BartBlog

May 20, 2007

Zepp Jamison: Making a Confederacy of Dunces

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 8:40 am

Zepp Jamison, May 20, 2007

The other day, Paul Krugman wrote a column called “Don’t Blame Bush.”
Drastically boiled down and rendered into varnish, his point was that
while Putsch may look and sound like a demented moron, it wasn’t
entirely his fault, because the whole fershluggeneh GOP was demented.
The eleven lawn jockeys at the Faux/GOP debate promised nothing but More
of the Same (with the exception of Ron Paul, who the GOP wants to ban
from future debates). Krugman pointed to the candidates’ debate as an
example, in which 10 of the 11 candidates applauded the gulag at
Guatanamo. (Guiliani even said he would “double” it, leading an ecstatic
Jon Stewart to shout, “He landed the double Guantanamo! No one’s ever
done that before!”). Stewart watched the debate and saw the same thing
that Krugman apparently did: that some or all of the eleven clones
standing there must have forgotten to pay their brain bills or
something, because they all sounded like drooling idiots.

This all came out on the same day that Al Gore’s new book, “The Assault
on Reason” came out. It deals with the ignorance and stupidity – often
willful – that has become so prevalent in US politics. Gore’s book
reminds us all that the powers of viciousness and stupidity overcame the
will of the American people in 2000, and installed a man who can’t even
read a book, let alone write one. Gore also notes that far too many
people are complacently happy to be led by people who think evolution is
a secular hoax, or that scientists have a political agenda but that
politicians don’t.

Having GOP candidates sound like drooling idiots isn’t exactly new. They
wouldn’t be where they are today if they didn’t sound like drooling
idiots. Look at the White House. Would Present Occupant be there if he
hadn’t managed to convince a lot of drooling idiots that he was the kind
of guy they would like to sit down and have a beer with? Nothing at all
like that guy Gore, with his correct English and ability to name the
capitals of foreign countries like Canada and New Mexico!

(more…)

Myths of the Netroots Part 3

Filed under: Uncategorized — Centristdem @ 7:36 am

One of the advantages of being a centrist is you’re not often bound by political dogma. Sure, a centrist can be loyal to any given political party and subscribe to common points of view with that party, but we’re also able to weigh evidence and opposing opinions to arrive at a political stance. We’re not beholden to the liberal or conservative ideology. Consequently, we’re not often confined by “truthiness,” a term coined by Stephen Colbert in reference to the quality by which a person claims to know something intuitively, instinctively, or “from the gut” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts. Colbert uses the term specifically when he critiques conservative/Republican politicians, but anyone who has ever had a discussion of a political nature with someone on the far left has probably encountered the use of “truthiness” themselves. They’re just not as organized with it as the Right.

A recent phenomenon coming from “progressives,” ripe with truthiness, was ripped from the conservative’s playbook. The belief that somehow Ross Perot caused George H.W. Bush re-election in 1992, thereby propelling Bill Clinton into the presidency, is a textbook example of the term. The Left’s recent embrace of this political myth is further indication of their disdain for President Clinton which often rivals in terms of vitriol with the Right’s.

The truth, though (not “truthiness”) lies in the actual statistical analysis of the ‘92 election. This is where it gets complicated. If number crunching makes your eyes glaze over, just skip to the end. Ready? (more…)

May 19, 2007

Frank Rich: The Reverend Falwell’s Heavenly Timing

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 11:29 pm

Frank Rich, The New York Times, May 20, 2007

Hard as it is to believe now, Jerry Falwell came in second only to Ronald Reagan in a 1983 Good Housekeeping poll anointing “the most admired man in America.” By September 2001, even the Bush administration was looking for a way to ditch the preacher who had joined Pat Robertson on TV to pin the 9/11 attacks on feminists, abortionists, gays and, implicitly, Teletubbies. As David Kuo, a former Bush official for faith-based initiatives, tells the story in his book “Tempting Faith,” the Reverend Falwell was given a ticket to the Washington National Cathedral memorial service that week only on the strict condition that he stay away from reporters and cameras. Mr. Falwell obeyed, though once inside he cracked jokes (“Whoa, does she look frumpy,” he said of Barbara Bush) and chortled nonstop.

