1964: Different Change, Same Thing

"...Goldwater's tone reflected the tenor of this ugliest of Republican conventions since 1912, as entrenched moderates faced off against conservative insurgents. In an era in which a national consensus seemed to have coalesced around advancing civil rights, containing Communism and expanding government, the moderates believed they had to win to preserve the Republican Party. The conservatives—who wanted to contain the role of the federal government and roll back Communism—believed they were saving not just the party but Western civilization.

The logy Mark Hopkins elevators gave the insurgents, flooding into town for what Goldwater biographer Robert Alan Goldberg called the "Woodstock of the right," at least two chances a day to bait Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, anchors of NBC's nightly newscast—and crypto-liberals, according to their harassers. "You know, these nighttime news shows sound to me like they're being broadcast from Moscow," one conservative observed to another on the way down, loud enough for the two newsmen to hear. Brinkley forbade his son, Alan, to show his NBC insignia, except to security.

The volume of right-wing rage at the media was novel at this Republican convention. Unprecedented, too, was the attention focused on the issue of television coverage. The convention was the first since CBS and NBC had expanded their nightly newscasts from 15 minutes to 30 minutes, and the first since the assassination and funeral of President John F. Kennedy redefined the bond between television and politics. In 1960, there were about as many journalists, both print and broadcast, as delegates. Four years later, broadcasters alone outnumbered delegates two to one..."

Rick Perlstein
Revolution From The Right
Smithsonian
August 2008

Do Get Above Your Raisin'

"Children and politicians are notorious for either not understanding the consequences of their actions or refusing to believe that the same actions will always result in the same consequences. (It is fascinating to ponder why we punish children for not heeding the consequences of their actions, yet vote for politicians who promise to ignore history and repeat the mistakes of the past.)"

Robert Ringer
from Action

The Environmentalists' Dilemma

Environmental activists Raoul Surcouf and Richard Spink set sail from Bristol, England, in May on a 40-foot boat outfitted with solar panels and a wind turbine to attempt the first carbon-neutral crossing of Greenland's polar ice cap (a journey being monitored eagerly online in Bristol by 25,000 schoolchildren). However, 400 miles off the coast of Ireland, hurricane-force winds destroyed the boat, and the crew was lucky to be rescued by a nearby ship, which was a tanker carrying 680,000 barrels of crude oil.

Christian Fundamentalists Pray For Global Warming

Friut flies, gay penguins! What's next? Transvestite turtles...



A pair of gay penguins are proving to be excellent adoptive parents after they incubated an abandoned egg and are now constantly caring for their chick.

Z and Vielpunkt, two Humboldt penguins at a German zoo, got the egg after the zoo placed it in the males' nest after the egg's original parents rejected it.

The new dads are one of three same-sex pairs at the zoo..

Stillwater Bridge Update

The Sierra Club's lawsuit against the US DOT, the Federal Highway Administration, the US Department of Interior and the National Park Service is finally scheduled for oral arguments on August 28.

The Sieraa Club's primary contention of this lawsuit is that the National Park Service overturned their objection to the proposed bridge design without any substantive evidence. Their original NPS findings were that the bridge design will, in fact, cause significant impact to the riverway without any plans for mitigating those impacts.

It is important to again note - contrary to what has been voiced by some politicians - that the Sierra Club's lawsuit HAS NOT been the impediment to the bridge being constructed for the last few years. The real impediment is that there has been no funds provided by the Minnesota legislature to support this project.

The Minnesota portion of the proposed new bridge design is now estimated to approach $400 million. With the projected environmental impacts and the skyrocketing price tag, the Sierra Club has continued to believe the design of the bridge should be revisited to find alternative designs which would have less impact and a lower cost to taxpayers.

$400 million today = $295 M in 1999 = $217 M in 1989 = $169 M in 1979 = $188 M in 1969

GOP Future Looks To The Past: McCarthy & Gingrich

..."The elite media tried to ignore us. The government labeled us 'extremists.' But on April 15, more than one million Americans came together, spontaneously, to defend fairness and freedom. I know because Callista and I were there. Here is our story."

