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Here it is, from the (I'm assuming, Republican) mayor of Arlington TN, on his Facebook page, referring to Tuesday night when Obama announced an increase in troops to Afghanistan:
"We sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose..."
Riiiiight. I'm sure that Obama, the Joint Chiefs of staff and other military bigwigs, as well as Obama's secret cadre of Muslim advisors, all got together in the Situation Room at some point and pored over the TV Guide, just to find the best time to ruin the plans of hick Peanuts fans.
BONUS -- At another point he wrote, "you know, our forefathers had it written in the original Constitution that ONLY property owners could vote, if that has stayed in there, things would be different........"
Yeah. "Property" in the original Constitution included slaves. Nice point, bubba.
CUYAHOGA FALLS, Ohio – Following a pipe bomb explosion Monday night, police and federal law enforcement officials are trying to figure why a Center Avenue man turned his apartment into a bomb factory.
Police said no charges have been filed against Mark Campano, 56. Police found 30 completed pipe bombs in his apartment along with components to make more, plus 17 guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Campano is in an Akron hospital with injuries received when one of the bombs exploded.
As police and federal authorities puzzle over Campano's past and what he planned to do with the bombs, a former neighbor said Campano often railed against the government.
Barbara Vachon lived next door to Campano at the Center Park Place Apartments for several years and said he was a big reason she moved.
"He was always trying to get me and another neighbor to listen to anti-government tapes and watch anti-government videos," said Vachon. "I would never watch them. He was some kind of radical, and he didn't believe in the government."
Apparently, "Psalm 109:8" appeared at the top of Google Trends last week, the internal Google device that sees what people are searching most.
And why? Because of a new bumper sticker popping up all over the country. The bumper stickers say "Pray for Obama", but the biblical reference is Psalm 109:8, so it's not as "nice as it sounds.
Psalm 109:8 reads "May his days be few; may another take his office."
Yup, it's an anti-Obama sticker.
Psalm 109 belongs to a special category of the psalms known as "imprecatory" prayers--it is a lament in the form of petition to destroy one's enemies.It is the personal prayer of an individual, someone who has been dealt an injustice by another--and usually more powerful -- person.
One could argue that those who sport the bumper sticker merely want him to be a one-term president. However, the next passage opf the Psalms reads: ""May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow", suggesting a more -- uh -- violent end to Obama's presidency.
The slogan comes at a time of heightened concern about antigovernment anger. Earlier this year, the president’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, said that Tea Parties could lead to something unhealthy. In September, authorities shut down a poll on Facebook asking if President Obama should be killed.
Still, that doesn’t push the Psalms citation into the realm of hate speech, says Chris Hansen, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The use of Psalm 109:8 is ambiguous as to whether its users are calling for the President to serve “only one term, or less than one term,” he says.
Deborah Lauter, director of civil rights at the Anti-Defamation League agrees that the bumper sticker falls within acceptable political discourse.
For it to be considered hate speech, it “would advocate actual violence or cite scripture that was more clear in its message.”
But that doesn’t mean that it’s completely innocent.
“Are we concerned about real hostility towards [President Obama]? Absolutely,” says Ms. Lauter. “Is this a part of that movement? It may be, but in terms of this message itself, we would not criticize it.”
“The problem is you don’t know if people who are donning that message in a shirt or on a bumper sticker are fully aware of the quote or what follows. Obviously that message makes the ambiguity disappear. If they’re just referring to him being out of office, that’s one thing. If they’re referring to him being dead, that’s so offensive. It’s protected speech, but it’s clearly offensive.”
As a free speecher myself, I tend to agree with Cafepress's final assessment. It shouldn't be banned (although CafePress, not being a government entity, can ban anything it damn well pleases and not violate the First Amendment). Still, it's unnecessarily ugly, and quite anti-Christian. We ought to keep that in mind, especially at this time of year when a President was shot down by an assassin's bullet 46 years ago.
If one is so inclined to pray for Obama, perhaps a better prayer would be
I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone, for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.” – I Timothy 2:1-2 (NIV)
So the tea partiers boarded the corporate-sponsored buses to come to Washington DC today to let their Congressmen know that they don't want socialism blah-blah-blah. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn, who fell out of the right wing crazy tree and hit every branch on the way down, was the one who called for the protest. She's not known for her truthfulness when it comes to healthcare.
A couple thousand are there, along with B-list celebrities. Well, two B-list celebrities. Actors Jon Voight and Jon Ratzenberger ("Cliff" from Cheers).
And things aren't going well.
First, one speaker forgot the Pledge of Allegiance, after giving a fervent speech about its importance:
Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) had the honor of leading the anti-health care protesters on Capitol Hill today in the Pledge of Allegiance. To show his fervent devotion to the Pledge, he gave a short speech about the importance of the phrase “under God.” However, when it came time to actually recite the Pledge, he was so excited about that one phrase that he forgot to say “indivisible” before “with liberty, and justice for all.” The crowd seemed to remember the actual words though, which threw Akin a bit off track.
Ironic how the divisive GOP forgets the word "indivisible".
Almost as embarrassing was House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), who decided to wave his pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution around. Boehner, with voice raised, pledged to "stand here with our Founding Fathers, who wrote in the pre-amble: 'We hold these truths to be self evident ..."
In our reality, that's the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, not the U.S. Constitution.
Now, I'll gladly concede that these were fairly inconsequential errors, which were part of a fairly inconsequential right-wing rally. But the flubs were nevertheless a reminder -- self-righteous conservatives, who enjoy nothing more than lecturing others on patriotism, should hesitate on using the Constitution and the Pledge as some kind of partisan weapon, especially if they don't know what they're talking about.
By the way, here's one of the signs out there today (click to embiggen):
That's right. Health care reform is just like the Holocaust.
UPDATE -- More rally signs, these having little to do with health care:
At the Capitol Hill Tea Party, TPMDC's Christina Bellantoni happened upon what looked to be a series of several arrests -- for an as-yet unidentified offense. She reports that a crowd of Tea Partiers began heckling Capitol Police and singing "God Bless America" while several people were being detained.
There's also a massive backup of people outside Longworth office building. They've blocked traffic and some supportive cars are honking. Many protesters are shouting, "Kill the bill!"
Many conservatives and many liberals have taken up the meme that Obama really hasn't done that much in his first year. Esquire's John Richardson shoots this down. A healthy excerpt:
These days, the argument that Obama hasn't accomplished anything may be the only example of real bipartisanship in America.
Here's the conventional wisdom in a single paragraph: Three hundred and sixty-four days after he was elected president, Obama is still stuck in Iraq, hasn't closed Guantánamo, is getting deeper into Afghanistan, hasn't accomplished health-care reform or slowed the rise in unemployment. His promises of bipartisanship are a punch line... And there's still no peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. What a failure! What a splash of cold water in the face of all our bold hopes!
But the conventional wisdom is insane. Consider the record:
A week before he was sworn in, Obama jammed part two of the bank bailout down the throat of his own party — a $350 billion accomplishment.
Two days after he was sworn in, Obama banned the use of "harsh interrogation" and ordered the closing of Guantánamo.
A day later, Obama reversed George W. Bush's funding cutoff to overseas family planning organizations — saving millions of lives with the stroke of a pen.
Three days after that, Obama gave a green light to the California car-emissions standards that Bush had been blocking for six years — an important step on the road to cleaner air and a cooler planet.
Two weeks after that, Obama signed the stimulus bill — a $787 billion accomplishment.
Ten days after that, Obama formally announced America's withdrawal from Iraq.
A week later — we're in early March now — Obama erased Bush's decision to restrict federal funding for stem-cell research.
In April and June, Obama forced Chrysler and GM into bankruptcy.
In June, Obama reset the tone of our relations with the entire Arab world with a single speech — an accomplishment that the Bush administration failed to achieve despite a series of desperate PR moves (anyone remember Charlotte Beers?) and a "public diplomacy" budget of $1 billion a year.
Also in June, Obama unveiled the "Cash for Clunkers" program, a "socialist" giveaway that reanimated the corpse of our car industry — leading, for example, to the billion-dollar profit that Ford announced on Monday.
I haven't even mentioned Sonia Sotomayor, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the order to release the torture memos, Obama's push for charter schools, his $288 billion tax cut, or the end of Bush's war on medical marijuana. Or the minor fact that he seems to have — with Bush's help, it must be said — stopped the financial collapse, revived the credit markets, and nudged the economy toward 3.5 percent growth in the last quarter.
Oh, and one more thing: President Obama is now a month or two from accomplishing the awesome and seemingly impossible task that eluded mighty presidents like FDR, LBJ, and WJC — health-care reform.
Obama's early returns also include a host of remarkably cautious and prudent national-security decisions that seem, these days, to have been completely forgotten:
Appointing a conservative Bush holdover like Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense.
Appointing an establishment centrist like Leon Panetta at CIA.
Reinstating, with tweaks, Bush's military tribunal system for Guantánamo prisoners.
Fighting, in another unexpected defense of a controversial Bush policy, lawsuits against the "warrantless wiretapping" program — as recently as this weekend with a decision that a leading civil liberties group called "extremely disappointing."
Sending, way back in February, seventeen thousand more soldiers to Afghanistan. As Fareed Zakaira recently pointed out, this was just three thousand fewer soldiers than Bush sent to Iraq for his famous "surge."
Richardson points out that, if you're a conservative, Obama's actually done a lot to please you in the areas of foreign policy. If you're a liberal, he's done a lot to please you with his domestic policy.
But either way, to suggest that he hasn't done enough strains credulity, he argues. Just remove the partisan blinders:
So the question, a year since we elected him, isn't how much Obama has accomplished. The question is why we've turned so small and mean that we only see half of it — the half we happen to agree with.
To all the conservatives who rooted against America (which, not too long ago, you once considered a bad thing), pat yourselves on the back: Mission accomplished.
