Government

by

Our Evil Liberal Plan is Ruined!

Curses!

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has seen through our nefarious plan.

Badman

A typical liberal

He has called out the national guard to prevent us from taking over Texas and installing our evil liberal agenda across the country!

And our plan was so perfect too! We would bring all branches of our military together to Texas under the guise of doing routine military exercises just as we have done dozens of times before, but this time they would really be there to take over Texas and install martial law! All of the top brass in the military had agreed to the action, evilly putting aside the vows they had made to the Constitution, and have done an excellent job of keeping this completely secret — in fact, to this day, they are insisting that our plan does not even exist!

Once we had taken over Texas, we would then install our plan, which is the evilest of evil!  We would:

  • Give health care to everyone
  • Remove all barriers that discriminate against people
  • Reduce the deficit
  • Reform campaign finance laws
  • Make the tax system fairer and reduce taxes on the vast majority of Americans
  • Increase benefits to our veterans

Yes, our evil goals would finally be accomplished, and none would be able to stop us!  Muhahahahaha!

But no — Texas Governor Abbott has seen through our plan and has thwarted us! His collection of weekend warriors will clearly stop the full-time professional largest-military-on-the-planet and keep us from accomplishing our nefarious goals!

Curses, foiled again!

by

The parties from 50 years ago are not the parties of today

“More Republicans supported civil rights in the ’60s than Democrats did!”

I hate that argument, and anyone who says it should be ignored. They clearly know nothing about history.7546-004-7F54297C

First and primarily, it wrongly assumes that the Democratic party and the Republican party are exactly like they are now.

The Republican party was originally the liberal party, fighting against slavery (with Lincoln) and income inequality (with Teddy Roosevelt). But that morphed, and we went through a long period where each party had liberals and conservatives. There were conservative Democrats (mostly in the south) and liberal Republicans (mostly in the north).

The civil rights movement in the ’60s was largely led (in our government) by President Lyndon Johnson (a Democrat) and mostly fought by George Wallace (a Democrat). There were people in both parties on both sides of the issue.

What you can say with certainty was that it was the liberals from both parties that supported civil rights in the ’60s while the conservatives from both parties fought against it.

Today, there is a parallel: liberals are the ones supporting gay rights and conservatives are the ones against it. It just so happens that our parties no longer look like they did 50 years ago — now all the liberals are in one party and all the conservatives are in another.

This is actually a very bad thing, because it discourages compromise. Our government would get a lot more accomplished if we had liberals, moderates, and conservatives in both parties. We can mostly blame gerrymandering for the divisiveness we now have in America.

But the other reason to ignore this comment is because it so stupidly tries to distract you from the real issue:  What do Republicans support today? Usually, a conservative will use this argument when they’ve been attacked for supporting racist policies. “Oh yeah?” they reply. “Well, we were right 50 years ago!”

That certainly doesn’t mean you’re right now.

by

Patriot Games

by Guest Blogger Robert Killian

Liberals are just as patriotic and moral as Conservatives, who are just as intolerant and prone to outrage as Liberals. If you use terms like Rethugian or Libtard, you are as much a part of the problem as your counterpart. Moreover, watching them each eat their own for lack of purity is not nearly as much Schadenfreude as one would hope.

Guiliani: "Obama's not one of us. He wasn't brought up the way I was brought up." That's very true. Obama's father wasn't a mob enforcer who spent years in Sing Sing.

Guiliani: “Obama’s not one of us. He wasn’t brought up the way I was brought up.” … That’s very true. Obama’s father wasn’t a mob enforcer who spent years in Sing Sing.

The tribal nature is also evident in how partisans readily switch sides of an argument when their side is now doing what they had so adamantly opposed before—and seeking out the most picayune technicality to justify their flip-flopping.

Both sides believe they are guided by principle, and may well be, but don’t translate well in their actions. Sometimes the hyperbole extends to total fabrication.

