I really need to stop being outraged at this stuff, but I can’t help it, I am: Mike Huckabee is the latest — and most high-profile to date, unless I missed somebody — Republican to push the line that Barack Obama is a Kenyan alien.
Earlier this week, he told a radio talk-show host:
“One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American,” said the Fox host. “If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”
He also mentioned Obama’s removal of a loaned bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the Oval Office and called it “a great insult to the British.” (He didn’t mention that Obama replaced it with one of Abraham Lincoln, who just might have more resonance for an African American president, but oh well — he is from Arkansas.)
These remarks, reflecting a stunning ignorance in a man who considers himself presidential timber, set off the usual whirlwind of blah-blah, which set off the usual response — it’s all the media’s fault, because he clearly “misspoke” and meant to say Indonesia.
Which is about as lame an excuse as they get, given the elaboration on the details about Kenya — even in Arkansas public schools, I don’t think they teach that the Mau Mau rebellion happened in Indonesia — and even if you take him at his word, how does five years of a childhood constitute “growing up” anywhere? Granted, Hawaii is such an exotic, foreign place, you can’t blame an Arkansan for getting confused.
The smart money is on this being dog-whistle politics, that Huckabee in no way misspoke, that he’s just letting the base know that he’s down with the program. And if that’s true, then no one — no voter, and certainly no journalist — owes Huckabee anything resembling respect anymore. Only shunning, and maybe not even that, will work on this sort of moronic, racist idiocy. Yes, racist. Yes, Mike Huckabee, you are a racist. A big, dumb racist. Racist McRaciston, the governor of a state with a large black population, has thrown in with racists. Own it.
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. Where does this stop? WHERE?
Let’s switch to hockey, shall we? I expect this story will pick up steam hereabouts, or maybe not: Bob Probert, legendary hockey goon of Chicago and Detroit, died last summer of heart failure, but carried within his brain evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, doubtless the result of the head trauma he endured both on and off the ice:
Probert’s posthumous autobiography, “Tough Guy,” gleefully offers details of his 3,300 career penalty minutes — fifth in N.H.L. history — and recounts so many brawls with enforcers like Tie Domi and Marty McSorley that it requires 11 pages to list them all. He scored 163 goals in his career from 1985 through 2002, for the Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Blackhawks, but was so known for his fighting that a 2007 Hockey News poll rated him the greatest enforcer in hockey history.
Probert drank heavily beginning in his youth in Windsor, Ontario, and he used cocaine to the point that he served 90 days in a Minnesota prison and was suspended by the N.H.L. multiple times, including for the entire 1994-95 season. His police record included driving citations, bar fights and assaults on police officers. While boating last July 5 on Lake St. Clair, near his home in Tecumseh, Probert collapsed and died of heart failure, including an 80 percent blockage of the left coronary artery.
Many athletes later found with C.T.E. — whose test for abnormal protein deposits in brain tissue can be administered only after death — presented symptoms like drug abuse, impulse control and impaired memory only in the years before they died, suggesting that the disease contributed to it.
So the trauma created its own loop, I guess — head trauma leads to poor impulse control which leads to more head trauma. This is a story that started small, with a few studies mostly covered by the prestige papers, and mostly off the sports pages, but is picking up steam over the course of the last few years. The suicide of former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson — who is said to have shot himself in the heart to preserve his brain for postmortem research — pushed it higher, and I imagine this finding will, too.
Ironically, I remember reading this story a couple of years ago as the Stanley Cup playoffs got under way, “Why the Red Wings don’t fight,” about how the North American game is changing to a more European, less pugilistic model. Fewer goons, better skating.
Do click that first link on the Probert story, and check out the photo, and the look on the kid’s face. There’s the problem in a nutshell. Oh, and I did the math — 3,300 penalty minutes translates to 55 hours.
OK, we’ve done infuriating and depressing. Can we take a run past something fun?
I’m tapped out for funny, but here are a couple shots of Christina Hendricks in a low-cut dress. (Yes, Rob Daumeyer, that’s a big WIN!!!!!) I actually love the first dress (what I can see of it, anyway), but think it would look better with a double strand of pearls rather than that big honkin’ heart, but that is the product after all. (And I am old.) My jewelry box seems to be missing a giant crown of oak leaves; I’m glad someone has stepped in to fill the gap.
