The appalling bigotry of Sally Kern II

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In March of 2008, I wrote about Sally Kern's ridiculous, bigoted claims that that homosexuality is "the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, "that proponents of "the homosexual lifestyle" "want to get [children] into the government schools so they can indoctrinate them," and that "no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted for more than, you know, a few decades."

Well, the Oklahoma Republican was back at it on Wednesday, this time directing her bigotry at people of color:

The Republican-controlled Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a proposed constitutional amendment [on Wednesday] that would eliminate Affirmative Action in state government. The offical GOP reasoning for the change is that while "discrimination exists," "I don't think Affirmative Action has been as successful as we like to believe," the bill's sponsor, state Rep. T.W. Shannon (R), explained. But perpetual extremist state Rep. Sally Kern (R) offered her argument for ending the system that helps minorities advance: "blacks" simply don't work as hard as whites:

Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said minorities earn less than white people because they don't work as hard and have less initiative.

"We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that's tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don't want to study as hard in school? I've taught school, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn't study hard because they said the government would take care of them."

There isn't really much that needs to be said about this. Such bigotry, I think, speaks for itself. It's an appalling example of an all-too-common form of somewhat indirect racism. Racists like Kern don't necessarily say that blacks and other "minorities" are sub-human and don't deserve equal rights, just that they're all or mostly (note the broad generalization) lazy, uneducated, and undeserving of government support -- and, worse, "lazy" can be understood as a euphemism for un-American and worse. It's a way of explaining, justifying, and ultimately perpetuating racial inequality.

As Steve Benen asks, "where does the Republican Party even find people like this? Is there a website where a party can order cartoonish racists to serve in state government?"

It apparently doesn't have to look too hard. Cartoonish racists are right at home in the GOP.

What's new in New York's 23rd Congressional District?

By R.K. Barry

I was wondering today how things were going in the NY-23rd Congressional district. You may recall events in the district that took what probably should have been a safe GOP seat and handed it to the Democrats due to infighting between more mainstream Republicans and the Tea Party.

This started when Republican John M. McHugh resigned the seat on September 21, 2009 in order to become the Secretary of the Army. Thus a special election was required, which, under normal circumstances almost certainly would have been won by the Republican nominee, Dede Scozzafava, who had previously been a member of the New York State Assembly.

What made circumstances other than normal was that Scozzafava supported abortion rights and gay marriage and had other unseemly affiliations, as far as the emerging Tea Party movement was concerned.

Tim Pawlenty and Sarah Palin, among others, decided to put their weight behind some sad sack character who would run under the Conservative Party banner. I believe his name was Doug Hoffman, though as I recall he was a terrible political performer and has mercifully disappeared into political obscurity, but not before he could lend the Democrats a very useful helping hand.

Long story short, running as a third party candidate, Hoffman made it impossible for Scozzafava to win. Upon realizing this, and no doubt sick of being vilified by members of her own party, she dropped out and ending up endorsing the Democrat, Bill Owens (pictured above).

Owens not only won in 2009, but won again in 2010 when Hoffman, having failed to secure the Republican nomination ran (again) as a third party candidate allowing Owens another two-year term. Oddly, Hoffman dropped out late in the race, but too late to have his name removed from the ballot. In the end, Owens got about 48%, the nominated Republican (Matthew Doheny) got about 46% and our helpful friend Hoffman got 6%. That's what they call a spoiler. Yes indeed.

I think I've got the details mostly right and I only recount them because I see that the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is already hard at work to reclaim the seat, as they may be able to do (assuming they don't blow their feet off again). Okay, I'm also recounting it because I'm really hoping that Republicans and the Tea Partiers amongst them dance the same dance all over America in 2012.

In total, the NRCC is targeting 23 Congressional districts with robo calls and even some television ads with the same basic message, which I found interesting and perhaps indicative of things to come. So, take heed.

Here's the script:

Hello, I'm calling from the National Republican Congressional Committee with an important alert about your Congressman Bill Owens. Thanks to Owens' addiction to spending, the federal government borrows $4 billion every day. That's given us fourteen trillion dollars in debt on the backs of our children and grandchildren. And Bill Owens is making it worse. He voted for another Pelosi budget that would strangle our economy with more spending, more debt and more borrowing from China. Call Congressman Owens and tell him to stop spending your money. Paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

And, if you insist, here's the ad:

The usual ham-fisted bullshit. My favorite part is the bit with the People's Republic of China and the big red curtain and the Statue of Liberty, that and the beautiful children we are condemning to lives of desperation. It almost brings a tear to my eye.

