Anti-Christ Du Jour

"The body of the Antichrist is the Leopard. Nazism is the Leopard. Hitler will be the style of the Antichrist. Hitler used whatever was popular at the time to keep his movement going forward. Obama will use the same methods. Who else will be accepted by the Islamics, the Europeans, the United States, the Hindus, Russia, China. Rev.12&13 says the beast shall turn to attacking Christians. Satan can only be in one place at a time. U.S. is most known for Christians. The beast is seen coming up out of the ocean. Standing on U.S. shore and looking out, Obama rises from the sea, Hawaii."

Blog comment


For more fruitcake receipts, click here.

Where Have All They Flowers Gone?

“I read history books just like you do. None of these guys are immune to the laws of history. They’re going to go up or down, and they’re going to take their people with them. None of us really knew what was happening in the economy. It changed so quickly into a true nightmare of horror. In another day and age, heads would roll. That’s what would happen. The rot would be cut out. As far as blaming everything on the last president, think of it this way: The same folks who had held him in such him regard came to despise him. Isn’t it funny that they’re the very same people who once loved him? People are fickle. Their loyalty can turn at the drop of a hat.”

Bob Dylan
Rollingstone 5/14/2009

1964: Different Change, Same Thing

"...Goldwater's tone reflected the tenor of this ugliest of Republican conventions since 1912, as entrenched moderates faced off against conservative insurgents. In an era in which a national consensus seemed to have coalesced around advancing civil rights, containing Communism and expanding government, the moderates believed they had to win to preserve the Republican Party. The conservatives—who wanted to contain the role of the federal government and roll back Communism—believed they were saving not just the party but Western civilization.

The logy Mark Hopkins elevators gave the insurgents, flooding into town for what Goldwater biographer Robert Alan Goldberg called the "Woodstock of the right," at least two chances a day to bait Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, anchors of NBC's nightly newscast—and crypto-liberals, according to their harassers. "You know, these nighttime news shows sound to me like they're being broadcast from Moscow," one conservative observed to another on the way down, loud enough for the two newsmen to hear. Brinkley forbade his son, Alan, to show his NBC insignia, except to security.

The volume of right-wing rage at the media was novel at this Republican convention. Unprecedented, too, was the attention focused on the issue of television coverage. The convention was the first since CBS and NBC had expanded their nightly newscasts from 15 minutes to 30 minutes, and the first since the assassination and funeral of President John F. Kennedy redefined the bond between television and politics. In 1960, there were about as many journalists, both print and broadcast, as delegates. Four years later, broadcasters alone outnumbered delegates two to one..."

Rick Perlstein
Revolution From The Right
Smithsonian
August 2008

Do Get Above Your Raisin'

"Children and politicians are notorious for either not understanding the consequences of their actions or refusing to believe that the same actions will always result in the same consequences. (It is fascinating to ponder why we punish children for not heeding the consequences of their actions, yet vote for politicians who promise to ignore history and repeat the mistakes of the past.)"

Robert Ringer
from Action

The Environmentalists' Dilemma

Environmental activists Raoul Surcouf and Richard Spink set sail from Bristol, England, in May on a 40-foot boat outfitted with solar panels and a wind turbine to attempt the first carbon-neutral crossing of Greenland's polar ice cap (a journey being monitored eagerly online in Bristol by 25,000 schoolchildren). However, 400 miles off the coast of Ireland, hurricane-force winds destroyed the boat, and the crew was lucky to be rescued by a nearby ship, which was a tanker carrying 680,000 barrels of crude oil.

Christian Fundamentalists Pray For Global Warming

Friut flies, gay penguins! What's next? Transvestite turtles...



A pair of gay penguins are proving to be excellent adoptive parents after they incubated an abandoned egg and are now constantly caring for their chick.

Z and Vielpunkt, two Humboldt penguins at a German zoo, got the egg after the zoo placed it in the males' nest after the egg's original parents rejected it.

The new dads are one of three same-sex pairs at the zoo..

