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”For those who are directly or implicitly lobbying against climate action, I have a clear message: your ideas are out of date, and you are running out of time…Continuing to pour trillions of dollars into fossil-fuel subsidies is like investing in sub-prime real estate,” Ban said.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)

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