If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything! So I have no comment on Pat Sajak’s idiocy.
Category: Wing Nuts
How it works
I’m listening to right-wing talk radio, and a 22-year-old self-described Christian woman who describes herself as “extremely confused until I started listening to you,” calls in to ask the host for help in arguing with her left-leaning boyfriend about his voting for Jerry Brown.
The host asks why her boyfriend’s avoiding talking about the election.
“Oh, that’s not him, that’s me,” she said. “I asked to delay talking about it until I knew more about the issues.”
In other words: She only wants to hear something that confirms what she instinctively “knows.” And she only wants to know how to argue that pre-determined position — even though she doesn’t really know why she’s chosen it.
Is she any different from any other cult member?
An eye for an eye
Look, I know that there are also attacks on Israelis originating in Gaza – but not like this cold-blooding shooting of children:
At least 10 Palestinian children have been shot and wounded by Israeli troops in the past three months while collecting rubble in or near the “buffer zone” created by Israel along the Gaza border, in a low-intensity offensive on the fringes of the blockaded Palestinian territory.
Israeli soldiers are routinely shooting at Gazans well beyond the unmarked boundary of the official 300 metre-wide no-go area, rights groups say.
According to Bassam Masri, head of orthopaedics at the Kamal Odwan hospital in Beit Lahiya in the north of Gaza, about 50 people have been treated for gunshot wounds suffered in or near the buffer zone while collecting rubble in the past three months; about five have been killed.
He estimates that 30% of the injured are boys under 18.
Defence for Children International (DCI) has documented 10 cases of children aged 13 to 17 being shot in a three-month period between 50 and 800 metres from the border. Nine were shot in a leg or arm; one was shot in the stomach.
The creation of the no-go area has forced farmers to abandon land and residents to leave homes for fear of coming under fire. Last month a 91-year-old man and two teenage boys were killed while harvesting olives outside the official zone when Israeli troops fired shells. Forty-three goats also died in the attack.
In another case a mother of five was killed by a shell outside her home near the zone in July.
Israel declared the buffer zone inside Gaza after the three-week war in 2008-9, saying it was intended to prevent militants firing rockets. It has dropped leaflets from planes several times warning local people not to venture within 300 metres of the fence that marks the border or risk being shot.
However, the UN, aid agencies and rights groups say that Israel has unofficially and without warning extended the zone to up to 1km from the fence, leaving residents and farmers uncertain whether it is safe to access their land or property.
“The army knows the kids are there to collect. They watch them every day and they know they have no weapons,” said Mohammed Abu Rukbi, a fieldworker with DCI. “They usually fire warning shots but the kids don’t take much notice.”
Mohammed Sobboh, 17, was shot just above the knee on August 25 when he was 800 metres from the border, he said. The 12 people in his family have no other income and are not entitled to aid from the UN as they are not refugees.
Hack
NJ Gov. Chris Christie and his advisors are trying to sell him as a “principled” man who does the right thing no matter what, but a closer look reveals an egomaniacal political hack who is a lot more concerned about his image than anything else. Now he blames a good little wingnut soldier like Bret Schundler for his very expensive temper tantrums, and apparently his major decisions are being dictated by the local right-wing talk radio:
Before rejecting a compromise with teachers that would have won New Jersey a $400 million federal education grant, Gov. Chris Christie’s main objection was that it would appear that he had given in to the teachers’ union, a former education commissioner testified on Thursday.
The governor, who had battled the union all year, said “that he was not going through the fire with all of their attacks on him merely to cave in to the union,” the former commissioner, Bret D. Schundler, told a State Senate hearing investigating the loss of the federal grant. “And he said that emphatically and for a rather extended period of time.”
Continue reading “Hack”
Taibbi meets the Tea Party
“I’m anti-spending and anti-government,” crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. “The welfare state is out of control.”
“OK,” I say. “And what do you do for a living?”
“Me?” he says proudly. “Oh, I’m a property appraiser. Have been my whole life.”
I frown. “Are either of you on Medicare?”
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
“Let me get this straight,” I say to David. “You’ve been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?”
“Well,” he says, “there’s a lot of people on welfare who don’t deserve it. Too many people are living off the government.”
“But,” I protest, “you live off the government. And have been your whole life!”
“Yeah,” he says, “but I don’t make very much.” Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations.
The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.
Witless
Very funny!
Southern Chivalry
Department of No Shit Sherlock
The Bush administration insisted that “enhanced interrogation techniques” — torture — were necessary to extract information from prisoners and keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks. Never mind that it was immoral, did huge damage to this country’s global standing and produced little important intelligence. Now, as we had feared, it is also making it much harder to try and convict accused terrorists.
Because federal judges cannot trust the confessions of prisoners obtained by intense coercion, they are regularly throwing out the government’s cases against Guantánamo Bay prisoners.
A new report prepared jointly by ProPublica and the National Law Journal showed that the government has lost more than half the cases where Guantánamo prisoners have challenged their detention because they were forcibly interrogated. In some cases the physical coercion was applied by foreign agents working at the behest of the United States; in other cases it was by United States agents.
By the time you get done reading the whole thing, your desk will have a six-inch deep imprint of your forehead. And here’s one last paragraph to gt you started:
Even in cases where the government later went back and tried to obtain confessions using “clean,” non-coercive methods, judges are saying those confessions too are tainted by the earlier forcible methods. In most cases, the prisoners have not actually walked free because the government is appealing the decisions. But the trend suggests that the government will continue to have a hard time proving its case even against those prisoners who should be detained.
The Bush Administration fucked it all up, the whole ball of wax. Bin Laden’s still alive, we lost in Iraq, we’re going to lose in Afghanistan, and now we have one more reminder of what happens when you put an incompentent C+ legacy student and his CIA father’s corrupt chums in charge of the government: when you try to skirt the law and due process, you end up losing.
All of this was, of course, predicted by the rational people. Not that it matters.
So my remaining question is, when do we hang Jay Bybee and John Yoo on national TV from RFK Stadium?
Cut and Paste
Cut and paste this into an email, and send it to all your friends so the next time they get one of the fake Obama emails, they have a handy reply:
To those of you who have sent me yet another email about Barack Obama, here’s some advice.
Learn to check www.snopes.com, so you can find out that pretty much everything you’ve ever sent me was a lie made up by some money-loving corporate lobbyist somewhere to get you riled up. Congratulations, you fell for it! (Again.)
If you’re too lazy to look these things up, maybe it’s because you WANT to believe them, and maybe that has something to do with Barack Obama being a black man.
Because as hard as I try, I can’t remember you ever sending me an email like that about George W. Bush. I wonder why?
You remember him, don’t you? He’s the person who deregulated just about everything during his eight years as president, and what few regulations were left, he didn’t bother to enforce. So if someone in your family gets e.coli and has to be hospitalized, be sure to give him the credit.
You’re worried about the deficit? This war he stuck us in (remember the imaginary WMDs?) and his tax cuts for the wealthy took us from a record budget surplus to a record deficit. Remember how he told us the tax cuts were going to generate new jobs and new investment? We actually LOST jobs while he was president. In the meantime, he raised the debt ceiling SEVEN TIMES and then sold off our national debt to China.
I wonder why you weren’t worried about that when it happened. It couldn’t be because George W. Bush is white, could it? Or are you just one of those people who doesn’t pay any attention at all to politicians when they’re Republicans?
I’m not going to explain the details of the recession because, well, you’re probably too suspicious to believe anything I tell you, and too lazy to check it for yourself. (Somewhere other than Glenn Beck’s show, I mean.) But I can tell you this: It wasn’t “black people getting mortgages they couldn’t afford” that triggered this mess. If you still believe that, you obviously don’t read anything but WorldNet Daily and probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
NO, Barack Obama wasn’t born in Kenya. Don’t be so gullible, it’s embarrassing.
NO, Michele Obama doesn’t have more White House staffers than any First Lady. In fact, she had four less than Laura Bush — and a little more than half of Jackie Kennedy’s staff.
NO, Barack Obama didn’t issue a postage stamp honoring a Muslim holiday. It was issued Sept. 1, 2001 — by George W. Bush.
NO, Barack Obama isn’t a Muslim. Yes, he did attend a mainstream Muslim public school (not a madrassa) in Indonesia. He also attended a Catholic school. Why aren’t you accusing him of being a Catholic?
I was going to answer more of these stupid lies, but there’s simply too many of them, and the facts aren’t the real problem. The problem is, despite the facts, people like you want to believe them. So you will, no matter what.
So when people say the folks attacking Barack Obama are racists, that’s what they mean. They mean you’ll believe almost anything if it’s about a black President.
Yes, we’re neighbors/co-workers/relatives, but I don’t think like you just because I’m white. I actually care about things like truth, and fairness, and what bigoted propaganda like this does to our country. That’s why I don’t spread these idiotic lies.
Please, don’t send me anymore of these stupid, racist emails. You’re just highlighting your own ignorance and bigotry.
Sincerely,
Your Fed-Up Friend
“A True American”
Tea Party Campaign Ad
No, they’re not crazy.