Sad, really, that they're lust to see Obama "lose" trumps everything good. Let's have a flashback to January 2008:
President Bush Meets with Chicago 2016 Bid Committee and United States Olympic Committee Members
THE PRESIDENT: I want to thank the members of the 2016 Chicago bid to get the Olympics. Listen, Mr. Mayor, you and your committee have put together a great plan. It's a plan that will make America proud.
They say that the Olympics will come to Chicago if we're fortunate enough to be selected, but really it's coming to America, and I can't think of a better city to represent the United States than Chicago.
This is a well thought out venue. There will be -- the athletes will be taken care of. People who will be coming from around the world will find this good city has got fantastic accommodations, great restaurants. It will be safe.
And so I -- this country supports your bid, strongly. And our hope is that the judges will take a good look at Chicago and select Chicago for the 2016 Olympics.
Remember, in 2005, when New York was eliminated as a host city for the 2012 Olympics, and liberals everywhere giggled like children and mocked the Bush administration?
I don't think conservatives should be celebrating the U.S. losing out on the Olympic games. The Olympics is always a chance to put our national pride on display. However, this might be an instructive lesson on how Obama views the world and possibly the miscalculations of his political team.
Obama looks bad. Anyone disagreeing is being disingenuous. But conservatives should temper their excitement. Is losing the Olympics enough to really go nuts over an Obama loss?
So here's what The World's Worst Politican Evah (tm) said on the floor of the House last night:
For the video-impaired, here's a transcript:
"[T]he bill orders that these clinics protect patient privacy and student records. What does that mean? It means that parents will never know what kind of counsel and treatment that their children are receiving. And as a matter of fact, the bill goes on to say what's going to go on — comprehensive primary health services, physicals, treatment of minor acute medical conditions, referrals to follow-up for specialty care — is that abortion? Does that mean that someone's 13-year-old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back and go home on the school bus that night? Mom and Dad are never the wiser.
[Emphasis mine]
By the way, this is classic GOP fearmongering. You know how you can tell? Because it comes in the form of a question.
As in "Does the mean....?" or "Could it be that...?"
Example: "The Constitution says that the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Does this mean that Obama will command the United States Marines to come to your home, rape your children, and drink the blood of your grandmother?"
Then they'll add (usually in a follow-up on MSNBC's Hardball), "Well, it doesn't say otherwise. So naturally, we must take it to mean that Obama will command the United States Marines to come to your home, rape your children, and drink the blood of your grandmother."
That's how the game works. Learn it. Look for it.
Anyway, back to Bachmann.
What she's doing is echoing a bottom-dweller convervative argument. The origin of this argument, which has been hitting GOP inboxes in chain-letter fashion, seems to have come from blogger Peter Fleckenstein and trumpeted by the anti-abortion Liberty Counsel, which recently claimed that Page 992 of the bill "will establish school-based 'health' clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!"
The nonpartisan (and Pulitzer-Prize winning) PolitiFact, which provided the Liberty Counsel origin, found the assertion baseless, giving the charge its lowest rating, "Pants on Fire."
It concludes:
"The money could also be used to provide 'mental health assessments, crisis interventions, counseling, treatment and referral to a continuum of services including emergency psychiatric care, community support programs, inpatient care and outpatient care.' The clinics would have the option to provide 'oral health, social and age-appropriate health education services including nutritional counseling.'
"Clinics getting federal dollars must act in accordance with federal, state and local law, according to the bills. For example, clinics in Louisiana are not even allowed to counsel students on abortion, according to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals."
But these inconvenient facts are overlooked by Bachmann and her brethren. None of the three bills in the House explicitly prohibit the use of the school-based clinics to steer kids to abortion clinics, so naturally allow for it, according to the odd conservative logic.
And soon you'll see the lie-meme popping up in ads, complete with scary music underneath, presenting this as truth. Oh, and Beck, too.
NYT columnist Thomas Friedman recalls not too long ago when Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was accused by his political opponents of being a socialist, a Nazi, a treasonous villian, etc. That all pretty much ended when Rabin was assassinated in 1995.
Friedman today writes that what we're seeing in America now is much the same thing:
Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.
What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.
Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.
Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.
Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.
And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.
Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.
The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.
Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world.
As if to prove Friedman's point, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele responded to Friedman's editorial by calling Friedman "a nut job".
Also proving Friedman's point, an op-ed in Newsmax appeared yesterday endorsing a potential military coup as the only way to solve the "Obama problem". Newsmax appears to have taken down its article, but here's the full text of the article as it originally appeared.
The article not only endorsed the idea but seemed to suggest that top military brass were also planning or actively considering such an option. That, however, is dubious. In his Washington Post column, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson acknowledges that “military leaders seem impressed” with President Obama’s decision-making process. “Obama’s engaged, deliberate style has fans in the military,” he writes.
Count in singer and still-not-dead Andy Williams as a teabagger:
"Don't like him at all," he said, "I think he wants to create a socialist country. The people he associates with are very Left-wing. One is registered as a Communist.
"Obama is following Marxist theory. He's taken over the banks and the car industry. He wants the country to fail."
It's okay to cut Andy some slack. he's got to be close to senility by now.
What happens when you gin up anti-government sentiment among the rightwing nuts?
The AP is reporting that Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found hung to death in Kentucky with the word “fed” was scrawled on the dead man’s chest. Investigators are still trying to determine the motive, but “law enforcement officers have told the agency the matter is ‘an apparent homicide.’” “Our job is to determine if there was foul play involved — and that’s part of the investigation — and if there was foul play involved, whether that is related to his employment as a census worker,” said FBI spokesman David Beyer.
[Cantor] expressed frustration with [Speaker of the House Nancy] Pelosi’s suggestion last week that the vitriol injected into the health reform debate could end in violence akin to the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone in the 1970s. “I think she’s living in another world — I really do,” Cantor said of the California Democrat.
Orly Taitz is an attorney and a doctor and she's the one filing all these lawsuits trying to prove that Obama was actually a Kenyan.
Having had one of her cases thrown out of federal court last week (with an admonishment from the judge that if she continues to waste the court's time, she'll be fined), now she's the object of conspiracy theories, apparently. My how the worm turns:
Please don't listen to vicious rumors
Attorney Orly Taitz responds to her critics
I am getting close to removing the Usurper, and there are more and more vicious rumors about me and my whole family. It is 5:30 in the morning and I had to cut on sleep yet again to take some time and debunk all those vicious rumors.
The Usurper is a Batman villian now, I think.
First, there was a rumor that there is a declaration by Larry Sinclair filed with court. Please, go on Pacer, it is a public record. There is nothing there, no such declaration. People need to understand that a person cannot just come from the street and file a declaration or an affidavit. It has to be filed by a party to the action. Either I, as an attorney for the plaintiffs, or the attorney for the defendants, assistant U.S. attorney, would file something. Neither I nor the U.S. attorney filed any such affidavit or declaration.
Dr. Orly Taitz learned that in law school. And I use the word "in" advisedly. You see, she received a law degree from William Howard Taft Law School. Which is a "distance learning" law school only. So she wasn't IN law school. Also, Taft isn't accredited by the ABA. No, I'm not kidding.
There was a rumor that there was some complaint filed with the CA bar and I was disbarred. None of it is true. Please go on the web site of CA bar and see that I am an attorney in good standing and never had any action against me.
There was a rumor that Philip Berg somehow became part of my case with judge Carter and filed a subpoena to ambassador of Kenya as part of this case. Again, Berg has nothing to do with this case. There is nothing in the case having to do with Berg.
Berg is another birther attorney who also gets his cases routinely thrown out of court. That's why it's easy to understand why so many people apparently think the two are working together.
Lastly, there was a vicious rumor that my husband is somehow connected with swine flu and swine flu vaccine. Again, ridiculous rumor.
My husband studied computer science and business. He never studied pharmacology, doesn't know pharmacology and wouldn't know the difference between a virus and an elephant.
One doesn't need to study phramacology to know the difference between a virus and an elephant.
He is a CEO of a company that produces a software, which is a tool used in research.
Whoa there, Einstein! You're going to fast. Now what is this "software" thing of which you speak?
It is used by many universities in the country. It is used in agriculture research, in chemical research, in any research that deals with molecules and computation of properties of molecules, that are being synthesised. There are millions and millions of molecules in the world. New ones are being synthesised every day, my husband has no clue what different companies are doing in their research. It is similar to any other software that is used as a tool.
So he makes software used for agricultural research and molecules. Actually, that does connect him with the swine flu -- just as much as Obama's grandparents being Kenyan connects Obama to Kenya.
There is an accounting software, quicken. A computer engineer, who invented this software didn't become your accountant, didn't enter the information in your tax returns. Microsoft Word or Word Perfect is used by many writers, but it didn't make Microsoft a poet or a comedian or a screen writer. Microsoft Word or Word Perfect is just a tool.
No, no. I'm sorry. I'm just not following you, Orly.
I hope I explained this point and wouldn't have to go to it again.
That makes two of us.
My husband is a good man, he is a devoted father and he is there for our three sons when I am travelling around the country raising support for Obama's illegitimacy issue, when I am in court fighting to make sure this country doesn't turn into another Communist Hell, as I experienced as a child, so we don't live under Dictator Obama with all his szars like another Himler or Herring or another Beria.
In other words, your husband behaves responsibly, while his kids' mommy is annoying the country on her Dingbat Tour.
By the way, I know there are many ways to spell "czars" -- or "tsars" -- but "szars" is a new one for me.
I hope people stop attacking my family and start attacking Obama and demand that he produce his vital records immediately or resign or be removed immediately. Judge Carter has written "Court encourages discovery before the scheduling conference (it is on October 5th)" I have submitted a proposed deposition schedule. Let's make sure Obama shows up for his deposition with his hospital birth certificate ready for examination.
Yeah. Don't hold your breath.
UPDATE: It gets funnier as the day goes on.
TPM posted a letter one of Orly's clients, telling her to stop representation. Orly now says the letter is a forgery. Yup, Obama birth certificate is a forgery; so is the letter from her ex-client.
