May 14, 2009
May 13, 2009
May 12, 2009
May 11, 2009
The Tattlesnake – I Heard It Through the Grapevine Edition
There’s nothing more reliable than anonymously-sourced comments, as readers of the NY Times well know…
Item 1. “Here’s the way it worked in the GOP when Bush Junior was in office: If some Republican senator or representative threatened to vote against the White House on an important issue, they’d get ‘The Call,’ which went something like: ‘Okay, you vote any way you want but, when you’re up for re-election, don’t count on any help from the RNC, and we’re gonna call the big money donors to the party and tell them to take you off the list. Oh, and we’re also gonna run a heavyweight Republican against you in the primary, so you may not even get to run for re-election. So, you go on and cast your vote however you want.’ You could count the number of Republicans who crossed the line on one hand. I don’t understand why the Democrats can’t do this with the Conserva-Dems.”
Item 2. “These big biotech companies like Monsanto have labs down in Mexico that experiment on all kinds of weird sci-fi stuff they couldn’t get away with in the States. This new Swine Flu virus – H1N1 — is some kind of mutant combo of bird flu, swine flu and a human flu. How did those three get together naturally? If one of these weirdo genetic combos got loose outside the lab and started making people sick, you really believe in your wildest dreams that Monsanto or whoever is going to fess up and say ‘Whoops – our bad! We goofed and this genetically-altered mutant virus we created got loose!’ Sure — the billions in lawsuits and bad PR would bury them.”
Item 3. “Arlen Specter’s dreaming if he thinks he’s going to win the Pennsylvania Democratic primary. Off-year primaries are where the real party faithful vote and some of these folks still remember when Specter jumped from the Democrats to the Republicans in 1965, and they’re still pissed about it. Any credible Democrat could beat him. Hell, Chris Matthews could beat him. Specter could maybe save his bacon if he became a real progressive Democrat, but he’s already shown he’s not going there. Obama and [PA Gov. Ed] Rendell will say a few good words about him, but that’s not going to save him. That old man’s living in a fairyland. His ass is astroturf in 2010, in my opinion.”
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May 10, 2009
The Origins of the Two Mother’s Days
Before becoming the commercial holiday it is now, the Mother’s Day we celebrate on the second Sunday in May was originally about other issues, such as battlefield hospital sanitation and world peace. As Mother’s Day on the Net says in “The History (AKA Her-Story) of Mother’s Day”:
“In the United States, Mother’s Day experienced a series of false starts before eventually transitioning into the “Hallmark” holiday that we celebrate today. In 1858, Anna Reeves Jarvis was the first woman to hold an official celebration of mothers, when in her home state of West Virginia, she instituted Mothers’ Work Day to raise awareness about local sanitation issues. During the Civil War, she expanded the scope of Mothers’ Work Day to include sanitary conditions on both sides of the battlefield.”
In 1870, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” author Julia Ward Howe, appalled at the bloodshed of the American Civil War, proposed making it a Mother’s Day for Peace, as “Julia Ward Howe: Beyond the Battle Hymn of the Republic” at About.com states:
“In 1870, Julia Ward Howe took on a new issue and a new cause. Distressed by her experience of the realities of war, determined that peace was one of the two most important causes of the world (the other being equality in its many forms) and seeing war arise again in the world in the Franco-Prussian War, she called in 1870 for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. She wanted women to come together across national lines, to recognize what we hold in common above what divides us, and commit to finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts. She issued a Declaration, hoping to gather together women in a congress of action.”
Not surprisingly, a world Mother’s Day for Peace never received the support of the politicians that the later commercialized version would. From the About.com article:
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May 9, 2009
May 8, 2009
May 7, 2009
May 6, 2009
New Republicans Still Going to the Devil
‘New Ideas’ Mitt Romney distorts American history for fun and profit…
** Actual quote from Mitt Romney babbling BS in public at the GOP-Lite National Council for a New America ‘town hall listening tour’ at a pizza place in Northern Virginia, May 2, 2009, as quoted by CNN.
Brief history lesson: During the Revolutionary War the American Tories, the conservatives of their day, sided with the British; the rebels were the progressive liberals who wanted to break from King George III and bring an independent nation founded on the principles of freedom to the colonies, where no one was above the law. The Unitary Executive theory, which essentially makes the American president a monarch unaccountable to the laws of the land, is an invention of the Republican right-wing, not the Democrats.
“That new study indicating that conservatives might not quite understand that Stephen Colbert’s wingnut rants are devastating mockery rings true. Because not understanding isn’t just a failure to get the joke, it’s a defense mechanism: Without a certain level of cluelessness, the whole party would be knocking around in an unstatesmanlike manner, blurting, ‘My God, what have I done?’ Isn’t it simpler to insist, as Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe does, that Arlen Specter’s flight from the GOP is exactly what the party needs to regain control of both the House and the Senate? ‘This is the first visible evidence that what happened in 1993 is happening again now,’ Inhofe told Fox News, sounding like Caligula claiming that treasure chests of seashells were his tribute from Neptune for defeating the sea.”
