Bryan Fischer, the director of issues analysis of the conservative fundamentalist American Family Association, on Thursday told a so-called “expert” who denies climate change that not using God’s fossil fuels would be like “crushing” someone’s feelings by rejecting their birthday present…
Song by Nanci Griffith; Kentucky Educational Television's "The Lonesome Pine Specials"; recorded at the Kentucky Center for the Arts; producer Richard Van Kleeck; director Clark Santee; copyright 1992, KET
Witness Fox News cult deprogramming in action:
Kudos to DailyKos diarist(s) Roosevelt Institute for spotting the article this morning, and succinctly summarizing it, as follows:
Bruce Bartlett explains how he got shunned and excommunicated from the mainstream conservative movement after decades of toeing the party line because he dared to point out that observable economic reality seems to have a strong Keynesian bias.
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For more than 30 years, I was very comfortable within the conservative wing of the Republican Party. [I worked for or with: Goldwater, Nixon, Young Republicans (during Vietnam), Ron Paul in 1976, Jack Kemp, supply-side economists, Jude Wanniski, Heritage Fdn, Reagan's White House, Gary Bauer, James Baker, Nick Brady, Glenn Hubbard, Cato Institute and NCPA; and wrote conservative editorials for: WSJ, Washington (Moonie) Times, Investor's Business Daily, NY Sun, etc.]
In November 2003, I had an intellectual crisis... The [2004] article is best remembered for his quote from an anonymous White House official dismissing critics like me for being “the reality-based community.” ... I was banned from Fox News... extended throughout Rupert Murdoch’s empire. After careful research [in 2007-08], I came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100% right in the 1930s. Previously, I had thought the opposite. ... I had previously viewed Krugman as an intellectual enemy and attacked him... For the record, no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman. The blind hatred for him on the right simply pushed me further away from my old allies and comrades.
The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today."
The Latest Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory: Obama's Third Term
Mitt Romney can take some solace in his devastating loss on Nov. 6: at least he won the voters who really count.
That’s the thesis anyway of top adviser Stuart Stevens, who penned an op-ed in the Washington Post on Wednesday arguing that by winning wealthier and whiter voters, Romney secured the moral victory over Obama.
Start attacking Susan Rice for her ‘temperament’
“How did they pull Kelly Ayotte in?” Scarborough wondered. “They pulled Kelly Ayotte into this trifecta after [Sen. Joe] Lieberman starts running for the doors.”
“They need a third amigo,” New York magazine’s John Heilemann explained. “And now two of the three are women — at least one of the three are women. They both think they are trying to recover from the war on women.”
“As apparently the only liberal with no interest in helping Republicans repair their political flux capacitor so they can get out of 1957 (My em. Heh.), I wholeheartedly agree with Joe Scarborough, and then some,” Christopher wrote. “Instead of ignoring Ambassador Susan Rice’s impressive qualifications in favor of a ginned-up controversy, Republicans should ignore Susan Rice’s qualifications in favor of a ginned-up controversy and her ‘temperament,’ and maybe they could also wonder how Rice will perform as Secretary of State and get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour.”
Filthy Mitt Romney Delivers Campaign Speech To Audience Of Confused Shoppers In Ohio Safeway
CANTON, OH—According to eyewitnesses at the scene, an unkempt and thoroughly disheveled Mitt Romney gave an impassioned campaign speech Monday to a group of bewildered shoppers inside a local Safeway.
Sources confirmed the filth-covered former presidential candidate walked into the store unannounced early yesterday evening, went to the store’s cereal aisle, and started to play Kid Rock’s “Born Free” on a portable boom box, enthusiastically waving and pointing to no one in particular.
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Witnesses told reporters that Romney walked around the store barefoot as he gave his speech, wearing only a pair of dirt-caked jeans and a wrinkled dress shirt covered in food stains.
