Today's paranoid: Obama said to be jockeying for one-world presidency
From a Time story about a Virginia gathering of Congressional candidates sponsored by a Tea Party group:
Feda Morton, the only woman in the race, has been a teacher, a state-championship basketball coach, a school board member and a Republican organizer. A diminutive mother of five sporting a sparkling flag pin, she fidgeted as she recited the merits of her candidacy in an interview with TIME. When the topic turned to Barack Obama, she confessed deep fears. "I don't think the President really cares about our health care," Morton says. "He's not trying to lead America. He's trying to position himself to be a leader higher up, and the only way he can do that is to bring America into the whole one-world order concept."
Obama, she adds, belongs to a plutocratic cabal that manufactures crises for personal profit, foisting scams like health care reform and global warming on U.S. taxpayers to depress the economy. "Look at who his czars are," she says. "He's tied very closely to George Soros, European socialist organizations, Howard Dean. These people all play into this one-world order, one-world money system. And it's to make money for them."
Wow! I love the expression "his czars" -- it's like a combination of the concept behind Jesus's admonition that no one can have two masters, with some neo-Red Scare ideology. Here is her website.
Some clever, strong-voiced protesters infiltrated an insurance industry meeting and sang their "thanks for killing the Public Option" to the dumbfounded attendees. (Courtesy Stellaa)
Of course, in a third-world country they all would have been taken out and shot.
I would mercilessly go after this story if the accused were a Republican, so in the interest of balance and fairness, let me rip Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich a new one for exhibiting new lows in cynicism and corruption. The two-term governor, formerly a three-term congressman, was arrested today under an indictment courtesy well-known U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, previously famous for prosecuting Scooter Libby.
Among Blagojevich's alleged crimes, one stands out: he intended to offer an appointment to Barack Obama's seat in the Senate to the highest bidder. Fitzgerald said today he purposely arrested Blago to prevent this, among other things, from happening. Disgusting.
Details of the indictment include Blagojevich saying "I'm going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain. You hear what I'm saying? And if I don't get what I want and I'm not satisfied with it, then I'll just take the Senate seat myself... (A Senate seat) is a f---ing valuable thing; you just don't give it away for nothing."
This (LGBT movement) is a movement of the people that you most fear. It's a movement of progress -- and your words on FOX News only show how truly desperate you are to maintain control of a world that is changing before your very eyes.
I was in the break room at work, where a TV was playing CNN. A slip showed Sen. Ted Stevens leaving an office building as Wolf Blitzer narrated, "One day after being convicted on corruption charges, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens says he wants to get back on the campaign trail."
A janitor was sitting there watching. "A crook, and he wants to campaign!" the guy said. "'Look at me, I just got convicted, vote for me.' He's just a big crook!"
I said something about how I guessed he already had his campaign donations in hand so why not get out there and spend them.
"That's all they're there for," the janitor declared. "Crookery!"
The Democrats are poised on the brink of victory. And they cannot stand it. The news is too good. Something has to go wrong.
On Saturday, Charlie Cook, an independent analyst and author of the Cook Report, wrote: "This election isn't over, but it is looking very bad for Republicans -- and seems to be getting worse."
This plunged the Democrats into a deep gloom. Good news is always bad news for them.
Ha ha ha! It's funny because it's true.
The other funny thing in that article is when the writer suggests that Obama has such a lead in money raised that he could, like Oprah, just buy everybody a Pontiac. No! Make it a green car, built by American workers. Now that's change I can believe in.
Obama visits NC diner, gets mixed reception but lots of grub
Obama visited a diner in North Carolina and got a generally respectful reception except for one nutbag. Most reports are focusing on her, but note the last graf of the story (emphasis mine):
Obama ordered some food to go for himself and his aides. They ordered chicken, collards, baked beans, slaw and wings. The tab was $13.91.
Now that's value. And that's the white diner -- the one for black folks was down the block.
By today, disgusted contributors from across the country had donated nearly $500,000 to her opponent, one El Tinklenberg, a former Methodist minister, mayor of Blaine, Minn., and state transportation commissioner.
Just as the ruling by the California Supreme Court created a fabulous opportunity for conservatives to raise funds and solidify the base through the usual fear-mongering, the prospect of a black man with a funny name being elected president could be the greatest thing for far-right conservatives since Hillary Clinton.
