Situation Awareness

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

2009-09-05T05:37:00.004-04:00

Thursday, Aug. 20, 2009
The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists
By Joe Klein

In one of those awful collisions between public policy and real life, I was in the midst of an awkward conversation about end-of-life issues with my father when Sarah Palin raised the remarkable idea that the Obama Administration's attempt to include such issues in its health-care-reform proposal would lead to "death panels." Let me tell you something about my family situation, a common one these days, in order to illuminate the obscenity of Palin's formulation and the cowardice of those, like Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the lead Republican negotiator on the Senate Finance Committee, who have refused to contest her claim.

Both my parents are 89 years old. They have been inseparable, with the exception of my father's service in World War II, since kindergarten. My mother has lost her sight and is quite frail. My father takes care of her and my aunt Rose, lovingly, with some — but not enough — private help at their home in central Pennsylvania. One night in early August, I had a terrible scare. I called home and Aunt Rose was freaking out; she didn't know where my father was. All the worst possibilities crossed my mind — it turned out he was just getting the mail — as well as a very difficult reality: if he'd had a stroke, I would have had no idea about what he'd want me to do. I had lunch with him the next day to discuss this.

It wasn't easy. My dad is very proud and independent. He didn't really want to talk about what came next. He was pretty sure, but not certain, that he'd signed a living will. He was very reluctant to sign an enduring power of attorney to empower me, or my brother, to make decisions about his care and my mom's if he were incapacitated. I tried to convince him that it was important to make some plans, but I didn't have the strategic experience that a professional would have — and, in his eyes, I didn't have the standing. I may be a grandfather myself, but I'm still just a kid in my dad's mind. Clearly, an independent, professional authority figure was needed. And this is what the "death panels" are all about: making end-of-life counseling free and available through Medicare. (I'd make it mandatory, based on recent experience, but hey, I'm not entirely clearheaded on the subject right now.)

Given the heinous dust that's been raised, it seems likely that end-of-life counseling will be dropped from the health-reform legislation. But that's a small point, compared with the larger issue that has clouded this summer: How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?

I'm not going to try. I've written countless "Democrats in Disarray" stories over the years and been critical of the left on numerous issues in the past. This year, the liberal insistence on a marginally relevant public option has been a tactical mistake that has enabled the right's "government takeover" disinformation jihad. There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare. There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees' unions. There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don't retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.

It is a very different story among Republicans. To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama's plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush's presidency has been obliterated. The party's putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard's William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama's political prospects. In 1993, when the Clintons tried health-care reform, the Republican John Chafee offered a creative (in fact, superior) alternative — which Kristol quashed with his famous "Don't Help Clinton" fax to the troops. There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009. The same people who rail against a government takeover of health care tried to enforce a government takeover of Terri Schiavo's end-of-life decisions. And when Palin floated the "death panel" canard, the number of prominent Republicans who rose up to call her out could be counted on one hand.

A striking example of the prevailing cravenness was Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who has authored end-of-life counseling provisions and told the Washington Post that comparing such counseling to euthanasia was nuts — but then quickly retreated when he realized that he had sided with the reality-based community against his Rush Limbaugh-led party. Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner for President according to most polls, actually created a universal-health-care plan in Massachusetts that looks very much like the proposed Obamacare, but he spends much of his time trying to fudge the similarities and was AWOL on the "death panels." Why are these men so reluctant to be rational in public? (See how to prevent illness at any age.)

An argument can be made that this is nothing new. Dwight Eisenhower tiptoed around Joe McCarthy. Obama reminded an audience in Colorado that opponents of Social Security in the 1930s "said that everybody was going to have to wear dog tags and that this was a plot for the government to keep track of everybody ... These struggles have always boiled down to a contest between hope and fear." True enough. There was McCarthyism in the 1950s, the John Birch Society in the 1960s. But there was a difference in those times: the crazies were a faction — often a powerful faction — of the Republican Party, but they didn't run it. The neofascist Father Coughlin had a huge radio audience in the 1930s, but he didn't have the power to control and silence the elected leaders of the party that Limbaugh — who, if not the party's leader, is certainly the most powerful Republican extant — does now. Until recently, the Republican Party contained a strong moderate wing. It was a Republican, the lawyer Joseph Welch, who delivered the coup de grâce to Senator McCarthy when he said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Where is the Republican who would dare say that to Rush Limbaugh, who has compared the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler?

This is a difficult situation for the President. Cynicism about government is always easy, even if it now seems apparent that it was government action — by both Obama and, yes, George W. Bush — that prevented a reprise of the Great Depression. I watched Obama as he traveled the Rocky Mountain West, holding health-care forums, trying to lance the boil by eliciting questions from the irrational minority that had pulverized the public forums held by lesser pols. He would search the crowds for a first-class nutter who might challenge him on "death panels," but he was constantly disappointed. In Colorado, he locked in on an angry-looking fellow in a teal T shirt — but the guy's fury was directed at the right-wing disinformation campaign. Obama seemed to sag. He had to bring up the "death panels" himself.

This may tell us something about the actual state of play on health care: the nutters are a tiny minority; the Republicans are curling themselves into a tight, white, extremist bubble — but there may be enough of them raising dust to render creative public policy impossible. Some righteous anger seems called for, but that's not Obama's style. He will have to come up with something, though — and he will have to do it without the tiniest scintilla of help from the Republican Party.

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The Lion Sleeps....

2009-08-26T00:22:00.002-04:00

...and another American legend is passed to the ages, to join his brothers, including Robert:

"My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

Racism, Right-Wing Rage and the Politics of White Nostalgia

2009-08-17T20:03:00.001-04:00

Racism, Right-Wing Rage and the Politics of White Nostalgia
By Tim Wise
Mon Aug 17, 2009 at 06:25:30 AM PDT

"How dare you say this is about racism!"

And a pleasant Monday to you too sunshine, I thought, as I stared at my computer screen this morning, reading over the first e-mail of the day.

It was from someone who had apparently seen my presentation on CNN last night, in which I explained why racism is indeed a driving force behind the outpouring of anger we've been seeing at the various town halls around the country, in opposition to health care reform and pretty much all things Obama.

Although I had been careful to point out that not everyone who opposes the President's agenda is a racist, but rather had made the more nuanced argument that racial resentment and white racial anxiety was the background noise of that opposition--often being stoked quite clearly by the radio talk show hosts on whom the mobs have been relying--my electronic interlocutor was having none of it. He had no more listened to me than he had actually read the health care proposals about which he was frothing so at the mouth.

The message continued:

"You know full well that no one is talking about wanting to go back to the days of segregation."

Well, no, I don't know it. I don't know that at all, seeing as how so many of the tea-bag set and anti-health care folks make "taking their country back" one of the most prominent lines of their vocalized outrage. What does that mean, coming from people in their 60s and 70s, for whom the America of their youth was indeed a white supremacist place? A place where white hegemony could be taken as a given, something that could be presumed in perpetuity? What does it mean when someone says that they want to go back to the country the way the founders envisioned it, as many have also explained at these rallies? After all, they envisioned a white republic. They envisioned and sought out the extirpation of indigenous peoples, most believed in the enslavement of African peoples, and none truly believed that blacks should be treated as equals.

"But that's not what we're talking about when we say we want our country back," another writer intoned, also angered by my televised comments: "We aren't talking about the racism part. We mean the rest of it." How fascinating. That it is factually impossible to separate out the "racism part" from the rest of it is something many white folks seem not to understand. They seem to think there was once a time of innocence when oppression wasn't happening, or that we can easily extract from our accounting of those crimes the great and noble things about our forefathers and view them in some patriotic vacuum. But we can't. Anymore so than we can say that the man who beats his wife might still be a loving father. Or that the company that poisons the air and water with toxic chemicals is still okay because they have a good record on labor or because they give a percentage of their annual profits to charity.

