2010 Taxpayer Protest in Washington, DC
Many of you have asked whether FreedomWorks would be hosting another Taxpayer March on Washington in 2010. We will definitely be holding another event the weekend of 9-12-10, but we haven’t decided exactly what that event will be. We are looking at our options, as well as figuring out what other events will be going on during that time.
We are still fighting the Obamacare battle and preparing for battles in state legislatures next year. But look for an announcement in a few months about our plans for 2010!
In the meantime, if you’d like to make travel reservations for the weekend of 9-12-2010, please contact our travel agent, Joanne Griffing at (401)-822-7777 or joannegriffing@cox.net.
Keep involved in the fight by visiting www.freedomworks.org and check back here in a couple of months for an update about our plans for 9-12-2010.
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We are already organizing buses to meet Glenn Beck at the foot of Abraham Lincon’s Memmorial on 8/28/ 2010. Alot of us will not be able to do both. Is there anyway to have both at the same time period?
I’ve already made reservations for 8/28 because I never got a response from FreedomWorks as to the date for the 9/12 event for 2010. As you know, that was Glenn Beck’s date. To date, no response (and I am getting ticked off) from FreedomWorks. I will not attend if I cannot get a good hotel room. I train in from NY and last year I was three blocks from Union Sta and two blocks to the Capitol. It doesn’t get any better than that. I’ve got people coming in from Michigan and they have also made reservations for the August date.
What the devil is going on? Please let me know if you hear anything.
Hi,
Please go to http://www.teapartyplanning.com for available rooms for the March in September/2010.
You can shoot me an email or call, 1-888-512-2558.
Thanks.
Smiles,
Joanne Griffing
We were in DC on 9/12 for the March on Washington. Unfortunately, we can’t make both the 2010 March in September and the Beck’s event in August. Will opt for August. Beck continues to keep the American people informed about the corruption and deceit in Congress and the Administration and he continues to educate us about the Progressive movement and their objectives, and about our Constitution and the founding principles of this nation. Wish you would consolidate the events – we need to be united, especially with the looming elections.
This is sad. I can’t believe these dates were not coordinated.
I am sending out an email NOW to get people reved up and get them to inviting people to Washington. I believe a goal of 3-5 million people is attainable if we all agree on the same date. If we fragment the crowd, that is how the media will report it, “Conservatives are fragmented” “Unable to determine their destiny” etc. Or, they will just ignore two smaller crowds of a million each. This needs to be unified!
FreedomWorks response is completely lackluster. Check back “in a few months” does not inspire.
I am going to provide my friends with the 8/28 Glenn Beck date.
See you in August!
Hope all 75 bazillion of you come to Washington, just like THE BIGGEST MARCH EVER on 9/12!
That way, it will be easier for we liberal fascist pussy tyrants to round you up and send you off to the work camps!
it would be interesting to see those kinda folks try.
Oh, YOU WILL GO TO THE WORK CAMP WHEN YOU ARE TOLD, JEAN!
I have asked repeatedly that the day of the rally not be on 9/11 which would over shadow the meaning of that day and also asked that someone coordinate the Beck rally and this together in the same weekend. There should be no protesting on 9/11.
My group wanted to take part again as last year was awesome but we will not march on 9/11. That will also give the media something else to bash the 9-12 group about so as to muddle up the real meaning of what we are trying to convey.
Out of all the weekends in the year why would this Saturday (9/11) be chosen other than it is closest to 9/12 – who is thinking this through?? We ask again that it not be held on that day.
The perfect Saturday – millions in DC in August marching down Pennsylvania in DC to the Capitol for a rally and then marching down the mall to the Lincoln Memorial to hear Glenn Beck speak – that would be a day Washington never forgot! Please Freedom Works – coordinate that!!!!! We will choose August with Beck to stay away from 9/11 and this is going to splinter the numbers that we need to make a difference!
Think this through people!!
I agree that this and Glenn Beck’s should be at the same time, or at least a day apart. I really want to attend both.
The Fundamental Transformation of America
When Obama wrote a book and said he was mentored as a youth by Frank, (Frank
Marshall Davis) an avowed Communist, people said it didn’t matter.
When it was discovered that his grandparents, were strong socialist, sent
Obama’s mother to a socialist school, introduced Frank Marshall Davis to
young Obama, people said it didn’t matter.
When people found out that he was enrolled as a Muslim child in school and
his father and stepfather were both Muslims, people said it didn’t matter.
When he wrote in another book he authored ³I will stand with them (Muslims)
should the political winds shift in an ugly direction²… people said it
didn’t matter.
When he admittedly, in his book, said he chose Marxist friends and professors
in college, people said it didn’t matter.
When he traveled to Pakistan , after college on an unknown national passport,
people said it didn’t matter.
When he sought the endorsement of the Marxist party in 1996 as he ran for the
Illinois Senate, people said it doesn’t matter.
When he sat in a Chicago Church for twenty years and listened to a preacher
spew hatred for America and preach black liberation theology, people said it
didn’t matter.
When an independent Washington organization, that tracks senate voting
records, gave him the distinctive title as the “most liberal senator”, people
said it didn’t matter.
When the Palestinians in Gaza , set up a fund raising telethon to raise money
for his election campaign, people said it didn’t matter.
When his voting record supported gun control, people said it didn’t matter.
When he refused to disclose who donated money to his election campaign, as
other candidates had done, people said it didn’t matter.
When he received endorsements from people like Louis Farrakhan and Mummar
Kadaffi and Hugo Chavez, people said it didn’t matter.
When it was pointed out that he was a total newcomer and had absolutely no
experience at anything except community organizing, people said it didn’t
matter.
When he chose friends and acquaintances such as Bill Ayers and Bernadine
Dohrn who were revolutionary radicals, people said it didn’t matter.
When his voting record in the Illinois senate and in the U.S. Senate came
into question, people said it didn’t matter.
When he refused to wear a flag lapel pin and did so only after a public
outcry, people said it didn’t matter.
When people started treating him as a Messiah and children in schools were
taught to sing his praises, people said it didn’t matter.
When he stood with his hands over his groin area for the playing of the
National Anthem and Pledge of Allegiance during his campaign, people said it
didn’t matter.
When he surrounded himself in the White House with advisors who were pro-gun
control, pro-abortion, pro-homosexual marriage and wanting to curtail freedom
of speech to silence the opposition… people said it didn’t matter.
When he aired his views on abortion, homosexuality and a host of other
issues, people said it didn’t matter.
When he said he favors sex education in Kindergarten, including homosexual
indoctrination, people said it didn’t matter.
When his background was either scrubbed or hidden and nothing could be found
about him, people said it didn’t matter.
When the place of his birth was called into question, and he refused to
produce a birth certificate, people said it didn’t matter.
When he had an association in Chicago with Tony Rezco, a man of poor
character, who is now in prison and had helped Obama to a sweet deal on the
purchase of his home, people said it didn’t matter.
When it became known that George Soros, a multi-billionaire Marxist, spent a
ton of money to get him elected, people said it didn’t matter.
When he started appointing “czars” (a communist term) that were radicals,
revolutionaries, and even avowed Marxist/Communists, people said it didn’t
matter.
When he said “My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of
the world, I hope you will join with me as we try to change it”…..people
said it didn’t matter.
When he stood before the nation and told us that his intentions were to
“fundamentally transform this nation” into something else, people said it
didn’t matter.
When it became known that he had trained ACORN workers in Chicago and served
as an attorney for ACORN, people said it didn’t matter.
When he appointed cabinet members and several advisors who were tax cheats
and socialists, people said it didn’t matter.
When he appointed a science czar, John Holdren, who believes in forced
abortions, mass sterilizations and seizing babies from teen mothers, people
said it didn’t matter.
When he appointed Cass Sunstein as regulatory czar who believes in “Explicit
Consent”, harvesting human organs without family consent, and to allow
animals to be represented in court, while banning all hunting, people said it
didn’t matter.
When he appointed Kevin Jennings, a homosexual, and organizer of a group
called gay, lesbian, straight, Education network, as safe school czar and it
became known that he had a history of bad advice to teenagers, people said it
didn’t matter.
When he appointed Mark Lloyd as diversity czar and he believed in curtailing
free speech, taking from one and giving to another to spread the wealth and
admires Hugo Chavez, people said it didn’t matter.
When Valerie Jarrett was selected as Obama’s senior White House advisor and
she is an avowed Socialist, people said it didn’t matter.
When Anita Dunn, White House Communications director said Mao Tse Tung was
her favorite philosopher and the person she turned to most for inspiration,
people said it didn’t matter.
When he appointed Carol Browner as global warming czar, and she is a well
known socialist working on Cap and trade as the nations largest tax, people
said it doesn’t matter.
When he appointed Van Jones, an ex-con and avowed Communist as green energy
czar, who since had to resign when this was made known, people said it didn’t
matter.
When Tom Daschle, Obama’s pick for health and human services secretary could
not be confirmed, because he was a tax cheat, people said it didn’t matter.
When as president of the United States , he bowed to the King of Saudi
Arabia, people said it didn’t matter.
When he traveled around the world criticizing America and never once talking
of her greatness, people said it didn’t matter.
When his actions concerning the middle-east seemed to support the
Palestinians over Israel , our long time friend and ally, people said it
doesn’t matter.
When he took American tax dollars to re-settle thousands of Palestinians from
Gaza to the United States , people said it doesn’t matter.
When he upset the Europeans by removing plans for a missile defense system
against the Russians, people said it doesn’t matter.
When he played politics in Afghanistan by not sending troops the Field
Commanders said we had to have to win, people said it didn’t matter.
When he started spending us into a debt that was so big we could not pay it
off, people said it didn’t matter.
When he took a huge spending bill under the guise of stimulus and used it to
pay off organizations, unions and individuals that got him elected, people
said it didn’t matter.
When he took over insurance companies, car companies, banks, etc. people said
it didn’t matter.
When he took away student loans from the banks and put it through the
government, people said it didn’t matter.
When he designed plans to take over the health care system and put it under
government control, people said it didn’t matter.
When he set into motion a plan to take over the control of all energy in the
United States through “Cap and Trade”, people said it didn’t matter.
When he finally completed his transformation of America into a Socialist
State , people finally woke up……… but it was too late.
Any one of these things, in and of themselves does not really matter.
But…. when you add them up one by one you get a phenomenal score that
points to the fact that our Obama is determined to make America over into a
Marxist/Socialist society. All of the items in the preceding paragraphs have
already occurred or are a work in progress. All can be documented very
easily. Before you disavow this, do an internet search. The last paragraph
alone is not yet cast in stone. You and I will write that paragraph. Will
it read as above or will it be a more happy ending for most of America ?