Safeway patrons also said the former Massachusetts governor gave off an incredibly strong odor and appeared to have gone “days, possibly weeks” without bathing.
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Sources said a weeping Ann Romney at one point attempted to pull her husband out of the store by his arm but was angrily rebuffed, with the 65-year-old retired businessman yelling that he was “trying to do [his] job here.”
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According to reports, Safeway employees finally called local authorities when Romney attempted to grab an infant from the arms of her mother “for a quick photo op.”
After three police officers managed, with some effort, to subdue Romney in the produce section, he could be heard shrieking incoherently at the top of his lungs for several moments before he finally trailed off, muttering about a plan to “create 12 million jobs by the end of [his] first term.”
“We’re going all the way to the White House!” Romney loudly proclaimed in the parking lot as he was gently guided into the back of a police car. “Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America!”
The Top 4 Whoppers Norquist Tells To Keep Republicans From Defecting
Another Bush, Another Target-Rich Presidential Campaign
The Jeb Bush boomlet that fascinated gullible pundits — and tantalized Republicans — during the dark days of last winter’s presidential primary is undergoing a swift revival. Less than three weeks after the defeat of Mitt Romney, a candidate who proved repellent to minority voters, Republicans are said to be yearning for Jeb, who speaks fluent Spanish and whose wife is from Mexico.
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While some aspects of the Jeb story may sound uplifting, there are certainly other episodes that will make voters’ hair stand on end.
So yes — run, Jeb, run! The fact is that almost any presidential candidate from Florida represents a full-employment program for investigative journalism — and the “smarter” Bush brother is no exception.
You gotta take care of your own karma. You gotta nurture your own heart, take care of what’s around you and immerse yourself in those you love, calm the fearful and anxious mind and choose where to place your energy as wisely as possible, offering heaps of compassion to all needful things in your world but careful not to overload the psycho-emotional circuitry lest you blow out your nav system and die.
It’s all another way of saying, the karma of the world is not yours to solve. This is the great teaching, shared across any responsible tradition you can name. Shoulder all the illnesses, traumas, violence, abuses, pollutions of the planet, feel the suffering and pains of every living creature, along with the seemingly imminent doom of the earth herself, and watch yourself implode.
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Put another way: Do you believe our science and technology will surely save us, because smart people and sheer luck have almost always kept total annihilation at bay, save for all those times and all those magnificent empires throughout history when they didn’t?
This much we know, and this much is sometimes all we can know. You gotta take care of your own karma, the love around you. As the terrific Tantra teacher Rod Stryker told me recently, you gotta calm the frenzied terrors of the mind enough that you can summon the bravery to act with full and clear conscience. This is the only way. This is all you can do.
Republican Senators Still “Troubled” After Meeting With Susan Rice
Michael Tomasky on How Obama Shouldn’t Back Down Vs. the GOP
Elections are supposed to have consequences. So why does the GOP think it can strong-arm the president into compromising on entitlements without first giving in on taxes?Answer:
It’s nice to see Norquist’s Maginot Line holding about as well as the real one did.
Obama will have to give to get. That’s how it goes. But he’d better not forget, and he’d better not let the Republicans forget, that he just won an election in which the American people were given a clear choice—and they made it. Republicans walking away from Norquist deserve a few brownie points for coming back to planet Earth, but that sure doesn’t entitle them to start calling any shots.
In the wake of the Petraeus scandal, Melik Kaylan sounds the alarm over the loss of privacy in the Internet age:
This is a huge loss that accompanies the huge gain of the Internet. Non-saints all need some zone of privacy if they are to remain sane. And yet no one can really avoid the tools of email and texting and tweeting and Tumblring and Instagramming if they want to be part of society - and any single image or text or email can be instantly communicated to everyone on the planet by almost anyone. Anthony Weiner will therefore always live with the image of his fruit-of-the-loom chubby as if it were stamped to his forehead like a Scarlet Letter of old. Yes, there are great advantages to transparency - we would never have grasped the full extent of the torture under Bush and Cheney if some hadn't taken digital photos of the Cheney-authorized techniques in use at Abu Ghraib. But there is also great human cost.