Onward into a cold, cold March morning.
Julie Robinson said on March 3, 2011 at 9:49 am
Isn’t it clear? Huckabee was a hockey player.
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Mark P. said on March 3, 2011 at 10:12 am
In case anyone has missed it over the years, in general, education is not valued in the South, and educated politicians, if any exist any more, must hide behind a folksy facade. But most Southern politicians are not so burdened. Huckabee is one of them. He is typical of southern governors today – ignorant and racist. Both of these traits are required for the base. The racism is sometimes hidden, and sometimes merged with a broader ethnocentrism. If these people speak outside their normal range (that is, where people other than their base can hear them) they have to put a little frosting on the racism to make it seem purtier. But put these guys into a time machine, run them back 40 or 50 years, and they would fit right in with Orville Faubus. Call them traditionalists.
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Dorothy said on March 3, 2011 at 10:12 am
I followed the Tom & Lorenzo link to the pics of Christina in the black pants and off-white top. They call them “Satan’s pants” – HAH! Those guys are fantastic. I’d love to have dinner with them sometime.
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del said on March 3, 2011 at 10:13 am
Huckabee’s misstep would be a problem if it’d happened in Canada.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/fox-news-will-not-be-moving-into-canada-after-all_b_829473.html
In the U.S. the dog whistles continue.
Duerson and Probert are the tip of the iceberg with CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). Brain trauma, never good. A no-brainer (rimshot).
I feel guilty just watching football but because I played as a kid I still watch. Hopefully it’ll stop with me in my family. And I rememember the stories about the European hockey style reducing fights. Seems there are far fewer fights now than when I was a kid, and, hey, they have helmets.
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Randy said on March 3, 2011 at 10:28 am
Sidney Crosby hasn’t played in nearly two months, due to a concussion resulting from a check that may have been dirty. It’s not clear when he will be back, such is the nature of brain injuries. If the NHL loses its best player for a long time, or permanently, I wonder what will come of it.
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ROgirl said on March 3, 2011 at 10:49 am
Idiot.gov?
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LAMary said on March 3, 2011 at 11:01 am
The big honking heart necklace is not so great, but if you go to the site there are some earrings that look like acorns that I am coveting. Luckily, I found some on Amazon that look a lot like those pricey ones for 14.99. Little silver acorns appeal to me. Perhaps I should become a Druid.
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Kim said on March 3, 2011 at 11:09 am
I find I have so few places to wear a crown of any sort these days.
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Bob (not Greene) said on March 3, 2011 at 11:12 am
Kim,
You left your crown here. Dan and Andy take turns wearing it now.
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Peter said on March 3, 2011 at 11:16 am
“…their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”
And how, may I ask (I know, I’m setting up Coozledad with one right over the plate…) is that different from our view?
And this is the guy who’s saner than Snowzilla? And they say Charlie Sheen’s crazy?
Speaking of Charlie, any chance he’ll spin this as performance art ala James Franco or Andy Kaufman?
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moe99 said on March 3, 2011 at 11:20 am
Excuuse me but I seem to recall that we fought the Brits to gain our independence. Is Huckabee saying he would’ve been on the Redcoats side back then? Or is he just angling for an invite to the wedding?
Edited to add these points about brain injuries in football. I wonder if the sport will survive?
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/31/110131fa_fact_mcgrath
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gladwell
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ask/2009/10/questions-for-gladwell.html
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Jeff Borden said on March 3, 2011 at 11:31 am
I kick myself for occasionally indulging in optimism, but I did allow myself to hope that the election of a black man as president would help put this racist shitbaggery to rest, at least among so-called reasonable people. Sure, I reasoned, the drooling crackers who live beneath the sleazy, slimy rocks would never change their view, but at least we’d be rid of the Jesse Helms-style asshats of yore, the high-ranking party elders who longed for the days of the rope and the robe.
I was a dunce.
I forgot that the Republican Party is a movement without honor, a well-financed hate machine with no governing principle beyond destroying the reputations of its opponents and lining the pockets of the billionaires who fund it at the expense of the poor and the middle-class.
