Hangin' Out Those "Family Values"

"Playgirl is not porn. I don't think it's a bad thing to do. Art, if you want to call it."

Levi Johnson
Playgirl pinup boy
Father of Sarah Palin's grandchild

"...I admit that I have winced at some of the lurid speculations about Governor Palin's family life, and thought them unkind and tasteless even as I lapped them up. She now claims that Levi Johnston is a fabricator when he describes a wildly dysfunctional Palin household. So then: what if she's right about him? It wasn't the liberal elite media who dug up this scapegrace and nudity artist. It was the Republican nominee for the vice presidency who hauled the lad before the cameras and forced us to look at him: a fit husband for her beloved daughter and an example to errant youth in general. Once again, one is compelled to ask which would be worse: a Sarah Palin who really meant what she merely seemed to say, or a Sarah Palin who would say anything at all for a cheap burst of applause..."

"...So there it is: anti-Washington except that she thirsts for it, and close enough (and also far enough away to be "deniable") to the paranoid fringe elements who darkly suspect that our president is a Kenyan communist. If you object to Kenyans interfering in the internal affairs of these United States, you really ought to raise an eyebrow at a candidate for the governorship of Alaska who accepts anointment from "Bishop" Thomas Muthee, a weird person who claims that witch removal in his Kenyan parish led to a reduction in crime, booze, and traffic violations..."

Read more of Palin's Base Appeal in Newsweek

What's In Your Finite Pool Of Worry?

Yesterday Roadkill made the following point in a comment:

"Funny how this all works. Seems like anytime there is a significant global warming meeting, rally, cor conference, mother nature sends a reality check."

Last night, as the first blizzard of the 2009-2010 winter was raging outside my window, I read a newspaper articles that provide parallel insight into RK's comment. This morning is I type this before I go out to shovel my driveway and the dog's kennel out and I think about a History Channel video I watched last night titled "A Global Warning!" The documentary looked back over the past 650 million years and reminded me the way things were and they way they will be.

I'm sure I care about the future of our planet, but as the article discussed below points out, we have a "finite pool of worry."

"We are collectively irrational, in the sense that we should really care about the long-term well-being of the planet but when we get up in the morning it's very hard to motivate ourselves."

Dan Ariely
Professor of behavioral economics
Duke University

"...Psychologists studying the issue say that the now-familiar warnings about climate change kick at emotional dead spots in all human brains -- but especially in American brains. Researchers have only theories to explain why people in the United States have done less than those in such places as Europe and Japan. Some think Americans are culturally leery of programs that the government might develop to target climate change, trusting instead that the free market will solve major problems..."

"...One U.S. researcher thought television is to blame: All those TV ads have made Americans more focused on their own wants, she theorized, and less likely to care about the long-term good...But the obstacles to progress -- internationally and in the U.S. Senate, where a climate bill is stalled -- aren't just mental...Climate change is a policy problem that has "psychological distance": In layman's terms, there's a sense that this is a problem for somebody else or some other time..."

Read Save the planet? It's irrational at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune


"Simply urging people -- or telling them that it's a good idea to recycle or conserve energy -- is the same as nothing."

Robert Cialdini
Arizona State University Professor

Just A Pinch Between The Right & Left

"The game seems to be that all countries pick a politically safe number.India is now joining that game. And the game started with the United States."

Navroz K. Dubash
India Center for Policy Research

"...Last week, President Obama announced that the United States, the world's second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China, would set a provisional target to cut its total greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent by 2050. The next day, the Chinese government announced a target to slow emissions by reducing carbon intensity levels by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels.

Neither the Chinese nor the American plan satisfied many critics, who want both countries to commit to far bolder steps. Navroz K. Dubash, a climate change specialist in New Delhi, said the American pledge was actually a lesser commitment than it would have been obligated to meet under the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States refused to ratify. Mr. Dubash said that India had become a more constructive participant in climate change negotiations, but that the flurry of pre-Copenhagen announcements did not represent a breakthrough response to the crisis..."

Read more of India Announces Plan to Slow Emissions at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Compromise Pushes Nuclear Option

"The line I always remember from Winston Churchill is that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after all other possibilities have been exhausted. The good news is that we're there."

J. Wayne Leonard
CEO of Entery

“The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Our is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”

Omar Bradley
US Army General

“Well you know boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like women. You just have to read the manual and press the right button.”

