All In The Family

"For too long, this country has wandered in darkness, and we have wandered in darkness in periods from the beginning. We have had moments of brilliance and moments of darkness. But this country has spent far too long worried about scars and thinking about the scars and concentrating on the scars. Today, we are going to concentrate on the good things in America, the things that we have accomplished - and the things that we can do tomorrow. The story of America is the story of humankind...America today begins to turn back to God."

Glenn Beck
I Have A Wet Dream Rally
Washington DC 08/27/10


"God made dinosaurs 4,000 years ago as ultimately flawed creatures, lizards of Satan really, so when they died and became petroleum products we, made in his perfect image, could use them in our pickup trucks, snow machines and fishing boats.

Now, as to the ANWR, Todd and I often enjoying caribou hunting and one year we shot up a herd big time, I mean I personally slaughtered around 40 of them with my new, at the time, custom Austrian hunting rifle. And guess what? That caribou herd is still around and even bigger than ever. Caribou herds actually need culling, be it by rifles or wolves, or Exxon-Mobil oil rigs, they do just great!"

Sarah Palin

"Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the 'remaking' of the Reich as they call it."

Adolf Hitler

"On this earth you must belong to the church militant or get the hell out of it. That's the right word. You're either with me or against me' There is no middle ground in this battle between Christ and the anti-Christ."

Father Coglin

“One of these days the people of Louisiana are going to get good government - and they aren't going to like it.”

Huey Long

Democratic Boot Licker...

"Are the Republicans terminally stupid or are they just playing the dangerous fool? In either case, the irrational attack on Muslims everywhere by the GOP’s leadership is not only deeply subversive with regard to the American ideal of religious tolerance but also poses a profound threat to our national security. Nor does it help that some top Democrats like Harry Reid are willing to demean Muslims even as we fight two wars in which victory depends on our ability to convey a respect for their religion..."

Bob Scheer
Truthdig

Forget the Constitution! Make Political Hay...

“There is nothing surprising in the president’s continued pandering to radical Islam. What he said last night is untrue and in accurate. The fact is this is not about religious liberty.”

Newt Gingrich
"If we take Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich at their word, their objection to the proposed community center two blocks north of Ground Zero is that the entire area is hallowed ground, and a Muslim facility so close to the site is an insult to the victims and heroes of September 11.

Of course this is entirely about a swath of 9/11 fetishists, mostly Christians, ginning up anti-Muslim fear and demagoguery to score political points. It's a cheap and obvious exploitation of the widespread American prejudice that anyone who happens to be Muslim is equally as guilty and offensive as the terrorists who hijacked and crashed two airplanes into the World Trade Center towers.

It must be an election year because Republicans are once again rolling out September 11 as a wedge issue. You know, because they care about honoring the fallen. When it helps them politically..."

Bob Cesca
Huffington Post

Teachers Union Battling For A "Raise"

Here's any interesting example of a public that might be fighting for something that might make the flaccid public stand up and take interest. Down in Milwaukee the teacher's union would rather have Viagra than keep 17 of their fellow teachers employed. Democratic candidate for Governor, Tom Barrett, is opposing the teachers union on this one. Read on...

Barrett calls on Wis. union to drop Viagra lawsuit
By RYAN J. FOLEY
MADISON, WIS.

Breaking with his own supporters, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett asked the Milwaukee teachers union Tuesday to drop its lawsuit seeking taxpayer-funded erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra.

The Milwaukee mayor said he was "surprised and disappointed" to learn about the lawsuit at a time when Milwaukee Public Schools has laid off hundreds of teachers, including his own wife.

"As governor I will work to invest more resources to strengthen education in Wisconsin," Barrett told Mike Langyel, president of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association, in a letter. "However, I believe education dollars should be devoted to enhance performance in the classroom, and I urge you to drop the lawsuit."