I don't know if this letter came from her, since she is in Iraq now and the Office -max store from where it came, states that they don't send faxes for customers. The signature on her notarized letter from Kansas and this letter looks different. Regardless, whether it is her or not, there is no ground for accusations. She authorized me to proceed with the legal action. Motion for reconsideration is a routine procedure and attorney is not required to get an additional consent from the client. Any attorney will confirm that. That is particularly true in exigent circumstances like these.
Wrong, Orly. You can't do squat without the client's permission, especially when the client tells you to cease and desist.
It appears Connie was pressured by the military. It appear to be a concerted effort to quash all free speech, particularly any legal challenges to Obama's legitimacy, Attorney Hemenway in DC was threatened with sanctions of $10,000, I was threatened with sanctions. Connie Rhodes was threatened with high costs of litigation to be paid to the Department of Defense and Department of Justice. It is possible that this letter was written to avoid paying high litigation costs.
So the letter is from her now, and she was pressured?
The most important question is still on the table: why would the judge levy $10,000 in sanctions instead of instructing Obama to produce a real Hospital birth certificate with a name of the hospital name of the doctor and signatures , so we can locate this birthing file? Why go to such extend?
Because your case is bullshit?
The only answer is: that the administration is scared, they know they have nothing to show for except for the piece of JPG garbage that Obama posted on the Internet (no name of the hospital, no name of the doctor).
Yes, of course. And the judge is.. uh... in on it?
Well, all good that ends good. This threat of sanctions gives me an opportunity to demand rule 11 discovery and get all of Obama' records through the back door
Yup. That's what you're going to hear about, starting this week and going on for the next few weeks.
Here's the "scandal" in a nutshell, as described by the rightwing "journalist" who "broke" it:
I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”
Now if you read his article in full, he goes on to speculate:
Could the National Endowment for the Arts be looking to the art community to create an environment amenable to the administration’s positions?
As you should know by now, the answer to that question isn't relevant to the noisy conservative anti-Obamites. They will assume this is true, and within days, you'll be hearing (cue Glenn Beck) a lot about how we're going down the path of Leni Riefenstahl and Joseph Goebbels, those formidable Nazi propagandists.
None of it, of course, is true. Even if a work of art -- whether it be a song, play, movie, drawing, whatever -- is ostensibly about, say, health care, it doesn't necessarily have to be "amenable to the administration's positions", and nothing that happened in the August 10 conference call, or in any NEA materials requires that it has to be, in order to receive funding.
And even if some bit of NEA-supported art does arguably support the administration's position on one of these issues (and what would that look like anyway? "Public Option: The Musical"???), the NEA supports and finances TONS of things, most of which doesn't have an "agenda"-driven message at all.
And then there's things like this, which you can find right on the NEA website:
In 2008, U.S. Armed Forces active duty troops and veterans of both current and past conflicts will have an in-depth opportunity to reflect on their service through the National Endowment for the Arts’ groundbreaking initiative Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. Operation Homecoming will host writing workshops at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers, military hospitals, and affiliated centers in communities around the country.
None of this, of course, will matter to the rightwing propagandists at all. They are going to be using the ACORN template to try to bring down the NEA.
I don't mind Obama opposition in general, and concerns about exploding the deficits are more than reasonable concerns. Heck, make a coherent argument against anything I support, and I'll listen and consider it.
My problem with many -- if not most -- of the Tea Party protesters is that -- well, how shall I say it -- they're idiots. They simply don't understand how things work, so they're not in a position to criticize.
The classic example are the senior citizens who are on -- and like -- Medicare, but who loudly voice their opposition to any form of government-run healthcare. Do they have low IQs or are they just uninformed? Is there a brain severance that prevents them from understanding that the kind of thing they protest is something they actually like?
Doesn't matter, really. At the end of the day, one can dismiss their viewpoints as, at best, noise.
And today we have another example.
Last weekend, a large number of tea party protesters descended on Washington, D.C. to protest the -- well, they really didn't have a unifed message, but generally, it was against government.
And apparently, some of them were less-than-satisfied with the service they got from the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA), and found themselves facing crowded trains. It was difficult to get from point A to point B.
The irony? Well, the Washington metro is public transit — in other words, it’s run by big government. Nevertheless, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) has written a letter to WMATA complaining that the service wasn’t good enough for the tea baggers:
“These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration,” Brady wrote. “These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them.”
That's right. People opposed to government spending are now calling on government to provide better services.
By the way, they didn't only use public transportation.
Those millions tens of thousands of teabaggers used the facilities of the government-run National Park system.
They left a significant amount of trash behind in garbage cans (mostly anti-socialism signs, of course) for the government-run sanitation department to dispose of.
They arrived at the Tea Party on government-built and -maintained roads.
They relied on government-funded police to provide security.
Many of them are on government-provided social security and/or Medicare.
Apparently, many of these people think these things pay for themselves. Or they want these government services (or better government services), but they just don't want to pay for them.
Apparently, Brady heard complaints from some of his constituents who traveled to D.C. to protest "big government." They were disappointed to discover, however, that the government hadn't done more to satisfy their public-transportation expectations, and now want other government officials to address the problem.
In some instances, Brady said constituents relied on private enterprise -- taxi cabs -- rather than the (ahem) public option. The conservative lawmaker described this as a bad thing. Local officials, Brady said, should have made "a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit" to the public.
Read that sentence again and replace "transit" with "health care coverage."
First it was "Liar, liar" (embodied in Joe Wilson); now it's "he started it" ("he" = Obama).
My favorite:
After the vote was taken, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) declared on the House floor that Obama had insulted Congress, by saying that his opponents were lying about his health care proposals. "He comes in here talking about a lie ... He says we're making wild claims," said Gohmert. "That's no way to act when you're invited into somebody else's house."
(1) Death panels for granny? Insurance for illegal immigrants? Those are lies and wild claims.
Van Jones, ACORN, and now the video of the school bus brawl.
Anyone notice a pattern of the right-wing targets?
There seems to be a racial pattern to the target-du-jour of the right wing.
The school bus brawl incident is especially noteworthy, because it is clearly race-baiting. I mean, some kids beat on another kid on a school bus. Worthy of a national story? Nope. But when the kids doing the beating are black, well then.... we're off to the races.
"It's Obama's America, is it not? Obama's America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,' and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white."
Was the attack bad? Of course. Was it racially motivated? There's no evidence -- absolutely none -- of that. In fact, it appears to be about a bunch of bullies (who happen to be black) trying to dictate who sits where on the bus.
But that doesn't stop the right from engaging in some good ol' race-baiting that would do George Wallace proud. The message? "See what happens now that we've elected a black person? Those uppity n****ers think they own America now. And they're coming after us white people."
Which is just the sort of message to fire up the racist base of the GOP. Why else would Limbaugh et al say such a thing?
The story was a classic schoolbus bully incident; it could happen anywhere any time and has happened everywhere at all times with kids of all races, backgrounds and religions. To infer both that it was racially motivated and that this is somehow connected to having a black president is repulsive. I know that is almost de trop with Limbaugh, but sometimes you have to regain a little shock. This man is spewing incendiary racial hatred. He is conjuring up images of lonely whites being besieged by angry violent blacks ... based on an incident that had nothing to do with race at all. And why, by the way, does someone immediately go to the racial angle when looking at such a tape?
These people are going off the deep end entirely: open panic at a black president is morphing into the conscious fanning of racial polarization, via Gates or ACORN or Van Jones or a schoolbus in St. Louis. What we're seeing is the Jeremiah Wright moment repeated and repeated. The far right is seizing any racial story to fan white fears of black power in order to destroy Obama. And the far right now controls the entire right.
Do they understand how irresponsible this is? How recklessly dangerous to a society's cohesion and calm?
They don't. Because at their core, they themselves are themselves racist, or, if not, then they're intentionally catering to racists by stirring up racial resentment. ("race-baiting").
But that's not why I took down the item and the link to the video. I took it down because now we have Rush Limbaugh blaming Obama for black kids beating up a white kid on a school bus. This is what happens in "Obama's America," he said today on his radio show.
How low will these people go? Look, I think it's important to talk about black male violence, or at least as important as it is to talk about any other important social trend. I don't think we should be squeamish about discussing it in a responsible and fair-minded way, despite what the politically correct say. But good grief, Limbaugh is up to something wicked. He's plainly trying to rally white conservatives into thinking that now that we have a black president, blacks are rising up to attack white kids! Christ have mercy, what is wrong with these people?
I won't have anything to do with it, not even tangentially, which is why I took down the post. I can't see this as anything other than Limbaugh deliberately trying to whip up racial fear and loathing of the president. This goes far, far beyond tough criticism of Obama. Does that man Limbaugh have any idea what rough beast he's calling forth?
***
That world [of racism] seems like a thousand years ago. But it only seems so far away because many people worked too hard -- and some even gave their lives -- to drive those demons out. And now here is Limbaugh, of Palm Beach, and his ilk, calling them back insouciantly, for political advantage. This is evil.
It's undeniably true that black males, as a group, are disproportionately responsible for violent crimes today (and blacks are disproportionately victims, too). This is important to talk about. This means something. I hate the kind of political correctness that demands we pretend not to see what we see. But as far as I'm concerned, if the Limbaughs of the world are going to be doing this kind of thing, and trying to blame, with no logical grounds whatsoever, a black president for black-on-white violence, and if they're going to do this in an increasingly hysterical atmosphere of protest against that black president, I don't want to talk about these things at all. Now is not the time. With this kind of inflammatory rhetoric, they are quite simply tearing the country apart.
Where do they think this is going to go?