Have you seen the alarm that Obama is going to declare martial law in 2016 and suspend the presidential elections? I heard the same unmerited anxiety over Bush in 2008. It’s bad enough that the faux outrage targets minutiae or contorts for effect, but to project onto projections is to scrape outside the bottom of the barrel, mixing bad metaphors.

Of course, this seeming irrational tribalism is not limited to politics but sports allegiances. The same facts, or lack thereof, available in disparate media sources produce what was reflected in a state-by-state poll of the recent Super Bowl contestants. Forty-four states are convinced that the New England Patriots are cheaters, six don’t think they are. I think you can guess which ones keep faith with the Patriots.

In a recent example of what I noted above, Rudy Giuliani also keeps faith with fellow Conservatives who think they are true patriots, unlike Liberals, in particular, their favored target: “I do not believe — and I know this is a horrible thing to say — but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

Here Giuliani not only makes a scurrilous accusation of a Democrat for lacking patriotism, which Liberals are used to, but hints at Obama’s otherness for being raised for some of his youth outside of America.

Liberals generally believe in multiculturalism, and would see his breadth of experience as a good thing, but that is why they invented such terms as reverse racism and elitism to counter a term like otherness.

And so the merry-go-round of accusations back-and-forth keeps us going in circles.

 

Robert “Bert” Killian, a graduate of the VCU Art School, is a publications designer at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where one of his books, A Temple of Invention, took a first place award at the Washington Book Publishers. He taught his two boys about baseball and helping those less well off. A dilettante at many things: painting, photography, prose, politics… his kinder friends indulge his independent thoughts.

by

Latin? As in “Latin America”?!!

Damn ferners taking over our country.  They should just learn English!

Vermont is the latest hotbed of illegal immigration, being right on the border like it is.  (Oh, it’s the Canadian border?  Yeah, well, them ferners will find a way to get in, even if it means traveling across the entire US from Mexico to get into Canada to cross the border!).  vermontAnyway, it seems that in Vermont, they done passed a law making the state motto “Stella quarta decima fulgeat” which means in real language “May the Fourteenth Star Shine Bright,” ’cause they’re the fourteenth state and all.

When right-minded folk complained, the traitor who proposed it defended himself by saying “It’s Latin.”  Well, we don’t need no Latin Americans taking over our language!

The complaints from real Americans has dominated that small state of Vermont these last few days, as all the pointy-headed libruls defend the motto.

I mean, come on!  We’re one nation!  Our forefathers knew we were the land of English!  Doesn’t anyone believe in E Pluribus Unum any more?

Geez, the next thing you know, our math class will be using numbers designed by Arabs.

by

Louis Gohmert’s Stupidest Comments

Although Congress’ IQ rose tremendously upon the departure of Michelle Bachmann, Louis Gohmert has been doing his best to push it into the single digits.  What really excites me today, though, is his announcement that he will be challenging Boehner for Speaker because Boehner is just too radical.  Why, he actually even accomplished a few things in the last term!gohmert

Seriously, this is a fight worth watching, as the Republican party implodes and turns even more into the “Stupid Party”.  I can’t wait to see what happens.

But for now, allow me to point out Louis Gohmert‘s Top Ten Stupidest Comments.  (And it wasn’t difficult to come up with ten):

  1. Women are having “terror babies” here in the US, then sending the kids off to be trained as terrorists so in twenty years or so they can come back here legally and kill us all!
  2. Radical Islamists are entering America by posing as Latinos (because, really, who can tell these dark-skinned people apart?).
  3. Gay marriage clearly will lead to the legalization of bestiality and pedophilia.
  4. The Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated and runs the White House.
  5. Vaccines are evil, not because of worries about autism, but because they will allow for people to live longer against God’s will, and soon the world’s population will be at a staggering 700 million!  (Note:  It’s currently about 900% larger than 700 million.)
  6. The Aurora, Colorado gun massacre was God’s will, punishing us for keeping God out of the classroom.
  7. Gays in the military is a terrible idea because they’ll be so busy giving each other massages that they won’t be able to defend us.
  8. Obama’s immigration policy is the real “War on Women” because it allows immigrants to come over the border and rape our women.
  9. The Keystone pipeline is important because it allows caribou to have a warm place to mate (because for the millions of years prior to a pipeline, they never mated.  Oops!  Sorry.  Gohmert doesn’t believe in science.  Make that 4,000 years.).
  10. “The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!” (Yes, he said that on the floor of Congress.)

