On Politics

Posted by Cyn | Filed under NaBloPoMo, politics

Plinky asked, “Where do you fall on the polit­i­cal spectrum?”

Pro­gres­sive Gifts

That depends on where you’re stand­ing. In Europe, I’d be con­sid­ered con­ser­v­a­tive, appar­ently. In the U.S., I’m pro­gres­sive, so I’m con­sid­ered a flam­ing lib­eral.



I agree with the lib­er­tar­i­ans on some issues, like gun con­trol (it means hit­ting what you aim at).



I also think that any decent soci­ety takes care of its peo­ple in far more ways than just hav­ing a strong mil­i­tary force. Uni­ver­sal health care (not insur­ance, CARE), strong con­sumer pro­tec­tions and con­sis­tent, fierce envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion are just a few of the things that need to come from the fed­eral gov­ern­ment with­out inter­fer­ence from any other entity — includ­ing state gov­ern­ments.



I live in Geor­gia, where there’s talk of the state gov­ern­ment cre­at­ing a panel to review every fed­eral law and decide whether or not to allow that law to be effec­tive in Geor­gia. That’s a vio­la­tion of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, as I under­stand things, as fed­eral law is sup­posed to super­sede state law. Georgia’s state gov­ern­ment is pretty free and easy about vio­lat­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion, as evi­denced by the state house recently pass­ing a bill to post the ten com­mand­ments in every pub­lic build­ing in the state (includ­ing every pub­lic school). There’s an excel­lent chance that the state sen­ate will pass it, too, because any­body who votes against it will be in trou­ble with the con­ser­v­a­tives in their dis­tricts.



Decent edu­ca­tion is impor­tant, too, and it’s too impor­tant to be left up to states like Geor­gia, Alabama, and Mis­sis­sippi. It isn’t pos­si­ble to have an insti­tu­tional edu­ca­tion that’s as good as a home edu­ca­tion, since most peo­ple leave the edu­ca­tion of their chil­dren up to the gov­ern­ment, it is espe­cially impor­tant for the future of our coun­try that the job be done right.

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Read more | Comments off | March 13th, 2012

The Hateful Tea Party, Its True Origins, and President Obama’s Accomplishments

Posted by Cyn | Filed under Civil Rights, politics

I was chal­lenged in com­ments on a friend’s Face­book wall yes­ter­day “pro­vide us with a spe­cific exam­ple of Tea Party hate ful (sic) speach and some thing good that Pres­i­dent Obama has done for our coun­try.” The com­menters there also claimed that “THE TEA PARTY HAS NO REPRESENTATIVES IN CONGRESS” and seemed to be under the impres­sion that it is a grass roots move­ment, which is a claim friends of mine have also made. Rather than post this infor­ma­tion in more than one place, I decided to make one post in my blog and refer to it in the future.

First, Pres­i­dent Obama has accom­plished plenty of things dur­ing his term. I started to make my own list, then decided that it’s fool­ish to rein­vent the wheel. The most com­pre­hen­sive list I’ve found is here: Accom­plish­ments of Pres­i­dent Obama. While some peo­ple may not think some of those things are accom­plish­ments, I doubt there’s any­one who can argue with all of them. I’d add to the list the fact that Osama bin Laden is dead. That hap­pened dur­ing Obama’s pres­i­dency. His peo­ple were able to keep a lid on the infor­ma­tion about bin Laden’s where­abouts and the oper­a­tion long enough to get that bas­tard. The fact that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell pol­icy in the mil­i­tary is over is pretty damned impor­tant, too.

Those accom­plish­ments look much bet­ter, too, when you real­ize two things:

  1. The IMF informed Pres­i­dent Bush that they intended to audit the U.S. back in June 2008. Bush just put them off until the end of his term.
  2. While Obama is often blamed for the mas­sive deficit, that’s inac­cu­rate. The 2009 fis­cal year began before Obama even took office, and the bud­get for that year was almost entirely deter­mined by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. There was an 88% increase in spend­ing dur­ing the years of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, com­pared to only a 7.4% increase dur­ing the Obama admin­is­tra­tion. That’s why Bush inher­ited a $128 bil­lion sur­plus from Clinton’s last bud­get, and bequeathed a $1.4 tril­lion deficit to Obama.

I know per­fectly well that the tea party (no caps) was orig­i­nally billed as a grass roots move­ment about fis­cal issues and against big gov­ern­ment. Yes, gath­er­ings to sup­port Ron Paul’s 2008 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign were called “tea par­ties,” and those issues were cen­tral to his campaign.

