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December 6, 2009
The Tattlesnake – GOP Nuts ‘n’ Money Edition
“The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.”
– Paul Krugman, “The Politics of Spite,” NY Times, Oct. 5, 2009.“… [T]he 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”
– Alex Carey
Now Alaska’s Hockey Momster has had her ‘Birther’ moment, alternately encouraging the Orly Taitz Bizarros to pursue their vain quest to besmirch Obama’s presidency by endlessly questioning his birth certificate, and then backing away from that stance on her Facebook ramblings. This madness has reached its limit – every sane member of Congress should condemn this insanity and then demand that Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs, Jerome Corsi, random Republican politicians, and any other right-winger who has questioned Obama’s American citizenship post their own birth certificate publicly and, in keeping with the Birther’s rules, it can’t be a stamped copy. Of course, they won’t be able to do this – every US state keeps the original document and issues a photocopy or duplicate certificate when legal proof of birth is required – and perhaps that will finally shut these fringe-freak nitwits up.
Speaking of Wasilla’s Gift to the Democrats, word is her book tour is something of a bust, leaving a trail of disappointed Palinites in its wake, and not just in Indianapolis where she left a crowd of cranky book-buyers standing out in the rain. Not only is her speaking bureau allegedly regretting signing her on after her Hong Kong fiasco, but now her publishing company may be thinking twice about that $1.4 million they paid her in advance. Sure, they’ll probably make it back in book sales, but Palin’s unstable personality, and her unpopular insistence on selling photos of herself posing with her fans, have driven her bus tour handlers eye-rolling, hair-pulling crazy.
But Palin is just the most prominent peak of a small molehill of the American public — ignorant, peevish, narrow-minded, misinformed, angry, intolerant — they are an army of everything that’s wrong with America, denizens of a weird trickster God who speaks to them through words they don’t completely understand, or tint with their interior wrath, rendered and interpreted by preachers, politicians and other charlatans either crass or confused or both, but they’re all making a quick buck from peddling hatred-on-a-cross to this crowd.
They wouldn’t matter much except they are whipped into a frenzy and ‘played’ by cynical manipulators like Frank Luntz, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who, in turn, wouldn’t have much impact without the billions of dollars spent to spread their message from right-wing corporatists like Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch.
If Sarah continues to implode, even Fox News and Limbaugh may not be able to save her presidential chances in 2012 – at some point, we may have to form a Progressives for Palin coalition to make sure she’s the GOP nominee in three years, assuring Obama’s reelection and the ultimate crack-up of the radical GOP.
© 2009 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org
April 25, 2009
February 26, 2009
September 23, 2008
The Tattlesnake – Flying Under the Cuckoo’s Nest Edition
“In fact, now I come to think of it, do we decide questions at all? We decide answers, no doubt: but surely the questions decide us? It is the dog, you know, that wags the tail — not the tail that wags the dog.”
– Lewis Carroll
“Welcome to the conservative’s worst nightmare: The law of unintended consequences. Why? Nobody wants to admit it, folks, but the conservatives’ grand ideology is backfiring, actually turning the world’s greatest capitalistic democracy into the world’s newest socialist economy.”
– Paul B. Ferrell, “11 reasons America’s a new socialist economy,” MarketWatch, July 22, 2008.
“The US economy had better have luck on its side. Luck is about all it has left.”
– Clive Crook, “Only Luck Can Save America’s Economy,” Financial Times, Aug. 3, 2008.
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke are a couple of dimwitted chuckleheads who shouldn’t be in any position of authority related to solving this current GOP-generated economic catastrophe. Either Paulson and Bernanke didn’t see it coming, in which case they were asleep at the switch; or they did see it coming, and did nothing to stop it. Either way, they are useless at effecting a solution; both should be handed their walking papers. Good replacements might be Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research as Treasury Secretary – he appreciated the danger of the approaching tsunami years ago – and Princeton economist Paul Krugman for the Fed. NY Times columnist Krugman also had to brains to read the signs indicating that the bridge is out up ahead and we were entering the Twilight Zone financially long before most of the various Up with People-Eaters ‘experts’ on The Street realized we were cruising to sure doom. Paulson and Bernanke should exit quickly with their heads held in shame, lucky they haven’t been forced to walk the plank for their egregious ignorance and incompetence. Oh, and the Bush Boy? Keep making speeches about the economy you still don’t understand, Junior, and reminding voters why they don’t need another neoconservative Republican in the White House next year.
The current economic meltdown, which some of us left-wing nuts like Mike Whitney and yours truly have been predicting for years, is the direct result of neoconservative policies, starting with Ronald Reagan. When Reagan said government is the problem, he apparently forgot that the government of the United States is of, by and for the people, so he was actually saying that ‘we the people’ are the problem. And so we are – if not for our demands that rapacious corporations and the greedy wealthy obey the laws, pay us and treat us fairly, and otherwise conduct themselves with some modicum of decency, the Corprocracy could have a field day, in the same way the Mafia could prosper wildly if there weren’t any ‘regulations’ governing their activities. For the last 25 years, the neoconservative Republicans, and especially John McCain, have successfully done all that they could to deregulate banks, business and the markets and it has culminated in the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, as even one of the ardent handmaidens of the collapse, flank-coverer Alan Greenspan, recently confessed. This is also a failure of F.A. von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Paul Wolfowitz, Grover Norquist and every other neoconservative jackass who has come down the pike banging the drum for the delusion of trickle-down wealth, the deception of free international trade, the hallucination of cheap privatized government services, and the myth of self-regulating markets.