Once, there was some slight hope. The late Jack Kemp, who had played in the NFL, was tireless in his advocacy for a Republican Party that addressed the racial, ethnic and economic disparities among us and did not demonize urbanites. I doubt he’d be welcome among the current group of psychopaths.
The GOP is a cancerous tumor these days. And it is going to be a painful cancer to treat.
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Kim said on March 3, 2011 at 11:32 am
BobNG – I know that isn’t true because if it were there would be photos!
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on March 3, 2011 at 11:33 am
Huckabee, my friends, ain’t running. But the simulacrum of running is good for the brand (see entry under Gingrich, N. pp. 1996 ff.).
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Rana said on March 3, 2011 at 11:40 am
Regarding Tom and Lorenzo, I agree on the oak-themed jewelry, but that gawdawful heart? Really?
(Plus, as several commenters pointed out, palladium mining is not exactly an environmentally-friendly activity.)
Not only is Huckabee a racist, but, as Melissa pointed out today, apparently anyone who didn’t grow up participating in Boy Scouts or Rotary isn’t his idea of an American. Which, for the record, counts out anyone who’s not straight, conservative, Christian, and male.
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Snarkworth said on March 3, 2011 at 11:46 am
JTMMO: But the simulacrum of running is good for the brand
“Snarkworth announces 2012 exploratory committee…”
/rushes hopefully out to mailbox; flips through Neiman Marcus catalog…
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Sherri said on March 3, 2011 at 12:30 pm
Alan Schwarz has been covering the concussions in sports (particularly football) story regularly in the New York Times. He’s done good work in raising this issue to more prominence.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on March 3, 2011 at 12:35 pm
Oh, and why are y’all talking about crowns and earrings and necklaces today? Nice photos of Christina Hendricks, though.
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Scout said on March 3, 2011 at 1:10 pm
Andrew Sullivan has been all over the Huckabe-a-racist proclamations this week.
-It goes without saying that Scouting, like Rotary, is an international movement. The purple badge on every scout’s uniform, the “World Crest”, is a reminder of this. It is worn on the left, over the scout’s heart. From Scouting.org: “It is still worn by 28 million Scouts in 216 countries and territories and is one of the world’s best-known symbols.”
On that note, Snopes knocked down an email rumor that Obama “refuses to sign Eagle Scout certificates.” And of course there was the Jamboree uproar. Another reader:
Huckabee might be interested to know that Indonesia boasts over 17 million registered scouts, according to the world scouting movement [pdf], compared to the roughly 7.5 million in the US. Even Kenya has nearly half a million.
Of course, this is to take Huckabee literally. What he clearly meant to say is that someone called Barack Obama is not a real American. He’s Palin without the figure.-
It’s good to see that this crap is not being allowed to stand unchallenged. Not that Fux News has any interest in bringing any meaningful attention to the correction of any crazy stories their spokesliars fabricate. And unfortunately to many of the people who consider Fux “news” will run with stuff like this.
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Suzanne said on March 3, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Concussion story reminds me of a former co-worker whose daughter got a college scholarship to play soccer. We got a Christmas card from them a few years later in which they said that the soccer coach at the college made her quit playing after her 7th or 8th concussion, (or the 7th or 8th one that they knew about), and that the daughter was devastated and they were too. My reaction was shock that they would even consider putting soccer before her brain health. I’d have made my kid quit after concussion #2, if not #1.
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Bitter Scribe said on March 3, 2011 at 1:46 pm
However much Huckabee tries to pander to “the base” with “dogwhistles,” I have a hard time believing he’ll ever get anywhere. I don’t see how he can live down his tendency when he was Arkansas governor to pardon violent criminals who said they were “saved,” including that guy who went on to murder those four Washington State cops for no reason at all.
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Mark P. said on March 3, 2011 at 2:01 pm
Bitter Scribe, that kind of stuff doesn’t stick to this kind of guy. He’s forgiven, you know. Besides, dog whistles will drown out lots of other noise when you blow them hard enough.