This second writer sought to explain herself further however, just so as not to be misunderstood. When people like her claim they want to return to "what our forefathers started," she continued, they simply mean the part about being dependent on God, rather than government.

Okay, I suppose. Of course, last time I checked God wasn't offering to pick up the tab for chemo treatments, organ transplants, or any other medical procedure for that matter. Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it, but the founders actually did foster quite a lot of government dependence: enshrining slavery was about government protecting white people from the competition of free black labor, and white folks becoming quite dependent on that protection. Stealing native land and then redistributing it to white people was about dependence on government-imposed violence. And later, yet still in the supposedly "good old days," government dependence was at the heart of segregation--which artificially subsidized white people in the job, school and housing markets--and was at the heart of the FHA and VA loans that white families used (and from which black families were all but completely blocked) in the 40s and 50s, which literally built the white middle class.

But I'm guessing that when she uses a phrase like "dependence on government" she isn't thinking about the white folks who were given 270 million acres of essentially free land under the Homestead Act. Or the 15 million or so white families who got those racially preferential home loans, with government underwriting and guarantees, thanks to programs implemented by liberals and thanks to pressure from the left. I'm thinking she isn't talking about the white soldiers (but typically not the black ones) who were able to return from World War II and make use of the GI Bill to go to college, or get job training. And the fact that she likely doesn't think of those kinds of things and those kinds of people as being dependent on government is, of course, precisely the problem, and the point I was trying to make.

Indeed several of the e-mails made this same argument about opposing "government dependence," all the while oblivious, it appears, to the way in which that concept has become so color-coded in the white imagination over the past several decades. In fact, this is a point I had made on the program: that according to a significant body of social science research (among the most prominent, Martin Gilens's brilliant book, Why Americans Hate Welfare), most whites perceive social program spending aimed at helping the have-nots (be they income have-nots, housing have-nots, or health care-have nots) as being about giving something to those people, who are, of course, conceived of in black and brown terms, and taking from "hard-working" white folks in order to do it. So if the notion of government dependence itself has been racialized--and the evidence says it has been--to say that it is only this dependence you oppose, and that racism has nothing to do with it is to either lie or engage in self-deception of a most unfortunate and unbecoming variety.

There were of course others who wrote to me, and who felt no need to finesse their hostility; those who wore that hostility quite clearly on their electronic sleeve, in fact. Like the one guy who called me, in big capital letters, a "FUCKING FAGGOT," because nothing demonstrates a keen command of the health care issue better than a little random homophobia.

Or the guy who mentioned--in response to an incident I had discussed on the show--that he too had cheered when the white man attacked the black woman holding a Rosa Parks poster in the Missouri town hall meeting. To him, the woman deserved to be assaulted and thrown out of the hall because she was (and here he was simply stealing the latest line from the woefully under-medicated Michael Savage) "nothing but a race baiter." This, unlike, say, the whites in the crowd with signs calling the President a nigger, or the talk show hosts who have been claiming for months that Obama hates white people, hates white culture, and really only wants health care reform as a form of reparations for black people. To him, the black victim of white thuggery is a race-baiter, but the white kid with the sign calling Obama a monkey is probably just an all-American boy, and the whites with the signs comparing the President to Adolf Hitler, are just under-appreciated amateur historians, making obvious analytical points that real historians are just too obtuse, or, ya know, educated, to understand.

In the end, although there are many people, with many different reasons for opposing the President or his health care proposal, the role that race and racism is playing cannot be ignored. With major conservative spokespersons stoking the fires of racial resentment daily, and with most whites having long ago come to the conclusion that social program spending is something done on behalf of racial "minorities" at their own white expense, it is not too much to insist that race is operating, for some quite overtly and for others more subtly.

And for those who insist racism has nothing to do with it, the question remains why they have said nothing to those persons coming to their rallies and giving exactly that impression by way of the signs they carry. Where are their letters or calls to Limbaugh or Beck, chastising them for saying Obama hates white people, or that health care is just a form of reparations--racial payback of white America? Of course they have written no such letters. They have made no such calls. They are too busy. Busy waxing nostalgic for bygone days, which they mis-remember as a time of innocence, of decency, and of self-reliance, but which days were really days of widespread injustice, profound indecency, and institutionalized racial preference for people like them.

They can neither accept the present as it is, nor, interestingly, the past as it was. So they invent a phony version of the latter, while hoping against hope for a reversal of the former. Let us deny them the ability to do either for very long.

(read the entire article)

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In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition

2009-08-16T09:42:00.001-04:00

In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition
By Rick Perlstein
Sunday, August 16, 2009

In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."

It was interesting to hear a BBC reporter on the radio trying to make sense of it all. He quoted a spokesman for the conservative Americans for Tax Reform: "Either this is a genuine grass-roots response, or there's some secret evil conspirator living in a mountain somewhere orchestrating all this that I've never met." The spokesman was arguing, of course, that it was spontaneous, yet he also proudly owned up to how his group has helped the orchestration, through sample letters to the editor and "a little bit of an ability to put one-pagers together."

The BBC also quoted liberal Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's explanation: "They want to get a little clip on YouTube of an effort to disrupt a town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car. This is an organized effort . . . you can trace it back to the health insurance industry."

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."

The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news. (Internment camps for conservatives? That's the latest theory of tea party favorite Michael Savage.)

The orchestration of incivility happens, too, and it is evil. Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror -- powerful elites -- find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.

That provides an opening for vultures such as Richard Nixon, who, the Watergate investigation discovered, had his aides make sure that seed blossomed for his own purposes. "To the Editor . . . Who in the hell elected these people to stand up and read off their insults to the President of the United States?" read one proposed "grass-roots" letter manufactured by the White House. "When will you people realize that he was elected President and he is entitled to the respect of that office no matter what you people think of him?" went another.

Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.

(read the original article)

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Walter Cronkite: Television pioneer, broadcast legend, gone

2009-07-18T19:30:00.001-04:00

Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr.
November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009

Translation

2009-07-08T06:56:00.000-04:00

Matthew 25:35: "For I was hungry and you told me, 'Get a job'"

2009-07-04T09:31:00.000-04:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Tip/Wag - Cynthia Davis & Fox News

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Jeff Goldblum

The wingnut prayer: "bin Laden, please bomb a US city so we can come back into power."

2009-07-01T18:05:00.003-04:00

Yep... more rightwingnut thinking...

Thanks to Tom Tomorrow. His original cartoon was right on the mark... as usual.

Republican conservatives are just liberals in right-wing drag

2009-06-26T00:29:00.001-04:00

Friday, June 26, 2009
Remind me: Which political party is "decadent" and "sick"?
by Joe Conason

Whenever the latest Republican politician is caught with his zipper undone, a predictable moment of introspection on the right inevitably ensues. Pundits, bloggers and perplexed citizens ruminate over the lessons they have learned, again and again, about human frailty, false piety and the temptations of flesh and power. They express concern for the damaged family and lament the fall of yet another promising young hypocrite. They resolve to restore the purity of their movement and always remember to remind us that this is all Bill Clinton's fault. What they never do is face up to an increasingly embarrassing fact about themselves and their leaders.

They're really just liberals in right-wing drag.

The proof is in the penance, or lack thereof, inflicted on the likes of Mark Sanford, John Ensign and David Vitter, to cite a few names from the top of a long, long list. For ideologues who value biblical morality and believe in the efficacy of punishment, modern conservatives are as tolerant of their famous sinners as the jaded libertines of the left. Even after confessing to the most flagrant and colorful fornication, the worst that a conservative must anticipate is a stern scolding, followed by warm assurances of God's forgiveness and a swift return to business as usual.