UPDATE -- I would remiss to not add Will Bunch to the mix:
Look, there's a lot to talk about with a new president such as Obama, who has a lot of policy proposals on complicated issues like health care or climate change, and so there's a lot there for a thoughtful conservative critique. But that's not where the conversation is going right now -- it's all about the shiny black object. Fox News and its out-of-control Howard Beale, the seriously unanchored Glenn Beck, have spent most of the last several weeks focused on two issues: ACORN, and mid-level Obama officials like now-departed so-called "green jobs czar" Van Jones. Jones -- did I mention that he is black -- and ACORN have both shared a common mission, bringing a dose of political power to poor, mostly urban people who have not had power. And make no mistake, what really scares Beck, Fox News and the vast right-wing media is not the petty fraud of some ACORN employees or a few nutty things that Jones said in his more radical past, but the fact that they will succeed in their legitimate mission of empowering American citizens.
There's something else that the right wing finds alarming, and that is Obama's relative success in speaking to the American public in a calm and persuasive manner, as he did last week. I think it is this frustration, the worry that while it's mostly a vast work in progress that the president may not be "failing miserably" as Drudge and some Politico op-ed writer allege but showing signs of success, that have led to the new more overtly racial tone, dragging the current discourse to a low level that didn't seem possible. And so -- as Maureen Dowd concluded, also reluctantly -- I can't help but feel there was a racial edge to ex-Strom Thurmond acolyte Joe Wilson and his exasperated "You Lie" at the president. It plays right into the toxic narrative that is building on Drudge and talk radio and Fox like a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico.
Obama's post-racial America? Good grief, were we really that naive, and so recently? I can honestly say that America right now, on the ides of September 2009, feels more racial, at least to me, today than it has any time in a generation, since I was living in New York City in the era of "Do the Right Thing." And the "Racial America" of Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and far too many of their millions of "dittoheads" is going to keep getting even more racial -- if we don't call them out.
Well, there's no doubt that ACORN, the community organizing group, has some -- shall we say -- issues.
What I don't understand is why this is such a victory-lap issue for conservatives, who have been targeting ACORN since Obama became President. In fact, getting ACORN has been part of a prong in the Beck-driven right's full frontal assualt on Obama.
But what I don't get is why? Attacking ACORN was kind of like attacking Cindy Sheehan. When all was said and done, Cindy Sheehan was just one small part of a large anti-war movement, but she wasn't the movement.
In the scheme of Obama politics, ACORN plays even a smaller role that Sheehan did.
So why the crowing about how bad ACORN is? I'll conceed that the organization has problems (although, to be honest, this really does look like all we're talking about is some "bad apples", and at worst, ACORN needs to do a much better job of training and screening its employees)
But what am I conceeding, in terms of my support for the President?
If you don't want to see the whole thing, jump to the 6:00 minute mark. The young interviewer explains to Tea Party protesters what "czars" are (they are merely advisors and don't have executive power), and who appointed the first "czar" (Ronald Reagan). The reactions are priceless.
WASHINGTON — State and local tourism officials are being flooded by emails and calls from people across the country, saying they won't vacation in South Carolina because they're upset by GOP Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst at President Barack Obama.
The officials said that a number of the out-of-state e-mailers have said they've taken beach trips for years in Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head and other South Carolina resort areas, but don't plan to return.
***
South Carolina's $1 billion-plus tourism industry, centered around its beaches, had already been hit by the recession as Americans postpone vacations or cancel travel altogether. The state's 11.8 percent unemployment rate is among the highest in the country.
According to a press release by ColorOfChange.org (emphasis added):
The advertising boycott of Glenn Beck has cost the controversial host over half of his estimated advertising revenue since it was launched by ColorOfChange.org a month ago. This according to data analyzed from industry sources.
Estimated advertising revenue [the total amount of advertising money being spent during a block of commercial time for a program] was collected on a week-by-week basis for a period of two months. According to the data collected, the amount of money spent by national advertisers on Beck’s program per week was at its highest at approximately $1,060,000, for the week ending August 2, 2009. ColorOfChange.org launched their campaign at the end of that week and since then, 62 advertisers have distanced themselves from Beck. Data collected for the week ending September 6, 2009 shows Beck’s estimated ad revenue at $492,000, equal to a loss of $568,000.
Joe Wilson, the "You Lie!" guy, went on Fox News Sunday to tell Chris Wallace that he ain't going to apologize for his outburst again, to anyone.
Wallace asked Wilson about Maureen Dowd's op-ed, in which she alleges that Wilson's disrespect for the president was motivated by racism. Wilson came back with a surprising and absurd defense:
I respect President Obama. Actually, there's a relationship in a way ... his wife, ah, her family's from Georgetown [South Carolina], ah, my family's from next door, in McClellanville, so I, ah, have a great respect for the president.
So Wilson's best defense to the accusation that his Obama antagonism is motivated by racism... is that Obama's wife's ancestors grew up in slavery and segregation in the county next to Wilson's.
Except that ABC News, citing the DC fire department, reported that between 60,000 and 70,000 people had attended the tea party rally at the Capitol.
How could Malkin be so far off? You see, Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, the rightwing group sponsoring the rally, told the crowd that that ABC had reported there were 1.5 million people there. And that number got tweeted around, and then Malkin finally blogged that there were 2 million.
It was a lie. Kibbe lied.
Malkin retracted the number, but is now all concerned that the left will take note of the "error to discredit the undeniably massive turnout today."
Well, 2 million is undeniably massive. That's how many turned up for Obama's inauguration. Hotel rooms were double booked -- it was indeed massive.
70,000 is a football game.
The cited figures were not a little "oopsy". They were 25 times greater than the actual figures. Off by 2500%.
Yes, the left is going to take note of this, Miss Malkin. It was a gargantuan lie told by the activist group behind all the tea party rallies.
UPDATE: Powerline's John Hinderaker is trying to spin, spin spin....
There has been a surprising amount of controversy over the size of the anti-Obama administration protest in Washington yesterday. Liberal media have pegged it in the "tens of thousands" (or even just "thousands") range, while some have claimed that there were as many as 2 million people there, which seems impossible. There probably will never be a definitive number, but efforts to lowball the crowd are ridiculous.
Riiiight. Assuming that there was, say, 100,000 people (most reports say 70,000 at most), efforts to lowball the crowd by claiming there are "tens of thousands" are "ridiculous".
And what about the efforts by the march organizers to exaggerate the claim twenty-fold?!? Chirp, chirp, chirp.
I have no expertise at estimating crowds, but this one was obviously huge. If you compare it, in very rough terms, to the 50,000 or so it takes to fill a stadium, it appears to be well into six figures.
I have no doubt that Washington Democrats are well aware of how many people turned out, even as their media outlets try to downplay the event. Ultimately, those media efforts will have little effect, just like the media's silly attempt to portray anti-big government voters as "racists," etc. The rubber will hit the road in November 2010. If present trends hold, the ruling Democrats will suffer a severe reversal that the media will not be able to avoid reporting, however much they may hate it, as in 1994. On the other hand, if the economy turns around and the Democrats hold on next year, no one will care much how many protesters did or did not turn out yesterday.
Now comes the punchline, something added to the post after it was published:
SCOTT adds: The site John linked to for the photo he originally posted above has retracted it, noting the picture was of another rally.
UPDATE: Teabaggers in their own words:
Collectively, they don't seem to have much message discipline. They just seem to dislike Obama.
Sadly, there was an election not too long ago. We won, they lost.
But while the majority of both parties' lawmakers behaved as adults, the insolence by House Republicans stole the show. There was derisive laughter on that side of the chamber when Obama noted that "there remain some significant details to be ironed out." They applauded as he spoke of "all the misinformation that's been spread over the past few months." They laughed again when he said that "many Americans have grown nervous about reform."
When Obama addressed the charge that he plans "panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens," someone on the GOP side shouted out "shame!" The president went on: "Such a charge would be laughable if it weren't so cynical." "Read the bill!" someone shouted back. Obama mentioned those who accuse him of a government takeover of health care. "It's true," someone shouted back.
***
Even as Obama delivered a tribute to the late senator Ted Kennedy, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga), a leader of House conservatives, perused his BlackBerry. Shortly before the speech ended, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) walked out to beat the rush.
This morning, the conservosphere is lining up to demonstrate that Democrats booed and hissed Bush when he gave a State of the Union in 2005. Except what they were booing and hissing at wasn't Bush, but at what Bush was saying. Bush was warning that if something wasn't done, Social Security would fail. That prompted a boo -- the spector of Social Security failing. It was not an attack on Bush, but an acknowledgement in agreement with Bush that losing Social Security would be bad.
But I suppose that;s a little to nuanced for conservatives to understand.
The best write-up on this non-issue comes from Forbes writer Tunku Caradarajan in an article aptly titled "Too Many Kooks":
The Silly Season ceases to be "silly" when what passes for political debate in America turns not merely stupid or witless, but certifiably demented.
I write of the kooky reaction of many conservatives--politicians, citizens and commentators in the media--to the plan by President Obama to address the nation's schoolchildren tomorrow. (And I write, please note, as a nonlefty libertarian who did not support Barack Obama in the presidential election.)
Obama will, as we all know, address our kids--plenty of whom need a lesson or two on the subject, since they clearly don't get it from their parents--on the virtues of study, education and hard work. According to a White House spokesman, the aim of the speech is "to challenge students to work hard in school, to not drop out and to meet short-term goals like behaving in class, [and] doing their homework ..." If anyone thinks that's unpalatable, subversive, Commie and un-American, I'd like to meet for a duel at dawn by the skating rink at New York's Central Park. (Pick your weapon, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck ...)
All those links are to other Malkin screeds. I don't if those are really the "subtext" of Obama's speech (which I've printed in full below the fold). Maybe she means "context".
So basically, Malkin is now claiming that she doesn't have a problem with the actual speech; but it serves as a platform to go on a tangent of rants about other nonsensical things.
And that is why you should keep your kids out of school today... um.... yeah... I guess.
Malkin closes by asked "Now, who are you calling 'kook'?"
How long did it take the right to go from: "if you criticize the President you are a traitor" to "School children should not trust the President."
But seriously, what IS it with the objection to President Obama talking with school children and encouraging them to study hard and learn and do well? I mean, it's not like he's going to be preaching partisan policy, like Reagan did two decades ago when he talked to schoolkids (via CSPAN) about tax cuts.