Barrett noted a consultant's estimate that reinstating the drug coverage would cost the district up to $786,000 per year, money he said could be better spent on other priorities...

Read more at Bloomberg Business Week.

“Don’t retreat, instead — Reload!”

"Gunpoint is the point where our ignorant armies trade Matthew Arnold for Benedict Arnold. We do not and we will not live in a country where the armed can ignore the law and bully the unarmed with threats of violence. You cannot say to us, you may have the votes and the Constitution, but we have the guns. When Sarah Palin chants “Don’t retreat, instead — Reload!” she’s already way over the line. If anyone on the Left talked this way, they’d be called terrorists, not patriots, and fall afoul of Homeland Security. We’ve heard enough. Bill Clinton judiciously chose the 15th anniversary of the mass murders committed by Timothy McVeigh, a kind of spiritual ancestor of the Tea Party, to speak out forcefully against the armies of the night. “We do not have the right to resort to violence — or the threat of violence — when we don’t get our way,” he wrote in a Times op ed piece. “Our founders constructed a system of government so that reason could prevail over fear. Oklahoma City proved once again that without the law there is no freedom.”

Progressive Populist

The Knuckle Dragging Arm of the GOP

"...Tea Party patriots aren’t good at making connections. In all honesty, though elitists like me are hesitant to say so, they’re not the cream of the crop, not the sharpest tools in Uncle Sam’s toolbox. When the 2 million-year-old skull of a new hominid, Australopithecus sediba, was pictured in the New York Times and sediba was described as a creature with “a human-like face but a tiny brain,” I thought “homo teaparticus” and was ashamed of myself — until I saw the head shots of sediba’s lineal descendants, eight “Hutaree” militiamen from Michigan recently arrested for plotting to kill policemen. Unfortunately, the Hutaree conspirators appear to be precisely the kind of knuckle-dragging, genetically-challenged primates-in-pants that the average elitist imagines at the right end of the political spectrum. And no Tea Party leader rushed forward to distance his movement from these primitive 'Christian warriors'..."

Hal Crowther
author of Gather at the River

Strong Backs & Weak Minds...The Value of...

"...Once you devalue intellect and education, you clear the way for every kind of charlatan. A politicized rabble of TV weathercasters, with no research or academic credentials to back them up, now defies all climate science by denying global warming, and of course the Tea Party laps it up. Whatever it doesn’t understand, it rejects. One researcher asked a right-wing sample group whether the Bush tax cuts had reduced the deficit. Predictably, most thought they had. Presented with incontrovertible evidence that they were wrong, they were polled a second time. They held to their original error by an even larger margin. What seems to animate this movement even more than xenophobia, the raw material of racism, is “epistemophobia”—-fear of knowledge—-the raw material of superstition and barbarism. You may not be living in the Dark Ages, but you can always make your own. Rather than a tea cup, the symbol of this Party ought to be the ostrich, with its head buried in the sand. In 1825, the year before he died, a discouraged Thomas Jefferson wrote that he felt lost in a nation contaminated by business, banking, religious revivalism, “monkish ignorance” and anti-intellectualism. If Tom could see us now..."

Read more at Progressive Populist

Personal ResponsibiliTEA

..."Personal responsibility” has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs (TEA Partyers)—even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn’t have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?..."

Read My Country, Tis of Me at the Atlantic.

Fringe On The Right

"...What most animates the tea partiers, it seems, is their fear and loathing of the federal government, a government they believe taxes and spends too much, and is trending under President Obama toward “socialism.” No surprise there, given the rhetoric emanating from their rallies. More particularly, the tea-party faithful are angry about Democratic Washington’s supposed excessive concern with helping racial minorities (especially blacks) and the poor, who neither need nor deserve help, and with its wasteful and unnecessary efforts to create jobs and expand health care. The tea types self-righteously view such actions as running counter to their own moral imperative: cutting the budget and reducing the size of government...