Mark Sanford may have forfeited his presidential ambitions, but the South Carolina governor seems determined to hold onto his office despite his escapade in Argentina -- and if he is thrown out, the reason will be his offenses against good government rather than his betrayal of his marriage vows. John Ensign isn't expected to step down from the Senate, despite the mounting evidence that he concealed his extramarital affair through the misuse of public funds; even now he remains more popular than fellow Nevadan Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader. And then there is David Vitter, the Louisiana bon vivant whose evangelical constituents seem inclined to reward him for consorting with prostitutes by giving him another Senate term. The safest prediction is that these pharisaical pols will continue their careers without suffering the retribution they have earned.

According to the Old Testament -- a text regularly cited by these worthies as the highest authority in denouncing reproductive freedom and gay rights -- the proper penalty for adultery is death by stoning. Leviticus is quite clear on this point (as any truly strict originalist could hardly deny). Fortunately for all of us, biblical law doesn't rule this country, despite the zealots on the religious right who disdain separation of church and state. Very few Americans believe that we should impose state sanctions, let alone the death penalty, on private peccadilloes. But civic tolerance doesn't excuse the limp, smiling attitude of the Republican right toward the infidelity of its leaders.

That flabby acceptance contrasts sharply with right-wing screaming about the iniquity of the opposition. As understood by conservative commentators, this is not mere rhetoric but a theory of civilization's rise and fall. Ann Coulter believes that liberals actively "seek to destroy morality" by "refusing to condemn what societies have condemned for thousands of years," including "promiscuity" and "divorce." Dinesh D'Souza once recommended sarcastically that the Democrats adopt the mantle of "moral degeneracy" by forthrightly advocating "divorce, illegitimacy, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality and pornography."

The supposed depravity of the Democratic Party has long been a favorite theme of conservatives, dating back to the rise of Newt Gingrich, who distributed an official campaign lexicon to Republican congressional candidates that featured such defining insults as "decadent," "permissive," "sick," "selfish" and, of course, "liberal." Back then the Georgia Republican was on his second marriage and carrying on a clandestine affair with the young Capitol Hill clerk who would eventually become his third wife (after he converted to Catholicism and had his union with wife No. 2 annulled). In 2007, he admitted on James Dobson's radio show that he was cheating on wife No. 2 with future wife No. 3 while he was publicly chastising President Clinton for consorting with Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich has remained a consistent favorite among his pious comrades.

Today, in fact, Gingrich is fully rehabilitated as a party spokesman, still nurturing presidential ambitions. So why should any other Republican fear the wrath of the righteous? The disappointment in Sanford and Ensign among the devout must be particularly keen, since they have so rigorously aligned themselves with the most fervent elements of the religious right.

For more than a decade, Ensign lent his name to Promise Keepers, the all-male Christian prayer movement run by a former Colorado football coach, whose mass rallies highlighted men's integrity, purity and uncompromising domination of family life. Both he and Sanford have worked closely with the Family, a secretive Christian fellowship on Capitol Hill that maintains a brick townhouse where Ensign and other members of Congress have resided. Over the years both men have won the highest marks from the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition and the American Family Association -- and until the other day, Sanford was featured as an invited speaker at the Family Research Council's upcoming Values Voters Summit 2009. (As Pam Spaulding and Think Progress noted, however, the FRC removed his photo from the summit Web site immediately following his confessional press conference.)

Certainly there is considerable pressure for Sanford to resign in South Carolina, and perhaps he will surrender. But he might well ask whether that is fair when Ensign is hanging on and Vitter appears to be in the clear. For a while, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins had threatened to challenge Vitter in the Republican primary next year, but last March he announced that he won't run after all -- and instead endorsed Vitter for reelection. Amazingly, Perkins then hosted a radio broadcast with Vitter as his guest, where they tut-tutted over the alleged ethical problems of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Nobody had the poor taste to mention the infamous black books in which Vitter's friendly madams in Washington and New Orleans had inscribed his name and phone number.

By the way, while Vitter, Ensign, Gingrich and perhaps Sanford have been able to retain their positions and political viability, the same cannot be said for the most recent offenders on the progressive side. Neither Eliot Spitzer nor John Edwards, each among the most promising figures in the Democratic Party, will ever be a candidate for public office again, although their misbehavior was no worse than what their Republican counterparts did.

If they looked honestly at themselves, religious conservatives might notice that they are morally lax, socially permissive and casually tolerant of moral deviancy -- just like the liberals they despise. So as they wonder aloud why the same salacious nightmare haunts them, year after year, the best advice they can get happens to come from that old sinner Clinton. As he so often says, the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing while expecting a different outcome.

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More rightwingnut thinking

2009-06-23T18:19:00.000-04:00

Click image for larger view.
Click here for original comic.

Mythbusting Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism

2009-06-21T16:57:00.002-04:00

[Note: My cohort at Orcinus, Sara Robinson, has been nearly as preoccupied the past couple of weeks in dealing with media requests to discuss the recent spate of domestic terrorism now washing up on our shores. She posted her thoughts about it yesterday, and it was so good, I had to pass it along to our readers here. -- DN]

Mythbusting Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism

By Sara Robinson

It's been a wild couple of weeks for those of us in the wingnutology business. Our services have been in tremendous demand as the mainstream media tries to sort out the meaning of what Scott Roeder and James von Brunn did. I've done an average of one radio show every day for the past two weeks trying to help various lefty talkers around the country make some sense of it all; and I'm generally gratified at how seriously people are starting to take this.

At the same time, I'm also appalled (though, sadly, hardly surprised) by the conservative mythmaking that's going on around the very serious issue of right-wing domestic terrorism. So it's obviously time to pull together another "Firing Back" piece to give progressives what they need to separate fact from fiction when these talking points start flying.

I've actually had every one of the following myths pitched to me by on-air interviewers, phone-in callers, and/or online commenters over the last two weeks. Most of them have come up over and over, which suggests to me that you're likely to encounter them, too. So let's walk 'em through...

(read the entire article)

Colbert versus Graham

2009-05-25T14:16:00.001-04:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

She Said, CIA Said - Bob Graham

colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Keyboard Cat

Not your daddy's GOP

2009-04-15T18:50:00.003-04:00

Okay, so, there are these "protests" across the country today. Seems some people have, all of a sudden, gotten all upset about "spending our children's (and children's children's) money."

Where the hell were they, say, 7 years ago? Oh, that's right. George W. Bush was president, the GOP had the majority in Congress, and major deficit spending wasn't a problem.

Also, do they have even the slightest clue what "tea bag" means?

Florida Young Democrats Celebrate 75 Years!

2009-03-29T14:57:00.002-04:00

The Role of Government (or, reflections on the party of Bevis and Butthead)

2009-02-25T17:47:00.001-05:00

What should government do? A Jindal meditation
By Paul Krugman

What is the appropriate role of government?

Traditionally, the division between conservatives and liberals has been over the role and size of the welfare state: liberals think that the government should play a large role in sanding off the market economy’s rough edges, conservatives believe that time and chance happen to us all, and that’s that.

But both sides, I thought, agreed that the government should provide public goods — goods that are nonrival (they benefit everyone) and nonexcludable (there’s no way to restrict the benefits to people who pay.) The classic examples are things like lighthouses and national defense, but there are many others. For example, knowing when a volcano is likely to erupt can save many lives; but there’s no private incentive to spend money on monitoring, since even people who didn’t contribute to maintaining the monitoring system can still benefit from the warning. So that’s the sort of activity that should be undertaken by government.

So what did Bobby Jindal choose to ridicule in this response to Obama last night? Volcano monitoring, of course.