What could possibly happen as a result of the president and schoolchildren getting together?
Oh, shit. We're screwed.
No, but really serously this time -- if parents are going to pull their kids out of school on Tuesday because Obama (he's black, you know) is going to give the kids a pep talk, maybe we should pick that day to teach evolution and real sex education.
Monica Novotny: John, what about this controversy over opposition to Obama's speech to school children?
John Harwood: I've got to tell you Monica, I've been watching politics for a long time and this one is really over the top. What it shows you is there are a lot of cynical people who try to fan controversy and let's face it, in a country of 300 million peopl there are a lot of stupid people too because if you believe that it's somehow unhealthy for kids for the president to say "work hard and stay in school," you're stupid!
Novotny: (laughter)
Harwood: I'm worried for some of those kids of those parents who are upset. I'm not sure those parents are smart enough to raise those kids.
The [Texas] State Board of Education has appointed “review committees” made up largely of active and retired school teachers to draft new social studies curriculum standards as well as six “expert reviewers” to help shape the final document.
The standards, which the board will decide next spring, will influence new history, civics and geography textbooks.
The first draft for proposed standards in United States History Studies Since Reconstruction says students should be expected “to identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority.”
On September 8, President Obama will speak to schoolchildren throughout the country. He's going to convey a rather standard message.
In an August 26 letter to principals, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described Obama's September 8 speech as being about "the importance of education" and "persisting and succeeding in school." Duncan also offered K-12 "classroom activities" to "engage students and stimulate discussion on the importance of education in their lives." From his letter:
In a recent interview with student reporter, Damon Weaver, President Obama announced that on September 8 -- the first day of school for many children across America -- he will deliver a national address directly to students on the importance of education. The President will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning. He will also call for a shared responsibility and commitment on the part of students, parents and educators to ensure that every child in every school receives the best education possible so they can compete in the global economy for good jobs and live rewarding and productive lives as American citizens.
Since taking office, the President has repeatedly focused on education, even as the country faces two wars, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and major challenges on issues like energy and health care. The President believes that education is a critical part of building a new foundation for the American economy. Educated people are more active civically and better informed on issues affecting their lives, their families and their futures.
This is the first time an American president has spoken directly to the nation's school children about persisting and succeeding in school. We encourage you to use this historic moment to help your students get focused and begin the school year strong. I encourage you, your teachers, and students to join me in watching the President deliver this address on Tuesday, September 8, 2009. It will be broadcast live on the White House website www.whitehouse.gov 12:00 noon eastern standard time.
In advance of this address, we would like to share the following resources: a menu of classroom activities for students in grades preK-6 and for students in grades 7-12. These are ideas developed by and for teachers to help engage students and stimulate discussion on the importance of education in their lives. We are also staging a student video contest on education.
But the right wing is going ballistic.
There's Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin -- frothing at the mouth about Obama trying to "indoctrinate the children" into his "socialist agenda". (Staying in school is "socialist" now?)
Parents, prepare yourselves--your kids are going to be made a captive audience to this forced nonsense. I suggest you plan your own civics lesson to teach your children when they get home from school on September 8. Teach them that "civic duty" does not mean doing whatever the President wants you to do, but instead, being strong-minded enough to stick to your principles and formulate your own thoughts about the role government should play in our lives.
P.S. George H.W. Bush: Encouraged "America's students to strive for excellence." While president, George H.W. Bush gave a speech to schoolchildren intended "to motivate America's students to strive for excellence; to increase students' as well as parents' responsibility/accountability; and to promote students' and parents' awareness of the educational challenge we face." According to The Washington Post, the "White House sent letters to schools across the nation to encourage teachers and principals to allow students to tune in the speech, which was also carried live by the Mutual Broadcasting and NBC Radio Network. The live television and radio coverage was arranged at the request of the Education Department." [Washington Post, 10/2/91]
It amazes me what conservatives decide to get in a tizzy about.
The latest? Obama signed into law a measure in April that designated Sept. 11 as a National Day of Service.
OMG!!! Here's how a conservative wrote about this in The American Spectator. This is an actual quote, not -- I repeat, not -- a parody:
The plan is to turn a "day of fear" that helps Republicans into a day of activism called the National Day of Service that helps the left. In other words, nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning.
And there you have it. To conservatives, 9/11 means "fear" and we should commemorate that day as a "day of fear". And we would, were it not for Obama's desecration.
Never mind that George W. Bush called for community volunteer work on the anniversary of 9/11, and the right didn't find it controversial then. Never mind that victims' families have recommended making 9/11 a national day of service for years.
And besides, if you check out the official web site set up for the day, you'll find that that they're asking people to come up with their own events. So if you don't want to help out at anti-American places like food banks and community gardens, you can organize your own event. A pee-in-your-pants event, if one chooses.
After we conducted polls over the last couple of weeks finding significant numbers of 'birthers' in North Carolina and Virginia, we decided to take the question national but also drum down more specifically on where exactly the people who think Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States do think he's from.
Oh, this should be good.
The answer is that 62% of Americans think Obama was born here, while 24% think he was not and 14% are unsure.
Okay. So 38% can't say for sure if Obama was born in America. So.... where do they think he was born?
10% of the country thinks that he was born in Indonesia, 7% think he was born in Kenya, and 1% think he was born in the Philippines.
That makes 18%. What about the other 20%? Where do they think Obama was born if not in America, Indonesia, Kenya, or the Phillipines?
Some people who correctly believe that Obama was born in Hawaii, but... don't consider Hawaii to be part of the United States. You read that right- 6% of poll respondents think that Hawaii is not part of the country and 4% are unsure.
Shoot. Me. Now.
These people don't vote, right? PLEASE tell me they don't vote.
And as for the remaining 10%? Who knows? THEY certainly don't.
So who ARE these people? Of the 38% who can't say for sure if Obama was born in Hawaii which is part of America....
-62% are Republicans, 20% are Democrats, and 18% are independents -57% are conservatives, 33% are moderates, and 9% are liberals -56% are men, 44% are women -86% are white, 7% are Hispanic, 4% are black, and 3% are other races
Well, I'm generally concerned about the state of education in this country. Frankly, the Democrat count is higher than I expected.
It is not within our power as members of Congress, it’s not within the enumerated powers of the Constitution, for us to design and create a national takeover of health care. Nor is it within our ability to be able to delegate that responsibility to the executive.
Pinhead, let me tell you what your job description is. No, let the Constitution tell you what your job description is. It's all there in Article One. Among other things, Congress has the power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises” and to “provide for….the general welfare of the United States.”
That's a pretty broad mandate, something which the then-right-wing Supreme Court recognized and wrote about almost 75 years ago:
Congress may spend money in aid of the "general welfare." Constitution, Art. I, section 8; United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1, 65; Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, supra. There have been great statesmen in our history who have stood for other views. We will not resurrect the contest. It is now settled by decision. United States v. Butler, supra. The conception of the spending power advocated by Hamilton and strongly reinforced by Story has prevailed over that of Madison, which has not been lacking in adherents. Yet difficulties are left when the power is conceded. The line must still be drawn between one welfare and another, between particular and general. Where this shall be placed cannot be known through a formula in advance of the event. There is a middle ground, or certainly a penumbra, in which discretion is at large. The discretion, however, is not confided to the courts. The discretion belongs to Congress, unless the choice is clearly wrong, a display of arbitrary power, not an exercise of judgment. This is now familiar law.
It was "familiar law" in 1937, yet Bachmann apparently didn't get the memo.
(And by the way, nobody is proposing that national health care reform be delegated to the executive. It's Congress writing the bills now; not the executive branch).
Still, One has to wonder what Bachmann's view of America is.
It’s important to note just how radical Bachmann’s theory of the Constitution is. If Congress does not have the power to create a modest public option which competes with private health plans in the marketplace, then it certainly does not have the authority to create Medicare. Similarly, Congress’ power to spend money to benefit the general welfare is the basis for Social Security, federal education funding, Medicaid, and veterans benefits such as the VA health system and the GI Bill. All of these programs would cease to exist in Michele Bachmann’s America.
While just 36 percent believe Obama’s efforts to reform the health system are a good idea, that number increases to 53 percent when respondents were read a paragraph describing Obama’s plans.
In other words, when you describe Obama's general health care plan without mentioning Obama, a lot more people like it.
In yet more other words, many people don't like the health care plan because it's Obama's health care plan. They don't know what it is; they don't even care what it is.
But when you tell them what it is (without ascribing it to Obama), they like it. In other words, many people, blinded by Obama hatred, are ignorant:
Majorities in the poll believe the plans would give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants; would lead to a government takeover of the health system; and would use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions — all claims that nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue about the legislation that has emerged so far from Congress.
Forty-five percent think the reform proposals would allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care for the elderly.
I don't know how you can educate people who can't see beyond their own hatred of their President.
RELATED: A new Public Policy poll shows that 39% of Americans think the government should ‘stay out of Medicare,’ something inherently impossible.
Naturally, he's offended. At the end of the confrontation, she makes a mock crying noise, indicating that he's a wimp.
This is pretty disgusting, even by teabagger standards. I can't embed it, but you can see it here .
UPDATE: Okay, found an embeddable version...
Here's a short interview with the "Heil Hitler" woman. Her husband has three jobs and is uninsured. She thinks there needs to be health care reform, but she doesn't think the government should handle it.
Pray tell, WHO does she think should handle it?
Oh, well. Hard to expect a rational thought process from an irrational woman.
The hubbub may have died down, but WorldNetDaily hasn't given up on Obama's birth controversy. The latest?
WorldNetDaily considers websites to be more credible than state documents, I guess.
The online media lizard notes that Obama's Facebook page correctly lists 1961 as his birth year, as do all other online references, including earlier archived MySpace pages. But rather than simply dismissing the current MySpace error as, well, an "error", WND thinks it apparently means something sneaky is going on.
This stupid. Here is Fox New's Megyn Kelly talking to the White House's Bill Burton:
Look, it's quite simple, Megyn.
