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Bill Ayers said it with bombs that he planted.
Community activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people.
Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.
Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn’t know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?
Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government — people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America’s influence in the world.
Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration’s enemies list.
Nothing so epitomizes President Obama’s own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year — each bill more than a thousand pages long — too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed.
That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question — and the biggest question for this generation.
Sucks to be you
October 31, 2009 • 8:55 am
Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many “czars” appointed by the president, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50% or 90%?
Did you think that another “czar” would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers — that is, to create a situation where some newspapers’ survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?
Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called “experts” deciding who could and could not get lifesaving medical treatments?
Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life-and-death decisions about your loved ones?
Does any of this sound like America?
How about a federal agency giving schoolchildren material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.
How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.
We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brownshirts of dictators than like anything American.
How far the president will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin.
Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to “change the United States of America”; the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.
Jeremiah Wright said it with words: “God damn America!”
Wow, what would you have the President do?
1. cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50% or 90%? Why not, they got billions of dollars of welfare from the gov, and are still paying themselves millions a year. What part of that sounds right to you?
2. a national police force? I haven’t heard this one before so I am not sure if you have been reading too many comic books.
3, What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama?
We will use your info to answer this one. We have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies AND THEY CAN’T WORK TOGETHER!!! What part of that have you missed since 911, then Katrina, and it goes on. Maybe we can get things right if we have one police force that has a single mission. Then, we can be sure that security in our country will be handled consistently and that all arms of government receive needed information.
4.the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility the values, the principles and the people of this country. Now, you are either a billionaire or a complete zero. What part of the Wallstreet debacle did you miss? What values are you talking about? If you would put some facts behind your wild accusatory statements, you might wind up sobering yourself. Intellectual masturbation will make you blind too!
The Psychology of the Right-Wing’s Anti-Government ‘Death-Panel’ Delusions
By Michael Bader, AlterNet
Posted on September 5, 2009, Printed on October 21, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142439/
A lot of heavyweight thinkers have offered explanations of the irrationality of modern political behavior — you know, behavior like Medicare recipients at town halls screaming about the evils of government-run health care, or otherwise-reasonable people likening President Barack Obama’s plan to Nazi eugenics.
George Lakoff theorizes that conservatives interpret reality through metaphors and meta-narratives modeled after authoritarian family structures.
Drew Westen argues that they interpret facts according to emotional investments in conclusions they already hold, bypassing cortical centers of reason altogether.
These and other analyses are powerful and helpful. But they aren’t satisfying to me because they aren’t specific enough to account for both the passionate urgency and self-destructiveness of the right-wing rejection of a program that will obviously benefit them.
In both my consulting room and my writing and teaching about organizational and political change, my focus is on understanding the often unconscious causes of irrational and self-destructive thinking and behavior.
However, whenever I ascribe such motivations to political attitudes, I often encounter two types of negative responses: First, the people I’m “studying” — in this case, the Right — feel demeaned (much like campus radicals did in the 1960s and 1970s who were told they were simply working out their “issues” with authority). And second: People on my side of the political aisle tell me that I’m using psychological mumbo-jumbo to unnecessarily complicate something quite simple. In this case, the simple truth turns out to be some throwaway line like “They’re just racist idiots,” or “They’ve been manipulated by the radical right.”
While I personally share the anger at the right of my progressive detractors, I would point this out to them: Just because we all have unconscious minds that irrationally interpret and react to the world, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t motivated by other feelings and attitudes as well, or that we shouldn’t be held accountable for the damage we do in the process.
It simply means that when people routinely act against their own best interest, it’s worth understanding all levels of their motivation. Progressives, by the way, aren’t immune to unconscious self-sabotage; they display such irrationality all the time when, for example, they launch quixotic campaigns against the “enemy” that don’t stand a chance of winning.
But in the case of health care reform and the anti-government rage we see in town halls and “tea party” events, the irrationality seems to me more prominent on the right.
I’m not talking about the behavior of people who have a vested interest in the status quo or are shilling for them. I’m talking about ordinary folks who are currently acting against their best interest.
Of course, they don’t think that this is what they’re doing. When people do or say irrational things, they always think they’re being reasonable. I’m arguing that it’s patently against their best rational interests to fight against health reform, to vilify government when it helps and protects them every day, and do so in ways that insure that the folks who are screwing them continue to be able to do so.
For example, at a recent tea party demonstration in Sacramento, Calif., a participant, Walter Branson, was interviewed. Branson said that he had worked for many years in the lumber industry but hadn’t worked at all this year. His unemployment benefits were about to run out and, he added, “winter is coming.”
He further reported that a lumber company executive had just spoken at the rally and claimed that business was down because of environmental regulations. Now, I don’t know Branson but his anti-government zeal interests me because he clearly benefits from what he hates. Among the myriad ways he depends on government is his unemployment insurance, a government program, and one that has recently been extended by that same government as part of Obama’s stimulus package.
And it’s widely accepted that the timber industry is depressed primarily because of a slow down in new-home construction, international competition, and rapidly vanishing old-growth trees — none of which were caused by government. Protecting the spotted owl was only the icing on the cake.
Arguing that Branson is brainwashed, racist or stupid feels good but doesn’t really explain the heart of his irrational fear and hatred of government.
So, I’d like to offer another theory, another narrative about the psychology of angry conservatives. It’s a narrative that hopefully will deepen our understanding, and, therefore, our ability to politically respond.
The current language of the right in this debate is all about the perils of government taking over our lives, robbing us of freedom, and even threatening our survival (or that of our aging parents).
After wending its way through our minds and picking up steam from hot-button symbols like Nazi Germany and communism, the picture of government that emerges looks increasingly like a tyrannical parent who wants to control us. It’s not simply an authoritarian parent, but one who wants to suffocate and rob us. Lakoff has argued that we need to redefine this metaphor into one of a family based on care, and he’s right.
Still, it remains a puzzle how people who dearly depend on government maintain a view of it as an inimical force that wants to colonize and exploit them.
I think that one answer to this puzzle lies in the psychological perils of helplessness and dependence, defenses against which lead to anti-government paranoia. The process by which this occurs is complicated and takes a bit of explaining.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my clinical practice, it’s that people hate feeling helpless and dependent. And yet, we’re all born this way and only gradually relinquish this position over the course of our lives — until, that is, we become elderly or ill and have to re-experience it intensely once again.
Interestingly, if feeling helpless and dependent is threatening, then so, too, is feeling innocent. Why innocent? Because if we’re helpless, we can’t really be responsible for what we feel and do. In this sense we’re innocent. Over and over again in my work, I see people struggle against the feeling that they’re helpless, dependent, and, yes, innocent.
