of securitized mortgages he bought with his hard-earned savings during his teenage years or to losing his virginity in the back of his father’s trading floor. Probably no senator thinks back nostalgically to the beloved uncle who proudly broke his back every day for 40 years working in the reinsurance business. To a lot of politicians and White House aides, G.M. isn’t simply another failing company looking for a handout; it’s as much a symbol of middle-class aspiration as the tract house and the Disneyland vacation..."

Matt Bai
Totaled
New York Times Magazine
March 25, 2009

Only 230 Days Till Christmas

It's too late for Mother's Day, but, if you hurry, you can procure yourself stocking stuffers now...



What the critics are saying:

"It's the book that every 15 year old should read,
and no adult should take seriously."

"My cat likes to eat spaghetti."

"The irony of Atlas is that in the book, the "master of the universe" is a factory owner who fixes the problems created by bankers. Our current situation was generated by bankers who saw themselves as masters of the universe.. and forgot the rest of her story."

"Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber — go!'"

"If only a good writer had written the story. I've read the book and found it extremely bad, though some ideas it contains may be good."

This Is Your Brain On TEA

“These taxpayers, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, haven’t been born yet. So they are not being represented today. That’s taxation without representation of the worst kind.”

Rep. Mary Fallin (R-OK)

There Is A "TEA" In "Hypocrisy"

I ran across a two-part column in Forbes by Bruce Bartlett that shed some interesting facts and figures on the recent TEA Party rallies. I suppose most of the TEA Party protesters have gone fishing and given up on their initial burst of "grass roots" activism. However, I prattle on in search of numbers that will lead me to where the suckers are hid in this blame game. I still think the TEA Parties are the initial rumblings of the Newt in 2012 campaign...



"...I have problems with this argument as a justification for the sudden appearance of tea parties to protest taxes. First, many protesters implicitly assume that that the deficit has increased solely as a result of Barack Obama's policies. But in fact, the Congressional Budget Office was projecting a deficit of more than $1 trillion this year back in January, before any of Obama's policies had been enacted, and a cumulative deficit of $4.3 trillion through 2019. (CBO made no assumptions about what his policies might be in making its projection.)

It's true that projected deficits have gotten larger since January. But much of this resulted from deteriorating economic conditions that would have occurred even if John McCain were president. Moreover, it is absurd to assume that McCain would not have enacted any stimulus programs had he been elected.

More than likely, McCain would have proposed a stimulus plan of roughly the same size as that proposed by Obama. No doubt, it would have had a different composition--heavier on tax cuts, different kinds of tax cuts, less spending, different spending--but it wouldn't have been all that different from Obama's package given large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and the pressure to act quickly.

I strongly suspect that many of those that loudly denounced the Obama stimulus package for its impact on the deficit would have cheered the McCain stimulus package even though it would have increased the deficit by about the same amount.

Proof of this proposition is that there were no tea parties during the years when George W. Bush was turning the surpluses of the Clinton years into massive deficits. Indeed, if concerns about deficits are the primary motivation for this week's tax protests, then these same people should have been holding demonstrations of support for Bill Clinton in 2000 when the federal government ran a budget surplus of 2.4% of the gross domestic product--equivalent to a surplus of $336 billion this year.

The truth is that the greatest addition to national indebtedness occurred in 2003 when Bush rammed through the Republican Congress a massive expansion of Medicare to provide drug benefits even though the system was already broke. According to the latest report from Medicare's trustees, the drug benefit added $7.9 trillion to the nation's indebtedness. This should have led to massive tax protests on April 15, 2004. But, of course, there weren't any. Those protesting this week were only protesting because it is a Democrat who has increased the deficit. When a Republican did worse, it's like Emily Litella used to say, 'Never mind.'..."

Bruce Bartlett @ Forbes

Tax Tea Party Time?
Tax Tea Party Time; Part 2

TEA Parties: They Look So Innocent

"...One evening in the spring of ’89, Hendrickson and his girlfriend, Doreen Wright (they met while working on Paul’s campaign), were at a barbecue at her house in suburban Detroit with some fellow members of the Metro Detroit Libertarians. Eventually, the conversation turned to that old Libertarian bugaboo, the income tax. Like many people of his ideological persuasion, Hendrickson was familiar with a book titled “The Great Income Tax Hoax,” written by a former insurance broker named Irwin Schiff, which argued that, among other things, the tax was unconstitutional. In order to “raise the consciousness” about the evil of the income tax, Hendrickson proposed to the Metro Detroit Libertarians an audacious act of protest, something different from passing out fliers and holding up signs — something that, as he later recalled, “could not be kept quiet.” His idea found some takers and, over the course of the next year, Hendrickson, Wright and a married couple, Scott and Karen Scarborough, devised and carried out a plan to build a firebomb and mail it to the I.R.S.