And leaving aside the chutzpah of casting the failure of his own party’s governance as proof that government can’t work, does he really think that the response to natural disasters like Katrina is best undertaken by uncoordinated private action? Hey, why bother having an army? Let’s just rely on self-defense by armed citizens.

The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

The "Right" Stuff

2009-02-14T10:09:00.001-05:00

Right-wing historical revision

2009-02-03T21:53:00.001-05:00

Monday, February 2, 2009
The right-wing New Deal conniption fit
by Andrew Leonard

For the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the spectacle of a major government spending program aimed at combating a severe recession is evidently a nightmare beyond belief, complete with a popular interventionist-leaning president, Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House, and, scariest of all, a legion of zombie back-from-the-dead Keynesian economist holy warriors. How else to explain the paper's increasingly shrill declarations that the New Deal absolutely, positively did not work?

The latest salvo came Monday morning in a piece by two economists, Harold L. Cole and Lee. E. Ohanian: "How Government Prolonged the Depression."

Defenders of the New Deal will find much to argue with in Cole and Ohanion's account, but for simplicity's sake, I am going to zero in on just one point -- the impact of the New Deal on unemployment.

Cole and Ohanian:

The goal of the New Deal was to get Americans back to work. But the New Deal didn't restore employment. In fact, there was even less work on average during the New Deal than before FDR took office.

How can one make this claim? Unemployment reached 25 percent in the Great Depression, and fell steadily until World War II (although there were some bumps up along the way). Ah, but the revisionist position is that unemployment did not fall as much as it should have. And this argument is based on an interesting interpretation of the available data. As Amity Shlaes, currently the premier anti-New Deal historical revisionist writing for a popular audience, explained proudly in her own Wall Street Journal opinion piece in November, "The Krugman Recipe for Depression," a necessary step is to not count as employed those people in "temporary jobs in emergency programs."

That means, everyone who got a job during the Great Depression via the Works Progress Administration (WPA) or Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), or any other of Roosevelt's popular New Deal workfare programs, doesn't get counted as employed in the statistics used by Cole, Ohanian and Shlaes.

Let us reflect, for a moment, on what the men and women employed by those programs achieved (aside from earning cash to buy food and pay for shelter, of course). In his paper, "Time for a New, New Deal," Marshall Auerback (pointed to by economist James Galbraith) summarizes:

The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown.

It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

In other words, millions of men and women earned a living wage and self-respect and contributed mightily to the national infrastructure. But, according to the statistics as interpreted on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, they were unemployed.

Way back in 1976, economist Michael Darby exposed the absurdity of not counting WPA workers as "employed" in his paper "Three-and-a-Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, an Explanation of Unemployment, 1934-1941." More than 30 years ago, Darby observed that correctly counting those 3 and a half million people as employed workers effectively debunked "the 'un-fact' that recovery was extremely slow from 1934 through 1941. From 1933 to 1936, the corrected unemployment rate fell by nearly 5 percentage points per year..."

Shlaes dismisses Darby's reappraisal of Great Depression unemployment statistics by arguing that "to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn't have regular work with long-term prospects."

Of course, some would argue that "masking the anxiety" of workers who did not know how they were going to feed their children or put a roof over their heads is precisely the job of government in times of great economic turmoil. And that, really, is where the whole project of New Deal revisionism breaks down.

The bottom line conservative position on the New Deal is that, theoretically speaking, the economy would have returned to "normal" more quickly if FDR had refrained from interfering with the workings of the free market through his vast array of interventionist programs. Sadly for them, we never got a chance to find out, because the situation in 1933, when Roosevelt took office, demanded government action. Twenty-five percent of the nation was unemployed. Human suffering was immense. If the market had been left to work its problems out all by itself, further suffering in the near term would have been unimaginable. And not just unimaginable -- but also politically unacceptable.

If the New Deal actually extended the Great Depression, we might wonder, why was Roosevelt reelected three times? One explanation would be that the general public is an idiot, and I must confess, I've leaned toward that point of view myself after viewing the aftermath of Election Day in the U.S. on a number of occasions over the last three decades. But another explanation could be that a majority of voters experienced material improvements in the quality of their lives as a result of New Deal programs. This is a point of enduring frustration to conservatives, and they've expended vast effort over the years in their attempt to rewrite history and convince us that what our grandparents knew was wrong -- to the point that they've even tried to tell us that the people who built the fantastic Art Deco structures at the high school my daughter is currently attending were "unemployed."

I do not think those workers would have agreed.

Obama battles Darth Vader

2009-01-24T22:39:00.000-05:00

In the blink of an eye...

2009-01-20T12:02:00.002-05:00

Just before noon today the Web site http://www.whitehouse.gov/ was still all Bush all the time:

And by less than two minutes after high noon, it was all President Barack Hussein Obama:

In the blink of an eye!

44th President of the United States of America

2009-01-20T12:01:00.004-05:00

President Barack Hussein Obama

A Parade of Presidents

2009-01-08T06:29:00.002-05:00

The 41st President, George H.W. Bush, the 44th President (elect) Barack Hussein Obama, the 43rd President, George W. Bush, the 42nd President, Bill Clinton, and the 39th President, Jimmy Carter (l-r)

The Paliban

2009-01-01T12:45:00.003-05:00

Merry Christmas, 2008!

2008-12-25T00:01:00.002-05:00

Robin Williams on Barack Hussein Obama

2008-12-13T10:25:00.000-05:00

An American Icon: Bettie Page

2008-12-12T18:19:00.002-05:00

1923-2008
"I think that she was a remarkable lady, an iconic figure in pop culture who influenced sexuality, taste in fashion, someone who had a tremendous impact on our society."
- Hugh Hefner

The buck stops where?

2008-12-03T21:08:00.001-05:00

Wednesday, December 3, 2008
The buck stops where?
by Joan Walsh

I haven't written about President Bush for quite a while. I prefer to look toward the future. But his delusional exit interview with ABC's Charles Gibson made me pay attention again.

When Gibson asked Bush what he was "unprepared for" when he became president, Bush gave this rather stunning answer.

"Well, I think I was unprepared for war. I didn't campaign and say, 'Please vote for me, I'll be able to handle an attack.'"

What an odd, self-pitying outbreak of candor for this strange president. I'm not sure how anyone could run for president and be "unprepared" for war. The job includes the title of commander in chief of the armed forces. It's true, though, that Bush didn't campaign as someone who would quickly start two wars, and commit the U.S. to a belligerent and reckless policy of unilateral preemptive attacks on our enemies based on perceived threats, not hostile actions (that's the "Bush doctrine," in case you're reading, Sarah Palin).

This was a man who warned against nation building during the 2000 campaign, who said our foreign policy must be "humble," who seemed opposed to the Clinton administration's interventionist foreign policy whether in partly humanitarian missions like Bosnia, or defensive strikes against Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Osama bin Laden in Sudan. Few people who voted for Bush thought he was gunning to be a war president, based on his campaign rhetoric, so it was an incredible bait-and-switch when he became one. In retrospect, though, it seems clear that he arrived in the White House surrounded by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other twisted neocons who were determined to topple Saddam Hussein given any excuse, or none at all.

Certainly the president was being candid in another quite concrete way: He was woefully unprepared for the Iraq war, invading with inadequate planning for the occupation and rebuilding that had to follow the fall of Saddam. Almost 5,000 Americans, and an unknown but much larger number of Iraqi civilians, have died thanks to his lack of preparation. History will prove him right on that score, but it won't be kind to him.

Bush made a second stunning admission in his interview with Gibson. "The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq," he said. "A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess."