Stillwater Bridge Update

The Sierra Club's lawsuit against the US DOT, the Federal Highway Administration, the US Department of Interior and the National Park Service is finally scheduled for oral arguments on August 28.

The Sieraa Club's primary contention of this lawsuit is that the National Park Service overturned their objection to the proposed bridge design without any substantive evidence. Their original NPS findings were that the bridge design will, in fact, cause significant impact to the riverway without any plans for mitigating those impacts.

It is important to again note - contrary to what has been voiced by some politicians - that the Sierra Club's lawsuit HAS NOT been the impediment to the bridge being constructed for the last few years. The real impediment is that there has been no funds provided by the Minnesota legislature to support this project.

The Minnesota portion of the proposed new bridge design is now estimated to approach $400 million. With the projected environmental impacts and the skyrocketing price tag, the Sierra Club has continued to believe the design of the bridge should be revisited to find alternative designs which would have less impact and a lower cost to taxpayers.

$400 million today = $295 M in 1999 = $217 M in 1989 = $169 M in 1979 = $188 M in 1969

GOP Future Looks To The Past: McCarthy & Gingrich

..."The elite media tried to ignore us. The government labeled us 'extremists.' But on April 15, more than one million Americans came together, spontaneously, to defend fairness and freedom. I know because Callista and I were there. Here is our story."

Thus began Newt Gingrich's heart-warming albeit rose-colored glasses-garbed assessment of the Tax Day Tea Parties held across the nation on April 15. However, it is probably less interesting to deconstruct Gingrich's optimistic views of Tea Party-ness, as expressed in "Will the Tea Parties Matter?" -- a disquisition on "the nature of the Tea Party movement" -- then it is to recognize that the former House Speaker, has more and more come to represent both what's left of the intellectual firepower of the post-Bush Republican Party and the critic/commentator/analyst/partisan politician that will take on just about any question that comes his way.

With the Republican Party seeming to settle into a state of beserkiness, what with their call for Democrats to rename itself the Democrat Socialist Party; with McCarthyite claims that there are a host of "socialists" in Congress; with a very strange Michael Steele heading up the RNC, while Rush Limbaugh assumes the Party's head-without-portfolio position, it is left to Gingrich to be in as many places as possible, to criticize the Obama Administration (with an occasional compliment tossed its way), to slash away at current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and to proclaim that the Party still has some guiding principles.

Gingrich's goal? To stitch together a coalition of disparate GOP forces that will back him for the Party's Presidential nomination in four years. Does it matter that the public has never liked the man? Apparently, not to the Newtster!..."

Bill Berkowitz
Gingrich's Gasps of Wrath

US Chamber Pot & Capitalsim Propaganda

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is launching a $100 million campaign it describes as standing up for capitalism — an effort that could pit the group against the Obama administration and liberal activists on issues such as health care reform, energy, regulation of businesses and executive pay.

The chamber’s Campaign for Free Enterprise is a national and local effort opposing tax increases and government intrusion into the competitive marketplace.

MoveOn.org says the campaign will spearhead business opposition to the Obama administration’s health care reform and energy policies. The administration has sought business advice on the recession, credit crunch and housing crash, but has moved against some private sector wishes on issues such as credit card protections, health care reform, and CEO pay and bonuses.

GOP Future Vision

"Certainly our party has taken its licks the last few cycles, but that's why we're here. The reality is, the prescriptions coming out of Washington right now are not reflective of the mainstream of this country."

Eric Cantor
Republican House Minority Whip


"We are the party of the revolutionaries; they [Democrats] are the party of the monarchists.…We have an advantage. When a party has the White House, communication comes [from the] top down, and there's a strategy that everyone has to march behind."

Mitt Romney
Former Republican Governor of Massachusetts


"I would say you can't beat something with nothing. The other side has something. I don't like it, but they have it.”

Jeb Bush
Former Republican Governor of Florida



"I don't believe in crystal balls. I do think that our administration has taken some steps that have restored confidence in the American people that we're moving in the right direction and that simply opposing our approach on every front is probably not a good political strategy."

