Needlenose

No automatic citizenship for the uneducated

I actually think the Tea Baggers may be on to something with their calls to repeal the 14th Amendment.  Just because somebody is born here doesn’t mean they’d make a valuable addition to the US, right?  Here is what I’d do – when the person turns 18, I’d have them hand-letter a sign.  If the sign is misspelled or ungrammatical, the candidate is denied citizenship and deported to some random 3rd-world country.

By the same token, we should fast-track the citizenship process for immigrants with Masters and Doctorates to replace the vast swath of stupid conservatives we’d be deporting.  It’s a win-win proposition!

Gingrich has been gradually creeping out from the shadows into the limelight since his fall from grace when leading the impeachment crusade against the very popular Bill Clinton.  But the Gingrich of the 90s seems relatively tame compared to the teabaggers and birthers of today – and even compared to Gingrich 2010!

In a recent speech to the reactionary American Enterprise Institute, Gingrich seems to have planted one foot firmly amidst the teabagger camp with his calls to forbid the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (which is neither a Mosque nor at Ground Zero), and the other solidly planted in the Wolfowitz/NeoConArtist era of never-ending war on Radical Islam:

“I believe [Bush] was right but in fact could not operationalize what he said. That is, there was an Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq, North Korea. Well we’re one out of three. And people ought to think about that. If Bush was right in January of 2002 — and by the way virtually the entire Congress gave him a standing ovation when he said it — then why is it that the other two parts of the Axis of Evil are still visibly, cheerfully making nuclear weapons? And it’s because we’ve stood at brink, looked over and thought, “Too big a problem.”

“If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in ‘41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won,” Gingrich said. The U.S. has to “over-match the problem,” he said, adding, “That’s what Americans are all about.”

I wonder if he got the memo that various Repug leaders were starting to bail on Shrubya’s Afghanistan Folly?  Palin/Gringrich in 2012 – the worst of 3 eras of Repug misleadership!  It would be kinda luck the Germans in WWII – invading a bunch of weak countries (Iran, N. Korea), then going crazy and attacking Russia from Palin’s house…I don’t even want to think about the hell they’d create.

Repug pols can be honest – when the microphones are off! Republican Senate Candidate Ken Buck calls Tea Bagger Birthers dumb-asses:

“Will you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I’m on the camera,” Buck said to the staffer. “God, what am I supposed to do?”

Now if he’d only speak the truth when he knows he is on camera, America can make some progress going forward!

Tip of the ‘Nose to Film Critic Buddy

Looks like the would-be car bomber of Times Square is a middle-aged white guy. All that remains is to find the guy’s misspelled, hand-lettered protest sign and we can confirm that he is a tea-bagger.

*Update 5/4/10* Hmm unbelievable as it might sound, the perp might not be a Bubba, first suspect is a Jihadi.  Wonder how long it will take for “Al” Bundy to start working with “Al” Qaeda…?

Reactionary losers looking for a fight

Armed protesters on the National Mall?  On the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing? 

Last summer I had remarked on how the complete repudiation of the GOP at the polls would spark a repeat of the wrong-wing wackiness and terror of the late ’90s.  I was really expecting more militia activity, abortion clinic terror and media hate talk, all of which has been delivered.

But this so-called Open Carry protest has a whole different quality.  The no-dick big-mouth gun nuts now strut into public,  family settings like National Parks and Starbucks, brazenly displaying their ability to target and kill us with a squeeze of the trigger.

Now they are marching on the Capitol, brandishing weapons?  Are these guys transforming into the Sinn Féin to the militia group’s IRA?

Seriously, it’s just a matter of time now before some wacko unloads on an elected leader or government official – or car bombs another Federal building.    Make no mistake, this is terror of the early Nazi brownshirt variety, and the target is you, me and the rule of law.

Tea Bagger political discourse

CNN’s Bob Schieffer doesn’t believe the Tea Baggers are Yahoos.  Here is how Swift described the Yahoos:

“…the Yahoos were known to hate one another more than they did any different species of animals; and the reason usually assigned was the odiousness of their own shapes, which all could see in the rest, but not in themselves.”

“…“For if,” said he, “you throw among five Yahoos as much food as would be sufficient for fifty, they will, instead of eating peaceably, fall together by the ears, each single one impatient to have all to itself”…if a cow died of age or accident, before a Houyhnhnm could secure it for his own Yahoos those in the neighborhood would come in herds to seize it, and then would ensue such a battle as I had described, with terrible wounds made by their claws on both sides, although they seldom were able to kill one another, for want of such convenient instruments of death as we had invented. At other times the like battles have been fought between the Yahoos of several neighborhoods without any visible cause: those of one district watching all opportunities to surprise the next, before they are prepared. But if they find their project hath miscarried, they return home, and, for want of enemies, engage in what I call a civil war among themselves.”

“That in some fields of his country there are certain shining stones of several colors, whereof the Yahoos are violently fond; and when part of these stones is fixed in the earth, as it sometimes happeneth, they will dig with their claws for whole days to get them out, then carry them away, and hide them by heaps in their kennels; but still looking round with great caution, for fear their comrades should find out their treasure…in the fields where the shining stones abound the fiercest and most frequent battles are fought, occasioned by perpetual inroads of the neighboring Yahoos…when two Yahoos discovered such a stone in a field and were contending which of them should be the proprietor, a third would take the advantage and carry it away from them both”

“…the Yahoos appear to be the most unteachable of all animals; their capacities never reaching higher than to draw or carry burthens. Yet I am of opinion this defect ariseth chiefly from a perverse, restive disposition. For they are cunning, malicious, treacherous, and revengeful. They are strong and hardy, but of a cowardly spirit, and, by consequence, insolent, abject, and cruel.”

Hmm, I suspect that Bob has ever read Gulliver’s Travels.

Who woulda guessed that a party of ‘haters’ can’t get along with each other?  We really should help these knuckleheads out with putting a real party with candidates together.  Remember how Ross Perot and his Independent Party’s 5% helped push Bush Sr. into the abyss (and how they dissolved into a puddle shortly after)?

Seriously, I think we progressives should flood this ‘movement’ as faux reactionaries and push hard to create an extremist platform with wingnut candidates.  At this point that is the only thing which can save the Democratic Party’s ass in the upcoming Congressional elections.