What a cowardly, buck-passing answer. It was his administration that was responsible for the faulty intelligence; his administration that notoriously "stove-piped" the available evidence to make the case for war, ignoring all facts that contradicted the neocons' theories, crushing any dissent in the Pentagon and intelligence establishment. His administration then sold that corrupt evidence to Congress and browbeat members into authorizing the use of military force on the eve of the 2002 midterm election, by depicting them as traitors and sissies if they raised questions. Now Bush is trying to say he was misled by the "failure" of his own intelligence leaders and Cabinet advisors? What a loser.

One last related distortion was Bush's lamenting that he hadn't changed the political tone in Washington. "9/11 unified the country, and that was a moment where Washington decided to work together. I think one of the big disappointments of the presidency has been the fact that the tone in Washington got worse, not better."

But it was the Bush administration that changed the tone. On the heels of a brief bipartisan moment after 9/11, Karl Rove and others began laying the groundwork for a 2002 midterm campaign that would use the terror attacks against Democrats, and make sure that anyone who didn't support Bush's military and intelligence policies was smeared as being on the side of al-Qaida. Like the war and the intelligence failure, Bush bears personal responsibility for the ugly tone during his administration, but once again, the buck stops somewhere else.

Bush brags to Gibson that he's proud that "I didn't sell my soul for politics" during the eight years of the presidency. If that's true, it's only because he sold it a long time ago.

Update: In letters, several readers note an additional falsehood in Bush's interview: His claim that we "had to" invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn't let weapons inspectors in. Of course, Hans Blix and his team had gone into Iraq in late 2002 for the first time since 1998, and found no evidence of WMDs. In March, 2003, Bush demanded they leave before they completed their work so he could commence the invasion. Robert Parry recounts the sequence of events here. "Had we had a few months more [of inspections before the war], we would have been able to tell both the CIA and others that there were no weapons of mass destruction [at] all the sites that they had given to us," Blix told the Associated Press in 2004.

Adobe Acrobat copy of The buck stops where?

Roomba Cat

2008-12-03T17:20:00.001-05:00

Feline Technocal Support, Part II

2008-12-01T06:34:00.005-05:00

In addition to last year's entry...

The importance of nutmeg

2008-11-24T20:15:00.001-05:00

Yes, I am a liberal

2008-11-21T17:00:00.002-05:00

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

John F. Kennedy, September 14, 1960

The Church of Jack Lord

2008-11-16T18:28:00.000-05:00

Faux News Reacts!

2008-11-09T16:34:00.000-05:00

History

2008-11-04T23:00:00.002-05:00

President-elect Barack Hussein Obama

It's Time for Change

2008-11-02T20:34:00.001-05:00

Colbert Endorsement

2008-10-31T07:20:00.001-04:00

Obama on The Daily Show

2008-10-31T07:19:00.000-04:00

Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

2008-10-29T23:04:00.000-04:00

These are the stakes...

2008-10-25T22:09:00.001-04:00

The Endorsement

2008-10-25T21:19:00.000-04:00

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

A Vote for the Future

2008-10-19T08:49:00.003-04:00

click image for complete editorial

Why they call him "McSame"

2008-10-18T09:25:00.001-04:00

Bush, but worse

2008-10-18T09:21:00.000-04:00

Vote for McCain

2008-10-16T05:45:00.000-04:00

See more Hayden Panettiere videos at Funny or Die

Failed direction

2008-10-14T18:27:00.000-04:00

see more pwn and owned pictures

Obama on the economy

2008-10-07T06:35:00.001-04:00

What Palin's candidacy says about America

2008-10-07T06:08:00.004-04:00

Mad Dog Palin
The scariest thing about John McCain's running mate isn't how unqualified she is -
it's what her candidacy says about America
by Matt Taibbi
Posted Oct 02, 2008 3:00 PM

From the article:

It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.

=====

So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we're actually going to need in government if we're going to get out of this huge mess we're in.

Here's what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins "Country First" buttons on his man titties and chants "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.

The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.

(read the entire article)

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Les Misbarack

2008-10-06T22:01:00.000-04:00

How did GWB do?

2008-10-02T06:52:00.000-04:00

Hypocrisy, they name is…

2008-09-25T05:36:00.002-04:00

In light of the current financial crisis I thought it would be helpful to see what the Republicans really think about the government helping to bail out financial institutions. From the 2008 Republican National Convention platform:

We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself. We believe in the free market as the best tool to sustained prosperity and opportunity for all.

Flip flop...Indeed.

A flustered rookie playing in a league too high

2008-09-23T06:28:00.002-04:00

McCain Loses His Head
By George F. Will
Tuesday, September 23, 2008; A21
From the article:

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

(read the entire article)

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Charlie applies the lipstick

2008-09-19T21:03:00.000-04:00

Task from God

2008-09-13T12:31:00.001-04:00

Written and produced by Joe Bechtold

Sarah in her natural habitat

2008-09-12T15:50:00.004-04:00

Sarah Palin Bags a Big One

Bush or Batman?

2008-09-12T12:26:00.001-04:00

Feminism's Bastardization

2008-09-11T18:36:00.002-04:00

Thursday, September 11, 2008
Zombie feminists of the RNC
by Rebecca Traister

From the article:

In this strange new pro-woman tableau, feminism -- a word that is being used all over the country with regard to Palin's potential power -- means voting for someone who would limit reproductive control, access to healthcare and funding for places like Covenant House Alaska, an organization that helps unwed teen mothers. It means cheering someone who allowed women to be charged for their rape kits while she was mayor of Wasilla, who supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, who has inquired locally about the possibility of using her position to ban children's books from the public library, who does not support the teaching of sex education.

In this "Handmaid's Tale"-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we're witnessing "a new creation ... of the feminist ideal," the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it's now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: "put a skirt on." "I want her watching my kids," says Deutsch. "I want her laying next to me in bed."

Welcome to 2008, the year a tough, wonky woman won a primary (lots of them, actually), an inspiring black man secured his party's nomination for the presidency, and a television talking head felt free to opine that a woman is qualified for executive office because he wants to bed her and have her watch his kids! Stop the election; I want to get off.

(read the entire article)

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A pig by any other name...

2008-09-10T06:23:00.000-04:00

Let's look under the hood

2008-09-09T11:38:00.000-04:00

What she said:

What was going on under the hood:

BULLWINKLE ASSASSINATED!

2008-09-08T19:30:00.001-04:00

You own your own words

2008-09-04T23:22:00.001-04:00

I'm Thinkin' 'Bout Nailing' Sarah Palin

2008-09-04T05:46:00.001-04:00

I'm Thinkin' 'Bout Nailing' Sarah Palin

Some say it is Katherine Harris...

2008-09-03T06:39:00.001-04:00

This is sure to make your hair hurt

2008-08-16T08:02:00.001-04:00

Ouch!

The Secret to Long Life

2008-08-14T17:23:00.000-04:00

The GOP Playbook

2008-08-11T06:58:00.000-04:00

Republicans: The Party of Stupid

2008-08-10T09:20:00.003-04:00

Know-Nothing Politics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 7, 2008

From the article:

...the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.

(read the entire article)

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The Depths of Desperation

2008-08-09T20:59:00.003-04:00

It is always enlightening to see what a desperate campaign (or their followers) will resort to when they're down.

A current tactic by the conservatives is to cast doubt on Senator Obama's eligibility to even hold the office of the President. Article II of the US Constitution outlines the three requirements to be eligible for election as President:

be at least thirty-five years old;
have been a permanent resident in the United States for at least fourteen years;
be a natural-born citizen of the United States

It is on that last item, "be a natural-born citizen of the United States" on which many have tried to "disqualify" Obama. They claim that his mother had to have been 21 at the time of his birth in order for Obama to be a natural-born citizen of the United States. But is this really the case?

