Daily Show host John Stewart eviscerates those asking teachers and other unions to make sacrifices in the name of cutting the budget deficit, especially when those same people (literally!) did not ask the same from Wall Street bankers following the trillions of dollars of bailouts and easy money:
I recently spotted this excerpt in Wikipedia (I left the footnote references so you can backtrack):
A heavy smoker, Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer in 1974. Although she had long opposed government assistance programs, she eventually accepted Social Security and Medicare payments for herself, under the name of "Ann O'Connor", and her husband as well.[87] A July 1998 interview with Ewa Joan Pryor, a New York state social worker, conducted in 1998 by the Ayn Rand Institute, revealed that Pryor assisted the two with filing. Federal records obtained through a Freedom of Information act request confirmed that between December 1974 and her death in March 1982, Rand collected a total of $11,002 in monthly Social Security payments.[88] O'Connor received $2,943 between December 1974 and his death in November 1979.[89]Rand, is often cited today by conservatives touting extremely limited federal government, including many Tea Party advocates who are currently collecting social security payments and Medicare benefits. Here is the Wikipedia opening paragraph on Rand:
Rand's political views, reflected in both her fiction and her theoretical work, emphasize individual rights (including property rights) and laissez-faire capitalism, enforced by a constitutionally limited government. She was a fierce opponent of all forms of collectivism and statism,[3][4]
Representative Michelle Bachman is the national voice of The Tea Party. Recently, in speaking to a group of Iowans, she made some claims about American history that would be laughable if they had not come from someone who likes to style herself an authority of Constitutional matters. She claimed that the glory of our country is that color and language didn’t matter, nor did class or parentage, that once people got here, “we were all the same.” Wishful thinking at best. Certainly that was the idea behind the Declaration of Independence, with its grand opening phrases, but like all such ambitions, it took reality a long, long time to catch up—and it still hasn’t. The fact is, despite our stated political and social goals, immigrants have always had difficulty upon arriving here, some more than others, and those already here have always resented new arrivals. And even for those who were already living here, equality was simply not a reality. African slaves aside, women did not achieve equality until…well, some would say they’re still trying to achieve it, but just for one metric, they didn’t get the vote until 1921. People who owned no property were barred from the vote for a good portion of the 19th Century and other barriers were put up here and there, time and again, such as literacy tests. Anything to keep certain groups from being able to vote against the self-selected “true” Americans. She went further, though, and suggested that slavery was an unfortunate holdover from colonial times and that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was gone from the United States.” She cited John Quincey Adams, who was a staunch campaigner against slavery. The problem, though, is that he was not a Founder. He was the son of one. [More . . . ]
Wikileaks continues to be punished for being one of the few organizations brash enough to inform us what our governments are really doing and why. This is intolerable, of course, because the U.S. government is being run by big corporations and wealthy people who, for the most part, are driven by greed--so sorry to break this to the kids who are studying civics in grade school, where they don't tell you about armies of lobbyists, and they don't tell you that the banks own Congress. The true powers that be are running the federal government in secret and they are, regrettably, running it into the ground. That's what one should expect when there is no sunshine to keep powerful people accountable. What we have is a needlessly warmongering, debt-ridden secret and personally invasive brave new government. I truly wish I didn't believe these things. Consider that our government first attacked Wikileaks by starving it financially, despite the lack of any charges filed against it. They did this by harassing Amazon and various financial organizations to make sure that Wikileaks had no funds to fight in Round II, which is underway. We now know that there are secret subpoenas being issued by the US, and thank goodness that Twitter had the decency to inform its users that their privacy is being invaded, unlike the big U.S. telecoms, who have a long documented track record for turning over our private information without informing us (encouraged very much by President Obama's agreement to grant them retroactive immunity for past invasions of our privacy. Julian Assange sums up the current grand jury proceedings like this, and we know of this only because the U.K. Guardian has continually refused to be the lapdog of the U.S.:
The emergence of the Twitter subpoena – which was unsealed after a legal challenge by the company – was revealed after WikiLeaks announced it believed other US Internet companies had also been ordered to hand over information about its members' activities. WikiLeaks condemned the court order, saying it amounted to harassment. "If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," Assange said in a statement.Glenn Greenwald comments further:
It's worth recalling -- and I hope journalists writing about this story remind themselves -- that all of this extraordinary probing and "criminal" investigating is stemming from WikiLeaks' doing nothing more than publishing classified information showing what the U.S. Government is doing: something investigative journalists, by definition, do all the time. And the key question now is this: did other Internet and social network companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) receive similar Orders and then quietly comply? It's difficult to imagine why the DOJ would want information only from Twitter; if anything, given the limited information it has about users, Twitter would seem one of the least fruitful avenues to pursue. But if other companies did receive and quietly comply with these orders, it will be a long time before we know, if we ever do, given the prohibition in these orders on disclosing even its existence to anyone. UPDATE III: Iceland's Interior Minister, Ögmundur Jónasson, described the DOJ's efforts to obtain the Twitter information of a member of that country's Parliament as "grave and odd." While suggesting some criticisms of WikiLeaks, he added: "if we manage to make government transparent and give all of us some insight into what is happening in countries involved in warfare it can only be for the good."
Matt Tabbi has a way about putting things into perspective:
I just found out about the suspension of Keith Olbermann for making political contributions . . . We had a whole generation of journalists who sat by and did nothing while, for instance, George Bush led us into an idiotic war on a lie, plus thousands more who spent day after day collecting checks by covering Britney's hair and Tiger's text messages and other stupidities while the economy blew up and two bloody wars went on mostly unexamined ... and it's Keith Olbermann who should "pay the price" for being unethical? Because, and let me get this straight, he donated money, privately, to politicians? This is absurd even by GE's standards. There is no reason, not even a theoretical one, why any journalist should be prevented from having political opinions and participating in election campaigns in his spare time.