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September 1, 2008
July 26, 2008
The Tattlesnake – Obama Globetrotting Triggers McCain Jealousy Edition
Jealousy Thy Name is McCain: The GOP and the Punditrocracy are livid over Obama turning his world tour, which was supposed to expose his bumbling inexperience as he committed an endless string of gaffes, into a victory jaunt, the images sent back to America showing a confident and relaxed Obama at home and presidential on the world stage. As anyone who has studied Ronald Reagan’s campaigns knows, the successful image is often more important than what was said in the speeches, especially to those with the TV sound muted or who only catch a part of the news, as so many Americans do. Obama, I think intentionally, wanted to show himself as ‘The President,’ getting white America comfortable with the idea of a black man as their leader, and in that he has succeeded beyond expectations. Another aspect is the palpable tinge of jealously displayed by the McCainiacs – they well know that their withered and dull candidate couldn’t attract an adoring crowd of that size overseas and it preys on them to no end. The McCain campaign was out-played and outclassed on this one, as Globetrotter Obama vanquished the amateurish McCain team in their home court.
A Campaign Metaphor? Barack Obama goes to Berlin, Germany, and is greeted by over 200,000 cheering Germans waving US flags; John McCain goes to the German Village neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, and chows down on bratwurst and cream puffs. (Did Ron Fournier of the AP pick up the tab?) Isn’t this pretty much the prevailing zeitgeist of both campaigns: Obama’s large and in charge and McCain’s left sitting there forlornly chewing on a sausage?
Speaking of the Out-of-Touch Punditrocracy: Following Obama’s spectacular Berlin appearance, many of the cable news pundits oddly obsessed, as did NBC’s Brian “Broadcast Newshawk” Williams, on Obama admitting that McCain’s ‘surge’ in Iraq had been right and Obama had been wrong. Obama wouldn’t play their game and correctly attributed the current less violent conditions in Iraq to many factors, so they pouted that he was evading the question. As Eric Alterman at Media Matters wrote the other day, “Why is the surge being reported as an undeniable success when it still has not accomplished most of the things it was promised to do and has likely accomplished nothing that will last once its unsustainable numbers are drawn down?” But that’s the kind of question that our infatuated Big Media somehow never gets around to asking McCain. Gee, it’s a good thing we have a liberal media – imagine what they would do to Obama if they were really McCain sympathizers at heart?
The Tattlesnake – Word on the Street Edition
In the spirit of the late Mike Royko’s Slats Grobnik, here are comments from the unFoxed Vox Populi:
– L.A. Mike, who was born and lived in Los Angeles for most of his life, on the Republicans paying $2K for simulated lesbian bondage at the Voyeur Club:
“What wrong with those dudes? It’s really stupid. For half that price in L.A. you could rent a motel room, hire a couple of hookers, see the same show up close and join in if you felt like it. You’d even have enough left for a bottle of some primo liquor. That’s really a stupid waste of money.”
– V.J., a small business owner for over 20 years, on Obama’s tax plan:
“I’m a middle-class small business owner and everybody was telling me, ‘watch out, Obama’s gonna raise your taxes!’ I just got my tax forms back from my accountant and I’m paying $800 less this year than last, and he specifically said it was thanks to two deductions Obama put through. If this is Obama’s big tax increase for the middle-class, keep it coming!”
– Anna, who worked in state government for 20 years, on Sarah Palin:
“I don’t get it – how do you quit as governor and then pass yourself off as a winner? How do you tell other families to practice abstinence when your own kid gets pregnant when she’s underage? Why does anybody take her seriously?”
– Al, who worked at a mail order firm, on the ruthless corporate culture:
“Worked at the same job for 12 years. We heard the rumor that company was being sold, but my boss, the owner of the company, looked me straight in the eye and told me he’d never sell and I’d always have a job there. Six months later we’re all fired and the owner makes off with a fortune from selling the company. I asked one of the ladies in accounting what happened – the S.O.B. was in the process of selling the company the very day he told me that B.S. that he’d never sell! The lady said he lied because he didn’t want people quitting to take other jobs before the new owner took over – wanted to squeeze every dime out of the place, even if it left us flat. He lied to my face and I thought this man was my friend!”
– Vernon, who managed an office for 10 years, talks about Michael Steele’s RNC spending:
“I’ll tell you this: If I had been charging anything from Tiffany’s or the liquor store to ‘office supplies,’ and I had approved an expenditure of a couple grand to a strip club, there would have been about two minutes before I was fired and out on the street. I don’t know how he gets away with it.”
– Lily, a waitress at an upscale restaurant, on GOP tax cuts:
“Why doesn’t the media ever call these guys out? They get up there, these Republicans, always talking about tax cuts and they’re rich as fuck! Sure, they want tax cuts – for themselves! Yeah, I got my little piddley-ass tax cut from Bush, and the price of everything went up, including my state taxes, so I went way further in the hole. They really treat us like we’re too dumb to know what they’re doing. Fuckers!”
– Rory, who once worked at a mental health facility, on the Teabaggers:
“These people must all have Alzheimer’s like Reagan. They don’t remember we had big deficits and big government under Republicans since Reagan? They don’t remember Reagan bailed out the savings and loans in the 1980s? I didn’t see them out there screaming and yelling then. They think the shitty economy started under Obama? Give me a break. They just hate him cause he’s black. These tea party people should go to their doctors and be tested for Alzheimer’s – they’ve definitely lost it. I mean if they can afford a head doctor on their fixed incomes — oh, wait a sec, Medicare will pay for that, so they’re covered!”