I didn't see any seniors in the clip who will live their "golden years" terrified that they won't be able to pay for their health care if the Republicans get their way. Maybe the next ad will cover all that.

Just to prove the game is on, a spokesperson for Congressman Owens responded by saying:

Now the Washington attack dogs are trying to distract voters from Rep. Owens' fight to protect Upstate seniors from the Ryan Budget, which would end Medicare as we know it and increase health care costs for the next generation of seniors.

Indeed.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)

Rebels without a cause

By Capt. Fogg

To be honest, I've come to hate activists, even when I agree with them. The passion behind so many crusades has often rendered the crusaders irrational, intemperate and more than half blind. It prompts them to accept spurious facts and figures and sometimes to invent them and in too many cases there's a kind of regenerative feedback that mimics a PA system with too much gain. It begins to howl and screech. Whatever was said into the microphone and what the howling is about matters little, only the joy of crusading, which not only surpasseth understanding, but prevents it.

Take genital mutilation, for instance. On the list of people I hate well in excess of my general contempt for humanity are those who painfully slice up young girls in a way that is intended to prevent them from enjoying sex as an adult. Yes, we have a constitutional ban on government interference with "free exercise" of religion, but we have a long standing interpretation of it that limits that free exercise to otherwise legal actions. We are, even so, usually able to make fair decisions because we distinguish between minor cosmetic surgery and malicious mutilation without a lot of hysteria. We can sometimes tell whether a comparison is ludicrous or not. We're able to take notice of the testimony of close to a billion males that it's not an impairment; unless we're prone to activism, that is.

Is circumcision, demanded by two of the major religious categories, really the kind of "mutilation" that falls outside of constitutional protection? To the activists of San Francisco, there are no uncertainties and certainly no distinction between something that is initially agonizing and a cruel lifelong impairment and something that isn't either. And let me be clear, this isn't a subject that will be illuminated by our traditional, left-right dichotomy. It simply doesn't matter whether it's liberals or Conservatives behind it; whether it's neither or both. I'd go so far as to say that the stated justifications for banning the circumcision of male babies is irrelevant to the passion for it and has too much to do with "aesthetics" to be more than an excuse. So I'm not going to indulge myself in modern fashion by invoking the traditional straw men ( and women of course) and restrict my contempt for people who need to have a cause and need it so much they aren't quite scrupulous about the high contrast, black and white scenarios they use in their passion plays.

If the crusade succeeds, much like the one that captured Jerusalem in 1099, the City by the bay will be as slippery a thing to hold on to. Jews and Muslims will simply use maternity facilities elsewhere or have the religious rite performed elsewhere. The Brit Milah, given in Gen. 17:10-14 to Abraham and in Lev. 12:3 is carried out on the eighth day. Muslims have a similar guideline. The law them would be only an inconvenience, like having to drive to the next town to purchase alcohol is in some places.

What then will it accomplish than, after all the sound and fury and obsession with penises wanes? Certainly nothing to stop what was intended to be stopped unless a further incursion by the dominant religion into the neighborhood of tolerance was part of the game all along.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Elephant Dung #27: Rand Paul takes aim at Donald Trump's questionable Republican cred

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

I'm not exactly a fan of Rand Paul, the Tea Party Republican senator from Kentucky. But I've got to hand it to him, he's a funny guy and he's got a knack for hilarious one-line swipes at fellow Republicans. Earlier this month, he took aim at Newt Gingrich. Yesterday, his target was Donald Trump:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Thursday took a swipe at billionaire businessman Donald Trump, demanding to see his "Republican registration."

While speaking at a breakfast with New Hampshire Republicans one day after "The Donald" visited the Granite State, Paul riffed off the potential GOP presidential candidate's "birther" questions.

"I've come to New Hampshire today because I'm very concerned," said Paul, according to The New York Times. "I want to see the original long-form certificate of Donald Trump's Republican registration."

Paul's comments follow up on some GOP-aligned groups' effort to discredit Trump as a conservative. The free-market Club for Growth has accused Trump of being a liberal for his previous support of universal healthcare and his desire to raise tariffs on China.

It's hard to be a successful Republican when you've got both the Tea Party (via Rand Paul) and the Club for Growth aligned against you. Which is no doubt partly why Trump has so enthusiastically embraced the whole Birther thing and is now channelling his racism (what else is it?) into suggesting that Obama is an affirmative action case.