Personally, I like happy endings.
If you are an Obama Supporter, please do not be angry with me because I think
the President of your choice is a Socialist, but there are too many facts
supporting this. If you seek the truth, you will be richer for it. Don’t
just belittle the opposition. Search for the truth. I did. Democrats,
Republicans, Independents, Constitutionalist, Libertarians and what have
you…. we all need to pull together. We all must pull together or watch the
demise of a society that we all love and cherish. If you are a religious
person, pray for our nation.
Never before in the history of America have we been confronted with problems
so huge that the very existence of our country is in jeopardy. Don’t rely on
most television news and what you read in the newspapers for the truth.
Search the internet. Yes, there is a lot of bad information, lies and
distortions there too but you are smart enough to spot the fallacies.
Newspapers are a dying breed. They are currently seeking a bailout from the
government. Do you really think they are about to print the truth? Obama
praises all the television news networks except Fox who he has waged war
against. There must be a reason. He does not call them down on any
specifics, just a general battle against them. If they lie, he should call
them out on it but he doesn’t. Please, find the truth, it will set you free.
Our biggest enemy is not China , Russia , Iran ; no, our biggest enemy is a
contingent of politicians in Washington DC .
For thoses who would like a better understanding of these disturbed folks:
The Psychology of the Right-Wing’s Anti-Government ‘Death-Panel’ Delusions
By Michael Bader, AlterNet
Posted on September 5, 2009, Printed on September 20, 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.
Alternate reality is really a bummer for you but, no matter how you slice it, your messiah is drowning in his own stupitity and each day more and more people are opening their eyes and seeing what he is trying to do to this country. So go have some wet dreams with this idiot Bader because death panels are a reality with current bill in Senate.
“the government provides a new source for enemies”.
Wake up, Fool. The Government IS THE ENEMY!!!!!!!!!
why do moonbat libs want the gov’t to control their lives? Over the weekend, I thought of an
amazing idea about what we can do with all the stupid libs in this great nation… feed them to
the homeless; make pet food with any excess, and there will be excess, cause this country is
lousy with lib idiots.
But the government SHOULD be able to tell people who they can and can’t marry, or whether they give birth, right?
Hello Racist…
It’s time for you to be honest. You’re gay and you really don’t want to marry anyone. You really don’t care about it at all. You only want to stick it to the church.
You are right about the government. It should not be involved at all with the issue of marriage. The mistake was made many years ago when our laws were tied to marriage. Marriage is not a government thing. It’s a God thing. The law tied itself to that. Trust me on this one. Marriage came first and the church makes the rules.
I would not have a problem at all with the separation of marriage and government.
I would not have a problem at all with the separation of birth and government.
I don’t care who you sleep with. You want to murder your kids… I won’t stop you. But stop screwing with the church. They have a right to disagree with you.
No nimrod, read and learn…
Marriage History
Most ancient societies needed a secure environment for the perpetuation of the species,a system of rules to handle the granting of property rights, and the protection of bloodlines. The institution of marriage handled these needs. For instance, ancient Hebrew law required a man to become the husband of a deceased brother’s widow.
Some varieties of marriage are
•polygamy
•polygyny
•polyandry
•endogamy
•exogamy
•common law marriage
•monogamy
Different periods of time and different cultures have very different histories when it comes to women. Ancient Egypt, in theory, gave women equal rights, but it wasn’t always practiced. Medieval women faced dual responsibilities to religion and marriage.
Throughout history, and even today, families arranged marriages for couples. The people involved didn’t and don’t have much to say about the decision. Most couples didn’t marry because they were in love but for economic liasons.
Some marriages were by proxy, some involved a dowry (bride’s family giving money or presents to the groom or his family), some required a bride price (the groom or his family giving money or a present to the bride’s family), few had any sort of courtship or dating, but most had traditions.
One nearly universal tradition is that of the engagement ring. This custom can be dated back to the ancient Romans. It is believed that the roundness of the ring represents eternity. Therefore, the wearing of wedding rings symbolizes a union that is to last forever. It was once thought that a vein or nerve ran directly from the “ring” finger of the left hand to the heart.
The notion of marriage as a sacrament and not just a contract can be traced St. Paul who compared the relationship of a husband and wife to that of Christ and his church (Eph. v, 23-32).
Joseph Campbell, in the Power of Myth, mentions that the Twelfth century troubadours were the first ones who thought of courtly love in the same way we do now. The whole notion of romance apparently didn’t exist until medieval times, and the troubadours.
The statement of Pope Nicholas I in which he declared in 866, “If the consent be lacking in a marriage, all other celebrations, even should the union be consummated, are rendered void”, shows the importance of a couple’s consent to marriage. It has remained an important part of church teaching through the years.
There appeared to be many marriages taking place without witness or ceremony in the 1500’s. The Council of Trent was so disturbed by this, that they decreed in 1563 that marriages should be celebrated in the presence of a priest and at least two witnesses. Marriage took on a new role of saving men and women from being sinful, and of procreation. Love wasn’t a necessary ingredient for marriage during this era.
Years later, the Puritans viewed marriage as a very blessed relationship that gave marital partners an opportunity to not only love, but also to forgive.
Many people hold the view that regardless of how people enter into matrimony, marriage is a bond between two people that involves responsibility and legalities, as well as commitment and challenge. That concept of marriage hasn’t changed through the ages.
Hey, lets make stuff up!
My church says marriage has always been a religious institution so without any proof whatsoever I’ll claim that too. Who needs facts when you have the word of some child molesting priest?
Thank you for proving my point.
Marriage exsisted before the laws that are tied to it.
You go to a church that has a child molesting priest?
I’m agnostic myself but I can now understand your reason for wanting to stick it to the church. Was it your child that was molested? Oh I forgot that you murdered your children so that can’t be it. Yes I remember… they wouldn’t let you get married.
Your wrong about the phobia part… I’m not afraid of you in the slightest.
No, it proves that marriage was a social institution before it was co-opted by religion.
Thanks for proving what an uneducated idiot you are (not that you don’t do that with every post). Homophobia covers a range of negative attitudes toward homosexuals… antipathy, contempt, prejudice, aversion, and (irrational) fear.
Shine a Light…Go drink your Koolaid somewhere else! I too am planning on going to the Glenn Beck rally on the Lincoln Memorial steps …can we please put the two together…I won’t be able to attend both…I was at the March in Sept 09
Facebook User, you are a total nut. You are also typical of the Teabaggers who believe everything Faux News tells them to believe without question.
It’s time for you to finally accept the fact that we have a Black President. Ranting and raving about it just makes you and others of your ilk look more ridiculous than you already do.
Yes, there is a lot of bad information, lies and
distortions there too but you are smart enough to spot the fallacies.
Indeed I am. Too bad you Teabaggers aren’t.
You couldn’t find a lie or distortion if it reached out and twisted your tit. Turn on your TV and listen to your president, watch his mouth move and listen to the lies.
Thank you for this excellent and true litany of all the evidence that Barack “Barry Soetoro” Obama is the Socialist/Marxist wolf in wolf’s clothing – too many Americans were too blind or stupid to see what was in front of them.
We have allowed our citizenry to become so dumbed-down that they believe any blurb from the formerly Main Stream Media (I believe Fox News single-handedly will relegate them to second-string), or internet blog by a brainwashed left-wing advocate who can’t see the writing on the wall.
This November will be the pivotal point in our history – either enough of our patriotic, Constitution-loving fellow Americans will stand up and be counted, or we are done for.
I hope you don’t mind that I am copying your list, to send to everyone I know – they will believe or not, but how can you not in the face of the TRUTH? God bless America.
I too have been waiting to hear what might be planned for 9-12; I guess I will plan for 8-28 instead.
I’m not sure if you’re crazy, or just fucking stupid.
On second thought, it’s the second one.
Nice leaders you douchebaggers have:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/tea-party-leader-arrested-rape
Join the war. Click my name.
Don’t be armchair pussies – actually get out there and make a difference. Your online whining just makes you look more pathetic than the POTUS. Forget marches. You know what must be done to get the medias attention. Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty and your nose bloodied. True patriots face their fears for the good of the nation.
Say pussy some more! Because that’s really persuasive!
Agreed. Fuck the Glenn Beck-ites. It’s time for a real fight, instead of praying and groveling with some overpaid media puppet.
Excuse me but it was Glenn Beck that inspired this movement and the 9-12 project. He was the one who gave it a name and inspired the tea party movement. What an ignorant thing to say,
Actually it was Ron Paul who started the tea party movement.
I, too, am concerned about the Glenn Beck event on Aug 28 diminishing the size of both events. Beck’s event is on the anniversary of MLK’s speech on the Mall.
I really think something should be done to combine BOTH.
I’m going to to have a hard time deciding. Beck’s event is on a Saturday and 912 is on a Sunday.
We won’t have a hard time at all deciding which to attend.
Glenn Beck started all of this.
After the 2008 election, all of us conservatives were totally lost and we felt we had nowhere to turn. We were alone and abandoned by the leaders we trusted to keep us from the claws of liberal thieves. I was terrified because I knew what would soon happen… and no one could stop it.
I never heard of Glenn until he came to Fox News. He alone brought us together with the 9-12 Project. He gave us hope in the darkest of times. He organized us into a nationwide Tax Day Tea Party to send a shot across the bow of the Obama juggernaught. That message was that the true American spirit is not dead. That we will see our America return to it’s Constitutional roots and once again become the shining city on the hill.
When this fight is over and the dust clears… we will have our America once again. Glenn came just in time. We almost lost it all. It’s not over yet but we are in much better shape now than we would have been if he was not there to show us the way back. It’s not that we didn’t know what was right… we just didn’t know what we could do about it.
I have never protested anything in my life. I always knew that the American people would always make things right no matter what happened. We never expected them to be able to roll out the greatest deceiver… I mean liar… of all time. The foundation of his house of lies is slowly coming apart and Glenn is the one chipping at it daily. With our help… It’s all gonna crash and we will have to pry his fingernails out of the front door of the White House after he is ejected from office.
We have never come so close to losing our America. I hope we save her in time. When we do I believe Glenn Beck will have schools, airports, and libraries named after him. He should receive the Medal of Freedom for what he has done. He is saving our country.
This is the time for FreedomWorks to let Glenn lead this one.
My wife and I will be with Glenn Beck 8/28/10. Soon after that… we will vote Harry Reid out of office.
Hate to tell you, DC, but your wife was already with Glenn Beck.
Is that the best you can do?
Typical response from a liberal. Can’t win the debate… so attack personally.