[…]
“The sad fact is, fidelity to a Lost Cause valorizes you, it imitates honor. So the Republican Party isn’t about greed or power or any base selfishness; rather, it’s about nobly committing to something larger than itself–ending abortion, spreading democracy by force, saving Terri Schiavo, or, as of late, saving the GOP itself from knowledge of itself. Never mind that none of those commitments is remotely achievable, even the last.“For the kingdom of Lost Cause Republicans is not of this world. This world is corrupt and fallen. But there is another world where all of our desires, be they sleeping with 72 virgins or living tax-free, will be fulfilled, and heavenly justice will prevail.”
– Leslie Savan, “GOP Has Hit the Dead-End of Politics: Who’s Going to Buy Their Fear and Hysteria?” TheNation.com, May 5, 2009.
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May 5, 2009
While GOP Lite Dithers, the Queen, Like an Asp, Lays in Wait
News item from CNN, “Republicans Kick Off Campaign to Shine Party Image,” Rebecca Sinderbrand, May 2, 2009:
“Three prominent GOP leaders [Jeb "Not Another" Bush, Eric "The Turd Polisher" Cantor and Mitt "Yawn on Steroids" Romney] kicked off a campaign Saturday to reshape their party’s image ["Message: we're new and we care!"], gathering at a restaurant [the Pie-Tanza, a strip-mall pizza place] in northern Virginia for the first of a series of town hall meetings.
“The goal of the initiative, called the National Council for a New America [a Wonder-bread yuppie version of PNAC], is to connect Republican leaders with voters across the country to help get the party’s electoral fortunes back on track [by imitating Hillary Clinton's listening tours and Barack Obama's town hall meetings].”
“Is this just an event put together to look soft-focus and smiley for the national media? After all, they are holding it just right outside of DC and not in the heartland of America where they SAY these meetings will be focused.
“All signs are currently pointing to just another photo op in place of actual policy initiative and new ideas.”
– From “NCNA Meets, Will It Learn Anything?” WheresEricCantor.com.
May 4, 2009
May 3, 2009
May 2, 2009
May 1, 2009
April 30, 2009
The Tattlesnake – Rep. Hoot, Sen. Smalley and the Fox Swine Crew Edition
The Harder They Fall…
What a Hoot: As Keith Olbermann reported Wednesday night, perpetually-insane Minnesota comediatrix Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Daft) brought the funny the other day when she took to the House floor to condemn Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Dems for the ‘Hoot-Smalley Act’ of the Great Depression era. While you can never be sure when dealing with a dingbat like Bachmann, who apparently stole her blank eyeballs from a crazy doll in “Bride of Chucky“, she probably meant the ‘Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act‘ that was sponsored by two Republicans, and signed into law by Republican President Herbert Hoover in 1930. In reality, FDR campaigned against the act in 1932, and a Dem majority in Congress effectively repealed Smoot-Hawley in 1934 with the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, but in Michele’s loopy-dumb, wish-I-had-a-brain, far-right universe facts are a liberal, commie plot invented by the Devil to trip up those patriotically lying in the name of Jesus. If you’re a sane Republican (okay, that would be confined to ex-McCain manager Steve Schmidt and Sen. Olympia Snowe) you know that Bachmann’s Sixth District is already in the ‘D’ column in 2010 (she nearly lost to an unknown children’s book character named Elwyn Tinklenberg in ’08), and that you must find a legal means to (a) shut this woman up before she further damages what’s left of your party and (b) prevent her from running for president or vice president in 2012. (The vision of a ‘Palin-Bachmann 2012′ ticket privately induces dyspeptic nightmares of an LBJ/Goldwater electoral slaughter among GOP bigwigs.) Of course, it may be too late – the GOP brand is so tainted that if you jettisoned all of the dotty Dittoheads, nattering neocons, tone-deaf teabaggers, putrid Palinites, raging racists, Savage Nation neo-Nazis, fatuous Freepers, flaming fully-automatic gun nuts and kinky religious kooks, you could assemble what’s left of the party in a Washington hotel ballroom with space to spare for a trained elephant act. (For more on this, read the last two items in this article.)
He’s Good Enough, He’s Smart Enough and Doggone It, the People Liked Him! Speaking of Minnesota, the drab electoral Death March of Numb Norm Coleman, the Republican Sore Loser, received a little spark of life thanks to the wily minds in Al Franken’s
The Future Mrs. Trump or Governor of California