Homer Simpson


"...When a brigade of Greenpeace activists stormed a nuclear power plant on the shores of the North Sea a few years ago, scrawling "danger" on its reactor, Robert Tindale was their commander. Then head of the group's British office, he remembers, he stood outside the plant just east of London telling TV crews all the reasons "why nuclear power was evil..."

Read Nuclear Power Regains Support at Washington Post

"It really is a question about the greater evil -- nuclear waste or climate change. But there is no contest anymore. Climate change is the bigger threat, and nuclear is part of the answer."

Robert Tindale
former director of Green Peace

"The national policy of the country in the 1970s was to wean ourselves from oil, so the government said, 'Go build coal and nuclear.' Then Three Mile Island happened, and all we had was coal. Now, it is fundamentally unfair to punish people for having carried out national policy...people in Indiana would be subsidizing people in California, and that's wrong."

James E. Rogers
CEO Duke Power

"I guess you could call it 'grudging acceptance. If we are really serious about dealing with climate change, we are going to have to be willing to look at a range of options and not just rule things off the table. We may not like it, but that's the way it is."

Steve Cochran
Environmental Defense Fund

"Because of global warming, most of the big groups have become less active on their nuclear campaign, and almost all of us are taking another look at our internal policies. We've decided not to officially endorse it, in part because we feel the nuclear lobby is already strong enough. But we are also no longer focusing our energies on opposing it."

Mike Childs
Friends of the Earth

"...The construction of nuclear plants was banned in Britain for years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in what was then the Soviet Union. But now the British are weighing the idea of new nuclear plants as part of the battle against climate change, and Tindale is among several environmentalists who are backing the plan..."

"More than 40 Prairie Island Indian Community members attended a rally today and voiced their opposition to Xcel Energy’s expansion and nuclear waste storage plans for the nearby nuclear plant.

Today is Native American Heritage Day. As a way of honoring their ancestors and protecting the community, officials urged tribal members to contact state legislators and continue voicing opposition to Xcel's plans..."

"We need to let the power plant know we're going nowhere. This is our ancestral lands."

Ron Johnson
Tribal Council President

Read more @ Red Wing Republican Eagle

GOP Still Taking The Southern Route

"By the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

Ken Mehlman
Former Republican National Committee chairman

"The Republican Party walked away from the black community in the late 1960s. It was stupid. It was dumb to pursue a southern strategy and it came back to bite them in 1992."

Micheal Steele
Current Republican National Committee chairman

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”

Former President Jimmy Carter

Republicans called Carter’s remarks “very destructive” (Newt Gingrich) or “an outrage” (GOP chairman Michael Steele, who happens to be black himself).

"Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks."

Bob Hebert
The New York Times

Hypocritical Oath

"I am not a racist. I am simply a person speaking up to make sure patients don't get hurt by the government and by insurance companies...Because I've been so effective in pointing out how the government plans are going to hurt patients in very serious ways ... the only way they can neutralize my message is to discredit me personally."

David McKalip
Florida surgeon
Sender of image below via e-mail


"...The image is a pastiche. Obama's head is grafted onto a picture of a man wearing nothing but bead necklaces and a loincloth, his legs spread wide, his long, thick fingers grasping a stick in front of him. There's a bone through his nose and a confection of feathers and flowers on his head. The picture evokes the world of National Geographic that once gave children a guiltless excuse to indulge their curiosity in the flesh. Under the witch doctor picture is the slogan "Obama Care," with the red, white and blue campaign symbol serving as the O and a sickle and hammer as the C.

The statement McKalip and his cohort were making is thus a political pastiche as well: Obama is foreign, strange, not "natural born"; half-naked, he is a figure of danger, seductive perhaps for his exoticism, his magic--the promise of cures--but ultimately loathsome, at once clownish, somehow thrilling to confront but also frightening, certainly not someone a white man would want to leave alone with his daughter... and a communist to boot..."

Joann Wypijewski
Read more of Red Scare, Black Scare at The Nation.



"I genuinely regret the decision I made in passing this e-mail message along. Directly to President Obama, I sincerely apologize for offending him. This was, in no way whatsoever, my intention. The image has nothing to do with my feelings or thoughts on any race or culture. I recognize that this image is offensive and hope that the nation refocuses on assuring all Americans have access to high-quality, affordable health care with no party interfering in the patient-physician relationship. My intention is to focus directly on the issue at hand, which is putting financial and decision-making power into the hands of patients and taking it from government and insurance companies."

