The first order of business for Mr. Romney should be to let Latinos know that the GOP wants all people to succeed to the very best of their abilities, unencumbered by the heavy and draconian foot of Fedzillacrats who believe they know what is best for people …
Mr. Romney should continue to press for education reform, and remind Latino voters that education is vital to success. He should illustrate the importance that Americans of Asia-Pacific descent place on education and how fast their children move into the middle class. It doesn’t have to be an Asian thing …
Mr. Romney should continue to remind Latinos that the GOP is not anti-immigration or racist …
Unintentionally hilarious, the Republican Party has stopped beating the wife, sez Ted. Straighten up and fly right like the “Asia-Pacifics”.
North Carolina GOP heevahavas haved passed law essentially declaring global warming isn’t happening because they say so. What else could we get them to pass because science needs debunking?
How ’bout bringing back the flatness of the world? Did you know it’s a scientific conspiracy to deny the Earth is the center of solar system too? We should also reinvigorate alchemy so people can be free to believe, if they just find the right stone, they will be able to transmute lead into gold. That will fix the economy.
Next, they could rule that dinosaurs lived with people thus clearing the way to make The Flintstones instruction material for high school biology. That will chase off the Darwinian vermin.
From the wire:
With hardly any debate, the state Senate on Tuesday nixed global warming restrictions on the state’s coast.
Lawmakers passed a bill that restricts local planning agencies’ abilities to use climate change science to predict sea-level rise in 20 coastal counties. The bill’s supporters said that relying on climate change forecasts would stifle economic development and depress property values in eastern North Carolina.
The bill has sparked outrage in some circles … Despite the controversy, it has repeatedly cleared every hurdle in the GOP-led legislature. In the Senate on Tuesday, the only comments were a few brief remarks in favor of the measure as a victory of common sense over alarmist research.
Two Southern states have made it clear they want nothing to do with the idea of global warming.
A day after the North Carolina state senate passed a bill requiring science on rising sea levels to be ignored, Virginia lawmakers allowed a study on its coastline to begin on the state’s dime only after all references to climate change or global warming were removed from its funding proposal.
Looking to address flooding and encroaching sea water on the coast, Virginia lawmakers recommended a scientific study on the problem. When state Sen. Ralph Northam pushed the study through the legislature in February, he met resistance from Republicans who didn’t want any reference to “sea level rise” or “climate change” in its language.
“(State Rep. Chris Stolle) said ‘This isn’t going to work with “sea level rise” in there, it’s not going to go anywhere if we don’t change it’,” says Northam.
Stolle told The Virginian-Pilot those were “left wing-terms” …
And why is the Democratic Party having its convention in North Carolina? What platoon of fools think this state is going for the president in November?
Foreign readers and Americans who are not nuts will note, once again, that your country can’t say it’s a leader in anything except the quality of obstinate homegrown stupidity when half its political leadership is an enemy to science.
It also looks like there’s a disconnection of the scientific community. It knows the Republican Party is insane from top to bottom, that the insanity is contagious and that there is nothing to be done.
So they have gone silent. Which seems sensible. After all, what is actually to be done when newspapers report this as matter of fact, and all one can expect is language like “the bill has sparked outrage in some circles … “?
Go to Hell leftist commie scientists.
For those about to rock against the global warming hoaxing, we salute you!
Let’s put it this way: Ron Paul is the Libyan air force of presidential candidates. He’s the Washington Generals of the ballot box. He’s the John Carter of the electoral process.
Dud. Bupkes. Zippo. Nada.
Yet the tea party can’t quite seem to take the rejection of the Paul campaign by the body politic. Republican voters would have rather shoved shards of glass up their noses than see Mr. Dithers on the ballot against President Barack Obama this fall.
Thus the tea party has started whining that the Republican National Committee is interfering with their plans for a three-day celebration of all things Ron Paul …
One can only imagine the excitement of a Ron Paul-Unchained event at the fairgrounds.
Day One: Don’t miss a robust taunting of the uninsured terminally ill, followed by the Ben Bernanke dunk tank. Entertainment: Florida Panther scavenger hunt.
Day Two: Revelers gather in the specially built survivalist bunker to exchange conspiracy theories. Be sure to sign up for the Heckling of the Homeless People bus trip. And don’t be left behind for special speaker, End Times beefcake Tim LaHaye. The evening ends with the Black Helicopter Cotillion. Entertainment: Bobbing for bald eagles.
And I had a song for it.
The question remains: How are the Romney people going to keep the rest of the hate crazies in line? It’s not like Paul supporters are the only nuts loudmouthed uncles coming to the party.