On tax day, Hendrickson and the Scarboroughs drove a parcel containing the bomb to the post office in Royal Oak, Mich., where Scott Scarborough placed it in a mail bin outside. Hendrickson had wrapped a Bigelow tea bag around the bomb’s tubing — in homage to the Boston Tea Party, America’s founding act of tax protest — and addressed the package to “The Tax Thieves.” The return address read, “Freedom Loving Americans...”

Jason Zengerle
Hell Nay, We Won’t Pay!
New York Times Magazine
March 27, 2009

The Pitchforks of Populism

"Our founding fathers knew that when the rights of the people get trampled, we must become a torch- and ptichfork-wielding mob empty of all thought."

Stephen Colbert

Socialist Bogeyman Sighted In 1912

"These ambitions revealed, Taft and his fellow conservatives deemed Roosevelt a dangerous radical. Once in power for a third term, they said, Roosevelt would be a perpetual chief executive. Roosevelt had become the most dangerous man in American history, said Taft, "because of his hold upon the less intelligent voters and the discontented." The social justice that Roosevelt sought involved, in Taft's opinion, "a forced division of property, and that means socialism.'"

Lewis L. Gould
Return of the Rough Rider
Smithsonian Magazine
August 2008

Liberalsim v Socialism

"Liberalism is not socialism, and never will be... Liberalism has its own history and its own tradition. Socialism has its own formulas and aims. Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely, by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the pre-eminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks, and shall seek more in the future, to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly."

Winston Churchill

Republicans: The Doofs Of Haphazard

Let's see, between 2000 and 2006 we kept hearing about the death of the Democratic Party. Looks like the imminent demise of the Republican Party will be a major talking head conversation piece leading up to the 2010 elections. More proof of the "free market of ideas"...as in free to invert the previous talking points and point them at the minority party...

"Anyone who tells you the Republican Party is on its way back is smoking grass. For the party to win, they have to have a broad base. They've lost the broad base."

Frank Luntz
Gop Strategist


"...The conversation dominating Republican politics is how to rebuild. There are no neatly distinct schools of thought in this inchoate debate. In an important sense, though, the argument in Republican circles is the same one that preoccupied Democrats in 2005 — that is, whether the party’s priority should be to retrench ideologically or whether it is more important to fan out in search of a broader message and audience. These aren’t really mutually exclusive schools of thought — most influential Republicans will tell you they need to do both — but which approach you emphasize says a lot about what kind of Republican Party you would like to emerge from the ruins of Bushism.


The retrenchers see the Bush era principally as a cautionary tale in forgetting where you came from. In their view, Bush and the Republican Congress proved to be about as grounded in conservative principle, fiscally and internationally, as Jimmy Carter and Tip O’Neill — spending the nation into debt with patronage projects, going soft on immigration, passing a massive entitlement program for prescription drugs, piling up indictments and mismanaging the military. Republicans lost the public not because their ideology became less relevant or less credible, the retrenchers argue, but because it was twisted in the morass of governing. The only way back, then, is for the party to rededicate itself either to fiscal conservatism or social conservatism or some combination of the two, which means, first and foremost, exposing Obama and Democrats on the Hill for the elitist liberals they really are.


As a broad generalization, most of those talking the loudest about retrenchment and confrontation are in the activist wing of the party; they’re the death-before-taxes conservatives or the picket-abortion-clinics conservatives or the online conservatives who incline, like their liberal counterparts, toward ideological purity..."

by Matt Bai
New York Times
Read Newt Again

"The changing demography is not on the side of the Republican Party. Republicans seen to be waiting for the single to get married and the young to get old."

Kellyanne Conway
Republican Pollster

Did It Really Start In Mexico?

"On Friday, the U.S. disease-tracking blog Biosurveillance published a timeline of the outbreak containing this nugget, dated April 6 (major tip of the hat to Paula Hay, who alerted me to the Smithfield link on the Comfood listserv and has written about it on her blog, Peak Oil Entrepreneur):

'Residents [of Perote] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to “flu.” However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.'

...the possible link to Smithfield has not been reported in the U.S. press. Searches of Google News and the websites of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal all came up empty. The link is being made in the Mexican media, however. “Granjas Carroll, causa de epidemia en La Gloria,” declared a headline in the Vera Cruz-based paper La Marcha. No need to translate that, except to point out that La Gloria is the village where the outbreak seems to have started. Judging from the article, Mexican authorities treat hog CAFOs with just as much if not more indulgence than their peers north of the border, to the detriment of surrounding communities and the general public health."

