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Tag: "republican"

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By Mark Tiedemann on November 10th, 2009

Sepuku, Republican Style.

It’s been absurd for a long while, but the apparent self-destruction of the Republican Party is reaching new depths. Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina is being censured by the state G.O.P. organization for working with Democrats on a climate bill.

Here is the Fox News report.

For contrast, here is the Huffington Report.

All one can do is stare and ask “What is wrong with those people?”

Despite party leader calls for bipartisanship, we see repeated motions by the grassroots elements of the embattled party to circle the wagons and harden their resolve to do nothing to aid and abet what they perceive as The Enemy.

Which is what, exactly?

Anything, it seems, which suggests that people cannot manage their own affairs, no matter how much they might affect other people, is disallowed. If legislation is proposed to control behavior of individuals, it is anathema to the Republicans.

Unless we’re discussing abortion. Then the full weight of the state must be brought to bear to prevent individual choice.

If the Democrats are smart, all they need do is continue to discuss issues in rational, thoughtful ways, and let the Republican Rabid Dog Wing continue to vociferate mindlessly, and in 2010 there will be another bloodletting of Republican presence in Congress. All the Republicans seem able to do anymore is bang their shoes on the desk and repeat “No! No! No!”

At some point, surely, there will be a schism (much like the one we saw in upstate New York) and the sane and rational Republicans will split away from the hydrophobic microcephalics that have been destroying them for so long. That cannot but be a good thing in the long run.

Current Events • Featured • Politics
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By Erich Vieth on October 17th, 2009

iPhone apps for modern-day Republicans

Are you a modern-day right-wing Republican needing some new apps for your iPhone? If so, this video is for you:

Humor • Politics
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By Erich Vieth on October 10th, 2009

On Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

When Norway’s Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Barack Obama, they hit America’s right-wing zealots with egg in the face. Here’s how Steven Weber put it at Huffpo:

As the predictable mobs of crypto-racist/sexually repressed obstructionists coagulate around the recipient, the Norwegian Nobel committee has acted unilaterally and struck a blow for the rest of humanity. The big tent Republicon party, which shelters everyone from flat-earthers to Taitz birthers, from gun-toters to Swift Boaters, in other words every scrap of social flotsam which identifies with the right’s disdain for All Things Other, is coming away from its stakes.

Noteworthy • Politics
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By Erich Vieth on October 05th, 2009

The many ways the right wing has become dysfunctional

Not all right-wingers have completely lost it. Not yet.

Now before you assume that I’m a knee-jerk liberal, keep in mind that I once voted for a Republican, Ronald Reagan, and I am still attracted to many traditional positions of conservatives. And I fully admit that there are still many thoughtful conservatives out there.

That said, check out the current crop of the salient qualities of prominent Republican spokespersons. As Brin sums it up so very well, this hasn’t been Barry Goldwater’s party for many years. Not in the least. What are the most bizarre changes we’ve seen? Here are a few from Brin’s long list:

* prudence to recklessness

* accountability to secrecy

* fiscal discretion to spendthrift profligacy

* consistency to hypocrisy

* civility to nastiness

* international restraint to recklessness

* efficiency to no-tomorrow wastrelness

* personal rectitude to flagrant licentiousness

I would differ with Brin on one issue. I wouldn’t attribute these dysfunctions to “stupidity.” Rather, I interpret them as the results of a combination of fearfulness, groupishness, over-reliance on disgust as a form of morality, and deep compulsion to constantly display badges of group membership.

Communication • Featured • Politics • Psychology Cognition
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By Erich Vieth on September 30th, 2009

Alan Grayson on “The Republican Health Care Plan”

What is “The Republican Health Care Plan”? Alan Grayson made this presentation yesterday:

Health • Politics
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By Erich Vieth on August 30th, 2009

Spotting fake libertarians

Darksyde at Daily Kos presents 10 clues for spotting fake libertarians (Republicans). Here’s one of the clues–you are a fake libertarian:

[I]f you think government should stay the hell out of people’s private business — except when kidnapping citizens and rendering them to secret overseas torture prisons, snooping around the bedrooms of consenting adults, policing a woman’s uterus, or conducting warrantless wire taps, you are no Libertarian.

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Government-Hating: An American Value
By Mark Tiedemann on August 27th, 2009

Government-Hating: An American Value

G.O.P. Chairman Michael Steele made a few remarkably in-your-face comments recently about the health care debate. Here, in his own words, is pretty much where he thinks the nation is going, why it shouldn’t go there, and what the Republican Party stands for.

This morning on NPR he tangled with Steve Inskeep, in particular over this.

One quote in particular caught my eye: ” Simply put, we believe that health-care reform must be centered on patients, not government.”