Case in point, people like this …
Nugent borrows from North American Indian imagery to communicate with his audience. Just as the Ghost Dance ritual was believed to have the power to lead the Plains Indians out of their dire circumstances in the late 19th century, so too, Nugent declares, will the Great White Buffalo lead us out of our dire economic-political straights …
Nugent performed this song as his encore in a full Indian feather head-dress.
“You and me are the great white buffalo, we are the spirit of the buffalo??? he told the crowd. “I feel the spirit of the buffalo inside of me and we are going to take back the White House this fall.???
Throughout the concert Nugent projected a mythic image of his imagined America. On two separate occasions he told the crowd: “You can’t do this in France, baby. You can only play this kind of music if you’ve got freedom, baby.???
The final act on stage was Nugent and all the members of his band donning WWII G.I. helmets and re-enacting the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima …
This self-proclaimed defender of conservative family values went on to dedicate his “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang??? as a “love song for all the girls??? in which he says: Wang dang, what a sweet poontang/A shakin’ my thang as a rang-a-dang-dang in the bell/Down on the street you know she can’t be beat/She’s so sweet when she yanks on my meat/What the hell …
Concertgoers who tried to reconcile the vacillating value system of Nugent left with a serious case of whip-lash …
From here. Best concert review I’ve read in a good long time.
Joe Klein of Time mag has produced a column in which, as usual, he interviews American salt-of-the-earth in the south for ways to restore “common cause.” It’s worthless. There will never be common cause in this country. There never was.
The people in the interview imagine a place from their past, which didn’t exist. What existed was that they were on top or where they wanted to be and all those they despised then and still despise, the designated no-goods, were out of sight.
I doubt if there was ever any time when I thought there were a big bunch of American comrades who could could gather around a campfire and sing songs like at Boy Scout Camp. In fact, I hated Boy Scout Camp and the whole idea of the shared rote ritual and duty, always designed by someone else allegedly more knowing than you.
Strip away Klein’s musings, leaving only the quotes from the interviews, and it reads as nasty business, older whites who, as usual, want to have it stuck to someone else, usually of different color, religion, sexuality, or place on the totem pole — preferably smaller and powerless.
The picture of the veteran with the bald head, shaking his finger, tells you what’s in store.
Richard’s coffee shop and military museum in Mooresville, N.C., is a down-home place where veterans from all our modern wars gather most days to talk and feel comfortable in ways they only can among their fellow warriors …
Most of those who spoke with me were Vietnam veterans, and they were not thrilled with the way the country was going. When I asked them how they’d rate Barack Obama as Commander in Chief, they started to laugh, which I thought was unfair and disrespectful …
It turned out that these vets, like many I’ve met, simply didn’t trust anyone who hadn’t been through boot camp–and so their pool of acceptable leaders was diminishing dramatically …
“There isn’t an 18-year-old boy who doesn’t need to get his butt kicked,” added Nosker [the finger-pointing old white guy], “by someone in a position of complete authority.”
This theme kept coming up in meeting after meeting during my first five days on the road, though usually in less vivid fashion …
For the conservatives, the country had changed beyond their imagining; not just civil rights but gay rights (a contentious referendum recently banned gay marriage in North Carolina), and new ethnic groups that seemed foreign–the South Asians who all of a sudden seemed to run half the convenience stores, the Latinos who didn’t seem to want to speak English. Why, even the President of the United States was something strange, neither black nor white. For liberals, it was all about intolerance.
[Because it is about intolerance. The first two sentences of the paragraph are just that. Everyone — the ‘everyone’ being the gays, the ‘new ethnic groups,’ the people who don’t speak English — needs a ‘kick in the butt’ to get with the program.]
But we were all Americans, I’d remind both sides. How were we going to get to know each other better, find some common ground?
[A lot don’t want common ground with the people interviewed for the piece. Why should they? As a decent human being it would be reasonable to want to have nothing to do with the intolerant. Just because we’re all “Americans’ by birth isn’t much of a reason for coming together.]
“I went to a private school where the students did all the cleanup work ourselves, except for the heavy-duty plumbing and electrical work, and it created a real camaraderie. I just went to my 50th high school reunion, and that spirit was still there. And I’ll tell you what else, we didn’t have very much destructive behavior or graffiti in our school …”
I asked if anyone around the table was opposed to Obamacare. “I am,” said Terry Kinum, 69, a recovering alcoholic, retired from the Navy, who now works with addicted veterans. “I’m sick and tired of all these welfare and socialist-type Marxist programs we’re being inundated with.”