Try talking to someone sometime who was smacked around a lot growing up. Ask them whether they were helpless, dependent and innocent back then. Odds are they’ll equivocate, perhaps noting that they weren’t the easiest kid or extending forgiveness to the abusive parent on the grounds that he or she might have been under enormous stress at the time, or had been beaten by his or her own parents.
These caveats might be true, but they are also ways to mitigate innocence. They are intended to make us less sympathetic characters because most of us have a very hard time viewing our lives with much compassion for the helpless, dependent and innocent person we once were and, to some extent, still are.
One of the reasons we don’t like seeing ourselves this way is that we all naturally tend to take responsibility for our lot in life. We want to feel that we choose our lives, that we have some inalienable and existential freedom to determine our present and future, that we are actors and agents.
That’s one reason why offering psychological analyses of bad behavior is often scorned. We (psychologists, that is) are seen as letting people off the hook, subtly endorsing bad behavior on the grounds of bad childhoods, even getting serial killers acquitted on insanity pleas. Psychological explanations seem to invariably challenge dearly held beliefs in individual freedom, autonomy and choice, even though there is nothing invariable about this whatsoever.
The problem is this: There are many ways that our freedom and control were severely constrained as children and continue to be as adults.
As children, we were dependent on our caretakers for psychic and physical survival. They determined how we saw and experienced reality and morality. We weren’t actors free to choose another family. Further, we encounter institutions today that similarly restrict our freedom, laws that prohibit our choices, and cultural rewards and punishments over which we have no control.
If you’re born poor, you can succeed, but not as easily as someone born wealthy. If you’re a person of color you can do well, but not as easily as someone white.
While perhaps obvious, these facts nevertheless are tiny instances of the multiple ways that we don’t exercise free choice and autonomy but are both powerfully dependent and, therefore, ultimately innocent of blame in many areas of our lives.
What do we do then? What did we do as children when faced with this same contradiction? What do we do today? If we regularly encounter conditions over which we’re powerless and which put us into states of dependence, but such feelings are intolerable, what solutions do our minds generate? This is the stuff of psychotherapy, and, I believe, an important conflict underlying certain political attitudes and behavior.
One of the main things we do is blame ourselves. If our overinvestment in being free agents leads us to refuse to face feelings of helplessness, then we have no choice but to make our suffering our own fault.
If we always have choices, then we’re also always responsible for their outcomes, and if these outcomes are negative, then we have no one to blame but ourselves. That’s what children do. They feel responsible and guilty for their own pain and suffering because the alternative is too threatening. Because if they are not responsible, then who is? It’s scary to blame parents, whom we love and on whom we depend for everything.
It is said that children would “rather be sinners in heaven than saints in hell,” that they would rather exonerate their caregivers and feel guilty than hold their caregivers accountable and feel innocent.
Adults blame themselves, too. We’re a culture in which, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, anyone supposedly can go from rags to riches. We’re a meritocracy in which one rises or falls according to one’s ability and value. Our private tendencies to irrationally blame ourselves are sanctioned and reinforced all the time in the outside world. Despite the obvious barriers and constraints on social mobility, we still secretly blame ourselves for our lot in life.
At this point in the story, however, we don’t yet have much of an explanation for anti-government hostility and paranoia. What we have are people threatened by feelings of helplessness, dependency and innocence who are, as a result, inclined to blame themselves for their own suffering.
We need to take one more step, and that is to recognize that these feelings of self-blame, of guilt, are also very painful to feel. No one likes to hate him or herself, to feel the shame connected to feeling that “you have only yourself to blame” for your frustrations and pain.
But self-blame and guilt are the automatic and natural byproducts of our intolerance of helplessness and our belief in freedom and choice. So, what do we do with these toxic feelings of self-recrimination that are continually stirred up?
Most of my patients tend to project them. In other words, to blame others. “It’s not my fault, it’s yours or hers or his.” While only a transient solution, it’s a compelling one. It momentarily restores some sense of innocence. I’m an innocent victim. I had no choice. I’m back on the moral high ground.
Blame is a powerful antidote to guilt, albeit a temporary one. Because it’s not a real solution, the innocence it creates is not based on an accurate view of ourselves. These feelings of guilt, these irrational feelings of responsibility and self-blame, don’t go away. They’re still there. They have to be projected over and over.
Government is a good target for these projections. For the right, it’s the perfect target. It’s big and powerful. It’s anonymous. It interacts with our lives everywhere, all the time. What other institution does this? What other force is there in our lives that is so ubiquitous, so full of laws, rules, restrictions, restraints, obligations, demands, all backed by force?
The logic goes: “I’d be happy (translated: not self-blaming and/or hating) if government would just stop getting in my way, stop trying to hold me down and hold me back with its regulations and taxes! If government would just get out of my life, I could be free, autonomous, and successful.”
In this way, the conservative’s claims of innocence and victimization seek to counteract private feeling of guilt and responsibility.
The pain that our objective helplessness creates both personally and socially, the pain that we channel first into guilt and then blame, is the pain of not being taken care of, of not being protected, of not being recognized and supported. We don’t really think of it this way because to do so would highlight the feelings of dependency and helplessness, feelings that are intolerable.
However, for conservatives, such an awareness appears in a vicarious form, in the form of the envy that they especially feel toward people who they imagine are being properly cared for. The internal conversation might go something like, “We’re sacrificing and enduring deprivation, and those people over there are getting away with something, getting a free pass. We’re responsible for our own lot in life, but they seem content to get handouts.”
Like the Reagan Democrats who fantasized about the black welfare queen rewarded for being lazy, the modern conservative has other images provided for a similar purpose. The “illegal immigrant” will get the benefits that hard-working conservative Americans deserve to reap from their sacrifice and the taxes they pay.
This is another version of the vitriolic attacks on welfare of all kinds, including that contained in health care reform, attacks stemming from the fantasy that I’m not getting my own needs met so that someone “over there” can get theirs met.
Finally, we come to the psychology behind beliefs in “death panels.”
In my work, the sheer irrationality of the claims suggests that something psychically powerful and conflictual is at work. Since it’s so bizarre, let’s treat it like a fantasy.
The fantasy behind these claims is that the handicapped, the elderly and the demented, will be killed, and we have to stand up on their behalf and stop this terrible threat. Now, why would someone believe this? Part of the answer is sure that they’re told it’s true and everywhere they look, right-wing media is repeating it. But it’s not simple ignorance. The lie hits a nerve, it evokes a passion that overwhelms reason.
What do the handicapped, elderly and demented have in common? Simply put, they’re innocent and helpless. Besides children, are there any other groups who more automatically trigger our sympathies than these, who are more deserving of our care and protection? And like children, they are very innocent.