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Pam said on March 3, 2011 at 2:15 pm
I know with absolute certainty in my heart and mind that the Republican Party does this kind of shit on purpose. It’s part of the plan, just as she-who-must-not-be-named is part of the plan. Mike Huckabee is part of the murmuring that the GOP’s consultants and advisors have been staging since Obama became President. It’s all wrapped around fear, and Fox News and their ilk are a very important part of their strategy. There is a woman who comes to all of the Columbus auctions that I attend and she just turned 93 two days ago. She looks 73 and still drives very well and is in very good health. When I wished her Happy Birthday, she commented that she’s grateful for birthdays but “ready to go” at any time because the world is so scary to live in. Huh? I said, “Oh, you must watch Fox News everyday.” And yes, she said, I do. The AARP Bulletin recently had an editorial about this very thing. A man wrote about how his parents turned from happy, easy going folks to snarling, unhappy people within a few months. The virus: too much Fox News. They need to be put down like the rabid dogs they are.
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Sue said on March 3, 2011 at 3:06 pm
Update from Wisconsin:
Since the capital has been all but closed, people are sleeping on the lawn and some Dem legislators have moved their desks outside to meet with people.
Folks are showing up with inflatable palm trees.
Senator Glenn Grothman, in spite of the fact that he has used some colorful language to describe protestors, told Greta Van Susteren that the people who surrounded him yesterday were mostly courteous and he wasn’t afraid.
This is a great state, people.
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Dexter said on March 3, 2011 at 3:07 pm
“A problem shared is a problem halved.”
So YOU listen to this song for a while…I have been trying to avoid it but it is everywhere I turn! ARRRRGHHH!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQAb_q3Fk5c
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LAMary said on March 3, 2011 at 4:16 pm
Here’s something more annoying than a singing Kardashian.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RClJ6vK9x_4
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Jeff Borden said on March 3, 2011 at 4:16 pm
I’m with Mark P. and Pam. . .the GOP knows exactly what it’s doing with this kind of behavior. Huckabee might package himself in an “aw shucks country boy” persona, but he’s just as much an asshole as unrepentant racists like Pat Buchanan. There’s no penalty to pay for playing to the drooling goobers with this kind of language. In fact, it will get you positive attention and those who point out the racism inherent will get a lecture about being too politically correct.
The Democrats (as usual) are too timid to call this out for what it is. They’re also too wimpy to lay out in stark terms what the GOP is all about these days. The party has declared war on working people.
You cannot look at the budget submitted by Scott Wanker and not be struck by how twisted they see the world. Nice, fat tax cuts and rebates for the connected while services such as education and health care are gutted. But, hey, it’s all about the kids! Wanker and his ilk want to make sure future children aren’t burdened by debt. Now, admittedly, this will mean smashing up one of the better statewide school systems in the U.S., defunding the state university system, making it harder for vast numbers of people to afford some kind of health care. . .but the kids will have more money. They may be dumb and sick, but by God, they will not be in debt as deeply as they might.
Paul Krugman is correct. The Republicans are eating the future.
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LAMary said on March 3, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Maybe Huckabee meant that Obama hated the Dutch for colonizing Indonesia and he was referring to Molukkans and not Mau Maus. How that ties in with the Churchill bust I don’t know.
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Bob (not Greene) said on March 3, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Jeff B. FTW times 2
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Jakash said on March 3, 2011 at 4:41 pm
Why Huckabee is considered a reasonable candidate is beyond me. His views on evolution voiced in the last campaign pretty much indicate to me how seriously he should be taken. From a cnn summary:
“If anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it.”
However, when pressed about whether he believed in a literal interpretation of the timeline laid out in Genesis — that God created the world in six days about 6,000 years ago — Huckabee said, “I don’t know.”
“Whether God did it in six days or whether he did it in six days that represented periods of time, he did it. And that’s what’s important.”
“It’s interesting that that question would even be asked of somebody running for president,” Huckabee said. “I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book. I’m asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States.”
http://articles.cnn.com/2007-06-05/politics/debate.evolution_1_mike-huckabee-god-evolution?_s=PM:POLITICS
He doesn’t know if the world is 6,000 years old or not, and evidently doesn’t think that knowing about it is particularly significant to anybody but science book authors. Remarkable.