Is the White House asking people to write them with myths regarding healthcare?
Yes.
Will some of those emails contain the email addresses of other people (including the sender)?
Of course. The White House has no control over what people put in their emails to the White House.
Will the White House be holding on to those emails?
Yes. By law, they have to preserve the emails they receive.
But this does not mean that the White House is "maintaining a list" of people who spread myths about health care!
Sure, the information about myth-spreaders is there, but the White House doesn't care about that and they're not doing anything about that -- they care only about debunking the myths themselves.
I love this photo. It was taken at the NH protest when Obama held his town hall in Portsmouth. Click on it to embiggen.
Now, obviously the guy in the middle is having fun at the expense of the others. But his sign ("We have NO idea what we're talking about", with arrows pointing to the protesters) really touches on truth.
What is the message of the protesters?
Well, who knows? It all seems to be misdirected anger. Or rather, anger directed in every direction.
For example, on the left side of the picture, a man wearing a confederate shirt is holding a sign saying "Abolish federal government". Right next to him is a man with a sign saying, "We the People ARE the government".
So apparently, the protesters are collectively saying that we need to abolish ourselves. Good message.
Then there is someone who says "NO to health care reform", while another says "Just give us the same helath care plan as Congress". Uh, fellas? Which is it?
Some of the signs standing alone don't make much sense. "Heath care reform = drug testing = piss in cup first". I swear to God -- I know that is in English, but I don't know what that means.
All this goes to my larger point about these protests. Sure, I have no doubt that there are legitimate concerns with health care reform, but I honestly don't know if these people are against health care reform per se, or against particulars of Obama's health care reform. Or maybe they're just against Obama.
On message, people.
Mostly, however, I don't think this is about health care at all. I think these people are mostly just ginned up, fearful, and angry, because they listen to rightwing radio and media, which is doing an admittedly great job of creating fear and anger. Fear about what? Anger directed at what?
It doesn't matter. It's almost like the James Dean line from "Rebel Without A Cause". "What are you rebelling against?" "(Shrug) What do you got?"
UPDATE -- I hand the mike over to Darrin Hutchinson at Salon, who makes the same point and expands on it:
Although the Associated Press article does not analyze the irony of the protestors' positions, it nonetheless presents a factual basis for concluding that many of the activists suffer from selective opposition to big government. Consider the following passage:
Nancy Snyder says she kept quiet when abortion was legalized and prayer in schools was eliminated. Not this time.
"They did it for prayer, they did it for abortion, and they're not going to do it for our healthcare," the 70-year-old nurse from Philipsburg, Pa., said Wednesday as she and her husband Robert, 74, a retired coal miner, waited in a long, snaking line for Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter's town hall meeting.
Apparently, Snyder believes that it is perfectly fine for the government to dictate the reproductive choices of women and to force kids to pray in school. Expanding the availability of healthcare is outlandish. All of these situations, however, involve "big government."
Big government for me, but not for you!
Ironically, many of the people whom the article portrays as fuming over "socialized medicine" probably have state-sponsored health plans. Accordingly, if the protestors actually applied their anti-government rhetoric to their own lives, many of them would lose health insurance coverage or would have to spend a fortune to obtain it.
One protestor is a public school teacher, who undoubtedly has a public-sponsored health plan and pension (along with his salary). In other words, the individual is living on the taxation of others. Another person has a 74-year old husband, who is likely on Medicare -- the largest government-sponsored health plan. Even if these individuals have "private" plans provided by their employers, the public still pays for roughly 1/3 of the costs of these plans through favorable tax treatment (for further discussion, see here and here).
According to a recent Gallup report, only 13.3 percent of Americans with health insurance purchase their policies on the open market. The remaining individuals are enrolled in either state-sponsored plans or in employer plans that are heavily subsidized by state and federal tax policy. The notion of a free market in health insurance is a myth for the vast majority of Americans.
Big government for Bush, but not for Obama!
It also seems like many of the protestors have conveniently repressed their memories of George Bush's expansion of government, including his role in the expensive bailouts of the financial sectors and of the auto industry. Bush and Paulson proposed the financial sector bailout and ushered it through Congress. Bush also structured a $17.4 billion bailout for the auto industry, claiming authority to do so pursuant to the financial sector legislation. Despite this very recent history, the protestors apparently blame Obama exclusively:
For many opponents the health care overhaul amounts to the final straw. After seeing Obama bail out banks and car dealers, push a major energy bill and pass a $787 billion economic stimulus package that hasn't driven down unemployment, overhauling the $2.5 trillion U.S. health care system is a step too far.
Certainly, the fact that Bush also accelerated public spending and cut taxes simultaneously should have concerned these proud stewards of the national treasury, but only Obama's spending has caused them to mobilize. The protestors are acting, to use Ron Paul's language, like "born-again fiscal conservatives." If Obama is wrong for spending more during an economic downturn, Bush was definitely wrong for spending more while intentionally taking in less.
Perhaps some of my friends up north don't understand why I blog so often about the birthers. And that might be because the birther movement truly is fringe up north.
But not here in North Carolina.
According to a Public Policy Poll released yesterday, only 24% of self-identified Republican voters in North Carolina believe Barack Obama was born in the United States. 47% do not believe that Obama is American born, and 29% of Republicans aren’t sure. I'll spare you the math, but that means that 900,000 Republicans in North Carolina don’t think the president of the United States is legitimate, or aren’t sure about the matter.
That's why I write about it. Because I'm knee-deep in stupid.
Now, certainly not ALL Republicans in North Carolina are stupid. Not really really stupid After all, according to the same poll, 7% of those who voted for John McCain do not believe Hawaii to be a part of the United States. A further 4% weren't sure. That means that one out of every ten North Carolinian Republicans can't say for sure whether Hawaii is part of the United States.
I can see now why Republicans are against improving education in this state. Because if people got smarter, then Republicans would lose more elections.
This week, MSNBC got a live shot of of a man with a gun in a holster. He was not a law enforcement person; he's one of the protesters at an Obama town hall even in Portsmouth, NH.
Chris Matthews later interviewed him.
At the protest, the man had a sign saying "It is time to water the tree of liberty", a direct reference to the Thomas Jefferson quote:
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.
That quote rang a bell for me....
Ah, yes. It was on the T-shirt worn by Timothy McVeigh on the day he bombed the Murrow Federal Building in Okalhoma City...
Here is a reminder of McVeigh's handiwork on April, 19, 1995.
McVeigh's bomb claimed 168 lives. Many of them were children. Those were the "patriots & tyrants" whose blood was spilled.
So what is it with this quote?
Well, obviously, it justifies horrific action by the violent extreme right. Assassinate the President? Sure why not? He's a tyrant, and Jefferson -- a founding father, for crying out loud -- would have approved.
It's interesting doublespeak. Thousands peacefull demonstrated against Bush when he was putting this country into war -- the right branded them as "unpatriotic". But to talk openly about "spilling blood" when Obama is trying to pass a health care plan? That's patriotic. It's enough to make one's head explode.
But did Jefferson really say that? Would Jefferson have applauded the efforts of those who openly discuss armed revolt against their country?
The "tree of liberty" quote comes from a letter written by Jefferson to William Smith, John Adam's aide and son-in-law. Here is the letter in full:
Paris, November 13, 1787
DEAR SIR, -- I am now to acknoledge the receipt of your favors of October the 4th, 8th, & 26th. In the last you apologise for your letters of introduction to Americans coming here. It is so far from needing apology on your part, that it calls for thanks on mine. I endeavor to show civilities to all the Americans who come here, & will give me opportunities of doing it: and it is a matter of comfort to know from a good quarter what they are, & how far I may go in my attentions to them. Can you send me Woodmason's bills for the two copying presses for the M. de la Fayette, & the M. de Chastellux? The latter makes one article in a considerable account, of old standing, and which I cannot present for want of this article. -- I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: & very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: & what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent & persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, & what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it's motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independent 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen-yard in order. I hope in God this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted. -- You ask me if any thing transpires here on the subject of S. America? Not a word. I know that there are combustible materials there, and that they wait the torch only. But this country probably will join the extinguishers. -- The want of facts worth communicating to you has occasioned me to give a little loose to dissertation. We must be contented to amuse, when we cannot inform.
So what was this about?
Jefferson, living in Paris (which was in the throes of the French Revolution) as the U.S. ambassador, had received a copy of the newly-written, but not yet ratified U.S. Constitution. He doesn't have much deep commentary on it. He then addresses Shay's Rebellion.
Shay's Rebellion was a post-Revolutionary War rebellion by farmers in central and western Massachusetts. It took place in 1786 and 1787, and is named after one such farmer, Daniel Shay. Their greivance? Debt and taxes.
At the time, the United States was operating under the Articles of Confederation, the first attempt at what we now call "the U.S. Constitution". The rebels shut down Massachusetts courts, preventing them from collecting taxes. Then, in January 1787, about 1000 of them made for the Springfield (Mass) armory, where a Masschusetts militia of 4,000 was waiting. Thousands of rebels were arrested, a few were killed. Shay's short-lived rebellion was over.
But the impact was felt.
Now, in his letter, Jefferson correctly described the rebels as "ignorant" masses. But he downplayed their significance. They're idiots, not evil, he said. And it's better to have idiots involved in the process of shaping their country, than to have evildoers trying to undo it.
So, for those who now take Jefferson "tree of liberty" quote to heart, they should understand that Jefferson was calling them -- literally -- "ignorant". And included among the blood to be spilled was, and is, their blood.
But the main impact of Shay's Rebellion was that it caused a powerful group of Americans to realize that the national government needed to be stronger so that it could create uniform economic policies and protect property owners from infringements on their rights by local majorities. And that led to the rejection of the Articles of Confederation, and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.
So for anyone prone to thinking that the "tree of liberty" provides a blessing to engage in domestic terrorism, please note the following:
Jefferson, the man you are quoting, thinks you're an idiot. He was sympathetic and unworried about idiots like you.
