Month: August 2010

Republicans Are Poised to Trash Conservative Principles, As Usual, to Stop the NY Muslim Center

Jon Ponder

Remember how the Republican Party abandoned its principles during the Bush years — the hundreds of billions they borrowed from communist China to pay for government programs and war supplementals, because, as Dick Cheney said, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”; remember their disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, followed by their 180-degree flip-flop in 2003 on their firm opposition to nation building in 2000; their corrupt and incompetent fiscal mismanagement; their passing a law in March 2005 to force the federal government to intervene in the Terri Schiavo end-of-life case, a bill Bush rushed back to Washington from his Easter vacation to sign; the legal shenanigans deployed by top GOP officials, including, among many others, Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales as well as George Bush and Dick Cheney in order to avoid responsibility for their own malfeasance and ineptitude; and on and on?

Now, even though they’re not yet back in power, Republicans are already tossing conservative principles overboard. In an effort to pander to their tea-bagger base, they are in a full-court press to force the government to intervene in the construction of the Park 51 Islamic center near New York City Hall, also known as the (not at) Ground Zero (not a) mosque.

But don’t take my word for it — I’m the sort of partisan progressive-liberal Democrat that makes Glenn Beck cry like a little baby. Here is a conservative, Josh Barro, writing for the National Review’s website, a gold-plated bastion of right wing propaganda and spin, calling out his conservative brothers and sisters on their willingness to shove principles aside to stop the dang mosque:

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Democrat for Florida Governor Sums Up the State of Republican Opponents

Trish

According to polls, Democratic Florida Governor candidate Alex Sink is benefitting from the hatchet jobs her Republican opponents are doing on one another. In a debate summed up as a “race to the bottom” in Florida newspapers, Attorney General Bill McCollum and disgraced CEO Rick Scott got personal, but said very little about…what is it candidates are supposed to address? Oh yeah, how to fix the state. In this video, Sink continues to point out that Republicans offer pretty much nothing in the way of ideas.

Verbatim

Buck Banks

Obviously he’s been a disaster … Michael Steele has failed miserably in the things you’re supposed to do — raise money and basically go out and articulate the message. It’s not going to matter though. In 11 weeks from now, what he says and does in the next 11 weeks is not going to matter.

— Political consultant Ed Rollins, on Face the Nation, on Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.

Verbatim

Buck Banks

I know an article about Rep. Boehner’s tan may seem superficial, but it underscores a vital truth about communications: Audiences take more meaning from a spokesperson’s vocal tone and body language than they do from words alone. That doesn’t mean words don’t matter — they do. But if the audience is distracted by something in an interview — whether it’s a monotone delivery, a few dozen uhhhs or ummms, or an overly-tanned face — they are not going to hear what you have to say.

— Brad Phillips, media communications specialist, suggesting House Minority Leader John Boehner’s (R-OH) extreme tan might be getting in the way of his message.

Rand Fan Creates Biggest Message, Carbon Footprint

Buck Banks

In a peculiarly apt expression of novelist Ayn Rand‘s “every man for himself and damn the weaklings who should stop sucking up our wealth and just crawl away and die” philosophy, Nick Newcomen drove 12,328 miles across the United States using a GPS logger to spell out the message “Read Ayn Rand” in what he calls “the world’s biggest writing.”

ayn_rand

On his website Newcomen gives 10 reasons why we should read Rand, but I’ll spare you nine of them and give you the one that makes me wonder if Newcomen didn’t get a little too much carbon monoxide on his writing ride through 30 states: “Atlas Shrugged is the ‘second most influential book for Americans today’ after the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club.”

Wanting to determine just how selfishly Randian Newcomen was, I did a little carbon footprint calculation. Now, I don’t know what kind of vehicle he drove, but I assumed it would be some Ayn Rand would approve of, so I selected a 2005 four-wheel-drive automatic Rover. Based on that, Newcomen’s big writing assignment added just under 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the environment.

At least he spread it out over the entire country, I guess.

So, I give Nick Newcomen a D- for penmanship and an F for environmental wastefulness and selfishness worthy of John Galt.

Crist Continues to Demonstrate His Special Brand of Leadership

Trish

CristBlue

I have to hand it to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (NPA), whose wardrobe choice for a recent roundtable with the president in Panama City helped him stand out. Charlie and the First Lady went with aqua, while the business owners, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, and others stuck to neutrals. If you’re going to go, go bold, Crist seems to say, while sitting as far from Obama as possible without leaving the room. No doubt Crist wants to avoid more photos of himself seeming friendly with the president. The endless repetition by Republicans of a shot of Crist doing the one-armed man hug with Obama last year could have been one reason for his departure from their party as a candidate for U.S. Senate. Well that, and the fact that they are soulless jerks.

Verbatim: Lest There Be Any Doubt, Pat Buchanan Really, Really Hates Gays

Jon Ponder

When did the Creator indicate that among these rights was for homosexuals to have their unions recognized as marriages? The author of that declaration, Thomas Jefferson, equated homosexual acts with rape and wrote that male homosexuals (they used the term sodomites in that time) should be castrated and lesbians should have a hole cut into their noses.

Undeniably, homosexuals have the same constitutional rights of free speech, peaceable assembly and trial by jury. But what the judge has done is declare the life choices and lifestyles of gays and lesbians to be equal to the life choice of married men and women. This is nothing but Walker’s personal opinion.

But he is declaring it to be the only rational conclusion that can be reached. And having reached it, he has seized upon a phrase in the 14th amendment, ‘equal protection,’ distorted its meaning and dictated that this means his view and his values henceforth are the law in California, the voters be damned.

And what the judge dismisses and rejects as irrational is a conviction rooted in the history of the human race, biblical truth, natural law and basic common sense. For, in recent decades, male homosexuality has been linked to enteric diseases, hepatitis, AIDS and early death. Historically, from the late Roman Empire to Weimar, flagrant homosexuality has been associated with sick societies, decadent cultures and dying civilizations. Today would appear to be no exception.

– Christian-nationalist racist and homophobe Pat Buchanan, letting his freak flag fly, insulting gay people with the tired old lie that they are less healthy than straight people, rewriting history to suggest that openness toward homosexuality was the cause of the collapse of various empires, suggesting that Bible verses should be used as evidence in court, asserting that some civil rights of gay people are not covered under the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and offering as justification for suppressing gay rights the 18th-century attitudes towards sex of Thomas Jefferson, who notoriously had sexual relations with a woman he kept enslaved, which, by definition, is rape — all as a rationale for restricting gays’ right to marry.