01.07.11
Posted in Extremism, Ted Nugent at 12:28 pm by George Smith
Can you count the number of times superman Ted Nugent uses the word wuss in his new column at the Washington Times?
Can you spot the sodomy joke on what China will do?
An official DD No Prize if you can!
Nugent:
If it weren’t for dependent wusses that the Democratic Party creates and coddles, the party would be extinct …
We’ve all heard about the jobs Americans are not willing to do. Wusses …
Food stamps are for wusses, and the master wussy Democrats have seen to it. It’s easier to be a lazy lump …
Parents should turn off the television, computer games, video games and cell phones. These things make Americans, especially our kids, soft, uninspired, anti-social wusses …
Every kid in America should have at least 10 chores every day …
[Wusses] need to be weeded out and excommunicated. America needs hard-charging warriors, not weak wusses.
Permalink
01.06.11
Posted in Extremism, Ted Nugent at 11:14 am by George Smith
Today the Post ran an op-ed by a Nation contributor, making a joke of the GOP farce called “the reading of the Constitution.” It’s here.
It’s essentially the Ted Nugent’s Rural White America Constitution.
Excerpted:
We, the Real Americans, in order to form a more God-Fearing Union, establish Justice as we see it, Defeat Health-Care Reform, and Preserve and Protect our Property, our Guns and our Right Not to Pay Taxes, do ordain and establish this Conservative Constitution for the United States of Real America.
Congress shall balance the Federal Budget, preferably by eliminating the Departments of Labor, Energy, Education and State.
The preceding provision shall not apply to spending for the Department of Defense, appropriations for which shall increase three times as quickly as the growth in gross domestic product …
2. The right to bear Semi-Automatic Weapons, AK-47s or Bazookas shall not be infringed by background checks, safety locks, age limits or common sense.
3. The right of Corporations, Hedge Funds, Business Leaders and Lobbyists to spend endless cash on campaigns and influence-purchasing shall not be infringed. The so-called right of Unions to associate shall be denied as fundamentally un-American and contrary to the agenda of the Chamber of Commerce.
For Nugent, I’d specifically have substituted “Machine Guns” for “Bazookas” in the 2nd Amendment.
Moving along, CNN’s Anderson Cooper stupidly put him on a panel yesterday.
Roseanne Barr was the only person with the nerve to stand up to his bowdlerized Ayn Rand for outdoorsmen shtick. In the last year you couldn’t find anyone with the stones to do so in the mainstream media.
It’s here.
The salient bits with the standard black-people-in-the-cities-are-parasites and rich-people-make-all-the-jobs bits:
NUGENT: No, you need to try to help people by scolding them to help themselves. If you keep rewarding them for sleeping in then they’ll never get out of slavery. Why would you support slavery?
BARR: I’m scolding you because you’re blaming the people at the bottom who have nothing whatsoever..
NUGENT: I’m blaming people who refuse to be productive.
BARR: Why don’t you blame the people who have the blame? Why aren’t you ever…
NUGENT: Why do you want to [blame] people who have jobs and produce things?
BARR: I want to blame the Koch brothers and the billionaires and all the people who robbed the taxpayers of this country, absolutely.
NUGENT: The government is the one who’s robbed the taxpayers [of] this country.
BARR: What would we do without government? Expect the rich people to take care of the poor? Are you crazy?
NUGENT: The rich people are the ones providing jobs.
BARR: No, they’re not. There are no jobs. There are no jobs and rich people…
NUGENT: Rich people who put all their lives on the line to get creative.
BARR: Rich people don’t pay squat and it’s proven.
Permalink
01.03.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 2:46 pm by George Smith
A few alert readers may have already seen Tom Tomorrow’s two recent cartoons summing up the “Year In Crazy.”
A free No-Prize if you can guess who this is before looking at the rest of the post!
Got the answer yet?
It’s one of the junior leaders of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy — Frank Gaffney.