How­ever, there was appar­ently no talk of a Tea Party (note the caps) dur­ing those gath­er­ings, and after Obama was elected, the name was co-​​opted for anti-​​Obama ral­lies by Repub­li­can oper­a­tives, led by Dick Armey and mouth­piece Rick San­telli. Of course, if they’d said, “We’re orga­nized by lob­by­ists for big busi­ness, because guys like Steve Forbes and the Koch broth­ers don’t want mid­dle class peo­ple to have help pay­ing their mort­gages!” then mid­dle class peo­ple wouldn’t have been as likely to get involved. So the fic­tion of a “grass­roots move­ment” was care­fully maintained.

Even for those who might not believe that Free­dom­Works, the Koch broth­ers, etc. have always behind the Tea Party, it must be dif­fi­cult to deny that “grass­roots” cer­tainly isn’t what the Tea Party is about now. Any­one who wants to argue about it has only to look at Michelle Bach­mann, Rick Perry, and and their Chris­t­ian Domin­ion­ist views to know that. Of course, Perry also claimed in his book that Social Secu­rity is uncon­sti­tu­tional, despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruled oth­er­wise in 1936, and Bach­mann signed a pledge that claims that blacks were bet­ter off when they were slaves, so their cred­i­bil­ity rat­ings are suf­fer­ing, as far as I’m con­cerned. By the way — that pledge thing is pretty darned racist, to me, and the rest of Bachmann’s well-​​known his­tory gaffes aren’t mak­ing things any better.

Michelle Bach­mann (head of the Con­gres­sional Tea Party Cau­cus) worked for the IRS as a tax attor­ney before quit­ting to be a stay-​​at-​​home mom. So she’s never had a job that doesn’t come with a gov­ern­ment pay­check, but she’s sup­pos­edly against big gov­ern­ment? How very hyp­o­crit­i­cal. Bachmann’s hus­band runs a clinic that takes fed­eral money to pro­vide a form of ther­apy to “cure” homo­sex­u­al­ity — ther­apy that isn’t approved by the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion or the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion or, actu­ally, any accred­it­ing board. If any­body wants to truly cut out gov­ern­ment waste, then pay­ing for that sort of thing should be stopped right away, and psy­chol­o­gists who file for reim­burse­ment for it should lose their licenses and be arrested for fraud. (Homo­sex­u­al­ity was ini­tially sug­gested for removal from the Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­ual as a dis­or­der in 1973, and com­pletely removed by 1986. Dr. Bach­mann, if he actu­ally is a psy­chol­o­gist, should know that.) Michelle’s remarks about homo­sex­u­al­ity include such lovely bits as say­ing that it’s “of Satan.” Yes, that’s bigotry.

Steve King (R-​​Iowa, mem­ber of the Tea Party Cau­cus) has demon­strated big­otry in his attacks against Barack Obama before his elec­tion because of his mid­dle name (Hus­sein) and the fact that his father was Mus­lim. He has also shown him­self to be a racist by mak­ing claims that Obama favors blacks—with­out pro­vid­ing any sub­stan­ti­a­tion, of course. His misog­y­nist vot­ing record speaks for itself.

Louie Gohmert (R-​​Texas, mem­ber of the Tea Party Cau­cus), is a birther (crazy enough right there), who equated homo­sex­u­al­ity with bes­tial­ity, necrophilia, and pedophilia dur­ing a debate on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (video clip). He also made a stu­pidly racist remark when com­plain­ing about one par­tic­u­lar bit of fund­ing — the infa­mous “moo goo cat pan” joke that fell flat. (He’s got so much crazy that we could spend a lot of time talk­ing about him. I imag­ine even the Tea Party would be happy to lose him alto­gether. Search on “ter­ror babies” and you’ll see what I mean.)

One of King’s bud­dies in the Tea Party cau­cus, Phil Gin­grey (R-​​Georgia), went to the Mex­i­can bor­der with King on a fact-​​finding mis­sion, and put his racist foot in his mouth by claim­ing that his desire to end birthright cit­i­zen­ship isn’t moti­vated by xeno­pho­bia because, “if I had to choose from immi­grants across the globe, my favorite alien would be our His­panic and Latino res­i­dents com­ing from across the South­ern bor­der. On June 22, 2011, Dr. Gin­grey, an OB-​​GYN, said: “Democ­rats like to pic­ture us as push­ing grand­mother over the cliff or throw­ing some­one under the bus. In either one of those sce­nar­ios, at least the senior has a chance to sur­vive. But under this IPAB [Inde­pen­dent Pay­ment Advi­sory Board] we described that the Democ­rats put in ‘Oba­macare,’ where a bunch of bureau­crats decide whether you get care, such as con­tin­u­ing on dial­y­sis or can­cer chemother­apy, I guar­an­tee you when you with­draw that the patient is going to die. It’s rationing.” He knew per­fectly well that he was lying, but Repub­li­cans want to con­trol the way the money is spent, rather than to per­mit a non-​​partisan board to con­trol it and achieve any cost sav­ings. You would think a fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tive would be in favor of cost sav­ings, but it doesn’t work that when polit­i­cal power is at stake.!

