Category: Politics As Usual

‘All you libtards take it in the ass’

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

http://youtu.be/x0Rc8L7ltFw

He certainly sounds like someone I’d want as my police chief:

In a video that has received wide attention, police chief Mark Kessler repeatedly tells those upset by his use of profanity to “go f*ck yourself” as he fires various automatic weapons.

Mayor Mary Lou Hannon told The Morning Call that Kessler had the right to express himself. The city would “not take action to quash free speech, whether or not each member of council or any member of council agrees with it.”

Kessler has uploaded several profanity-laced videos to YouTube. In one video, Kessler berates “libtards” and warns of an armed rebellion against the government.

“F*ck all you libtards out there, as a matter of fact, read my shirt,” he says, turning around to show a message on his back which read, “Liberals take it in the a**.”

“You take it in the ass and I don’t give a f*ck what you say so you can all just go f*ck yourselves. Period. I wont be going to D.C. and I don’t give a f*ck. If you f*cking maniacs want to turn this into an armed revolt, knock yourselves out. I’m not about that, so see you on the other side.”

In a video on basic pistol defense, Kessler repeatedly shoots a picture of scary clown, which he says is Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). He calls Secretary of State John Kerry a “c*cksucker” in another video before firing off an automatic weapon.

Tuesday on his Facebook page, Kessler called for a massive rally to “show these tyrants we will not stand for any more violations on our constitution or our freedoms.”

“I’m calling on all true Americans , all militia members, all true oath keepers to assemble, be ready to march on a tyrannical county government right here in Schuylkill county Pennsylvania, democrats are the true enemy of our country, our freedoms, our constitution, along with liberal news agency’s , liberal news reporters, much like hitlers nazis , time we clean these antiamerican thugs from office,” he wrote.

[…] Kessler is also a freshman member of the North Schuylkill School Board and founder of the Constitution Security Force, which lists the Southern Poverty Law Center as an “anti-American organization.”

Sometimes people tell me cops would never turn on the people like that. I just laugh and laugh!

http://youtu.be/AQakPtOQCJo

Will a fall budget deal happen?

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

GBcartoon

Allow me to translate: Using the fact that the sequestration (which the administration happily embraced) is causing so much pain out in the world outside D.C., Obama hopes to leverage said pain to get the Democrats to support his Grand Bargain. We already know he’s working to get enough Republican senators lined up behind it, and this is really all he cares about now:

Over the past six months Washington, D.C. has settled into an unexpected and uneasy stasis on economic policy. After Republicans accepted some tax increases on the rich in January, they managed to delay a debt-ceiling showdown and a government shutdown — something many thought House conservatives would force. Then sequestration went into effect, which wasn’t supposed to happen, and Republicans decided they kinda liked it. Then the deficit began dropping like a rock. And then Congress simply moved onto other things, like immigration and doing nothing.

grandbargain

The expectation in Washington is that this quiet truce will continue. That’s not the Obama administration’s expectation, though. The fall will bring another debt ceiling increase as well as a deadline on funding the government. House Republicans might turn either or both of these into showdowns — whether their leadership wants them to or not.

If House Republicans force a showdown, then something will have to happen — just as it did in February 2011, and August 2011, and January 2013. Showdowns are how Congress legislates now.

The White House’s hope for a deal here doesn’t come from a speech. It comes from the Senate, where there does seem to be a breakaway group growing frustrated with House Republicans and more interested in White House dealmaking, where there are more Republicans whose top issue is defense (and thus more concern over sequestration’s ongoing defense cuts), and where the White House has spent much of the last six months assiduously strengthening relationships.

Will it work? Everybody agrees that the chances of a deal are not great. But in much the same way that the chances of a deal were overrated because budget talks got so much coverage before sequestration, they might be underrated now, when so much of Washington has come to believe 2013′s stasis is the new normal, rather than a brief interregnum from budget brinksmanship.

Again: It’s very important that you let your elected representatives know that a deal cutting Social Security and Medicare is a guarantee they won’t be going back to Washington.

Pot

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

It’s a good thing!

The federal government, in its attempt to keep marijuana illegal and misunderstood, recently sponsored a study which was conducted by the University of California Center for Medical Cannabis. The goal of the study was to disprove the many other studies that show cannabis to be safe and effective in treating symptoms, side-effects and diseases. Guess what? The CMCR came to the same conclusion as those other studies: marijuana is medically useful and effective. Oops. That’s rather inconvenient, isn’t it?

As published in the Open Neurology Journal, this new study showed that cannabis treats many conditions including chronic pain, peripheral neuropathy and the side-effects of chemo therapy, among other things. The study also showed that other delivery systems besides smoking – vaporizing, tincture, ingestion – work almost as well as lighting up. But smoking is the best way to take cannabis. Good thing another recent study showed that marijuana does not cause lung cancer.