Who wouldn’t want to “man the barricades” for such folks? Who wouldn’t be outraged by even the hint of an anonymous bureaucrat denying them help? These groups are symbols of innocent dependency of a sort that is pure, entitled to help and deserving of care.
Everything that we’re not.
Everything, in this case, that conservatives can’t feel about themselves. Conservatives respond so passionately to the specter of government-ordered euthanasia because they are vicariously defending their own right to feel innocent, to be dependent, to get some care and protection, a right that unfortunately they’re too ashamed to consciously embrace.
Unable to accept their own legitimate dependency needs, they project them onto others, locating them — in a sense, the vulnerable and innocent parts of themselves — in others who are indisputably dependent and to whose defense they can safely come.
I recently treated a guy who was virulently anti-government. He frequently complained that everyone got a handout but that he had to work all the time to make ends meet. His background was harsh, both emotionally and economically. His father was a tyrant and his mother was, in his mind, a doormat who didn’t protect him.
He learned to endure harsh conditions in which he got little recognition and developed a strong work ethic that enabled him to overcome a lot of obstacles. He didn’t ask anyone for anything. He likened himself to a camel in the desert adapted to going long distances without water.
He internalized the lack of empathy in his childhood home, and therefore had difficulty extending empathy to others, including his own children. What was striking was the way that his view of all the people “on the government dole” replicated the harsh way that his father had seemed to view him (a good-for-nothing, lazy, etc.).
His antagonism toward any kind of affirmative action or welfare stemmed from the bitter conviction that people “didn’t deserve to get something for nothing,” a conviction that had actually harmed him a great deal growing up but which he had made into a way of life. As he gradually became aware of his own unrequited needs for help, protection, comfort and care, his hostile scapegoating decreased.
He didn’t become less conservative. He became less vitriolic about it. It was a case in which the passion diminished but the formal political position remained, again reminding me that therapy can help explain and moderate passion, not politics.
We all have a longing to be cared for, a longing that unfortunately comes to feel inherently in conflict with autonomy and freedom. The conflicts that we all have about being deserving of such care thus get distorted and appear as anti-government paranoia.
Our own internal sense of being undeserving of care becomes, then, a rejection of the need for care, which becomes an external distrust of the care that is actually being offered. Government-as-caretaker becomes a threat rather than a gratification. If you see government as providing help, you are forced to accept that you need help, and that position is what ultimately is intolerable. Try telling a town-haller some time that he or she is on the government dole via Medicare and see how far you get!
This dynamic process in which need becomes fear becomes anger is well known to clinicians who treat paranoid patients. The threat feels external to these patients, but the source of it is really internal, a fear of their own dependency needs being manipulated and used as a means to control them.
The only way that they can feel safe and innocent is if they locate the problem outside themselves in some larger malevolent power and then aggressively defend themselves against that power. If they join with others in the process, all the better, since such imaginary communities provide a further sense of safety and connection.
In the end, though, the paranoid system has to be continually replenished with new enemies, new threats, and, therefore, new dangers to battle. For the hard-core right, egged on by their media and political patrons, the government provides an endless source of new enemies.
The answer to this type of dynamic in which feelings of helplessness, dependency, and innocence are so dangerous isn’t through reason. In my experience, there are two options.
The first is to give up on attempts to reach them, an approach that I think is perfectly appropriate for many of the hard-line paranoid anti-government types. I am generally a therapeutic optimist, except in cases where there is significant paranoia. Since everything I do or say is seen through a paranoid filter, there is little chance for me to reach the person.
Politically, we shouldn’t try. We should outvote them, outfight them and defeat them.
The other option, appropriate with other less-rigid and brittle members of this psychic class is take a longer view. In these cases, while defeating them politically, we have to also disprove or disconfirm their experience in practice, to provide over time experiences in which they can feel some control but also get helped.
It’s almost as if you have to take care of them in spite of themselves, in ways that allow them the maximum amount of freedom and the maximum autonomy to say “No.”
Only then will you stand a chance of them hearing your arguments.
Conservatism = Contentment
Liberalism = Resentment
The New York Times
——————————————————————————–
November 1, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York
By FRANK RICH
BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.
The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican “comeback.” But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.
The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.
The New York fracas was ignited by the routine decision of 11 local Republican county chairmen to anoint an assemblywoman, Dede Scozzafava, as their party’s nominee for the vacant seat. The 23rd is in safe Republican territory that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress in decades. And Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York standards; one statistical measure found her voting record slightly to the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. But she has occasionally strayed from orthodoxy on social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) and endorsed the Obama stimulus package. To the right’s Jacobins, that’s cause to send her to the guillotine.
Sure enough, bloggers trashed her as a radical leftist and ditched her for a third-party candidate they deem a “true” conservative, an accountant and businessman named Doug Hoffman. When Gingrich dared endorse Scozzafava anyway — as did other party potentates like John Boehner and Michael Steele — he too was slimed. Mocking Newt’s presumed 2012 presidential ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and Al Gore as “global warming czar.” She’s quite the wit.
The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch. Then came the big enchilada: a Hoffman endorsement from Palin on her Facebook page. Such is Palin’s clout that Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor (and presidential aspirant), promptly fell over one another in their Pavlovian rush to second her motion. They were joined by far-flung Republican congressmen from Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma and California, not to mention a gaggle of state legislators from Colorado. On Fox News, Beck took up the charge, insinuating that Hoffman’s Republican opponent might be a fan of Karl Marx. Some $3 million has now been dumped into this race by outside groups.
Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman doesn’t even live in the district. When he appeared before the editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days ago, he “showed no grasp” of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman complained that he should have received the questions in advance — blissfully unaware that they had been asked by the paper in an editorial on the morning of his visit.
Last week it turned out that Hoffman’s prime attribute to the radical right — as a take-no-prisoners fiscal conservative — was bogus. In fact he’s on the finance committee of a hospital that happily helped itself to a $479,000 federal earmark. Then again, without the federal government largess that the tea party crowd so deplores, New York’s 23rd would be a Siberia of joblessness. The biggest local employer is the pork-dependent military base, Fort Drum.
The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.
The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.
The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.
These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis Rams, he moaned about being done in by the “race card.” What actually did him in, of course, was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion. Limbaugh didn’t understand that in an increasingly diverse nation, profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court black ticket buyers, not drive them away.
This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent column by the former Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol’ Pat sounded like the dispossessed antebellum grandees in “Gone With the Wind” when lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. “America was once their country,” he wrote. “They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”
They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century profile.
That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost every demographic group by large margins in 2008 except white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s still rural. It’s also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration, whatever Obama’s ups and downs. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 17 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans (as opposed to 30 percent for the Democrats, and 44 for independents).
No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine.
Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first time, the president’s numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”
There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry about at this moment: Hamid Karzai. It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down.
