Month: January 2011

Surrounding Herself with Amateurs Has Put Palin’s Future in Jeopardy

Jon Ponder

photo-palin-glasses-blood-libel

Here’s a little bipartisanship for you. I, a bona fide member of the unprofessional left, agree with Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist for the rightward-tilting Washington Post op-ed page and who until recently wrote for right-wing Commentary magazine, that Sarah Palin is facing a career crisis of her own making, and that the crisis is a result of her decision to surround herself with amateurs and sycophants rather than seasoned political pros. Rubin writes:

It has been reported that that she is exceedingly insulated from experienced voices by a mini-staff in Alaska and her husband … A case in point is:

Rebecca Mansour who especially personifies the amorphous yet fervid network of Palin World. Mansour said . . . “I majored in English and history and minored in philosophy, but I’ve never been a Beltway person, so that does confuse people.”

And this person is “Palin’s primary speechwriter, researcher, online communications coordinator and all-purpose adviser.”

It was Mansour who went on a righty radio show hosted by former liberal (and current gay Stockholm-syndrome victim) Tammy Bruce last weekend to road test a new lie about the infamous crosshairs map Palin’s camp released last spring on which Giffords’ district was targeted, along with 19 others:

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Verbatim

Buck Banks

She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted … I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us — we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our childrens’ expectations.

— President Obama, remembering 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, who was killed by the gunman in Tucson last Saturday, at a memorial service for the victims Wednesday night.

Palin’s ‘Blood Libel’ Is a Centuries-Old Anti-Semitic Term

Buck Banks

Writing on Business Insider, Glynnis McNichol notes that Sarah Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” to describe the media response to her use of crosshairs in a campaign ad a few months before Rep. Gabriela Giffords was shot in Tucson last weekend is “reprehensible,” given the etymology of the term:

Says Palin in her post:

But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

Again, emphasis mine. Blood libel is a strong term with historically violent connotations and one wonders if Sarah Palin is familiar with its actual definition and history. From Wikipedia:

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Breaking: Hey Right Wing, You Can Have Jared Loughner Back

Trish

Someone’s finally sorting out the mess that is Jared Loughner’s mind and discovering what most of us have suspected all along. Loughner has much more in common with rightwing extremists than with the political left. Justine Sharrock at Mother Jones explains what Loughner’s obsession with grammar means to people in the “sovereign citizen” movement, which among many other things, maps out strategies to avoid paying taxes.

Glenn Beck would no doubt be envious of the hairpin logic used by the “sovereign citizens”

Many of his seemingly random statements—on “grammar,” “the ratifications,” “the new currency,” and more—echo the teachings of the “sovereign citizen” movement, a right-wing school of thought alleging that Americans have been surreptitiously stripped of their God-given rights.

These are not random parallels, as I discovered in reviewing Loughner’s YouTube videos. In multiple instances, he uses the precise talking points sovereign-citizen theorists teach via a thriving cottage industry of books, websites, bogus legal companies, and seminars; one popular theorist, David Wynn Miller, told the New York Times that Loughner has “probably been on my website.”

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The Fire Next Time: Can We Build a Recession-Proof Economy?

Trish

plan aheadAs we climb out of the recession, which we clearly are and were before the freshmen Republicans in the House took their oaths of office last week, it’s a good time to remember we are not all on the same page about how we got into an economic mess, nor about how to go forward from it.

There are people out there who believe, thanks to FOX News and Rush Limbaugh, that the whole housing market collapse was because of groups like ACORN trying to help people who couldn’t afford them buy houses.

Keefe: ‘We can either summon the collective will to invest in our common future or continue to stumble along hoping the next asset bubble temporarily bails us out while entering into a period of long national decline’

There are others, like me, who witnessed the mortgage crisis from closer to the inside and know firsthand that the wealthy led the way into economic ruin with such instruments as no-money-down mortgages, interest-only mortgages, five-year balloons, and other highly creative arrangements dreamed up for folks who wanted to make even more profit by flipping second and third and fourth houses than they were by investing in shaky stocks.

Most of those in the latter group were just one slow-selling property away from bankruptcy and foreclosure, which we all got to find out together. Of course, most of them will just wait out the seven or so years it takes to clear one’s credit record if one is of a certain income bracket, and go forth to sin again.

And since we’ve never collectively gotten straight about the causes, why should we expect to agree on the remedies? Sadly, we shouldn’t.

Joseph F. Keefe, president and CEO of Pax World Mutual Funds, says we can’t fix what’s wrong in this country, or in the world, by looking for the next boom. (Emphasis that follows is added.)

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Crazed In Arizona

Buck Banks

Being in Congress isn’t much fun.
Indeed, one wonders why anyone would run.
Especially considering that
Some constituents are maniacs
Who trade the voting booth for a gun.

The media says it’s all about rhetoric
And pundits whose prose style is manic.
But in the end it’s insanity
That’s lost touch with humanity,
And trades political discourse for the psychotic.

In the End, Palin’s Followers Will See Her as Tucson Tragedy’s Ultimate Victim

Jon Ponder

Glad the news media is quickly recognizing who the real victim of this week’s shooting is: Sarah Palin.

– Teresa Kopec, via Twitter.

It is fair to say that, upon learning about the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday, most regular Americans assumed that a deranged tea partier had been pushed over the edge by one anti-government, anti-Democratic Party dog whistle too many from the GOP’s Fox channel personalities and hate radio propagandists.

That’s certainly what people close to Giffords assumed. On Saturday, as he rushed to his daughter’s side at the hospital, Spencer Giffords, 75, was asked if Gabrielle had any enemies. “Yeah,” he replied, “the whole tea party.”

Over the ensuing three days, it has become clear that the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, suffered from delusions, at least, and, at worst, was in throes of mental illness that was untreated, perhaps even undiagnosed.

It is equally clear that Loughner planned the attack and specifically targeted Rep. Giffords, a Democrat, because she was a member of Congress. When police searched Loughner’s home, they found an envelope on which he had written, “I planned ahead,” and “My assassination” and the name “Giffords.”

And witnesses say Loughner ran through the crowd at the congresswoman’s event in Tucson and opened fire when he spotted her talking with constituents.

What is still murky, however, is whether or to what extent the toxic political environment, which is especially acute in Arizona, home to nationally known Republican hatemongers Sen. John McCain and Gov. Jan Brewer, played a role in his rampage.

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