Now, is Trump a Republican? Yes, no doubt. His wealth-based sense of entitlement and megalomania would seem to indicate that he leans to the right, as would his pro-business (or, to be more precise, pro-Trump business) views. But his own political history is mixed. He has espoused various liberal positions over the years, and he was a registered Democrat for years. As he himself has acknowledged, if prior to his current courting of the Republican base, he's an independent, and he has voted for and financially supported both Democrats and Republicans.

None of this should disqualify Trump from being a Republican today, but of course the Republican Party, and in particular its powerful Tea Party wing, is all about party purification. They're the new Bolsheviks. If you're not Republican enough, Republican as they define it, they'll purge you from the party. We're seeing this happen again and again, with the Tea Party and others on the right challenging even established conservatives like Orrin Hatch, Richard Lugar, and John Boehner. The Republican Party is descending into madness, as I've said many times, and all this ongoing purge is accelerating that descent.

Trump has the media platform, not to mention the temperament, to fight back against those who would challenge him, including Paul. But Paul's onto something. Birtherism aside, Trump just isn't the sort of Republican, if truly Republican at all, to win over enough of the grassroots base to win the nomination, even if he manages to lure some of the party establishment (like Ralph Reed). He's got the anti-Obama attack going, and that's sustaining his popularity in the party, but were he to run that popularity would likely fracture once he was actually subjected to any sort of sustained scrutiny of his record. In that sense, he's got a Romney problem, and it's the sort of problem that's virtually insurmountable. Just ask Mitt.

And just ask Rand, who threw a pile of dung at the upstart Trump. If The Donald insists on remaining in the Republican spotlight, there will no doubt be much more to come.

Lib Leader Desperate, Hypocritical, Demagogic

 

Don't vote for this scary, dangerous man, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, seen also below with his scary, dangerous, communist comrades Jack and Gilles...

By the way, see the guy on the far left, Jack Layton of the NDP?

I swear he looks just like Vladimir Lenin!

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has nothing to offer- no sound policies; just rhetoric and demagoguery.

He has already lost and is flailing about in vain.

It's pathetic.  What a way to go down, down, down, back to Harvard or perhaps some George Soros-funded organization for international socialism and one-world dictatorship-by-committee-of-amoral-billionaire-elites.

(...) you got to show up, you got to be real . . . you got to have a team.

Funny HE would point fingers and say that.  I understand that HE barely ever showed up in Parliament himself, choosing to prorogue himself about 70% of the time!

Sheesh.  Such hypocrisy!

He also demanded that voters subject Layton’s platform to the same scrutiny as other parties.

Funny- the old, "mainstream" media isn't scrutinizing HIS platform all that much.  Nor are they scrutinizing HIM much at all, for they're pretending he never honestly, openly, clearly expressed the ultra-extreme positions (pro-torture, pro-Iraq-war, pro-Bush, etc., etc.) he has in the past, and then flipflopped completely as Liberal leader.  They don't care that he's an opportunist who'll say anything for a shot at the Prime Ministership before leaving Canada again for whatever, wherever.

They ought also to be investigating the extent to which billionaire NWO extremist and openly-admitted-and-unrepentant Nazi Holocaust collaborator George Soros has his puppeteering hand upside Iggy's hiney.

He also claims:

“The country wants to get rid of this (Conservative) regime (...)

Oh, really?  Why on earth would Canadians want to get rid of the best government Canada has ever had, the government that has raised Canada above the rest of the Free World, finally?  The government that restored all the jobs lost during the recession and that is shrinking the deficit way faster than predicted?  It wouldn't make sense.  Besides, those who won't vote Conservative don't know feck-all about diddly in the first place and have been brainwashed by old-media, hard-left propaganda into supporting left-wing parties.  Sheesh.  Thank goodness for our first-past-the-post election system!

Besides, It would be more appropriate to say that three-quarters of Canadians want to keep the Ignatieff Liberals out of power!!!

Ignatieff says the NDP platform doesn’t add up because it involves $72 billion in new spending over four years without any way to reduce Ottawa’s $40 billion deficit. “It’ll end up in raising taxes and, in my view, it’s a bad plan for the Canadian economy.”

Funny... the same could be said about the Liberal platform!