At the state level, we have Alabama state sen­a­tor Scott Bea­son refer­ring to blacks as “abo­rig­ines.” After open­ing a speech by say­ing that “ille­gal immi­gra­tion will destroy a com­mu­nity” he closed it by advis­ing his lis­ten­ers to “empty the clip, and do what has to be done”.

David Bar­ton hangs out with sev­eral Tea Party fig­ures—Rick Perry is spend­ing Labor Day week­end with the guy. He claims on his tax records that he is an expert on African-​​American his­tory, but when ques­tioned about the fact that he reg­u­larly addresses white suprema­cist groups (who adore him) he tried at one point to claim that he didn’t under­stand their lean­ings. One of his main claims is that Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. made no sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the civil rights move­ment and that he and Thur­good Mar­shall should be removed from our his­tory books. Newt Gingrich’s spokesman, Rick Tyler, said, “I think David Bar­ton is one of the most knowl­edge­able teach­ers on Amer­i­can his­tory.” (Inter­est­ing, as Gin­grich is a for­mer his­tory pro­fes­sor him­self, and Bar­ton is only an “ama­teur his­to­rian.”) He’s pop­u­lar with Bach­mann, Beck, and Mike Huck­abee, too.

Then there’s just about every­thing Glenn Beck says — the man is anti-​​semitic, racist, homo­pho­bic, misog­y­nis­tic, you name it. He seems to adore com­par­ing any lit­tle slight against him­self or Fox News to the Holo­caust. If his man­i­curist slips up an causes dis­com­fort, she’s prob­a­bly accused of being Men­gele in dis­guise, or at least a descen­dant of his. He has stooped so low as to attack the president’s chil­dren and refer to the First Lady as the president’s “Baby Mama.” Any­one who cares to do so can find plenty of videos of him any­where, but I refuse to link to them. I don’t think there are any clips in which he opens his mouth that aren’t offensive.

Matthew Vadum is a colum­nist who is extremely sup­port­ive of the Tea Party. He recently pub­lished an arti­cle claim­ing that “Reg­is­ter­ing the Poor to Vote is Un-​​American”, equat­ing voter reg­is­tra­tion to giv­ing the poor “bur­glary tools.”

By the way, if you haven’t seen all the signs car­ried at Tea Party ral­lies depict­ing the Pres­i­dent as a mon­key, or a witch doc­tor, or Hitler, then you haven’t been pay­ing atten­tion. There are plenty of places where I could find more, but I’ve had enough more than enough expo­sure to nas­ti­ness for one day.

Any­one who reads this post can no longer say that they’ve never heard of any­one asso­ci­ated with Tea Party say­ing hate­ful things, or that they’re not aware of any­thing that Pres­i­dent Obama has accom­plished dur­ing his presidency.

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Read more | Comments off | September 3rd, 2011

WTF? Georgia Senate Threatens to Secede!

Posted by Cyn | Filed under Civil Rights, News

Cur­rent Mood:Angry emoticon Angry

Geor­gia Sen­ate threat­ens dis­man­tling of USA
They really did, by a vote of 43 – 1. On April 1, but it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.

The res­o­lu­tion goes on to endorse the the­ory that states have the right to abridge con­sti­tu­tional free­doms of reli­gion, press and speech. Accord­ing to the res­o­lu­tion, it is up to the states to decide “how far the licen­tious­ness of speech and of the press may be abridged.”
(snip)
Finally, the res­o­lu­tion states that if Con­gress, the pres­i­dent or fed­eral courts take any action that exceeds their con­sti­tu­tional pow­ers, the Con­sti­tu­tion is ren­dered null and void and the United States of Amer­ica is offi­cially dis­banded. As an exam­ple, the res­o­lu­tion specif­i­cally states that if the fed­eral gov­ern­ment enacts “pro­hi­bi­tions of type or quan­tity of arms or ammu­ni­tion,” the coun­try is disbanded.

You bet­ter believe that I’m writ­ing to our state sen­a­tor right away. Yes, this non­sense was slipped in on day 39 of the 40 day leg­isla­tive ses­sion, but that is absolutely no excuse. Our rep­re­sen­ta­tives have no busi­ness vot­ing for any­thing they haven’t thor­oughly read, under­stood, and debated. That’s their job!

