via brooklynmutt.com
Let's remind Republicans that history will always have them on the wrong side.
Conservatives love to re-write Ronnie Reagan history, YouTube keeps them in check. Remember, he was also selling arms to Iran at the same time.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Sad Comparison
via tumblr.com
King was looking to give equality to the people. Beck is trying to take what he never gave back. What an interloper.
Friday, August 27, 2010
The Prodigal Gay Son
"Mehlman would like us to believe that he didn't know he was gay back then. And, I'm sorry, but that doesn't pass the smell-my-finger test. Mehlman rose quickly through the ranks of the GOP, wound up on top, cashed the checks, made the contacts, did real and lasting harm to other gays and lesbians, and Mehlman knew damn well what he was and what he was doing."
-Dan Savage
Mehlman is the perfect Republican poster boy: fights to deny rights of people and minorities to which you yourself are a part of.
Add tea baggers on Medicare yelling about getting the Government out of their health care and anyone not making $5 million who votes Republican.
NOTE: Savage is OK with Mehlman now using his clout and contacts to fight for gay rights. What a mensch
Your House Is Burned: Who's At Fault Rebuilding It?
Okay, here's a heavy-handed analogy, followed by a brief quiz:
So, some guys burn a house down.
Then they walk away.
Another guy comes along, sees the charred remains and wants to rebuild. He tries to gather materials but is thwarted by the friends of the guys who burned the house down.
Having little choice, he tries to get money to buy materials from those same guys.
They take the money, give him some materials to rebuild, but when he tries to use them, they knock the materials out of his hands. He bends down to pick them up and they knock them out of his hands again.
Sometimes they trip him.
Sometimes they make up scary stories about him.
They force him to give time and energy towards things that make no sense instead of toward rebuilding the house they burned.
And they never really let him get started with the rebuilding of the house they burned down.
Question: is the whole thing the new guy's fault?
Answer: if you are a Republican, then yes.
via bobcesca.com
The only action Republicans have taken in 2 years is inaction.
Palin: Nationalistic, Hawkish, Vapid, And Above All Dishonest
Roger Ebert’s post on the Park 51 project is a must-read, but this bit about Sarah Palin was especially good:
6. Somewhere on the Right is an anonymous genius at creating memes. Sarah Palin floats a suspicious number of them: Death Panels, Ground Zero Mosque, 9/11 Mosque, Terror Babies. Her tweets are mine fields of coded words; for her, “patriot” is defined as, “those who agree with me.” When she says “Americans,” it is not inclusive. These two must have been carefully composed in advance to be tweeted within 60 seconds of each other:
By using the evocative word “shackles” she associates Dr. Laura’s use of the N-word with the suffering of slaves. By implying Dr. Laura was silenced by “Constitutional obstructionists,” she employs the methodology of the Big Lie, defined in Mein Kampf as an untruth so colossal that “no one would believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” She uses the trigger word “reload” to evoke her support of Second Amendment activists while attacking “activists” for evoking the First.
She really does represent everything that is wrong with conservatism in this country. Quite the avatar for a dying movement.
Catholic Church Involved In 1972 IRA Bomb Cover-Up Sheds Light On Cordoba
Mollie Wilson asks, relative to Cordoba mosque in NYC:
"On one level, it’s the same dynamic we’ve seen revealed in the sex-abuse scandal applied to a different crime. But it’s also the real-life illustration we didn’t know we were looking for on the question of how much responsibility ordinary believers ought to take for the worst atrocities committed in the name of their religion. After all, the Catholic church wouldn’t tolerate, let alone harbor, terrorists. Certainly not terrorists implicated in the death of eight-year-old girls. Would it?"
Partisan v Stupidity
"It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence? But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier. It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?" - Timothy Egan
The Jon Stewart On Beck's "I Have A Scheme"
via brooklynmutt.com
Beck claims he had no idea 8/28 was MLK's speech, yet he is trying to "take back the Civil Rights Movement".
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Libertarian Utopia Meets Reality
Timothy B Lee tackles seasteading, "a program for political reform based on a proliferation of self-governing ocean colonies":
If all you care about is avoiding the long arm of the law, that’s actually pretty easy to do. Buy a cabin in the woods in Wyoming and the government will pretty much leave you alone. Pick a job that allows you to deal in cash and you can probably get away without filing a tax return. In reality, hardly anyone does this. To the contrary, people have been leaving rural areas for high-tax, high-regulation cities for decades.
Almost no one’s goal in life is to maximize their liberty in this abstract sense. Rather, liberty is valuable because it enables us to achieve other goals, like raising a family, having a successful career, making friends, and so forth. To achieve those kinds of goals, you pretty much have to live near other people, conform to social norms, and make long-term investments. And people who live close together for long periods of time need a system of mechanisms for resolving disputes, which is to say they need a government.