The quote comes before the founding document of this country, the U.S. Constitution. In other words, the "tree of liberty" quote is not patriotic; it is not a founding principle of this nation. It was Jefferson (you know, the slave-fucking Jefferson) being, well, Jefferson.
"Patriots", I think we all can agree, include all members of the armed forces. These are men and women who take an oath to fight against all foes, "foreign or domestic" -- yes, domestic. That's you, pinhead.
In other words, the "tree of liberty" quote doesn't belong in the lexicon of people who care about the Constitution (you know, the document which allows you to have guns in the first place). It's not a quote for people who fancy themselves wrapped in the American flag. It's a quote for anarchists and domestic terrorists. Just like Daniel Shay -- ignorant and armed.
Obama has a town hall meeting in Portsmouth New Hampshire today, and the nuts are out in full force.
Get this: MSNBC this morning caught a live shot of a man with a gun in a holster. No, he is not a law enforcement person; he's one of the protesters. And the sign he's carrying? It's got that famous Jefferson quote on it: ""The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
MSNBC was told by local police that the guy with the gun has a legal permit to carry, and he's nowhere near where Obama will be, and he's under constant surveillance.
Still.....
UPDATE: The Obama town hall meeting was televised; it seemed to be civil (invited participants and heavy police guard probably helped)
It's kind of embarrassing (for our country's level of discourse) that it's come to the point where the President of the United States has to publicly state that he's not in favor of killing Grandma.
Obama has a town hall meeting in Portsmouth New Hampshire today, and the nuts are out in full force.
Get this: MSNBC this morning caught a live shot of a man with a gun in a holster. No, he is not a law enforcement person; he's one of the protesters. And the sign he's carrying? It's got that famous Jefferson quote on it: ""The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
MSNBC was told by local police that the guy with the gun has a legal permit to carry, and he's nowhere near where Obama will be, and he's under constant surveillance.
Still.....
UPDATE: The Obama town hall meeting was televised; seemed to be civil (invited participants and heavy police guard probably helped)
And earlier today, at Spector's rally in Pennsylvania...
And here's how Fox News' Megyn Kelly interpreted what you just saw:
"And there you have it. An extraordinary showing out of Pennsylvania. As we watched for the past hour non-stop, an informed, articulate, and very concerned group of American people take their questions directly to their elected representative, Senator Arlen Specter, who they attempted to put on his heels with some very tough questioning. This is American democracy at work. This will not provide fodder for those who describe these folks as angry mobs or dismiss them as un-American. It will however provide a lot of fodder for debate."
Oh, really?
And also, Rep. David Scott (D-GA) had a wildly contentious town hall meeting last week. Today, he discovered that his district office in Smyrna, Georgia, was vandalized with a four-foot swastika.
Josh Marshall reflecting on the "Obama health care = Nazi Germany" comparisons:
Most significant here is not the right-wing liars and demagogues making this stuff up but the fact that they've convinced a significant number of their followers that this stuff is true. That's a very dangerous situation.
We should also keep in mind that the birther-mania, as comical as it is on one level, is all part of the same fabric with the Hitler and Holocaust comparisons, an aggressive process of denigration and dehumanization, dressed up around claims about paperwork and places of birth, but all escalating and churning the belief of a minority of Americans that President Obama is not a legitimate president but rather a usurper.
It's always important for us to remember what the last eight years have again taught us, which is that America has a very strong civic fabric, one that can withstand, absorb and conquer all manner of ugly behavior. It can take in stride a lot of angry rhetoric, townhall fisticuffs and more.
But as this escalates we should continually be stepping back and thinking retrospectively from the vantage point of the future about where this all seems to be heading.
It's tempting, at times, to feel a little sorry for the right-wing mobs, made up of people who may not know better. They're convinced that fascism is upon us and competition between private and public insurers will mean the end of Western civilization. Clinton-era tax rates represent Soviet-style governing, and those FEMA concentration camps, staffed by ACORN volunteers, are right around the corner.
But the pity quickly dissipates when I see them applauding the clown comparing health care reform and the Holocaust. They may be victims of a right-wing con, but they also have a responsibility to at least give decency and critical thinking a try, and resist a mass movement that's more than a little dangerous.
Policy fights like the one we're watching unfold put their character on display, and it's not a pretty sight.
This was a townhall meeting conducted by a Republican congressman from South Carolina, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC), who opposes Obama's general plan for health care reform, so you would think there wouldn't be anything to protest from the teabaggers.
But nope -- he went after the moron's sacred cow: Glenn Beck. The crowd revolted when Inglis told people to “turn the TV off” and stop listening to Glenn Beck. Watch it:
There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.
That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.
Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.
And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.
So this is something new and ugly.
Indeed. Let's take a look at yesterday.
On his program, Rush Limbaugh took note of a town hall meeting in Tampa Florida, to be held yesterday evening. According to Media Matters' summary of that broadcast, Limbaugh read a report that "Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) scheduled a 'last minute' town hall event."
"This is what's happening," explained Rush, "Obama has mobilized union thugs to go out and also attend these town meetings to intimidate the genuine citizens out there who are upset about this." The implication here, we guess, is that "union thugs" aren't "genuine citizens." He added:
LIMBAUGH: Those are paid act -- paid activists are going to be showing up. And that's why -- so the Democrats are going to get brave now. They're going to have protection there. The mob's showing up. The real, genuine mob is showing up to defend these Democrats from the unruly Nazis that are showing up to protest the health care bill.
And what happened at that meeting last night? The teabaggers drowned out discussion. You can see it for yourself starting about two minutes into this video clip.
And then it got worse In addition to the vocal disruptions, there were some reports of violence at the town hall. According to WTSP, the Tampa CBS affiliate:
Violence at Tampa health care forum
Tampa, Florida - Angry protesters and strong supporters are clashing inside and all around a health care reform town hall meeting in Downtown Tampa. The meeting which was scheduled to begin at 6:00 at the Children's Board of Hillsborough County drew hundreds of people who quickly began to overwhelm staff and event organizers at the front entrance.
As the building filled to capacity, angry protesters stuck outside began to scream, yell, and chant. At one point, those trying to get inside began banging on windows as Tampa Police officers quickly spread out guarding all entrances.
10 Connects photojournalist Kevin Carlson, currently inside the meeting reports at least one fist fight breaking out inside. Some other journalists remain outside.
Rush also took umbrage with Nancy Pelosi's comment that there were swastiksa appearing in the angry mobs at some of these townhall protests. Unfortunately...
....it's true.
There are further reports of violence, especially from St. Louis. Details are sketchy, but it appears that a lot of protesters were prevented from attending the town hall meeting, held in a small venue. When to SEIU employees were then admitted (SEIU was a sponsor, as they were in a NH meeting, where a 9 month pregnant SEIU staffer got harrasssed), that provoked the teabag contingent outside.
St. Louis County police arrested six people, including a Post-Dispatch reporter, during a demonstration Thursday evening outside a forum on aging called by U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-St. Louis.
Three people were arrested on suspicion of assault, two for interfering and one for peace disturbance - all misdemeanors, said St. Louis County Police spokesman Rick Eckhard.
"You've got to understand -- we're at a very volatile situation, we've got 800 people and we've got to maintain order," Echkard said. "They did what they had to do."
One man, a conservative protester was injured.
Spitz said she won't be returning to any such meetings anytime soon.
"These tea baggers are dangerous," she said. "I'm not going to any more town hall meetings until these people calm down."
Kenneth Gladney, 38, a conservative activist from St. Louis, said he was attacked by some of those arrested as he handed out yellow flags with "Don't tread on me" printed on them. He spoke to the Post-Dispatch from the emergency room at St. John's Mercy Medical Center, where he said he was awaiting treatment for injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face. Gladney, who is black, said one of his attackers, also a black man, used a racial slur against him before the attack.
Some conservative blogs are using the injury of Gladney (who is black) to make the allegation that people who support health care are "racist"... a rather bizarre charge since Gladney's assailant was also black.
The bottom line is that the teabagging protesters came angry and ready to fight. And now that they're getting some pushback, the whole thing is getting seriously out of control.
About healthcare reform.
Where do I weigh in?
Look, I don't have problems with civil disobedience, protests, etc. That doesn't bother me (although, of course, I don't think violence on any side helps anybody). What troubles me about the teabagging opposition isn't their opposition per se, but that it is a movement against healthcare reform which offers nothing. Their slogan -- literally -- is "just say 'no'".
But even that pales in comparison to the opposition's outright lying (or, at the grassroots level, believing the lies). The insurance industry and status quo lobbiest have played the fearmongering card so skillfully, that it stifles reasonable debate. How can you listen (or better yet, educate) someone who literally believes that Obama wants to euthanize senior citizens? How can you reason with people addicted to unreasonableness?
WaPo columnist Steven Perlstein,normally a mild-mannered guy, writes about this, in an article which really deserves the full read-through treatment. Here's how he starts:
As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don't agree. Today, I'm going to step over that line.
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
There are lots of valid criticisms that can be made against the health reform plans moving through Congress -- I've made a few myself. But there is no credible way to look at what has been proposed by the president or any congressional committee and conclude that these will result in a government takeover of the health-care system. That is a flat-out lie whose only purpose is to scare the public and stop political conversation.
Under any plan likely to emerge from Congress, the vast majority of Americans who are not old or poor will continue to buy health insurance from private companies, continue to get their health care from doctors in private practice and continue to be treated at privately owned hospitals.
The centerpiece of all the plans is a new health insurance exchange set up by the government where individuals, small businesses and eventually larger businesses will be able to purchase insurance from private insurers at lower rates than are now generally available under rules that require insurers to offer coverage to anyone regardless of health condition. Low-income workers buying insurance through the exchange -- along with their employers -- would be eligible for government subsidies. While the government will take a more active role in regulating the insurance market and increase its spending for health care, that hardly amounts to the kind of government-run system that critics conjure up when they trot out that oh-so-clever line about the Department of Motor Vehicles being in charge of your colonoscopy.
