2009/10/19
2009/10/02
Limbaugh compares Obama's new healthcare logo to Nazi swastika
Over the last few days, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) has repeatedly accused people at a recent protest against President Obama's healthcare reform of wearing swastikas and SS symbols -- a claim that was later bolstered by a series of photographs.
"I think they’re AstroTurf, you be the judge," said Pelosi. "They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare."
Perennial Obama critic and conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh was quick to respond to the accusations, arguing today on his radio show that it was in fact the Democrats who were using Nazi symbolism to advance their agenda. He cited a post on the conservative blog Sweetness & Light that compares Obama's new healthcare logo -- a combination of his campaign logo and the ancient Greek symbol of medicine -- to the Nazi swastika symbol.
“They accuse of us being Nazis, and Obama's got a healthcare logo that's right out of Adolf Hitler's playbook,” said Limbaugh.
Limbaugh then proceeded to describe the ways Democrats are like Nazis -- a list that included their dedication to animal rights and their opposition to smoking and pollution.
Well, the Nazis were against big business -- they hated big business. And of course we all know that they were opposed to Jewish capitalism. They were insanely, irrationally against pollution. They were for two years mandatory voluntary service to Germany. They had a whole bunch of make-work projects to keep people working, one of which was the Autobahn. They were against cruelty and vivisection of animals, but in the radical sense of devaluing human life, they banned smoking. They were totally against that. They were for abortion and euthanasia of the undesirables, as we all know, and they were for cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare.
What do you think? Is Obama's new healthcare logo really a symbolic reference to Nazism?
--Brendan Bigelow
Photo: The Nazi swastika, left, as it appeared at the Mauthausen death camp (credit: Simon Wiesenthal Center) compared to Obama's new healthcare logo, righ
2009/09/11
2009/07/04
Sarah Palin: Next Stop Fox?
AllGov.com
Speculation about the reason behind Sarah Palin's surprise resignation as governor of Alaska has centered on her national political ambitions, possible unrevealed legal problems and maybe yet another pregnancy. More likely, Fox News or another TV network has made her an offer she can't refuse.
Why settle for being the governor of a state with a population the size of Columbus, Ohio, when you can have triple the audience with your own show on Fox News? And why settle for the paltry salary of a state executive when you can make millions on television? When you're a politician and you want to spend $150,000 on clothes, you get in trouble, but spend the same amount on clothes as a talk show host and it's a legitimate tax write-off.
Let's face it, being a government official is a hassle. Say something stupid and half the country makes fun of you. Say something stupid on television and your ratings go up. Punish your personal enemies and you're accused of ethical violations. Do you same in the world of TV and you fit right in.
Good luck, Sarah. We'll see you in prime tim
2009/06/23
The Real Lesson Of Iran -- Beware America's Republican Mullah
The Republicans are faulting President Obama for not taking a "strong enough stand" in support of the freedom marchers in Iran. Yet if the Republican/Religious Right/Neoconservative agenda had come to full fruition over the last 35 years the Republicans would have plunged America into our own version of the misbegotten theocracy destroying Iran today. I know. As a former Religious Right leader I worked to make America "safe" for "Christian values" and dangerous to everyone else. Thankfully I, and those like me, failed.
Had we succeeded America would be another version of Iran. Instead of people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson having become marginalized they'd be sitting in Washington advising whomever was the next Republican president. Instead of environmental protection and new mileage standards for cars there would be new anti-gay laws on the books.
- Read the whole article here
2009/06/10
"I" on the news
Has the concept of free speech and freedom of press already failed? It seems there are two american people who live in separate countries who never meet, watch different shows and have differents information. Conservatives are so self-rightgeous and their media are so eager for rating that they keep servingee the thickest propaganda just using the same silly tricks the communist used by the late USSR 50 years ago.| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| "i" on News | ||||
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2009/05/25
Ridiculous
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner admits private investors are worried about investing in new government-backed commercial mortgage securities and dismisses as "ridiculous" a recent Republican National Committee resolution stating that Democratic policies bordered on socialism.
"There's still a bit of concern about whether, if you participated in these programs, you'll face in the future some change in the rules of the game, and that's causing a bit of -- a bit of concern," Geithner told The Post's Lois Romano for her continuing "Voices of Power" interview series. Private investors have expressed interest in the program, the government will work to limit their concern and he anticipates they will be "a good deal for the American taxpayer."
"That's the important thing to recognize," he said, "because you -- you have in this basic structure, investors putting skin into the game, taking risk, making judgments about what the price should be for these securities, and the taxpayer gets to participate in the upside in those judgments. So we think they're a good deal for the taxpayer."Geithner also defended President Obama against this week's RNC resolution, stating that the administration "had to do exceptional things to help protect the American economy, help fix this crisis, fix this mess."
"Where we engage in these areas is with extreme reluctance and only because we think it's the necessary way to help reduce the risk of greater damage to businesses, to the basic fabric of the American economy," he said. "And I say where we do it, we'll do it only temporarily, try to make sure we get out as quickly as we can."
The government plans to divest itself of investments in the financial and automotive sectors, "As soon as we can," Geithner said.
Read more of his comments in Tuesday's editions of The Washington Post and watch video of the exchange above.
Read the whole story: Washington Post
2009/04/24
The Big Takeover
It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).
So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."