Conservatives long for time, an idyllic past, that exists in their minds but does not have any bearing with current ways of life and the costs involved. Government is ALWAYS the problem, yet they want the same Government to protect and maintain the entire country. They never follow through on any of the cuts they campaign on and just pass all the costs on to the next generations through debt and rising deficits.
The fact is, the Government is not going anywhere and taxes are going to cover the costs of running it. Deal with it.
More Empty Homes Than Homeless: An American Travesty
About 3.5 million US residents (about 1% of the population), including 1.35 million children, have been homeless for a significant period of time. Over 37,000 homeless individuals (including 16,000 children) stay in shelters in New York every night. This information was gathered by the Urban Institute, but actual numbers might be higher.
Fox Business estimates, there are 18.9 million vacant homes across the country.
3.5 million people without homes; 18.9 million homes without residents.
No magic bullet answer, but it shows how America is a bubble culture and can over-react to most things.
Banks will bulldoze before they let another option like affordable housing take root.
Liberalism v Conservatism: A Debate
Via DougJ at Balloon Juice:
"I’ve always been liberal, proud to call myself liberal, and if people who want fiscal sanity and a decent health care system think they should call themselves “progressive” instead, I’ll all myself a progressive instead. If there’s two sides and one of them is wrapped up in meaningless ideology and the other is at least somewhat interested in attaining practical goals, I’ll call myself whatever the practical side calls itself.
Right now, pragmatic people call themselves liberals and ideological people call themselves conservative. That’s painting with a broad brush, I realize, but it’s pretty much true. I’m not sure any of that has to do with liberalism or conservatism per se. I don’t know if it means that Burke and Bobo’s other idols suck and their liberal equivalents are awesome. But I do think that fact that conservative pundits talk so much about Burke and Hayek and (let’s be honest) Reagan, while liberals talk more about exactly how much large the stimulus should have been and how much money we could have saved with the public option…that is telling."Simply put, conservatives are mostly interested in shrinking government, no matter the effect, liberals are interested in getting the government to provide certain services, not in growing government per se.
Or, the main difference is that conservatives look back to a supposedly idyllic past which they work to recreate, while liberals tend to look forward to a potentially idyllic future.You decide. I find we cannot change or recreate the past, so pragmatism has no place in achieving conservative goals, which are ultimately based on nostalgia and other emotions.
The Strategic Dimension of the Mosque Debate
"Islam did not attack the United States on 9/11. It is simple collectivism—the denial of individual agency that libertarians reject—to believe that the tiny band of thugs who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks speak for an entire religion, culture, or creed. Our sympathy to families of 9/11 victims and our vestigial fears should not allow us to indulge gross and wrong generalizations about individuals of any faith." - Jim Harper
"The debate itself sends signals: If the United States were predominantly anti-Muslim, this debate wouldn’t be happening. If our political leaders had the power to decide matters of religious observance, this debate wouldn’t be happening. The debate is helping to show Muslim populations around the world—who might not know otherwise—that we think and debate about these things, that we are a functioning democratic republic, and that our country is undecided about the position of Muslims in the United States or, at worst, weakly anti-Muslim."
McCain Beats McCain
“No incumbent out there last night suffered a more decisive defeat than Senator John McCain. Who, last evening was rejected by voters for his anti-tax cut, anti-border fence views. Instead they voted for a candidate who took the exact opposite position of John McCain, dark horse candidate John McCain.
John McCain really tapped into the anti-McCain sentiment. So Senator McCain, our heartiest congratulations and condolences on your victorious defeat.” - Stephen Colbert
via brooklynmutt.com
Republicans with double standards and hypocritical changing views from year to year are not a problem. It's a reflexive mechanism to help never accept blame for anything.
Bush Campaign Chief and Former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman: I'm Gay
Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.
via theatlantic.com
Ken managed the most anti-gay Presidential campaigns in modern history. He spent his entire adult life attacking and taking away human rights from groups he was a member of. Classic Republicanism and conservatism.
Funny that Ken now feels comfortable to come out in a climate of tolerance towards gay and lesbians that he spent his whole life trying to destroy and undermine. What an evil man.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Collateral From Idiots: NYPD Charges Man With Muslim Hate Crime
Thank you, hateful Tea Bagger and Conservative Americans for making crazy people feel like they can act out:
The New York Police Department has confirmed to TPM that a cab driver in Manhttan was allegedly stabbed by a passenger who asked if the cabbie was Muslim, and says the incident is being treated as a hate crime. The suspect has been charged with attempted murder and other crimes.
All the hypocrites wrapped in their Constitutions and Bibles need to wake up and remember what they say believe in has to be lived up to.
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