Conservatism = Merit
Liberalism = Affirmative action
I really SUCKKKS to be me!!!! I can’t come up with anything on my own so all I can do is cut and paste what others have already said. I am typical of the mindless followers of Obama. I hope all the conservatives can forgive me.
Tea Party Movement Returns, This Time with Much More Dangerous and Explicit Rhetoric
By Frank Schaeffer, AlterNet
Posted on October 27, 2009, Printed on October 31, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143554/
According to the “Tea Party” website, Tea Party Express II: Countdown To Judgment Day” is underway. Here’s how their website describes it:
All throughout the recent Tea Party Express national bus tour we kept receiving calls from people around the nation who lived far away from the route our buses took across America. We vowed at the time to keep the Tea Party Express effort alive — and that’s exactly what we are doing.Join us from October 25th to November 11th, 2009 as we tell Congress and the White House: “Enough!” Let’s stand up and stop the bailouts, cap and trade, out-of-control spending, government-run health care, and higher taxes! We’re back and determined to take our country back!
What will happen on their predicted “Judgment Day”?
If you buy the biblical spin of the Religious Right folks — that make up the bulk of the Tea Party movement — the implication is clear: Jesus will soon return, send all Democrats, gays, blacks, progressives, liberals, college-educated unbelievers, etc., to Hell, while saving what Sarah Palin calls “us” “Real Americans” — in other words unreconstructed frightened and resentful white lower middle class Americans.
(As a former right wing evangelical anti-abortion leader who built a good career from these folks — until I quit in disgust with myself, the anti-American nature of the movement and the takeover the Republican Party by extremists — I know of what I speak.)
If you put the secular/right’s “tree-of-Liberty-must-be-watered-by-the-blood-of-tyrants-Timothy McVeigh spin on the Judgment Day scenario; then there will soon be a hoped for bloody day of reckoning for the occupant of the White House.
If you put the Republican Party/Rupert Murdoch/Fox News spin on Judgment Day; then it’s the old game trotted out once again: stir up the malcontent and get them to defeat their own self interest in the name of flag, country, God, babies, free enterprise — and support the corporate interests that profit from village idiots, say by defeating health care reform.
When the Tea Party folks say they want to “take back our country” who do they want to take it back from? It turns out it’s going to be taken back from the democratic process itself. The effort here is to reverse the last election result.
In this scenario any time there is not a white, wealthy, far right Republican in the White House and any time Congress isn’t controlled by the far (white) right of the Republican Party, then the country has been “stolen” from “us” “Real Americans.”
Since democracy is not so easily undone, the implication is that to “take back” America must needs involve, not votes but “Judgment Day.” In the view of the right Democracy Herself has failed “we” good God-fearing, “birther” “deather” “he lied!” “Obama is Hitler!” Americans. So we must now turn to “other means.”
First Tea Parties then Judgment Day. Get it?
What do you think “We Real Americans” have all those guns for?
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.
Conservatism = Right
Liberalism = Wrong
a voice from Imperial Rome.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason
from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his
banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly
whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims,
and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep
in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in
the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it
can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear”.
45 BC
Love it. The more the world changes, the more it stays the same.
You can say that again! Sounds like Marcus was talking about the Tea Party clan.
Sounds more like the Obama clan.
“Treason from within” = Tea Party Clan
“Treason from within” = Mao loving, Constitution shredding White House.
Tea Party = Brave, patriotic American Citizens trying to protect their Country from said treasonists.
Conservatism = Fire
Liberalism = Smoke
Liberals just need to die offcompletely already. Haven’t they all gotten gay AIDS yet? Perhaps we should add all of the liberals we know to our abortion doctor hitlists published online. That should speed up the process to taking this country back to be a God-fearing Christian nation.
No press for you today tea baggers!
We’ll see another 2 million people get ignored again.*sigh* Stupid biased liberal media. At least there is one news station on our side.
Our victories are coming though. Making sure that fags are singled out as subhuman and undeserving of fag marriage was a major victory that must hurt your little pea brains so bad.
HAHAHAHAH
I stand corrected potty mouth. You did get some press.
TPMDC
Strange Scene: 10 Arrested As Tea Partiers Heckle Police
Christina Bellantoni | November 5, 2009, 4:04PM
U.S. Capitol Police arrested 10 people this afternoon after the Capitol Hill Tea Party crowd stormed Congressional office buildings.
Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, public information office for the Capitol Police, told TPMDC the arrests happened in the Cannon House building as tea partiers attempted to protest Speaker Nancy Pelosi about health care.
They were charged with unlawful entry (entering a Congressional office and refusing to leave when told to do so) and/or disorderly conduct (yelling in the hallway outside an office) at Room 235 in the Cannon House Office Building.
Room 235 is Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office for district business, not where she conducts her duties as Speaker. That’s handled at an office in the Capitol building.
TPMDC happened upon a crowd that formed around two police vans as the protesters were prepared for “transporting,” according to one officer there.
Without those official details, protesters in the crowd watching the arrests were furious. They shouted “Let them go!” and one man yelled at the police that “Martin Luther King” was being dishonored and shouted “Letter from Birmingham Jail!”
One woman told officers they were “shameful.”
“This is America, this is not the Soviet Union,” one woman said.
Like a bad game of telephone, the crowd spread rumors without anyone having witnessed exactly what happened.
Several people said the group had been arrested for praying. Others said the group was arrested for ripping up pages from the nearly 2,000-page health care bill.
To show support for them, members of the crowd started ripping up their pages from the bill, which rally organizers had handed out for the purpose of reading them to members of Congress.
“Here’s a piece of paper, I’m tearing it,” one woman shouted as another joined in: “I tore a piece too!”
That woman later told the officers, “I know you guys are just doing your job but don’t you hate your job?”
“I’m embarrassed,” another woman told her friends.
“Read your history books,” another woman shouted at the officers.
“Thugs from Chicago,” a man shouted at police.
“Arrest Nancy Pelosi for treason. You’re arresting the wrong people,” another shouted.
One of the men arrested (photo below) appeared to be wearing a priest’s collar. He was ill, and officers were holding him up as he sat on the curb. After several minutes, he was led away in an ambulance and the crowd shouted that he was a “hero.”
“Shame on you!” the crowd erupted.
“In your heart you know this is wrong,” a man yelled at police.
We’re uploading video of the strange scene, but it may take awhile, so check back.
Late update: Here is the first video we’ve uploaded, of the “God Bless America” moment.
Later update: Here you can watch another video as the man, priest collar visible, is led away to an ambulance.
That’s when the heckling really kicks up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92BItoNdpWM&feature=player_embedded#
Is that really how you define heckling? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHHHAHAA
What, you would want the press to cover Americans’ trying to stop out of control Government over a domestic terrorist on an Army base. HUH?