Yes, the Mitt Romney private school was so civilized fifty years ago. All the nice white boys and girls from the good families kept the place neat, clean and orderly. No riff raff allowed. For sure, it proved they were made of all the right stuff.
Another day, another first person piece — like grains of sand — on the people of good will at the coffee shop.
We had a saying for this man, even back in ’74: “Blow it out your ass.”
Estimated median household (2 – 3 people) income in Sangamon County, IL: $53,000.
Price of Ted Nugent to speak at GOP Party dinner in Sangamon Country recently: $25,000, 10 thousand of which was for a special air flight from Waco to deliver the speaker.
Meanwhile, another significant bit of information has surfaced about the Springfield appearance of rocker and conservative activist TED NUGENT at the Sangamon County GOP’s Lincoln Day dinner Feb 10.
A large-donation report filed by the party with the State Board of Elections on May 24 listed a $10,000 in-kind contribution from Brandt Consolidated, a Springfield-based farm supply business.
The description of the donation is “Airflight,??? and it turns out that the passenger on that flight was Nugent.
Nugent’s appearance — which became controversial because of comments Nugent made about President BARACK OBAMA, such as calling the President an “America-hating punk??? — took place before
e Long became the party chair. She said Kent Gray made the connection with Brandt Consolidated.
Large donations are supposed to be reported in a matter of days after they are made, not three months later.
“We had a horrible time trying to reach someone to get the cost,??? Long said when asked about the delay.
RICK BRANDT, a Tampa, Fla., resident and president and CEO of the company, said he personally owns the jet, and there could have been a delay in billing from the company that manages the aircraft for him. He said he provided a one-way trip for Nugent from Texas.
“Being a child of the ’80s, I didn’t want to miss that,??? he said of the flight with Nugent. “It was neat to meet him.???
The party also paid a $15,000 appearance fee for Nugent.
Cheapest one-way flight from Waco to Springfield: $300, coach, from ExPedia.
“We have a guy in the White House who is an absolute, America-hating punk,??? Nugent said. “And it isn’t really the punk’s fault. It’s we the people for bending over and letting the punk in the door.???
“How about a welfare program … (where) for every kid who gets a sandwich from the welfare program, there’s about 10,000 pigs buying bling-bling, dope and meth with my welfare money,???
“If we don’t fix the United States government this November, we will get exactly what we asked for,??? Nugent said, “and it won’t be the rabid coyote’s fault for getting into our living room – it will be our fault for not shooting him.???
A political columnist at Esquire puts together the best thing I’ve read on the Wisconsin recall.
He states the other side won out of anger at the very idea of it and that outside pundits, specifically Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, fed this. That coverage on the progressive network, as if the recall was in the bag, was used by Koch money to aggravate people and assure them they were right to be angry. (Incidentally, I stopped watching Maddow and Schultz for related reason. Their careers rise and fall on the niche entertainment value of how irritating and meddlesome they appear to non-progressives on national issues. Whether that’s an asset or a liability is for marginal and uninspiring Democratic politicians to mull over.)
The writer, Charles Pierce, points out the belief in Wisconsin that governors should not be recalled except for criminal misconduct, ignoring recent history in which California’s Gray Davis was recalled over outrage at electricity market gouging and rolling blackouts — which the electorate, largely, did not find out had been rigged by Enron until well after Arnold Schwarzenegger was in office.
But those were the forces that combined with an overwhelming flood of out-of-state money to make liars out of practically everybody. This was a winning electorate that found itself besieged by the images it saw on its television, and it felt its concerns being drowned out by drum circles and chants. When Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch got up and began her speech with the line “this is what democracy looks like,” she was doing more than simply engaging in some stunningly high-level gloating; she was telling her audience exactly what they wanted to hear. Their democracy was hijacked by other people. The out-of-state special interests that most bothered them were not the Koch Brothers; it was Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz. Upwards to $50 million poured into Wisconsin from various plutocrats and their front groups to tell the people in this hall that people from outside Wisconsin were taking them all for a ride. The money was a balm. The money was an amplifier. The money gave them absolution because the money told them what they already believed …
As the room grew steadily more rowdy, I fell into conversation with Ed Hannan, a lawyer from Greendale …
“It means the restoration of integrity in government,” he continued. “It means an understanding of the role of government, the limitations of the role of government, and the return of power to the taxpayers, as opposed to union organizers. That is how important this is. Going forward, what we will then see is more legislation that is going to limit the role of government and, more than that, a repeal of laws. For instance, the Minimum Mark-Up Law, a limitation on the environmental laws. We need to have sunset laws on environmental restrictions and the employment-related laws. This election was never about collective bargaining. It was about legislation that removed the state as the collection agency for union dues.”