Read more @ Grist.

Grover Kisses A Newt

It's statements like this that make me a little suspicious about the April 15 TEA Parties being non-partisan...


“If you were going to make a list of 10 potential Republican nominees, Newt would be on any list. He’s probably in most people’s Top 5.”

Grover Norquist

Racist Swines Squeal From The Right

"In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile—and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep."

Hunter S. Thompson
The Great Shark Hunt, 1979



"Illegal aliens are bringing in a deadly new flue strain. Make no mistake about it."
Michael Savage

"I've blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the US as a result of uncontrolled immigration."
Michelle Malkin

"What happens if there's a rash of deaths in Mexico... and if you're a family in Mexico and people are dying and Americans are not, why wouldn't you flood this border?"
Glenn Beck

"What better way to sneak a virus into this country than to give it to Mexicans....then spread a rumor there there are construction jobs here, and there they come."
Neal Boortz


"It's time for Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele, to speak out against this virulent strain of looniness. Immigrants aren't responsible for infecting Americans with swine flu — but racist commentators like these are spreading a far more destructive disease: hate!"
Bonnie Fuller

Washington DC -- Fantasy Island 2009

"The Republican fantasy was that tax cuts were the magic elixir that would solve every problem. Now that the public has rejected it, it's disappointing to see Democrats offering up the equally fantastic notion that Americans can have all the government they want while getting someone else to pay for it."

Steven Pearlstein
Washington Post
Read more...

Economic "Simpletons" Have Tea Party

"...The Tea Party crowd would have more credibility if they had chanted calls to abolish all farm subsidies and student aid and waved placards to repeal the Medicare drug benefit, to shrink the Army and Air Force to 1938 levels and return the Navy to coastal defense as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson.

What these simpletons are unwilling to acknowledge is that if you don't cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, are not willing to shrink the armed forces drastically, and don't repudiate our contractual commitment to pay interest on the national debt, you could cut all other federal spending to zero and we still would have a substantial budget deficit.

You cannot close the deficit without raising taxes, period.

Other nations, including Canada, Germany and the Netherlands, which all faced similar deficits a decade or so ago, did that and found they could still prosper.

Until the general public is willing to face the facts in the choices we confront, politicians will continue to pander to self-delusion. And we will leave our grandchildren with a poorer nation..."

Read more by Ed Lotterman.

Ludlow: Playing Hardball in 1913

...At a ball game on Sunday between two teams of strikers the militia interfered, preventing the game; the miners resented, and the militia—with a sneer and a laugh—fired the machine guns directly into the tents, knowing at the time that the strikers' wives and children were in them...
---
I just happened to looking through my bookshelf the other night and happened to pull out a book titled "Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman's MOTHER EARTH (1906-1918." Thumbing through the book I ran across a piece titled "Remember Ludlow!" by Julia May Courtney. By coincidence the evening was April 20 and the story told about the Ludlow, Colorado massacre on April 20, 1913. Fifty-five women and children died in the attack by federal militia.

Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it titled "Ludlow Massacre." It is a haunting song that will melt the hardest heart with lyrics like...

It was early springtime when the strike was on,
They drove us miners out of doors,
Out from the houses that the Company owned,
We moved into tents up at old Ludlow.
...
You struck a match and in the blaze that started,
You pulled the triggers of your Gatling guns,
I made a run for the children but the fire wall stopped me.
Thirteen children died from your guns.
...
We took some cement and walled that cave up,
Where you killed these thirteen children inside,
I said, "God bless the Mine Workers' Union,"
And then I hung my head and cried.
---
Below are some excerpts from Remember Ludlow...

"...And the climax came when the first spring winds blew over the hills and the snows melted from the mountain sides. On the 20th of April the cry was heard "Remember Ludlow!"—the battle cry that every workingman in Colorado and in America will not forget. For on that day the men of the tent colony were shot in the back by soft-nosed bullets, and their women and children were offered in burning sacrifice on the field of Ludlow.

The militia had trained the machine guns on the miners' tent colony. At a ball game on Sunday between two teams of strikers the militia interfered, preventing the game; the miners resented, and the militia—with a sneer and a laugh—fired the machine guns directly into the tents, knowing at the time that the strikers' wives and children were in them. Charging the camp, they fired the two largest buildings—the strikers' stores— and going from tent to tent, poured oil on the flimsy structures, setting fire to them.