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Jeff Borden said on March 3, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Jakash,
I’m old enough to remember when the GOP was referred to as the “grownup party.” You cannot say that about the group of toddlers hogging the national stage these days. Stupidity is celebrated. Education is denigrated. And shitheels like Huckabee get rich.
Unless you’re in the eight-figure salary range, you don’t really have a friend in the Republican Party.
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alex said on March 3, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Don’t know much about history
Don’t believe in diversity
Don’t know nothin’ ’bout science books
Don’t know nothin’ ’bout Wall Street crooks
But I do know one and one is three
And if you’ll vote for Mike Huckabee
What a wonderful world this would be…
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Bitter Scribe said on March 3, 2011 at 6:06 pm
Jeff Borden: When was it the “grownup party,” exactly?
When Richard Nixon was destroying himself?
When they were shamelessly pandering to Joe McCarthy and the ignoramuses (forebears of today’s Tea Party) who slavishly followed him?
When they let Wall St. chase phantom profits off a cliff, leading to the Great Depression? (That sounds oddly familiar.)
When they were stealing everything in sight during the Teapot Dome scandal?
When they were stealing everything in sight during the Gilded Age?
Oh, I get it…it must have been when they fought to abolish slavery and preserve the Union.
Yes, that was a hell of an achievement, but 140+ years is a long time to be riding it.
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Jeff Borden said on March 3, 2011 at 6:23 pm
Bitter Scribe,
I didn’t say I agreed with the designation, only that it was considered common knowledge at one time. You know, liberals were the crazy kids with the wild ideas and the conservatives were the sensible, worldly adults.
Your post underscores the many perfidies associated with the modern GOP, but in fairness, let’s remember it was a group of Republicans who visited Tricky Dicky and told him it was the end of the road. And it was a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who called out federal troops in Little Rock to desegregate schools and who warned his countrymen in his farewell address to beware the military-industrial complex.
I fully acknowledge that Ike, Nixon and, maybe, even St. Ronny Himself might not pass ideological muster with the current group of fascists controlling the party.
As noted earlier, I try not to be optimistic about American politics. So, I will resist the siren song that somehow the ham-handed douchenozzle in Wisconsin has finally taken a step too far –as even the notoriously Republican-oriented Rasmussen poll finds Scott Wanker’s popularity dropping to the ocean floor– and that progressives have finally risen to confront the robber barons who seek to return us to the 1890s.
But what if it did?
BTW, I’m reading that Ohio is doing even worse things to its state workers. (Sigh.) I left the Buckeye State a long, long time ago but it’s still hard to realize just how redneck the whole damned state has become in the past several years.
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Dexter said on March 3, 2011 at 6:24 pm
Dani Probert, on her husband’s death: “In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe fighting is what did this to Bob,” she said. “It was hockey — all the checking and hits, things like that.”
I watched Probert’s games on TV a lot and this may be right. Probert was just tough and he played hard, leading me to believe that although the documented concussions definitely hurt Bob Probert, all the violent checking probably did as much damage.
In the spring of 1994 the San Jose Sharks beat the Red Wings in a stunning opening round playoff upset. After that, the Russians started coming and by the early summer of 1997 the Red Wings had won another Stanley Cup. The fighting had dropped noticeably in Detroit.
In 93-94 Probert trailed only Darren McCarty in fights. McCarty was a hard-nosed “grinder” while Probert skated hard and really crashed the boards and anybody near them.
Now that the sports world is focussing on concussions, it does not surprise me that Bob Probert’s name is coming up. I have heard tapes of players who played baseball over 100 years ago. Hans Lobert of National League fame recalled how he had been hit in the head by a fastball. He was knocked cold for 15 minutes, revived, and told to get in the batters’ box. He said he felt like one leg was in a bucket and the other leg was stepping into a deep hole, every step. He had to play like that, fighting double vision and terrific headaches for two weeks before he could not even move anymore and was out for the season after that. Wow. Look how far we have come…I guess.
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coozledad said on March 3, 2011 at 6:57 pm
Huckabee’s a royalist all right, in all likelihood a blumpking. While I was being raised to believe we southerners were the displaced heirs of some sort of Eden that was real nice till the Yankees messed it up, Arkansans figured prominently among the turncoats, with Maryland and Tennessee running neck and neck for second: Texans didn’t even start fighting until the war was over, not in this particular mythology.
