political_talk

Bachmann Jumps the Shark Again, Likens Financial Reform to Mussolini’s Italy

Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), who can always be counted on for hyperbole and assorted fabrications chained together in to her very own special drivel-language, jumped the shark, yet again, during a Tuesday evening webcast with a Tea Party PAC. She likened the financial reform bill currently in Congress with the policies of the fascist government in Italy during Mussolini's reign:

Let's remember really what this is. This has a lot in common with Italy in the 1930s and they way Italy dealt with economics. It still continues private ownership of business but government is in control.

So government control of the private business, while it's private ownership, that's still at the end of the day the federal government virtually having a say over private business. We lose freedoms; we lose economic competitiveness.

And don’t forget, Italy is in tough shape financially, and that’s not what we want for the United States.

The Governator Pokes Fun at Arizona

During his commencement address to students at Emory University on May 10, 2010, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger poked a bit of fun at the outrage of the recently enacted illegal immigration law in Arizona, which requires racial profiling to enforce.

I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republican, CA 1947 -

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Arizona’s immigration law. 

Source of image: John Spink/Atlanta Journal Constitution

Liberal Columnist TBogg Paraphrase of Ross Douthat Article

Ross Douthat (pictured in the image at left), conservative columnist for the New York Times, is against choice for women. He probably likes the new Oklahoma travesty law too. Liberal blogger, TBogg, accurately paraphrases Douthat's original article so that you don't have to read it:

Conservatives are kept poor and stupid because they refuse to stoop to the level of the liberal elitists who get ahead in life by killing their own babies. Totally unfair.

Frank Rich: Profiles in Courage NOT the GOP

New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, in his column about the Arizona immigration law recently enacted which promotes the use of racial profiling. 

There are few profiles in courage among the leaders in this G.O.P. — only a lot of guys hiding under their desks.

Mike Huckabee on the Constitution and the "living God"

During a campaign (during the primary presidential campaign) stop in Warren, Michigan, in 2008, Mike Huckabee made it clear that he believes that we need two new amendments to the Constitution. One a human life amendment, and the other an amendment which would define marriage as between a man and a woman only.

I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than trying to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.

Charles de Gaulle: In order to become the master....

Charles de Gaulle, born November 22, 1890, and died on November 9 1970, was  a French general and statesman. He was the founder of the French Fifth Republic [1958] and became its first President in 1959.

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

Jon Stewart on Orly Taitz

  Jon Stewart, mocking Orly Taitz, while addressing the ridiculous spectacle of the birther movement.

Wait, she’s an attorney, a dentist, and a real estate agent. Are you looking to have a botched root canal, sue for damages, and then use the settlement money to buy the house of your dreams? If so, you can call me, Orly Taitz, your one-stop shop for all things legal, tooth, and shelter related.

Via Daily Show Video

Glenn Beck & Rep. Steve King on the vote for health care reform

Rep. Steve King (R-IA)  discussed the vote on health care reform with Glenn Beck of Fox News on Beck’s radio show (March 2010). The vote was slated for a Sunday.

They intend to vote on the Sabbath, during Lent, to take away the liberty that we have right from God.

Beck responded with his usual googly-eyed nonsensical gibberish.

You couldn’t have said it better. Here is a group of people that have so perverted our faith and our hope and our charity, that is a — this is an affront to God. And I honestly, I don’t think anybody is like, “yes, and now what we’ll do is we’ll vote on the Sabbath.” But I think it’s absolutely appropriate that these people are trying to put the nail in the coffin on our country on a Sunday — something our founders would have never, ever, ever done. Out of respect for God.

So, you would think that no Republican ever called for a vote on a Sunday. You would be wrong. Via Think Progress:

On Palm Sunday in 2005, the Republican-controlled Senate passed a controversial bill to allow a federal court to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo. The House passed the same bill shortly after midnight on Monday morning.

Via Think Progress.

Sen. Lindsey Graham on health care reform

In March of 2010, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) began referring to health care reform as a “suicide run”, making an attempt to compare it to a Japanese bombing run. This quote is from an interview Graham did on a local radio station.

