"Who do you think you are, attacking South Carolina's esteemed US Senator Jim DeMint (R), just because he's letting all the other states hoard federal earmarks at our expense? Don't you get it? How can we pound the ridiculousness of your critique into your little snail-brain?"
Recently your newspaper published a letter from state Rep. Bakari
Sellers attacking U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint and his opposition to
congressional earmarks.
There is a saying that the Jews who are
wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking
care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not
using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using
actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to
preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all
an opportunity to succeed.
Jim DeMint is like a Jew! Hey, what are you getting upset about it? It's in a good way. Everyone knows that Jews get rich by being cheap about the little things. C'mon, it's a saying! Some jackass once said something about "being penny-wise and pound-foolish," but that guy obviously knew nothing about crafty Jew mercantilism.
Louis C.K. did a clever bit years ago about how awesome it would be if stereotypes were more positive. Like, "You know why I love Chinese people? Because they're made out of candy. And Puerto Ricans can fly!"
The late defensive end Reggie White also once shocked the Wisconsin state house by giving a speech in which he "praised" races and ethnicities for their shared characteristics, like "Hispanics are gifted in family structure, and you can see a Hispanic person, and they can put 20, 30 people in one home."
So let's give South Carolina GOP county chairmen James Ulmer and Edwin Merwin (ha ha ha) a break or two. How many of the 40,000 white people in their counties have ever even been to shul?
I'm a reluctant Verizon Wireless customer. Their coverage is fine, but their smartphones blow.
But my 13-year-relationship with Verizon (nee GTE, nee Bell Atlantic-Nynex Wireless) is about to end. Why? Because they're sponsoring the Friends of America rally on Labor Day, including special guests Sean Hannity and The Nuge.
I'm not sure exactly why an American would also be a Friend of America, but I do know this: the rally's definition of Friend of America is "giant coal mining and coal services companies." And conversely, the Enemy of America is anyone who wants to see the USA burning less coal, for a million great reasons.
The Friends of America rally website promotes a petition against the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that will be our country's first serious attempt to regulate carbon emissions. That petition is sponsored and hosted by the National Mining Association.
Most of the other sponsors of Friends of America are coal mining and mining services companies. Why is Verizon Wireless rolling with this crowd? I sent them an email, and "Gary the Supervisor" responded as such, in its entirety:
The sponsorship you're concerned about was a local decision to support
the community and sell our products at the event. It is not a statement
of our policy on any public issue.
Big coal is absolutely terrified of carbon regulation, so they're mobilizing political rallies like this one to kill it. And Verizon thinks they can financially support this (or apparently any) political rally without it being a "statement of our policy."
Well, perhaps Verizon could also financially sponsor Klan rallies, Berkeley anti-Israel rallies, and militia recruiting sessions. Hey, sponsorship doesn't mean support, right?
I have a suggestion for the Birthers, the Truthers, and the Deceptors: It's time to merge.
Some definitions, for those who aren’t familiar with the terminology:
Birthers: a subculture of wacko right-wingers who believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and has never produced evidence of birth in America, and maintain this belief in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Truthers: a subculture of wacko left-wingers (primarily) who believe that 9/11 was an inside job propagated by the neo-cons and military investors to start WWIII for power and financial gain.
Deceptors: a subculture of pan-ideological wackos who watched “The Obama Deception” on Google Video and now believe that Barack Obama is merely a puppet of stateless financial interests bent on forcing the world into indentured slavery.
The Truthers have been banging their heads against the wall for almost eight years with little traction. The Birthers have been doing much better; probably millions of white rednecks have hung all their fear and disgust about our first Scary "The Other" President on his wildly improbable illegitimacy. The Deceptors’ beliefs are doomed never to find mainstream acceptance; they’re almost as complicated as reality.
But what if the Birther, the Truther, and the Deceptor movements merged? The Debruthers! Think about it. With their collective batshit power, they could take this evil regime down!