Saul Alinsky must not have ever covered this part but you are showing just how frightened you are. My rules come from better men than him, you, or anyone you follow.
You could learn something from one of my heroes… General George S. Patton.
Oh I’m sorry, you wouldn’t know who he was. They don’t teach our children real American history anymore. Go ahead and Google him if you have the guts to learn something.
You will learn… COWARDS NEVER WIN.
Isn’t this just like the left wing pigs, who can’t believe that we won’t stand aside and let crass, crude brainless Marxist followers ruin our country – all they have left to use is insult and name-calling. HaHaHa – you’re so funny, MoreRacismPlease – and I guess you got more, from your leader Harry Reid. HaHaHa…but don’t worry, we know you don’t have the brainpower to keep up with what’s really going on, so just keep hurling the insults, and we will keep saving the country for you.
Thank God you still have the freedom of speech (for right now), so you can say whatever tripe passes from your little brain to your big mouth.
We came close to losing America when Bushit was installed as President by the Supreme Court. You worship Glenn Beck, the liar and alcoholic? No wonder you people lost the election.
You are a year late to the party Gracie girl we are long past calling names about Glenn Beck and thinking this is about a black president. Get up to speed or go home and play with your dolls.
Glenn Becck is the last American hero Grace. He’s the only one who dares spread the rumors on TV that others are afraid to even blog about for fear fof sounding nuts. It takes balls the size of Indiana to cry on camera like that.
He’s not a liar, and he is an alcoholic, but one thing about Glenn Beck – he recognized the behavior that was destroying his life, and he changed his life. You, on the other hand, I have little hope for – keep on believing the “wisdom” of the leftists, and you will be “left” with nothing.
READ THE BILL!
Agree 100%, he founded this movement and we will be there to support him as well. I wish Freedom Works would change their date.
We will be with you and many others. Glad to see another organization making the trip to stand with Glenn Beck and that is mom4america.ning. Great news that Michelle Malkin will be key note speaker at their banquet and breakfast 28th and 29th. This should be an awesome event and can they hear us now?
Wow! Glenn Beck AND Michelle Malkin?!?!?!?!?!
I think I just shit myself! God Bless America. Or most of it, at least. Except the commies. I mean the fascists.
I remember the excitement and euphoria of attending the March on Washington and the let down of the medias marginalizing soon after. I know many of us want the next march to be so large that we cannot be ignored. Two events two weeks apart are confusing, devises and would likely result in a muted outcome. I hope all of these patriotic organizations can rally behind one combined weekend event. I believe the weekend of August 28th at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial would be perfect setting to reclaim our freedom.
Duh!
I knew all along your puny march was going to be a big flop. Less than five months later, we’re going to have health care reform.
Meanwhile, you’re going to get all worked up about another puny march that will result in nothing.
And at the same time, you will start hypocritically taking advantage of the health care reform that will pass next year.
You’re welcome. I’ll let Obama know you’re grateful.
I won’t be using the system – I will be in jail because I refused to buy into the Socialist single-payer plan. This is America, and I will choose what I buy and when.
Oh by the way, you don’t have to let Obama know how grateful we are – we will pass along our “thanks” in November, and again in 2012.
I would love to see the puny march you leftists might put together – the only time you get off your couch is to get your unemployment check out of the mailbox.
Why don’t you organize one, Mr. Big Shot? Obama would be ever so grateful to you.
READ THE BILL!
I do not see that there has been any chang in the dates of Glenn’s party and the 9/12 party. I want to be involved in both but can’t. We alone just in my small town are bringing at least 3 buses already. We need to show our force at one time. I hope we can find a way to combine both.
Yeah! Great! Everyone in the United States will be there. No, wait! Everyone in the world! And more!
Except you, loser!
Cindy, it would be nice if everyone could merge their events but maybe splitting them will be better to shine a light on both events as we head into the mid term elections. From the size of Code Red Rally this past week, more and more are waking up to the fact that this administration is out of control. Heck, even the Democrats are jumping from the sinking ship and becoming Independents. The trolls love this site so try to ignore them.
Americans, now is the time to revolt. We must physically remove our Presidency and Congress, all those that are violating the US Constitution that they deceivingly swore to uphold. A minimum of five years in jail without any compensation, and they must work after jail time and not be allowed to hold any government job. Now is the time to make sure every elected candidate will uphold the US Constitution. This our US Constitution is a Conservative, Capitalist, and more perfect way to govern our society. We must have no tolerance for liberalism which is the foundation of Socialism, Communism, and dictatorship. Let us stop the destruction of America, and the diminishing of our liberties and freedoms.
If anyone knows of a TRUE rebel faction, devoid of Glenn Beck, O’reilly, and anyone at Fox News, please drop me an email. Of course, I realize that extreme measures require absolute secrecy, and now that the internet is being policed by the Pelosi-whore, it will be very hard to communicate. Drop me a line anyway.
It’s a very Barry Christmas in the White House! Deck the Halls with your favorite communist dictator ornament, or how about a she-male! Chicks with dicks are all the rage in Obamaland!!! They are festive too! Hm, this cost a pretty penny, to hire such a faggy designer. Wonder where they got the money from?….US!!
http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/22/transvestites-mao-and-obama-decorate-white-house-christmas-tree/
>Can we wait until August or September? I am ready to go now! It’s Christmas Eve . What better gift would be greater for The United States as to let “THEM” know we’re paying attention to all the wrong moves.
You guys talking tough are just the cutest! It’s as if right wingers were not cowards and actually backed up their tough talk. How cute! I wish I had my camera so I can take a picture. It is so adorable!
If you had a camera you could have come to DC on 9/12 – and you could have taken a million pictures, or a picture of a million. But I guess Obama hasn’t started handing out free cameras yet…maybe by August or September you’ll be in business.
Keep talking that, and it’s OFF TO THE WORK CAMP WITH YOU, BELINDA!
I will be attending the APRIL tax day protest in DC, like the one that started a lot of this movement! I will go to as MANY of these events as I possibly can. I know they WISH we would just go away quietly, but it’s not going to happen. They can DENY our existence all they want, but they won’t take our country without a fight.
I wish we could UNITE as one big group. We would have the numbers to beat them at their own game.. (Organizing for America and all of its affiliates- bunch of brainwashed morons)
On the contrary, I don’t want you to go away. Keep up with your teabagging antics. I heartily encourage it. It makes our job easier because all we have to do is point at you idiots. After your march to end all marches that brought out a puny 30,000, health care reform is now inches away from reality. The more you act, the easier it will be to pass our agenda.
You people just don’t get it. You people are on the wrong side of history. You guys really think you’re gonna turn back the clock.
But keep it up. I love reading about your impotence and dejection. I go to several right wing sites to get my daily dose of anger, rage, and tough talk that will never EVER be backed up. It brings a smile to my face.
I agree. Watching these brainwashed morons kiss the asses of Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, and the extremely huge ass of Rush Limbaugh is hilarious. Their idols are only interested in making millions from exploiting their gullibility and ignorance. It’s not unlike the propaganda machine that Hitler ran in the 1930s/early 1940s.
I think you are referring to the Obama-Hitler propaganda machine – you must be getting confused – something in the Kool-Aid, maybe?
Speaking of this. I stumbled onto a newish blog that is basically the “Obama-Hitler Propaganda Mahcine” and is taking on The Tea Party crew directly.
It seems that they only have nodding yes-men and aren’t being challeneged for their lies.
If anyone wants to go help me set them straight with the facts, you can click on my name and see the den of evil for yourselves.
I fear that if they go unchallenged, there is less chance of saving some innocent persons soul who might read it and take it as truth if there are no counter arguments.
Just a thought, but if we don’t take on the source of the mass public brainwashing problem (liberal media) then we are just treating the symptoms and not adminitering the cure.
The conservative agenda is the only thing that will save our country from the free fall teh liberals have gotten us into.
Read todays paper much?
MUWAHAHAHA!!!
I will also be traveling with a group to meet Glenn Beck in August. I believe the event will be larger than the march in 2009. Many people who could not travel this past year are making plans to take vacation days to attend in August 2010.
We already have plane tickets for the Aug 28 event. We also hope to get enough folks to join us that we can charter a “Freedom Plane” direct from Alaska to DC.
Does your skin craw when you see Nancy Pelosi? Does Keith Obermann talking make you throw up in your mouth a little? Does Rahm Emanuel just plain give you the creeps? There is good reason for your repulsion. They are evil!
When looking it up in the dictionary, it becomes clear that liberals not only align nicely with evil’s definition, but they seem to personify the very essence of it it’s existence. The repulsion you feel is a self-defense mechanism no different than the gag reflex when encountering something rotten, or the instinct to jump back when you see a snake in the grass. The good that lives within your person is trying to protect you from these malefic villains before they can poison your mind.
Here is how Webster defines the word.
1 a : morally reprehensible : sinful, wicked b : arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct
2 a archaic : inferior b : causing discomfort or repulsion : offensive c : disagreeable
3 a : causing harm : pernicious b : marked by misfortune : unlucky
“Morally reprehensible” is Webster’s first attempt at helping us understand what is meant when the word evil is used. And you certainly don’t have to hang out long in liberal chat rooms or progressive websites to find examples of it. In fact I challenge you to join a site that proudly defines itself as progressive and read through the postings and comments and not come face to face with pure evil. You will find graphically depicted sexual spoofs that play out morbid fantasies meant to demean anyone of faith. You will witness deviants, with genocidal thoughts dream of controlling population-using infanticide. Racist scheming on nefarious social programs meant to keep blacks shackled in an economically dependent State sanctioned form of slavery. Homosexuals frequenting these sites letting down the “ hapless, lovable, and witty gay person on a sitcom” persona and letting their true lust for anything that society deems wrong run a muck. You will be astonished to find out that they actually delight in iniquity, they embrace the perverse, and they celebrate depravity!
These people are the worst kind of liars, because they have no boundaries, no God and no fear of sin. They can say and do anything, and I mean anything, with a clear conscience. Did you hear Obama when he said the that all negotiations on the health care bill would be out in the open, on C-Span, and then take congress behind closed doors to hash out their evil scheme? Do you think he feels bad about just outright lying to the American people, with the cameras recording everything? I know he doesn’t because lying means nothing to someone that is evil; it is as natural as breathing.
Evil hates anything good and that is the reason liberals hate America. It is as simple as that. Think about all of the good America has accomplished since it’s founding. It has stopped evil dictators, created wealth that has fed the hungry, invented life saving drugs, acted as a deterrent to evil regimes with evil intent, and has done it all in the name of Judeo-Christianity. In the evil liberal mind this beacon of good and tribute to God; we call America, cannot be tolerated. It must be changed, that is why they are called progressives.