Thus began Newt Gingrich's heart-warming albeit rose-colored glasses-garbed assessment of the Tax Day Tea Parties held across the nation on April 15. However, it is probably less interesting to deconstruct Gingrich's optimistic views of Tea Party-ness, as expressed in "Will the Tea Parties Matter?" -- a disquisition on "the nature of the Tea Party movement" -- then it is to recognize that the former House Speaker, has more and more come to represent both what's left of the intellectual firepower of the post-Bush Republican Party and the critic/commentator/analyst/partisan politician that will take on just about any question that comes his way.

With the Republican Party seeming to settle into a state of beserkiness, what with their call for Democrats to rename itself the Democrat Socialist Party; with McCarthyite claims that there are a host of "socialists" in Congress; with a very strange Michael Steele heading up the RNC, while Rush Limbaugh assumes the Party's head-without-portfolio position, it is left to Gingrich to be in as many places as possible, to criticize the Obama Administration (with an occasional compliment tossed its way), to slash away at current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and to proclaim that the Party still has some guiding principles.

Gingrich's goal? To stitch together a coalition of disparate GOP forces that will back him for the Party's Presidential nomination in four years. Does it matter that the public has never liked the man? Apparently, not to the Newtster!..."

Bill Berkowitz
Gingrich's Gasps of Wrath

US Chamber Pot & Capitalsim Propaganda

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is launching a $100 million campaign it describes as standing up for capitalism — an effort that could pit the group against the Obama administration and liberal activists on issues such as health care reform, energy, regulation of businesses and executive pay.

The chamber’s Campaign for Free Enterprise is a national and local effort opposing tax increases and government intrusion into the competitive marketplace.

MoveOn.org says the campaign will spearhead business opposition to the Obama administration’s health care reform and energy policies. The administration has sought business advice on the recession, credit crunch and housing crash, but has moved against some private sector wishes on issues such as credit card protections, health care reform, and CEO pay and bonuses.

GOP Future Vision

"Certainly our party has taken its licks the last few cycles, but that's why we're here. The reality is, the prescriptions coming out of Washington right now are not reflective of the mainstream of this country."

Eric Cantor
Republican House Minority Whip


"We are the party of the revolutionaries; they [Democrats] are the party of the monarchists.…We have an advantage. When a party has the White House, communication comes [from the] top down, and there's a strategy that everyone has to march behind."

Mitt Romney
Former Republican Governor of Massachusetts


"I would say you can't beat something with nothing. The other side has something. I don't like it, but they have it.”

Jeb Bush
Former Republican Governor of Florida



"I don't believe in crystal balls. I do think that our administration has taken some steps that have restored confidence in the American people that we're moving in the right direction and that simply opposing our approach on every front is probably not a good political strategy."

Senator Arlen Specter
Former Republican and now a Democrat

"The polar bears will be fine."

Obviously, there are differences of opinion on the impacts of global warming. A renowned scientist with an Obama bumper sticker on his car weighs in...


“The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models...The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”

Freeman Dyson
World-renonwned scientist

"...Climate-change specialists often speak of global warming as a matter of moral conscience. Dyson says he thinks they sound presumptuous. As he warned that day four years ago at Boston University, the history of science is filled with those “who make confident predictions about the future and end up believing their predictions,” and he cites examples of things people anticipated to the point of terrified certainty that never actually occurred, ranging from hellfire, to Hitler’s atomic bomb, to the Y2K millennium bug. “It’s always possible Hansen could turn out to be right,” he says of the climate scientist. “If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t. By the public standard he’s qualified to talk and I’m not. But I do because I think I’m right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it’s true my career doesn’t depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it’s more a matter of judgement than knowledge.”...

by Nicholas Dawidoff
The Civil Heretic
New York Times Magazine
March 29, 2009

“There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about...if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”

James Hansen
Head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
An adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth"



Dyson quotes:

“The costs of what Gore tells us to do would be extremely large. By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor. I’m concerned about the Chinese...They’re also changing their standard of living the most, going from poor to middle class. To me that’s very precious.”
---

Al Gore talking about Hurricane Katrina: “How in God’s name could that happen here? Nature’s been going crazy.”