From the blazing tents rushed the women and children, only to be beaten back into the fire by the rain of bullets from the militia. The men rushed to the assistance of their families; and as they did so, they were dropped as the whirring messengers of death sped surely to the mark. Louis Tikas, leader of the Greek colony, fell a victim to the mine guards' fiendishness, being first clubbed, then shot in the back while he was their prisoner. Fifty-two bullets riddled his body.

Into the cellars—the pits of hell under the blazing tents—crept the women and children, less fearful of the smoke and flames than of the nameless horror of spitting bullets. One man counted the bodies of nine children, taken from one ashy pit, their tiny fingers burned away as they held to the edge in their struggle to escape. As the smoke ruins disclosed the charred and suffocated bodies of the victims of the holocaust, thugs in State uniform hacked at the lifeless forms, in some instances nearly cutting off heads and limbs to show their contempt for the strikers.

Fifty-five women and children perished in the fire of the Ludlow tent colony. Relief parties carrying the Red Cross flag were driven back by the gunmen, and for twenty-four hours the bodies lay crisping in the ashes, while rescuers vainly tried to cross the firing line. And the Militiamen and gunmen when the miners petitioned "Czar Chase" and Governor Ammons for the right to erect their homes and live in them..."


I don't know what made me pull that book of the shelf and I don't know what made my eyes fall on the words "Remember Ludlow" on the 96th anniversary of this tragic event. That's just how life is sometimes...

Read more...

Is "Populism" In Your Tea Party?

From the Wall Street Journal:

Conservative activists Wednesday sought to put a different twist on populism with a series of "tea parties" to denounce not corporations but government spending and taxes. Supporters and critics bickered over whether the parties amounted to a popular groundswell or false anger stirred up by cable-television hosts.

Tea parties aside, the anti-corporate anger hasn't so far led to a movement with specific demands, let alone a new political party, as in the past.

Read more...

Moldy Nuts...

On The Left Hand...What Comes Around, Etc.

I've been thinking about the striking similarity of the tactics, phrases and comparisons I've been noticing in today's "political debate." "Protest is patriotic" was a slogan on display during the Bush years. I saw pictures from the recent Tea Party rallies with the same phrase on it. Bush and Hitler comparison where big during the Bush years. The post below this post will shows some pictures comparing Obama and Hitler that are from the Tea Party rallies last week. Do you suppose the Right has accidentally come up with these phrases and Obama-Hitler comparisons accidentally? Could it be that protesters in the United States aren't very creative?

Along with the Bush-Hitler pictures below, I've included some comparisons by liberal opinionators comparing Bush and Hitler. Nazis, communists, socialists, whatever...was there ever a time when our President was an American trying to the best to make his vision of America come true? Probably not...



"...Neither Hitler nor Bush could have effected their radical plans without a party full of functionaries and a compliant national media, of course. Hitler relied on his “Nazi” party, a word derived from the name of his National Socialist organization. He had a brilliant individual named Joseph Goebbels to control the Reich Propaganda Ministry and rally the public behind Nazi policies. Bush relied on his “Nozi” party, a word derived from “Zionism,” with the first four letters Z-i-o-n remixed into N-o-z-i. He had a brilliant cartel of Zionists to control the American Mainstream Media and rally the public behind Nozi policies..."

Peter Guenther
Art History Professor
From “Amerika Über Alles” — Our Nazi Nation.



"...From the Third Reich, Bush learned how to exploit "terrorism" to consolidate his dictatorship. Bush is on the Hitler end of the political spectrum opposing the very principles of our founding. What Bush knows he most surely learned by way of his Grandfather's old trading partner --Adolf Hitler. Hitler's Lesson Number he summed up himself in one sentence.

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death."

--Adolf Hitler

Bush learned how to rule ruthlessly. Hitler never got more than 37 percent of the vote in several elections called over a short period of time ending with an act of terrorism that Hitler would exploit to consolidate his dictatorship. That act was the Reichstag Fire, Hitler's 911..."

Richard Horton
The Guardian
2007



"The 2004 election--which Karl Rove's Nazi thugs stole for Bush II--revealed that many American citizens are as intellectually and morally debased as the Germans in the 1930s. Such incompetence and ignorance always lead to tyranny. The United States is exactly at the same point in national degradation as the German nation in the 1930s when Hitler assumed absolute power and began his regime of mass murder and war crimes against the people of the world.

We've been conditioned to see Germany under Hitler as an unquestionably horrible example of dictatorial tyranny and inhuman barbarity--and to see our present American culture as completely opposite to that of Nazi Germany. And we like to think that if a tyranny such as that in Germany under the Nazi regime were present and growing in America we'd unquestionably be able to see it.