I will leave with a few videos of liberals delighting in the perverse. Notice the joy they exude as they wallow in their degradation.
That twinkle in their eyes is the evil that is in them.
Open Lesbian And Obvious Pervert Rachel Maddow On Tea Bagging
Yes. Lesbians are terrible. Better she be a child-rapist. PRAISE YOUR LEADER:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/tea-party-leader-arrested-rape
Oh, and I forgot to say — Fuck you. Your belief in an imaginary superhero will have no impact on my life, or those of my children. You’re a disgusting piece of shit.
MoreRacismPlease: You are one sad, sorry SOB. Come to DC in Aug and spew your bullshite. You only have a pair when you are online.
The CIA has apparently known since November that a Nigerian terrorist was planning to blow up a plane on Christmas Day, but simply did nothing. His own father had apparently gone personally to the U.S. embassy several times to warn officials about his son’s al Qaida ties, but was repeatedly ignored.
This is the system that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said “worked.” It is reminiscent of “Mission Accomplished” (only, in that case, Bush made it abundantly clear that he was referring to the initial invasion rather than the war in general).
So let’s compare this week’s “man-made disaster” on American soil under Obama to the one that occurred in the opening months of Bush’s two terms…
Bush had just taken office after eight years of liberals tying the hands of the enforcement agencies and allowing al Qaida to attack us with impunity.
Despite the fact that:
he had already increased counter-terrorism funding by 27% and ordered a full-scale review of our military options against the Taliban (pages 202-203 of the 9/11 Commission Report),
Democrats had made it illegal to profile Islamic terrorists (which would have prevented 9/11),
he had far less warning than the Obama Administration–only a uselessly vague memo repeating the common knowledge that al Qaida wanted to attack somewhere in the U.S., at some time, in some way,
after three days, Obama finally decided to take a break from golfing long enough to briefly comment on this “isolated extremist”…at which point, he promptly returned to golfing,
…Bush was excoriated as having taken too many vacations and ignoring the terrorist threat. And when he responded by taking the fight to the enemy, liberals hysterically denounced Republicans as war-mongers (Democrats have gotten us into nearly every war we’ve been in for the last hundred years), blamed Islamic savagery on America for daring to fight back and insisted that it would never prevent attacks on American soil.
But then we went seven years without a single terrorist attack…until Obama took over, at which point we started getting attacked again, repeatedly.
Liberals who weren’t accusing Bush of staging 9/11 were hysterically denouncing him for using it to trample the non-existent constitutional rights of foreign terrorists (the Constitution only applies to U.S. citizens). He exposed hardened al Qaida operatives to college hazing rituals like water-boarding (which actually worked, unlike the Obama approach) and even locked them away in Gitmo–until liberals pressured him into releasing some of them, at which point they turned around and attacked us again.
Holy shit! You guys are still at it?? LOL!
I just wanted to come back to say, thanks for the support on health reform. If it wasn’t for your constant overblown misrepresentations and outright lies, people might have been less inclined to care enough to get involved. Keep up your “rules for radicals” or whatever it is that turns so many people against you. It’s done wonders. I especially like how your dear leader Glenn Beck has been caught red handed again and again as a raging hypocrite.
Love,
Foxy
No problem Foxy!
We haven’t debated in a while. Hope all is well with you.
My man Brown (any relation?) wins Kennedy’s seat.
Obamacare stopped…again.
Pelosi goes for another botox injection to prop up her smile.
Reid and Pelosi admit defeat today.
See what you went and made us do? You made us mad. Your not so Foxy after all?
You know just more of the normal slamming of the liberal agenda here in Mass. But this is after all the most Republican state in the country, right?
Stay tuned folks….much more to follow in the next several months,
How’s that Healthcare Bill working out for you Foxy? Loser
Somthing great was heard today about the leftist liberals and how they SIN
S– switch the subject
I– Ignore the facts and when those don’t make you back off they—
N– Name call
How true
Washington, DC
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released its 2009 list of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians.” The list, in alphabetical order, includes:
Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT): This marks two years in a row for Senator Dodd, who made the 2008 “Ten Most Corrupt” list for his corrupt relationship with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and for accepting preferential treatment and loan terms from Countrywide Financial, a scandal which still dogs him. In 2009, the scandals kept coming for the Connecticut Democrat. In 2009, Judicial Watch filed a Senate ethics complaint against Dodd for undervaluing a property he owns in Ireland on his Senate Financial Disclosure forms. Judicial Watch’s complaint forced Dodd to amend the forms. However, press reports suggest the property to this day remains undervalued. Judicial Watch also alleges in the complaint that Dodd obtained a sweetheart deal for the property in exchange for his assistance in obtaining a presidential pardon (during the Clinton administration) and other favors for a long-time friend and business associate. The false financial disclosure forms were part of the cover-up. Dodd remains the head the Senate Banking Committee.
Senator John Ensign (R-NV): A number of scandals popped up in 2009 involving public officials who conducted illicit affairs, and then attempted to cover them up with hush payments and favors, an obvious abuse of power. The year’s worst offender might just be Nevada Republican Senator John Ensign. Ensign admitted in June to an extramarital affair with the wife of one of his staff members, who then allegedly obtained special favors from the Nevada Republican in exchange for his silence. According to The New York Times: “The Justice Department and the Senate Ethics Committee are expected to conduct preliminary inquiries into whether Senator John Ensign violated federal law or ethics rules as part of an effort to conceal an affair with the wife of an aide…” The former staffer, Douglas Hampton, began to lobby Mr. Ensign’s office immediately upon leaving his congressional job, despite the fact that he was subject to a one-year lobbying ban. Ensign seems to have ignored the law and allowed Hampton lobbying access to his office as a payment for his silence about the affair. (These are potentially criminal offenses.) It looks as if Ensign misused his public office (and taxpayer resources) to cover up his sexual shenanigans.
Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA): Judicial Watch is investigating a $12 million TARP cash injection provided to the Boston-based OneUnited Bank at the urging of Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank. As reported in the January 22, 2009, edition of the Wall Street Journal, the Treasury Department indicated it would only provide funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending. Not only was OneUnited Bank in massive financial turmoil, but it was also “under attack from its regulators for allegations of poor lending practices and executive-pay abuses, including owning a Porsche for its executives’ use.” Rep. Frank admitted he spoke to a “federal regulator,” and Treasury granted the funds. (The bank continues to flounder despite Frank’s intervention for federal dollars.) Moreover, Judicial Watch uncovered documents in 2009 that showed that members of Congress for years were aware that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were playing fast and loose with accounting issues, risk assessment issues and executive compensation issues, even as liberals led by Rep. Frank continued to block attempts to rein in the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs). For example, during a hearing on September 10, 2003, before the House Committee on Financial Services considering a Bush administration proposal to further regulate Fannie and Freddie, Rep. Frank stated: “I want to begin by saying that I am glad to consider the legislation, but I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. That is, in my view, the two Government Sponsored Enterprises we are talking about here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not in a crisis. We have recently had an accounting problem with Freddie Mac that has led to people being dismissed, as appears to be appropriate. I do not think at this point there is a problem with a threat to the Treasury.” Frank received $42,350 in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between 1989 and 2008. Frank also engaged in a relationship with a Fannie Mae Executive while serving on the House Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner: In 2009, Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner admitted that he failed to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes from 2001-2004 on his lucrative salary at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an organization with 185 member countries that oversees the global financial system. (Did we mention Geithner now runs the IRS?) It wasn’t until President Obama tapped Geithner to head the Treasury Department that he paid back most of the money, although the IRS kindly waived the hefty penalties. In March 2009, Geithner also came under fire for his handling of the AIG bonus scandal, where the company used $165 million of its bailout funds to pay out executive bonuses, resulting in a massive public backlash. Of course as head of the New York Federal Reserve, Geithner helped craft the AIG deal in September 2008. However, when the AIG scandal broke, Geithner claimed he knew nothing of the bonuses until March 10, 2009. The timing is important. According to CNN: “Although Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told congressional leaders on Tuesday that he learned of AIG’s impending $160 million bonus payments to members of its troubled financial-products unit on March 10, sources tell TIME that the New York Federal Reserve informed Treasury staff that the payments were imminent on Feb. 28. That is ten days before Treasury staffers say they first learned ‘full details’ of the bonus plan, and three days before the [Obama] Administration launched a new $30 billion infusion of cash for AIG.” Throw in another embarrassing disclosure in 2009 that Geithner employed “household help” ineligible to work in the United States, and it becomes clear why the Treasury Secretary has earned a spot on the “Ten Most Corrupt Politicians in Washington” list.
Attorney General Eric Holder: Tim Geithner can be sure he won’t be hounded about his tax-dodging by his colleague Eric Holder, US Attorney General. Judicial Watch strongly opposed Holder because of his terrible ethics record, which includes: obstructing an FBI investigation of the theft of nuclear secrets from Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory; rejecting multiple requests for an independent counsel to investigate alleged fundraising abuses by then-Vice President Al Gore in the Clinton White House; undermining the criminal investigation of President Clinton by Kenneth Starr in the midst of the Lewinsky investigation; and planning the violent raid to seize then-six-year-old Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint in order to return him to Castro’s Cuba. Moreover, there is his soft record on terrorism. Holder bypassed Justice Department procedures to push through Bill Clinton’s scandalous presidential pardons and commutations, including for 16 members of FALN, a violent Puerto Rican terrorist group that orchestrated approximately 120 bombings in the United States, killing at least six people and permanently maiming dozens of others, including law enforcement officers. His record in the current administration is no better. As he did during the Clinton administration, Holder continues to ignore serious incidents of corruption that could impact his political bosses at the White House. For example, Holder has refused to investigate charges that the Obama political machine traded VIP access to the White House in exchange for campaign contributions – a scheme eerily similar to one hatched by Holder’s former boss, Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The Holder Justice Department also came under fire for dropping a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. On Election Day 2008, Black Panthers dressed in paramilitary garb threatened voters as they approached polling stations. Holder has also failed to initiate a comprehensive Justice investigation of the notorious organization ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which is closely tied to President Obama. There were allegedly more than 400,000 fraudulent ACORN voter registrations in the 2008 campaign. And then there were the journalist videos catching ACORN Housing workers advising undercover reporters on how to evade tax, immigration, and child prostitution laws. Holder’s controversial decisions on new rights for terrorists and his attacks on previous efforts to combat terrorism remind many of the fact that his former law firm has provided and continues to provide pro bono representation to terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Holder’s politicization of the Justice Department makes one long for the days of Alberto Gonzales.
Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)/ Senator Roland Burris (D-IL): One of the most serious scandals of 2009 involved a scheme by former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to sell President Obama’s then-vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. Two men caught smack dab in the middle of the scandal: Senator Roland Burris, who ultimately got the job, and Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, emissaries for Jesse Jackson Jr., named “Senate Candidate A” in the Blagojevich indictment, reportedly offered $1.5 million to Blagojevich during a fundraiser if he named Jackson Jr. to Obama’s seat. Three days later federal authorities arrested Blagojevich. Burris, for his part, apparently lied about his contacts with Blagojevich, who was arrested in December 2008 for trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat. According to Reuters: “Roland Burris came under fresh scrutiny…after disclosing he tried to raise money for the disgraced former Illinois governor who named him to the U.S. Senate seat once held by President Barack Obama…In the latest of those admissions, Burris said he looked into mounting a fundraiser for Rod Blagojevich — later charged with trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat — at the same time he was expressing interest to the then-governor’s aides about his desire to be appointed.” Burris changed his story five times regarding his contacts with Blagojevich prior to the Illinois governor appointing him to the U.S. Senate. Three of those changing explanations came under oath.
President Barack Obama: During his presidential campaign, President Obama promised to run an ethical and transparent administration. However, in his first year in office, the President has delivered corruption and secrecy, bringing Chicago-style political corruption to the White House. Consider just a few Obama administration “lowlights” from year one: Even before President Obama was sworn into office, he was interviewed by the FBI for a criminal investigation of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s scheme to sell the President’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder. (Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and slumlord Valerie Jarrett, both from Chicago, are also tangled up in the Blagojevich scandal.) Moreover, the Obama administration made the startling claim that the Privacy Act does not apply to the White House. The Obama White House believes it can violate the privacy rights of American citizens without any legal consequences or accountability. President Obama boldly proclaimed that “transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency,” but his administration is addicted to secrecy, stonewalling far too many of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act requests and is refusing to make public White House visitor logs as federal law requires. The Obama administration turned the National Endowment of the Arts (as well as the agency that runs the AmeriCorps program) into propaganda machines, using tax dollars to persuade “artists” to promote the Obama agenda. According to documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, the idea emerged as a direct result of the Obama campaign and enjoyed White House approval and participation. President Obama has installed a record number of “czars” in positions of power. Too many of these individuals are leftist radicals who answer to no one but the president. And too many of the czars are not subject to Senate confirmation (which raises serious constitutional questions). Under the President’s bailout schemes, the federal government continues to appropriate or control — through fiat and threats — large sectors of the private economy, prompting conservative columnist George Will to write: “The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.” Government-run healthcare and car companies, White House coercion, uninvestigated ACORN corruption, debasing his office to help Chicago cronies, attacks on conservative media and the private sector, unprecedented and dangerous new rights for terrorists, perks for campaign donors – this is Obama’s “ethics” record — and we haven’t even gotten through the first year of his presidency.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): At the heart of the corruption problem in Washington is a sense of entitlement. Politicians believe laws and rules (even the U.S. Constitution) apply to the rest of us but not to them. Case in point: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her excessive and boorish demands for military travel. Judicial Watch obtained documents from the Pentagon in 2008 that suggest Pelosi has been treating the Air Force like her own personal airline. These documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, include internal Pentagon email correspondence detailing attempts by Pentagon staff to accommodate Pelosi’s numerous requests for military escorts and military aircraft as well as the speaker’s 11th hour cancellations and changes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also came under fire in April 2009, when she claimed she was never briefed about the CIA’s use of the waterboarding technique during terrorism investigations. The CIA produced a report documenting a briefing with Pelosi on September 4, 2002, that suggests otherwise. Judicial Watch also obtained documents, including a CIA Inspector General report, which further confirmed that Congress was fully briefed on the enhanced interrogation techniques. Aside from her own personal transgressions, Nancy Pelosi has ignored serious incidents of corruption within her own party, including many of the individuals on this list. (See Rangel, Murtha, Jesse Jackson, Jr., etc.)
Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) and the rest of the PMA Seven: Rep. John Murtha made headlines in 2009 for all the wrong reasons. The Pennsylvania congressman is under federal investigation for his corrupt relationship with the now-defunct defense lobbyist PMA Group. PMA, founded by a former Murtha associate, has been the congressman’s largest campaign contributor. Since 2002, Murtha has raised $1.7 million from PMA and its clients. And what did PMA and its clients receive from Murtha in return for their generosity? Earmarks — tens of millions of dollars in earmarks. In fact, even with all of the attention surrounding his alleged influence peddling, Murtha kept at it. Following an FBI raid of PMA’s offices earlier in 2009, Murtha continued to seek congressional earmarks for PMA clients, while also hitting them up for campaign contributions. According to The Hill, in April, “Murtha reported receiving contributions from three former PMA clients for whom he requested earmarks in the pending appropriations bills.” When it comes to the PMA scandal, Murtha is not alone. As many as six other Members of Congress are currently under scrutiny according to The Washington Post. They include: Peter J. Visclosky (D-IN.), James P. Moran Jr. (D-VA), Norm Dicks (D-WA.), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), C.W. Bill Young (R-FL.) and Todd Tiahrt (R-KS.). Of course rather than investigate this serious scandal, according to Roll Call House Democrats circled the wagons, “cobbling together a defense to offer political cover to their rank and file.” The Washington Post also reported in 2009 that Murtha’s nephew received $4 million in Defense Department no-bid contracts: “Newly obtained documents…show Robert Murtha mentioning his influential family connection as leverage in his business dealings and holding unusual power with the military.”
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY): Rangel, the man in charge of writing tax policy for the entire country, has yet to adequately explain how he could possibly “forget” to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income he earned from his off-shore rental property. He also faces allegations that he improperly used his influence to maintain ownership of highly coveted rent-controlled apartments in Harlem, and misused his congressional office to fundraise for his private Rangel Center by preserving a tax loophole for an oil drilling company in exchange for funding. On top of all that, Rangel recently amended his financial disclosure reports, which doubled his reported wealth. (He somehow “forgot” about $1 million in assets.) And what did he do when the House Ethics Committee started looking into all of this? He apparently resorted to making “campaign contributions” to dig his way out of trouble. According to WCBS TV, a New York CBS affiliate: “The reigning member of Congress’ top tax committee is apparently ‘wrangling’ other politicos to get him out of his own financial and tax troubles…Since ethics probes began last year the 79-year-old congressman has given campaign donations to 119 members of Congress, including three of the five Democrats on the House Ethics Committee who are charged with investigating him.” Charlie Rangel should not be allowed to remain in Congress, let alone serve as Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and he knows it. That’s why he felt the need to disburse campaign contributions to Ethics Committee members and other congressional colleagues.
For thoses who would like a better understanding of these disturbed folks:
The Psychology of the Right-Wing’s Anti-Government ‘Death-Panel’ Delusions
By Michael Bader, AlterNet
Posted on September 5, 2009, Printed on September 20, 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.
Politically Correct
December 5, 2009 • 12:11 pm
Alternate reality is really a bummer for you but, no matter how you slice it, your messiah is drowning in his own stupitity and each day more and more people are opening their eyes and seeing what he is trying to do to this country. So go have some wet dreams with this idiot Bader because death panels are a reality with current bill in Senate.
How many time will you post this crap from Bader? Can’t find anything usefull to say anymore besides this crap and more lies.
This guy sums it up quite well and yes indeed we have a dummy in the White House.
By Alan Caruba on January 02nd, 2010
Obama’s Make-Believe Life
I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he’s led a kind of make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened because at some point early on somebody or some group took a look at this tall, good looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an exotic African/Muslim name and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his facile speaking skills could even put him in the White House.
In a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? “Dreams of My Father” was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The “Audacity of Hope” followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls himself a “communist with a small ‘c’” was the real author.
His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois legislature to the Senator from that state because he had the good fortune of having Mayor Daley’s formidable political machine at his disposal.
He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game plan that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital. How, many must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had ever even heard of him before?
He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black population, he oozed “cool” in a place where agriculture was the antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of volunteers drawn to a charisma that hid any real substance.
And then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select one of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And then John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female governor from the very distant state of Alaska. It was a ticket that was reminiscent of 1984’s Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and they went down to defeat.
The mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now over the man. The venom directed against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was extraordinary.
Now, nearly a full year into his first term, all of those gilded years leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be President. Left to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.
Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to “wish away” some terrible realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly Islam initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained a foothold in Spain.
The great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign “world tour” were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history and the reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad intentions.
Oddly and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk, has positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party’s hold on power in Congress because in the end it was never about the Party. It was always about his communist ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.
Obama is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police officer who arrested an “obstreperous” Harvard professor-friend, but would warn Americans against “jumping to conclusions” about a mass murderer at Fort Hood who shouted “Allah Akbar.” The absurdity of that was lost on no one. He has since compounded this by called the Christmas bomber “an isolated extremist” only to have to admit a day or two later that he was part of an al Qaeda plot.
He is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at Guantanamo even though those released were known to have returned to the battlefield against America. He could even instruct his Attorney General to afford the perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever even consider such an obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days before having anything to say about the perpetrator of yet another terrorist attack on Americans and then have to elaborate on his remarks the following day because his first statement was so lame.
The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.
Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and manufactured this pathetic individual’s life.
When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate, this man has spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most other documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been sequestered from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain hidden.
We laugh at the ventriloquist’s dummy, but what do you do when the dummy is President of the United States of America?
The conflict between the 8-28-10 and 9-12-10 events is a HUGE mistake – both events and, more importantly, the cause will be diminished if this issue is not resolved. Many who would support one big event will reconsider if the return on their investment of time, inconvenience and expense was to be diluted by competing events. Given Glenn Beck’s following and media resources, I will bet on his event if I must choose.
I’m an American living in Australia. I’m planning on traveling to the U.S. for the summer & would like to stay long enough to participate in the march if there is one. But I don’t want to stay around until Sept. 12 if it turns out there’s no event then & that the major event is actually on August 28. I have to book my flights by tomorrow. So should I take a punt just stay through Aug. 28 or should I stay longer? It means an extra 2 weeks of accommodation I have to pay for & it really would be helpful to know what the plans for a march are.
By all means try and make the 28th of August. It will be worth it, I’m sure.
http://www.youtube.com/v/HiyqvuTxaEs&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1%22%3E%3C/param%3E%3Cparam
Time to stand up and take a stand
Stick it yto that nigger in teh whitehouse! that was 3 minutes of pure awesome. I’m so sick of liberal nigger lovers trying to make all of us care about brownies and global warming
Keep up the good fight for the christian whites
America’s Mayor? More like Amnesia’s Mayor
It’s a new year, but conservative media figures are up to their old tricks. And that, of course, means politicizing terrorism.