The GOP Faces Years in the Wilderness After 2012 Election LossesSensible Republicans?! Perhaps it's simply that abject defeat begets a semblance of thought.
Sensible Republicans seeking to renew the viability of a conservative party that seems out of touch after a stinging defeat at the polls are being denounced as ‘heretics.’ Robert Shrum on why the party might never find its way back.
[...] Outside the South, President Obama defeated his opponent 55 to 45 percent, winning a landslide there as well as in the Electoral College. The bottom line: Romney got elected president of the old confederacy.That's good. When the mouthbreathers secede, they can call him. He'll answer the phone. Hasn't got much else to do these days. He can take over another failure, put it deep in debt, and sell it for pennies on the dollar and further enrich himself in the process. One caveat: whoever buys the South has to tow it away. Far, far away. I would suggest the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. Then sink it.
Obama pollster Joel Benenson responded that such shifts may require two or three more cycles of presidential loss. [...]Outreach to fewer and fewer scared old white hypocrite Christers, that's who. Continue the march, Repugs!
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That’s not where realistic Republican strategists want their party to be. But four overriding realities militate against a GOP return to the White House in 2016 and perhaps for several campaigns beyond.
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Second, the nature of the Republican primary electorate hamstrings the party’s capacity to adapt. The religious right and the true believers who dominate the nominating process have their own explanations or rationalizations for 2012. Romney wasn’t conservative enough. [...]
Schmidt recommended that Republicans dispense with the Iowa caucuses, where the litmus test is who’s most for Jesus, according to the narrow measures of right-wing fundamentalists. That change won’t happen, not yet; religious and movement forces on the far right won’t yield their hold on the primary process and their veto power over the nominee. In the last two elections, they sacrificed at least five Senate seats for the sake of ideological ultra-orthodoxy. So why won’t they demand their kind of presidential candidate—no doubts, no flip-flops, always there with them? And they believe the country will come around to them. Former Moral Majoritarian Ralph Reed smoothly explained how. Yes, there has to be change, to “combine core principles with outreach.” But outreach to whom, if the core principles are reaction and intolerance?
Instead, in the throes of their self-proclaimed reexamination, many Republicans remind me of a scene in Theodore H. White’s classic The Making of the President 1960. JFK spoke in the Boston garden on the last night of the campaign, with politicians and ward heelers smoking cigars arranged in rows behind him. As the crowd cheered, White wrote, a look passed across their faces. You could see what the pols were thinking: Kennedy has a trick; if only I could figure it out, I could be president.The GOP has missed the point entirely. They pimped off the fringe right for votes and the tables got turned and now the GOP is the trick. Deep, deep, deep in the wilderness is a good place for them. They could only be improved by being turned into bear scat.
It was a false and easy conceit. And if what the GOP looks for now is a trick, what it will find is a way deeper into the wilderness.
My, how times have changed. In the 1760's, you could be jailed in this country for not growing hemp! Cannabis was so highly prized that King George III made growing hemp mandatory. Tensions that arose from England's demand for raw hemp fibers from the New World were partially responsible for events that led to the American Revolutionary.
As industrial use for hemp declined, a new market developed. Medical uses for cannabis were almost unknown in Western Europe and the Americas due to the suppression of information from "heathen" cultures by the Catholic church. Medicinal Cannabis wasn't introduced to the West until 1839 by a 30-year old British physician, W. B. O'Shaugnessy, who had observed doctors in the Indian province of Bengal treating all manner of illnesses with concoctions made from hemp extracts. (Bengal means Bhang Land, which literally translates to Cannabis Land.)