So as much as Huck busts his ass trying to play that race card, and sucks up to the Confederacy, the real haters down here won’t be disabused of their impression he’s a carpetbagging communist pussy. Went on a diet, too. Ate salad.
Now his kid, on the other hand, the one who tortured the dog? That boy’s got potential. Got a lot of Lester Maddox in him.
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prospero said on March 3, 2011 at 7:24 pm
Yeah, Huckleberry, those Indonesian Mau Maus were pretty scary. This is pretty much like the infamous Willie Horton simultaneous Time and Newsweek covers. Scary black guy. Which cover had the blacker Willie?
I love hockey, but college hockey is the better game. Nobody fights, because of instant suspensions. Nobody connected to the Wings wants to talk about that sort of thing. Gordie Howe was a great player, but he was also a ridiculously adept dirty player.Still, though TY Domi’s acquaintence with skates was pretty much limited to standing up on ice while boxing and throwing cheap shots, the brawlers never gave me a problem. What is far worse is the cheap shot artist like Ulf Samuelson, who trashed Cam Neely’s knee by purely dirty play. Neely vs. Samuelson, on a continuum of brilliance, speed and being a good guy, about 100 to 0. Nobody with any Wings allegiance wants to admit it, but Gordie wasn’t just one of the all-time great players, he was also adept at stickwork and dirty play.
My family moved from the South to Detroit when I was in about 5th graade. We were riding in the car and there were three or four interceptions in less than a minute. My brothers and I could not figure out how this could happen. Back in those days, Wings had a very Neely-like player in Gary Unger. He was a sports star for the ’60s. Showed up for celebrity golf tournaments and played courses barefoot. Longer hair than John and Paul together. We just bought a copy of Slap Shot at the grocery store for $4.99. This is a de rigeur sports movie. We were a family of jocks. All of us decent or better, over a wide range of sports. (Football, baseball, hoops, swimming, diving, track.)
Nothing could convince me that participation in scholastic sports isn’t very good for teenagers. Swimming is the best, because every single kid regardless of talent that practices gets a chance to compete in meets.
Listen. Do y’all know anything about Ted 2011? How did this sneak by me? Shouldn’t Nancy or at least Cooze have been invited. All smarter and less whack than David Byrne. This is pretty interesting, but he wouldn’t get the Grande, where you just cranked it and made sure it was political. What the hell is TED? Our room was the Birmingham Teen Center. Bach worked well there, in its Procul iteration, and so did just blowing the hell out of the amps, and having the two hottest guitar players, like MC-5. Sonic and Brother
Wayne kramer were so good it’s ridiculous to consider other guitar duos other than Duane and Dicky.
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prospero said on March 3, 2011 at 7:53 pm
Southern governors are no more stupid than people like Walker. The best governor in a long time was Jimma Earl Carter, a very bright and well-educated Son of the South. Cali elected Twenty-Mule Team Raygun, and he plunged the country into an Ayn Rand nightmare of disregard for fellow human beings, while claiming to be Christian. So much for respect for education and folksiness. Reagan asked, in disarming honesty, “When I was a young man, who even knew there were disadvantaged Negroes?” Clueless, bigoted and poorly-educated. Was he stupider than Haley Barbour? Maybe. Maybe not. He was a lot more crafty at disguising his bone-deep racism.
Hucklebee thinks that most Americans don’t think the Brits were imperialists and colonialists. Seriously? Why’d they call it the Brit Empire? What a maroon. Didn’t the US sort of do what the Mau Mau did about colonialism? Guy is an idiot, and an out and out lying sack for his “explanation”.
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prospero said on March 3, 2011 at 7:58 pm
Michigan used to have good governors. G. Mennen Williams, George Romney. Republicans worth a shit. Now they had to import a Canadian. Florida elected a jackass that paid the highest fine in history for defrauding the US government. What a fine bunch of citizens.