Nancy Pelosi, I think, has got them all liquored up on sake and you know, they’re making a suicide run here,

Via Think Progress.

Rep. Paul Broun calls the Civil War the ‘Great War of Yankee Aggression’

On March 18, 2010, in his overly zealous effort to aid in defeating health care reform, Rep. Paul Broun (R- Ga.) made the following statement on the floor of the House of Representatives:

If ‘ObamaCare’ passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States — the Great War of Yankee Aggression.

Sen. Tom Coburn tells seniors that they will die sooner because of health care reform

The outright lies, the myths, and the hyperbole flew during the battle for health care reform in 2009 and 2010. Including this fabricated myth from Sen. Tom Coburn (R- OK) who made this claim on the floor of the Senate in December.

I have a message for our seniors: “You’re going to die sooner.”

John Adams on His Election to the House of Representatives

In a letter to Benjamin Rush,  Adams wrote of having been chosen to become a member of the House of Representatives.

When I went home to my family in May, 1770, from the town meeting in Boston, which was the first I had ever attended, and where I had been chosen in my absence, without any solicitation, one of their representatives, I said to my wife, "I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning, that you may prepare your mind for your fate." She burst into tears, but instantly cried out in a transport of magnanimity, "Well, I am willing in this cause to run all risks with you, and be ruined with you, if you are ruined." These were times, my friend, in Boston, which tried women's souls as well as men's.

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Source

John Adams on the Jewish Religion

In a letter to François Adriaan van der Kemp, a Dutch minister, in 1809, Adams wrote of his admiration for the tenets of the Jewish religion. His opinion of Christianity is here.

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

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Source: WikiQuote

John Adams on Christianity

In an 1814 letter to his friend, John Taylor, Adams denigrated Christianity as incapable of real "inquiry".

And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality, is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes

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Source:  Letter to John Taylor

Thomas Jefferson on the Role of the Judiciary

From a letter to Monsieur A. Coray, Oct 31, 1823, by Thomas Jefferson:

At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.

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Image Source: Wikimedia Commons - Painting of Thomas Jefferson in 1805 by Rembrandt Peale

George Will on Media Fascination With Sarah Palin

A surprisingly astute quote by George Will from his article dissecting the media's fascination with Sarah Palin, "Sarah Palin and the mutual loathing society". I especially liked the last two lines.

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election. But today's saturation journalism, mesmerized by presidential politics and ravenous for material, requires a steady stream of political novelties. In that role, Palin is united with the media in a relationship of mutual loathing. This is not her fault. But neither is it her validation.

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Source:  The Washington Post, George Will

Palin Lies on Leno

On The Tonight Show, Palin spewed her usual gibberish in reference to her Family Guy remarks, and her lack of opportunity (oh, please...) to follow up after the media responded.

I commented and then that gets out there in the blogosphere, it gets out there in the different forms of the mediums that we have today. And then it’s left there, not an opportunity for me to follow up and kind of elaborate on what I really meant and what I really thought of the thing.

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Source:  Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, The Atlantic, 'Lying on Leno'

Howard Zinn on War in Our Time

We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.

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Source:  Dr. Howard Zinn, The Progressive Magazine, November 2001
Image of painting [of Dr. Zinn] by Brett Cook

There is no flag large enough......

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable.

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Dr. Howard Zinn

HOWARD ZINN: How Change Occurs

I would encourage people to look around them in their community and find an organization that is doing something that they believe in, even if that organization has only five people, or ten people, or twenty people, or a hundred people. And to look at history and understand that when change takes place it takes place as a result of large, large numbers of people doing little things unbeknownst to one another. And that history is very important for people to not get discouraged. Because if you look at history you see the way the labor movement was able to achieve things when it stuck to its guns, when it organized, when it resisted. Black people were able to change their condition when they fought back and when they organized. Same thing with the movement against the war in Vietnam, and the women's movement. History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.

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Source: Wikiquote
Dr. Howard Zinn