Gee, sad what you consider a priority lefty Mary
The Truth about Becks organs.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/143781/jon_stewart_gets_teary-eyed_over_the_plight_of_glenn_beck%27s_internal_organs/
I used to think Jon Stewart was an idiot, but this proved me wrong. I take it all back and may even start paying attention to his show.
Hope Jon gets some of the message while he studies Beck’s mannerism’s. LOL
President Obama didn’t wait long after Tuesday’s devastating elections to give critics another reason to question his leadership, but this time the subject matter was more grim than a pair of governorships.
After news broke out of the shooting at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas, the nation watched in horror as the toll of dead and injured climbed. The White House was notified immediately and by late afternoon, word went out that the president would speak about the incident prior to a previously scheduled appearance. At about 5 p.m., cable stations went to the president. The situation called for not only his trademark eloquence, but also grace and perspective.
But instead of a somber chief executive offering reassuring words and expressions of sympathy and compassion, viewers saw a wildly disconnected and inappropriately light president making introductory remarks. At the event, a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian affairs, the president thanked various staffers and offered a “shout-out” to “Dr. Joe Medicine Crow — that Congressional Medal of Honor winner.” Three minutes in, the president spoke about the shooting, in measured and appropriate terms. Who is advising him?
Anyone at home aware of the major news story of the previous hours had to have been stunned. An incident like this requires a scrapping of the early light banter. The president should apologize for the tone of his remarks, explain what has happened, express sympathy for those slain and appeal for calm and patience until all the facts are in. That’s the least that should occur.
Indeed, an argument could be made that Obama should have canceled the Indian event, out of respect for people having been murdered at an Army post a few hours before. That would have prevented any sort of jarring emotional switch at the event.
Did the president’s team not realize what sort of image they were presenting to the country at this moment? The disconnect between what Americans at home knew had been going on — and the initial words coming out of their president’s mouth was jolting, if not disturbing.
It must have been disappointing for many politically aware Democrats, still reeling from the election two days before. The New Jersey gubernatorial vote had already demonstrated that the president and his political team couldn’t produce a winning outcome in a state very friendly to Democrats (and where the president won by 15 points one year ago). And now this? Congressional Democrats must wonder if a White House that has burdened them with a too-heavy policy agenda over the last year has a strong enough political operation to help push that agenda through.
If the president’s communications apparatus can’t inform — and protect — their boss during tense moments when the country needs to see a focused commander-in-chief and a compassionate head of state, it has disastrous consequences for that president’s party and supporters.
All the president’s men (and women) fell down on the job Thursday.
And Democrats across the country have real reason to panic.
That’s not what I saw. Sounds like a fixed news cut and paste job.
Why are we not surprised? All that is necessary is to take the blinders off and listen with your ears.
I can’t believe ANY of you people are still lurking here. Life too difficult to face so you amuse yourself here?
Get a life, reall!
TPMMuckraker
Patriot Games: GOP Reps Pick Tea Party Rally Over National-Security Votes
Zachary Roth | November 6, 2009, 12:29PM
When it’s a choice between strengthening the Patriot Act, or showing up for the Tea Party Patriots, what’s a GOP lawmaker to do? We’ll give you one guess…
Several Republican members of Congress yesterday blew off votes on the signature anti-terror legislation of the post 9/11 era to attend Michele Bachmann’s Tea Party rally against health-care reform.
Reps. Steve King of Iowa, Trent Franks of Arizona, Randy Forbes of Virginia, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Louie Gohmert and Ted Poe of Texas all took time out yesterday for the “Super Bowl of Freedom,” as Bachmann has called it. And all missed votes in the House Judiciary committee on Republican-sponsored amendments to the reauthorization of the Patriot Act — measures that would have toughened the Act, but narrowly failed. Those votes took place, a committee staffer confirmed, between noon and two — the very time when Republican lawmakers were rallying the Tea Party troops on the Capitol steps.
One measure, offered by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the committee, would have extended the “lone wolf” provisions of the Act, which would allow the FBI to surveil or search foreign nationals even if it can’t be shown that the person is an agent of a foreign power. Many believe that had this been in effect before 9/11, the FBI might have caught Zacarias Moussaoui. And Republicans had said that extending the lone wolf provision this time around was crucial to protecting national security. Even some Democrats supported the measure, giving it a good chance of passage. But it failed by a single vote, 15-15. Reps. King and Gohmert were absent.
Another measure, offered by Rep. Dan Lundgren (R-CA), failed by a vote of 11 to 8. Reps. King, Gohmert, Jordan, and Poe were all missing.
And a third, brought by Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL), which would have bolstered the ability of local law enforcement to use a device that records phone numbers from a particular phone, failed by 12 to 10, with King, Gohmert, Jordan, Poe, and Franks all absent. (A subsequent amendment that did essentially the same thing later passed, it’s worth noting.)
Several other members of both parties missed some of these votes as well, but there’s no evidence they were Tea Partying.
To be sure, the Rooney and Lundren amendments appear to have largely tinkered around the edges — neither would have been far-reaching enough to produce broad GOP support for the final bill, which was strongly backed by civil libertarians and liberal Democrats. But the Smith measure was more far-reaching. And a Hill aide confirmed that all three Republican measures would have shifted the bill toward increasing the power of law enforcement to fight terror, and away from civil liberties — an approach that Republicans have long argued is crucial to national security.
At the Bachmann event yesterday, King, of Iowa, sounded one of the more passionate calls to arms. “We own this hill. We’re the American people,” he told the Tea Partiers. “And you know what? We’re not going to leave this hill until we kill this bill.”
But a few hours later, the bill that King actually had a chance to help shape was voted out of committee by 16-10 — with King, Gohmert, and Forbes, as well as three other Republicans, again absent for the final vote. Republicans on the panel blasted the legislation, saying it would hinder law enforcement and intelligence agencies in fighting terror. But had a few more of their own showed up to vote, instead of playing to the Tea Party crowd, perhaps they would have been able to fix some of what they didn’t like about it.
None of the offices for King, Gohmert, Poe, Forbes, Franks or Jordan responded to requests for comment from TPMmuckraker.
by Perez Hilton
Take that, right wing conservatives!
Your poster child is a big ol’ hypocrite, but we already knew that!
Although Carrie Prejean demanded over $1 million for her lawsuit with the Miss California Pageant, she settled without receiving a dime!
And it’s because of a sexxx tape! It seems the video is super graphic and is rumored to showcase some of Prejean’s solo talents!
The even-more-disgraced former Miss California is finally getting a little retribution – and a lotta nothing!
