Cheney and Mr. Burns: Separated at Birth?

There’s an uncanny resemblance between one Dick Cheney and dreaded Simpsons power plant owner Montgomery Burns. Besides their obvious physical similarities, the two share the same philosophy, the same outlook on life. Just read these quotes from Mr. Burns and see if they don’t remind you of a certain someone:

“What good is money if it can’t inspire terror in your fellow man?”

“Smithers… we have to stop dumping our nuclear waste in the playground, all those bald children are starting to raise suspicion.”

“Smithers, this is a golden opportunity. If we get him alive, we can put him on Broadway. Dead and we can sell monkey stew to the army!”

“Just give the great unwashed a pair of oversized breasts and a happy ending, and they’ll ‘oink’ for more every time.”

“Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favor? Well, maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys. Nature started the fight for survival and she wants to quit because she’s losing? Well, I say Hard cheese!”

O.K., Mr. Burns doesn’t have the Cheney potty mouth nailed down, but there’s still a LOT of similarity. I think Dick is leading a double life.

From the Lousy Excuses Department, an apparently unreconstructed racist in Charlotte (my hometown) was forced to shutter his campaign for city council race because it was discovered that he’d posted to a racist website over 4,000 times. He says he did it for research:

Doug Hanks said the postings on the site stormfront.org were fictional and designed to win white supremacists’ trust as he researched a novel he was writing.

“I needed information for the book and some other writings I was doing,” Hanks said. “I did what I thought I needed to do to establish myself as a credible white nationalist.”

Good one, Doug. Yes, “research.” I think the research must have paid off . When you posted on June 1 that black people were “rabid beasts,” man, that really sounded authentic.

[…]

When asked why he didn’t volunteer to fight in the Iraq, which President Bush describes as “the central front in the War on Terror,” one young Republican said he felt compelled to stay stateside and fight in the “war of ideas.” We’re pretty sure Paul Gourley, treasurer of the national College Republicans organization, had signed onto that argument before the events depicted in the photos above.

But if you’re reading this, Mr. Gourley, when the dawn breaks – and it will, my friend, it will – and you’re looking for a way to expiate your sins, we’d like to refer you to Operation Yellow Elephant, where there is a place for you on the next plane out to Sadr City.

Photos: Truth Caucus

USNews.com:

When FBI agents raided the home and storage facilities of William Krar in Noonday, a small town in East Texas, two years ago, they stumbled upon a small arsenal. There were about 2 pounds of deadly sodium cyanide, 65 pipe bombs and several remote-control briefcase bombs. They also recovered more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition and a collection of white supremacist books. If mixed with some of the other chemicals Krar had, the cyanide compound could have created enough poison gas to kill everyone inside a large office building.

In the decade since the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, local police and federal agents have foiled roughly 60 right-wing extremist terrorist plots, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. While homeland security and intelligence officials understandably focus today on terrorism threats from abroad, hate-group experts say the danger from homegrown extremists like Krar, now in federal prison, shouldn’t be ignored. “The fact that the only chemical weapon incident in the United States involved a domestic extremist suggests that domestic terrorism is still a serious threat,” says Mark Pitcavage, director of fact finding at the Anti-Defamation League. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s estimates that 762 extremist right-wing hate groups were active in the United States last year, up slightly from the 751 groups tallied the year before.

Because it worked so well for Gov. Wilson and the California GOP (remember them?) when they successfully passed Proposition 187, the anti-immigrant measure, in 1994…

Associated Press:

The Democratic Party chairman, Howard Dean, argued on Friday that Republicans would try to make immigrants the “scapegoats” in the next election.

At a rally here a few miles from the Mexico border, Mr. Dean garnered the loudest applause when he said Republicans would make immigration a pivotal issue in coming elections, as they did same-sex marriage and affirmative action in previous elections.

“Do you know who the scapegoats are going to be? Immigrants,” he said. “In Colorado, the chairman of the Republican Party endorsed Tom Tancredo for re-election. That is morally reprehensible. The governor of California, a supposed moderate Republican, invited the Minutemen to visit California. We do not need vigilante justice.”

…Mr. Dean also criticized President Bush, contending that he rebuffed President Vicente Fox of Mexico because of divisions over the Iraq war.

We know Ann Coulter is a hypocrite, a liar and a rightwing tool but is she also a plaigarist?

Of course she is. Check out this column in the Tucson Weekly for the full story but here are a few of the key facts:

As of this writing, the mainstream media still hasn’t picked up on the latest credibility controversy surrounding conservative columnist Ann Coulter–that several chunks of her June 29 column appear to be lifted from sources as much as 20 years old…

Coulter’s column, titled “Thou Shalt Not Commit Religion,” was her reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision banning displays of the Ten Commandments in courthouses. The column’s disputed text involves descriptions of federally funded art projects that conservative religious groups called “obscene art.” Those exhibits were the jumping-off point for the “Deo et Patria” crowd’s failed effort to convince Congress to yank all funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

The sentences she allegedly lifted are vile – but were copied by Coulter word for word from a defunct web publication called “The Flummery Digest.”

We heard about the Tucson Weekly column via a Media Matters email, in which MM wryly noted that the charges of plaigarism are “hard to believe; if she’s getting ‘help’ with her columns, shouldn’t they make more sense than they do?”

USA Today:

A series of actions by the Republican-controlled Congress threatens to send the federal deficit soaring, reversing a downward trend caused by new tax revenues from a rebounding economy.

Legislation passed by Congress this year will add $35 billion to next year’s budget deficit and $115 billion through 2010, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-partisan watchdog group…

“Republicans are spending at a rate not seen since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency,” said Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union. Added Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense: “They’re legislating as if deficits don’t matter.”

Finally, signs the frenzy over so-called “sex offenders” might be abating. A Florida official was recently brave enough to stick his neck out and interject some reason into the fear-based hysteria.

St. Petersburg Times:

City Commissioner Alan Bildz said he is pushing for a resolution that would urge state legislators to “do their job.”

Bildz wants to add a third category that would separate sex offenders whose partners were willing from offenders who forced themselves on someone.

“I don’t want to change the definition of the sexual predator,” Bildz said. “But I think that the lesser one, the sexual offender, should be broken into two categories: those that consented and those that didn’t.”

Recent legislation in Florida, such as the Lunsford Act, is burdening public budgets with elaborate background checks and resident notifications, including demanding schools fingerprint and clear every visitor – even district school employees, food service vendors, and UPS drivers.

But the city council member cited here, who proposed making a distinction between 19-year-olds having teen sex with 17-year-olds, and 44-year-olds raping and torturing 10-year-olds, found some fellow commissioners opposed. These idiots want

…to mandate the number of times law enforcement officials go door to door informing residents of the presence of sexual offenders and predators in Treasure Island. The law requires law enforcement agencies to inform residents of the presence of sexual predators. Currently, the Treasure Island Police Department notifies the fewer than 10,000 residents of sexual offenders as a courtesy, on a case-by-case basis.

[Knee-Jerker] Collins said that is “totally unacceptable.” He wants police to go out at least three times a year to inform residents of sexual offenders in the neighborhood.

So far, the loonies are winning, and untold dollars are being spent to further fortress-ize schools (even though Jessica Lunsford was kidnapped from her home), and stigmatize for life people who aren’t perverts at all.

I’m glad my parents dated in the ‘50s. At the time they eloped, my dad was 20 and my mom 18. They started seeing each other over a year earlier so it’s quite possible, had they been caught, that the police would now have to knock on neighbors’ doors to inform them the man who celebrated his 49th wedding anniversary two weeks ago is a sex offender.