Why we love Alan Grayson

~ susie

And why he’s the most effective member of the House:

The new strategy is simple. Grayson and his staff scan the bills that come out of the majority. They scan amendments that passed in previous Congresses but died at some point along the way. They resurrect or mold bills that can appeal to the libertarian streak in the GOP, and Grayson lobbies his colleagues personally. That’s how he attached a ban on funding for “unmanned aerial vehicles,” i.e. drones, to the homeland security bill. He swears that they don’t back away from him because of his old persona—well, his relationship with Webster is “strained,” but he points out that Webster won re-election by 5,000 votes and Grayson won with 70,000. Never mind that. Are the members of Congress more forgiving than members of the press?

“It’s either that, or we’re all senile,” he says. “In some cases it’s a short conversation. In some cases it’s a long conversation. In some cases, they’re desperate to talk to somebody. Some members are actually very lonely people.”
This is how he brings members aboard on bills that either keep resources in Florida or enshrine some liberal or libertarian principle in the law. “They might come from the perspective that Barack Obama is a horrible president, and I come from the perspective of being critical of the military-industrial complex.” Grayson added one amendment to the last homeland security funding bill that prohibited “funds in the bill from being used in contravention of the First, Second, or Fourth Amendments.” That was surprisingly easy to do.

“We knew they couldn’t vote against it,” he says. “They wouldn’t want to roll call vote against the Constitution. They’re constantly trying to acquire the Constitution for their own purposes, and claim that they’re the guardians of it, so we knew that couldn’t fail.”

The real prize of passing that amendment was writing the legislative justification for it into the Congressional Record. “The intent of Congress with this legislation,” Grayson wrote, “is to place an absolute prohibition on any DHS involvement of any type or to any degree with any surveillance of Americans without specificity or without probable cause, such as the National Security Agency’s recently revealed surveillance program.” That, he says, was “the benefit of future courts, for the benefit of future administrations.”
Continue reading “Why we love Alan Grayson” →

Drawing the lines

~ susie

israel
Juan Cole:

Apparently far right wing Israelis live in such a cocoon that they can’t understand how extreme a statement such as ’1967 borders are Auschwitz’ sounds to normal people. Really? Letting the Palestinians have a decent life is comparable to gassing innocent Jews? Trivializing Auschwitz like this is the real crime, and ratcheting up the rhetoric so that any concession to political reality is equated to genocide, is an offense against common sense. And, you will never ever hear mainstream American news programs report or quote Landau’s absurd and deeply offensive pronouncement.

A minor obstacle

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Don’t be silly! Magically, this law will change in time for Christie to run:

If the polls are right and Chris Christie wins a lopsided reelection victory this fall, it will put the New Jersey governor in position to seek the presidency in 2016. That’s the conventional wisdom, at least, and there’s plenty to be said for it. After all, by racking up a big margin in a deeply blue state, Christie would be making a powerful statement to Republicans across the country about his electability.

What’s not getting much attention is the flip-side: the severe consequences that winning a second term as governor could have for Christie’s ability to raise money for a national campaign – and the possibility that he might be compelled to resign his office during his second term if he’s going to seek the White House.

This is the result of two federal rules, one from the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board dating back nearly two decades and the other from the SEC in 2011, that drastically curb the ability of employees of Wall Street firms to donate to governors seeking federal office and of the uniquely broad appointment powers that come with the New Jersey governorship. Put together, they have the potential to prevent Christie from raising millions of dollars from a cash-rich sector – the financial services industry – that has been particularly enthusiastic about him.

“It affects a huge swath of potential donations,” Ken Gross, a former lawyer for the Federal Election Commission who now runs the political law practice at the firm Skadden Arps, said on Sunday. “Because it not only affects corporate donations where permissible at the state level to a governor or somebody, but also affects [corporation’s] PACs and individual executives’ personal giving down to very, very low limits – $250 or $350, depending on what you’re talking about. So a tremendous impact.”

Quote of the day

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

When a reporter for the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command interviewed Frank Zappa for the commands news syndicate, the story was held by a superior who demanded that Zappa – who had been rather hard on the army – answer one more question: just who does he think will defend the country without the army?

Zappa’s reply:

“From what? The biggest threat to America today is it’s own federal government…. Will the Army protect anybody from the FBI? The IRS? The CIA? The Republican Party? The Democratic Party?….The biggest dangers we face today don’t even need to sneak past our billion dollar defense system….they issue the contracts for them.”

The interview was not run.