How long till the tape leaks?!
http://perezhilton.com/2009-11-04-the-dumb-bitch-has-a-sex-tape
Perhaps it is because the massive tax bill disguised as Health care is actually more of a danger to this country than Terrorism. Sad but true. The massive Health Care bill will do more damage to this country than 9/11 did. Besides it’s pretty fair to say that Obama opening up the borders of this country and welcoming in all sorts of terrorists is a baromoter of how important he feels terrorism is.
What is it that was said about the Ft. Hood shooter? He was a muslim first, American second. sound like anyone else we know? Someone who clearly wants to destroy this country from within?
Don’t cha just love plausible deniability
Nidal Hasan was on Homeland Security advisory task force aimed at Obama transition team
November 6, 1:29 PMTrumbull County Conservative ExaminerJohn Hull
On May 19, 2009, The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI), an entity that “creates innovative strategies and solutions to current and future threats to the nation,” published a report entitled “Thinking Anew – Security Priorities for the Next Administration – Proceedings Report of the HSPI Presidential Transition Task Force April 2008-January 2009″ Listed in the report under the heading “Task Force Event Participants” is none other than alleged murderer, Nidal Hasan.
This self-proclaimed “think and do tank” took on an advisory role with respect to Homeland Security during the presidential transition. This means that prior to becoming a threat to Homeland Security, Hasan was a strategic advisor on Homeland Security.
This is an unfortunate turn of events for the Obama Administration as, no doubt, there will be commentators revelling in the fact that another terrorist can be linked to Obama, though it’s highly doubtful the incoming President knew anything about Hasan.
The President commented briefly on this tragedy and the implications surrounding it, “We don’t know all the answers yet and I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts. What we do know is that there are family, friends and an entire nation grieving right now for the valued men and women who came under attack yesterday in one of the worst mass shootings ever to take place on an American military base” He ordered flags to be flown at half staff.
You and your clan need therapy!
Birther Site Is Already Lying About Ft. Hood Shooter and Obama
By Spencer Ackerman 11/6/09 11:04 AM
Conspiracy-theorist Website WorldNetDaily posts the inevitable “connection” between Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and President Obama, and it possesses the same level of rigor and responsibility we’ve come to expect from the leading source of disinformation that the president wasn’t born an American. Under the headline “Shooter Advised Obama Transition,” Jerome Corsi — he of the Swift Boat liars — writes:
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday’s massacre at Fort Hood, played a homeland security advisory role in President Barack Obama’s transition into the White House, according to a key university policy institute document.
The Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University published a document May 19, entitled “Thinking Anew – Security Priorities for the Next Administration: Proceedings Report of the HSPI Presidential Transition Task Force, April 2008 – January 2009,” in which Hasan of the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine is listed on page 29 of the document as a Task Force Event Participant.
Wrong! So thoroughly, thoroughly wrong!
That GWU document no more “advised” the Obama transition than did the flurry of think-tank documents and advisory strategies put out by endless interest groups. It had, and therefore Hasan had, absolutely no connection to the Obama administration. Here, for instance, is a story I wrote in November about one such strategy “advisory” paper prepared by the civil liberties community for the Obama transition about counterterrorism strategies. Really, this is as stupid as saying that a guy who writes a letter to The New York Times “advised” editor Bill Keller.
For the sane version of this story, please see Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman:
In May — a few weeks after his pro-bomber post — he participated in attended a meeting of the Homeland Security Policy Institute’s presidential transition task force.
Hasan attended a meeting of a private organization that gave the transition some unsolicited advice. To a group of conspiracy theorists, this is the “connection.” How long before Fox News picks up the story?
Just thought I pop my head in here again with a simple question.
Answer yes or no, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Is Barack Obama a US citizen?
The last sentence of this article sums it up quite accurately.
Fort Hood’s 9/11
Islamist terror strikes US again
Last Updated: 2:50 PM, November 6, 2009
Posted: 1:36 PM, November 6, 2009
Ralph Peters
On Thursday afternoon, a radicalized Muslim US Army officer shouting “Allahu Akbar!” committed the worst act of terror on American soil since 9/11. And no one wants to call it an act of terror or associate it with Islam.
What cowards we are. Political correctness killed those patriotic Americans at Ft. Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did. And the media treat it like a case of non-denominational shoplifting.
This was a terrorist act. When an extremist plans and executes a murderous plot against our unarmed soldiers to protest our efforts to counter Islamist fanatics, it’s an act of terror. Period.
When the terrorist posts anti-American hate-speech on the Web; apparently praises suicide bombers and uses his own name; loudly criticizes US policies; argues (as a psychiatrist, no less) with his military patients over the worth of their sacrifices; refuses, in the name of Islam, to be photographed with female colleagues; lists his nationality as “Palestinian” in a Muslim spouse-matching program, and parades around central Texas in a fundamentalist playsuit — well, it only seems fair to call this terrorist an “Islamist terrorist.”
But the president won’t. Despite his promise to get to all the facts. Because there’s no such thing as “Islamist terrorism” in ObamaWorld.
And the Army won’t. Because its senior leaders are so sick with political correctness that pandering to America-haters is safer than calling terrorism “terrorism.”
And the media won’t. Because they have more interest in the shooter than in our troops — despite their crocodile tears.
Maj. Nadal Malik Hasan planned this terrorist attack and executed it in cold blood. The resulting massacre was the first tragedy. The second was that he wasn’t killed on the spot.
Hasan survived. Now the rest of us will have to foot his massive medical bills. Activist lawyers will get involved, claiming “harassment” drove him temporarily insane. There’ll be no end of trial delays. At best, taxpayer dollars will fund his prison lifestyle for decades to come, since our politically correct Army leadership wouldn’t dare pursue or carry out the death penalty.
Maj. Hasan will be a hero to Islamist terrorists abroad and their sympathizers here. While US Muslim organizations decry his acts publicly, Hasan will be praised privately. And he’ll have the last laugh.
But Hasan isn’t the sole guilty party. The US Army’s unforgivable political correctness is also to blame for the casualties at Ft. Hood.
Given the myriad warning signs, it’s appalling that no action was taken against a man apparently known to praise suicide bombers and openly damn US policy. But no officer in his chain of command, either at Walter Reed Army Medical Center or at Ft. Hood, had the guts to take meaningful action against a dysfunctional soldier and an incompetent doctor.
Had Hasan been a Lutheran or a Methodist, he would’ve been gone with the simoon. But officers fear charges of discrimination when faced with misconduct among protected minorities.
Now 12 soldiers and a security guard lie dead. 31 soldiers were wounded, 28 of them seriously. If heads don’t roll in this maggot’s chain of command, the Army will have shamed itself beyond moral redemption.
There’s another important issue, too. How could the Army allow an obviously incompetent and dysfunctional psychiatrist to treat our troubled soldiers returning from war? An Islamist whacko is counseled for arguing with veterans who’ve been assigned to his care? And he’s not removed from duty? What planet does the Army live on?