You might remember that former White House spokeswoman Dana Perino was once forced to admit that she didn’t know anything about the Cuban missile crisis. More recently (last November), she conveniently forgot that 9-11 occurred while George W. Bush was president.
It’s no wonder why. For the right, terrorism is a political tool to be used against progressives, whom they work to portray as weak, vacillating, and incompetent on national security. That tendency has been on stark display since December 25, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, allegedly attempted to bomb a Northwest Airlines jet using explosives hidden under his clothes.
Since then, numerous conservatives both in and outside of the right-wing media have been hard at work rewriting history, blaming Bill Clinton and Barack Obama for any and all acts of terrorism committed against the United States, all while ignoring the presidency of Bush. It was Mary Matalin who claimed on CNN that Bush “inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.” Similarly, on January 3, the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Sherman Frederick wrote that “in the wake of fierce criticism, Obama now talks tough about keeping America safe. But in the two cases of domestic terrorism since 9/11 — both on Obama’s watch — red flags flew aplenty.”
Frederick’s argument was a perfect encapsulation of the willful amnesia of the right, which has chosen to ignore some or all of the six attempted (and in some tragic cases, successful) incidents of terrorism that occurred during Bush’s watch. Indeed, the conservative figure to do so most recently was none other than America’s Mayor himself, Rudy Giuliani, who on Friday took a page from Perino’s history book. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s Good Morning America. “We’ve had one under Obama.”
Unfortunately, statements such as these are just the tip of the iceberg. Conservatives have been pushing numerous falsehoods and distortions concerning terrorism and national security, among them: the idea that trying Abdulmutallab will endanger U.S. security (as Dick Morris and Sarah Palin claimed); that Obama was too slow (three days) to publicly respond to the Abdulmutallab attack (according to Karl Rove, who must have forgotten it took Bush more time to publicly respond to the attempted “shoe bomber” Richard Reid); and that racial profiling will enhance national security (Giuliani again and numerous Fox News personalities). As usual, the right-wing media have been in lockstep, as Fox’s Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Bill Kristol, among others, have all advanced similar fictions.
Indeed, the media have a crucial role to play in all of this, and since conservative outlets have no interest in delivering honest analysis of national security issues to the public, that responsibility falls to more respectable and responsible journalists. For that reason, Stephanopoulos’ failure to correct Giuliani’s statement on GMA was particularly disappointing. Much to Stephanopoulos’ credit, he quickly apologized for the error, whereas a spokesman for Giuliani offered only the excuse that he misspoke. Regardless, the public is counting on reporters of integrity to cut through the baseless accusations peddled by the right — especially on an issue as pivotal as this one.
MM
I think there should be a major march on Wahington before congress votes on healthcare. A march after the fact is like closing the barn door after the horse gets out. Once nationalized healthcare is established, it will be very hard to abolish. The next march on Wahington should be in the next few days.
Wow, the colors are bright and bold. I hear revolution looks good this time of year!
The ‘Devil’ Writes Pat Robertson A Letter
6:03 pm
January 15, 2010
By Frank James
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune published a letter from Satan to evangelist Pat Robertson, responding to his comment that Haiti’s persistent troubles, including the earthquake, are due to a pact the nation made with Mephistopheles.
Actually, it wasn’t Satan who wrote the letter but Lilly Coyle of Minneapolis writing in the persona of the hellish one.
I think she got it down pretty well. What say you?
Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action.
But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.
Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”?
If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll.
You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.
Best, Satan
LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS
Of course Satan is a deceiver, he fools anyone who makes a deal with him. Look at ObaMao the greatest, who lies and lies and lies and lies. No matter who sees it and calls him out about it, he continues to lie. It’s was so like him to attend a church yesterday but we can see through that too. When your eyes can see the evil it isn’t hard to see it in others.
Please update us on the date.. We need to keep it to one date since they are so close to each other. I would go to both if I could but thats not posable with my three part-time jobs (no thanks to Obama for any of them).
I hope this guy will speak!
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/tea-party-leader-arrested-rape
Up here in Mass. we dealt with you progressive post amerikan trolls.
While you squander your time here we make meaningful progress.
We will continue the fight till you see smoke rising up over the horizon.
You will then retreat like your leaders are doing now.
Your leaders have forsaken you.
Brown pries the seat from your liberal bastion Massachusetts.
Now lay down and take a couple tea bags like the submissive little things that you are……
Yes! Palin-Brown in ‘12! Or Palin and this guy:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/tea-party-leader-arrested-rape
Try this one on?
MoreFlailingPlease
Hey Racism!
What can Brown do for you?
You mean, like vote for more or less the exact same system for you Massholes that he’s now opposing for the rest of the country? Which is exactly what he did, of course.
Some might call that hypocrisy. But, you know, he does drive a pickup truck. So that makes him a man of the people. Enjoy him. You deserve it.
Oh, yeah. And make sure you contribute to the defense fund for this guy. Because he’s a Patriot, just like you:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/tea-party-leader-arrested-rape
The healthcare question is better left defined by STATE rights. Not sweeping federal regulation. This is what Brown stands for. You should know this?
I already pay into Mass’s state run healthcare system for now. I don’t like it and we are working against it. It is a sinking ship. But I flat-out refuse to pay for your healthcare in addition to it.
Don’t worry about us up here in MA. Racist. We have it figured out. I suggest you take the fight to your own state legislature……and leave the USofA and bill of rights the hell out of your personal progressive ambitions.
If you can’t do that you are worthless and weak.
Hey Mass M—Great Job and kuddos to the great State of MA
CONTRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!! YOU DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GO SCOTT BROWN°¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤ø¸GO!!º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°SCOTT BROWN¨¨°º¤ø GO SCOTT BROWN ø¤º°¨¨¨°º¤ø ¸„øGO SCOTT BROWN GOº°¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤GO SCOTT BROWN FROM MASS¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°GOP¨¨°º¤ø, GO SCOTT BROWN GO!º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤øø¤º° KEEP THE WAVE GOING! COPY AND PASTE! GO SCOTT BROWN!!!… CONTRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!! YOU DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GO SCOTT BROWN°¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤ø¸GO!!º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°SCOTT BROWN¨¨°º¤ø GO SCOTT BROWN ø¤º°¨¨¨°º¤ø ¸„øGO SCOTT BROWN GOº°¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤GO SCOTT BROWN FROM MASS¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°GOP¨¨°º¤ø, GO SCOTT BROWN GO!º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤øø¤º° KEEP THE WAVE GOING! COPY AND PASTE! GO SCOTT BROWN!!!…
This was won by both national and international support from our like minded allies.We worked hard on the ground here in the not-so positive days of -31% polling numbers. We received much energy from the various Tea Party chapters all over the country. Of course special mention goes to the progressives themselves for running a shamble in DC……..
The favor will be returned magnified to all you patriots wherever you need them I can assure you. There are no State boundaries that can separate our movement. As I said above there is truly international support for our cause.
The war chest is open…the people have spoken…the right has awakened.
They totally underestimated the power of our great movement to get our great nation back on the RIGHT track. Scott Brown is just the beginning. Wait till Nov. these socialist will finally see who the real majority are in this country.
International support? I thought Obama was a fucking jerkoff for caring what people from other countries think! This sounds like treason to me!
Oh, yeah. And this guy:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/tea-party-leader-arrested-rape
It has nothing to do with what other “countries” think as you say. It has every thing to do with what their citizens do to support us or hinder us. Like here in our country, We Surround Them, is a wake-up call that resonates around the globe.
Not something wimpy like Yes We Can. It sounds like half of an elementary school bickering match…”yes we can…not you can’t……uh huh….. nuh uh”
If you CAN, then, why haven’t you?
Who is to blame but you and your leaders?
What an egotistical fuckwad. The only thing that matters about the rest of the world is how they can help you? And spare me the rhetorical critique. You just elected a Senator whose platform centered on a pickup truck.
Gloat away for the next nine months, by the time whatever independents have switched sides will remember how insufferable you are, and realize that saying no to everything doesn’t really accomplish anything. Your movement had its high-water mark on Tuesday night, and that was the great accomplishment of attaining a 41-59 disadvantage. Congratulations.
See that is exactly how weak your argument truely is, isn’t it?
With a 59 to 41 disadvantage we stopped you cold…..
That from -31 percentage points in the hole a month ago……
Even a foul mouthed loser like you can see the problem?
You have been rejected, period.
Forgive me if I leave the fortune telling and predictions to someone who can properly read the TEA LEAVES…..
SNNNAP!
So, in reference to your comment above about not wanting to pay for anybody else, I have to assume that you will refuse to participate in any federal program such as Medicare, or Social Security, or any other in which someone else may have paid in more than you have, right? Because otherwise, you’re a miserable hypocrite whose tune will change the minute you need the help of the government you hate so much.
Hope none of you ever lose the health insurance you have and suffer the fate — be it bankruptcy, needlessly premature death, or both — you wish upon millions of your fellow countrymen.
Of course I participate in the programs already established. I pay for those in addition to MA HC and use none of them.
I’m just not ready to allow YOU to jump on board at 50 years of age and start sucking the life out of what was intended for our seniors. Just because uncle O says it’s OK.
All the while other states are getting a free-ride….geez aren’t your leaders simply brilliant coming up with that one?
Get it?
Probably not…..
Eat a dick. If you haven’t already, or dreamed of doing so, this morning.
I’ve paid more taxes in the past year than you’ll pay in 10, and pay 100 percent of health insurance for my employees. And you don’t hear me crying about either, though if you don’t think the insurance system is completely screwed, you evidently do not pay for your own. Unless you think annual double-digit increases are an acceptable result of the free market.
Just wanted to share some simple math with you. Forty-one percent is not a majority. One state, which already has health insurance, voting against a miserable failure of a candidate does not a national “rejection” make. Pickup Truck Boy (I drive one too! Does that qualify me for Senate, too?) and the rest of your Senators can sit there with their thumbs in their asses for nine months, and we’ll see where it gets you in November.
What is it with you, and dicks, and asses, and pickup trucks? I know you! You are from “Brokeback Mountain”…. no? It’s OK if you are, I’m from MA after all….
You “pay 100% of your employees health benefits”? Prove it! YOU LIE
You “pay 10 times the taxes I pay”? Prove it! YOU LIE!
And I “don’t hear you crying about it”? Want a tissue?
“if you don’t think the insurance system is completely screwed, you evidently do not pay for your own. Unless you think annual double-digit increases are an acceptable result of the free market.” No one says things aren’t broken and couldn’t be improved. We simply say the federal government should have limited power over the states rights to fix problems within their areas of soveriegnty and not make buying anything a condition of being a free citizen of the USA.