One inconvenient truth revealed by the Times survey is that the broad groundswell of national indignation the doting mass media see in the tea-party uprising just doesn’t exist. Americans who identify as tea-party supporters make up, according to the polling data, only 18% of the population (barely one person in five), and only 4% of our fellow citizens have either contributed to the cause or attended its rallies. Moreover, those who have imbibed the Kool- Aid, so to speak, are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Republican party. Interviews reveal three-quarters of the tea partiers to be self-described conservatives who regularly vote for the GOP; contrary to the media-generated image, only a minority are independents, and only a tiny minority are Democrats. Most telling, fully 57% hold a favorable view of George W. Bush, nearly the exact percentage of the general public holding an unfavorable view of the former president. Based on their political views, tea partiers are essentially the far-right fringe of the Republican base..."

Read more @ Progressive Populist.

Oh Yes...The Good Old Days!

“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.”

Doug Larson

Is That A Poll In Your Pants or...

"...A Times/CBS poll of Tea Party supporters confirmed what we all suspected — two-thirds of them admit to getting all or most of their “news” from Fox News. These are true ‘people of the bubble” who are genuinely surprised if we laugh at them for believing that the president was born in Kenya. Inside their bubble it’s a twilight world of distemper, paranoia, and rumor where the warm light of reason (or even the dim light of neutrality) will never fall. Where did the Tea Party get the dizzy notion that health care reform was some kind of communist plot? Fox personality Glenn Beck, the unstable caveman now routinely described as “the guru of the new right wing,” was monitored by the Politico website for his use of inflammatory buzzwords while America debated health care. Its log showed Beck saying “Marxist” 127 times, “communist” 330 times and “socialist” 404 times. This kind of demagoguery leaves nothing to chance. Herding the uncomprehending for the enrichment of the cynical won’t win you a place in heaven, but it’s highly lucrative. In his first year tracking communists for Fox, Beck increased his audience by more than 50% and became the hottest property on cable TV, with an eight-figure salary...

Still, Beck is a special head case. Testing his limits, he’s pressing boldly into unmapped territory on the Outer Right, out where few public figures have ventured since Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare or Father Coughlin’s pro-Nazi broadcasts of the ‘30s. (Though Father Coughlin, no whore to Wall Street, called capitalism and communism the two horns of Satan, which is still worth considering.) In a recent outburst Beck warned his radio audience to boycott any church that preaches social justice — code words for Communism and Nazism, he declared — and was quickly repudiated by his own Mormon Church. Last week he denounced Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” as subversive, un-American music. If Beck had stumbled onto Dan Pollitt’s memorial service in Chapel Hill, he would have called the FBI. Even his on-camera colleagues at Fox, solemn purveyors of audience-tested right-wing bombast, have been eyeing Beck uneasily. Just as the Republican Party grows increasingly wary of the Tea Party—-what kind of woolly-wild candidate might it take to win their votes, how far right is there before you fall off the edge of the American mind?—-smug corporate reactionaries are beginning to suspect that Glenn Beck really means it, and that he may be inconveniently deranged..."

Read more @ Progressive Populist.

Media Rare

“…every time one of my concrete-pouring pals tells me the country is headed to hell in a hand basket thanks to drug-addled media lesbians soft on crime, I am tempted to reply, in my best third-grade-recess voice, ‘I know you are, but what is Rush?’ There are the standard targets, but I swear to your, the scariest thing I heard on my car radio all year aired on a station that had recently switched to a liberal talk format and was running promotional liners one of which featured a female caller saying, ‘I used to listen to NPR, but now I listen to Air America in the morning, because they make me laugh.’ I was pouring hot coffee in my lap at the time, and may have misheard.”

Michael Perry
Truck: A Love Story

TEA and Fantasy

"Many people live in information cocoons in which they talk only to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect."

David Brooks
NY Time columnist


"They come with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality...and create a world in which their consumers have a reality presented to them that is completely at odds with the reality the rest of us live in."