David McKalip's apology

Turn Your Head And Cough

"The amount of death and disease would be less, if all disease were left to itself."

Dr. Jacob Bigelow
1835

Nobody Said It Was Going To Be Fair

"Millions of people — in small islands, least-developed countries, landlocked countries as well as vulnerable communities in Brazil, India and China, and all around the world — are suffering from the effects of a problem to which they did not contribute."

Angelica Navarro
Chief climate negotiator for Bolivia

"Privately, we already hear the simmering resentment of diplomats whose countries bear the costs of our emissions. I can tell you from my own experience: It is real, and it is prevalent. It's not hard to see how this could crystallize into a virulent, dangerous, public anti-Americanism. That's a threat too. Remember: The very places least responsible for climate change — and least equipped to deal with its impacts — will be among the very worst affected."

Senator John Kerry


"That, in a nutshell, is the argument for climate debt. The developing world has always had plenty of reasons to be pissed off with their northern neighbors, with our tendency to overthrow their governments, invade their countries and pillage their natural resources. But never before has there been an issue so politically inflammatory as the refusal of people living in the rich world to make even small sacrifices to avert a potential climate catastrophe. In Bangladesh, the Maldives, Bolivia, the Arctic, our climate pollution is directly responsible for destroying entire ways of life — yet we keep doing it."

Naomi Klein
Read Climate Rage @Rollingstone


“Man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

Senator Inhofe (R-Oklahoma)
Senate Committee on the Environment

"There are very few objections to the theory as a whole; everyone in the scientific community agrees that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is on the rise, and almost everyone believes that it cannot help having some effect. To declare, as some editorialists have done, that the warming has not yet appeared and therefore the theory is wrong is like arguing that a woman hasn't yet given birth and therefore isn't pregnant."

Bill McKibben
The End of Nature

"The whole (global warming) thing is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability."

Jerry Falwell
Religious Capitalist

When Two Roads Collide

“It’s time to heed the call from General McKiernan and others for more troops. That’s why I’d send at least two or three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan. We also need more training for Afghan Security forces, more non-military assistance to help Afghans develop alternatives to poppy farming, more safeguards to prevent corruption, and a new effort to crack down on cross-border terrorism. Only a comprehensive strategy that prioritizes Afghanistan and the fight against al Qaeda will succeed, and that’s the change I’ll bring to the White House.”

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL)
2008 Presidential Campaign

"The Taliban often came into the village to ambush convoys, and then almost immediately the foreign air strikes hit us. Our children were killed; our crops were destroyed; our homes were damaged. There was nothing left for us there."

Afghan Villager


"The foreigners would bombard us, and the Taliban would come in and demand that we give them our sons...The Taliban have swarmed the village and have established checkpoints and outposts everywhere. Believe me, if there were even a slight possibility of return, I wouldn't be here. But there is none."

Sultan Mohammad
Afghan father


"If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress."

President Barack Obama

“If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

Lewis Carroll

Walls Of Dreams & Nightmares

"America was and is the immigrant's dream."

Don DeLillo

"As you know, I'm an immigrant. I came over here as an immigrant, and what gave me the opportunities, what made me to be here today, is the open arms of Americans. I have been received. I have been adopted by America."

Arnold Schwarzenegger

“Reagan went to Berlin and said, ‘Tear down this wall.' We went to San Diego and said, ‘Build a fence.’ It was just stupid. You have Hispanics saying, ‘I’m not going to vote for those guys because they don’t like me.’ ”

Dick Armey
Freedom Works lobbyist

Read Dick Armey Is Back on the Attack
@ New York Times Magazine


"...José and Victoria don’t like talking about their journey into America - that episode in their life is over. But the kids can’t keep from recounting the story, and the memory of the blisters on their feet walking north through the desert with their mother.

Ask José why he came here, and he will say he wanted a job with a wage that could support his family. He entered the U.S. legally with a work visa, but decided not to return after it expired.

Ask him why he stayed, and the undocumented Mexican sounds more like a patriot than an alien..."

Read more of A delicate existence: Undocumented and living on a Wisconsin dairy farm
at Wisconsin Watch

“I love this country (USA) because there are many opportunities, many jobs — not like in Mexico, and it’s more beautiful. Wherever one goes, one sees beautiful pastures.”

