Ted Nugent hates more on the Wisconsin protesters and the state senators who have left for Illinois.
The insults and name-calling range from calling for the hanging of Democrats, to bringing up Chappaquiddick, to insinuating the state politicians are lower than Muammar Gaddafi because at least the dictator is choosing to stay and slaughter people to the end.
This juvenile, pro-union stunt has only tightened the political noose for Democrats in 2012. Hang ‘em high.
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Just as it sank the presidential aspirations of Democratic poster boy Ted Kennedy when he ran away and hid for eight hours or so before reporting to the police that he had driven off a bridge with a female passenger, this stunt is going to bleed Democrats of support
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No Democrat is going to turn on the labor unions. Al Capone and Jimmy Hoffa live.
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Terminally whacked as he is, at least Col. Whackjob Gadhafi has so far vowed to stay and fight to the end in Libya. He hasn’t run away yet from the mob of Libyans looking to lynch him, but maybe he hasn’t been following what is happening in Wisconsin and Indiana.
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Americans intrinsically know that running away is a sign of weakness…
Weaklings, cowards, having less stones than a crazy dictator, like Al Capone and to be figuratively hung. Did I miss anything?
Fifteen hundred+ mass layoffs in January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Original here. Blog copy doesn’t show actual uptick of mass layoff events as of January on BLS page.)
Mass firing in Rhode Island, as in teachers, flippantly equals “creative solutions to … municipal fiscal woes” according to some jerk at Politico.
DD is surprised it took Ted Nugent almost a week to begin hating on the Wisconsin teachers. His contempt for unions, particularly those serving the middle class of his old home state, Michigan, is well known. And his loathing of auto-workers is probably one of a few reasons the person once known as the Motor City Madman is now living near Waco, TX.
While he can still fill the occasional theater near Detroit, most of the people in the state no longer have any use for him.
So many teachers in Milwaukee have called in sick to protest this widely supported bill that Milwaukee schools have shut down. The teachers should be fired or at least forced to sit in the corner and wear dunce hats and apologize for this juvenile stunt … Wanting their fantasy cake of unaccountability and eating it too, the unions and their ignorant, brainwashed sheep are whining and protesting …
What kind of lowlifes would call in sick when they are not? Look and see.
Previously, I’ve tried to explain the spite of Ted Nugent. Most of it revolves around his disappointing story. His career declined, as so many do, through no fault of his own. So he reinvented himself as a blighted old white man with a bullhorn.
A couple months ago, I described it thusly:
Suggesting churches give up what he implies is loot in gold and silver is an unusually new and surprising low, even for someone like Ted Nugent.
When I started the Ted Nugent tab … I wondered what had shriveled him so much.
Here was a guy who had everything in the Seventies (and for a chunk of the Eighties). And as his career declined he folded like cardboard. Unable to reinvent himself gracefully in old age, he turned into a mouthpiece for the extreme right’s most vicious social policies, nothing more than a convenient gasbag for the Washington Times, or someone good for three minutes on Fox News.
Nugent fled Michigan for Crawford, Texas, starting a column for the Waco Tribune, where he was also run off for being uncharitable and rude.
Those who have read the entries on Nugent in this blog have seen the man in his words, ranting on obscure Internet radio programs and television shows. There he is, the strict law-and-order dude and mighty hunter, complaining bitterly and vituperatively over trivial troubles that were entirely his own doing in California. Opining that he’s been victimized by various conspiracies.
What motivates Ted Nugent is vindictiveness … He never recovered from losing his place at the top of the heap, a process all rock stars must inevitably go through. Many handle it with struggle and embarrassment. Others deal with it quietly and gracefully. A few die from it.
However, Ted Nugent decided he’d take it out on the values of the people who put him in the arenas during the high tide of classic rock. And he lost even more, gaining only a reputation as a panderer for people with fortunes which make his place in life look very small.
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Unionized public employees with their sweetheart deals at taxpayer expense are one significant reason why some cities and states are in such dire financial condition.
Unionized public employees have better deals than the taxpayers who are funding them. Federal employees make twice as much as their private-sector peers. This is all beyond bizarro.
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Unionized public employees with their sweetheart deals at taxpayer expense are one significant reason why some cities and states are in such dire financial condition.