One company, Gunjah Wallah, made a highly popular maple sugar hashish candy for over forty years that was advertised in the Sears Roebuck catalog as a "totally harmless, delicious, fun candy."There ya go! Installs the munchies and takes care of them in one swell foop! I'm trying to order some of that from Sears for Christmas presents. I have some uptight Repug friends who could benefit from it spiritually as well as having their eyes opened.
Next week we will examine how every drug prohibition has its roots in racism aided by yellow journalists who promoted "Reefer Madness" hysteria for their own financial gain.
STRONG SALES REPORTED ON BLACK FRIDAY
Based on higher-than-expected number of people trampled per store.
Pope: Jesus Born Years Earlier Than ThoughtCat'lick Choich, meet John McCain. Two irrelevant anachronisms that ought to go rock on the porch.
Long before God even met Mary.
Romney Visits Disneyland
After long campaign, says he's glad to “get back to reality.”
Pundits: Jeb Bush Could Win GOP Nomination in 2016Fine. He can be the next Repug loser.
If he changes his name.
We don’t yet really know as a society what a person has to do to completely and utterly cancel out a record of war heroism, but we may be about to find out. [...]Grampa Walnuts will be the last to know.
Just as conservatives couldn’t see that Romney was losing because they believed their own propaganda, I think McCain probably isn’t aware right now of what a joke he’s become.
In a bizarre interview aired Friday morning, “Fox & Friends” apparently got punked by an author who declared that society absolutely has every reason to “destroy the imaginations of our children.”Too easy. Those morons are dumber'n a bag o' hammers. Heh.
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Asked about the premise of his book, Esolen flipped the conversation on its head. “First of all, we do want to destroy the imaginations of our children,” he said. “Otherwise our economy would collapse and people would stop buying things they don’t need and don’t really even enjoy.”
“You can’t let your kid be outside, because a single blade of grass out there is a more wondrous object than anything a kid will see on a screen in a month’s time of viewing television and video games,” Esolen continued. “So, absolutely, you’ve got to keep them indoors.”
He added that fairy tales are also not advisable because “they are based on what every culture really knows about human beings.
“It’s archetypal, it’s natural human knowledge,” Esolen said. “And we don’t want that because that really taps in the imagination. So, instead we’ve to replace it with stories about who ever happens to be politically favored at the moment. This trains the child away from participation in politics.”
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If Esolen was in fact punking Fox News, it wouldn’t be the first time this particular show has gotten fooled. [...]
Guthrie’s most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” was written in 1940 in response to Kate Smith’s "God Bless America.” "Woody saw ['God Bless America'] as a strident, jingoistic, complacent, tub-thumping anthem to American greatness,” Kaufman says. “And now, he had just come from the Dust Bowl. He’d just come from the barbed-wire gates of California’s Eden there. He’d seen the Hoovervilles. He’d seen the bread lines. He’d seen labor activists getting their heads busted. And so, he’s thinking, what — God bless — what America, you know, is Kate Smith singing of?” In 2009, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performed “This Land Is Your Land” for the inauguration of President Obama.
Over the next hour, we’ll hear from folk singer Pete Seeger, the British musician Billy Bragg and the historian Will Kaufman. But first, Woody Guthrie, in his own words, being interviewed by the musicologist Alan LomaxThere ye go! Enjoy.
ALAN LOMAX: What did your family do? What kind of people were they, and where did they come from?
WOODY GUTHRIE: Well, they come in there from Texas in the early day. My dad got to Oklahoma right after statehood. He was the first clerk of the county court in Okemah, Oklahoma, after statehood, as he is known as one of them old, hard-hitting, fist-fighting Democrats, you know, that run for office down there, and they used to miscount the votes all the time. So every time that my dad went to town, it was common the first question that I ask him when he come riding in on a horse that evening, I’d say, "Well, how many fights did you have today?" And then he’d take me up on his knee, and he’d proceed to tell me who he is fighting and why and all about it. "Put her there, boy. We’ll show these fascists what a couple hillbillies can do."