For the first time since I joined the Army in 1976, I’m ashamed of its dereliction of duty. The chain of command protected a budding terrorist who was waving one red flag after another. Because it was safer for careers than doing something about him.
Get ready for the apologias. We’ve already heard from the terrorist’s family that “he’s a good American.” In their world, maybe he is.
But when do we, the American public, knock off the PC nonsense?
A disgruntled Muslim soldier murdered his officers way back in 2003, in Kuwait, on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Recently? An American mullah shoots it out with the feds in Detroit. A Muslim fanatic attacks an Arkansas recruiting station. A Muslim media owner, after playing the peace card, beheads his wife. A Muslim father runs over his daughter because she’s becoming too Westernized.
Muslim terrorist wannabes are busted again and again. And we’re assured that “Islam’s a religion of peace.”
I guarantee you that the Obama administration’s non-response to the Ft. Hood attack will mock the memory of our dead.
Ralph Peters’ latest novel is “The War After Armageddon.”
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/fort_hood_xjP9yGrJN7gl7zdsJ31vnJ#ixzz0WIxGnw9x
Conservatism = Wheat
Liberalism = Tares
So when are you people going to rise up and take “your” country back? There was a lot of empty chest beating here a few months ago that is typical of conservatives. Talk tough but you won’t do a single damn thing about it.
I predicted it. Your puny march on Washington wasn’t going to change a thing. Universal health care is coming, don’t ask, don’t tell is going down, and your racist, backward America is never coming back.
So when are you racist cowards going to bring it?
It ain’t over yet you leftist pussy. Don’t ask, don’t tell won’t help your ass and only make you a bigger target. Alluha Akbar.
Be careful of what you wish for, the great health care program is nothing more than a huge tax bill. Check out the fines and taxes for non compliance with the new rules. This will really help all those poor innercity people that the leftist pretend to care about.
Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.
n response to the JCT letter, Camp said: “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail. It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”
Key excerpts from the JCT letter appear below:
“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]
- – – – – – – – – -
“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…” [page 2]
- – – – – – – – – -
“Criminal penalties
Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses. Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:
• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.
• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]
When confronted with this same issue during its consideration of a similar individual mandate tax, the Senate Finance Committee worked on a bipartisan basis to include language in its bill that shielded Americans from civil and criminal penalties. The Pelosi bill, however, contains no similar language protecting American citizens from civil and criminal tax penalties that could include a $250,000 fine and five years in jail.
“The Senate Finance Committee had the good sense to eliminate the extreme penalty of incarceration. Speaker Pelosi’s decision to leave in the jail time provision is a threat to every family who cannot afford the $15,000 premium her plan creates. Fortunately, Republicans have an alternative that will lower health insurance costs without raising taxes or cutting Medicare,” said Camp.
You seem to be anxious for some violence. Guess you must be a muslim.
American infidels you all belong burning in hell for your arrogance and bullishness bossing every one around and infecting our country with your vile dirty soldiers. How dare you try to give us freedom to spill our hate in our own country when we can hide in yours and spill it on your streets and you can’t stop us, your pussy president can’t stop us, your military can’t stop us and if I want to throw my headdress on and stand on your street corners venting my hate and anger at you citizens, I can and will. You gave me this right and you pay me to do this with you taxpayers money and now if one of my friends get sick your doctors will be forced to take care of me and if I don’t like that doctor, I can spit in his face as that is my culture and you can’t stop me if you try to stop me I will hire attorney and sue your ass of infringing on my rights.
Allahu Akbar infidels
sily spoiled americans you don’t even know who your enemy is and we laugh at you.
you call each other names and fight over your insignificant little political problems and we laugh at you.
we walk the halls of your courts, hospitals, government, military, universities and public schools and we laugh at you.
we look for your weak and sickness in mind and body and we laugh at you.
we go to your churchs but you don’t see us and we laugh at you.
your government is more worried about their elections and positions of power and we laugh at you.
your country is being destroyed from within and we laugh at you.
you play such childish foolish games with your money and possesions and we laugh at you.
soon you will all be crying, how did this happen? and we will laugh at you.
You people are all crazy and need to grow up. You all sound like high school (my apologize to high school students) children. This is a very serious time in this country our freedom is at stake. this crap that I am reading is stupid and a waste of time. I won’t be back to this site because the asylum called and they are looking for ALL of you. wtf!
By the way…you people are the biggest bags of wind….wow…get a job or something. do all of you think you are that interesting! lol what a joke!
God = good
Obama = evil
Soldiers of Allah, our time is almost here: Allahu Akbar
Silly americans and ACLU and their justice system will free our brothers and victory will be ours.
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top law enforcement officer announced Friday that he is returning the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and his accomplices to the scene of their alleged crimes — a decision that drew immediate outrage from some lawmakers and victims’ families.
Attorney General Eric Holder said Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and four others now detained in Guantanamo Bay will be moved to a prison facility near the Brooklyn Bridge and stand trial in a civilian federal courtroom down the street from the World Trade Center buildings that Mohammad takes credit for demolishing on Sept. 11, 2001.
“The Department of Justice will pursue prosecution in federal court of the five individuals accused of conspiring to commit the 9/11 attacks. Further, I have decided to refer back to the Department of Defense five defendants to face military commission trials, including the detainee who was previously charged in the USS Cole bombing,” Holder said at a Justice Department briefing.
Calling this the toughest decision he has made as attorney general, Holder said he is instructing attorneys in the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of Virginia to pursue the death penalty for the five.
“For over 200 years our nation has relied on a faithful adherence to the rule of law to bring criminals to justice and to provide accountability to victims. Once again we will ask our legal system in two venues to rise to that challenge. I am confident that it will answer the call with fairness and with justice,” Holder added.
The decision infuriated Republicans and many who had lost loved ones on Sept. 11.
“These terrorists planned and executed the mass murder of thousands of innocent Americans. Treating them like common criminals is unconscionable,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a statement.
“This, I think, will go down as one of the worst decisions any president has ever made,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y.
“The only thing they are going to do is give them a stage to mock us … and this makes me sick to my stomach,” said Tim Brown, a former New York City firefighter and founder of TheBravest.com, a group that is petitioning the administration not to bring terrorists to civilian courts.
President Obama, speaking in Tokyo, said he will insist that Mohammed be subject to “the most exacting demands of justice” and called the move both a prosecutorial and a national security decision.
“I’m absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheik Mohammad will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice. The American people insist on it. My administration will insist on it,” he said.