You wouldn’t understand. You are a follower. You need to be governed to and fed from above. You are not an illustrious captain of industry as you imply. You are simply a POSER.
He drives a pickup truck! And he treats his daughters like whores in public! He’s going to be a great Senator!
Dear Mass Minuteman -
I don’t have to prove anything to you, fuckface. I could buy and sell you. But you wouldn’t be worth the money. And how, exactly, would I prove that? Post my tax returns on here, maybe?
I pay my employees’ health insurance because they work hard at a sometimes-dangerous job. Between my personal income taxes, corporate taxes, and property taxes, I’m sure I pay several times what you make in a year at whatever sort of shitsucking hourly wage you make to sit in a cubicle and rant and rave online on someone else’s time, and campaign for posers who pretend they give a flying fuck about you.
I’m sure Scott Brown appreciates all the hard work you did to get him elected. Maybe if you pay $1000 for a ticket to his next fundraiser, he’ll let you stand next to him for a picture, while he’s busy forgetting your name. You can take that home and jerk off with it!
Nice job you shitheads did with your big political coming out party this weekend in Nashville, by the way. Obama better watch out for the Teabaggers!
Of course you have nothing to prove to me racist. You can just come on here, say whatever you will, try to build/lie yourself up (oh my captain style), issue yourself a dose of cred meds, assume you could buy me like your gurus did Blanche Lincoln (for a 300 million dollar loss like she was… brilliant), tell me that you have considered selling me like a slave was/is, admit to co-mingling of your finances as you imply that you are a corporation alone and pay taxes alone not as in corporate taxes (separate tax entity). You swear like no tomorrow showing distain for anything civil and it proves that you are flustered easily…o my captain….riiight…..heh heh heh.
You don’t know the difference between Corporate taxes and personal taxes. As I said you prove it here. You are a POSER nothing less. Or did you malform a corporation and are now suffering the tax implications? Even if you are only an S-Corp it’s still just personal taxes on the profits…….POSER POSER POSER LOSER.
Even now you haven’t learned anything about politics. You now disenfranchise people in cubicles and people making hourly wages At this point I need to inform you that you are just plain stupid. Not foggy. Not fuzzy. Just plain Dumb.
Even your demented logic should allow you to drop a couple more f and s-bombs aroung this time…no?
Of course you may have thought a corporation would shelter you from yourself and your bad decision making and management skills. It is evidenced by your political persuasion after all….Want another tissue, crybaby?
I’ve got your profile. You pay 100% for NOTHING. Never have never will………. You are all about zingers. You have no where-with-all to actually back your lies up. Just more gas spewing is all I hear…..ZZZZzzzzzzzz
Hey More Racey: Sour Grape’s Perhaps! Idiot!
Me thinks racism is losing it big time! Getting really angry like his messiah today in Ohio. I I I I I I I I I I II IIII how many times did he say “I” the narcissistic AH
Congratulations to John and Elizabeth Edwards on finally acknowledging the love child of Johnny boy.
Yeah. Because Patriots never say I. Except as in “I don’t want to pay my taxes. I wish I could still get away with saying nigger in public, but I can’t, so instead, I’ll cry about how my liberty is somehow being taken away, and how I don’t want to pay one extra cent so everyone can have reasonable health coverage (but boy, nobody had better touch my Social Security, or my Medicaid, or my Medicare, or my unemployment when I lose my cubicle job after being caught masturbating to Sarah Palin photos, or my disability insurance when I’m too depressed over losing my liberty to find another job).”
For people who love to act like a bunch of Rambo cowboys, you’re the biggest bunch of whiny fucks I’ve ever heard. Pay your fucking taxes and shut the fuck up. Do you honestly think anything you say makes any difference whatsoever? Keep fooling yourselves. And make sure you buy your $500 tickets to the Teabag Circle Jerk, so your queen can take $100,000 home with her and the organizers can get rich off you.
Can’t wait to see all 83 quintillion of you show up for your next Delusion Festival in Washington.
Yes you are right we have no voice. We will never be heard. We can not cause change. We are a defeated people. A relic of a day when freedom meant free. You will keep whipping us down and we will obey….
:>)
Not in this lifetime buddy.
Keep venting here. It is good for you. We can take it.
Hey! Keep Capitalizing Every Word! Makes What You’re Saying Look Really Intelligent! Keep Whining About How Bad You’ve Got It, And How Much You Hate America! Fucking Traitor!
TO THE WORK CAMPS WITH ALL OF YOU!
It’s not all in the presentation as your liberal college professor would like you to believe. It is all about the message and who is listening.
Your leaders are listening to us now.
You have lost your glamor boy messiah status in MA. NJ. VA. DC, USA and beyond.
How’s them for capitols?
You had your chance and blew it like dust away from your control.
Every moment you spend here drains valuable (?) resources from your cause. Or have you no value?
Your progressive post amerikan values are not and never will be welcome here in this country. You’ve tried for 80+ years and we have stopped you again now.
I know your kind isn’t good at math or history, but your side has the House, White House and Senate for six years (as opposed to one for the Democrats), and accomplished nothing except getting us into and escalating a corruptly expensive, needless war in Iraq, ignoring the real enemy in the terror war, and running up the largest deficit in American history.
When anyone criticized the then-president or his party, they were called un-American traitors. But it’s OK now for the right to wave around pictures of the president dressed like a witch doctor, spread baseless fantasies about where and under what circumstances he was born and accuse him of both fascism and communism, betraying a basic lack of understanding of what those words even mean.
The vast majority of the country is somewhere between you and I. The difference is, I don’t believe that everyone will, or should, see everything my way. You, however, think that some senate race that about 90 percent of the country cares far less about than American Idol or Jersey Shore is going to come to whatever masturbatory march on wherever you crybabies hold next.
When the right starts producing leaders who either aren’t A) middle-aged or elderly white men; or B) a woman who middle-aged and elderly white men think is purty, you might be on to something. Until then, you’re a steadily shrinking anachronism that will have moments of success, like Tuesday, when periodic political frustrations make people forget how hatefully unproductive you really are.
But enjoy your victory. Let me know when it means something besides preserving record profit margins for health-insurance companies, and the double-digit insurance increases for those of us who actually pay the bills.
EDIT
You, however, think that some senate race that about 90 percent of the country cares far less about than American Idol or Jersey Shore means Middle America is going to come to whatever masturbatory march on wherever you crybabies hold next.
Oh I see the logic now. Only the young black man will do. So you really do want more racism. It is the spark that lights your fuse. It is what you cling to when the competition comes a calling. Is this the best you can do? Does this fit well in the progressive agenda?
Maybe Bo isn’t quite black enough for you either?
Maybe Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Kennedy, Biden……ad nauseum……are really young “truely” black men in disquise?
You make absolutely NO sense my fuzzy friend still yet today. I was hoping to see some growth in your abilities since my 2 month departure from here to get Brown elected. I can see you will never improve upon your cut and paste tactics masterfully written by “Manure Matters”…..
Does Marco Rubio mean anything to you? Look it up and don’t move to Florida….
What a week! May the arrogancy, hypocrisy, liberalism, and unrighteous dominion be exposed for what it is by the voice of the people, the patriots, the conservatives, and all those who stand fast to defend the US Constitution.
Yes! It sure was a great week for Patriots!
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/tea-party-leader-arrested-rape
Minuteman (which is more descriptive than you care to admit):
Yawn.
Get back to me when the minority caucus has the votes to actually pass legislation, rather than appeal to its ever-shrinking base by opposing anything and everything.
That you’re on here preaching to like-minded Patriots and arguing with a dick like me, who obviously shows up once a month or so for the express purpose of jerking your chain, says more about the sadness of your existence than I would ever need to.
As for Rubio, I’m sure he’ll ignite the Hispanic base. It will be interesting to see if middle and lower-class Hispanics and blacks are as easy to convince to vote against their own interests as the Great White Teabag Movement.
Two months working on a campaign? That campaign? So are you a paid hack, or just very, very bored? Or do you just have a pickup truck fetish? Either way, have fun pretending that 41 is really more than 59. See you next time I feel like baiting the impotent.
Can’t you see it yet?!
We don’t need a majority caucus. We only need your leaders taking your ideals forward for all to see. This alone works against you since your “tribe” is as incoherent and more loosely formed than the gas spewing from their chaotic mouths.
Can’t you see it yet?!
We don’t need a majority caucus because we have you progressives to fight amongst yourselves.
You will defeat you. You need George Bush in order to exist in a majority. You win on the backs of him and the like.
We are enjoying the position of being your puppet master. Controlling the ebb and flow of your leadership and their decision making abilities. We can get more done, quite frankly, by just sitting back and steeping you the way that we are and watching you self destruct.
C’mon back now ya hear?
One would think that after all this time and almost a year of Tea Parties, people would start getting it. But no, they continue to believe the crap they hear from that tool Oldman on BSNBC. Perhaps they live in those non-existant districts that have received millions in stimulus dollars. Maybe their world of denial and disception is where they want to stay, it’s easier than accepting the truth of their existence.
We will be sending a bus load of patriots to the Glenn Beck Rally August 28th. Unite or Die. UNITE OR DIE.
Thanks Walter! Maybe we can have 2 million this time. They can’t ignore us now.
jegan February 5, 2010 2:12 PM
I think it’s important to keep in mind the fundamentally incoherent nature of this so-called “movement”. The first Tea Party was organized in early February 2009, when they had just barely finished picking up the litter on the Mall after Obama’s inauguration. To claim that these people are united by their opposition to the man’s “policies” is just absurd. He hadn’t been President long enough to HAVE any policies, let alone have any that had actually worked or failed yet. Sorry, but these are people united by one thing only, and that’s anger. It’s awfully hard to make a political party, let alone a mere “movement” coalesce around something as unfocused as raw, undistilled anger. Yes, they all think they are angry at Obama’s socialist/fascist/communist/terrorist/alien policies, but really . . . have you ever actually listened to these people? I mean, really listened? They are the most ill-informed bunch of malcontents I’ve ever heard, easily manipulated by just crazy, irresponsible talk of conspriacies and dark, secret agendas. Some of them may actually be capable of STARTING with a slightly rational discussion of principles of federalism, and Constitutional notions of personal liberty, etc., but let them get wound up and, almost without fail, they start veering off into the La-La Land of Creationism, gun worship, death panels, birth certificates, one-world government, creeping socialism, covert Islamism, subversive media, etc., etc., etc. And we’re now surprised that this . . . “movement” doesn’t seem to be able to speak with a clear voice? That they can’t figure out whether The Grande Diva is friend or foe? That charlatans, grifters, and shake-down artists have highjacked their so-called “party”?