When you listen to the NPR interview it’s clear that we’re hearing another in the now decades-long tirades against the government which has become the hallmark of Right Wing politics in this country.

In this country, in theory, the government is supposed to be us, the people. We elect our representatives, we tell them how we want them to vote, we change our minds, we are supposed to be in charge. In theory. Obviously, the reality is far from that. For one, we are not a full-fledged democracy, we are a republic, and while we elect those who operate the machinery of the republic on our behalf, we do not have a direct say in the running. Nor could we, really. it is simply too complex. We send our representatives to the various points of departure—state capitols, Washington D.C., county seats, city halls—to do that for us because it is a big, complex, often indecipherable melange of conflicting goals, viewpoints, and problems. We do not have the time to pay the necessary attention to do that work ourselves, so we pay people to do it for us.

So why do we distrust it so much?

Well, because we distrust each other.

American Culture • Bigotry • Communication • Community • Culture • Current Events • Featured • History • Medicine • Politics • hypocrisy • ignorance
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By Erich Vieth on August 21st, 2009

Dense news media is stunned by Republican lies and obstructionism

How dense are our news reporters that they are stunned by Republican lies and obstructionism? Truly we are victims of journalistic malpractice. That’s the well-reasoned conclusion of Jamison Foser of Media Matters:

Have these people been asleep, Rip Van Winkle-style, for the past few decades? Conservatives buried the last serious effort at universal health care under an avalanche of (media-abetted) lies. And they won the 2000 election on the strength of (media-abetted … and sometimes media-invented) lies. And they took us to war in Iraq based on (media-abetted) lies. And … well, you get the point. When was the last time conservatives approached a big fight without relying heavily, if not exclusively, on misinformation and deception? Why would anyone have thought this time would be different?

Likewise, the increasingly obvious fact that conservatives aren’t actually interested in working toward bipartisan reform — this seems to have taken reporters by surprise. But when was the last time conservatives made significant concessions in order to win bipartisan support for anything?

What makes all this shock really amazing is that so much of political journalism consists of pontification by people who have supposedly been around and understand how things work — and yet they’re constantly stunned when history repeats itself in the most predictable of ways.

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Hitler and the Dining Room Table
By Mark Tiedemann on August 19th, 2009

Hitler and the Dining Room Table

I like Barney Frank. He says what he feels, usually in a way that makes his argument better. But it’s almost a no-brainer to do a comeback on the idiocy with which he was faced in Dartmouth, Massachussetts this past week. I mean, what do you say to someone who thinks it’s a valid statement to compare Obama to Hitler?

A woman carrying a poster with Obama’s image modified with a Hitlerian mustache stepped up to the microphone to ask why Frank supports a Nazi policy.

There are so many things wrong with this it boggles the mind where to begin. Frank’s response was probably the most effective.

“On what planet do you spend most of your time?” he asked. Then: “Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table.”

He then commented that her freedom to carry that poster and make such lamebrained statements was a tribute to the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech. I salute his restraint.

To compare any president of the United States to Hitler is a stretch, even with the likes of Obama’s predecessor. (I might consider it for Cheney, but even he does not match the level of malignancy achieved by Adolph, nor does our system allow for such people to act with unrestrained impunity, hard as that might be for some to accept.) But to compare Barack Obama to the man man of the 20th Century is such a profoundly ignorant mischaracterization that it is tempting to write off this whole experiment in potential civilization as a failure.

Where does this shit come from?

The Republican Party, what is left of it, is grasping at straws, sinking in the quicksand of its own inanity. We must take care to not be pulled into the quagmire in some misguided attempt to rescue it through well-intentioned but doomed bipartisan sentiments. The Republican Party has devolved into a nasty cadre of ideologues, a shrinking room of hydrophobic screechers who claw and scratch at anyone who tries to do this country a service by bringing it back to some semblance of decency. They have fed on their own conspiracy-fevered viscera for so long that they cannot even hear the words much less the sentences of opposing viewpoints. We should perhaps let them sink and drown. It would be a kindness.

The fear-mongering is reminiscent of everything we’ve seen since 2000. Rachel Maddow, who is one of the most able of contemporary analysts on television, shows the process and the connections here.

Shouting, screaming, inane blather—noise filling the spaces in which rational discourse might take place if only the decibel level could be reduced. Platitudes, sloganeering, slander, and lies are flooding these so-called town hall meetings and shoving aside reason and discovery and thought. These are not people who are interested in understanding anything, they are people bent on stopping something they’ve been told—been told—they should not allow.

