The problem with discussing social issues in public is that they usually end up being unsocial.
Once we get beyond describing ourselves as Heinz 57 with legs … well that’s when the fight breaks out.
Dear Cable Outlets — you need to find a way to tweak Bill Maher’s willy. Now.
Bill Maher is on HBO which does not have ‘advertisers’, only cable outlets which send money. So how do you deal with rudeness that is vile?
Rush Limbaugh was a disgusting figure in his attack on Fluke.
Bill Maher actually defended Rush Limbaugh’s right to say what he said — First Amendment, etc — but then noted that he had called Palin a name just as vile, but luckily he was cable and not FCC-regulated.
Some Maher defenders have claimed that he is a comedian commenting on a public figure. So? He attacked the very essence of womanhood (not Palin but …).
Limbaugh defenders have claimed, and he has claimed, that he is just an entertainer. Hey, isn’t that what Maher is too?
Bullshit.
Both men are rude and crude whenever they believe that it will get them a rating bounce.
It is extreme arrogance for Maher to claim that his calling of Palin a c*nt was OK, while Limbaugh’s calling of Fluke a sl*t was not.
There is no excuse for the inexcusable — no matter how damn funny your fans find you.
Limbaugh got what he deserved. Maher deserves a dog pooh outside his door too.
Filed under Civil Society
Dear NRA – Your ‘Defeat Obama Fact Sheet’ bothers me. Where are the facts?
NRA – this bothers me.
Am an NRA member and a gun owner; owner of guns.
It bothers that the NRA is actively targeting President Obama for election defeat by distributing its ‘Defeat Obama Fact Sheet‘ (PDF).
In this factsheet the NRA provides 10 talkingpoints. This is just a collection of innuendo, half-truths (barely truthful is more accurate), and some facts charitably best described as lies.
Dear NRA, advocate for Second Amendment Rights and gun safety and … but please leave attack politics out. Or someone is going to think that you are a gun nut. And since I am an NRA member then I really don’t want to be called a gun nut.
Filed under Uncategorized
Romney the Faux. Romney the Winger. Romney as Capitalist Giant. Romney as GOP Nominee? Maybe not.
Mitt Romney has so screwed up being what he is that being ‘fake’ is now his claim to fame.
I liked the old Romney, the business guy Romney, the pragmatic Romney, the Romney that could be governor of the bluest state in the nation and get things done, the RINO Romney.
Yes, Romney had to adapt or die for 2012. 2010 sent a message: the right wing sez we don’t have a plan, and we’re not interested in discussion, but the GOP will do things our way or pay for it.
It boggles my mind however that someone that is so rich is willing to sell their soul for so little.
What the election of 2010 did was to hold core Republicans hostage to a fundamentally attractive theme: ‘balanced budgets, less spending, less taxes, etc’ that they had to embrace — but the hostage taking comes in that Republicans cannot now honestly address the issues without being labeled a RINO. To fix our deficit and debt problems requires the old Romney, the Romney that sets aside dogma to seek a balanced solution.
Just imagine if a Republican were to say ‘climate change is real and dangerous’ or ‘war must be paid for just like social benefits’ or ‘tax increases of some sort must be on the table’ … no wonder the few dream GOP candidates of 2012 refused to enter the race. They would be skewered for being RINOs and then washed down with a cup of tea.
As for Rick Santorum. He is on a hot to trot winning streak! He will siphon off enough delegates that it will stop Romney just short of the gates of victory. I don’t think that Santorum will get the nomination … but I don’t think that Romney will either … not without a brokered convention.
Santorum is what Romney v2012 is not: authentic. I don’t like Santorum. I won’t vote for him. But he is authentic.
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Mitt’s Real Problem
Mitt’s real problem is that he is Republican.
A Republican in 2012 is expected to embrace dogma. Such a person needs to focus on ‘beating Obama’. Truth doesn’t matter — and Mitt has excelled at making this so through his heavy handed PAC campaigns.
The GOP’s problem as I see it is that it has made Obama the objective. Beating Obama overrides all other concerns.
That is failure in and of itself.
The GOP has lost its soul in search of a way to beat someone that it has demonized — yet there is not a single Obama policy that is much different than that embraced by Republicans in the past.
So to make Obama look ever more left the GOP has moved further to the right.
Republicans no longer debate issues. They slur each other as to how close they are to the fringe ends of the right side of the flat earth.
