Maryland’s notorious kook, House Republican Roscoe Bartlett, is nearing what appears to be the end of his political career as head of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy lobby.
As long as I can remember Bartlett has been in congress, warning about how an enemy — North Korea, or terrorists, and now the special foe — Iran, will destroy American civilization with an electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuclear weapon detonated over the United States.
The Cult of EMP Crazy, aka as the missile defense/bomb Iran lobby, would have been nothing without Bartlett. Year after year after year Bartlett pounded the issue from the House, as often as possible, even causing the formation of a commission, now years past, to study the threat. And conclude that the nation could be trivially returned to the age of horse and buggy. (Or as I used to like to put it, the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.)
Roscoe Bartlett will go back to being a private citizen, beaten by a banker running on the Democratic ticket. Maryland was redistricted and Bartlett’s once safe red corner of it has been made part of another, mostly blue.
Maryland’s ruling Democrats had a plan to oust 10-term Republican U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett …
Now the 86-year-old incumbent must persuade independent and crossover voters in the Washington suburbs that he is more of a centrist than his 92 percent rating from the American Conservative Union suggests. Meanwhile, the better-financed John Delaney of Potomac, 49, has been running a brisk schedule of events on his home turf.
Voter registrations in the district favor Democrats over Republicans, 46 percent to 34 …
Despite all the lobbying, Bartlett was never able to put into action any legislation to deal with electromagnetic pulse doom. But the lobby itself is loud, vociferous and incessant, writing books, articles and opinion pieces, casting movies and commercials, even spanning the Atlantic Ocean to plague the Brits.
In the House, the mantle of Bartlett’s leadership of the electromagnetic pulse crazy caucus has been passed to the odious and stupid Trent Franks, GOP birther from Arizona.
Reads the Chronicle:
[Bartlett] recently voted to dismantle the Clean Water Act, block limits on mercury and carbon emissions and continue taxpayer subsidies to the oil industry …
Bartlett chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. He counts among his achievements a 2006 law barring condominium and homeowner associations from restricting how the American flag can be displayed and a 2001 law permitting the adoption of military working dogs after their retirement. He has also championed banning scientific research on chimpanzees, and he warns frequently that an electromagnetic pulse, such as that from a nuclear explosion in space, could disable all electronic devices.
The congressman who first brought the potentially catastrophic effects of an electromagnetic pulse event to the nation’s attention is now under fire from the electric power industry that has fought voluntary efforts to protect the national grid with hardened transformers.
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., is fighting for re-election against the influences of the powerful electric power industry lobby …
And in a quote from one of the old Electromagnetic Pulse Threat commissioners Bartlett pushed regularly:
“Millions of Americans and their children may well owe their lives and future prosperity to the vision, determination, and political courage of Congressman Bartlett in his unrelenting quest to protect our nation from natural and nuclear EMP …”
Since Roscoe Bartlett has been at his cause for so long, one might legitimately ask what is the man’s legacy?
Striking fear into people who are not particularly perceptive is one of his signal achievements … Bartlett’s unstinting work aimed at describing the total end of US civilization in an instant is particularly resonant within the Christian right …
Bartlett, who won re-election at 84 in November, has been around longer than PEZ candy, parking meters and penicillin.
At the end of Maloof’s piece at WND, a plug for yet another book about electromagnetic pulse doom to throw directly into the trash:
In the [new tv drama Revolution], society has collapsed [due to mysterious electromagnetic pulses] and the country devolved into a collection of mutually hostile self-styled militias, private armies and warring tribes … It shows that basic necessities that Americans take for granted, such as widely available food and clean water, become inaccessible as millions die from starvation, disease or widespread violence.
[And so do shows about zombie hordes.]
A coming book, “A Nation Forsaken,??? suggests that the show actually may downplay the real threat.
Maloof doesn’t tell readers he’s the author, too. And that without old Roscoe, what audience there is for it wouldn’t exist.
Sunday was a fine day in Pasadena, warm but not incinerating like most of late summer. You could feel the fall coming on as the sun set, the heat from the afternoon leaving for the sky. And so the closest thing I still have to a family member and I took one last year’s opportunity to grill chicken in the driveway, something we hadn’t done much since the death of a close friend over a year ago.
And while enjoying the day we spent a lot of time talking about what had happened to the country. How had our demographic, the white American, become so rancid and bad? And we had no answers. How could anyone be so driven mad by hate as the current standard of the Republican Party?
In Pasadena, there are stark examples of what the last four years of austerity have wrought. California has been a smaller version, ahead of things in the rest of the country. Before the presidency of Barack Obama, it had a Republican minority that made governance impossible.
Because of the legislative rule that all law having to do with taxes and the budget requires a two-thirds majority, the unimportant party paralyzed California. It ruined the political career of one its own, the celebrity governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was torn to shreds on the horns of its extremism.
And in Pasadena, something I see every day, PCC — the city college, is now virtually undone. Sure, it still has students and the buildings are there. But because of austerity and the Great Recession, there isn’t the money to teach anyone. There’s no money to pay instructors, no money for anything. One of the jewels of the California city college network, long a way for the disadvantaged to at least get some manner of education that might help in the American labor force, sits idle. You can maybe take one course a semester.
“They come in, they’re admitted, but there are no classes. They want that basic English, basic math, all that, chemistry, history courses. And it’s full,” Scott said.
Last year the system as a whole turned away 137,000 students who could not get into a single course.
“It’s sad to think that we’re looking at a group of students who are thirsty for higher education, all of which would enrich their life and enrich the economy of California, and because of a lack of state resources, we’re having to limit it,” Scott said.
Gen said those numbers don’t even include the number of students who may get one or two courses but will take much longer to reach their goals.
He said this is especially problematic when the community colleges are often relied upon for retraining and updating skills during an economic downturn.
“It’s not happening because we’re not willing, and not because there are too few students, but because we’re not able to get funding,” Gen said.
The Republican Party, which can’t get officials elected anywhere in the state that isn’t lily white in the hinterlands or near San Diego, have brought on the destruction of everything.
And this is what Mitt Romney will deliver to the rest of the nation of he inexplicably wins in the first week of November.
The party of nihilism and know-nothing will take over, people who believe in naught but maximizing theirs and squeezing and persecuting everyone else unlike them.
A party that disbelieves science.
A demographic in which reason and truth mean nothing.
And it’s frightening.
Because so many have bought into its toxic philosophies, repellent beliefs that 50 percent of the citizenry are parasites, that the Federal Reserve needs to be destroyed, that gays, women and non-white immigrants must be hounded. The astonishing burning animosity toward everyone not the same color. There is no bottom to the vat of poison it has tapped into.
[If] these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.
[It’s] their general hostility to anything that helps the 47 percent — those Americans whom they consider moochers who need to be taught self-reliance.
Before the weekend, the Associated Press ran another of those stories on the Heevahave Vote — the so-called “undecided voter,” and it’s lead subject, a white middle-aged man named Kelly Cox, was from California.
Who are these people who still can’t make up their minds? They’re undecided voters like Kelly Cox, who spends his days repairing the big rigs that haul central California’s walnuts, grapes, milk and more across America.
He doesn’t put much faith in either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. But he figures he’s got plenty of time – a little more than a week – to settle on one of them before Nov. 6. And he definitely does plan to vote.
“I’ll do some online research,” said Cox, co-owner of a Delhi, Calif., truck-repair shop. “I don’t have time to watch presidential debates because it’s a lot of garbage anyway. They’re not asking the questions that the people want to hear.”
On-line research. It’s to laugh, tossed-off horseshit.
First, the debate made [these undecided voters] want to do more research on the candidates. “I need to research some of these facts,??? one skeptical sounding woman said.
And they’ll research us into total failure, given their way.
Cox, said to be from Delhi, is from the other part of California, the great dusty wasteland, in this case somewhere between Modesto and Merced, that votes Republican but will have no impact due to the electoral college. (Don’t believe me? May you be stuck there some summer, driving the highway north and south.)
In this itself, the AP story was a joke. It’s banner undecided voter was someone whose vote is irrelevant next week.
Stay home, skip the on-line research, Mr. Kelly Cox.
Nationally, the state is going for Obama. His vote won’t matter at the national level. Neither candidate has bothered to campaign in the nation’s largest state.
However, at the local level it has been quite another thing. Because it’s the small extremist white minority in California that has managed to strangle the place, a lesson for the rest of the country.
Other pro-growth reforms would increase government tax revenues needed for these programs by stimulating the economy. One would be to adopt, yes, a flat tax. It would go a long way in achieving the prosperity that Mr. Obama never achieved with his monstrous spending. A flat tax would reduce taxes for many people …
Returning to a gold standard is another much-overlooked reform. Most people today, including most politicians, fail to appreciate how our current system of fluctuating currency values is a drag on the economy.
President Obama enters the final days of the campaign with a substantial lead among women — about 11 points, according to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll — and enormous leads among Latinos and African Americans, the nation’s two largest minority groups. Mitt Romney leads among white voters, with an incredible 2-to-1 advantage among white men.
It is too simplistic to conclude that demography equals destiny. Both men are being sincere when they vow to serve the interests of all Americans. But it would be disingenuous to pretend not to notice the obvious cleavage between those who have long held power in this society and those who are beginning to attain it.
When Republicans vow to “take back our country,??? they never say from whom. But we can guess.
From Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly (1984), which had quite a lot to say about American failure in Vietnam, but which closes with something more universal:
While such virtues as [character] may in truth be in everyone’s power, they have less chance in our system than money and ruthless ambition to prevail at the ballot box. The problem may be not so much a matter of educating officials for government or educating the electorate to recognize and reward integrity … and to reject the ersatz. Perhaps better men flourish in better times, and wiser government requires the nourishment of a dynamic rather than a troubled and bewildered society.
NEW ALBANY, Ind. — Mitt Romney is distancing himself from Richard Mourdock after the Republican U.S. Senate hopeful said in a debate Tuesday night that all pregnancies are “something that God intended to happen” — even in cases of rape.
“I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen,” he said.
You can’t update the list fast enough. We have tribes so different there will never be common ground.
It’s difficult for grasp how the Republican Party retains any support. That is, until you recognize that human beings, and the way they think, haven’t changed much.
Here’s William L. Shirer, in a yellowed 1959 copy of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” with something to say on people who live in media cages:
I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state … It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsification and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.
The Psychopath Vote, the Romney vote, has its media, much like the one Shirer described experiencing in his book. The internet did not give anyone a free, uncensored world. In practice, it made it easier to encapsulate the space of one’s own tribe.
As far as foreign policy went, viewers will have noticed how the GOP, using its media, has made global warming a third rail issue in American politics.
“The rapid melting of the polar ice cap is turning the once ice-clogged waters off northern Alaska into a navigable ocean …” reads the piece.
However, in 2012 America, one insane and dangerous political party, often faced by only supine opposition, has successfully convinced half the country that this isn’t happening or is of no consequence.
And so we’ve had debates in which the the incumbent and the gazillionaire menace squabble over who will be most aggressive digger and miner of fossil fuels.
The worst candidate for president in my lifetime pulled his inane 1917 navy argument in the debate and the president sank him in thirty seconds of zingers:
“Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets …We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go under water, nuclear submarines … The question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships …”
Early in the debate Romney also apparently forgot Iran has a southern coastline on the Persian Gulf, making the claim that Syria was its route to the sea.
In any western nation except the United States, a Mitt Romney-esque candidate would be toast after his last two performances, each generating their own viral collective guffaws. (“Binders full of women” and tonight’s WWI navy excrement.)
And Romney was not just beaten last night. Obama destroyed him, showing the country exactly what the man is — a gazillionaire poseur who only gets away with continual mendacity because the US system is badly broken.
The Republic Party is insane and their candidate is but one symptom, albeit a big one, of the illness.
Mitt Romney is obviously surrounded by lickspittles. The proof? If his staff weren’t just a bushel basket of apple-polishers, someone would have told him to drop the ridiculous WWI navy shit weeks ago before it blew up in his face.
And, quite obviously, no one did. And the president politely kicked his teeth in.
Basic cable, as Media Matters notes today, is rotted. It features a slew of name channels, all doing reality shows which range from intelligence-insulting to the outright nauseating. They cater to the worst of bottom-out-of-sighters in the country, most notably this year, the total dogshite demographic called “preppers.”
If one scene defines last week’s premiere of Ted Nugent’s Gun Country, set in the survivalist-thick scrublands surrounding Waco, Texas, it is the show’s unnervingly giddy and pony-tailed host standing behind a .50-caliber Browning armor-piercing machine gun and blowing a bunch of holes in the four-inch reinforced steel door used by a team of local “preppers” to protect their bunker armory against an attack of the undead. Neither the machine gun nor the vault hatch fills any conceivable civilian-defense need ….
It’s the sort of weapon you’d expect to see wielded with glee in a Dawn of the Dead remake …
The Pet Psychic is A Brief History of Time compared to many of the shows now airing on the channel. In recent years Discovery has joined other companies in its former documentary niche in largely abandoning in-depth science programming in favor of its antipode, what might best be called anti-science: shows that glorify stupidity and celebrate a giggling, Beavis and Butthead-style pleasure in blowing stuff up and killing things …
‘[The] arrival of Ted Nugent on [the Disovery] roster is a new low suggestive of just how much more socially destructive television can become,” it continues.
Read the rest. It’s thoroughly depressing, but an excellent supercilious takedown.