I would direct these "detectives" to the United States Code, Title 8 > Chapter 12 > Subchapter III > Part I > § 1405:

A person born in Hawaii on or after August 12, 1898, and before April 30, 1900, is declared to be a citizen of the United States as of April 30, 1900. A person born in Hawaii on or after April 30, 1900, is a citizen of the United States at birth. A person who was a citizen of the Republic of Hawaii on August 12, 1898, is declared to be a citizen of the United States as of April 30, 1900.

And that, my friends, answers that!

Hunter S.

2008-08-09T08:51:00.001-04:00

These Foolish Things

2008-08-08T05:37:00.000-04:00

What's She Doing?

2008-08-08T05:23:00.000-04:00

An Answer to the White Haired Dude

2008-08-06T17:27:00.000-04:00

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

GOP "Takes Pride in Being Ignorant"

2008-08-05T22:48:00.004-04:00

In response to a question about what individual Americans can do about the high cost of gasoline, Senator Obama replied that individuals could inflate their tires to the proper pressure in other to improve fuel efficiency.

As is typical of rightwingnuts this commonsense answer was ridiculed (by taking it out-of-context, of course) and claiming it is the centerpiece of Obama's energy policy. And on par with a junior high school joke the McCain campaign came up with this:

And without realizing it the McCain campaign simply highlighted the obvious, they take pride in being ignorant, as Obama was more than willing to point out:

Way to go, Senator Obama!

Happy Birthday to Tony Bennett

2008-08-03T15:57:00.003-04:00

A true American High Standard.

Happy Birthday, Tony Bennett!

One year ago...

2008-08-03T15:48:00.002-04:00

Today marks one year since the Free World Radio Network Web site, http://freeworldradionetwork.net/, went live on the Internet.

And tomorrow at this exact time it will be one year since my first post on this blog!

What a difference a year makes!

Relax... it is August 1st

2008-08-01T18:45:00.001-04:00

My thanks to Mark Weaver

2008-07-26T11:00:00.002-04:00

If you couldn't tune in to today's The Mark Weaver Show, here it is:

Thank you, Mark. I enjoyed our conversation.

Hans Meyer on The Mark Weaver Show

2008-07-25T17:15:00.000-04:00

I will be Mark's guest on tomorrow's broadcast, which starts at 9:00am Eastern Time. I should be on around 9:15am to talk about the Free World Radio Network.

The Mark Weaver Show is a production of Florida Progressive Coalition.

The "Lesser of Two Evils"

2008-07-24T20:22:00.002-04:00

Is it any wonder why so many Republicans are voting for McCain as the "lesser of two evils"? If I were a GOPher I wouldn't be too excited about my candidate, either.

The Great American Songbook Turns A Page

2008-07-19T18:11:00.003-04:00

Jo Elizabeth Stafford
1917-2008

Zen Observations

2008-07-11T19:19:00.000-04:00

1. Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much leave me the hell alone.

2. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt or a leaky tire.

3. It's always darkest before dawn , so if you're going to steal your neighbor’s newspaper, that's the time to do it.

4. Don't be irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.

5. Always remember that you're unique. Just like everyone else.

6. Never test the depth of the water with both feet.

7. If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.

8. Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.

9. If at first you don't succeed...... Skydiving is not for you.

10. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

11. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

12. Some days you're the bug, some days you're the windshield.

13. Everyone seems fairly normal until you get to know them.

14. The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.

15. A closed mouth gathers no foot.

16. Duct tape is like 'The Force'. It has a light side and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.

17. There are two theories to arguing with a woman - Neither one works.

18. Generally speaking, you aren't learning much when your lips are moving.

19. Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

20. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

"We Almost Deserve It"

2008-07-05T10:28:00.005-04:00

or, What Will It Take For Americans To Wake Up?

From In Search of Optimism

Jamie Dimon, the affable grandson of Greek immigrants who runs J.P. Morgan Chase....

Government action is the key, Dimon said. To make his point, he asked the participants whether they were "pissed off" about the high price of gasoline at the pump. Most hands shot up.

"YOU HAVE NO RIGHT!" Dimon declared. "We almost deserve it," he said, because as a country we had dithered for decades rather than transforming our energy economy. "We knew about this in 1974!" he said. The crisis we face now is the result of a "lack of political will."

(read the entire article)

One of America's most notorious race-baiters has died

2008-07-04T14:28:00.000-04:00

Race-Baiting Former Senator Jesse Helms Has Died
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, AlterNet at 1:21 PM on July 4, 2008.
From the article:

David Broder of the Washington Post summed up Helms' legacy in an 2001 op/ed entitled, Jesse Helms, White Racist, "What is unique about Helms -- and from my viewpoint, unforgivable -- is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans."

That says most of it. Here's the rest:

Upon Helms' death Heritage Foundation president Ed Fuelner praised the late conservative icon effusively, vowing that the legacy of this "great patriot" would live on. In 2002 Heritage bestowed its highest honor on Helms for his “dedicated, unflinching and articulate advocate of conservative policy and principle"--which tells you just about everything you need to know about Helms and the conservative movement.

(read the entire article)

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

2008-07-04T09:01:00.002-04:00

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

I Am An American

2008-07-04T00:01:00.003-04:00

What am I?

I am a free man -- a good and decent man -- a man of compassion, generosity, and understanding -- a true friend, a steadfast ally, and a bitter foe.

I owe my allegiance to a government founded in the belief that among the rights of man are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, I would acknowledge no other. I can redress my government for injury; not satisfied with redress, I can elect a new one. I have watched my government function smoothly during periods of transfer of power caused by re-election, assassination, and resignation.

While other nations have a distinct race, religion, and/or geographic denominator, I live among people of my home without fear of intrusion by anyone -- citizen or government designee -- unless they have my personal invitation or a duly authorized search warrant.

I have a press to keep me informed -- a press free to write, without inhibition, the truth as they see it. A press that needs fear no repression, no retaliation, no censorship so long as it prints the truth.

I live under a system of justice, merciful and fairly administered, where I am assumed innocent until proven guilty -- a system which provides me appellate privilege while denying it to the power of the state.

I am free to go anywhere I want, earn my living in any way that suits me and, based on that freedom, I have created a standard of living unequalled in the history of man and envied the world over.

I have suffered in humility at the consequences of my mistakes -- economic deprivation, social injustice, unequal opportunity and racial prejudice to name a few -- but, once aware of these mistakes, I have set out to right the wrongs they created.

I have faced challenges to my way of life. I have fought and died countless times from Lexington and Concord to Vietnam. I was humbled at Valley Forge, Pearl Harbor, Corregidor and Malmady. But these experiences gave me the character I needed to go to Yorktown, Gettysburg, Midway and Normandy. I cherish my freedom above all else -- I bow to no tyrant.

I am two hundred years old today. I have never been so proud of my ancient heritage, so grateful for my present situation, and so confident of the future. Today, I reaffirm my allegiance to, faith in, and love of my country. To the proposition that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth, I do humbly pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor.

I am an American.

An anonymous letter to the Washington Post editor on July 4, 1976.

Did McCain and his team really squander a four-month head start?

2008-07-03T12:56:00.001-04:00

It sure did.

The Future of Home Computing

2008-06-28T05:50:00.003-04:00

From 1954: This is how the RAND Corporation envisioned what a home PC would look like 2004:

click on image for larger view

The text from the picture:

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.

Baby boomers: Born to be wild? Or ...

2008-06-26T17:30:00.002-04:00

Bored…Tubby…Mild!
by Walt Handelsman
Click on image for animated toon.

Get your Motrin ready,
Head out on a treadmill.
The heating pad is warming,
In case your herniated disk kills.

We’re aging Boomers but refuse to show it,
I just got implants and a tummy tuck.
A triple bypass and two knee replacements,
Getting old really sucks!

I just took Viagra,
Both the kids are out late.
I’ll go get some Merlot,
Let’s hope it won’t inflame your prostate.