Gaffney shows up much more than we’d like in the Cult of EMP Crazy tab. In the past couple years he’s also distinguished himself as a birther and more recently as one of the co-authors of the “Team-B report” aimed at purportedly describing the threat of Sharia law to our precious bodily fluids American courts.
You can review a recent post here — containing some of Gaffney’s greatest hits, including a speech on electromagnetic pulse doom, from YouTube.
H/t to Jason at Armchair Generalist where the Tomorrow cartoons were syndicated.
Related: Today, now on Fox News, because there’s mountains of snow outside in the east, global warming is disproved!
Permalink
Posted in Extremism at 1:11 pm by George Smith
From time to time I’ve linked to the Lehigh Valley Conservative blog. It’s run by a scripture-spouting LV member of the Tea Party, a former union steward now virulently anti-union in the middle of a community that enjoyed its best days due to unionized labor.
Nothing on the Lehigh Valley Conservative’s blog makes much sense but it is emblematic of the great vigor of the Tea Party. As such, it’s thoroughly mixed up, sometimes comically so, but driven.
Today, the LVCer asks what’s the greatest threat to the “future of America.” (I’d say embedded ignorance but that’s only a slight subtextual matter here. Plus it gets in the way of the joke.)
LVC writes:
Francis Schaeffer said when ask the question; “What is the greatest concern for the future of America???? Without hesitation he answered saying “State-ism???.
State-ism involves a philosophy of government, by which the state, or government, is viewed not only as the final ruling authority but the ultimate agency of redemption. The government in the form of “State-ism??? will supplant the church and can never function under God. If and when, the social order has made that transition into “State-ism??? there is no stopping the civil/social slide into Hell.
State-ism is the reason or why you have Democrats, Republicans and Independents being called “Progressives??? to some degree or another, a political branding, they all are of or follow after the preaching and Theology of the religion of “State-ism??? with there god and savior being big government.
If you’re not getting why this is amusing, follow this link: “State-ism.”
Anyway, statism was also a part of the Ayn Rand lexicon — her philosophies now holding full sway in the GOP. Ted Nugent, for example, is the dull-witted man’s regurgitator of Ayn Rand and sundry Atlas Shrugged-isms.
In the context of the world of the Lehigh Valley Conservative, this is a second layer of unintentional humor.
LVC begins his screed on “state-ism” with some of his standard cant endorsing “theological issues,” in his case meaning the US should transform into a theocracy.
Ayn Rand was an atheist.
This leaves some Tea Partiers, so quick to invoke God, scratching their heads over the cognitive dissonance. Others, like Glenn Beck, have built an entire foundation on the illogic.
Writes the Lehigh Valley Conservative, over a visit to the local Tea Party by a disciple of Ayn Rand, in March of last year:
Last night at the lehigh Valley 9/12 meeting we heard Professor Andrew Bernstein gave a talk on the virtues of reason and with his talk mentioning Ayn Rand and how much the book “Atlas Shugged??? had influenced him. He also was promoting his new book “Capitalism Unbound???. An interesting thing happened in the Q&A Someone ask him—- And I Para-phase—Were does the “Christian Faith??? fit into reason and the founding of the country? To which he said, It didn’t and that Christianity had nothing to do with the founding of the country. I heard or at least I think I heard some voicing of disapproval around the room. I tell you this only because a house divided cannot stand and we either put God and His Bible first or Ayn Rand and her book “Atlas Shugged??? first. And from everything I read about her she was not a Christian and as a matter of fact she hated Christ and Christianity. Her position and thinking cannot line up with God if that is true and we than must consider our position and her teachings.
Permalink
12.31.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, Extremism, Stumble and Fail, War On Terror at 3:37 pm by George Smith
As the year ends, I’d summarize the greatest threats to the nation as those of our own making.
al Qaeda hasn’t the manpower or resources to destroy the security of average Americans.
However, traditional American institutions have proven more than up to the task.
A striking illustration of fail over the last ten years is illustrated by my first choice — the now irrational size of the investment in homeland security, shown in the graphic.