Senator Arlen Specter
Former Republican and now a Democrat

"The polar bears will be fine."

Obviously, there are differences of opinion on the impacts of global warming. A renowned scientist with an Obama bumper sticker on his car weighs in...


“The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models...The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”

Freeman Dyson
World-renonwned scientist

"...Climate-change specialists often speak of global warming as a matter of moral conscience. Dyson says he thinks they sound presumptuous. As he warned that day four years ago at Boston University, the history of science is filled with those “who make confident predictions about the future and end up believing their predictions,” and he cites examples of things people anticipated to the point of terrified certainty that never actually occurred, ranging from hellfire, to Hitler’s atomic bomb, to the Y2K millennium bug. “It’s always possible Hansen could turn out to be right,” he says of the climate scientist. “If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t. By the public standard he’s qualified to talk and I’m not. But I do because I think I’m right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it’s true my career doesn’t depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it’s more a matter of judgement than knowledge.”...

by Nicholas Dawidoff
The Civil Heretic
New York Times Magazine
March 29, 2009

“There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about...if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”

James Hansen
Head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
An adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth"



Dyson quotes:

“The costs of what Gore tells us to do would be extremely large. By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor. I’m concerned about the Chinese...They’re also changing their standard of living the most, going from poor to middle class. To me that’s very precious.”
---

Al Gore talking about Hurricane Katrina: “How in God’s name could that happen here? Nature’s been going crazy.”

Dyson: “That is of course just nonsense. With Katrina, all the damage was due to the fact that nobody had taken the trouble to build adequate dikes. To point to Katrina and make any clear connection to global warming is very misleading.”
---

“Most of the time in history the Arctic has been free of ice. A year ago when we went to Greenland where warming is the strongest, the people loved it. They were so proud. They could grow their own cabbage.”
---

Dyson On Al Gore: “He certainly is a good preacher. Forty years ago it was fashionable to worry about the coming ice age. Better to attack the real problems like the extinction of species and overfishing. There are so many practical measures we could take.”

"Free" or "Freer"

“One problem with the American system is that if you lose your job and are without an income, that’s not just bad for you but for the economy. Our system has more security. And I think it makes our quality of life better. My American friends say they live in the best country in the world, and in a lot of ways they are right. But they always have to worry: ‘What happens to my family if I have a heart attack? What happens when I turn 65 or 70?’ America is the land of the free. But I think we are freer.”

Geert Mak
Dutch author

Yesterday's Dixiecrats Are Today's Republicans (or conservatives or whatever)

"But it was southern Democrats who formed the line to defend Jim Crow. Georgia governor Lester Maddox famously brandished ax handles to prevent blacks from patronizing his restaurant. He was a Democrat. Alabama governor George Wallace stood in front of the Alabama schoolhouse in 1963 and thundered, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." He was a Democrat. Birmingham Public Safety commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor sicced dogs and turned fire hoses on black civil rights demonstrators. He was a Democrat. In 1954, Orville Faubus tried to prevent the desegregation of a Little Rock public high school. He was a Democrat. President Eisenhower, a Republican, sent in federal troops to prevent violence and enforce a court order desegregating the school. As a percentage of their respective parties, more Republicans voted for the passage of the Civil Rights Art of 1964 than did Democrats. A Republican President, Richard Nixon, not John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson, instituted the first affirmative action program with goals and timetables."

Larry Elder
The Ten Things You Can't Say In America

"Technical Arrogance"

“I felt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands. To release the energy that fuels the stars. To let it do your bidding. And to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles, I would say, this what you might call ‘technical arrogance’ that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

Freeman Dyson
Nuclear scientist

Newt Gingrich: No Alien To Controversy

Does anybody really respect Newt Gingrich? He is a low point in conservative intellectualism. He's Karl Rove witha GED and Dick Cheney without dog pee on his leg. But hey, the future looks grim for Republican fairy tales when the only three chords left in the GOP songbook are Gingrich, Cheney and Rove. Maybe they should fade to white...