Adapt or die. Darwinism is alive in the GOP.
Romney adapted by embracing the fringe (only figuratively as it is not in his DNA to follow through) and now he is paying the price. He needs to quickly reembrace being a giant of capitalism. Capitalism is agnostic about such things as tax increases and social policy so long as budgets balance and the people are happy — and that requires Democrats and independents like myself being happy too.
Mitt – we hardly knew you. And we probably never will.
Regards and thanks to Paul Miller: I borrowed a number of his thoughts on how Romney should portray himself in 2012 and his success as governor of America’s bluest state.
Note – I consider myself conservative. But I’ll be damned if I am going to join the fringe (a rather large fringe — maybe half of the GOP) in its crusade against a man.
Ideas matter. Facts matter. The marketplace of ideas is not alive and well within the GOP.
Truth in advertising: at the moment I very much hope that the GOP gets crushed in 2012. It really does need a ‘come to Jesus’ moment where conservative principles and traditions come to matter once again.
Filed under Republican Party, Uncategorized
Are conservatives anti-women? Are women that think this just anti-conservative?
Women have the right to vote. They should use it.
With Rick Santorum being on a hot streak in recent GOP primaries a lot of talk is being generated about how Republicans are embracing anti-women policies. Certainly the social conservatives are on the blitz in a number of states on almost every aspect of birth control and abortion/choice issues. But does that make the GOP anti-women?
As to whether conservatives and ‘the right’ are anti-women: I’ve got an opinion but will defer giving it because I believe that women need to speak out on this more than we men need to.
I will say however that women seem no more cohesive in their thought than we men if the following is considered:
>> From the Tea Party Patriots coordinator’s notes of 2012.03.14: It may be noted that over 53% of the tea party organizers/activists are women. All 4 of the Tea Party National Coordinators are women. 3 of 5 of the TPP Board members are women. Guess the left thinks we have declared war on ourselves…
Are women just as far left and right as guys? Would seem so.
Filed under Uncategorized
Thomas Jefferson about banks: Caveat emptor!
Many folks seem to think that money shellgames by the Federal Reserve is bad and almost evil — yet the actions of ‘for profit’ banks is just normal capitalism and somehow acceptable.
Caveat emptor!
What was it President Thomas Jefferson said?
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
President Thomas Jefferson in 1802 letter to Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin
Filed under Uncategorized
Pragmatic Conservatives Exist? How I see 2012.
Question – a reader in a discussion group on Facebook asked: “William - just for a matter of perspective, my understanding is that you consider yourself a conservative, is that correct?”
Hmmm… could be a trap.
The author had not really identified their own perspective. Earlier in the day I had gotten a broadside from another Facebooker when I posted the picture below.
The broadside writer wanted to know: “Why do you post crap like this? There are no real “Republicans for Obama” – only pretend Republicans trying to give an extremist legitimacy.”
Maybe. Maybe not.
My purpose wasn’t to support either Obama or to support these Republicans.
There seems to be no discussion these days that isn’t a bit dangerous to one’s reputation.
+++++++++
Back to the question:
“William - just for a matter of perspective, my understanding is that you consider yourself a conservative, is that correct?”
Yes. I do consider myself a conservative.
What passes for conservatism these days is mostly a reactionary push back against a world that has changed and some folks know that their days are numbered. Their days are numbered because they have chosen to embrace a political ideology that is at the same time just as much exclusionary as it is generational. Except for Ron Paul’s fans, the Republican Party is older, overwhelmingly a party of caucasian America, and seemingly tone deaf as to how others see America.
I myself am a caucasian so the issue is not with that as a cause. The cause of the numbering of the GOP’s days is that Republicans have played so long to themes embraced by those that have enjoyed white privilege that its tone deafness just feels normal for it. What? Problems? No, the average GOPer sees the rest of the world as having problems but not it. Maybe not. Except for RINOs. RINOs see things in a multitude of colors – ergo they have got to go too. They are a cancer in the Republican Party. You either see things as black and white, good or bad, evil or our way.
Election 2012 - "The Plan"
Until 2009 I considered myself a Republican. I considered myself a conservative Republican.
I was active in the Tea Party at the very beginning. Met many fine people. Met many strange ones, too. Most of the strange ones are still there but the pragmatic conservatives have moved on.