The current issue (19 Nov 07) of Newsweek has this remarkable passage:
[As the Spring of 1968 began, President Lyndon] Johnson was bitter. "How is it possible," he repeatedly asked, "that all these people could be so ungrateful to me after I had given them so much? Take the Negroes. I fought for them from the first day I came into office. I spilled my guts in getting them the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress ... I asked so little in return. Just a little thanks. Just a little appreciation. That's all. But look what I got instead. Riots in 175 cities. Looting. Burning. Shooting ..." On and on, Johnson would rant, against the students and poor people who had turned against him, despite all he had done for them, "young people by the thousands leaving their universities, marching in the streets, chanting that horrible song about how many kids had I killed that day ..." ("Hey! Hey! LBJ! ...")
Johnson's worst dream, the most violent and diabolical, began with a twisted take on a cattle stampede. "I felt," Johnson later confided to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, "that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions." There were "the rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing that I had feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of his name, were dancing in the streets."
How satisfying -- even 30 years later -- to hear a politician actually acknowledging the effect of protests. No wonder baby boomers are so full of themselves now -- they brought down not just Nixon, but Johnson as well.
As for now, can you imagine George Bush even being aware of -- much less being upset by -- the national mood of disgust with him?
Authors getting '10 percent of nothing' for foamer books
Five right-wing authors have sued their publisher for marketing huge lots of their books to book clubs and other outlets it owns at vastly reduced prices, meaning that instead of getting the usual 15% royalty on cover price, they get 10% of the publisher's net profit on the internally-marketed books, which is virtually nil.
Said one disgruntled writer: "You get 10 per cent of nothing because they basically give them away." Another complained:
The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books. It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance. Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?
I'm not sure where the Marxist part comes into it, unless he's referring to the fact that these writers are already wealthy and the publisher, using the dictum "To each according to his needs," figured they didn't need the money.
Anyway, fun for all. Once you see what books they're talking about, you'll quickly lose any sympathy. The titles include such shit-bombs as "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry" and "Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America's National Security."
Man, if the Democrats manage to fuck this up, there's just no hope.
Evangelicals find little to love in presidential field ... Republican strategist Arnold Steinberg said that he has found "enormous confusion" among evangelical voters as they consider the GOP presidential field. Social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage remain fundamental for such voters -- but in an era of war and terrorism, "their concerns about national security have trumped their values concerns," Steinberg said.
"They'll say, 'I disagree with Rudy -- but I'm terribly concerned about national security and Islamo-fascism,'" Steinberg said. "Some people will say they will never vote for a pro-choice Republican, (yet) they're voting for him."
This is one reason why Newt Gingrich decided not to run -- in the eyes of the fundies, with his divorces and all, he's no better than Giuliani.
Today's New York Times has one of their regular, pleasantly voyeuristic articles about a bizarre medical condition -- this time Capgras Syndrome, a form of psychosis in which the sufferer becomes convinced that their family and regular acquaintances have been replaced by doppelgängers -- inexact copies of the genuine people, sinister duplicates who, while resembling their real loved ones, somehow are not them. It's as if the sufferers have been dropped into the first half hour of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," where a Chinese laundryman insists to Donald Sutherland, "That not my wife!"
Sometimes I have that feeling about our country. In many ways it looks like the country I grew up in, feverishly rushing into the future while constantly evoking nostalgia for its past -- now that the 1940s and the late 1960s have been thoroughly mined for nostalgia, it's the early 1960s that are being polished and put on display, what with AMC's "Mad Men" and the hoopla around the 50th anniversary of "On the Road." We continue being willing to sell anything to anybody, stopping only when the evidence that it's killing them is incontrovertible. We continue filling the earth with tons of shiny crap and living like there's no tomorrow. That sure hasn't changed.
But in many sinister ways, this country has changed. When I was a kid, there were one or two things we thought set our country apart from our enemies -- special characteristics that were reinforced in the movies over and over again. We treated prisoners of war humanely -- better than ours were treated. We didn't torture people. And most of all, we didn't invade another country for purely cynical reasons.
Of course, to varying degrees, those myths were false, even in the 1960s when I was a kid. But it was still possible to believe them. Who today can even pretend those things are still true?