I've even gotten the narrative started:
Mombasa-born Muslim Barack Obama blew up the Twin Towers and WTC7 with explosives at the bidding of the Rothschild banking family, so that Bush would turn America into a security state and Alan Greenspan would ignite a credit bubble, putting America’s citizens and businesses in hock to the global financial oligarchs. Then Hawaii state officials, at the bidding of the bankers, created fake a birth certificate and doctored the birth announcements in the Honolulu newspaper archives. This set the stage for Obama to be elected president, place financial insiders in positions of political power, create citizen dependency on the state, increase national indebtedness, take our guns away, and institute mandatory national service. This clears the way for Obama to enforce an form of Islamic fascism in which ownership of all assets falls into the hands of the shadowy Jews who placed him in power.
Admit: that's some compelling shit right there. It all makes so much sense.
If I start a blog about this, do you think I could get on Hannity?
If I might break away from my typical cynical grumbling for a moment, I'd like to say something nice: The first four months of the Obama Era have been extraordinary. The change has been as radical as expected, and while our new president isn't doing everything right, the most serious change has been doing anything at all.
Yesterday's pro-active capitulation of the Health Care-Industrial Complex is case in point. Leaders of America's largest health care corporations and associations stepped up and said, "We're going to try to rein in cost increases." While some on the left are decrying this as mere PR by a private industry trying to maintain its profitability, this move by Big Healthcare is utterly striking. You couldn't imagine anything like it occurring in any industry under the asleep-at-the-wheel stewardship of the Bush-Cheney years.
For the first time in 15 years, health care is hot again. (It was still only lukewarm during the Medicare drug benefit debate a few years ago.) Which is, of course, reminding us of "HillaryCare," perhaps the most frustrating public policy debate since the Reagan years.
This is how I remember it: After Bubba wins the election, he puts Hillary in charge of health care policy. She convenes a panel of experts, hold a few hearings, and then go behind closed doors to pound out a plan. They emerge with nothing short of a real healthcare system, which America has always lacked. Republicans attack it sight unseen, which turned out to be their exact strategy. Creating a healthcare system means creating a management structure, which also looks like a giant government bureaucracy. The plan fails.
In desperation, Senate Dems try to get symbolic targets like "90% coverage" into bills. Those fail, too. It all fails. A few months later, Democrats are swept from office in the GOP revolution.
With Dems running the policy-making branches of government for the first time since '94, healthcare is back. And so are our memories of the last time that we tried to fix this horrifying non-system of ours.
Since '94, things have only gotten worse. Healthcare is now more than 1/6 of our total economy. The rest of the advanced world gets 100% coverage, no insurance burden on employers, no medical bankruptcy, higher life expectancy, and lower infant mortality, all for about half of what we spend here. We oddly support an expansive Medicare system (a giant medical bureaucracy) while we fear creating any sort of real system for everyone else. We prefer skyrocketing premiums and hidden costs to anything that smells like "taxes." Or so they tell us.
And then we have our friends Harry and Louise.
Harry and Louise are one of America's great political myths. They were the stars of a paid campaign by the Coaltion for Health Insurance Choices, itself a front group for the insurance industry. In a series of ads, Harry and Louise moped around their kitchen fretting about the government assigning them a new doctor, and a faceless idiot Washington bureaucrat deciding which procedures are covered. (As opposed to their employers' insurance companies telling them which doctors they could go to, and which procedures would be covered.) Harry and Louise turned American opinion against the Clinton plan, and health care reform was dead forever.
Or so I've heard. I never saw a Harry and Louise commercial, and neither did anyone else I talked to back then. In fact, few people saw the ads at all, except in the TV news reports that covered the debate. The campaign targeted deeply anti-government audiences like Rush Limbaugh's, and saturated markets where national media opinions were formed (primarily two cities on the eastern seaboard).
Will we see another anti-reform campaign? Undoubtedly. Obama's plan is to create a public insurance option to cover the uncovered, while preserving the current employer-based system. (The New Yorker had an excellent analysis of how we reach universal coverage given our current conditions and traditions.) The long-term hope -- or fear, depending on your perspective -- is that the public system will effectively control costs and ration care. What does that mean for private insurers down the road? It's scary for them -- and for Dittoheads, teabaggers, and other anti-government types -- to contemplate.
And they'll try to scare us, too. But doing nothing since '94 has only pushed our healthcare non-system deeper into decline. The cost issue is undeniable -- even right-wingers admit that health care may not be an unalienable right, but it's definitely too expensive.
This time, the "nothing" option isn't really an option at all.
If you know me, you know that I’m very old and wise. And in my very long life, I’ve learned a great many important things.