Yet another rea­son I don’t want to live in Geor­gia any more. I seri­ously think this is a back­lash against our elec­tion of a black Demo­c­rat to the pres­i­dency. I’m look­ing at blue states now.

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Read more | Comments (3) | April 16th, 2009

Another Homegrown Terrorist, This Time in Tennessee

Posted by Cyn | Filed under News

Police: Man Shot Church­go­ers Over Lib­eral Views

Knoxville, Ten­nessee — An unem­ployed man accused of open­ing fire with a shot­gun and killing two peo­ple at a Uni­tar­ian church appar­ently tar­geted the con­gre­ga­tion out of hatred for its sup­port of lib­eral social poli­cies, police said Monday.

That makes a lot of sense. This whack­job is unhappy because he lost his job, gets a let­ter say­ing he’s los­ing his food stamps too, and instead of blam­ing the Repub­li­cans who have been in charge of the coun­try for the past eight years, he trots off to the near­est UUA con­gre­ga­tion and opens fire dur­ing a children’s performance.

Two peo­ple are dead, one because he gave his life in an attempt to save oth­ers. Five more are injured – no chil­dren, at least.

What did those peo­ple do to upset the home­grown terrorist?

The Unitarian-​​Universalist church pro­motes pro­gres­sive social work, includ­ing advo­cacy of women and gay rights. The Knoxville con­gre­ga­tion also has pro­vided sanc­tu­ary for polit­i­cal refugees, fed the home­less and founded a chap­ter of the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union, accord­ing to its Web site.

Good­ness. How upset­ting. Obvi­ously, they caused him to lose his truck­ing job. Yep. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Sam Har­ris’ views on reli­gion make more sense every day.

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Read more | Comments (5) | July 28th, 2008

TotD: Controlling the Public

Posted by Cyn | Filed under Movies, politics

Wag the Dog, anyone?

Wag the DogThere have always existed three ways of keep­ing the peo­ple lov­ing and loyal. One is to leave them alone, to trust them and not to inter­fere. This plan, how­ever, has very sel­dom been prac­tised, because the politi­cians regard the pub­lic as a cow to be milked, and some­thing must be done to make it stand quiet.

So they try Plan Num­ber Two, which con­sists in hyp­no­tiz­ing the pub­lic by means of shows, fes­ti­vals, parades, prizes and many paid speeches, ser­mons and edi­to­ri­als, wherein and whereby the pub­lic is told how much is being done for it, and how for­tu­nate it is in being pro­tected and wisely cared for by its divinely appointed guardians. Then the band strikes up, the flags are waved, three passes are made, one to the right and two to the left; and we, being com­pletely under the hyp­no­sis, hur­rah our­selves hoarse.

Plan Num­ber Three is a very ancient one and is always held back to be used in case Num­ber Two fails. It is for the ben­e­fit of the peo­ple who do not pass read­ily under hyp­notic con­trol. If there are too many of these, they have been known to pluck up courage and answer back to the speeches, ser­mons and edi­to­ri­als. Some­times they refuse to hur­rah when the bass-​​drum plays, in which case they have occa­sion­ally been arrested for con­tu­macy and con­tra­ven­tion by stocky men, in wide-​​awake hats, who lead the stren­u­ous life. This Plan Num­ber Three pro­vides for an armed force that shall over­awe, if nec­es­sary, all who are not hyp­no­tized. The army is used for two purposes—to coerce dis­turbers at home, and to get up a war at a dis­tance, and thus dis­tract atten­tion from the trou­bles near at hand. Napoleon used to say that the only sure cure for inter­nal dis­sen­sion was a for­eign war: this would draw the dis­turbers away, on the plea of patri­o­tism, so they would win enough out­side loot to sat­isfy them, or else they would all get killed, it really didn’t mat­ter much; and as for loot, if it was taken from for­eign­ers, there was no sin.

A care­ful ana­lyst might here say that Plan Num­ber Three is only a vari­a­tion of Plan Num­ber Two—the end being gained by hyp­notic effects in either event, for the army is con­scripted from the peo­ple to use against the peo­ple, just as you turn steam from a boiler into the fire-​​box to increase the draft. …

The pas­sage is by Elbert Hub­bard, from Lit­tle Jour­neys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. XIV: Great Musi­cians, Chap­ter 8: “Lud­wig van Beethoven”. I can’t hon­estly see what it has to do with Beethoven in par­tic­u­lar, but per­haps that would become clear in context.

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Read more | Comments (2) | May 9th, 2008

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