They are buffoons.
Dear “Couldn’t Have Said It At All”,
It is good to know you can cut and paste from the Atlantic.com. This makes you intelligent enough to understand 2 things.
One. Yes you did leave the Mall a mess. Don’t worry though. We are still cleaning up after your party. Cleaning up has never been more enjoyable.
Two. I think you may want to rethink the “speak with a clear voice” statement above as evidenced in most every major election since 2008…..’cept the expensive NY23 against an unknown. (yay for you!)
People are buffoons it’s true. Based only on perspective and persuasion. We are to buffoons as you are to baboons.
There hasn’t been a ‘major election’ since 2008. There have been governor’s races and congressional special elections, none of which mean shit outside those areas. But keep pretending that they do, and keep pretending there were 78 quintillion people at your little white-power festival in DC, and maybe it will become true.
Nice to see you could put down Scott Brown’s centerfold for long enough to contribute, though!
Mass Minuteman
February 6, 2010 • 8:56 pm
Keep pretending the country is not made up by the sum of the States too. It’ll serve as your shining moment in history……”It doesn’t matter what happens in NC, TX, NH…etc. does it? Duh?” You are so foggy it is incredible. You prove your ignorance in every other post. You should keep with cut and paste. You are sheltered that way.
Here’s one of my favorites….
Only fourteen months after his Bay State defeat of John McCain by 26%, Washington’s favored U.S. Senate candidate failed by a greater margin than Walter Mondale lost to Ronald Reagan in 1984. That year, Reagan carried Massachusetts by 2.8% on the way to his 49-state reelection landslide.
The more-than-30-point swing from November 2008 and the comparison to Reagan’s win are both important metrics. They demonstrate just how resounding the following rejection notices sent to Barack Obama and Congress, by voters in what is still virtually the most reliably liberal state in the union, really are:
Rejected — Predatory, life-threatening designs on the nation’s health care system.
Rejected — Micromanagement of virtually every aspect of our daily lives and drastic reductions in living standards, all in the name of environmental purity, championed by pseudo-scientists who are in reality proven scam artists.
Rejected — Out-of-control, crony-favoring spending that has “stimulated” nothing but the growth of crowds at the unemployment office.
Rejected — Government-sponsored bailouts, takeovers, and looting of private businesses, through the bankruptcy courts, the tax system, or the exercise of clearly condoned mob action.
Rejected — The condescending elitism that ridicules plumbers and people who drive trucks while all too often funneling their tax money to the undeserving.
Voters in the often wayward Cradle of Liberty looked danger in the eye, stood up, and said, “Enough.” Tuesday’s takeaway is this: if Obama & Co. can’t sell their agenda there, it’s an epic fail everywhere.
Keep pretending the country is not made up by the sum of the States too. It’ll serve as your shining moment in history……”It doesn’t matter what happens in NC, TX, NH…etc. does it? Duh?” You are so foggy it is incredible. You prove your ignorance in every other post. You should keep with cut and paste. You are sheltered that way.
Here’s one of my favorites….
Only fourteen months after his Bay State defeat of John McCain by 26%, Washington’s favored U.S. Senate candidate failed by a greater margin than Walter Mondale lost to Ronald Reagan in 1984. That year, Reagan carried Massachusetts by 2.8% on the way to his 49-state reelection landslide.
The more-than-30-point swing from November 2008 and the comparison to Reagan’s win are both important metrics. They demonstrate just how resounding the following rejection notices sent to Barack Obama and Congress, by voters in what is still virtually the most reliably liberal state in the union, really are:
Rejected — Predatory, life-threatening designs on the nation’s health care system.
Rejected — Micromanagement of virtually every aspect of our daily lives and drastic reductions in living standards, all in the name of environmental purity, championed by pseudo-scientists who are in reality proven scam artists.
Rejected — Out-of-control, crony-favoring spending that has “stimulated” nothing but the growth of crowds at the unemployment office.
Rejected — Government-sponsored bailouts, takeovers, and looting of private businesses, through the bankruptcy courts, the tax system, or the exercise of clearly condoned mob action.
Rejected — The condescending elitism that ridicules plumbers and people who drive trucks while all too often funneling their tax money to the undeserving.
Voters in the often wayward Cradle of Liberty looked danger in the eye, stood up, and said, “Enough.” Tuesday’s takeaway is this: if Obama & Co. can’t sell their agenda there, it’s an epic fail everywhere.
Of course, you can’t point to one single example of my cutting and pasting anything, ever. But it’s nice to see you did learn at least that skill at your cubicle.
I did enjoy your explanation of how being clearly and decisively in the minority is somehow better. I’ll give you that — by being an obstructionist minority, you don’t have to actually do anything to fix anything. You can just hold your breath, call the president all sorts of names and complain about how everybody else is fucking you over, instead of getting off your ass and trying to be part of some sort of solution.
Your hero Reagan only succeeded because he actually tried to achieve some sort of bipartisan cooperation. His present-day descendants sit around looking for something to be offended by (see everything that comes out of Sarah Palin’s mouth) and smirking and nodding at nutball conspiracy theories.
You’re a fucking crybaby. How the fuck is your “liberty” being taken away? You and your kind repeat that bullshit over and over, without ever citing an example that isn’t batshit crazy (like the workcamps and death panels). You still have the right for someone else to pay 15 percent more this year for your health insurance, and nobody’s preventing you from spewing your traitorous bullshit on this site (which is all you’ve got, since I don’t imagine anyone would listen to you for more than two minutes in person).
You’re a leach who contributes nothing to fixing anything and a coward, afraid of anything that looks or feels even slightly different, and anything that offends your delusions of superiority. And you would be a traitor, as well, except that only a tiny minority of like-minded cowards gives a flying fuck what you think.
Racist,
I suspect you change your name here more than your leader changes policy decisions. Hide behind others’ words and act like the chameleon that you are. It bodes well for you and your kind. At least we know one thing. You are the biggest little “easy button” on any site that I’ve ever seen. Swear filled rants and assumptions are you. Is that your Corporate name as well oh captain my captain? :>) Strike a pose there’s nothing to it right?
I don’t just get “off my ass” for anything but this fight has brought me up. As you said above “instead of getting off your ass and trying to be part of some sort of solution” I don’t subscribe. You as a prominent (he he) businessman/woman should know that the right decision is not based on any knee-jerk reactions to anything. “Let’s force the State’s to be more muted to the Feds”…I’ll sit this one out I think, but you keep drumming along though! “Let’s force every citizen to buy something or lock them up” Is another I think I will resist, but hey knock yourself out! “Let’s continue our push for cap and trade even though the data is skewed and manipulated plain as day with proof”. “Let’s close Gitmo”. “Let’s have an NYC trial”. Let’s get Nebraska a free healthcare ride”.
Well, you get the idea. I don’t have all day to point out your inability to put careful consideration before knee-jerk responses. Let the above serve as my response to a “throw money away with blinders on” progressive like yourself. I will continue to work against you and you will expose yourselves like you are doing daily and being REJECTED for it.
Yes you CAN?……still waiting on that one too poser. The progressive persuasion….the little train the couldn’t….
The little train that couldn’t because it’s the little train that shouldn’t…’nuff said.
The only traitor we care about sits in the White House.
Fuck you, too, traitor. Sorry you’re so scared of everybody except shitheads like yourself.
You really need some professional help dude, if the Tea Party Patriots didn’t pose such a threat to your future of government handouts you would probably be on your porn sites. Be afraid, very afraid the Tea Party isn’t going anywhere except up up up with more conservative candidates and responsible, accountable politicians. The days of Lord Obama and his merry court jesters are limited.
OL,
DUCK! Here comes another fushizzle bomb!
Oh My!!!
Good one! You really got me! If only you had worked in the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” somehow! Because that just gets funnier every time you Patriots use it!
And Less-Than-A-Minuteman: Way to use decade-old street slang to make yourself sound like something other than a hateful, painfully white prick.
I see your Patriotic Representatives who are fighting so valiantly for your right to go bankrupt when you become seriously ill and your insurer drops you are shitting their pants over the idea of sitting down for an open forum on health care with the president. Cowards, just like all of you.
Are you talking about that dog and pony show ObaMao is staging for the cameras? Do you really believe that is anything than what he intends it for? Another chance to crap on the Citizens of this country while Empress Nancy and Lord Harry continue their backroom deals. Oh please Racism, I thought you were smarter than that.
I’m willing to bet serious money you get your news from BSNational Barak Channel? or some other lame stream media, right? You people still can’t accept the fact that conservatives have some better ideas when it comes to health care without giving away the store. Or could it be you want the federal aid for abortions as a means of birth control? Freedom of Choice does not mean taxpayer funded Racism no matter what your color so fushizzle that.
Please Freedom Works – Please, Please plan a march joining with the August march. I agree with others that have already voiced their opinion that we do not need a march on 9-11. The media would slam the march and the focus would be on” Why did they march on the terrorist bombing of 9-11″ and not the TEA Party. If we COMBINE in August – WHAT A FORCE OF PEOPLE! Most of us cannot go to both and therefore each event will not be as large as they could be. COMBINE THEM! THINK ABOUT THIS SERIOUSLY PLEASE!
Our group from Arkansas TEA Party and across the state and really around the nation are making plans to attend Glenn Beck’s rally “Restoring Honor” at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th, 2010. I was told within hours of Glenn Beck’s announcement on TV that ResistNet had canceled the permit for The Mall that was scheduled for the 9.11 event that now has been canceled. Glenn’s “Restoring Honor” will be the most Historical Event in our lifetime. I pray God will Bless Glenn and his message. Our country will benefit from the momentum this rally will produce.
Sign of the times: Blizzard conditions make global warming more credible??? Gives state of NC reason to stop sales of alcohol or carry a gun??? And what in hell happened to H1N1??? Should we even try to guess whats going on with Toyota and all other foreign auto makers??? What about the new dog and pony show being orchestrated by this administration on healthcare???
I was at the 9/12 rally last year in DC. I plan to go back to DC, but I do believe the Glen Beck rally and the 09/12 rally will split the people and not have as a great of an effect. If there is any way to coordinate this on the same weekend, I believe it would have an even bigger effect being a whole weekend event. I am sure this has been thought of by FreedomWorks, but I really can’t make it to both and would have to choose one or the other. If it is possible, please look into it and if it is not possible please inform the rest of us, because there are many questions that this would help anwser for many of us.
Prefer going to the Glen Beck event. Can’t afford both events. Why not combine the events and make it one great day for all Americans.