The original version, larger, is here at a blog post entitled “Digging Into the Changing Regulatory State.”
Post 9/11 and upon the creation of the Dept. of Homeland Security the sudden reallocation of resources and growth in jobs and investment made sense.
As 2011 begins, however, the current state is shocking. The graph represents a now atrocious diversion of resources away from the middle class and into security aimed at protecting the country from external threats.
At the expense of everything else the government does domestically.
This expenditure does not aid innovation. It does not provide any path forward the country will need to combat its current problems. It does not fix infrastructure. It does not guarantee decent education. It does not make the national food supply safe from bad business and keep people from getting sick. It does not repair the middle class.
It just stands as a continuous investment in protection, walls, devices and restriction. Now entirely out of proportion to threats.
And the more that is invested in security the less there is to protect as the rest of the country withers.
In the last year we have also seen the emergence of the argument that more security, particularly cybersecurity, is needed to defend — most gallingly — Wall Street, bankers and big business.
But in news story after news story, everyone has seen that Wall Street is not good for main street.
The admonishments to defend it, by sending more money into the security apparatus at the expense of the middle class, is still more political dynamite.
The question that has to be asked is easy: Why do institutions now seen to be attacking the American way of life need more defending? And why should we pay for it?
The second threat, in no way lesser and to which the first is linked, is the fast growth of economic inequality.
Economic inequality and mass unemployment have given us very bad government, desperation and fear. These are, in turn, now proven fertilizer for even more destabilizing right wing extremism.
And it has left the country without the leadership needed to prevent slippage into permanent status of banana republic with the world’s most powerful military and security infrastructure.
Now there are regular cries for austerity, for even more cannibalization of government functions which protect the middle class. Famously, such calls seem to take no account of the actual conditions of austerity placed upon everything but homeland security in the last ten years.
And this leads directly to my next example.
I give you the case set by Austin “Jack” DeCoster and his illness-provoking egg farms.
Although most Americans still do not know his name, DeCoster is a living model of the Dickensian character now common in American business. In 2010, DeCoster was more threatening to Americans shopping in supermarkets nationwide than any jihadi terrorist a decade after 9/11.
DeCoster is a current standard-setter: A corporate boss successful at bringing about the biggest mass food poisoning incident in US history.
And this did not happen by accident.
Looking again at the above graph, one immediately notices the virtual total destruction of any government role in “consumer safety and health” and “industry specific regulation” relative to homeland security.
It is no coincidence that the Austin “Jack” DeCosters of the country have flourished. By conducting business the way they do, they exhibit a tacit understanding that the public can be menaced by unsanitary and disease-causing practices in pursuit of the bottom line because what exists of the regulatory process is ignorable.
What regulatory processes still existed at the local level were busy issuing DeCoster with certificates of healthy business even as the corporation was sending poisoned eggs all around the country.
Again, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that it is no random event when half a billion eggs are tainted and thousands of people become ill.
It is a direct consequence of malfeasance in corporate agribusiness.
It is the consequence of decisions to run a business as cheaply as possible, to take steps knowing full well that such practice exposes one to substantial risk — in this instance the causation and distribution of disease — but that an adverse outcome can just be written off as overhead under the current state of regulation.
In 2007, it was Stewart Parnell of the Peanut Corporation of America.
In 2008, it was the boffins of Baxter pharma shipping in counterfeit heparin from China.
And this woeful state of affairs stands in stark contrast to the constant exhortations for more spending against the marginal threat of bioterrorism.
While the Republican Party was unable to prevent passage of the Food Modernization Act during the lame duck session of Congress, the existence of the new legislation does not, in and of itself, guarantee change.
We will have to wait and see what becomes of the Jack DeCosters. What other corporate American time-bombs and landmines are waiting to explode?
And the last internal threat is again tied to the others.
The Republican Party is a threat to security. And not solely because of its descent into right-wing extremism or its desire to torpedo a nuclear arms reduction treaty because it despises the president.