Jose
Undocumented worker living in Wisconsin

Tea'd Off

“Nobody has ever lived on this earth with the prosperity, the tranquillity, the safety, the security, the freedom and the peace that we Americans have enjoyed. Europe is governed by a concern for the well-being of the collective. That’s what they care about. What makes us different is we begin with the liberty of the individual. We got it right, and they got it wrong.”

Dick Armey
Former Republican House Majority Leader
Currently paid $500,000 annually as a Freedom Works lobbyist and TEA Party organizer

Political Fore Play

"Politics is about the improvement of people's lives. It's about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and the world. Politics is about doing well for the people."

Paul Wellstone


"Only two kinds of people can afford the luxury of acting on principle, those with absolute power and those with none and no desire to get any...everyone else who wants to be effective in politics has to learn to be ‘unprincipled’ enough to compromise in order to see their principles succeed."

Saul Alinsky
Community Organizer

Dobbs Stories - The Turd Degree

“You know, I discern more of a difference between then, which was under the Bush administration whom I was criticizing, and now, when it is the Obama administration and an entirely different tone was taken."

Lou Dobbs
Former CNN Commentator

Bootstrap Mentality

"The reason people are poor in America is not because they lack money, it's because poor people in America lack values, character, and the ability to work hard."

Bill Cunningham
Conservative Radio Talk Show Host



"Every American kid should be required to watch videotape of the poor in New Orleans and see how they suffered because they couldn't get out of town. And then every teacher should tell the students, "If you refuse to learn, if you refuse to work hard, if you become addicted, if you live a gangsta life, you will be poor and powerless just like man of those in New Orleans."

Bill O'Reilly
FOX News Talk Show Host and Former War Correspondent

Cutting The Mustard -- Grey Poupon Economics

"We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all."

Brian Griffiths
Goldman Sachs

Fiasco Conservatism

"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives."

John Stuart Mill
Economist (1806-1873)

A Room Without A View

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2(This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3And everyone went to his own town to register.



So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

Kumbaya My Elephant

“Support our troops—bring them home” and “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”

“No conservative reads those bumper stickers and thinks, ‘Hmm . . . so liberals are patriotic! We liberals are universalists and humanists; it’s not part of our morality to highly value nations. So to claim dissent is patriotic—or that we’re supporting the troops, when in fact we’re opposing the war—is disingenuous.

“It just pisses people off.”

Jonathan Haidt
University of Virginia

“Liberals tend to have a very optimistic view of human nature. They tend to be uncomfortable about punishment—of their own children, of criminals, anyone. I do believe that if liberals ran the whole world, it would fall apart. But if conservatives ran the whole world, it would be so restrictive and uncreative that it would be rather unpleasant, too.”

Jonathan Haidt
University of Virginia

“They’re driven by the idea that God gave man dominion over the earth, and keeping the planet healthy is our sacred responsibility. If we simply rape, pillage, destroy, and consume, we’re abusing the power given to us by God...The climate crisis and the economic crisis are interesting, because neither has a human enemy. These are not crises that turn us against an out-group, so they’re not really designed to bring us together, but they can be used for that. I hope and think we are ready, demographically and historically, for a less polarized era.”

Jonathan Haidt
University of Virginia

Read Liberals-Arent-Un-American-Conservatives-Arent-Ignorant by Tom Jacobs @ Utne Reader.

Red State Values

"A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions, so as to consolidate the collective life of the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any individual, and more concerned about others than about himself. Only thus can he be considered a Communist.

Every comrade must be brought to understand that the supreme test of the words and deeds of a Communist is whether they conform with the highest interests and enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of the people. "

Mao Zedong
The Little Red Book

"Reagan Conservatives are those who don't compromise their values. The Republican party needs that these days...yet it seems difficult to find them. Republicans also need someone who can actually orate--someone who is not like a McCain. The Democrats seem to find plenty of skilled salesmen for their cause...but the Republicans are the ones who need them...

"...Conservative values are backed up by historical precedent, logically derived principles, and prudence (practicality). Conservatives love facts. Liberals, Socialists, Communists, and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists hate facts, because to them facts are pernicious things that get in the way of a good ideology--and their irresponsible actions. Speaking of facts, anyone who checks into them will fairly quickly learn that it's Conservatives who make up the intellectual party in politics. Liberals co-opted--that is, stole--that concept in order to grab power..."

Read more @American Conservative Values.

"Americans will respect your beliefs if you just keep them private."

Bill O'Reilly

The International Democracy Conspiracy Continues...