In 2009 Craig Miller of Lebanon, PA, confronted fake Democrat Senator Arlen Specter at a town hall meeting. It made great television and went nationwide, a GOP rally point for virulent opposition to the Obama administration’s plan to rework the health care system.
Miller was incoherent, then and in later television appearances. He couldn’t express, even in a basic way, the specific nature of his gripes other than to rage over alleged violation of the Constitution. However, his anger was very real. Three years on, it’s still visceral. It wilted and ultimately destroyed a sick Arlen Specter who was unprepared for it. What Specter got that day, he had coming. Craig Miller, and everyone else, deserved so much better than him.
The outburst was emblematic of the lack of Democratic leadership and its choices of wan uninspiring ruling class pols so used to being surrounded by sycophants and legal bribe-masters they can’t engage with people outside Washington in any way. After having been given the keys to power at a time so fraught in American history, they decided being empty unresponsive suits was most prudent.
I wrote the melody, a very hard rock funk thing (in the Seventies it would have been heavy metal), called it Hey Craig Man! and realized it was impossible to write any lyrical narrative. The only thing that worked was non sequiturs and balderdash about heevahavas, nudists, poozle, on your floor, outside your door, plus Pennsylvania Dutch-isms. There was nothing you could take away from the event except failure.
I stuck it on the web as an MP3.
Yesterday, with the upholding of Obamacare, I remastered it and added Tea Party video.
Readers will note it’s still nonsensical. There is no other way to describe what went on and what still goes on. Craig Miller may have never appeared at a political rally/townhall meeting again but tens of thousands like him continue to do so.
(For the rock music types, I was imitating an effect from something old called the Seamoon Funk Machine.)
Reader Mikey D secured a copy of Thomas Franks’ “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right” for DD blog to review and it arrived yesterday. I again thank him profusely!
It describes a stupefying chain of events in American history. With the world economy leveled by Wall Street misdeeds, the time was ripe for a popular uprising to rival that of the coming of the New Deal.
That didn’t happen. Instead, against all reason and common sense, the opposite. The popular uprising, in the guise of the Tea Party, instead blamed the US government and all of civilized democratic society, coming to accept a twisted conspiratorial story which blamed the economic collapse on secret liberal plots that inflated government for the express purpose of interfering with, and then destroying, pure capitalism.
It was as if at least half the country suddenly decided, bizarrely, that their favorite characters in the tale of Robin Hood were the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne.
It marked signal failure by the Democratic Party, a total inability to tell and sell a moral story on the true nature of what happened, for reasons ranging from alliances with the wealthy class that had caused the disaster and inability and unwillingness to communicate that it stood for anything populist. From the nobodies to President Obama, the party engaged in what amounted to political malfeasance toward its base.
The outrage at what became derisively known as Obamacare was part of this.
I’ll share a complete review of “Pity the Billionaire” in the days to come.
The movie star A-list is further politically left than Fidel Castro, and the thought of Mitt Romney winning the White House will cause glitzy movie stars to raise stacks and stacks of cash for Mr. Obama while promising to leave America for a bankrupt, socialist country if Mr. Romney is elected president. (More proof, although not needed, that no copy editors work on a Ted Nugent column.)
The Occupy hippies could be requested to send in a portion of their unemployment checks or other government assistance to the Obama campaign. For donations of $100 or more, the Democratic Party could send the Occupy idiots a gold-painted brick to toss through the window of a Wall Street bank or other greedy, imperialistic American business (not Apple stores, though – even Occupy hippies need iPods and smartphones).
Unions and Eric Holder also vetted as roots of all evil. In more light news, a Lehigh Valley newspaper interviewed the Nuge for his weekend gig at a casino on what used to be part of the property occupied by Bethlehem Steel. The interview tells those who can read between the lines that no one is interested in helping Ted Nugent make a new album..
It’s now down to this: If Barack Obama holds the White House, and if Democrats win control of either house of Congress, then Obamacare will be unstoppable, and America will become the United States of Europe …
Obamacare was forced upon us by 219 representatives, 60 senators and one president. Simply put, their time in office must end. As I’ve said before, politically speaking, we must level their cities and salt their fields. The barren wastelands of their once-promising careers will be a stark reminder to future would-be statist politicians who are willing to betray the will of Americans and break the covenant of our Constitution.