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prospero said on March 3, 2011 at 8:12 pm
Seriously, if these bastards make claim to Christianity, aren’t they leaving behind deliberately the most worthwhile core belief of everything Jesus ever said. We are responsible for taking care of each other. How do they maneuver around what was the crux of everything Jesus ever said. He didn’t say, “I’ve got mine, Jack.” He said “Whatever you do for the least of my brethren.” Just like the Kochs, right? So screw WIC and fuck Headstart. Well-nourished and upbeat students might vote for Democrats, so screw them. The entire idea that these people want laws to allow bounty hunters to murder abortion providers legally, how do they explain their concern for the unborn juxtaposed with their utter disregard for the just recently born? These people are monstrous liars and hypocrites. Cut WIC? I see those WIC coupons every time I go to the grocery store. It’s essential. Try John Donne you pitiful assholes. Make sure they get born but make sure they’re not fed or educated.
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prospero said on March 3, 2011 at 9:13 pm
You can’t possibly claim to be Christian and to believe in Ayn Rand. Mutually exclusive philosophies. Poor people are poor because they’re lazy, not because Rich people found it convenient to keep them poor and beholden. Trash the last vestige of unions. Union money in elections? That weighs in at about next to nothing compared to the corporate individuals. These assholes intend to stamp out the last vestige of individuals voting. This isn’t democracy. America has nothing to do with Democracy. It’s sort of a joke. Corporations are people? Please. What a crock from the most biased political SC in history that parades as the originalists. Pardon me , but what a huge bunch of liars. The founders wrote multinationals that fucked hard-working Americans out of jobs into the Constitution? And then they said the bastards that put everybody out of work should be allowed to purchase governors? Somehow, I doubt it. That’s what we’re supposed to believe? What a major league group of liars. Republicans claim rich people made money. Many of them did, by not paying taxes while avoiding laws and fucking people over as traders. They created all sorts of derivatives and fucked everybody ove and the didn’t pay taxes. No joke. That;s what happened to people’s pensions. And these assholes absconded.
I went to Jesuit School. We believe we’re supposed to consider the least of our brethren. How can you be such a shit you don’t believe that’s true? We aren’t responsible for our fellows? Seriously sorry world if that’s not true. That’s Republicanism, where people are better if they inherited ill-gotten wealth.
NO shit? The vast amount of the wealth is ill-gotten. These people are crooks. No ahit what we’d say. Look, You tried whT NON’SENSE
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Deborah said on March 3, 2011 at 9:27 pm
Prospero, I admit I haven’t read all of your last 4 posts, I stopped at “what the hell is TED”. Here’s what I appreciate about it. As far as I know it was started by Richard Saul Wurman (not sure I spelled that correctly) a god in the graphic design world for basically inventing information architecture. Well Before he did that he worked for Louis Kahn, my all time favorite architect in the world who died in Penn Station of a heart attack or something, and was almost buried in paupers field because his personal ID was missing or something (see the movie “My Architect” by Kahn’s son). Anyway Wurman did a lot when he put out his Access Press travel guides. He revolutionized the way people get information in a clear and accessible way. TED does that for me too in a clear and accessible way on the Internet. In terms of content, it’s all over the map. Some of it I find riveting, some of it ho hum. I can’t imagine paying the vast sums that are required to attend the TED conferences when you can see them online for free. But I imagine the networking of the crowd at those events is probably priceless.
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Catherine said on March 3, 2011 at 9:54 pm
I think I feel safe admitting here that I have a crush on Robert Reich. Some of it is his voice (perhaps the other Alan Rickman fangirls can appreciate that), and some of it his intelligence and clarity of expression.
If you don’t listen to his commentaries on Marketplace or read his blog, they’re both excellent. I think he summarizes the current situation nicely: “Democrats have become irrelevant. If they want to be relevant again they have to connect the dots: The explosion of income and wealth among America’s super-rich, the dramatic drop in their tax rates, the consequential devastating budget squeezes in Washington and in state capitals, and the slashing of public services for the middle class and the poor. It is not a complicated story. Begin with what’s happened to the typical American, whose wages have been stagnant for thirty years. Today’s typical 30-year-old male (if he has a job) is earning the same as a 30-year-old male earned three decades ago, adjusted for for inflation…The bottom 90 percent of Americans now earn, on average, only about $280 more per year than they did thirty years ago. That’s less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century…But wait. The American economy is more than twice as large now as it was thirty years ago. So where did the money go? To the top. The richest 1 percent’s share of national has doubled – from around 9 percent in 1977 to over 20 percent now.”