This is the great spiritual leader whom John McCain and Mitt Romney raced to praise when he died on Tuesday, just as the G.O.P. presidential contenders were converging for a debate in South Carolina. The McCain camp’s elegiac press release beat out his rival’s by a hair. But everyone including Senator McCain knows he got it right back in 2000, when he labeled Mr. Falwell and Mr. Robertson “agents of intolerance.” Mr. Falwell was always on the wrong, intolerant side of history. He fought against the civil rights movement and ridiculed Desmond Tutu’s battle against apartheid years before calling AIDS the “wrath of a just God against homosexuals” and, in 1999, fingering the Antichrist as an unidentified contemporary Jew.

Though Mr. Falwell had long been an embarrassment and laughingstock to many, including a new generation of Christian leaders typified by Mr. Kuo, the timing of his death could not have had grander symbolic import. It happened at the precise moment that the Falwell-Robertson brand of religious politics is being given its walking papers by a large chunk of the political party the Christian right once helped to grow. Hours after Mr. Falwell died, Rudy Giuliani, a candidate he explicitly rejected, won the Republican debate by acclamation. When the marginal candidate Ron Paul handed “America’s mayor” an opening to wrap himself grandiloquently in 9/11 once more, not even the most conservative of Deep South audiences could resist cheering him. If Rudy can dress up as Jack Bauer, who cares about his penchant for drag?

Read More Here

Maureen Dowd: Résumé of Doom

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 11:11 pm

Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 19, 2007

Paul Wolfowitz may be out of a job soon, but think of what an amazing résumé he’ll be shopping around:

Work Experience

President of World Bank: 2005-2007

Responsibilities: Reining in European lefties, raining tax-free money on Arab girlfriend, and giving anti-corruption efforts a bad name.

Achievements: Paralyzed the international lending apparatus to the point where small countries had to max out their Visa cards to pay for malaria medicine. Learned the traditions of many cultures, including those of Turkey, where you apparently are not supposed to take off your shoes at mosques to reveal socks so full of holes that both big toes poke blasphemously through.

Deputy Secretary of Defense for President George W. Bush: 2001-2005

Responsibility: Starting a war.

Achievements: Mismanaged the world’s most powerful army. Shattered the system of international diplomacy that kept the peace for 50 years. Undermined the credibility of American intelligence operations. Needlessly brought humankind to the brink of nuclear war. Destroyed Iraq.

Demented Visionary: 1993-2001

Responsibility: Concocting a delusional plan for regime change in Iraq with pals like Shaha Riza, Ahmad Chalabi and his merry band of Iraqi exiles who conjured up phony intelligence about Saddam’s W.M.D.

Achievements: Imagining an Iraq that didn’t exist.

Read More Here

Al Gore Book Excerpt: “The Assault on Reason”

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 4:50 pm

Al Gore, Time Magazine, May 16, 2007

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: “This chamber is, for the most part, silent – ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate.”

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: “What has happened to our country?” People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy – and too partisan – to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason – the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power – remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

Read More Here

Hang In There, America: Competent Leadership Is Just 600-Plus Days Away

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 4:34 pm

Joseph L. Galloway, McClatchy Newspapers, May 17, 2007

As of May 17th, there were 613 days left until Jan. 20, 2009, and the end of our long national nightmare as President George W. Bush and his Rasputin, Vice President Dick Cheney, shuffle off to their necessarily well-guarded retirement homes and onto the ash heap of history.

So much of what they talked about doing in a new century and a new and different world never came to pass. So much of what they did to grow the power of the presidency and prune the constitutional safeguards crafted by our Founding Fathers, they never talked about.

