Subtitled: Double Standards by the Haterz on the Right
Tonight we will give a brief tribute to Teddy Kennedy, but that has and will be covered by everyone, so we want to address issues he surely stood against.
While the Right Wing Mainstream Media calls for murder of abortion doctors, while Senators applaud people standing and saying “I am a right-wing terrorist” and then call them “Real Americans<” one of our own is under attack.
Ariel Attack has been arrested for allegedly vandalizing a Democratic Headquarters in Denver. Legalese prevents us from speaking about or speculating about the case. We will, however be pointing out their attempt to demonize her by attacking her left-wing views and using her free speech on a BLOG.
By proxy, our good friends at Queers Against Obama are being slandered as some “terrorist movement” and a spokesperson named “Mary” will be calling in to speak to that issue.
We have invited Ariel to call in, and one of her supporters, we will call “Ben” and hope that the barrage of idiocy from the right doesn’t frighten them into silence.
Besides the obvious attempt to demonize the Left and equate us with the Real Terrorists of the Right, we will speak to the abuses, humiliation and lack of recognition transgendered people are treated with in the media.
If we do not stand together against being branded as terrorist for upholding the right of equal treatment and free speech under our Constitution, we will lose it.
There is no Left in DC anymore folks, so we on the mean streets must support eachother.
Join Gottlieb, Ed Encho and I tonight at 6pm EDT on Wild Wild Left Radio, via BlogtalkRadio, for an interesting hour of Political Reporting and Commentary.
As the much deserved accolades and praise continue for a fallen giant, one cannot help nut wonder…where have all the other Liberal Lions gone?
Who will step up to roar against injustice, inequality, and the oppression of the weak by the strong now?
Who will be the next Liberal Lion, the next Progressive Champion?
Who will stand up to those who have tried to make the word Liberal itself a pejorative and unashamedly Roar?
Eight years of George Bush and the Jingoism of Endless War and Shameful Torture, all accompanied by smirking taunts of “Traitor” and “Unpatriotic” and “UnAmerican” seem to have shouted down our Champions, seem to have cowed them.
The Bush Years seem to have downright SCARED our Democratic Senators into a kind of tentativeness, a subdued silence…a fear of Roaring out what they believe, on the Senate Floor and in the Media.
Only President Obama seems to be championing the critical issue of Health Care, where are our Senators? Are they too afraid to stand up? Too cowed to speak out strongly against the Special Interests, lobbyists ….and their own colleagues as Teddy did?
Are they AFRAID to be Liberals? Are they ASHAMED to be Progressives? Are they trembling too hard in the face of the Republicans and there Corporate Clients to stand up and fight, as Teddy did? Are they too cowardly to stand up and ROAR for what they believe in?
Where have all the Lions gone?
Now that Teddy has passed.
Who IS the Lion protecting the Working Men and Women in the Senate now? Who will Roar for the downtrodden and rail against the power of the Ruling Class now? Who will protect our rights in the lofty chambers of The Senate Elite?
Who IS the Champion of Health Care now that Teddy is gone?
What Senator or Senators will take his place and fill his role?
Who will step up to fill his shoes? Who will take on his mantle of Protector of the weak in the face of the strong? Who will fight for US?
Who will be the NEXT unashamed Liberal Lion in the Senate?
Step up Senators! Support your President, support The People, support what is RIGHT!
Do not praise and honor the Liberal Lion with hollow words. Praise and honor and remember his shining legacy by taking up the torch and running with it, FINISH THE JOB Teddy started.
Happy Friday and welcome to the 16th in the Dog’s First Amendment Friday series. This series is following the syllabus for the class called The First Amendment and taught at Yale Law School by Professor Jack M. Balkin. As with the Friday Constitutional series this is a layman’s look at the Law, specifically the Supreme Court opinions which have shaped the boundaries of our 1st Amendment Protections. If you are interested in the previous installments you can find them at the links below:
It seems almost trivial to accuse someone who launched an illegal war that has killed over a million people of torture. But if we are going to prosecute the lowest ranked torturers, it makes sense to look up the chain of command.
There is no doubt that George W. Bush conspired to commit torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, and murder. How do I know? He said so.
In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union, Bush said: “All told more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States.”
Last night on Countdown, Keith Olbermann and Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA35) discussed overt Republican racism {specifically her colleauge Rep Lynn Jenkins (Racist-KS2) call for a Republican Great White Hope to thwart the obviosly not white President Obama.}
As Keith Olbermann so eloquently put it regarding Rep. Jenkins half assed, half apology.