So go to it, Republicans!  Make Gohmert the symbol of your party.  We won’t mind.

EDIT:  This was written in 2015. He’s said a lot more stupid things since then.

 

by

Aristocracy vs. Democracy

You know, I think this quote may summarize things better than I thought, and applies to our social culture as well as our economy.    meme

It always comes down to whether decisions will be made by “our leaders” or by us. So much of American history has been the fight for the average person to get rights from those in power. The right to vote, the right not to be discriminated against, the right to a decent wage … It’s always a struggle between those who have power and those who fight against them.

That’s why voting is so damn important; it’s the best tool we have to keep them in line.  And it explains why they are always trying to limit it — from poll taxes to voter ID laws to fighting against early voting and otherwise just making it as damn difficult as possible for you and I to exercise the most basic right in a democracy.

As I used to tell my students back in the days when I taught Constitutional Law: All politics is about getting power and then writing the rules to make sure you keep that power.

But the power really is with us.  The problem is:  We’re too lazy to use it.

If we don’t take the simplest and easiest path to hold these people back by voting, then we get the government we deserve.

 

by

On Columbus Day

Columbus was no worse than any other person of his time. That doesn’t mean we should celebrate him … but neither does it mean we should treat him like he was the devil incarnate.

Whenever we judge those in the past, we should look at them in relationship to their times. chriscolumbusThose who were ahead of their time deserve much more respect than those who may have done great things in their time but did nothing to advance humanity in any way.

We must realize that taking over the natives and controlling them was how things were done. Europe held vast parts of Africa, India, and the east under their control, where the “sun never set” on their empire. Parts of Africa held other parts of Africa.  Even American Indian cultures fought with each other for land and resources.

Columbus was a product of his time. It’s not like he said, “Let’s exploit this new place I found and subjugate the natives,” and then everyone said, “That’s a terrible, evil idea!” No, they all said, “Hey, great! Just like we did to the natives in the Congo. More stuff for us!”

Slavery was a part of the history of the world for thousands of years before Columbus. He didn’t invent it. The ancient Greeks, with their democracy and philosophy, thought that enslaving those conquered in wars of expansion was perfectly fine.

We can’t hold everyone to today’s standards. Jefferson and Washington, who proudly grace Mount Rushmore, had slaves. Lincoln would never have agreed to give women the right to vote. Do you think Teddy Roosevelt would have supported gay marriage?

Society advances. There were people who disagreed with Jefferson and Washington about slavery (notably Franklin and Adams). There were people in Lincoln’s time who even advocated for woman’s suffrage. There are always people ahead of the majority, pushing to make the world a better place.

Maybe in the future we will have provided some rights to dolphins and whales. I certainly wouldn’t want someone 500 years from now calling us all evil and terrible for treating them so poorly.

Columbus is important not because he “discovered” a place where people already existed and had been visited by Europeans long before him. He is important because his “discovery” was a big turning point in the history of the world, for better or worse.

So when you judge Columbus, keep these thoughts in mind. I agree that we should rename the date so that it is not seen as a celebration of him.  Let’s treat it as a day of contemplation, like Veteran’s Day is supposed to be, where we learn from our mistakes.

 

(Note:  Much of today’s post is from last year’s Columbus Day post.)

by

Younger Americans more liberal; I blame the internet

Study after study finds that younger Americans are overwhelmingly liberal, at least when it comes to social issues. They are overwhelmingly in favor of gay marriage and abortion rights. They have no problem with race. They reject organized religion in numbers far larger than any generation before.