The American people have turned their backs on George Bush and his dreams of planting the seeds of democracy in Mesopotamia at the point of a gun and seeing them spread like kudzu across the Middle East.

He’s failed in his quest for victory in Iraq and for a world put in order by a new and stronger United States, and his brash blundering into a dangerous land has made us all much less safe.

The president’s approval ratings are below his knees, sinking to 28 percent in one recent poll, and he cannot recover short of the kind of miracle that parts seas and feeds the multitudes.

Read More Here

Myths of the Netroots Part 2

Filed under: Uncategorized — Centristdem @ 7:55 am

Yesterday in the first part of Myths of the Netroots, I discussed how the term “Democratic base” is often misused on the left and spoken of in such a way as to exclude the majority of the Democratic base – the real base. Today’s topic is the 1994 mid-term elections and the causes of the historic and sweeping Democratic losses. Despite what you may have read at DailyKOS and other “progressive” stops in the blogosphere, centrist Democrats were not the culprits.

Like their rightwing counterparts, the New Left and their younger ideological heirs in the netroots have convinced themselves centrist southern Democrats and the Democratic Leadership Council directly caused the massive Democratic losses of 1994. No amount of reasoning and presentation of facts and voting trends will convince them otherwise. It is so simply because they need it to be so – to fit into their vision of Democratic party history. (more…)

I Don’t Hate America (or, Civics 101)

Filed under: Uncategorized — daveb @ 12:49 am

This is my first blog entry for the Bartblog. So I angsted over it for some time. For my first entry I decided it was important to introduce myself and tell you how I think.

(more…)

May 18, 2007

The Dungmobile

Filed under: Uncategorized — grimgold @ 9:07 pm

I read that one of the reasons Communist Chinese manufacturers are running such a huge trade surplus, is because the Chinese govt is giving their local manufacturers up to a 13% income tax break! It’s on the net, check it out.
This means that if billionaire Chow Dung decided to produce an automobile for export – the Dungmobile – he could sell it very cheaply because his govt would give him tax breaks. Dung could, in effect, have Detroit for lunch.
Dungmobiles would soon running around all over the USA because they would be very cheap because of such favorable tax treatment. He could even afford to put some sort of ‘new car’ scent so people would say “Hey! There goes a Dung, don’t those things smell good?”
Do you think the evil rich American automobile manufacturers would get tax breaks from our fed govt to compete with the Dungmobile?

I have to laugh.

And this is what is happening. Countries are getting govt help to compete with us unfairly.

This contributes to jobs going overseas.

Thought you’d like to know.

Grimgold 

 

Hillary Inc.

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 8:13 pm

Ari Berman, The Nation, June 4, 2007

In a packed ballroom in midtown Manhattan, Hillary Clinton is addressing hundreds of civil rights activists and labor leaders convened by the Rev. Al Sharpton for his annual National Action Network conference. The junior senator from New York starts slowly but picks up steam when she hits on the economic anxiety many in the room feel. “We’re not making progress,” she says, her sharp Midwestern monotone accented with a bit of Southern twang. “Wages are flat.” Nods of agreement. “This economy is not working!” Applause. She’s not quite the rhetorical populist her husband was on the campaign trail, but she can still feel your pain. “Everything has been skewed,” Clinton says, jabbing her index finger for emphasis, “to help the privileged and the powerful at the expense of everybody else!”