Mohammed and the four others — Waleed bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali — are accused of orchestrating the attacks that killed 2,973 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
Bringing such notorious suspects to U.S. soil to face trial is a key step in Obama’s plan to close the terror suspect detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Holder said Friday’s decision “marks a significant step forward to close Guantanamo and bring to justice those individuals who have conspired to attack our nation and our interests abroad.”
However he acknowledged it would be very difficult to meet the administration’s self-imposed Jan. 22 deadline for closing the facility.
The decision is also a major legal and political test of Obama’s overall approach to terrorism. If the case suffers legal setbacks, the administration will face second-guessing from those who never wanted it in a civilian courtroom. And if lawmakers get upset about notorious terrorists being brought to their home regions, they may fight back against other parts of Obama’s agenda.
Holder did not give specific charges to be filed against the defendants.
“They will be charged for what we believe they did, and that is to mastermind and carry out the 9/11 attacks,” he said. He added that he has seen evidence that is not yet public that gives him confidence that “our outcome will be successful.”
The New York case may also force the court system to confront a host of difficult legal issues surrounding counterterrorism programs begun after the 2001 attacks, including the harsh interrogation techniques once used on some of the suspects while in CIA custody. The most severe method — waterboarding, or simulated drowning — was used on Mohammed 183 times in 2003, before the practice was banned.
But some supporters said they have confidence that the U.S. courts could successfully try enemy combatants.
“The transfer of cases to federal court is a huge victory for restoring due process and the rule of law, as well as repairing America’s international standing, an essential part of ensuring our national security,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “However, it’s disappointing that the administration has chosen to prosecute some Guantanamo detainees in the unsalvageable military commissions system. … Justice can only be served in our tried and true courts.”
Former Rep. Tom Andrews, director of the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo, said the U.S. courts have already proved themselves capable of ensuring terrorist convictions, though he seemingly declined to classify Mohammed and the others as terrorists.
“One hundred ninety-five terrorists have been convicted in U.S. federal courts since 2001. The terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 were tried and convicted in U.S. courts and are now locked away in a federal supermax prison,” Andrews said.
“Those responsible for 9/11 are not warriors, they are criminals and mass murderers. Treating them as anything else plays into Al Qaeda’s hands and rewards them an elevated status that only stokes their desire for ‘martyrdom.’ They need to be subjected to the full force of law and justice — nothing less,” he added.
Sen. Joe Lieberman disagreed, saying the defendants are not the average criminal afforded access to U.S. federal courts.
“The terrorists who planned, participated in and aided the September 11, 2001, attacks are war criminals, not common criminals. Not only are these individuals not common criminals but war criminals, they are also not American citizens entitled to all the constitutional rights American citizens have in our federal courts,” he said.
Justice and Defense Department officials spent part of the morning notifying Sept. 11 victims’ family members, members of Congress, state and local officials, governors, federal agencies and and others about the decision. Early Friday, an e-mail went out to victims’ family members telling them that an announcement would be coming later. Since then a “series” of e-mails has been sent, according to one official.
“The Defense Department and Justice Department are doing their best to provide information” to victims’ family members and “we’re trying to include as many people as we have,” the official said. “Our paramount concern is informing them.”
The actual transfer of the detainees from Guantanamo to New York isn’t expected to happen for many more weeks because administration officials have to notify Congress and wait 45 days.
Among those facing military commissions is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of conspiring to blow up the USS Cole, which caused the death of 17 U.S. sailors while the ship was refueling in Yemen in 2000.
At the last major trial of Al Qaeda suspects held at that courthouse in 2001, prosecutors did seek death for some of the defendants. However, Guantanamo transferee Ahmed Ghailani, charged with assisting in the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, is not facing the death penalty.
Mohammed already has an outstanding terror indictment against him in New York, for an unsuccessful plot called “Bojinka” to simultaneously take down multiple airliners over the Pacific Ocean in the 1990s.
Mohammed admitted to interrogators that he thought up the attacks — he allegedly proposed the concept to Usama bin Laden as early as 1996, obtained funding for the attacks from bin Laden, oversaw the operation and trained the hijackers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
However, concerns have been raised that his confession would be thrown out because he was water-boarded. Others have suggested that the defendants could delay a final trial for years through procedural motions. Some parents of adult victims of the Sept. 11 attacks have said they fear they will die before justice has been served on the detainees.
The charges against the others are:
– Bin Attash, a Yemeni, allegedly ran an Al Qaeda training camp in Logar, Afghanistan, where two of the 19 hijackers were trained. Bin Attash is believed to have been bin Laden’s bodyguard. Authorities say bin Laden selected him as a hijacker, but he was prevented from participating when he was briefly detained in Yemen in early 2001.
– Binalshibh, a Yemeni, allegedly helped find flight schools for the hijackers, helped them enter the United States and assisted with financing the operation. He allegedly was selected to be a hijacker and made a “martyr video” in preparation for the operation, but was unable to get a U.S. visa. He also is believed to be a lead operative for a foiled plot to crash aircraft into London’s Heathrow Airport.
– Ali allegedly helped nine of the hijackers travel to the United States and sent them $120,000 for expenses and flight training. He is believed to have served as a key lieutenant to Mohammed in Pakistan. He was born in Pakistan and raised in Kuwait.
– Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, a Saudi, allegedly helped the hijackers with money, western clothing, traveler’s checks and credit cards. Al-Hawsawi testified in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, saying he had seen Moussaoui at an al-Qaida guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in early 2001, but was never introduced to him or conducted operations with him.
Is it true TPP are stealing money from TPE?
Or…….is TPE stealing from TPP??? Either way, none of you can be trusted!!!
I am LMFAO! I seem to recall some douchebag on here accusing us “teabaggers” of killing this worthless pathetic turd named Sparkman because he was found hung with “FED” written on him. Now the cops have proof it was a set up and he killed himself. IN YOUR FACE!!!! Die libtards. Just die.
I’m LMFAO and I seem to recall some douchbags calling us flat earthers because we said global warming was a hoax and al gore is a liar. Turns out they all lied and tried to destroy evidence of their manipulation of facts. Die libtards and all your f’n political correctness. Just die a horrible slow agonizing death or call the ACLU to protect your sorry asses.
Agreed. They should just kill themselves and get it over with before the humiliation and public disgrace sets in. And they should take El Presidente Obama with them.
“Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.”
hmmmm…I ordered/payed for this last September. still havent recieved…oh my.
Gal…..hello?
Beater?…are you there?
Jethro?
Shiner?
Post American?
We TROUNCED YOU and your Post American bleeding heart progressive entitlementistic gimme gimme ideas up here in Mass. with a resounding Brown Victory.
Prying the seat from your machine.
Where’d you all go? Hiding under the apron strings of momma? BO has forsaken you.
We told you we are here to stay and now we are coming for you and your leaders…………….
Aporn, whatta joke!