Michael Tomasky
New York Review of Books

Still thinking small...

The biggest science machine ever built has begun churning out the smallest known bits of matter in the universe. Its goal is to uncover some of the deepest, long-hidden secrets of nature.

This enormously ambitious device is the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, a 17-mile-long ring-shaped tunnel 300 feet under the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It began operations on March 30 and has been called the greatest scientific undertaking since the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb during World War II...


"... The proton collisions produce a spray of even tinier particles, mostly "quarks,'' which are the smallest, most fundamental building blocks of matter so far discovered. According to CERN, protons are 100,000 times smaller than the simplest atom, hydrogen, and quarks are 10,000 times smaller than protons. For comparison, if a hydrogen atom were 6 miles across, a quark would still measure less than four thousandths of an inch..."

Read more @ McClatchy Newspapers.

Think small...what's in a nonmillion.

"...What ocean microbes lack in size they make up for in numbers. Marine census researchers calculate there are a "nonillion" of them.

Never heard of nonillion? Well, it's a lot. It's 1,000 times 1 billion, times 1 billion, times 1 billion.

Of course no one can really envision a number like that, so the researchers turned to the popular comparison measure — the African elephant.

A nonillion microbe cells, they say, is about the same weight as 240 billion African elephants — or the equivalent of 35 elephants for every person on Earth.

And that's just the microbes."

Read more...

Spill Baby Spill

What's It All Mean?

“To be sure, there were times you needed tall, tall boots, and every once in a while, if things got too bloated, or someone overreached, Taylor would rare back in his chair and – his one hand triple-tasking a whiskey glass, cigarette, and a pointer finger simultaneously – would direct our attention across the barroom to the opposite wall and say, ‘Hey. Hey. Hey.” Until everyone was looking at the photo-enlarged R. Crumb comic book cover just up the wall from the jukebox and beside the bulletin board with the postcards, bumper stickers, and headline ephemera. On the cover, Mr. Natural – in his robe and wingtips – is riding the sidewalk on a kick scooter. Flakey Foont and Big Baby are peeping over a wooden fence, and Flakey Foont says, “Mr. Natural! What does it all MEAN??’

And Mr. Natural, just cruising on that scooter, says “Don’t mean sheeit…”

Michael Perry
Truck: A Love Story

Racism On The Ropes

You Only Have To Drink The Kool Aid

James Bopp Jr, a Republican National Committee member from Indiana and author of a "purity" resolution that will receive consideration among committee members this week, said the resolution is about bringing conservatives back into the GOP fold :

"It's the difference between success and defeat," Bopp said. "It's counter productive for us to moderate our conservative message. We've tried that and it failed... We nominated the moderate's poster child, John McCain, for president. It's a prescription for defeat. What we have to do is be faithful to our conservative principles and when we do we will win."


"There is significant opposition on the RNC to any sort of litmus test or resolution that would take power away from the state parties or even primary voters as this proposed resolution would do," said Henry Barbour, a committee member from Mississippi. "We need to stick to our conservative principles without telling folks in the Massachusetts GOP that their choice for a U.S. Senate nominee cannot receive funding because of some litmus test."

Barbour, a nephew of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R), said the meeting should focus instead on the "blocking and tackling of elections."

Read more @Washington Post

Textbook Fundementals

“There are two basic facts about man. He was created in the image of God, and he is fallen. You can’t appreciate the founding of our country without realizing that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our history, that could kill a society. That’s why to me this is a huge thing.”

Don McLeroy
Texas Board of Education


“Textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict. But Christianity has had a deep impact on our system. The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of individual rights comes from the Bible. The Western development of the free-market system owes a lot to biblical principles.”

Don McLeroy

"I'm a dentist, not a historian. But I'm fascinated by history, so I've read a lot."

Don McLeroy

Read How Cristian Were Our founders @ New York Times Magazine