KO: “The old conditional apology. It’s your fault if you’re offended that an active politician in 2009 should use the most demeaning of racist phrases, vintage 1909.”
Following that nail on the head statement, Keith defers to Congresswoman Maxine Waters, whom I deeply respect, and can only imagine what it must feel like to be in her shoes, or any other member of the African American caucus in the Democratic party. I would say the same of African American republicans in congress if there actually were any African American republicans in congress, but I digress.
More, and a transcript of Representative Waters’s response below the fold.
Are you still employed? My advice is to keep that job because getting another one in this age is like getting waterboarded. Gone are the simple days of pounding the pavement. It has been replaced by an impersonal electronic Matrix apparently written by Satan himself.
BOSTON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democrats scrambled on Thursday to quickly fill the seat of Senator Edward Kennedy, to shore up President Barack Obama’s faltering effort to rally Congress behind an overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system.
Members of America’s most storied political dynasty said a private farewell to the Kennedy patriarch at a Mass in their Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, compound before accompanying his body to Boston for public tributes on Friday at the John F. Kennedy presidential library and for the funeral on Saturday.
Apart from depriving Congress of its most effective champion of healthcare reform, Kennedy’s death on Tuesday cost his Democratic party its essential 60th vote in the Senate, the number needed to beat Republican tactical blocking maneuvers.
Those who obey “laws” are losers. Those who game the laws are winners.
Law is for losers; Game Theory for winners.
Seems a parsimonious explanation, e.g., Wall Street, War Crimes, eh?
discuss.
I specifically invite IOZ and Greenwald, but please be inclined to a FREE-FOR-ALL.
Please also include human nature, as opposed to “rationality,” as a causal factor.
An intro to “selection pressures versus markets” would also be desired.
Thenk Q.
(Suppositions due by my birthday.)
MASSIVE UPDATE: IOZ’s opening statement:
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration will largely retain Bush era airline safety policies, the White House announced. Officials explained that these old policies were necessary to protect the future from the threats of the past.
“Everything that is currently happening will immediately reach a state of having happened,” said Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. “Therefore, it is in our vital interest.”
In a statement released later in the day, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that “in an increasingly legal world, we need to take every lawful illegal step possible to ensure that action is taken.”
The civil liberties community gesticulated and made several sounds indicating frustration.
However, administration officials remained committed. “Obviously it is impossible to wage cyberwar against the United States from outside of the United States,” said a spokesman. “But if you can get a laptop physically inside of American borders, all bets are off.”
The Internet could not be reached for comment by press time.
I knew this promised to be quite a show. Farmingville is a hotbed of right wing racism on Long Island on the best of days, and Bishop’s previous Town Hall in Setauket (held in June) dissolved into chaos thanks to the Freeptard presence. This was one of the reasons my husband The Martial Artist(tm) was also in attendance.
I have to admit, I was a little nervous when I didn’t see a single person I knew from Vets for Peace, IVAW or Code Pink anywhere in the 800 person, fully packed auditorium of Sachem Public High School tonight. I needn’t have worried. The angry looking tattooed skinheads and flag wavers in veteran regalia were strutting around, but for every one of them there were THREE people holding “We support Obama” signs.
Before the event began, freeptards planted throughout the room started chanting, well, whatever the heck they were chanting. I honestly couldn’t hear it because the Obama supporters started a counter chant, and the room (which already sounded like a sold out Led Zeppelin concert at Madison Square Garden) became a deafening cacaphony of unintelligible chanting. Signs were waving frantically over heads, the room went completely nuts for about 15 minutes.
Most awesome experience of the night: the supporters of health care reform – obviously present in larger numbers – started completely drowning out the wingnuts. Slowly, like an ocean of sound growing higher and higher and then crashing over the heads of everyone in the room, the louder chant became recognizable as…
As my husband and I realized what was going on we added our pair of sergeant-like leatherlungs to this endeavor. What press were in the room were going crazy, running up and down the aisles trying to capture this. It was frickin’ beautiful.
This incident pretty much set the tone for the entire evening. The astroturfers weren’t going to have a prayer in hell tonight. Newsday falsely reported that the opponents of health care reform outnumbered supporters, but those who were actually there know this is a blatant lie. There also were no buses in the parking lot for supposed “union imports”. Suffolk is a very large county and people are just going to have to understand that plenty of people in the unions actually do live in Bishop’s district, and they drive their own cars.