We’re Baby Boomers! The original rebels,
Used to smoke pot but now we drink green tea.
We tripped on acid, now we have acid reflux,
We’re in the AARP!

We were spoiled, pushy, wild,
But now we’re bored, tubby and mild.
We used to get so high,
Now they call us spry!!!

Bored…Tubby…Mild!
Bored…Tubby…Mild!

Energy: Carter was right

2008-06-26T06:12:00.002-04:00

Carter Tried To Stop Bush's Energy Disasters - 28 Years Ago
by Thom Hartmann
Tuesday, May 3, 2005

In his recent news conference, George Bush Jr. suggested that our nation's "problem" with high gasoline prices was caused by the lack of a national energy policy, and tried to blame it all on Bill Clinton. First, Junior said, "This is a problem that's been a long time in coming. We haven't had an energy policy in this country."

This was followed by, "That's exactly what I've been saying to the American people -- 10 years ago if we'd had an energy strategy, we would be able to diversify away from foreign dependence. And -- but we haven't done that. And now we find ourselves in the fix we're in." As is so often the case, Bush was lying.

(read the entire article)

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The G in GOP Stands for Ghoul

2008-06-25T06:31:00.003-04:00

June 25, 2008 at 06:26

The G in GOP Stands for Ghoul
by Mary Lyon
http://www.opednews.com/

I've heard of rooting for the bad guys, but this is ridiculous. John McCain's elite adviser Charlie Black opined to Fortune magazine that if there were another terrorist strike against our country in time for the general election, it "certainly would be a big advantage" for McCain's campaign ("a candid and very disappointing glimpse into the thinking of one of McCain's closest advisers.").

Wow. Nice. Which American city would you like to see take it in the shorts this time, Mr. Black? How many thousands of us are expendable for the sake of your candidate's success? Let's see, New York City has already been there. Same thing for Arlington, Virginia, home of the Pentagon. And don't forget New Orleans. No, that wasn't terrorism, per se, but it was still a disaster that needed - but did not get - government foresight and planning wisdom from seasoned, credible public service professionals as well as swift and effective response.

Is this the newest round of "October Surprise" paranoia? Or is it paranoia? A terrorist strike on American soil would be a major campaign boost for John McCain? Does it sound at all as though someone regards such a tragedy as a good thing? Really nice.

(read the entire article)

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McCain's YouTube Problem

2008-06-24T05:48:00.002-04:00

A Comedic Giant... Gone

2008-06-23T06:02:00.004-04:00

Sadly, the world is now a less funny place...

Carlin's Seven Words

Carlin on Religion

George Denis Patrick Carlin
1937-2008

I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

Carnival of the Liberals, Edition #67

2008-06-18T00:01:00.002-04:00

Welcome to the June 18, 2008 edition of The Carnival of the Liberals, hosted by my blog, Situation Awareness. I think that you'll agree with me that there are some great entries this week.

I have also included, at the bottom of this entry, a Blog Talk Radio player featuring my March 29, 2008 interview of Leo Lincourt, founder of The Carnival of the Liberals.

Enjoy!

- Hans

general interest

Only Three Notes presents Congratulations Obama! posted at Business & Controversy of Technology by Arnab Tagore.
Gbariela Baron presents posted at Internet Business Blog.
Joe Bechtold presents The Importance of Religion in America posted at Joe Bechtold's Political Journal.
Niharika presents The Top 100 Civil Liberties Advocacy Blogs posted at Criminal Justice Degrees Guide.

current events

Allen in Fort Worth presents QUEERS AND DYKES ARE GONNA GET MARRIED ! ! ! so don't worry about anything else posted at The Whited Sepulchre, saying, "the YouTube video in this post makes me ill."
Gracie Passette presents Republicans Suffer From Dementia & Can't Understand Satire posted at Cult Of Gracie, saying, "This post is rather a mish-mosh or current events, opinion, and frankly (or Franken lol) humor. :)"
John presents McCain and Obama Court Pro-War AIPAC posted at The Largest Minority.
Andrew Heath presents What the Hell Got into the President's Pet??? posted at Andy, saying, "Why did Scotty write that awful book about Bush when everyone thought he was Bush's biggest fan?"
Keith Wick presents Signs of Barack Obama posted at Weith Kick.
Jon Rochetti presents Photo of the Week - Hillary Tees…3 for $10 posted at The DC Traveler – Washington DC travel & tourism information, saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words."
Ian Welsh presents Clinton’s Legacy: Never Say Die posted at Firedoglake.
Shan Siddiqi presents Howard Dean is the Light into Obama's Future posted at Globally Rational.
Patrick Schwerdtfeger presents Check out my new Smart ForTwo Passion posted at Tactical Execution, saying, "The Smart Car is finally introduced in the USA! This post offers details about these tiny gas-powered fuel-efficient cars."
Phil B. presents Why Demonstrations and Petitions Do Not Work posted at Phil for Humanity, saying, "If demonstrations and petitions work, then the 1960s would have seen a lot more political, social, and environmental changes."

liberalism

Phil B. presents Global Warming is Ruining the Earth posted at Phil for Humanity, saying, "A list of how the world has changed so dramatically."
Greta Christina presents Loading The Dice: Bisexuality And Choice posted at Greta Christina's Blog, saying, "This post is about bisexuality -- and how the gay political community's focus on the "It's not a choice" PR strategy about gay rights leaves bisexuals out in the cold."
Greta Christina presents Greta Christina's Blog: The Amazing Mechanical Leftie: Reflexive Thinking in Alt Culture posted at Greta Christina's Blog, saying, "This piece is about the tendency alternative culture sometimes has to reflexively reject anything that's mainstream or conventional. It talks about how this tendency makes people just as controlled by the mainstream as they would be if they were going along with it. And more seriously, it talks about how it puts alt culture in common cause with the anti- intellectual, know- nothing strains of right wing American culture."

opinion

Allen in Fort Worth presents Cal Thomas Says Barack Obama's Not A Christian posted at The Whited Sepulchre, saying, "here is an analysis of an idiotic Cal Thomas column."
Andrew Heath presents How to Achieve Peace in the Middle East posted at Andy, saying, "An interesting and unconventional solution to our conflict in the Middle East."
phil F. presents WEEKEND FEATURE: Globalization and the Small Business posted at E-News Daily: Articles Without Borders.
Andrew Heath presents Why We Must Forgive President George W. Bush posted at Andy, saying, "There are some compelling reasons to forgive George W Bush, even if you currently hate him."
Hans Meyer presents The Historically Challenged posted here at Situation Awareness, saying, "The right-wing noise machine tries to re-write history."
Shan Siddiqi presents The Supreme Court has "legacies?" posted at Globally Rational.
Phil B. presents A Plan to Destroy All Weapons of Mass Destruction posted at Phil for Humanity, saying, "No leader and therefore no country can be trusted enough to control weapons of mass destruction."

politics

Ames presents Fox News: A Trifecta of Racism posted at Submitted to a Candid World, saying, "Fox News may be playing into our hand, by running a racist smear campaign against Barack Obama."
Jon Swift presents McCain: Make Sure You Have the Right Change posted at Jon Swift, saying, "We don't need to take a risk on a President who could make things even worse than they already are. We need a President like McCain who, when the telephone rings at 3:00 in the afternoon, waking him up from his nap, would be ready to answer it and solve whatever crisis needed to be solved."
Holly Ord presents John McCain Doesn’t Support the Troops posted at Menstrual Poetry.
Jason presents 1962: Adolf Eichmann posted at Executed Today, saying, "Adolf Eichmann remembered on the anniversary of his execution: the competent company man blithely earning his promotions by engineering mass-murder."
KevinBBG presents McBush posted at DAILY BBG, saying, "This is a clear and somewhat harsh statement as to whether or not to vote for McCain or Obama with reasons outlined."
Ron Britton presents Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ! posted at Bay of Fundie.