Even on economic issues, they lean to the left, supporting Obamacare, controls on Wall Street, and campaign finance reform.

I blame the internet. videos-internet

It’s no secret that urban areas tend to be more liberal than rural areas. One reason has to do with access to new ideas. If you grow up in a rural area where everyone is the same race, goes to the same church, and rarely leaves, you tend to accept what you see. However, if you are raised in a city where there are many different races, cultures, religions and views, you start to learn that hey, there may be more than one way of thinking about things. Maybe those people who seem different aren’t that different after all.

But now we also have the internet. Kids who grow up in rural areas are getting information from all over the world. The “neighborhood” is no longer the area where you were raised. (Television also plays a large part in this.) And more information about our differences leads to more acceptance of them.

This is just a theory; I am no sociologist, and have done no studies on it. What do you think?

by

The Paranoia Hucksters

by Guest Blogger John Shirley

It’s hard to see where it will end. Here’s one example. A highly dishonest anti-govt hysterical website called USPatriot just put out yet another claim that “Obamacare” will put “chips” in “All Americans” by the year 2017. Claimed it was reported on NBC. NBC did not report this. It’s a lie.  tin foil hat

There are countless sites like this and what their followers don’t realize is that they’re being exploited for money. If you put up a big headline that says “Obama plans to Turn Americans Into Zombies with Chemtrails”, say, it’ll be shared a zillion times, mostly by people who gaspingly react in a kneejerk way — sometimes by people who think it’s ironically funny. Either response gives the site lots of “hits”, lots of likes, a higher rating on Google. This in turn allows the site hucksters to sell advertising at high rates — or to sell the website itself after it gets enough following. For big money. Perhaps the same thing happens with some of the more crazed “left wing” (pseudo left, really) sites.

The New World Order fantasy, the “government is herding us all into FEMA camps this year for extermination” babble, the “We’re Sovereign Citizens Who Wouldn’t Know the Actual Constitution If It Bit Us In the Ass” crowd — they believe all this stuff because it’s stimulating, it makes them excited, it makes them feel special. But they’re special suckers.

They’re being used so other people can make money.

This faked up verbal-meth for hicks is designed to be jolting to get quick and dirty attention. It doesn’t have to be believable, because site followers don’t actually think about it, they just react. And it’s in a familiar pattern of disinformation, spread by the Timothy McVeigh spawn, the David Koresh sheep, that has been shown to work.

Paranoia works. So they use it again and again and again … and there are countless sites of this kind. Paranoic social lies are viruses, of a kind; paranoic social lies are poison memes. And what is the long term effect? How many confrontations in Nevada over someone’s imaginary “grazing rights”? How many “Oklahoma City bombings”?

How many attempted Presidential assassinations? How many children, raised by these people — to live in fear?

John Shirley was the co-writer of the film “The Crow”; he is the author of the A SONG CALLED YOUTH trilogy, DOYLE AFTER DEATH, HIGH, SILICON EMBRACE, DEMONS, and other novels.  His web page is john-shirley.com

by

Americans who identify as “conservative” at smallest levels in years

More Americans identify themselves as “conservative” than “liberal” in opinion polls, which is what the right constantly uses to support its argument that they represent American’s views.lib1

This number is dwindling quite a bit, and is the closest it has been in years according to a new poll from Gallup.

What the poll didn’t address is the fact that many people call themselves conservative yet hold liberal views.   As I have pointed out many times, A majority of Americans support Obamacare.  A majority thinks gay marriage,  abortion and marijuana should be legal.  A majority supports more gun control.  A majority want to raise the minimum wage and do something about campaign finance reform.  A majority wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and do not believe that “corporations are people.”

These positions are liberal positions, but even people who hold them still like to call themselves “conservative.”

So when a politician tells you America is a conservative country, just nod and smile.  He’s probably wrong about a bunch of other things as well.