Taxpayers should not be held accountable to bailout the automobile industry or any other industry for that matter. There is constitutional authority for the decades of poor management decisions, forecasting and labor deals that have put GM, the U.S.’s largest automobile maker, perilously close to going belly up.
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While the [United Auto Workers] may believe GM, Ford and Chrysler are in business to provide automotive workers a salary and other costly benefits, the reality is that car companies are in business to make a profit. Period. Write that down.
The UAW’s costly benefit demands over the years coupled with weak automotive management who historically caved into the UAW’s demands put the automotive bolts, so to speak, to the shareholders and, to a certain degree, has put the Big Three on the path to possible extinction.
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Bailing out GM with billions of taxpayer dollars is the wrong approach. GM is not too big to fail. What GM may be is too unprofitable to stay in business.
Have you gotten the idea that Ted’s pretty much a lost cause in Michigan?
It is not just the middle class Nugent despises. There’s literally no one (or nothing) too small or weak for him to hate on.
The e-mail dump from HBGary Federal, carried out by the Anonymous hacking group, has most famously exposed corporate plots to attack and discredit WikiLeaks, Glenn Greenwald and ThinkProgress.
On November 16, 2009, Greg Hoglund, a cofounder of computer security firm HBGary, sent an e-mail to two colleagues. The message came with an attachment, a Microsoft Word file called AL_QAEDA.doc, which had been further compressed and password protected for safety. Its contents were dangerous.
“I got this word doc linked off a dangler site for Al Qaeda peeps,” wrote Hoglund. “I think it has a US govvy payload buried inside. Would be neat to [analyze] it and see what it’s about. DONT open it unless in a [virtual machine] obviously… DONT let it FONE HOME unless you want black suits landing on your front acre. :-)”
The attached document, which is in English, begins: “LESSON SIXTEEN: ASSASSINATIONS USING POISONS AND COLD STEEL (UK/BM-154 TRANSLATION).”
It purports to be an Al-Qaeda document on dispatching one’s enemies with knives (try “the area directly above the genitals”), with ropes (“Choking… there is no other area besides the neck”), with blunt objects (“Top of the stomach, with the end of the stick.”), and with hands (“Poking the fingers into one or both eyes and gouging them.”).
But the poison recipes, for ricin and other assorted horrific bioweapons, are the main draw. One, purposefully made from a specific combination of spoiled food, requires “about two spoonfuls of fresh excrement.” The document praises the effectiveness of the resulting poison: “During the time of the destroyer, Jamal Abdul Nasser, someone who was being severely tortured in prison (he had no connection with Islam), ate some feces after losing sanity from the severity of the torture. A few hours after he ate the feces, he was found dead.”
It immediately caught DD’s eye because al_Qaeda.doc has been jihadi sucker bait for about a decade.
It’s a well-known fragment taken from the old Manual of Afghan Jihad, a copy originally seized from an old member of the Taliban in England and subsequently typed by the US and British government into a number of similar forms, and presented over the course of the war on terror as evidence at a number of terror trials.
A larger form of it, sans the poisons recipes, was even sequestered on a White House server during the Bush administration, part of an unintentionally hilarious argument made by that president that al Qaeda used torture but that the US did not.
I put the same fragment on the old DD blog years ago in connection with ongoing discussions on these matters, most notably because it was connected with the infamous London ricin trial and the resulting verdict, a time span between 2005-2006.
Since it has been an object of keen interest, it’s no surprise the US government might use it in an archive as bait to pass malicious rootkit software.
However, it should be noted that, over the years, it is not just the random wanna-be jihadis and terrorists who have been attracted to it. Even seeding it onto a “dangler site for jihadi peeps” probably guaranteed that not just “bad guys” would get it.
In fact, there has long been an array of US private sector intel businesses, not necessarily adept at computer security and defending themselves from malware, who scour such sites for these things. So they can sell them to their clients. Or back to the US government.
It’s also worth mentioning that the poison-making recipes in it are rubbish.
The “two spoonfuls of excrement” formula is basically the old crap recipe for botox, first published on the fringes of the neo-Nazi survivalist right in the US in the Eighties, specifically in Maxwell Hutchkinson’s “The Poisoner’s Handbook.”
The definitive story on that, along with screen snapshots and pictures, is here.