"She (Nancy Pelosi) really disqualified herself to be the speaker. She has a unique responsibility for national security. … She made this allegation that smears everyone who's trying to defend her. What she said … was a stunning dishonest statement about a major American institution that has a key role in our survival. I think the Democrats should get a new speaker."

Newt Gingrich
Former Republican Speaker of The House

"Right now there are two RNCs here in Washington, side by side. The contrast is instructive.

One, the Republican National Committee, is a clueless self-parody. The other, the (R)ush-(N)ewt-(C)heney tag team, is providing the real muscle as the Republican right begins to build traction in taking on President Obama and the Democrats.

The official RNC just spent the last two days wasting time and inviting ridicule—listening to a listless, empty speech by its chairman, Michael Steele, and debating the grand idea of calling the Democrats "socialists." Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh hammers away at the Democrats and the president on radio every day; Newt Gingrich sarcastically attacks Nancy Pelosi on The Daily Show (and gets laughs for doing so); and Dick Cheney continues his high-profile, Iraq-star media tour..."

Howard Fineman
US News & World Report




Gingrich's Voice of Experience:

"...In the summer of 1997, a few House Republicans had come to see Gingrich's public image as a liability and attempted to replace him as Speaker. According to Time, the replacement was engineered by several Republican backbenchers, including Steve Largent of Oklahoma, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mark Souder of Indiana. They soon gained the support of the four Republicans who ranked directly below Gingrich in the House leadership Dick Armey, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Republican conference chairman John Boehner of Ohio, and Republican leadership chairman Bill Paxon of New York.

On July 9, DeLay, Boehner and Paxon had the first of several secret meetings to discuss the rebellion. The next night, DeLay met with 20 of the plotters in Largent's office, and appeared to assure them that the leadership was with them.

Under the plan, Armey, DeLay, Boehner and Paxon were to present Gingrich with an ultimatum - resign or be voted out. Combined with the votes of the Democrats, there appeared to be enough votes to vacate the chair. However, the rebels decided that they wanted Paxon to be the new Speaker. At that point, Armey backed out, and told his chief of staff to warn Gingrich about the coup.

In response, Gingrich forced Paxon to resign his post, but backed off initial plans to force a vote of confidence in the rest of the Republican leadership.

By 1998, Gingrich had become a highly visible and polarizing figure in the public's eye, making him an easy target for Democratic congressional candidates across the nation. In 1997 a strong majority of Americans believed Gingrich should have been replaced as Speaker of the House, and he held an all-time low job approval rating of 28%[36] although his approval later rose to 45% by April 1998...."

Click here for more on the Republican's Richard Nixon of the 2012 Predisential race.

Republican Blowhard Back

"Thanks Rush. Rush listen, I voted Republican and I really didn't want to see Obama get in office. But you know Rush, you're one reason to blame for this election, for the Republicans losing. First of all, you kept harping about voting for Hillary. The second big issue was the torture issue. I'm a veteran. We're not supposed to be torturing these people. This is not Nazi Germany, Red China, North Korea. There's other ways of interrogating people, and you just kept harping about, it's okay, or it's not really torture. And it was just more than waterboarding. Some of these prisoners will killed under torture.

And it was crazy for you to go on and on like Levin and Hannity and Hewitt. It's like you're all brainwashed. And my last comment is, no matter what Obama does, you will still criticize him because I believe you are brainwashed. You're just -- and I hate to say it -- but I think you're a brainwashed Nazi. Anyone who can believe in torture has got to be -- there has got to be something wrong with them."

Chicago Caller On Limbaugh's Show

What's In A Name: Childish

I'm starting to think the Republican Party is embracing creation science more and more as it de-evolves into ever increasing ignorance and stupidity. As the GOP hunches into ape-like ignorance and more proficiently drags its knuckles, it becomes more obvious that it stoops to stupidity to keep its base. Obviously it will end up with its base being the Dixiecrats who rejected the Democratic Party after the the civil rights movement. No doubt that was socialism too...I guess we are seeing a case of the GOP unable to rebrand itself so they are focusing on the Democrats.