Dyson: “That is of course just nonsense. With Katrina, all the damage was due to the fact that nobody had taken the trouble to build adequate dikes. To point to Katrina and make any clear connection to global warming is very misleading.”
---

“Most of the time in history the Arctic has been free of ice. A year ago when we went to Greenland where warming is the strongest, the people loved it. They were so proud. They could grow their own cabbage.”
---

Dyson On Al Gore: “He certainly is a good preacher. Forty years ago it was fashionable to worry about the coming ice age. Better to attack the real problems like the extinction of species and overfishing. There are so many practical measures we could take.”

"Free" or "Freer"

“One problem with the American system is that if you lose your job and are without an income, that’s not just bad for you but for the economy. Our system has more security. And I think it makes our quality of life better. My American friends say they live in the best country in the world, and in a lot of ways they are right. But they always have to worry: ‘What happens to my family if I have a heart attack? What happens when I turn 65 or 70?’ America is the land of the free. But I think we are freer.”

Geert Mak
Dutch author

Yesterday's Dixiecrats Are Today's Republicans (or conservatives or whatever)

"But it was southern Democrats who formed the line to defend Jim Crow. Georgia governor Lester Maddox famously brandished ax handles to prevent blacks from patronizing his restaurant. He was a Democrat. Alabama governor George Wallace stood in front of the Alabama schoolhouse in 1963 and thundered, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." He was a Democrat. Birmingham Public Safety commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor sicced dogs and turned fire hoses on black civil rights demonstrators. He was a Democrat. In 1954, Orville Faubus tried to prevent the desegregation of a Little Rock public high school. He was a Democrat. President Eisenhower, a Republican, sent in federal troops to prevent violence and enforce a court order desegregating the school. As a percentage of their respective parties, more Republicans voted for the passage of the Civil Rights Art of 1964 than did Democrats. A Republican President, Richard Nixon, not John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson, instituted the first affirmative action program with goals and timetables."

Larry Elder
The Ten Things You Can't Say In America

"Technical Arrogance"

“I felt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands. To release the energy that fuels the stars. To let it do your bidding. And to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles, I would say, this what you might call ‘technical arrogance’ that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

Freeman Dyson
Nuclear scientist

Newt Gingrich: No Alien To Controversy

Does anybody really respect Newt Gingrich? He is a low point in conservative intellectualism. He's Karl Rove witha GED and Dick Cheney without dog pee on his leg. But hey, the future looks grim for Republican fairy tales when the only three chords left in the GOP songbook are Gingrich, Cheney and Rove. Maybe they should fade to white...

"She (Nancy Pelosi) really disqualified herself to be the speaker. She has a unique responsibility for national security. … She made this allegation that smears everyone who's trying to defend her. What she said … was a stunning dishonest statement about a major American institution that has a key role in our survival. I think the Democrats should get a new speaker."

Newt Gingrich
Former Republican Speaker of The House

"Right now there are two RNCs here in Washington, side by side. The contrast is instructive.

One, the Republican National Committee, is a clueless self-parody. The other, the (R)ush-(N)ewt-(C)heney tag team, is providing the real muscle as the Republican right begins to build traction in taking on President Obama and the Democrats.

The official RNC just spent the last two days wasting time and inviting ridicule—listening to a listless, empty speech by its chairman, Michael Steele, and debating the grand idea of calling the Democrats "socialists." Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh hammers away at the Democrats and the president on radio every day; Newt Gingrich sarcastically attacks Nancy Pelosi on The Daily Show (and gets laughs for doing so); and Dick Cheney continues his high-profile, Iraq-star media tour..."

Howard Fineman
US News & World Report




Gingrich's Voice of Experience:

"...In the summer of 1997, a few House Republicans had come to see Gingrich's public image as a liability and attempted to replace him as Speaker. According to Time, the replacement was engineered by several Republican backbenchers, including Steve Largent of Oklahoma, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mark Souder of Indiana. They soon gained the support of the four Republicans who ranked directly below Gingrich in the House leadership Dick Armey, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Republican conference chairman John Boehner of Ohio, and Republican leadership chairman Bill Paxon of New York.

On July 9, DeLay, Boehner and Paxon had the first of several secret meetings to discuss the rebellion. The next night, DeLay met with 20 of the plotters in Largent's office, and appeared to assure them that the leadership was with them.

Under the plan, Armey, DeLay, Boehner and Paxon were to present Gingrich with an ultimatum - resign or be voted out. Combined with the votes of the Democrats, there appeared to be enough votes to vacate the chair. However, the rebels decided that they wanted Paxon to be the new Speaker. At that point, Armey backed out, and told his chief of staff to warn Gingrich about the coup.

In response, Gingrich forced Paxon to resign his post, but backed off initial plans to force a vote of confidence in the rest of the Republican leadership.

By 1998, Gingrich had become a highly visible and polarizing figure in the public's eye, making him an easy target for Democratic congressional candidates across the nation. In 1997 a strong majority of Americans believed Gingrich should have been replaced as Speaker of the House, and he held an all-time low job approval rating of 28%[36] although his approval later rose to 45% by April 1998...."

Click here for more on the Republican's Richard Nixon of the 2012 Predisential race.

Republican Blowhard Back

"Thanks Rush. Rush listen, I voted Republican and I really didn't want to see Obama get in office. But you know Rush, you're one reason to blame for this election, for the Republicans losing. First of all, you kept harping about voting for Hillary. The second big issue was the torture issue. I'm a veteran. We're not supposed to be torturing these people. This is not Nazi Germany, Red China, North Korea. There's other ways of interrogating people, and you just kept harping about, it's okay, or it's not really torture. And it was just more than waterboarding. Some of these prisoners will killed under torture.

And it was crazy for you to go on and on like Levin and Hannity and Hewitt. It's like you're all brainwashed. And my last comment is, no matter what Obama does, you will still criticize him because I believe you are brainwashed. You're just -- and I hate to say it -- but I think you're a brainwashed Nazi. Anyone who can believe in torture has got to be -- there has got to be something wrong with them."

Chicago Caller On Limbaugh's Show

What's In A Name: Childish

I'm starting to think the Republican Party is embracing creation science more and more as it de-evolves into ever increasing ignorance and stupidity. As the GOP hunches into ape-like ignorance and more proficiently drags its knuckles, it becomes more obvious that it stoops to stupidity to keep its base. Obviously it will end up with its base being the Dixiecrats who rejected the Democratic Party after the the civil rights movement. No doubt that was socialism too...I guess we are seeing a case of the GOP unable to rebrand itself so they are focusing on the Democrats.

Seeing Neo-Red

"I don't think that left to its own devices, capitalism moves along smoothly and everyone gets treated fairly in the process. Capitalism is like a child: If you want the child to grow up free and productive, somebody's got to look over the shoulder of that child."

Radio Opinionator

"...Every dollar spent by government is one less dollar spent by taxpayers. Money comes from somewhere -- taxes, borrowing (taxes on layaway) or printing, which, if not offset by productivity, causes inflation, a stealth tax on everyone. Who can spend, save or invest more efficiently and humanely, you or some tenured bureaucrat in D.C. who's never run so much as a hot dog stand or lent himself out as a United Way volunteer?

Private enterprise is the most proficient job- and wealth-creating "system" ever designed. But many, if not most, Americans think only government can and should build and run "infrastructure" and that government "investment" creates jobs of which the private sector is incapable of creating. Really?

...Obama's anti-capitalist, Big Government, command-and-control economic vision exceeds mere "childishness." It is dangerous. After 100-plus days, the jury reached its verdict.

Obama is a neo-Marxist."

Larry Elder
Columnist

Edler's archives

(You'd think Mr. Elder would paint his pictures with broader strokes of reality and history...)

>

Investigate Obama's "career path toward a neo-marxist presidency.

She's No Harriet Meirs!

I wonder what the uproar would be, if President Obama nominated Jesus to be the next US Supreme Court justice? Of course, not being and of northern European descent and being somewhat olive complexion, he would definitely be a another "token judge." I supposed we are witnessing the parlor game that partisan politics has degenerated into. Actually, taking history into account, political business as usually is more like it.

Personally, I'm for more diversity on the Supreme Court bench. I'm for moving towards a day when we don't worry about "tokenism." But alas, the fortress of white-male power is slowly but surely crumbing into the history. When it does, American just might be a better place for it.