It’s a rousing speech, though ultimately not very convincing. If Clinton really wanted to curtail the influence of the powerful, she might start with the advisers to her own campaign, who represent some of the weightiest interests in corporate America. Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, not only polls for America’s biggest companies but also runs one of the world’s premier PR agencies. A bevy of current and former Hillary advisers, including her communications guru, Howard Wolfson, are linked to a prominent lobbying and PR firm–the Glover Park Group–that has cozied up to the pharmaceutical industry and Rupert Murdoch. Her fundraiser in chief, Terry McAuliffe, has the priciest Rolodex in Washington, luring high-rolling contributors to Clinton’s campaign. Her husband, since leaving the presidency, has made millions giving speeches and counsel to investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. They house, in addition to other Wall Street firms, the Clintons’ closest economic advisers, such as Bob Rubin and Roger Altman, whose DC brain trust, the Hamilton Project, is Clinton’s economic team in waiting. Even the liberal in her camp, former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, has lobbied for the telecom and healthcare industries, including a for-profit nursing home association indicted in Texas for improperly funneling money to disgraced former House majority leader Tom DeLay. “She’s got a deeper bench of big money and corporate supporters than her competitors,” says Eli Attie, a former speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals, but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, GOP operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists.

It’s not exactly an advertisement for the working-class hero, or a picture her campaign freely displays. Her lengthy support for the Iraq War is Clinton’s biggest liability in Democratic primary circles. But her ties to corporate America say as much, if not more, about what she values and cast doubt on her ability and willingness to fight for the progressive policies she claims to champion. She is “running to help and restore the great middle class in our country,” Wolfson says. So was Bill in 1992. He was for “putting people first.” Then he entered the White House and pushed for NAFTA, signed welfare reform, consolidated the airwaves through the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (leading to Clear Channel’s takeover) and cleared the mergers of mega-banks. Would the First Lady do any different? Ever since the defeat of healthcare reform, Hillary has been a committed incrementalist, describing herself as a creature of the “moderate, sensible center” whom business admires and rewards. During her six years in the Senate, she’s rarely been out front on difficult economic issues. Given her proximity to money and power, it’s not hard to figure out why she keeps controversial figures close to her–even if their work becomes a liability for her campaign.

Read More Here

Wolfowitz Will Not Have to Admit Wrongdoing and Will Recieve a $400,000 “performance bonus”

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 4:52 pm

John Donnelly, The Boston Globe, May 18, 2007

WASHINGTON — Paul D. Wolfowitz yesterday resigned as president of the World Bank over his role in arranging generous pay raises for his girlfriend, ending a prolonged, extraordinarily charged battle that some officials say has badly damaged the poverty-fighting organization. He will step down June 30.

The departure of Wolfowitz, who insisted throughout a six-week battle that he had done nothing wrong, came after the Bush administration dropped its efforts to try to keep him in the job and began trying to negotiate a deal for his departure. Senior US officials said they worried that the drawn-out affair was beginning to raise questions about the bank’s future effectiveness.

Wolfowitz will be able to collect a $400,000 performance bonus due him on June 1, according to two senior bank officials. US officials asked him to stay on as a caretaker until the end of June to allow time for the naming of a successor.

In the end, the 24-member bank board, in a statement that all but exonerated Wolfowitz, said, “He assured us that he acted ethically and in good faith in what he believed were the best interests of the institution, and we accept that. We also accept that others involved acted ethically and in good faith.”

While finding no ethical lapses, the board did conclude that “a number of mistakes were made by a number of individuals.”

Read More Here

Paul Krugman: Don’t Blame Bush

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 4:36 pm

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, May 18, 2007

I’ve been looking at the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: maybe we’ve all been too hard on President Bush.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Mr. Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law; he has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor.

But the leading contenders for the Republican nomination have given us little reason to believe they would behave differently. Why should they? The principles Mr. Bush has betrayed are principles today’s G.O.P., dominated by movement conservatives, no longer honors. In fact, rank-and-file Republicans continue to approve strongly of Mr. Bush’s policies – and the more un-American the policy, the more they support it.

Now, Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney may have done a few things other Republicans wouldn’t. Their initial domestic surveillance program was apparently so lawless and unconstitutional that even John Ashcroft, approached on his sickbed, refused to go along. For the most part, however, Mr. Bush has done just what his party wants and expects.

There was a telling moment during the second Republican presidential debate, when Brit Hume of Fox News confronted the contenders with a hypothetical “24″-style situation in which torturing suspects is the only way to stop a terrorist attack.