“I’m attacking the Harper government because I believe profoundly that this regime is corrupt, is contemptuous of democracy and is incompetent economically,”

"Regime".  Ha.  Liberals themselves have always run a "regime", so this is rich coming from a Liberal.  "Corrupt".  Ha.  I recall, oh... the Liberals' infamous ADSCAM corruption and criminality from their last regime!  Again, rich.  "Contemptuous of democracy"?  Oh, but Liberals don't want Canadians to have direct democracy, and refuse to accept the possibility of referenda to decide serious issues, preferring to have themselves (perhaps along with their coalition partners on the hard left) impose whatever (sush as same-sex marriage), using whatever draconian, anti-democratic tactics they can, such as bribing people to cross the floor (recall Belinda Stronach)...  plus Liberals are gung-ho about usurping the duly-elected government by putting together an extreme-hard-left-wing coalition hellbent on marching in lockstep with the Obammunist Reich down south that's deliberately overwhelming and destroying America with monster-deficit-and-money-supply-expansion-fuelled overspending and extreme communist practices.

Dismissed.  Go back to Harvard, or to some NWO/Soros-funded/ChiCom/Muslim Brotherhood job somewhere... obviously outside of Canada, like before.

Obama, Panetta, Petraeus

By Michael J.W. Stickings

President Obama shook up his national security team yesterday, notably moving CIA Director Leon Panetta to the Pentagon and Generalissimo David Petraeus to the CIA.

It was "a game of musical chairs," Slate's Fred Kaplan observed, though "under the circumstances, it's hard to imagine a shrewder set of moves, both politically and substantively."

Panetta is a Washington insider. Can he succeed at the Pentagon? Maybe. He certainly has credibility where it matters, on Capitol Hill:

The next defense secretary will have to wind down the wars without losing them and will almost certainly have to cut the budget without wreaking havoc in the Pentagon. It's a nightmare job for anyone, but Panetta has as much experience as anyone at carving out that sort of territory.

I don't much care for him, and he's come to be an apologist for the Bush-Obama national security state, but I suppose he has the political clout to lead what is undeniably a deeply political office. (Whether he manages to secure the trust and support of the military brass, not to mention of the rank-and-file, is another matter, though that may not matter given his political priorities in the months/years ahead.)

As for Petraeus, well, Obama had to do something with him, not least given his political inclinations, if not aspirations, and connections to the conservative/Republican foreign/military policy establishment:

Picking Petraeus to run the CIA is a move worthy of chess masters. He's been a wartime commander of one sort or another for eight years, almost non-stop. It's time for him to leave the battlefield; that was clear even to him. Yet for much of that time, he's also been a household name -- and widely hailed as the U.S. military's finest strategic mind in a generation. So the question -- which would have been vexing for any president -- is: What to do with this guy? Some who are close to the general refer to this question, with a slight smile and a cocked eyebrow, as "the Petraeus problem."

*****

Keeping Petraeus on the inside -- in a job that's related to, but not quite of, the military -- is a judicious stroke.

But will anything actually change? Well, we'll have to see. Maybe Panetta is the right man to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan, and particularly to preside of the end of the latter war. And maybe Petraeus will be a fine CIA director.

But these are political moves, first and foremost. Obama puts an ally/confidante at the Pentagon and a possible rival/critic at the CIA. Panetta will do what Obama wants him to do. Petraeus will perhaps be more independent, but he will also be constrained by his position.

Yes, it was a game of musical chairs. And Obama won.

This day in history - April 28, 1970: Nixon authorizes the invasion of Cambodia

By R.K. Barry

On April 28, 1970, President Richard Nixon authorized American combat troops to invade Cambodia to engage approximately 40,000 troops of the People's Army of Vietman (North Vietnamese army) and the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietman (NLF, also known as the Viet Cong) who occupied the eastern border regions of Cambodia.

A total of 13 major operations were conducted by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN or the South Vietnamese army) between April 29th and July 22nd and by U.S. forces between May 1st and June 30th.

The stated goal for the U.S. was to strengthen the position of the South Vietnamese army to enable it to carry on military operations on its own, after the withdrawal of the American military -- the so called "Vietnamization" process.

Some things never change.

In response to American military action, demonstrations erupted on American university campuses, with protestors expressing opposition to the expansion of the Vietnam War into another country. On May 4th, Ohio National Gaurdsmen shot and killed four unarmed students (two of whom were not protestors) during what became known as the Kent State shootings.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)