Primary among them is that all political ideologies are the same:
We represent freedom
They represent totalitarian fascism
Everything they say they’re concerned about are really smokescreens for their ultimate goals, which are their own corrupt power and taking control over our lives because they get off on that kind of thing
All political movements are, in essence, attempts to reposition society's winners and losers. Our winners are virtuous and make the world richer and freer and fairer, but their winners just want to make themselves richer and more powerful at the expense of the people.
Now that Obama has proposed a cap-and-trade system for CO2 emissions, a policy which his opponent also championed during the 2008 campaign, the Right has decided to go apeshit about global warming.
I am increasingly of the opinion that the main goal of the Obama administration through CO2 regulation, exploding deficits, punishing taxation, and any other means at their disposal is the destruction of the economy and the complete control of impoverished Americans.
Folks, don’t fall for more socialist lies aimed to remove more of the money you earned from your pocket to make even bigger government which aims to rob you of more of your God-given liberties... Isn’t it time you took a look at how
thin the “facts” are behind Al Gore’s religion, and join the rest of us
in rejecting this anti-American nonsense?
Never mind that almost all greenhouse gas is water vapor. But since the Statists can't measure water vapor and condensation, they
attempt to wrestle control of carbon dioxide instead, by claiming it's
toxic. But the point is, they want to control you... The economy is on life support, so what does the Enviro-Statist do? He grabs more power.
Because they don't care about the economy, they care about power!
They're not about preserving or improving our society, they're bent on
destroying it.
There's no truth to anything that's being said about all this, be it global warming or what the stimulus package is going to do. It's a disaster, and it's all designed to get you to agree to pay higher taxes down the road. It's all about surrendering freedom and advanced lifestyles, because those are the things said to be responsible for the destruction of the Earth via the warming climate.
The birth of the 'environmental crisis' was concoted by the international communists a long time ago. It's very well documented. What you're seeing now is how tyrants impose more totalitarian government and in the case of these united States of America, the destruction of private property rights with the ultimate goal: destroy capitalism.
Personally, I think the jury is still out on the relationship between carbon emissions and climate change, and it's unlikely we'll ever know the answer for sure. It's hard to look at data without bias; but the more I try, the more fuzzy the link seems.
I'm down with cap and trade, however. Emissions are disastrous for lots of reasons, and the costs of oil imports go way beyond $2 or $4 gas. If we taxed oil just to pay for our foreign policy distortions and international borrowing costs, gasoline would be priced at twice its current level.
But that's socialist talk. And as we all know by now, global warming is a phony phenomenon invented by left-wingers who want to destroy our way of life just to increase their own power. Everyone knows Al Gore just doesn't want to get a real job, after all.
Gorby looks like Cheney. And what's this about "secret meetings" with Gorby to help Russian-US relations? Did Medvedev meet with Jimmy Carter before he was elected?
Also, legal advises us that there are three AMANDA MILFs with current mailing addresses in Van Nuys, California. Last names that did clear: MALFO, MILAN, FILLMORE. Please choose one and revise accordingly.
I bitch a lot about the New York Times. But usually they get it right, or at least righter than most.
For example, I was at the gym today, and Fox "News" was up on one of the communal TVs, reporting breathlessly on the "Fort Dix Terror Trial." Calling this case a "terror trial" (which also sounds like the title of an awesome game show) is fairly standard in the media.
The wife and I saw Milk last night, which was extraordinary. And I don't just mean "extraordinary" that we got out to the movies at all; the film is excellent.
One scene that seems especially prescient to 2008 is a meeting among Harvey Milk and the primary bankrollers of "No on 6." Prop 6 was a particularly nasty California ballot initiative that would have smoked out and fired all gay public school teachers and their supporters.
In the scene, Milk (Sean Penn) reads a flier that the No on 6 campaign has created that focuses on "the human rights angle." Milk disparages the flier by noting the absence of gay people, or even the word "gay" from the flier. "You need a picture of at least one old queen on here," he insists before flinging the offending work into the fireplace. His co-campaigners disagree, preferring a cautiously vague campaign that won't scare straights.
Fast forward 30 years. California's Prop 8 threatens to take away the rights of a person to marry the consenting adult he or she chooses. What do we see from the anti-8 campaign? "The human rights angle." And barely a gay couple to be seen.
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