I also grew up with the idea that the Constitution, with its protections against any branch of the government becoming too powerful and against invasions of privacy, was inviolate. During the last six years the President and his administration have acted as if those protections did not exist. We don't even yet know all the ways the shadowy men like Addington have quietly knocked the props from beneath the Bill of Rights. We will only find out in the years to come. (Read the July 3, 2007 New Yorker piece on Addington, called the force behind the administration's most egregious assaults on the Constitution and this country's reputation around the world.)
And why is it that none of the Democratic candidates for President have spoken out about the assaults on the Constitution by the Bush administration? Why haven't any of them detailed the ways they will, in their first days in office, roll back these changes? Because they, too, want to take advantage of them. They aren't stupid. They realize how much easier their job will be -- if by "their job" you mean protecting the privileges of companies and corporations over those of individual people -- if they hang onto these expanded powers.
That's why I am suffering a bit from Capgras Syndrome today, the 6th anniversary of the plane crashes of 2001. My country looks somewhat the same. But in many fundamental ways, it is not my country anymore.
Nothing's simple in the modern world of overlapping media ownership, politics, personae and publicity. From a Washington Post article:
Former senator John Edwards, who has been throwing punches at Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News Channel, demanded yesterday that the other Democratic presidential candidates return contributions from Murdoch's media conglomerate. "John Edwards will never ask Rupert Murdoch for money -- he won't accept his money," said a statement e-mailed to supporters.
Not so fast, Murdoch's people say. His publishing unit, HarperCollins, paid Edwards a $500,000 advance -- and $300,000 in expenses -- for his 2006 book Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives. "We assume the senator is going to give back the money from his advance," News Corp. spokesman Brian Lewis said.
Edwards spokesman Eric Schultz said his boss donated the book payments to charity and that the expense money went to staffers and vendors.
Courtesy MediaBistro. What appeals to me about this little rock fight is how Edwards, as the underdog in the Presidential race, has once again put himself in a no-lose situation. The more he slams Fox News and its owner, megalo-titan Rupert Murdoch, the more Fox News attacks him, resulting in free publicity. Edwards can then send out more mail to his supporters depicting himself as a victim of right-wing attacks, resulting in more donations.
I was thinking yesterday of that old ploy by abortion clinic defenders of organizing pro-choice people to pledge donations to Planned Parenthood for each anti-abortion protester who showed up at a clinic, thereby de-motivating the protesters. It would be nice if there were some kind of similar process for, say, Ann Coulter: Every time she opens her mouth, more money is donated to the Democratic National Committee or, even more fitting, Code Pink, whose Medea Benjamin is simply the far-left photographic negative of Coulter.
There are nearly 50,000 "security contractors" in Iraq, reports the Guardian (U.K.). So even if the U.S. "pulls out its forces," tens of thousands of mercenaries would remain in some capacity; their numbers might even grow, as the war is "outsourced even more.
I almost missed this, but a Google-alert link to a Daily Texan editorial tipped me off. There's a far-right christianist group, tellingly called the Council for National Policy, which meets every year to attempt to unite behind certain right-wing candidates and causes. They provided early support to G.W. Bush, for example, when Karl Rove pushed him out there in 1999 to begin his presidential run.
Well, this year they met a couple weeks ago and couldn't decide whom to support in the prexy sweeps. They know McCain and Giuliani can't stand them, and even deeply conservative Christian candidates like Sam Brownback are suspicious. Brownback isn't tough enough on immigrants, and he supports the growing pro-environmental movement among evangelicals. As for Mitt Romney, the "council" has decided he has held too many liberal positions in the past, though he's now trying to claim the mantle of Family Values Candidate and Ann Coulter loves him. So the "council" is bereft of choices.
What's really happening is a generational change. The founders of the Council for National Policy -- people like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Jerry LaHaye, are in their 70s. The new evangelicals are looking beyond the classic hot-button issues of gay rights and abortion to care for the environment -- even things that Jesus actually talked about, like feeding and housing the poor. They include people like Rick Warren, leader of one of the largest churches in the country and author of a book, "The Purpose Driven Life," which is hugely influential among fundies, Pentacostals and the suburbanites who pack the non-denominational megachurches, of which Warren's is one.
I have the feeling that power-hungry christianists like those in the "council" will figure out by the end of the year that they have to choose between Brownback (who could never win) and Romney (who is anonymous enough to squeak by under the radar, and besides, Ann Coulter...). Meanwhile I'm enjoying the notion that they're twisting in the wind.
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