Bear in mind that such situations basically never happen in real life, that the U.S. military has asked the producers of “24″ to cut down on the torture scenes. Last week Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, circulated an open letter to our forces warning that using torture or “other expedient methods to obtain information” is both wrong and ineffective, and that it is important to keep the “moral high ground.”

But aside from John McCain, who to his credit echoed Gen. Petraeus (and was met with stony silence), the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, “where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil … My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo.” His remarks were greeted with wild applause.

Read More Here

Myths of the Netroots Part 1

Filed under: Uncategorized — Centristdem @ 10:51 am

People who know me know I’m a stickler for historical accuracy. I mean, shouldn’t everyone be? If someone, either knowingly or mistakenly, gets the historical record wrong, shouldn’t they be corrected? I believe so, and there are no better examples of historical revisionism than in the left netroots. I’ve gathered together five such leftwing political myths for your reading pleasure and will present them over the next five days… (more…)

May 17, 2007

Why Am I Not Hearing This?

Filed under: Uncategorized — grimgold @ 10:36 pm

Apparently the immigration reform bill is being rammed through Congress, before anyone has time to pour through the 1000+ pages.

What should take a month or two, with plenty of public comment, is being attempted in days.

Why? To cover up the fact that our elected leaders have been bought off by big business interests who want the cheap labor?

If this is true; if our House and Senate members are trying to pull a fast one, I have a really good answer:

Term limits.

Grimgold

Ann Coulter Tells Jerry Falwell to Say Hello to Ronald Reagan!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 9:34 pm

Ann Coulter, Human Events, May 16, 2007

No man in the last century better illustrated Jesus’ warning that “All men will hate you because of me” than the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who left this world on Tuesday. Separately, no man better illustrates my warning that it doesn’t pay to be nice to liberals.

Falwell was a perfected Christian. He exuded Christian love for all men, hating sin while loving sinners. This is as opposed to liberals, who just love sinners. Like Christ ministering to prostitutes, Falwell regularly left the safe confines of his church to show up in such benighted venues as CNN.

He was such a good Christian that back when we used to be on TV together during Clinton’s impeachment, I sometimes wanted to say to him, “Step aside, reverend — let the mean girl handle this one.” (Why, that guy probably prayed for Clinton!)

For putting Christ above everything — even the opportunity to make a humiliating joke about Clinton — Falwell is known as “controversial.” Nothing is ever as “controversial” as yammering about Scripture as if, you know, it’s the word of God or something.

From the news coverage of Falwell’s death, I began to suspect his first name was “Whether You Agree With Him or Not.”

Even Falwell’s fans, such as evangelist Billy Graham and former President Bush, kept throwing in the “We didn’t always agree” disclaimer. Did Betty Friedan or Molly Ivins get this many “I didn’t always agree with” qualifiers on their deaths? And when I die, if you didn’t always agree with me, would you mind keeping it to yourself?

Let me be the first to say: I ALWAYS agreed with the Rev. Falwell.

Read More Here

YOS Presents: Scribe’s Buried BS-O-Meter

Filed under: Uncategorized — Ye Olde Scribe @ 5:16 pm

Ye Olde Scribe’s Incredible, Inedible Links to Oblivion… and Other FUN Places
“Surfing the net at the speed of intellect.”


MySpace has been caught shutting down blogs critical of itself and other Murdoch owned companies. They even had the audacity to censor links to completely different websites when clicking through for MySpace. When 600 MySpace users complained, MySpace deleted the blog forum that the complaints were posted on. Taking their inspiration from Communist China, MySpace regularly uses blanket censorship to block out words like ‘God’. 

 

Things Learned on the Way to Doing Something Else
“Damn! Didn’t know THAT…” 

Part of the MUSTARD family?

Brussels sprouts

 

 Now, on to the main attraction…

      Scribe’s Buried BS-O-Meter…

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