You go girl!

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Sonia Sotomayor
Supreme Court nominee
from a 2001 speech

In Los Angeles on March 29, hit and run drivers killed two pedestrians: an 18-year-old female college student and, hours later, a 55-year-old Guatemalan American construction worker. As is not unusual, according to the Los Angeles Times, the LAPD went into massive "overdrive" to find the woman's killer but handed the other homicide off to "a lone detective with little more to go on than hope."

On April 25, in Washington, D.C., the murder of a black teenager was reported in two sentences of that day's Washington Post while nearly 10 times the space was devoted to the colonoscopy of a panda at the city's National Zoo.



"Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."

G. Gordon Liddy

"Someone pinch me. I must be dreaming. Some of the same Republicans who have wielded the hot blade of racial divisiveness for years, are now calling Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, a racist. Oh, the hypocrisy!

The same Newt Gingrich who once said that bilingual education was like teaching “the language of living in a ghetto” tweeted that Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist.” The same Rush Limbaugh who once told a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back” called Sotomayor a “reverse racist.” The same Tom Tancredo, a former congressman, who once called Miami, which has a mostly Hispanic population, “a third world country” said that Sotomayor “appears to be a racist....”

Charles M. Blow
Read more of Rogues, Robes and Racists at the NY Times

Grand Old Pissing Match in 1912

..."For years, the tensions within the Grand Old Party had been building over the issue of government regulation. During his presidency, Roosevelt had advocated a "Square Deal" between capital and labor in American society. By the time he left the White House in March 1909, Roosevelt believed that the federal government must do more to supervise large corporations, improve the lot of women and children who worked long hours for low wages in industry, and conserve natural resources. "When I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service," he said in August 1910. Roosevelt was especially critical of the state and federal courts for overturning reform legislation as unconstitutional, and he said that such decisions were "fundamentally hostile to every species of real popular government'"...

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

Mother Can You Spare A Dime?

”For those who are directly or implicitly lobbying against climate action, I have a clear message: your ideas are out of date, and you are running out of time…Continuing to pour trillions of dollars into fossil-fuel subsidies is like investing in sub-prime real estate,” Ban said. ”Our carbon- based infrastructure is like a toxic asset that threatens the portfolio of global goods, from public health to food security.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

"We have to do it this year. Not next year. This year. The clock is ticking, because Mother Nature does not do bailouts…The business community and the leaders of the world must go together to safeguard the world."

Al Gore

”Renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies are our fastest growing exports right now. That’s the message to businesses here: put pressure on governments that this is not just about idealism. This is not anti-growth.”

Connie Hedegaard
Danish Climate and Energy Minister


Read more...

Hens Peck Glenn Beck

Facts! Beck don't need no stinking facts!
There's no Whoopi cushion for the Beckster...

Dr. Evil Unmasked

“I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.”

Dick Cheney
Vietnam War Draft Dodger

Read more by Jay Brookman @ Atlanta Journal Constitution


"Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren...Provide everything necessary for them on the road."

George Washington
American Revolutionary War General

Please Name Names

Above is a picture of Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute. I've ran across a couple of interview videos of him lately. Now that everything that Ayn Rand predicted is coming true -- I heard it on FOX News -- it's time for the humble profits of liazze-faire talking points to sit up and take the stimulus-free credit they are so humbly owed. This, of course, includes Merle Haggard who was singing about free Bubble-Up and rainbow stew when Glenn Beck was still in Pampers.

Below is an interview of Yaron Brook by Glenn Beck. I catch Beck on his radio show occasionally on KTLK FM and find his rants and raving amusing. Interestingly, my favorite in-your-face-conservative working partner cringes whenever I ask him if he caught the latest Beck show. He hates Beck almost as much as he hates Michael Moore.

If you listen to the interview below, notice that both Beck and Brook say they know people who are giving up on working hard to make a buck. Evidently the entrepreneurial spirit has died in American. Let me know if you catch any actual names of capitalists who are dropping out. I missed the actual names of anybody. These Laissez-faire capitalist fundementalist remind me so much of Christian fundamentalists. They see the End Times coming tomorrow. Of course, what's always coming but never gets here?

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)