American Culture • Communication • Community • Culture • Current Events • Economy • Education • Language • Media • Politics • Psychology Cognition • Science • hypocrisy • ignorance • snake oil
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By Erich Vieth on July 10th, 2009

Republican Scientists are rare

PEW has issued new research findings showing that relatively few scientists are political conservatives. Only 6% of scientists identify themselves as Republicans:

Most scientists identify as Democrats (55%), while 32% identify as independents and just 6% say they are Republicans. When the leanings of independents are considered, fully 81% identify as Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 12% who either identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP.

Politics • Science • Statistics
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By Erich Vieth on May 06th, 2009

Republicans idea-less on energy issues

Think Progress has summarized current thinking by the GOP on energy issues:

Throughout the discussion on America’s energy future, Republicans have been notably absent. In March, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) announced the creation of the House GOP American Energy Solutions Group, an effort to “work on crafting Republican solutions to lower energy prices for American families and small businesses.” The man chosen to head the committee — which includes notorious climate change deniers Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and John Shimkus (R-IL) — is none other than House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-IN), who, just last night, refused to even admit that climate change is real. “Well, let me tell you,” he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, “I think the science is very mixed on the subject of global warming.” “Then why should your party believe you’re going to get serious about it, if you say the science is mixed?” Matthews asked. Pence replied, “Yeah, it’s a fair question.”

And what about the Chamber of Commerce? It MUST be walking in lockstep with the GOP, right? Wrong:

An analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council(NRDC) found that just four of the 122 board members at the Chamber share the group’s questioning of science and stark opposition to federal regulations to reduce global warming pollution.

Environment • Politics • global warming
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Growing opposition to Obama’s Tax Haven clampdown
By Tony Coyle on May 05th, 2009

Growing opposition to Obama’s Tax Haven clampdown

Opposition to President Obama’s plans to close the fiscal loophole of Tax Haven’s is under increasing pressure from business, lobbyists, and the media. You can be sure many Senators and Congressmen, worried about their campaign contributions in the run up to 2010, will be conveying this sense of alarm to the President.

Bloomberg ran with a story this morning, quoting some very influential Democrats including Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, Representative Joseph Crowley, a Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, and Senator Barbara Boxer.

This latest attack follows a lot of negative, primarily republican generated, commentary since last Monday, including the expected outrage from the Republican caucus and their media friends (particularly Fox). One of the most telling, however, was a seemingly innocent comment from CNBC’s Erin Burnett, during an interview on Morning Joe last week. She basically said that ‘avoiding taxes’ is a perfectly acceptable and legal practice and is basically the fault of our 35% corporate tax rate. To Ms Burnett, and all of the other people who think that tax avoidance is perfectly acceptable, I’ll share another quote that I discovered while following this story - posted on a discussion thread

“My Lords, of recent years much ingenuity has been expended in certain quarters in attempting to devise methods of disposition of income by which those who were prepared to adopt them might enjoy the benefits of residence within this country while receiving the equivalent of such income without sharing in the appropriate burden of British taxation. Judicial dicta may be cited which may point out that, however elaborate and artificial such methods may be, those who adopt them are “entitled” to do so. There is, of course, no doubt they are within their legal rights, but that is no reason why their effort, or those of the professional gentlemen who assist them in the matter, should be regarded as a commendable exercise of ingenuity or as a discharge of the duties of good citizenship.”

Lord Simon, L.C., Latilla v Inland Revenue Commissioners (1943)

Video and more details after the fold

Current Events • Economy • Featured • Politics • Psychology Cognition
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By Tim Hogan on April 27th, 2009

Republicans Are Crap Weasels

Republicans Are Crap Weasels and Even If You Tell Them, It Won’t Change Anything!

Lo, and behold, the lowly crap weasel! This creature is of indeterminate numbers, and stinks to high heaven because of its singularly smelly style of smearing itself with its own squishy fecal matter.

Such is the current Republican Party in America. No one can know how many Republicans there are in America as the numbers dwindle as they cover themselves with banners supporting Wall Street (not Main Street), torture, more tax breaks for the rich, Oil Companies and their other corporate masters, and vote with near unanimity against every attempt by President Obama and the Democratic Party to right the economy, fight our enemies (not US citizens’ rights) and restore integrity to our foreign policy.

Curiously, the Urban Dictionary definition of “crap weasel” also applies to the GOP;

“Any worthless individual [sic] who tries to steal credit for someone else’s work; also someone who tries to pass blame on others.”

I mean, who can forget that only three GOP members voted for the stimulus plan.

And, the three GOP Senate members who voted for the plan will likely now have far right primary opposition in their upcoming elections.

Thank you Senators Specter, Collins and Snowe!

Corruption • Economy • Politics • hypocrisy • ignorance • snake oil
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