So it's a shock when we realize: most people living in Nazi Germany didn't see the tyranny! They thought it was the best time of their lives!"

Norman D. Livergood
America 2009 Is Germany 1938.

A Different Lincoln...Same Kind of Hate

Recent talk in the news about surveillance of right wing extremists sent me thumbing through a copy of the book "Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell & The American Nazi Party" by William H. Schmaltz. Founder of the American Nazi Party, Rockwell has influenced Neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements in this country. He was assassinated by one of his follower on August 25, 1967.

The pictures below are from Tea Party rallies held across the America last Wednesday, April 15. The quotes are from Rockwell. You don't have to listen to carefully to the arguments around the fringe of these Tea Parties to hear some of the strains of Rockwell's voice. A lot has changed in the 40 years since Rockwell's death...and a lot hasn't changed.



“You have been brainwashed by the liberals, the peace creeps, you must hear both sides of the story. You do not hear both sides, look at the radio and TV – they are completely owned by three companies – ABC, CBS, and NBC. This wouldn’t be so bad, but these companies are controlled to the man, by Russian Jews.”

George Lincoln Rockwell
Colorado State College
May 14, 1964



“I am making an effort to do everything legal to stop the Communist-Negro Revolution now going on in our Country…We are almost all veterans who are simply sick and tired of communism and race-mixing – and the gang of Jews who are trying to force these filthy things down America’s throat.”

George Lincoln Rockwell
Virginia
August 25, 1963



“You’re working every day to pay taxes to breed little black bastards…You’re subsidizing Negro mothers who produce this little black scum for pay, and then when they don’t have any place to live, they want to come and take your house and neighborhood.”

George Lincoln Rockwell
Marquette Park, Chicago
1966

Stamp Recall Notice

The Post Office just recalled their latest stamps. They had pictures of politicians on them, and people couldn't figure out which side to spit on.

Not So Non-Partisan Tea Parties In NR & Hudson

Looks like Campaign 2010 officially kicked off today in New Richmond, North Hudson and across the country as the "grassroots" Tea Parties kicked off. I noticed that the only names getting the blame on the "non-partisan" signs where those of Democrats. I also noticed the same signs and sign holders appeared in both NR and North Hudson. I also noticed more than a few Bush stickers on bumpers of those taking time out to protest against taxes.

I'm all for lower taxes, but I'm wondering where these people were between 2000 and 2008? I noticed that you really didn't start hearing from these people till the Democrats took over the House in November of 2006.

Maybe if these people paid more attention to the facts, they'd finally peel off those Bush bumper stickers and quit being sucker by the Republicans. Of course, will be seeing Obama stickers on cars for the next 10 years -- regardless of the outcome of the 2012 election.

Maybe national politics has been dumbed down to where people are just pulling for the Red or Blue team. The electorate has morphed into two packs of junkyard dogs. They bark and they bite but they don't know why. They just know they like Blue and hate Red and visa versa.

I only made the last half hour of the North Hudson Tea Party, but I didn't learn much more than people where pissed off about their taxes. Would somebody tell me what level of taxes people think is fair and equitable? Do these people think that large business contribute hundreds of millions of dollars via employee surrogate to politician to keep the little guys taxes down? Don't these people realise that these contributions are aimed at mucking up the "free market" so certain competitiors gain advantage over their direct competitors or indirect competitors?

Maybe they could study the graphs below and understand why their children and grandchildren will be paying of the interest and principle of the national debt. Actually, looks like President Clinton was the last President to pay more than just interest on the debt.

Taxing The Rich 1929 Style

Income: $600,640,846
Federal Tax: $ 98,657,237
% Taxed: 16.4%

Twenty-million-dollar assets produce million-dollar incomes. Last week the Treasury's Bureau of Internal Revenue reported some facts about U. S. millionaires gathered during the 1927 tax year:

¶Two hundred ninety citizens (including 23 married women, three spinsters) had million-dollar-or-more incomes. (In 1922 there were 67; in 1926, 231.) From their combined income of $600,640,846,, the U. S. took $98,657,237 as taxes. New York had 136 million-dollar-income-tax-payers, Pennsylvania 34, Illinois 25, Michigan 18. Million-a-year men were lacking in 23 states.

Eleven taxpayers had incomes of five million or more per year— seven in New York, one each in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin. By some twist the Michigan Fords, Henry and Edsel, dropped out of the topmost income bracket. Possible explanation: reduced income due to bringing out Model A.

Incomes by states showed New York, No. 1 (net: $5,398,451,005; tax paid: $305,210,059). North Dakota, No. 48 (net: $33,252,341; tax paid: $187,635).

From the 11/11/1929 issue of Time