And he ends:
The Republican lies about the economics of health reform are also heavily laced with hypocrisy.
While holding themselves out as paragons of fiscal rectitude, Republicans grandstand against just about every idea to reduce the amount of health care people consume or the prices paid to health-care providers -- the only two ways I can think of to credibly bring health spending under control.
When Democrats, for example, propose to fund research to give doctors, patients and health plans better information on what works and what doesn't, Republicans sense a sinister plot to have the government decide what treatments you will get. By the same wacko-logic, a proposal that Medicare pay for counseling on end-of-life care is transformed into a secret plan for mass euthanasia of the elderly.
Government negotiation on drug prices? The end of medical innovation as we know it, according to the GOP's Dr. No. Reduce Medicare payments to overpriced specialists and inefficient hospitals? The first step on the slippery slope toward rationing.
Can there be anyone more two-faced than the Republican leaders who in one breath rail against the evils of government-run health care and in another propose a government-subsidized high-risk pool for people with chronic illness, government-subsidized community health centers for the uninsured, and opening up Medicare to people at age 55?
Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.
If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs.
Right on. And Obama needs to realize that this is one issue where bipartisanship simply ain't going to happen. He's the President; he has the majority in Congress. It's time to get the healthcare that people elected him to get. If the Republicans want to stifle all debate and rachet up the decibel levels, while lying to the American people, let them. We should pass health care without them.
UPDATE: A woman goes to a healthcare town meeting in Wisconsin; speaks up as "just a mom" -- turns out, not so much. She was vice-chairman of the Kewaunee County GOP until 2008. She actually worked for Kagen's opponent, and, according to her own resume, is affiliated with the Republican National Committee.
g.powell: But the right-wing crazies really believe this stuff about "kill granny". My father is one of them. He moved up the schedule of some elective surgeries at the VA because he is convinced Obama is out to kill him.
Anonymous: Wow g. powell. Now that's what I call irony! Moving up surgery within a govt run health care system (the VA) because govt-run health care is so scary.
g.powell: It's worse than that, my dad hates the idea of socialized medicine — it would be a disaster for the country — but loves the VA. Don't ask me to explain. I have thousand of these stories. The laws of physics and logic behave differently in Crazyland.
Five years ago, Moveon.org invited people to post their own homemade ads for the 2004 presidential campaign and submit them anonymously.
Some unknown person, out of over 1,500 submissions, put together an ad comparing Bush to Hitler, and put it on the MoveOn.org site without the group's knowledge. MoveOn pulled the submission. But it was too late.
The conservatives had a hissy-fit. Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, at the time called the anonymously submitted video "the worst and most vile form of political hate speech." Traditional news outlets ran with this, charactering MoveOn as being extremists.
That was all in response to a video submission from an anonymous person.
Contrast that to the present day.
Today -- just today -- Rush Limbaugh told his audience, "Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate."
Around the same time today, Glenn Beck tried to link health care reform to Nazis.
So will some please explain to me why -- a mere 5 years ago -- an unknown person makes a Bush-Hitler reference, and it causes a firestorm.... but today, prominent conservatives and GOP party leaders can routinely make Nazi comparisons and nobody cares?
Rep. Gerry Connolly (Va.), president of the freshman Democratic class, warned that right-wing groups are taking things to "a dangerous level" by manufacturing anger based on false information.
"When you look at the fervor of some of these people who are all being whipped up by the right-wing talking heads on Fox, to me, you're crossing a line," Connolly said. "They're inciting people to riot with just total distortions of facts. They think we're going to euthanize Grandma and the government is going to take over." [...]
Connolly said he spoke to at least one freshman Democrat who was physically assaulted at a local event. [emphasis added]
True? No clue who that "freshman Democrat" might be, but it's not a stretch given that we've already seen other types of behavior from the mobs:
And this morning, a couple more violent-tendency acts cen be added to the list:
At a “Freedom Conference” meeting earlier this week, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) mentioned that some Democratic lawmakers were almost “lynched” by angry protesters around the country at town hall meetings. In response, the crowd loudly laughed and applauded.
Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) will not be hosting any town hall events this August -- instead, he's making himself available to constituents for one-on-one meetings about health care reform -- and at least part of the reason is this: His offices have received threatening phone calls, including at least one direct threat against his life. "We had no town hall events scheduled for the August recess anyway, but in light of everything that's happened -- we have received a threatening phone call in the D.C. office, there have been calls to the Raleigh office," said Miller communications director LuAnn Canipe, in an interview with TPM. The threatening call in question happened earlier this week.
RNC Chariman Michael Steele is either clueless or lying when he says his party is not involved with those who use intimidation tactics to stifle public discussion.
"We're not inciting anyone to go out and disrupt anything," said Steele. "We're not organizing the town halls," only encouraging individuals to visit their congressman or senator to "express their point of view."
"There's no upside for the Republican Party [in the protests]," he said later in the call. "That's not something that's coordinated or deliberately set in motion by me or anyone in the state party.
"...To sit back and say this is a Republican cabal is a bunch of baloney. And you can substitute that 'b' for something else if you want."
Steele added that Republicans "are not encouraging people to be angry to the point of being brutish and ugly."
Oh, they're not?
Sorry, but the mobs have been cheered on every step of the way by elected Republican leaders. You've got no less that the House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), gleefully praising the right-wing "backlash," and promising a "long, hot August" for Democrats. His office blatently promoted the mob attacks again yesterday.
Then you've got the NRCC publicizing "Recess Roastings," promoting the notion that, as Republican leaders boast, town-hall meetings have become "town-hell" meetings.
Will this work?
I think it will motivate the GOP base. It won't win any converts to the party though. In fact it might lose some. Exhibit A is the Napa Valley Register -- a conservative newspaper -- which ran an interesting editorial on a mob screamfest yesterday:
The display was unwelcome -- and unsuccessful if it was meant to move health care reform supporters toward considering the concerns of the critics. Several callers to the Register on Tuesday reported they were repulsed by the aggressive tactics of some members of the crowd. [emphasis added]
To the degree the catcalls, chants and shouts were organized -- and it appears from events around the country that they were -- we strongly suggest that the organizers find more constructive ways to get their message out.
The crowd was so disrespectful that one frustrated attendee said he had come to the town hall with the intention of giving Rep. Green “a really hard time,” but changed his mind because he was fed up with another man who was “screaming behind my head for the last hour.”
Still, there's no reason why people who support healthcare reform shouldn't fight back.
UPDATE:Glenn Beck seems to know what's coming, and is trying to innoculate himself:
Well now, let me give the warning to you: If anyone thinks that it would be a good idea to turn violent, think again. It would destroy the Republic. I feel it with everything in me. There is a great reason for hope right now. Because, I am telling you, for the first time -- since I started saying this in the last couple of years -- for the first time I know it, I feel it, the American people are starting to wake up.
These people in Washington have no idea what they have done. They have wakened a sleeping giant. But just one lunatic like Timothy McVeigh could ruin everything that everyone has worked so hard for, because these people in Washington won't pass up the use of an emergency.
Look how the media ran with the abortion-doctor killing. They tried to pin that despicable act on Fox in general and specifically, Bill O'Reilly and me! The only thing either of us have ever said is there's no reason for that, ever.
Dave Neiwart responds:
Sorry, Glenn, but that isn't the only thing either of you have ever said. O'Reilly also happened to refer to Dr. Tiller as a "baby killer" nearly thirty times, and accused him of mass murder as well as running "an abortion mill" where he had "aborted 60,000 fetuses." He even mused aloud about someone taking him out.
Sure, you can add a disclaimer at the end telling people never to commit violence. But coming at the tail end of an endless litany of incendiary demonization, that's pretty weak tea as lame excuses go.
The lobbyist-run groups Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which orchestrated the anti-Obama tea parties earlier this year, are now pursuing an aggressive strategy to create an image of mass public opposition to health care and clean energy reform. A leaked memo from Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer with the FreedomWorks website Tea Party Patriots, details how members should be infiltrating town halls and harassing Democratic members of Congress:
Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”
Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”
Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”
The memo above also resembles the talking points being distributed by FreedomWorks for pushing an anti-health reform assault all summer. Patients United, a front group maintained by Americans for Prosperity, is currently busing people all over the country for more protests against Democratic members. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the NRCC, has endorsed the strategy, telling the Politico the days of civil town halls are now “over.” Meanwhile, AHIP, the trade group and lobbying juggernaut representing the health insurance industry is sending staffers to monitor town halls and other right-wing front groups are stepping up their ad campaign to smear reform efforts. The strategy for defeating reform — recently outlined by an influential lobbyist to the Hill newspaper as “delay” then “kill” — is becoming apparent. By delaying a vote until after the August recess, lobbyists are now seizing upon recess town halls as opportunities to ambush lawmakers and fool them into believing there is wide opposition to reform.
Back in Central Texas while Congress is on a month-long recess, Congressman Lloyd Doggett faced an angry reception at a town hall meeting at an Austin Randalls store yesterday.
Doggett, D-Austin, spoke at the Randalls at Brodie and Slaughter lanes on Saturday. A video of the event on YouTube shows many in the crowd showed up with signs denouncing President Obama's proposed health care plan.
Witnesses say that when Doggett was asked if he would support the plan even if he found his constituents opposed it, Doggett said he would still support the plan. From there, the crowd began chanting "Just Say No," and overwhelmed the congressman as he moved through the crowd and into the parking lot.
"The folks there thought their voices weren't being heard," said Kathy Acosta, a Bastrop resident who attended the meeting at Randalls and another one later that day in her hometown. "They were angry, but they were respectful. There wasn't any violence."
No violence. Wow, that's a relief.
I think there is an important distinction here. It's one thing for activists to show up at a town hall meeting in order to ensure that their concerns are heard and addressed. It's quite another for them to show up in order to disrupt and close down the town hall meeting altogether (or, if not close it down, limit its utility). The strategy here is the latter, and while it may be successful, I'm not sure it is going to win over many converts.
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