“Dr. Milton R. Wolf, a Washington Times columnist, is a radiologist and President Obama’s cousin,” reads the by-line. [1]
1. When Barack Obama and I first met he had already become president and was furiously erecting the government-controlled health care system that bears his name and I had already begun a very public crusade to save America from it. Fate would never reunite our mothers who grew up together as young girls, cousins and friends, after they were separated decades ago, but now their sons bridged a divide in our family that was created by decisions not our own. It’s not often that a president’s most vocal critic comes from his own family …
Today, ObamaCare is on the ropes …
— from here,My Cousin Barack Obama And Our Obamacare Family Feud
Google’s news tab highlighted a weak column by some nobody writing for US News & World Report.
Lara Brown, who has allegedly written a book entitled Jockeying for the American Presidency: The Political Opportunism of Aspirants, asserts the upholding of Obamacare will only inspire the opposition to greater heights of … what, exactly?
As extremists, they’re already as aggressive as possible. (In an aside, someone actually used the word “aspirants” in a title for a book. That level of unconscious self-sabotage is virtually Freudian. Either that or she can’t write at all.)
But nothing excites a party more than a political loss. And so today, while Democrats are basking in the sunlight of this decision, Republicans are raising unbelievable amounts of money and strongly coalescing behind Romney’s candidacy. Social conservatives and small government libertarians now believe their only hope to save America from becoming a European-style social democracy is to elect Mitt Romney and repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
If anything, the Supreme Court has helped the GOP more than it helped Obama.
I think the GOP is more like a colony of fire ants that once inhabited a driveway crack next to a house where I lived in Pasadena.
I discovered they were fire ants, not the usual common brown ants, when I inadvertently set up the weekend evening’s barbecue grill over their colony one summer. As I stood there grilling I noticed brown ants underfoot.
Believe me, these boots don’t help.
Three minutes later I was in the house with my boots, trousers and socks off, trying to get them off my lower half. My foot swelled up to just short of the size where I could put on a shoe. I wore flip-flops for ten days but not anywhere near the fire ants.
I found that if you stood within even three feet of the fire ant colony they came for you. I made that mistake twice.
The fire ants were implacable. Their level of hostility never varied. If you got in their space, appeared on their insect radar, they attacked in a swarm. Very quickly.
You had to hand it to the fire ants. They never did the live and let live thing. The house cats also gave the colony much respect.
Only the yard mockingbirds had an answer. They ate them occasionally. And I could not discern how they managed it.
Spraying the fire ant colony didn’t do much except force them into hiding for a couple weeks.
We were reluctant to call authorities or outside pros. Fire ants had been in the news as unwanted interlopers in the area. If you found a colony you were to inform local government and someone, or a crew, would be sent to handle it. I reasoned that if this was done half the driveway would be destroyed and the yard made sterile for ten years with insecticide.
So we lived with the fire ants, learning to give them a wide birth. And one winter season there was so much rain, the part of the driveway where they lived was under an inch of water for two weeks.
All the fire ants drowned and were never seen again.
The GOP, an extremist party, was like that colony of fire ants. They are always inspired in their hostility to enemies. And no matter the conditions, like the fire ants, they are 100 percent united and always totally vigorous in their fury.
The US army has successfully tested a laser device that shoots out 50 billion watt-powered bolts of lightning.
“We never got tired of the lightning bolts zapping our simulated targets,” admitted George Fischer, a physicist leading the project at the Picatinny Arsenal research lab in New Jersey …
The successful model tested features a series of adaptations that should ensure it can survive tough conditions in the field and stay powered-up for long stretches.
Not a trick question: What has the Picatinny Arsenal brought to science?
Continuing in yesterday’s vein, the LA Times blogging ninnies jump on the bandwagon, because talking about how many American believe in really stupid things and how American entertainment cleverly caters to them is just so … much … fun! As opposed to demoralizing.
Not only do more than 80 million Americans believe that UFOs exist, many are not afraid of an alien drop-in, according to a new study.
As part of its new “Chasing UFOs” series, the National Geographic Channel conducted a poll to assess Americans’ views on the paranormal. The study found that 11% of those polled firmly believed they’d spotted a UFO.