As the party that denies science, one that will put people in committee chairmanships overseeing science and technology issues in the House who are basically opposed to science whenever it contradicts their political views, the GOP poses a threat to America’s future.
You can’t have a forward-looking and capable nation with people in power who truly believe global warming and evolution are hoaxes.
In 2010, the Pentagon concluded global warming was a serious security threat, a destabilizing one. It has been an issue the Department of Defense has mulled over for the better part of a decade.
And then there’s the current GOP.
Permalink
12.22.10
Posted in Extremism, Ted Nugent at 11:05 am by George Smith
Working hard to guarantee Mexican-American voters detest the Republican Party:
America should launch the “Please Go Home” initiative for those 20 million or more illegals in America as soon as possible.
The “Please Go Home” initiative isn’t jingoistic or racist as the real vicious racists will proclaim. It is fundamental, logical immigration common sense.
The GOP will disagree with my proposed initiative because they believe that, to win future elections, they need to attract Mexican-Americans to the GOP. The GOP undoubtedly believes my initiative will further alienate Mexican-Americans. The Democrats will despise the initiative because they benefit politically from these folks.
It’s got to suck to be bought and paid for …
If the vast number of illegal Mexicans in America pack their bags and head back home, there will surely be an economic impact. Prices for food and other services will probably go up.
Prices for food and other services will probably go up. Savor that one. After all, Ted’s writing it from deep inna heart of Texas.
And at the Washington Times, Nugent compares himself to Thomas Jefferson. Because Thomas and him were/are extremists:
Like our Founding Fathers, I’m an extremist, and I wear my extremist label proudly. I buff it daily so that it shines extremely bright.
It’s Ted the parrot, another strike-out column repeating Tea Party orthodoxy he learnt just last year: Only Tea Party Americans understand the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.
Everyone else — lefty schnook socialist pond scum.
Again, the second column isn’t worth your time. While Ted insists Thomas Jefferson would be branded a radical today, he never gets around to presenting anything that would make you think that ol’ TJ was quite the extremist like Ted.
For instance, there’s nothing obvious in the historical record to indicate TJ might have endorsed shooting cats within city limits.
And there’s nothing in Jefferson’s history to compare with Nugent’s non-speaking role as an outdoorsman sidekick who shoots various Mexicans with his bow and arrow in Toby Keith’s criminally unappreciated easy to fall asleep on the couch to Beer For My Horses.
Permalink
12.10.10
Posted in Extremism, Ted Nugent at 9:20 am by George Smith
A bookend to yesterday’s “Varmint Hunter” piece on Ted Nugent advocating the shooting of feral cats.
Today, Nugent goes after the Dept. of Energy. He has a hate on for Steven Chu and wants the agency destroyed.
Nugent, who never pays attention to anything, makes the assumption that federal agencies never report to the US people what they’re doing.
While this is true for many things concerned with topics under the rubric of Secrecy Blog and WikiLeaks, it’s patently false when it comes to the material covered in Nugent’s column at the Washington Times.
Since Nugent doesn’t cover any news of the government he so despises and appears not to be Internet savvy, he has no idea of the wealth of information that is provided to everyone. Particularly on the economy, furnished by various federal and state agencies.
Nugent sneers:
For example, the DOE could have told us that oil drilling in the Gulf has been banned for the next seven years, how many new windmills were built, how many Americans rode their bicycles to work, how many tankers full of foreign oil we imported this week and how much that imported oil cost America.
Let’s take a minute to address the last one. How much oil do we import and how much does it cost?
Here.
Wow, Ted. That took five seconds. And look! It’s furnished by the despised by the Dept. of Energy. US government agencies do, in fact, generally try to release information and statistics on matters under their purview to the American public in a reasonable and timely manner.
As for answering the question on how many people ride bicycles to work in the US, there is no way to exactly measure the answer. As most reasonable people with scientific minds might tell you.
However, estimates can be made. And again — it takes about five seconds to come up with answers.
