Month: April 2010
Sublime Tea Baggery: ‘Don’t Steal from Medicare to Support Socialized Medicine’
This demonstrates, again, that these people have no idea what socialism is. They believe it’s synonymous with authoritarianism — a belief that is a conceptual artifact from McCarthy era, when socialism was demonized by eliding it with Soviet-style communist despotism.
Trapped inside their Fox News/Limbaugh bubble, tea baggers are oblivious to the reality that democracy and socialism have existed successfully side by side in every industrialized country in the world, including the United States, for decades.
The paradox is, their stunted worldview and inability to do critical thinking are results of the fact that they are products of America’s socialized but broken educational system.
Verbatim
“Well, I think that is a fairly silly comment to make. I think Michael Steele’s problem isn’t the race card, it’s the credit card.”
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, alluding to GOP Chair Michael Steele’s assertion that people like himself and Pres. Obama, who are black, “have a slimmer margin of error” and therefore too much is being made of lavish RNC spending of donor money. While there’s no doubt Steele is correct that powerful blacks face additional scrutiny, the White House seemed to say, “Hey, don’t drag us into this, pal. You’re on your own.”
Californians Favor Reelecting Reps Who Voted for Health-Care Reform By Double Digits
A new poll of California voters found a 17-point lead among those who say they will vote to reelect their congressional representatives who voted for health-care reform — including 34 House members and Sen. Barbara Boxer (Sen. Dianne Feinstein voted for reform but is not up reelection this year) — over voters who say they’ll vote against the reformers:
By a margin of 46 percent to 29 percent, California voters surveyed said they would be more likely to vote for a politician who had supported the health bill. And just over half the voters polled said they believed the country would be better off because of the bill…
On the health bill, 35 percent of those polled said that if their senator or U.S. representative had voted for the legislation, they would be “much more likely” to support them in November. Eleven percent said they would be “somewhat more likely” to vote that way.
On the other side, 20 percent said they would be “much less likely” and 9 percent said “somewhat less likely” to support that lawmaker. Nineteen percent said the health vote would have no effect on their support, and 5 percent said they did not know.
Other polls show the new law gradually becoming more popular as people learn what’s actually in the bill. Bills generally become more popular after they become law, but the reform law has been demogogued by Republicans more than most, and they have not let up in the weeks since it passed.
The GOP could be facing a day of reckoning if and when independent voters realize that Republicans have deliberately deceived them. The GOP’s tea-bagger base, who only get their “news” from propaganda sources like Fox and Limbaugh, will be shielded from the truth, but it is (much) more than likely that independent voters, who get information from legitimate media as well as Fox, will learn soon enough the none of the GOP spin — that the bill would create death panels, lead to rationing, constitute a government takeover, put government bureacrats between patients and doctors, cover illegal aliens, use taxpayer funds to pay for abortions and the rest — has ever had any basis in reality.
It doesn’t help the GOP that independent voters are much more likely to be uninsured than Republicans or Democrats.
Californians like to think of themselves as trendsetters. If there is a trend toward greater approval of reforms — and it is way too early to know if so — the outcome for Republicans in November could be very different than the rout of the Democrats they are predicting today.
Job Growth Improves Under Obama As Bush Recession Continues
Republican economic policies, particularly the elimination or under-funding of financial regulatory systems, all but destroyed the U.S. economy. Now the jobs picture for March shows modest growth and may be the first sign that Democrats’ efforts to revive the economy and bring the Bush Recession to an end may be working:
Employment in March grew by the most in three years, representing a turning point for the labor market that will help broaden the U.S. economy as it recovers from the deepest recession in seven decades.
Payrolls rose by 162,000 workers, the third gain in the past five months and the most since March 2007, figures from the Labor Department showed yesterday in Washington. The increase included 48,000 temporary workers hired by the government to conduct the census. Unemployment was 9.7 percent for a third month.
Manufacturers, health-care companies, temporary-help service providers and warehouses were among those adding jobs in a sign the expansion is becoming more entrenched. The jobless rate was unchanged even after Americans who had previously dropped out of the workforce decided to resume the job search, pointing to growing confidence that the world’s largest economy will continue to grow.
However, until the financial industry is re-regulated so that the safeguards that were in place before December 1999 are reinstated, the risk of another collapse will remain.
Verbatim
Three shark in attacks in Florida, million of sharks in the ocean, and no one will go in the water. Hundreds and thousands of children raped in churches and people still send their kids to church. It’s crazy. You should be sending your kids to gay bars. There they will be be safe.
– Dan Savage, columnist
Bachmann Attack on Census Revisited: ‘I’m Not Saying’ Obama Will Use Data To Put People in Concentration Camps
The time to return Census forms has come, which makes this an ideal moment to revisit Michele Bachmann’s call to conservatives not to turn in their forms.
Partial Transcript:
Bachmann: Take this into consideration. If we look at American history, between 1942and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that’s what the Administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private, personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up and put the Japanese in internment camps.
In his column in January, our Dr. Democrat — who agrees with Bachmann only in the sense that that it would be best for the country if only smart people filled out the census — offered five reasons conservatives are not returning their forms, translated into Teabonics for their convenience.
If you have conservative friends, feel free to email these five reasons not to fill out the census to them:
1. Obama and the entire Democrat Party support the Census, which is sufficient cause for suspicion among Tea Party activists on all other issues.
2. Many libertarians believe the Census should not be under government control, not just because it is bona fide socialism, but also because, unlike private industry, government is inept. Who knows what mistakes the government has made in censuses over the past two centuries? Libertarians believe the Census should be outsourced to a private company with experience collecting data, like Equifax, Experian or other credit reporting companies, which hardly ever make mistakes.
3. According to World Net Daily, the popular conservative news site, Obama seized control of the Census from the Commerce Department within weeks after he assumed the presidency. The fact that the 2010 Census will be taken under the direction of the Obama White House worries Rep. Bachmann, who has raised concerns that Americans’ personal data could end up in the hands of ACORN. What ACORN might do with it is anyone’s guess.
4. Bachmann also pointed out that the government has used Census information in the past to round up Americans and force them into concentration camps. She cited the example of the internment of thousands of patriotic Americans of Japanese descent by FDR’s Democrat socialist government during World War II.
5. The Obama administration has already put patriots on notice that it will fine anyone who refuses to submit to the Census. However, boycott supporters say that if the government can’t round up 20 million illegal aliens, how could it possibly find millions of real Americans who boycott the Census because they choose to exercise their rights to be free of government intrusion?
BONUS VIDEO: Here is Bachmann trying to out-crazy Glenn Beck last year on whether conservatives should fill out the forms:
One for the Gipper
The bumper sticker said, “Avenge Reagan”
On a Tea Partier’s station wagon.
With this swing to the right
It looks like we might
End up on the Reagan bandwagon — again.