That concludes this 67th edition of Carnival of the Liberals.

Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnival of the Liberals using our Carnival submission form.

Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: carnival of the liberals, blog carnival.

Making News...

2008-06-16T06:10:00.000-04:00

GWB: Worst. President. Ever. Part II

2008-06-15T11:24:00.004-04:00

Sorry, Mr. President, But Your Legacy Is More Awful Than You Think
by: Bob Cesca

Posted June 11, 2008 04:57 PM (EST)

From the article:

War mongering is a significant aspect of your legacy, but I think we can conclude, and without much debate, that your legacy will also be one of criminality, failure and a degree of incompetence rarely achieved by any American president, much less one whose deficit of character is rivaled only by his nearly unprecedented lack of humility in the face of his unprecedented roster of inadequacies.

Sorry.

As it turns out, you won't have much control over your legacy and the history of your administration anyway. You might have some cursory input, but no-one really takes you seriously anymore and anything you put forth will be taken as just another work of fiction; another bit of propaganda.

Your legacy will ultimately be written by those of us who have been actively documenting your presidency in real time -- millions of voices authoring the narrative of your awful regime and preserving it with digital clarity one trespass at a time.

And everywhere we look, we can plainly observe your smirking, affectless footprint.

Death, poverty, war, pain, ignorance, blind patriotism, joblessness, and abandoned homes. And guess what? We're writing it down on the Internets. Your history, Mr. President, is being written at this very moment by those of us who are watching our homes collapse in value and our friends and relatives sent to places like Ramadi and Fallujah and, in some cases, Walter Reed or worse. Your history, Mr. President, isn't going to be settled and published decades from now. It's being published immediately and without the fog of memory to obscure the ugly details.

(read the entire article)

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Farewell to a journalistic giant

2008-06-13T18:30:00.001-04:00

Timothy John Russert, Jr.
1950-2008

Senator McCain wants context? Fine.

2008-06-13T17:35:00.000-04:00

Okay, so, this bird walks into a store...

2008-06-13T07:01:00.004-04:00

A seagull in Marinette, Wisconsin has developed the habit of stealing snack chips from a neighborhood convenience store. The seagull waits until the manager isn't looking, and then walks into the store and grabs a snack-size bag of cheese Doritos.

Once outside, the bag gets ripped open and shared by other birds.

The seagull's shoplifting started early this month when he first swooped into the store and helped himself to a bag of Doritos. Since then he's become a regular. And he always takes the same type of chips.

The Manager thinks it's great because people are coming to watch the feathered thief make the daily grab and run, and that's good for business, and especially since customers have begun paying for the seagull's stolen bags of chips because they think it's so funny.

However, the Manager did say, "This is Wisconsin , and if that seagull starts to grab a 6-pac to go along with the Doritos, I may have to put a stop to it."

With thanks to my colleague, Brian Wolf, for forwarding this story along to me.

Yes...An Amazing Accomplishment!

2008-06-12T05:58:00.002-04:00

May 7, 2008
Jonathan Schwarz:
What an Amazing Accomplishment

It’s September 12, 2001. You’re sitting in front of a TV, watching footage of the World Trade Center collapse over and over and over again.

All of a sudden, someone from seven years in the future walks out of a tiny temporal vortex, and tells you: George W. Bush is going to fuck this up so badly that in 2008, the United States of America will likely elect as president a black man whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was Muslim. Oh, and he also admits he’s used cocaine.

I think it would have been easier to convince me of the reality of time travel. “No, no, I believe you really are from the future. But the other stuff, that’s CRAZY.”

posted by Jonathan Schwarz at 3:33 PM

Keeping an especially sharp eye...

2008-06-11T06:31:00.011-04:00

According to the "Hillary is 44" Web site/About page:

"We will keep an especially sharp eye on "progressives" or Democrats who repeat Republican talking points to undermine Hillary or any of our candidates."

Any of our candidates. Okay, that's plain enough.

Then just one question: Why does the entire site seem devoted to undermining the candidacy of Barack Obama for President of the United States? For example:

"Women will NOt vote for race-baiting, gay-bashing, women-hating Barack Obama in NOvember."

You know, the same Barack Obama endorsed by Hillary Clinton:

"The way to continue our fight now, to accomplish the goals for which we stand, is to take our energy, our passion, our strength, and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next president of the United States," Clinton told a crowd of 8,000 supporters during an emotion-filled rally at the National Building Museum in Washington.

"Today, as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won and the extraordinary race he has run. I endorse him and throw my full support behind him. And I ask all of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me."

Hillary Clinton says: "And I ask all of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me."

That's plain to all. Apparently, though, the "Hillary is 44" people have comprehension problems.

You'll Get What You Deserve

2008-06-10T17:07:00.001-04:00

click on image to enter site

The Historically Challenged

2008-06-10T11:26:00.005-04:00

There has been an obvious attempt of late by the right-wing noise machine to re-write (very current) history. Unfortunately for that noise machine, some of us have memories which go back further than 10 seconds ago. Let’s review some examples and how they illuminate this blatant attempt at historical revision.

First up, there’s the attempt to divorce conservative and Republican. This usually takes the form of “George Bush never was a conservative” proclamations from the pundits and mouthpieces on the right. For example, when Bush was at 60% approval in the polls (in November, 2003) Jonah Goldberg said “...Bush has proved that he's a Reaganite, not a "Bushie.” And when Bush plummeted to 32% (in May, 2007) what did he say? Goldberg said, “look at Bush from the right angle, he looks an awful lot like a liberal.” From “Reaganite” (in 2003) to looking like a “liberal” (in 2007)? Flip-flop.

Next, let’s look at the price of gasoline. The right-wingers want to blame the (just elected in November, 2006) Democratic Congress for the $4.00/gallon gasoline Americans are now facing. If they were honest with us and themselves (which they’re not), they would know that a stable Middle East equals lessened fears of potential shortages caused by the disruption of the world’s oil supplies, which in turn equals stable speculation on future oil prices. Instead, the Bush administration, in its foolish invasion of Iraq (and now saber-rattling over Iran), has caused oil speculators to raise the price of oil to astronomic levels. When Bush took office oil was around $30 a barrel and gasoline was around $1.20 a gallon. Now oil is $140 a barrel and gasoline is over $4.00 a gallon. Sorry right-wingers, this is not the result of action or inaction on the part of Democrats in Congress since January, 2007. This is a direct result of a destabilized Middle East, compliments of the Bush Administration’s war of choice/invasion of Iraq in 2003. And a destabilized Middle East equals fears of disruption of the world’s oil supplies, which equals higher prices driven by those fears of the speculators.

Finally, there’s the Iraq war itself. A few weeks ago Jonah Goldberg published a column on the surge and the Congressional vote last summer authorizing it, comparing John McCain’s vote for it to Barack Obama’s vote against it. Goldberg piously announced that had America followed Obama’s vote all the wonderful things in Iraq (since the surge began) would not have happened. What a perfect example of choosing a point in time which somehow proves your argument, while conveniently ignoring an earlier point in time which completely demolishes the point you’re trying to make. Sorry, Mr. Goldberg, but had you gone back just a little further in time to, say, 2002, and seen that McCain was in favor of the invasion in the first place, while Obama was against it, you might have been a little more circumspect in your judgment. Heroic efforts after the fact (in 2007) do not negate stupid choices in the first place (in 2002).

As I said at the beginning, some people have longer memories than the right-wing noise machine expects. Their attempts at revisionist history are all-too-easily spotted and refuted. Better luck next time.

This article is also posted on OpEdNews.com (The Historically Challenged).

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