The Tea Party very quickly attracted a different sort of conservative: those full of anger. There are those that say such a depiction is full of bull droppings. But it is not. Perhaps they were mad at themselves — hopefully they were because they had won almost total control of U.S. national government and they botched it. They did such a poor job that conservatives like myself no longer wanted to be associated with the party.
Reality is that you don’t have to be Republican to be a conservative. It is a good thing too as many conservatives in the Republican Party are what I consider wingers: they’ll do and say whatever they believe it takes to get the party back into power.
There is no real home for pragmatic conservatives at this time. Most still cling to calling themselves ‘Republicans’ but I don’t think that such will survive the election of 2012.
In 2010 it appeared that the conservatives surged back to power. What I saw was that our country was still very much in the depths of economic downturn. There was no good news with Obama’s name on it, and a very angry 24/7 campaign to attack Obama and to demonize Democrats paid off. (It didn’t hurt that most Democrats jumped at seeing their own shadow. That was extremely helpful to the 2010 GOP election efforts).
However, a recent study of policy positions rated Obama THE most moderate president of any Democrat since FDR’s day. His positions (except for health care) are scarcely different that President Bush’s. There are conservatives and libertarians that realize that. (Outside of the party we conservatives don’t think in talking points.) Add in just a tad of good economic news and people will come to stop and to think about that. People think much clearer when their homes aren’t being repossessed.
So as a pragmatic conservative I spend much of my time battling to save what little good remains of the ‘conservative’ bumper sticker.
Liberals aren’t evil. Neither are philosophical conservatives that believe that we are all in this together.
My prediction for 2012 — although it is still early in the game: Obama wins reelection courtesy of the GOP and many of the angry nutters that have the loudest voices. Democrats retain the Senate. And as for the House of Representatives … the Dems get it back by 10 seats.
Yes, I am conservative. But that doesn’t make me blind and tone deaf. Although, you just never know.
Filed under Democratic Party, Election 2012, Republican Party, TEA Party
Is Fox News following a script? Fox News on Energy Prices – Then and Now
Then and now … flip and flop … Politics 101: blame the other guy whenever possible and obfuscate when your guy is in office.
Often heard is that gas was something like gas was $1.84 on the day Obama became president and now … OMG.
Sure it was lower for that short period of time, but it had just fallen late in the 2008 election year from a high in the spring of 2008 that wasn’t much different than the current cost.
Beware of politicians … and fear their cheering sections even more. Truth often is irrelevant and YOU are trusted to have a short attention span.
So what does the energy industry itself say about high prices? Check it out at this link.
Thanks to Travis Johnson for sharing.
Filed under Uncategorized
Speak up. Ester is calling. War & Peace. Peace & War. Persia again.
Being a curious creature, I recently adopted the (Congregation) Chevrat Or LaOlam to learn more about Judaism.
One thing that I am learning is that there is a diversity of views.
Presented both for your entertainment and for their value as a form of political art, I present to you Israel’s President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Filed under Uncategorized
Belief in the market square – Let’s protect what makes our society great
Belief in the market square
We like to think that we live in a postmodern age, an age where we all as individuals can freely pursue our own lives and seek our own paths. The freedom to do that comes from freedom of speech as much as anything else.
Freedom of speech is actually under attack in many ways. One of those ways is through threat of violence by religious believers that oppose blasphemy.
Whenever anyone attempts to control the conversation, or to stifle questioning of beliefs or dogma, then we all lose.
What truly makes our way of life ‘great’ is that the only truths which are worthy of public respect must earn that respect through allowing open questioning of their validity.
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Hillsdale College recently published a piece entitled Blasphemy and Free Speech by Paul Marshall a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute.
This piece often makes many references to Islam, but it wasn’t too long ago that blasphemy laws or retribution for blasphemy was also common in Western society.
There are still too many occurences of violence towards those that do not believe or behave as we believe appropriate — such as the 70 year old Jewish woman that was beaten recently by five Jewish men because she was suspected of being a missionary, which blasphemed their community and their beliefs. As it turns out, she was indeed a missionary of sorts: she was teaching converts to Judaism how to be good Jews.
Blasphemy laws are the breeding grounds for intolerance and the inbreeding of hate.
We must be respectful to other beliefs but we must also insist that our culture is built on the right to free enquiry, freedom of speech, and both the freedom of religion and freedom from religion.
If your faith is big enough facts do not matter
Filed under Uncategorized