In addition, most of those polls said they would regard a minor alien invasion as only a minor inconvenience. And most expect the visitors to be “E.T.”-type friendly, according to a news release on the study.
Number of stories on National Geographic’s Alien invasion/Chasing UFO’s garbage in the Google news tab: 6,400.
That’s a gold medal record for dog excrement!
“The ‘Aliens Among Us’ survey was conducted with a random nationwide sample of 1,114 Americans from May 21 to 29. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.9%.” it reads. “‘Chasing UFOs’ will premiere at 9 p.m. Friday on the National Geographic Channel.”
And they are not worth the dust a rude wind might blow in their faces.
In the real world, SCOTUS screwed over the Tough Crowd in upholding Obamacare. Civil society 1, Heevahavas 0, at least for now.
In the event that Bill Pullman isn’t available, two-thirds of respondents to a new survey say that President Barack Obama would be better suited to handle an alien invasion than presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
“We wanted the pulse on people’s opinions,” said Brad Dancer, senior vice president of research and digital media for National Geographic, who conducted the survey for the new series “Chasing UFOs.” “We wanted to get a sense of how Americans view UFOs, what people believe and how mainstream pop culture may or may not be playing into their opinions on it.”
Nearly 65 percent of respondents said Obama would be better suited to handle a theoretical alien invasion than Romney …
I thought the pandering was bad then. The show, as billed, was to put together a team of “scientists” — or at least people who appear to look sort of like scientists to stupid people — to investigate whether things like UFO, Mothman, and other sightings were, ahem, fact or faked.
The correct science answer is they’re all faked, or imagined, or something else rational. And no real scientists waste their time on such things.
Assembling a team of “entertainers” to tease an audience on such issues is a disservice. It is not right to coddle the beliefs of idiots or encourage their manias. Doing it puts you on the side of evil, even if it’s just television and you need the money.
Six years gone by and it’s worse, ‘fact or faked’ being an industry standard. But at least I don’t even have to endure the commercials anymore.
I gave up cable and network tv shortly after viewing Doomsday Preppers.
Inspire magazine, while not meant to be an al Qaeda joke, has always been easy to brush off. It’s been an example of how al Qaeda has had a serious problem with recruitment filled as it is with wishful thinkers and fantasies on terror that will never come true. Al Qaeda, for practical purposes, is operationally dead. As far as the 99 percent and middle class America is concerned, it poses no serious threat.
Al Qaeda has been whittled down by American might over a decade of war. The US employs more money and manpower hunting it than it needs to destroy a handful of medium-sized nations …
The al Qaeda men writing for Inspire have obviously never actually been to the United States.
They just wishfully think it would be good, and really terrorizing, if someone could like, uh, start a couple fires in … wait for it … Montana!
Inspire only shows two things — that al Qaeda is virtually destroyed and that US war-on-terror reporters are crap.
The men who launched al Qaeda’s English-language magazine may have died in a U.S. missile strike last fall, but “Inspire” magazine lives on without them — and continues to promote jihadi attacks on Western targets, offering detailed advice on how to start huge forest fires in America with timed explosives …
Readers know — not a single William L. Shirer in the entire press army covering the war on terror.
Today:
WOODLAND PARK, Colo. – A stubborn and towering wildfire jumped firefighters’ perimeter lines and doubled in size in the hills overlooking Colorado Springs, forcing frantic mandatory evacuation notices for more than 9,000 residents, destroying an unknown number of homes and partially closing the grounds of the sprawling U.S. Air Force Academy.
Heavy smoke and ash billowed from the mountain foothills west of the city. Bright yellow and orange flames flared in the night, often signaling another home lost to the Waldo Canyon Fire, the No. 1 priority for the nation’s firefighters.
Interstate 25, which runs through Colorado Springs, was briefly closed to southbound traffic Tuesday. All told, officials said, evacuation orders affected as many as 32,000 residents …
Throughout the interior West, firefighters have toiled for days in searing, record-setting heat against fires fueled by prolonged drought. Most, if not all, of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana were under red flag warnings, meaning extreme fire danger.
In central Utah, authorities found one woman dead Tuesday when they returned to an evacuated area, marking the first casualty in a blaze that consumed at least two dozen homes. Sanpete County sheriff’s officials said they hadn’t identified the victim, whose remains were found during a damage assessment of the 60-square-mile Wood Hollow Fire near Indianola.
