Month: March 2010

Damn Liberals

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Fanning the flames of violence!

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – A Nashville man says he and his 10-year-old daughter were victims of road rage Thursday afternoon, all because of a political bumper sticker on his car.

Mark Duren told News 2 the incident happened around 4:30p.m., while he was driving on Blair Boulevard, not far from Belmont University.

He said Harry Weisiger gave him the bird and rammed into his vehicle, after noticing an Obama-Biden sticker on his car bumper.

Duren had just picked up his 10-year-old daughter from school and had her in the car with him.

“He pointed at the back of my car,” Duren said, “the bumper, flipped me off, one finger salute.”

But it didn’t end there.

Duren told News 2 that Weisiger honked his horn at him for awhile, as Duren stopped at a stop sign.

Once he started driving again, down Blair Boulevard, towards his home, he said, “I looked in the rear view mirror again, and this same SUV was speeding, flying up behind me, bumped me.”

Duren said he applied his brake and the SUV smashed into the back of his car.

Damn liberals. If he hadn’t had the bumper sticker on his car, the guy wouldn’t have had to ram him!

And Speaking of Sugar

~ susie ~ 15 Comments

Last night I ate a small piece of candy, an Easter egg with a cream filling. I had an immediate and scary reaction: my throat felt weird, it started to hurt and I began coughing and didn’t stop for the next three hours.

The ingredients don’t seem to have anything that should make me wary. The label lists milk chocolate made with sugar, whole milk, cocoa butter and soy lecithin; vanillan (artificial flavor), sugar, corn syrup, egg albumen, salt, vanilla, invertase (an enzyme), and sodium hydroxide. Made on machines used with peanuts, tree nuts and wheat.

As far as I know, I’m not allergic to any of that stuff. But I have to tell you, the experience scared the crap out of me.

Sugar, Sugar

~ susie ~ 11 Comments

Despite what those commercials made by the food manufacturers claim, high fructose corn syrup is demonstrably bad for you:

In results published online March 18 by the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, the researchers from the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute reported on two experiments investigating the link between the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup and obesity.

The first study showed that male rats given water sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup in addition to a standard diet of rat chow gained much more weight than male rats that received water sweetened with table sugar, or sucrose, in conjunction with the standard diet. The concentration of sugar in the sucrose solution was the same as is found in some commercial soft drinks, while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas.

The second experiment — the first long-term study of the effects of high-fructose corn syrup consumption on obesity in lab animals — monitored weight gain, body fat and triglyceride levels in rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup over a period of six months. Compared to animals eating only rat chow, rats on a diet rich in high-fructose corn syrup showed characteristic signs of a dangerous condition known in humans as the metabolic syndrome, including abnormal weight gain, significant increases in circulating triglycerides and augmented fat deposition, especially visceral fat around the belly. Male rats in particular ballooned in size: Animals with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained 48 percent more weight than those eating a normal diet.

“These rats aren’t just getting fat; they’re demonstrating characteristics of obesity, including substantial increases in abdominal fat and circulating triglycerides,” said Princeton graduate student Miriam Bocarsly. “In humans, these same characteristics are known risk factors for high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, cancer and diabetes.” In addition to Hoebel and Bocarsly, the research team included Princeton undergraduate Elyse Powell and visiting research associate Nicole Avena, who was affiliated with Rockefeller University during the study and is now on the faculty at the University of Florida. The Princeton researchers note that they do not know yet why high-fructose corn syrup fed to rats in their study generated more triglycerides, and more body fat that resulted in obesity.

Going To Extreme

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Krugman:

Mr. Obama seems to have sincerely believed that he would face a different reception. And he made a real try at bipartisanship, nearly losing his chance at health reform by frittering away months in a vain attempt to get a few Republicans on board. At this point, however, it’s clear that any Democratic president will face total opposition from a Republican Party that is completely dominated by right-wing extremists.

For today’s G.O.P. is, fully and finally, the party of Ronald Reagan — not Reagan the pragmatic politician, who could and did strike deals with Democrats, but Reagan the antigovernment fanatic, who warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom. It’s a party that sees modest efforts to improve Americans’ economic and health security not merely as unwise, but as monstrous. It’s a party in which paranoid fantasies about the other side — Obama is a socialist, Democrats have totalitarian ambitions — are mainstream. And, as a result, it’s a party that fundamentally doesn’t accept anyone else’s right to govern.

In the short run, Republican extremism may be good for Democrats, to the extent that it prompts a voter backlash. But in the long run, it’s a very bad thing for America. We need to have two reasonable, rational parties in this country. And right now we don’t.

Gee

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

So the Republicans are blocking a 30-day extension of unemployment benefits because… it’s not paid for with another cut.

Inciting

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

So the Washington Post interviews this Tea Party leader (the video is from the Alan Colmes show) former militiaman, the one who urged people to break Democratic party office windows, as if he were just someone with another reasonable point of view that’s not worth examining. It’s the old “he said, she said” that’s just what we’ve come to expect from the corporate media.

They don’t even mention that he’s calling for an armed march on Washington for April 19 – a favorite of extremists because in addition to being the date of the first shots fired at Lexington in the Revolutionary War, it’s also the anniversary of the last day of the government siege in Waco and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. No implied threat there, though! If you listen to the above radio interview, his stated position boils down to: Don’t make me shoot you.

And in the final irony, of COURSE he’s on government disability:

Vanderboegh said he once worked as a warehouse manager but now lives on government disability checks. He said he receives $1,300 a month because of his congestive heart failure, diabetes and hypertension. He has private health insurance through his wife, who works for a company that sells forklift products.

Born in Michigan and raised in Ohio, Vanderboegh said he was not always a libertarian. He once was active in the Young Socialist Alliance and the Progressive Labor Party. “In my youth, I was a communist,” he said. But in the mid-1970s, Vanderboegh read Friedrich von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” among other books, and had an epiphany.

“From that point on, I could never take Marxism-Leninism seriously again,” Vanderboegh said.

He said he long opposed President Obama because he believed the president has “collectivism” tendencies. But he became especially energized during the health-care debate.

Vanderboegh said he advocates breaking windows only of Democratic Party offices, not congressional offices, and that he does not condone the death threats and other incidents of harassment that some Democratic lawmakers have faced.

“Obviously I not only deplore or decry that, but I denounce that vigorously because it has nothing to do with what I was advocating,” he said.

I’m guessing he was not energized even once during the Bush years – which tells me everything I need to know about his moral compass. I can respect a libertarian like Bob Barr because he spoke out against the unconstitutional Bush policies. Where was this guy then?

Payback

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Remember that piece David Frum wrote about Republican extremists killing the GOP just last week?

He just got the axe from the American Enterprise Institute. I thought those were lifetime appointments!

This sheds some light. Bruce Barlett, via the Washington Monthly:

Since, [Frum] is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI “scholars” on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn’t already.

Sadly, there is no place for David and me to go.

Fascist America

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Are we there yet?

Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.

[…] a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.