There were cards being distributed for people to ask questions, and most of the first were asked by opponents of health care reform. This was very clever, because it gave Bishop a chance to totally derail the agenda the wingnuts had to disrupt the meeting. It wasn’t like they weren’t getting their questions addressed, after all. They certainly didn’t LIKE the way a lot of the answers debunked the propaganda they’d been programmed with, but they couldn’t complain that they weren’t being allowed to ask their questions and GET the answers!
The freeptards sitting directly behind me were obsessed with screaming accusations at Bishop of not having read the bill. This was pretty stupid. Bishop (who is on the Health Care Committee) made several specific references to sections and pages of the bill, which an assistant would flash up on a screen at his request. He was quite well prepared for every question they threw at him.
The moderator was this lady who did a really good job, in general, of keeping people calm. She was trying very hard to be reasonable, but there are just some people in this world who are too stupid to reason with. “I’m Italian,” she said, “I know all about passions, but we need to be respectful” and she went on like that for a bit. So the racist bastard sitting behind me heckled her, “Oh, I know how to speak Italian!” and I whirled around and gave him my Brooklyn best – “Oh yeah? FANGOOL!” That shut HIM up for a while. ;-7
There was only one person who the freeptards managed to shout down from the podium, and that was a Mr. Mitchell, head of the Long Island Federation of Labor, who lived outside Bishop’s district. It seemed to be a big deal that people who got to ask the questions live in the district, but you’ll never see a Town Hall in NY 3, which is my district, because Parasite Petey King, like most Republitards, doesn’t give a flying sideways fuck about what his constituents think. It is not and it has never been my fault that Parasite Petey is my Congressman, I never voted for the bastard in my life. So if I want to see democracy in action I’ll go where I can see it, and anyone who doesn’t like that can kiss my sweet Brooklyn ass.
Anyway there was a short scuffle as the freeptards shouted down Mr. Mitchell, and immediately other union members began surrounding the man as he stood at the podium – not doing anything, just standing their passively with their arms down, but obviously shielding him with their bodies. They were about two feet deep around the guy before he decided to waive his question rather than allow this single disruption to continue. I was not able to see whether anyone got removed from the room during that single scuffle in the audience, but there were no other incidents. The video (by a freeptard) shows that a guy in an orange shirt in the audience started a fight which threatened to become physical with a union guy (in a red shirt) and was removed from the hall. Toward the end of this video you can see the other union folks shielding Mr. Mitchell with their bodies in case the freeptards jump him.
The event went on until 8:30pm and the crowd dispersed peacefully. There was a lot of freeptard chanting and mugging for the cameras outside, but most everyone else decided not to stay around for that.
So that was my big whoop-de-doo Town Hall experience this evening. I think it went well, overall. Didn’t bring the camera, so no pictures from me today, sorry.
As noted in this post on DU, Sibel Edmonds recently testified in the case of Rep. Jean Schmidt (yes that Jean Schmidt) V. 2nd District Democratic U.S. Congressional candidate David Krikorian.
Edmonds testimony is long, and the linked post on BradBlog has five videotape segments to watch. I’ve only watched the first three so far, but wanted to post this information on Whistleblower Edmonds’ testimony which names names and alleges some very disturbing things regarding some Congress members, their staff members, and other government employees:
UPDATE: I forgot to mention Edmonds’ testimony regarding the “outing” of Brewster Jennings–Valerie Plame Wilson’s CIA cover agency, enabling her group to investigate the existence of/extent of WMD in the ME. Edmonds’ alleged that a government official warned the Turkish government and/or Turkish/foreign “operatives” that BJ was a CIA cover agency.
Vanity Fair printed the story only after they made certain they were on sure footing in the face of any possible libel by lining up more than five credible sources, and after triple pit bull style fact-checking. They were vindicated; Hastert did not dare go after them, nor did he ever issue any true denial. Moreover, further vindication occurred only a month ago. On April 10, 2009, The Hill reported that the Former Speaker of the House was contracted to lobby for Turkey. The Justice Department record on this deal indicates that Hastert will now be “principally involved” on a $35,000-a-month contract providing representation for Turkish interests. That seems to be the current arrangement for those serving foreign interests while on the job in congress – to be paid at a later date, collecting on their IOU’s when they secure their positions with ‘the foreign lobby.’
Wow–$35,000 a month! Selling out your fellow citizens and the best interests of your nation to foreign governtments/ interest groups certainly does pay well.
By David Swanson