The recipe for ricin, actually just a procedure for pounding and degreasing castor seeds, originally stems from Kurt Saxon’s Poor Man’s James Bond.
“According to Hoglund, the recipes came with a side dish, a specially crafted piece of malware meant to infect Al-Qaeda computers,” reported Ars Technica.
“Is the US government in the position of deploying the hacker’s darkest tools—rootkits, computer viruses, trojan horses, and the like? Of course it is, and Hoglund was well-positioned to know just how common the practice had become. Indeed, he and his company helped to develop these electronic weapons.
“Thanks to a cache of HBGary e-mails leaked by the hacker collective Anonymous, we have at least a small glimpse through a dirty window into the process by which tax dollars enter the military-industrial complex and emerge as malware.”
Trent Franks wasted no time in picking up the mantle of EMP crusader and anthrax denier Roscoe Bartlett (R – Maryland), initiating another bill to protect the nation from the fate of being hurled back to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Readers just stepping in should know the Cult has regularly tried to get bills through Congress, always failing. Bartlett’s last attempt, in 2010, was sent to the dumper by Lisa Murkowski.
In a manner similar to Roscoe Bartlett, Trent Franks is a nuisance as a Congressman. And his new legislation won’t survive, either. But no one will be around to note its passing when someone more significant than the junior GOP pest from Arizona nixes it.
Having the odious Franks as a leader of a caucus to protect the country from electromagnetic pulse doom might be seen as a setback for the Cult. He’s not a man to inspire much interest and collegial enthusiasm.
U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, (R-Ariz.) introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives Friday to protect the U.S. power system from electromagnetic attack. The bill has been assigned to the House Energy and Commerce and House Budget committees.
One commenter writes:
Only a moron like Franks would write a bill like this. Of all the things to be concerned about, a bill about sun spots. How about a bill to decentralize the grid to allow local power generation. How about a bill to create 1000 jobs in Mohave County — jobs that are not real estate agents. Franks is about as irrelevant as a Congressman could possibly be.
Jason at Armchair Generalist has a piece on Ralph Peters, a third tier security pundit seen most often on Fox News.
“Every now and then [Peters] gets to do an op-ed in a normal newspaper (e.g., other than the NY Post or Wash Times) or respectable journal (like the Armed Forces Journal) and he seems sane,” writes J. “He makes sense. And then he wigs out and starts foaming at the mouth again.”
“He’s done some truly graphic ranting at the Journal of International Security Affairs …”
Peters, if his wiki biography is accurate, is from Pottsville, PA, an old coal town that is Schuylkill County’s seat.
His message, not a unique one — you hear it everyday on Glenn Beck: The media are backstabbers. Children are too coddled. Our society has too many lawyers and lawsuits. Our enemies — and there are many — are destroying us piece by piece.
Anyway, I think that’s what he means when going on about not winning wars because we lack the resolve and necessary hardness to do so.
We have cheapened the idea of war. We have had wars on poverty, wars on drugs, wars on crime, economic warfare, ratings wars, campaign war chests, bride wars, and price wars in the retail sector. The problem, of course, is that none of these “wars??? has anything to do with warfare as soldiers know it. Careless of language and anxious to dramatize our lives and careers, we have elevated policy initiatives, commercial spats and social rivalries to the level of humanity’s most complex, decisive and vital endeavor.
War as humanity’s most vital endeavor.
Or to paraphrase Vince Lombardi, I suppose: War isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.
The GOP-controlled House now officially has a Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy caucus.
Started by EMP crazy Trent Franks, the official announcement is here.
Franks is a birther and doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming. He is famously known for this quote: “Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery.”
And he accepted the Team B report on sharia law corrupting precious American bodily fluids authored by Frank Gaffney, also a member of the Cult of EMP Crazy, and the infamous William “Jerry” Boykin.”
There’s not much more to say except that you can never be too nuts or odious in the 2011 GOP.
If a thing is backed up by hard science and poses a real danger for everyone on the planet, [like global warming], the Republican party denies its existence. If, however, the threat is something rather abstract to almost all Americans, rests almost entirely on theoretical prediction, is something not likely to ever occur at all, and then only in the context of what would promise to be an all out nuclear war, [like electromagnetic pulse doom], the GOP believes in it very strongly.