The nation is experiencing “a super-heated spike on top of a decades-long warming trend,” said Derek Arndt, head of climate monitoring at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Massive wildfires are a fact of life in the mid-west and west. Global warming has made them worse but they’ve always been part of the landscape. Sparks from cars, guns, lightning, arsonists, careless campers — many things touch them off.
Southern California has its red flag days every year. There is probably not anyone who lives here who hasn’t seen a helicopter dropping dyed fire retardant or been close to, if not too close, to a big wildfire.
A wildfire crawled through the south side of the San Gabriel mountains the first year I was here. The smoke plume from it dropped ash like a light snow on Pasadena for days. Coals set palms and rooftops on fire.
A smoke cloud from a wildfire near Venture turned the highway into Santa Barbara on a Sunday afternoon into what seemed like midnight to me and a friend a couple years ago.
Massive wildfires destroy lots of property. Casualties always remain low, hardest hit being the firefighters. People usually have time to get out of the way. Terrorizing is a poor way to describe them.
Firestorms that incinerate cities have been caused by massive strategic bomber raids. They were the property of the old US Army Air Force, Curtis LeMay and Bomber Harris of the United Kingdom during World War II.
The bats were kitted with white phosphorus encapsulated in a decaying gel strapped to a foot, put on racks, and packed into a bomb
which opened in mid-air. The only test resulted in a building burned down at the project site after an experimental bomb was released over a target. The bats flew out, declined to go where they were supposed to, flew back to roost at the base — their home, and set a fire.
The bat bomb’s scientist, and the bats, had roots in Pasadena.
“Fletch grinned when faced with my mastiff,” it reads. (The greater mastiff bat is the largest bat in the US.)
Continuing, from Bat Bomb:
(Fletch) had never seen a bat that large. “Man,” he said appreciatively. “Just think what Doc could do with a plane load of those puppies. Where’d you get ‘im from, Africa?”
My friend Don had a wonderful library. Books were a big part of his life and I have been trying to give the many fine ones in it new homes. All those worth having and reading, and there are many, will not be wasted on public school libraries or other similar “charity,” since the actual valuing of books in such traditional places is well and truly dead.
One of the great finds is a two volume set, Reporting WWII. It anthologizes a large number of American news reports from old foreign correspondents hardly anyone, except for other journalists, remember: A. J. Liebling, Bill Shirer, Ernie Pyle and many others.
William Shirer, from Berlin in September of 1940:
The statement of the High Command, obviously forced upon it by Hitler himself — he often take a hand in writing the official communiques — deliberately perpetrates the lie that Germany has only decided to bomb London as a result of the British first bombing Berlin. And the German people will fall for this, as they fall for almost everything they’re told nowadays. Certainly, never before in modern times — since the press, and later the radio, made it theoretically possible for the mass of mankind to learn what was going on in the world — have a great people been so misled, so unscrupulously lied to, as the Germans under this regime.
[Most Germans] I speak to are beginning for the first time to wonder why the invasion of Britain hasn’t come off. They’re still confident the war will be over by Christmas. But then, until a fortnight ago they were sure it would be over by winter … I have won all my bets with Nazi officials and newspapermen about the date of the Swastika appearing in Trafalgar Square and shall — or should — receive from them enough champagne to keep me all winter. Today, when I suggested to some of them another little bet so they could win back some of their champagne, they did not think it was funny. Nor would they bet.
Hitler made a surprise speech here this afternoon, the occasion being the opening of the Winterhilfe — winter relief — campaign. Like the Volkswagen, the cheap “people’s car” on which Germans are paying millions of marks a month in installments though the factory which is supposed to make them is actually manufacturing only arms, the Winterhilfe is one of the scandals of the Nazi regime, though not one German in a million realizes it. It is obvious in a country without unemployment not much “winter relief” is necessary. Yet the Nazis go on wringing several hundred million marks each winter out of the people for “winter charity” and actually use most of the money for armaments or party funds.