2009/02/13
Walter Jones, GOP Congressman, Signs On To Investigating Bush
A self-described conservative who brought "Freedom Fries" to Congress, Jones developed into one of the most vocal Republican critics of the Bush administration. He took particular umbrage at the handling of the Iraq War and the decision to prohibit photographs of returning coffins of American soldiers. Late in the past administration's time in office he was reported to have been reading Vincent Bugliosi's book, "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder."
HuffPost Reporting From DC ( read more)
2009/02/09
Government Beyond Obama?
By Richard ParkerThe Case for Big Government
by Jeff Madrick
Princeton University Press, 205 pp., $22.95
Jeff Madrick's The Case for Big Government arrives when one might imagine that Wall Street has made the case quite persuasively on its own. By mid-February, the Federal Reserve's once-gargantuan $29 billion rescue of Bear Stearns had been dwarfed not just by the government's hotly debated $700 billion "bailout bill" last fall, or even President Obama's nearly $800 billion stimulus package, but far more stunningly by the $7.6 trillion the Fed and Treasury had by the beginning of 2009 already pledged to contain the ever-widening collapse of the economy, and the additional sum of up to $2 trillion that the new administration said it would raise from public and private sources to rescue banks. Governments from London to Beijing have meanwhile rushed to provide vast sums to their own capital markets.
These figures are mind-numbing to voters—and to sophisticated investors and economists as well, and for good reason: fifty years ago the United States spent what in today's dollars would amount to only $115 billion on the Marshall Plan to reconstruct all of Western Europe; the 1980s savings and loans bailout—at the time the largest financial rescue operation since the Great Depression—cost taxpayers a mere $130 billion. But while bailing out the financial system should urgently concern us, Madrick argues, what is fundamentally needed is a different conception of the role of government.
In the midst of this crisis, one can make cases for three very different kinds of "big government." The first is the rescue of Wall Street, an immediate but temporary intervention, already in play; the second is for government to act as a general contractor in the economy's reconstruction—the medium-term investment in infrastructure, from roads to schools, that Obama is now unveiling in his "recovery plan." But the third possibility, which is the central concern of Madrick's book, has not yet been the subject of serious public debate: to use government as long-term guarantor of America's (and indirectly the world's) economic stability, as provider of widespread opportunity, and as partner with the private sector in restoring long-term stable growth. Madrick, in a nuanced and wide-ranging fashion, makes the case for that third approach.
2008/10/20
The Moment
by: John Cory, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Arizona Senator John McCain. (Photo: Gunby / AP)
Senator McCain. Was this the moment? The epiphany? The realization that stoking the flames of bigotry and fear had come home to roost?
As I watched your town hall gathering, I wondered what was going through your mind when you came face to face with the incendiary results of your campaign tactics. What did you see and feel when that elderly woman said Obama was an Arab? Or the man who said he feared an Obama presidency? And all the others?
I saw your face. I watched your body language as you took the microphone and quickly distanced yourself from that one.
At that moment, did you see your reflection in the mirror of her eyes? A reflection, not of a maverick, but a pariah? Did you see the decades of American scar tissue? Birmingham? Burning crosses? The noose? Did you see that awful year in American history when Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, cut down in the prime of their dreams for a better America?
Did you hear the echo of Dr. King's words about being "judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character," and suddenly realize that it was not your opponent's character in question - but yours? Perhaps you heard the whisper of Langston Hughes when he asked, "What happens to a dream deferred ...? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?"
Did you suddenly smell the rot and fetid acrid aroma of fear and hate, the carcass of mendacious political tactics decaying at your feet? Or did you sniff the flop-sweat of your own campaign standing in a puddle of decimating poll numbers?
I watched your mouth dry up and wondered if you could taste the bitter words like "Arab," "terrorist," "treason," "kill him," - all served up on the plate of red meat politics by your campaign. Did it make you choke and want to spit out the rancid flavor of ignorance and violence? Or did you want to savor the success of the politics of personal destruction?
Did you feel the cold chill of defeat? Did your heart pound with the all-encompassing realization that you would never be president? Could you sense that the America you appeal to is stale and dying out and being replaced by the freshness of hope and tolerance and a rainbow of change?
No doubt, the media will genuflect before your image and be pushed by your campaign spinners to reanoint you as a maverick and honorable man in rising to the defense of your opponent. But your ads still sully the airwaves. Your surrogates still spew their venom. After all, this is just politics. People need to understand that. Nothing personal - it is just politics.
But here was this moment. And you know it, regardless of whether or not you were reading from cue cards or just looking down to avoid having to face the ugliness before you - you know.
And when the crowd booed as you struggled to use words about decency and honorable character to defuse the situation you created, you must have recalled the words from Proverbs, "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind ..."
This is not a moment for you to be proud of in this campaign. Garnering credit for coming to the defense of Senator Obama is like an arsonist claiming heroism for saving lives after having set fire to the building in the first place.
It does not matter how the media or your advisers and consultants spin this moment because it can only reflect badly on you. If it is tossed off as politics as usual, your campaign appears shallow and less interested in what's best for America than what is best for John McCain. If it is said that there is no room for this kind of rhetoric in a presidential campaign, then you look weak and unable to control your own staff that continue to push these messages. If it is about leadership and going against the flow, then we see that a McCain presidency will be divisive and reinforce the meme of "two Americas." We have already had eight years of a divided country from the man who ran as a "Uniter not a divider."
This was a defining moment.
And you, sir, lost.
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But while that cross-racial and ethnic coalition figured significantly in Mr. Obama’s re-election last week, it has frayed over time — and ...
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by Frank Schaeffer New York Times best-selling author The Republicans are faulting President Obama for not taking a "strong enough stan...