So it was written earlier this week in a piece on how the Republican Party has taken years to ensure that it has the vote of every single person concerned about devastating electromagnetic pulse attack.
It is a voting demographic entirely lost to the Democrat Party.
WIC 1008 million
Food for Peace 544 million
NOAA 450 million
NASA 579 million
Energy efficiency and renewable energy 899 Science 1111 million
Nuclear nonproliferation 648 million
Federal buildings fund 1653 million Homeland security administration 489 million
FEMA, various, around 1.2 billion
EPA clean water and drinking water about 1.8 billion
Community health centers 1.3 billion
Centers for disease control 900 million
WIC is nutritional aid for pregnant women and women with young children; let’s cut that, because the damage to the nation from malnourishment is a problem for future politicians. NOAA is weather and climate — hey, what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Nuclear nonproliferation — well, we probably won’t feel the pain of a terrorist nuke assembled from old Soviet fissile material for a couple of years. FEMA — well, how often do hurricanes hit New Orleans? CDC — with luck, by the time plague hits someone else can be blamed.
Contrast the cuts for science and homeland security.
Since we know the GOP despises science, it’s a natural for them. It cannot, of course, cut all funding for science since this would not only destroy many universities, most government agencies including the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Health but — most importantly — private sector arms development, too.
The homeland security cut is trivial, as one might expect, a 0.8 percent sliver from its 56 billion 2011 budget. And there is found humor in that the GOP wishes to cut more from “nuclear non-proliferation.”
Bad ideas are those that are palpably unsound, like constructing a building from the top down, or trying to run a car with a pill in it. Some people can always be persuaded to embrace such notions, but most would agree that except as the material of jokes, they are a waste of time. Bad ideas, on the other hand, are widely accepted and so familiar as to go largely unquestioned …
[Another bad idea]: … [disease], homelessness, poverty and drug addiction are justly punitive, and will probably go away if we do nothing about them.
This quote from the New York Times piece channeling a recent article in the journal, Science, is all you need to know:
“With 15 to 20 percent of biology teachers teaching creationism,??? he continued, “this is the biggest failure in science education. There’s no other field where teachers reject the foundations of their science like they do in biology.???
When I was in high school in the Seventies in very conservative Pine Grove, PA, this was not an issue.
One might say it has evolved, driven by extreme religious right GOP efforts to use science as a wedge issue, not only because its findings conflict with its ideology but because people can be rallied by insinuating their faith is under attack by the other side which believes the hated “elites.”
PGAHS had a fine biology lab and equally good instruction. It prepared my entire class, most of which was headed toward a college education.
One of the academics interviewed by the Times did not think more education was an answer. And that’s because the right rejects evolution outright.
“At least 25 percent of high school teachers in Minnesota explicitly teach creationism,??? says one professor to the Times.
This would have presented me with a dilemma in 1972.
Walk and try to find a school where there wasn’t a creationist (PGAHS had only one high school biology instructor) or have my time wasted.
And when the president went on television to say we need more interest in science I just laughed. If people who were in a position to do something about that in this country now we would be able to reverse this atrocious statistic and run the creationists out of town.
The paradox is that American science hasn’t been up to this job. For many years the denial of science was taken as just a laugh-it-off kind of thing in University-land.
So we don’t live in a country where just more rational discourse has any effect. We live in a country that is in decline, that has lost a self-correcting capability, and this is one symptom of it.
When half the political establishment detests science and actively works to undermine it, it’s a driver of decline.
Over at Armchair Generalist, Jason Sigger has embedded a bit from Bill Maher. Here five trivial people, Maher included, argue global warming and evolution.
At this point there are only two solutions to the behavior.
The nice one is that you don’t give the Republicans an opening. You don’t invite them if you plan to discuss it. It’s not entertainment. It’s just more of the problem.
If Republicans — or any random heevahavas — get to open their mouths they present myths and falsehoods, now packed with the maddening implication that it’s they who have the scientific outlook because it is they who have evaluated all the data and are now being criticized for it.
They cling to the idea that the rightness of something is determined by the number of people who adopt it. And since their tribe is the one to adopt non-belief in science, that is what’s right.
The not-nice solution is to wind up and knock the grinning Georgia politician’s teeth out when he starts up on cable television.
“It’s a mystery how these people get dressed in the morning,” concludes Armchair Generalist.