Full entry: http://bit.ly/ia03Iw
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Dexter said on March 4, 2011 at 1:58 am
And my last link, the spider story. Not cool.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mazda-spider-20110304,0,6199399.story
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brian stouder said on March 4, 2011 at 8:03 am
He also mentioned Obama’s removal of a loaned bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the Oval Office and called it “a great insult to the British.”
This line struck me as particularly ironic, since it immediately called to mind the political vocabulary within the Madison and Jefferson book which I’m (slowly) progressing toward through.
Many (many) pages in that book have been devoted to the huge (1790’s) political divide between, on the one hand, founders like Madison and Jefferson who had great affection for France (and therefore were derisively called Jacobins, owing to the increasingly bloody French Revolution then unfolding; they themselves preferred the term “republican”, as does modern-day Gov. Idiot) and on the other hand, founders like Hamilton and Adams (and Washington?) who had great affection for the Brits (and therefore were called Monocrats and Royalists; they preferred the term “federalist”)
Really, and as usual, I’ve no real point to make, other than this made me laugh. Anyway – the only alternative to laughing at Gov. Idiot is to lament that garbage “thought” like that will never, ever abate
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Julie Robinson said on March 4, 2011 at 8:49 am
Dexter, the spider story earned a good laugh in this house when we saw it on the news last night since we seem to have those spiders around here too. They nest in the gas grill outside and the gas furnace in the garage. During the last cold spell our house furnace went down and we were contemplating a costly after hours service call. Not needed; it was spiders again. We haven’t experienced this anywhere else we’ve lived so it seems a bit bizarre.
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Jim Sweeney said on March 4, 2011 at 9:18 am
Remember that Huckabee last time around refused to say he believed in evolution. Now maybe that’s the vestiges of a strict Baptist upbringing or maybe it’s another tip of the hat to his base, but I couldn’t vote for a candidate who thinks the planet is 6,000 years old.
BTW, did you know that the Park Service at the Grand Canyon offers tours for creationists? The guides carefully omit any mention of ages older than 10,000 years or so. They don’t lie, but they refer to the various layers of rock as old, older and even older.
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coozledad said on March 4, 2011 at 9:25 am
Too bad they don’t offer “The Leap of Faith”.
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Halloween Jack said on March 4, 2011 at 10:35 am
I’m becoming convinced that Huckabee, like Palin, really isn’t interested in the job and is just going through the motions to renew interest in him and keep his price tag up. Why would he be? Much worse hours and pay than Fox is giving him. In fact, most of the GOP field in ’08 seemed not particularly interested in cleaning up after W; McCain seemed to be running out of spite as much as anything else (you might remember the infamously nasty letter that he wrote Obama when they were both in the Senate; that isn’t some casual little screw-you note). As the failure to let the rich-people’s tax cut expire shows, they can get what they really want anyway, and their born-again deficit hawkishness would keep any GOP president from doing anything particularly impressive unless the economy really takes off.
I don’t know diddly about hockey (and, after seeing that picture crowning the NYT article, with the boy nearly beside himself with glee at the sight of a bleeding Probert on the other side of the plexiglass, I’m not tempted to make its acquaintance), but on the general subject of brain-damaged athletes, I wonder if that isn’t maybe part of the problem of Lenny Dykstra; even though baseball isn’t known as a contact sport, Nails was known for diving into bases head-first, and descriptions of him in recent years tend to include things like mumbling, shaking hands, odd manner of walking, irregular sleep patterns, and so on. I’m sure that a lot of his current problems are due to a combination of humongous levels of hubris and the endorsement of so-called financial gurus like Jim Cramer who should know better, but there’s something about his general scatterbrainedness that reminds me of someone who used to be a big deal where I work, had a motorcycle accident sans helmet, and lost most of his ability to follow through on things. (And, just to keep this current, apparently Dykstra has become part of Charlie Sheen’s entourage lately.)
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