However, none of this matters to Nugent. As it also does not matter to advocate for the haphazard shooting of feral cats, which would be illegal within city and town limits, where most people in the United States live.
Another bit of nosegold buried in Nugent’s current column is an indication that he doesn’t believe in global warming. And that, in particular, he doesn’t believe burning coal contributes to it.
If you know the history of Ted Nugent, you know he was a spokesman for Don Blankenship, the villified owner of Massey Energy.
This was at a laughable event dubbed Coalstock.
Due to the famous coal mine fatalities at a Massey-owned facility, Don Blankenship will be forced into retirement at the end of this year.
This was done in an attempt to boost the stock price of the company in advance of trying to sell it off.
As one of the many Dickensian characters littering the US landscape, Blankenship is now loathed. But it has taken a golden parachute — a really big bribe — to get him off the stage.
Nugent does know how to pick winners, always going to bat for the finest. Like Massey Energy. Or BP.
But back to his Times piece. It reads:
It would come as no shock to me if Secretary of Green Energy Chu views the oil companies as villains, despises nuclear energy and believes burning coal causes global warming and is akin to genocide.
“Chu Urges Congress to Look to Nuclear Power” reads a headline from December 7.
And coal, as everyone who gets science knows, does contribute very powerfully to global warming.
Obviously, it’s no secret that Ted Nugent is as stupid as he is mean. And while he is certainly a demon on guitar, he’s one of the laziest writers under the sun who ever got paid for it.
In related news, sales of Sarah Palin’s book — “America by Heart” — have slowed.
Nugent was just given a Smokey Bear Award by the Texas Forest Service.
Apparently for making a thirty second TV public service announcement through the aegis of Texas A&M’s forest service university system. That video is here.
Other celebrities who made such videos for Texas include Jake Kellen, George Bush the Elder, and Willie Nelson.
The 2010 call for nominations for the award, run by the US government — which Nugent hates, is here.
Permalink
12.09.10
Posted in Extremism, Ted Nugent at 11:40 am by George Smith
Readers of this blog know Ted Nugent is a man stunningly bereft of ideas and human warmth.
As evidence one only has to read his columns.
Page after page on the Mao Tse-Tung fan club in the Whitehouse. And how subprime mortgages to people of color and entitlements to the same blew up the world economy, not Wall Street.
It’s the same stupid asshole’s worldview held by Tea Party voters.
In the book Griftopia, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi devotes quite a bit to describing them as confused white nincompoops, easily misled by wealthy crooks. And they, like Ted Nugent, really do believe the economy went to shit and left friends and family without jobs because black people got houses they didn’t deserve.
If you believe in God, then he certainly has a sense of humor.
Right next to Griftopia at Vroman’s in Pasadena — Michael Savage’s Trickle Up Poverty, a book that purports to tell how people who aren’t white blew up the economy and are making us all poor.
Rather surprisingly, Nugent hasn’t yet piped up on the granting of the tax cuts to the wealthy through holding the unemployed hostage. You would think it would have been a natural for him, something to cackle over between assertions that jobless people are bloodsuckers and that all taxes need elimination.
Instead, he went after feral cats, which, according to Ted, are all in need of shooting.
“[I] have instructed my family, friends, hunting buddies and casual passers-by to blast every feral cat they see,” Nugent writes, referring to open season on cats at his Crawford ranch.
Since there were no Democratic targets to insult or hate on for this subject, Nugent singled out a rather reasonable scientific paper issued by the University of Nebraska entitled “Feral Cats and Their Management.”
The population of feral cats in America is 60 million, notes the paper. It’s a staggering number that defies all methods aimed at reducing it.
The purpose of the paper is to describe the effectiveness of various methods of controlling feral cat populations, which are very damaging because of their impact on songbirds.
The authors realize the sensitivity of the subject in cat-friendly America and bend over backwards to avoid giving even the slightest impression of cruelty toward animals as a recommendation.
Nugent, naturally, won’t have it.
“Let us hope the University of Nebraska didn’t spend more than 10 bucks on this research,” he sneers.
The Nebraska authors conclude that “shooting is an efficient method” and that trapping, neutering, vaccinating and releasing of feral cats in established colonies is a great deal of work. And that eliminating colonies in this manner can take years.
They also write of other factors which would be of no concern to Ted Nugent. Like the fact that if you indiscriminately shoot all cats on your property, you will inevitably wind up killing someone’s beloved pet.
“[Determining] which cats are feral and which are someone’s pet may be difficult,” conclude the Nebraska researchers. “Owners must be responsible by keeping their cats on their property …”
“Shooting in urban areas is a very sensitive matter …” they advise in a paragraph informing that gunning for cats is not only potentially unsafe to others within built up populated areas but also illegal in Omaha and Lincoln — and probably, by extension, within the boundaries of most towns and cities.
Nugent’s column is also, naturally, PETA bait. Nugent hates PETA with a passion and recently implied that it was such animal lovers who were responsible for getting him into trouble with the hunting authorities in California.
And a representative of PETA wrote a letter to the editor at the Washington Times as a consequence of Nugent’s piece.
The PETA person cautions that people should not break the law as advocated by “Mr. Nugent,” who is called “cruel” — a fair assessment using any number of criteria.
PETA is, of course, only making “Mr. Nugent” happier.
Permalink
12.08.10
Posted in Extremism, War On Terror at 12:06 pm by George Smith
Informant pay, heard it was good work if you can get it:
A Baltimore man faces charges of attempted murder and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction after authorities say he tried to detonate what he thought was a bomb at a military recruitment center near Baltimore.
Court documents filed Wednesday say Antonio Martinez, also known as Muhammad Hussain, told an FBI source in October that he was seeking to attack and kill military personnel.
In conversations through his Facebook account, Martinez allegedly told the source that all he thinks about is jihad.
The documents say Martinez talked with the source about shooting people inside the center and burning the building. He was introduced to an FBI agent who along with the source provided him with a phony bomb in a van.
Permalink
12.06.10
Posted in Extremism, War On Terror at 8:45 am by George Smith
Who’s more dangerous?
Not a trick question.
Fact: Washington, DC is loaded with “terrorism experts” read to go on television whenever the FBI nabs some alleged jihadi wanna-be and attest on the growing menace of homegrown Islamic terror.
In the case of the recent teenage case, Juan Zarate — an assistant secretary for “combating terrorism” in the Bush administration was the designated face for the job. While out of power, he’s warehoused as an “adviser” to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Meanwhile, as far as DD can tell there’s never been a single comparison of homegrown white guy terrorists next to the number of alleged homegrown al Qaeda terrorists. Except perhaps at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
From the Associated Press today:
Neighbors gasped when authorities showed them photos of the inside of the Southern California ranch-style home: Crates of grenades, mason jars of white, explosive powder and jugs of volatile chemicals that are normally the domain of suicide bombers.
Prosecutors say Serbian-born George Jakubec quietly packed the home with the largest amount of homemade explosives ever found in one location in the U.S. and was running a virtual bomb-making factory in his suburban neighborhood. How the alleged bank robber obtained the chemicals and what he planned to do with them remain mysteries.
Bomb experts pulled out about nine pounds of explosive material and detonated it, but they soon realized it was too dangerous to continue given the quantity of hazardous substances. A bomb-disposing robot was ruled out because of the obstacle of all the junk Jakubec hoarded.
That left only one option — burn the home down.
San Marcos Fire Chief Todd Newman acknowledges it is no small feat: Authorities have never dealt with destroying such a large quantity of dangerous material in the middle of a populated area, bordered by a busy eight-lane freeway.
Governor Schwarzenegger declared an emergency for the neighborhood, according to the news.
Bomb experts were flown in from all over the country.
J at Armchair Generalist notes the same: White men not allowed to be dubbed WMDers.
Previously.
Permalink
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »