FEAR- FIGHTING BACK WITH FACTS!

Visit http://HealthCareFactCheck.com to help us expose Republicans' lies and over-the-top rhetoric while empowering our grassroots supporters to hold them accountable for trying to deny families quality, affordable health care.

Darkness to light- Jonestown is back

And in a surprise to everyone present, Her farewell speech was chock full’a Status Quo Wingnut “Pay Attention to Me” Paranoia (Here’s an Excerpt)-

Friends, and fellow Self-Righteous, Mud Humping, Haven’t a Fucking Clue About Jack Shit Creationist Whack Jobs, I stand before you today, Proud. Proud to know that I, like you, am not a Mean Old Liberal Meanie Pants. Proud to know that I am not part of the Elite Establishment Hell Bent on being Really Mean, and Nasty, and Hurtful toward people like Myself who are simply trying to Improve their Standing in life by Grifting the plethora of Mouth Breathing Goobers in this country Desperate for a Messiah, No Matter How Absurd, to save them from the Mundanity of their Sad, Meaningless Lives.
(Read the rest at Jonestown...)

The Limbaugh Principle

Rush Limbaugh Compares Al Franken's Win to the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Vote Recount

(A Poetic Justice Photomontage)

Sotomayor, White Grievance Politics & the Supreme Court

The topic below was originally posted on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

Two of America’s leading sexist bigots, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, recently cited a 2001 speech delivered by federal Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor as proof of her racism. As a liberal partisan, my instinctive reaction is disgust at their cynical attempt to exploit white identity grievance politics against the first Hispanic Supreme Court nominee. Conservatives have been singing the same tune since Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign in 1968 with enormous destructive impact upon American civic life.

Nonetheless, Sotomayor’s words and conservative critics reaction to her nomination, is instructive about our race/gender biases as well as the false ideal of objectivity in a Supreme Court justice. By now, many of us have read the following passage from Sotomayor’s 2001 speech to the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law:

“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”

First, let’s address the argument between Sotomayor and those who believe that competent judges should reach the same conclusions regardless of their backgrounds, while Sotomayor acknowledges the impact of life experience upon her decisions. It happens there is truth in both arguments.

For example, it might surprise many Americans to learn that the Supreme Court with judges as ideologically different as Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg could ever reach a unanimous decision. Yet, it’s not unprecedented for the Supreme Court to announce numerous unanimous decisions early in its term. Indeed, on January 27th of this year, the Supreme Court announced five unanimous decisions with respect to civil rights laws protecting workers against employer retaliation. The rights of workers and employers are often wedges between liberals and conservatives, yet Scalia and Ginsburg voted the same way on five such cases earlier this year.

However, Sotomayor is also correct. As legal scholar and former Supreme Court clerk Christopher Eisgruber, persuasively argues, the Constitution contains too many abstract and vague references such as the Equal Opportunity Clause, for nine individuals to interpret the law without any ideological predisposition. Typically, as Eisgruber pointed out to me in a podcast interview two weeks ago, precedent and text regardless of their judicial philosophies restrain lower court jurists. Even the famous case involving fire fighters in New Haven, Connecticut that have conservative critics frothing at the mouth against Sotomayor was a ruling largely based upon precedent and two of her colleagues voted the same way.

Yet as Eisgruber also noted in our interview, historically, liberals and conservative jurists alike are eventually compelled to be “activists” and intervene through judicial review whenever a clause in the Constitution is simply too vague to provide sufficient guidance. As someone who clerked for conservative U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Patrick E. Higginbortham and liberal Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens, Eisgruber knows whereof he speaks.

Most of the time, an appeals court judge can be an “umpire” as Chief Justice John Roberts famously put it during his 2005 confirmation hearings. Much of the time, Supreme Court justices are impartial actors and personalities as different as Ginsburg and Scalia often rule the same way. Sotomayor’s background suggests that when the law and Constitution are clear, she will likely be representative of that tradition.

Nonetheless, history also suggests that the next Supreme Court justice will be confronted with cases during their tenure that transcend the text drafted by America’s founders two centuries ago or feel compelled to overturn the will of congress. For example, future Supreme Courts may preside over cases with respect to civil liberties and the technology of functional magnetic resonance imaging (brain mapping) in which neither the Constitution nor legal precedent are applicable. It also seems inevitable the Supreme Court will eventually preside over a case that transcends the will of state legislatures or congress with respect to gay marriage to ensure equal protection for all citizens.

And that leads to the Sotomayor phrase about "a wise Latina woman” that has some conservatives behaving as if their sphincter muscles are on fire. I largely agree with Sotomayor’s 2001 speech. Even so, I believe her words about “a wise Latina woman” were ill chosen. Nonetheless, this latest conservative “outrage” is a mere distraction taken out of context. Conservatives are longtime practitioners of America’s fear industrial complex and the Sotomayor nomination is merely the latest example.

When it’s one of their presidents they want justices with a reliable predisposition towards conservative activism. If a Democrat is in the White House conservatives emphasize restrained moderation. In fairness, liberal activists also emphasize moderation whenever confronted with nominees such as Roberts and Alito but gear up for a fight to advance our cause when we have a Democratic president. Such is the game of politics and elections do have consequences.

Race/gender absolutely influences our worldview and can’t help but have an impact on a Supreme Court justice. Denying that is disingenuous and we shouldn’t. Nor should we fear it. Rather, a diversity of perspectives on our nation's highest court represents America at its best. Presently, this is an uncomfortable reality for many conservatives who don’t want to relinquish the benefits of “white privilege” and feel insecure about a black Democratic president nominating a female Hispanic judge. Unless of course that justice is pliable to their worldview as Clarence Thomas has been.

It happens that I have a measure of empathy for their discomfort. My formative years were in Rockland County, New York and it was largely white bread cookie cutter suburbia when I was a kid. Although I live in Brooklyn, New York, today, I occasionally feel nostalgic about that provincial homogenous existence of my youth. I love the diversity of my adult neighborhood but even a liberal like myself is not above such sentiments.

Nonetheless, white male hegemony domination of the Supreme Court is an anachronism best discarded. Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court is a reflection of our society's maturation and represents progress. As for conservatives and their childish grievances, I say spare the rod and spoil the child.

The Dick and Liz STFU Sandwich on Wry...

(A Poetic Justice Photomontage)

That 100 Days Leadership Thing

The topic below was originally published on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal. Also, I hope readers here will consider voting for my blog for the 2009 Chapeau Blog Awards. My appreciation as always for being allowed to X-Post here. I love the new format!

A charismatic president assumes power in a time of unprecedented turmoil after his hapless predecessor becomes a hated symbol of inertia. Financial institutions previously trusted for their forbearance are exposed as reckless stewards while the global economy implodes and regular folks who did nothing wrong are ruined. As job losses mount, unscrupulous demagogues at home and abroad exploit the chaos for nefarious objectives.

Discredited conservatives accuse the new president of socialism while anarchists under the guise of populism are determined to expropriate and redistribute private capital’s wealth no matter what the consequences. Yet the nation rallies to the new president even as progress is slow, uneven and plagued with setbacks. Critics on the left, including his wife, believe the new president is overly cautious while conservatives view him as akin to the anti-Christ.

The public discourse is volatile as the new president confounds his critics and towers over the body politic. Sound familiar? Generation-Y liberals may assume I’m referring to President Barack Obama’s first 100 days that we’ll be reading about next week. I am of course referring to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who first established the 100 days benchmark in 1933. FDR’s first 100 days were the foundation of twenty-years of Democratic Roosevelt/Truman administrations that forever changed American society and its place in the world.

FDR himself was brilliant and flawed as he navigated the country through perilous waters domestically and internationally. His leadership enabled America and its allies to prevail in World War Two and establish an enduring middle class. Yet there was also a dark side to the FDR years as the “imperial presidency” was launched and Japanese civilians were “relocated.” The imperial presidency later metastasized during the cold war following the 1947 National Security Act under Harry Truman.

Ultimately, the FDR years, like any presidency was a product of its time. Skirmishes between labor and business were violent. The gap between rich and poor was grotesque. Much of rural America didn’t have electricity and whites routinely murdered their black neighbors. Anti-Semitic demagogues such as Father Charles Coughlin polluted the airwaves. Industrial leaders like Henry Ford as well as national hero, aviator Charles Limburg, openly expressed their admiration for Adolph Hitler.

Capitalism as well as the concept of democracy itself seemed to be retreating as Hitler in Germany, Josef Stalin in Soviet Russia and Italy’s Benito Mussolini maneuvered for global domination. The Japanese Empire brutally worked to establish their “Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and carved up the Chinese mainland in the 1930s. Americans hoped to avoid foreign wars and FDR promised to keep us out as he plotted behind the scenes to save civilization.

In any era, leadership is not for the meek or faint of heart. FDR projected jaunty confidence and empathy for the downtrodden as he defined America’s center of political gravity on his terms. His leadership style was one of calculated confrontation and FDR skillfully utilized his political capital to take on conservative agents of the status quo at home while inspiring an international alliance against implacable enemies abroad. Seventy-five years after his first inauguration many historians regard him as America’s greatest president.



President Obama’s current challenges and leadership style is understandably compared to FDR – especially has we approach his 100 day benchmark. His support remains notably impressive in spite of the plutocratic dynamic duo of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner or his waffling with respect to prosecuting crimes committed by the Bush Administration.

Every week we set new records for unemployment claims and the Wall Street bailouts continue. Yet the public continues to believe in his leadership. I do too even as I fret over Obama’s handling of the banking crisis and worry his presidency will be consumed by efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan.

My interpretation of President Obama’s political standing is that his support is partly attributed to a conservative minority that is bereft of ideas and maturity. There is the faux populist outrage of “tea parties” to the sniveling temper tantrums of conservatives when Obama shakes hands with Hugo Chavez. Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh look like fools as they critique Obama’s handling of the Somali Pirates hostage crisis while the administration initiates a successful rescue operation. Republicans in Texas and Georgia speak openly of secession while a more sophisticated majority wants to come together and solve problems.

The public face of conservatism is angry, xenophobic, homophobic, shrill and insipid and no longer taken seriously. It's not just that conservative ideology is thorougly discredited as it was in 1933. Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, John Boehner and Newt Gingrich are almost cartoonish in their political opposition. Hence, the real debate with respect to public policy about issues ranging from the potential fall of Pakistan, engaging Iran, addressing global warming, strengthening public education, rebuilding infrastucture, renewable energy and health care is between the center and the left. The center of political gravity is being redefined by Barack Obama because Republicans don't belong at the grownups table.

On the left, people like me critique the administration so he will seize the moment and push the envelope further. We want accountability for the Bush Administration’s crimes, a swift reversal of the Wall Street centric economy that has placed millions of Americans on the abyss of destitution and a public option for health care. The end result of impatient liberal/left critics and America’s puerile conservatives is that President Obama owns the political center just as FDR did.

Whether Obama takes full advantage of his unique stature will take far longer than 100 days to know. This is only the end of the beginning.

Wild Action!

Time again to take action(s)!

+

petition your reps for

the wilderness

Frank Schaeffer tells it like it is...

Dear Republican Leaders: The Republican Party has become the party dedicated to sabotaging the American future.

You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired -- President Obama -- to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created.

I used to be one of you. As recently as 2000 I worked to get Senator McCain elected in that year's primary. (McCain and Gen. Tommy Franks wrote glowing endorsements regarding my book about military service, AWOL.). I have a file of handwritten thank you notes from Presidents Ford, Reagan, Bush I and II. In the 1970s and early 80s I hung out with Jack Kemp and bought into his "supply side" myth and even wrote a book he endorsed pushing his ideas.) There's more, but take it from me; my parents (evangelical leaders Francis and Edith Schaeffer) and I were about as tight with -- and useful to -- the Republican Party as anyone. We played a big part creating the Religious Right.

In the mid 1980s I left the Religious Right, after I realized just how very anti-American they are, (the theme I explore in my book Crazy For God). They wanted America to fail in order to prove they were right about America's "moral decline." Soon after McCain lost in 2000 I re-registered as an independent in disgust with W. Bush. But I still respected many Republicans. Not today.

How can anyone who loves our country support the Republicans now? Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan defined the modern conservatism that used to be what the Republican Party I belonged to was about. Today no actual conservative can be a Republican. Reagan would despise today's wholly negative Republican Party. And can you picture the gentlemanly and always polite Ronald Reagan, endorsing a radio hate-jock slob who crudely mocked a man with Parkinson's and who now says he wants an American president to fail?!

With people like Limbaugh as the loudmouth image of the Republican Party -- you need no enemies. But something far more serious has happened than an image problem: the Republican Party has become the party of obstruction at just the time when all Americans should be pulling together for the good of our country. Instead, Republicans are today's fifth column sabotaging American renewal.

President Obama has been in office barely 45 days and the Republican Party has the nerve to blame him for the economic and military cataclysm he inherited. I say economic and military cataclysm because without the needless war in Iraq you all backed we would not be in the economic mess we're in today. If that money had been spent here at home on renovating our infrastructure, taking us toward a green economy, putting our health-care system in order we'd be a very different situation. (Read the rest...)

Rush Limblah blah blah...

Submit Your Slogan

The Democratic Party will go through all of the submitted slogans, and the winner will have his or her submission appear on a billboard in Rush Limbaugh's hometown of West Palm Beach, Florida -- and receive a free T-shirt featuring the winning slogan.

Bush was to diplomacy what Rush is to neutrality.

Return Of The Mob - Or The Mob Strikes Back?

This ignoramus represents what the Republican party is now - a devolution we've witnessed all too well (more examples here, here, here, here, here and here) during the past U.S. Presidency campaign and which is now fully achieved:

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Joe the Plumber suggests some members of Congress should be shot

On Wednesday, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher said that if he were in Congress, he would “probably be in jail” because he’d be charged with “slapping some member.” He added, “And that’s not [bull] either.” ThinkProgress asked Joe at CPAC yesterday which members he would most like to slap. “Pretty much anybody that’s stood there and said anything bad about our troops, pretty much anybody who sat there and talked treasonous talk about America,” Joe said. He then implied that some members of Congress should be shot:

Back in the day, really, when people would talk about our military in a poor way, somebody would shoot ‘em. And there’d be nothing said about that, because they knew it was wrong. You don’t talk about our troops. You support our troops. Especially when our congressmen and senators sit there and say bad things in an ongoing conflict.

Watch it:

Of course, politicians aren’t the only ones Joe thinks should be banned from speaking about war. Last month, he said that journalists shouldn’t “be anywhere allowed war.” “I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting,” he said.

Update: ThinkProgress also asked Joe about his recent trip to Israel. Wurzelbacher repeated his claim that Obama’s victory means “death to Israel.” He also seemed to say that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Watch the video here.

If you think that Joe is not representative of today's devolved G.O.P., then try this for size:

This morning, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He tried to up the fear quotient in the room by raising the prospect of an Iranian-sent nuclear attack on an American city. “It’s [a] tiny [threat] compared to the Soviet Union,” Bolton said, “but is the loss of one American city — pick one at random: Chicago — is that a tiny threat?” The audience erupted in cheers and laughter at the idea of Obama’s home city being obliterated. Watch it:

Later during the conference, Joe Scarborough warned the audience that conservatives would have to work on their “tone.” “We’re not going to win votes, we’re not going to win elections by calling Obama a communist,” Scarborough said.

Update: The Wonk Room's Matt Duss, who attended CPAC today, notes that Bolton also fearmongered on Obama's dedication to Israel. He told an audience member that he "very much fear[s] it's right" that Obama would not aid Israel were it attacked.

And even this, as well:

ThinkProgress is attending the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference today. Earlier this afternoon, Cliff Kincaid, head of a conservative group Accuracy in Media, introduced Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN). Kincaid suggested that President Obama is a communist, then suggested Obama was not born in the United States — to which the crowd cheered wildly. Watch it:

Despite the fact that it has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked, radical conservatives continue to peddle the ridiculous myth. Last weekend, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) noted that he had never seen Obama’s birth certificate. Trying to calm the ensuing firestorm, a spokesman for Shelby claimed the senator “was not saying and I’m not saying he (Obama) is or isn’t [a U.S. citizen], he was just saying he hasn’t seen one (a birth certificate).”

The more things change ...

Aah, those primitive minds (here's yet another one) - it is fascinating - and also worrisome - how much they are uncivilized, crass, savage barbarians, don't you think?

This picture taken at this year's CPAC is quite telling (h/t):
Rush Limbaugh must be ever so proud (and then some) of his United Haters of America Party - where fear and hate are the end all, be all, of the game.

Good thing Joe's book of wit and wisdom is apparently failing to thrive ...

Maybe then there's still hope for us.

But we still have a long way to go ... a very long way to go.

Yet one more case in point.

(More here, here, here and there)

(Cross-posted from APOV)

Depraved Days

O! These depraved days of doom rocking the skies, the armies
Of sinister things toward death
To the fetid drums of war.

O! To our horror these damned devil dogs to their howling
Near the gaping mouths
And unwarranted, decomposed applause
Within the pulse of torturous, whirling dread.

Goddamned horror of their pasty mouthed infection
Riddling the mind, dulling the senses, stoking the fear of fear.
This! This! This is what we want? Tormented reason? Souls
Whose only judgments are bloody goddamned vengeance?
Rooting downward we’re filling our mouths with reeking sewage.

In these audiences are the people of this land. O! The children
Will soon look to them for truth,
Seek them out for sound council,
Shaping their ovation, bent, unripe and swilling from hell’s cup.

© 2007 mrp/thepoetryman

Hypocrisy And Primitive Minds

Here's one bit of "news" I just could not let pass without a comment, despite being busy as hell with science up to my ears:

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Limbaugh Opposes Health IT Provisions, Fears His Medical Records Might Become Public

As the Senate prepares to vote on its paired down version of the recovery package, Rush Limbaugh is still inventing reasons to oppose its passage. Today on his radio show, Limbaugh zeroed in on a $20 billion portion of the bill devoted to increasing the use of health care IT. Limbaugh warned, “Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system” and declared that this and similar health care provisions have “nothing to do with stimulus but have everything to do with advancing the liberal agenda”:

LIMBAUGH: Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Now there are arguments back and forth about whether or not this is a good thing. The opportunity for the loss of privacy is huge here by digitizing and making everybody’s health care records computerized. Especially having a major federal database where everybody’s health records are.

To illustrate his flawed argument about the “loss of privacy,” Limbaugh noted today’s revelations that Alex Rodriquez used performance enhancing drugs in the early part of this decade. “[A]sk Alex Rodriguez about privacy,” he remarked. Watch it:

Limbaugh can rest assured that his drug records (that have already been disclosed) and Americans’ health care records will be protected by “stringent privacy and security controls” even if they are digitized. In fact, President Bush’s former Coordinator for Health IT, Dr. David Brailer, explained that he is even concerned that “the House bill [goes] so overboard on privacy that it may inhibit the flow of information.”

In addition, Limbaugh is wrong to suggest that the recovery package would create a “major federal database” of every citizen’s health records. Rather, most summaries of the legislation explain that physicians will be offered financial incentives in the form of direct grants and increased Medicare reimbursement rates for adopting “certified electronic health records” and proving that they utilize them “effectively.” Indeed, while the government will be subsidizing the creation of this “nationwide system to exchange health data electronically” — it will not be running it.

Finally, Limbaugh’s claim that investment in health care has “nothing to do with stimulus” — a common right-wing canard — is false. The funding related to health care IT alone is projected to create over 200,000 jobs. As Igor Volsky recently noted, “Investing in Health IT not only saves money, creates jobs and reduces medical errors, but it also helps primary care physicians afford the infrastructure for expansion.”

Now, remember this oldie from Teh Rush?

Limbaugh, Fox's Angle repeated misleading claim that NSA program targeted only terror suspects

(...)

During the February 15 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program monitored Americans that "have to be getting or placing phone calls to terrorists overseas," while Fox News chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle similarly described the NSA program as "listen[ing] in on terrorists" during the next day's edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume. But as Media Matters for America has previously noted, media reports cite administration officials who characterize the wiretapping program as having cast a broad net, monitoring the communications of thousands of people with no terrorist connection.

Limbaugh criticized Washington Post staff writer Charles Babington while reading portions of Babington's February 15 article on the Senate Intelligence Committee's deliberations into whether to investigate the program, suggesting that Babington and the Post were not "accurately presenting the facts to the readers" in stating that the NSA program "eavesdrops on an undisclosed number of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents without obtaining warrants from a secret court." In doing so, he repeated, along with Angle, the defense of the program advanced by members of the administration that it targets suspected terrorists and not ordinary Americans.

(...)

Of course, we all know the truth of it now - and yet, where have been Rush Limbaugh's privacy worries concerning such factual revelations?

Oh, ri-ight ... this occurred on Bush's watch, now didn't it? Old Rush surely can't be expected to dump on his beloved Decider, eh?

No - so instead, he happily satisfies himself with gratuitous fearmongering about scary but groundless speculations in order to have something to gripe at Democrats.

Ah yes, those primitive minds and their hypocritical fearmongering ...

Q.E.D. - yet again.

But do not worry, Rush - your "new pal" is way ahead of you on this.

(sigh)

Speak truth to idiocy!

Follow this link and - Tell Rush Limbaugh what you think of him wanting Obama to fail!