Seeing Neo-Red

"I don't think that left to its own devices, capitalism moves along smoothly and everyone gets treated fairly in the process. Capitalism is like a child: If you want the child to grow up free and productive, somebody's got to look over the shoulder of that child."

Radio Opinionator

"...Every dollar spent by government is one less dollar spent by taxpayers. Money comes from somewhere -- taxes, borrowing (taxes on layaway) or printing, which, if not offset by productivity, causes inflation, a stealth tax on everyone. Who can spend, save or invest more efficiently and humanely, you or some tenured bureaucrat in D.C. who's never run so much as a hot dog stand or lent himself out as a United Way volunteer?

Private enterprise is the most proficient job- and wealth-creating "system" ever designed. But many, if not most, Americans think only government can and should build and run "infrastructure" and that government "investment" creates jobs of which the private sector is incapable of creating. Really?

...Obama's anti-capitalist, Big Government, command-and-control economic vision exceeds mere "childishness." It is dangerous. After 100-plus days, the jury reached its verdict.

Obama is a neo-Marxist."

Larry Elder
Columnist

Edler's archives

(You'd think Mr. Elder would paint his pictures with broader strokes of reality and history...)

>

Investigate Obama's "career path toward a neo-marxist presidency.

She's No Harriet Meirs!

I wonder what the uproar would be, if President Obama nominated Jesus to be the next US Supreme Court justice? Of course, not being and of northern European descent and being somewhat olive complexion, he would definitely be a another "token judge." I supposed we are witnessing the parlor game that partisan politics has degenerated into. Actually, taking history into account, political business as usually is more like it.

Personally, I'm for more diversity on the Supreme Court bench. I'm for moving towards a day when we don't worry about "tokenism." But alas, the fortress of white-male power is slowly but surely crumbing into the history. When it does, American just might be a better place for it.

You go girl!

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Sonia Sotomayor
Supreme Court nominee
from a 2001 speech

In Los Angeles on March 29, hit and run drivers killed two pedestrians: an 18-year-old female college student and, hours later, a 55-year-old Guatemalan American construction worker. As is not unusual, according to the Los Angeles Times, the LAPD went into massive "overdrive" to find the woman's killer but handed the other homicide off to "a lone detective with little more to go on than hope."

On April 25, in Washington, D.C., the murder of a black teenager was reported in two sentences of that day's Washington Post while nearly 10 times the space was devoted to the colonoscopy of a panda at the city's National Zoo.



"Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."

G. Gordon Liddy

"Someone pinch me. I must be dreaming. Some of the same Republicans who have wielded the hot blade of racial divisiveness for years, are now calling Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, a racist. Oh, the hypocrisy!

The same Newt Gingrich who once said that bilingual education was like teaching “the language of living in a ghetto” tweeted that Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist.” The same Rush Limbaugh who once told a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back” called Sotomayor a “reverse racist.” The same Tom Tancredo, a former congressman, who once called Miami, which has a mostly Hispanic population, “a third world country” said that Sotomayor “appears to be a racist....”

Charles M. Blow
Read more of Rogues, Robes and Racists at the NY Times

Grand Old Pissing Match in 1912

..."For years, the tensions within the Grand Old Party had been building over the issue of government regulation. During his presidency, Roosevelt had advocated a "Square Deal" between capital and labor in American society. By the time he left the White House in March 1909, Roosevelt believed that the federal government must do more to supervise large corporations, improve the lot of women and children who worked long hours for low wages in industry, and conserve natural resources. "When I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service," he said in August 1910. Roosevelt was especially critical of the state and federal courts for overturning reform legislation as unconstitutional, and he said that such decisions were "fundamentally hostile to every species of real popular government'"...

Lewis L. Gould
Return of the Rough Rider
Smithsonian
August 2008