There was a short time when the Reich took over Norway — the same is true of Holland — when Germans might have succeeded in winning the goodwill of the people there, who saw it was helpless to struggle against the overwhelming military power of Hitler. But the Germans did everything possible to forfeit goodwill and in a few weeks the sentiment changed. Now in all the occupied countries the Germans are bitterly hated. No decent Norwegian or Dutchmen will have anything to do with them.
The United States isn’t Nazi Germany in 1940. There are also exactly zero William Shirer’s in the national press corps. Life is bleak, though. Forty six million are on food stamps but the United States has the biggest military in world history.
And we get press reports from the war on terror, in ludicrous style similar to anything that so annoyed Shirer in 1940.
A Norwegian man who received terrorist training in Yemen is “operational” and is likely awaiting instructions to attack Western targets, according to a report by The Associated Press, which was confirmed by an ABC News intelligence source.
The AP reported today that officials from three European security agencies said that the man, who was not identified, is in his 30s, a convert to Islam and had completed training from the al Qaeda offshoot AQAP. One of the officials said the man was believed to still be in Yemen, but said that he has no criminal record and would be able to move freely across borders.
“Not even a parking ticket,” the official said, according to the AP. “He’s completely clean and he can travel anywhere.”
A terrorist. From Norway. Who went to Yemen and is now trained to hit us. He has not even a parking ticket, delivered in dead seriousness. Certainly this man must be of the most serious menace to American society. Perhaps he will finally be able to get through with an underwear bomb.
The White House on Monday promised to work with Turkey and other NATO allies to hold Syria “accountable” for what American officials have described as the deliberate downing of a Turkish military jet, apparently in international airspace …
“We stand in solidarity with Turkey, a key U.S. ally,” spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One. “We will work with Turkey, and other partners, to hold the Assad regime accountable …”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the shoot-down as a “brazen and unacceptable act” after discussing the incident by telephone with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Sunday.
“It is yet another reflection of the Syrian authorities’ callous disregard for international norms, human life, and peace and security,” Clinton said in a statement.
No matter what’s going on, Michelle and I make time to check in with each other — as partners and as parents.
I call it my Michelle time.
I’m lucky to have her by my side on the campaign trail — and I can’t think of a better guest for my upcoming dinner with supporters.
It’s most likely the last dinner we’ll do together on this campaign, and tomorrow night is the last chance to enter — donate $4 or whatever you can to be automatically entered to join us:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Meet-us-for-Dinner
Thanks,
Barack
From the original sticker price of five dollars, price drop to four. That’s a 20 percent savings, folks! You know you can’t pass up that deal.
From yesterday:
Not coincidentally, various arms of the DNC and the Obama campaign have filled e-mail in boxes with increasingly hysterical solicitations for money. All of these are wrapped around the truth that the Citizens United decision have given the GOP an unlimited supply of crazy billionaire sugar daddies …
The Obama campaign used to ask for 5 dollar micro-payments. Perhaps because of donation fatigue in the mailing list it has been ratcheted down to 4 dollars. But they still apparently believe crowd-sourced serial micro-collection is an answer to oligarchs.
Eat it. Crowd-sourced fund-raising against the little army of American plutocrats. What losers. Seeming almost like a good idea once, notice the almost , then destroyed by reality as the fancy of people who drank way too much of the Kool-Aid on the “social networking” power of masses of nobodies without mega-money, like me, on mailing lists. And it’s irritating.
Just this afternoon, in case being lined up for crowd-milking everyday is easy to overlook:
Hey George —
I just wanted to make sure you saw Barack’s email from this morning. This is the new reality we’re operating under in this election.
I know we can go up against all that spending on the other side and still win. But it’s going to take all of us.
Please chip in what you can today:
https://donate.barackobama.com/June-Deadline
Tonight is also your last opportunity to enter for the chance to have dinner with Barack and me sometime soon. Your donation today will automatically enter you.
Thanks so much for whatever you’re able to give today. It matters.
-Michelle
Irritating, squared. Because anyone with a lick of sense knows that flunky robots write and send these mails, not real human beings. So much heartfelt effort — all three minutes of it.
The only fault is that the nation is now seen to lack character and a basic morality in men of this station — except for Jimmy Carter. The silence from everyone else is deafening. And it tells you everything you need to know about the empire in decline.
THE United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.
Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended …
While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past …
At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice … But instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies …
