…and bring back miscegenation laws!! Don’t believe ‘em when they say they dislike Obama for his politics and not his race – the Reactionaries won’t stop at sending racist photo-shopped pictures of Obama, they won’t be happy until they restore Jim Crow laws.
Tip of the ‘Nose to Film Critic Buddy
Fox News viewers are less informed than people who don’t watch any news:
“people who watch Fox News are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government” and “6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government” compared to those who watch no news”…”the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”"
That’s being charitable. ”that something” is known as stupidity.
Tip of the ‘Nose to Film Critic Buddy
About a week ago some self-proclaimed ‘moderate’ (I suspect he was really a Tea Bagger in disguise) called me an ‘extremist’ and an ‘alarmist’ when I joked that the GOP was on a mission to roll back all significant labor, consumer protection and other legislation of the last 100 years in the rush to turn us into a 3rd world cleptocracy. I guess he doesn’t actually listen to what his leaders are saying. Check out today’s latest- Newt Gingrich wants to put the children of America to work! Interesting thought, although with roughly 1 out of 5 adults out of work, not sure what he’d have the kids do…sell True Grit? They can’t deliver newspapers anymore, that industry is dying.
I wonder if Gingrich and Senator Mike Lee get their radical agenda from reading Needlenose snark…
…is just a Reactionary phrase meaning “Don’t apply to them libruhl states.” Case in point – concealed gun permits.
To prepare for the inevitable turkey-fueled confrontation with Uncle Bob the Total Tea Partier over the Thanksgiving Holiday, make sure to read Tim Dickinson’s “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich.” In fact, you might want to print copies, and highlight some of the juicier passages for Bob and any other Reactionaries with whom you need to interact.
In a misguided attempt to appear ‘fair and balanced,’ the San Francisco Chronicle syndicates Debra Saunders, who may be one of the most poorly educated syndicated conservative columnists writing in the U.S. today. In particular, she seems ignorant of the actual contents of that conservative fetish, the U.S. Constitution. In a recent rant against the Occupy Oakland movement, she attempts the following bon mot:
“Free speech does not mean free camping.”
If memory (or cut and paste) serves me, free speech shares the First Amendment with a prohibition against:
“…interfering with the right to peaceably assemble ”
Except for a few miscreants, the camping has been relatively peaceable.
It’s not the first time that Ms. Saunders has demonstrated her ignorance of Constitutional law. I understand why the paper feels the need to have a token Reactionary in the editorial section, but why did they pick the most stupid one?
I think McCain is onto something in predicting the rise of a third political party in the U.S. I’ve been musing about the subject for several months now, and I reckon that neither party are providing the voters with what they are clearly clamoring for – an old school populist willing to tax wealthy individuals and corporations who is socially reactionary. Basically a pre-Robert Kennedy Democrat (or a guy like Ahmadinejad).
Such a beast could never get a nomination from the socially progressive Democratic party of today nor the corporate tool Republican party, so only a third party is plausible. I don’t think any serious politician has either gotten this realization yet. But I don’t think it would be too late for a dark horse Southerner with good hair, a little charisma and the balls to step out on his own to enter and pull the win from Obama. If I could venture a name, I’d say somebody like Mike Huckabee, but he’d have to do is drop his new-found Tea Party pandering and add ‘Government’ to his “God, Guns ‘n Gays’ talk.
Keep in mind I’m not advocating this in any shape manner or form, as I particularly hate social reactionaries. I’m just sayin’.
*Update 3:26P PT* Rep. Joe Walsh doesn’t get it
Okay, it wasn’t exactly betting on the Cardinals to win the World Series when they were still 5 games short of a playoff spot in mid-September, I’ll admit that. But I wrote elsewhere three weeks ago that Herman Cain’s rivals for the GOP presidential nomination were due to turn up the heat against him, and it should be clear now what I meant. And to boot, I wasn’t far off the mark with my lame joke educated guess that the insinuations against him would be sexual in nature.
However, the surfacing of past sexual harassment complaints against Cain hasn’t hurt him in the polls yet, which has surprised a lot of folks (including me) because Cain’s initial support seemed so soft. And perhaps I haven’t watched the Republican presidential contest closely enough — don’t blame me; I’ve always been squeamish about seeing car wrecks — but Cain hasn’t seemed to demonstrate the kind of extraordinary charisma or resonant message you’d think he would need for voters to rally around him.
Maybe it’s not about Cain, though. It could just be that the ever-more-delusional right-wing base has decided that this moment is as good as any to make a firm stand against reality, once and for all. Or perhaps Cain supporters’ instincts toward denial have been helped by the fact that the charges against him are still essentially anonymous, and therefore an abstraction.
The question now is, what (if any) shoe is going to drop next? Longtime observers of the politics of personal destruction know that once the amorphous issue of “character” has been raised regarding a candidate, all sort of follow-up allegations suddenly are treated as newsworthy, even if by themselves they would have been ignored. And if someone scheming against Cain gift-wrapped the harassment “scoop” for Politico without one or more sequels ready to be released, then Republican political campaigns really have declined in quality.
Or perhaps there is a slowly unspooling plan to put a face to the current allegations… preferably, from the standpoint of Cain’s rivals, one that not only can survive the inevitable blowback but also triggers the primordial fears (“He’s after our daughters!”) and resentments of the GOP electorate.
Failing that, the camps of Romney, Perry et al. will have to hope that Cain engages in current behavior that accomplishes the same goal. And, frankly, given the elevated levels of hubris that may intoxicate an inexperienced candidate who begins to believe he’s invulnerable — to the point where he starts to boast about his alleged vulnerabilities — that might not be such a surprising development. When you think you’re getting away with something, why not keep doing it?
(Adapted from a post at Firedoglake.)