There was no point in arguing with the man. There didn’t seem even to be any sport in pointing out that the “restoration of integrity in government” that he saw in the results was on behalf of a guy who took to the podium last night three steps ahead of a sitting grand jury. The distance between what I saw and what Ed Hannan saw was too great. I might as well have been talking to him in Finnish.
The Obama campaign’s Jim Messina dunned me for $5 with the virtual ink not even dry on the Wisconsin analyses:
What just happened in Wisconsin wasn’t an accident.
Republican Governor Scott Walker and his allies outspent the Democratic challenger nearly EIGHT to ONE — and one of the most unpopular governors in the country managed to hold on.
This result is direct confirmation that all the outside money that’s poured into elections this cycle can and will change their outcome. And it’s exactly what could happen on the national stage unless we can close the gap between special interests and ordinary people.
Go choke yourself.
You need to talk to your guy about making a message that beats the misinformation spread by billionaire money for the purpose of guaranteeing the white independent vote. You’ve no other choice. Shaking everyone else down regularly for serial micro-payments won’t get it done.
When voting yesterday I noted with bemusement “candidate” Orly Taitz, the clinically insane person best known for her national quest to prove the President is a foreign Manchurian candidate. But you can never be too nuts in this country. Taitz got over 100 thousand votes, most of them all in the category of “Registered Psychopath — White.” One also cannot rule out the possibility that some ‘voters’ ticked her out of sheer boredom and perversity.
It’s refreshing to see the delusions of “Queen of the Birfers” Orly Taitz extend beyond her crackers quest to prove Barack Obama was born in Africa. The South County dentist/lawyer/real-estate saleslady’s OrlyTaitzEsq site this morning boasts that Tuesday night’s election results show she is “currently” the fourth runner-up to incumbent Democrat U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and that “ballots will continue to be counted through July 13.” Oh, Orly . . .
Still, Taitz can take comfort in the fact that she finished ahead of 19 other candidates, and that at least 113,563 Californians share her crazy, including 17,549 in Orange County, where she was the choice of 6.1 percent of the voters.
Love the OC Weekly’s portrayal of the Taitz voter — below.
Today Ted Nugent did a radio interview with an Illinois station, WJBC, in advance of his show in Peoria. Ted informed the hosts that apparently the only reason there is unemployment is because people are lazy sods who want a handout. There are help wanted signs everywhere, according to Ted. And his many business friends tell him Americans don’t want to work, they just want to know how many sick days that get.
Hosted by R. C. McBride and Jim Fitzpatrick, the chat was mostly politics. It gave the rocker a chance to expound on all the people who hate him, the President, and his peculiar but very Tea Party views.
If you listen to the entire thing here — I admit it’s a hard slog — even the hosts become audibly uneasy with the direction Nugent’s philosophies take
But I did the heavy lifting so you don’t have to. The most paranoid and weird bits:
We are living in dangerous times. we have a corrupt government … We have a president who will quote the founder of communism … Then he’ll visit the Vietnam Memorial Wall and lie claiming that he wants to thank 58,000 dead American soldiers and Airmen and Marines and Seamen while he quotes the man they fought against.
No one has ever been as corrupt and dared to quote Mao Tse Tung as the President of the United States does right now … No one has raped the economy and destroyed the economy as quickly and efficiently as Barack Obama and his czars have done in such a short period of time because that was his goal. He wanted to fundamentally transform the greatest quality of life in the history of mankind into some kind of Detroit canker sore of dependency.
Because I’m a hunter, people hate me. People who hate me because
I hunt defines the left …
People who hate me believe you don’t have to get up early and work hard because you can get money from people who do get up early and work hard.
I’m a producer, I’m an asset to you, I benefit the American economy … If you look at the Occupiers, they hate me for that. I couldn’t be more proud that those who think Barack Obama and the Mao Tse Tung chant of redistributing earnings is good. I don’t want them to like me because that’s evil.
For every person that gets some form of welfare there are thousands
who don’t deserve it.
[One of the hosts gets audibly nervous at this saying “I don’t know if I’m qualified to [say] that …” He adds his family received some government benefit in the past when he was growing up. Nugent replies that he is because he’s done the “research.”]
Then Nugent comments on those on welfare — he means African Americans:
They get their hair done. They have cell phones. They have all the newest clothes they possibly want …
Ted, on the economy and unemployment:
An able bodied person in United States of America has no excuse to
not have a job. I drive up and down the streets of this country every day and there are help wanted signs everywhere. And I have hundreds of entrepreneurial friends who are trying to hire people and 99 out of 100 people who come in claiming to want to find a job, the first thing they ask is “How many sick days do I get?” Are you kidding me? Maybe you need to communicate more with people who are actually in touch with direct human touch with the people that are causing the problems in America … There is an actual category that is acceptable, there is an actual authorized category of people in the United States of America … people who have quit looking for work. That’s a category of Americans? That’s unbelievable!
The asset to the US economy, playing the Star Spangled Banner and cursing out women and the elites for morning television.
Steve Smith, a longtime racist activist with a history of violence and top-level ties to numerous white nationalist hate groups, has been elected to a 4-year term on the Republican Party’s county committee for Luzerne County, Penn., One People’s Project reports.
Recruited into the neo-Nazi movement while he was stationed at Fort Bragg in the 1990s, Smith, of Pittston, Penn., has been active in an extraordinary array of white nationalist, skinhead, and neo-Nazi groups, including American Third Position, Keystone United (formerly Keystone State Skinheads), and the Council of Conservative Citizens. He is a former Aryan Nations member and former leader of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of White People …
Smith’s ties to the racist right stretch far beyond the political. In 2001, he co-founded a racist skinhead group now known as Keystone United (which was until 2009 known as the Keystone State Skinheads, or KSS), one of the largest and most active single-state racist skinhead crews in the country. In March 2003, he and two other KSS members were arrested in Scranton for beating up Antoni Williams, a black man, using stones and chunks of pavement. Smith pleaded guilty to terrorist threats and ethnic intimidation and received a 60-day sentence and probation.
To advance his goals, Smith has distanced himself somewhat from his violent past and focused on political activism. As state chairman for American Third Position (A3P), a white nationalist political party that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule, he has for several years been working the crowds at local Tea Party gatherings, which he once described as “fertile grounds for our activists.???
In October 2010, he led a delegation of A3P activists in presenting the party’s position to a Scranton Tea Party group. “We explained that the A3P was formed to represent white Americans, who have been denied representation for decades …”
In our book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” my co-author Theda Skocpol and I examine this remarkable grass-roots engagement … In the end, we found that tea partyers combine laudable and effective political engagement with high levels of misinformation and troubling intolerance of their political opponents …
[Tea Party] members we interviewed held wildly inaccurate views of what is in, or not in, public policy. Tea partyers confidently told us that the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“ObamaCare” in their parlance) includes both death panels and the abolition of Medicare – although both claims are flat-out untrue … At times, the level of misinformation in tea party circles reached conspiratorial proportions. At a tea party meeting in Massachusetts, people discussed the possibility that the “smart grid” (an electrical infrastructure improvement approximately as controversial as road repair) was in fact a plan that would give the government control over the thermostats in people’s homes. Where are these smart, educated Americans getting such terribly inaccurate information?
Some of these rumors live primarily on the Internet, but another major source is Fox News. Almost all interviewees I spoke with had a favorite Fox News show – and some retirees reported watching as many as eight hours of Fox News a day. Checking the transcripts, we found that former Fox News host Glenn Beck had indeed raised the weird possibility of federal thermostat control on his show …
At a meeting I attended in Virginia, a visiting lecturer informed local tea party members . . . The United Nations and American authorities at all levels of government, it was claimed, are engaged in a communist conspiracy. In the near term, this scheme would take the form of apparently innocuous measures like new bike paths. But in the long term … would lead to the confiscation of all private property and the herding of Americans citizens into urban ghettos and then concentration camps. “Sustainable development,” the lecturer concluded, was a euphemism for the coming one world government.
Last week I used the words “bug nuts” to describe The Iowa GOP’s proposed party platform, also chock full of conspiracy theories including an assertion that government had made it illegal to do home repairs.
I have been told a Zygote is a person. That’s Zygote, with a capital Z.
At this juncture I have no tolerance for right wingers, theocrats and stupid people. Wish it were otherwise but it can’t be helped. I’m flawed this way.
You do realize that the term Zygote, like the terms: fetus, infant, toddler adolescent, teen, adult, and senior are quantifiers and not qualifiers of biological human life. So biologically speaking a Zygote is like an adult, but just at different stages of life. Even at the oocyte stage there exists 46 unique chromosomes with the entire genetic blueprint of a new individual. Chromosomes contain tightly packed, tightly coiled molecules called DNA. DNA contains all the instructions needed for this single-cell embryo to develop into an adult …
[snip — more stuff about abortion]
Also, for a long time the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), i.e. “the Central Bank’s Central Bank??? backed a gold standard as being the basis of sound monetary policy. Having a gold standard would reign in debt spending because it would constrain Congress/ Fed from creating liabilities out of thin air. So, guess which standard the political actors will support.
