Archive for July, 2009
July 30th, 2009
Mainstream-journalist-turned-wingnut Bernard Goldberg (above) has an INTERESTING THEORY regarding the birther issue:
”[T]he Chicago Mafia inside the White House want to keep this crazy controversy going. Because the longer it goes, the better the chance that they will conflate the crazy right-wing fringe with regular conservatives and regular Republicans.”
Actually, that theory is not too far from the truth. We libs have, in fact, been riding the birther thing with great enthusiasm. But the net effect has been to separate respectable conservatives from the lunatic fringe. Republicans who can walk upright and breathe through their noses have been disavowing the birther crap all over the place.
And if there’s an ancillary political benefit for us libs in driving a wedge between the wings of the GOP — well, so much the better.
Hey, as someone once observed, politics ain’t beanbag.
July 30th, 2009
Back in the 1960s, conservative Republicans of that time WARNED that Medicare was a socialistic scheme that would ruin America — the same kind of alarmism that their ideological progeny are employing today in arguing against health-care reform.
So, a question arises: If those right-wingers of the ’60s were correct, why don’t today’s Republicans seek to repeal Medicare?
Answer: Such a move would be political suicide. Americans don’t want Medicare repealed.
In other words, those right-wingers of yore were wrong. And their ideological descendants of today are wrong, too.
POSTSCRIPT: Silly as it seems, some folks apparently don’t understand that Medicare is a government program.
Witness the guy at a recent town hall meeting in South Carolina who admonished his representative in Congress to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” (Read about it HERE.)
Oh, and then there was the time nine years ago when George W. Bush, while campaigning for president, warned against Democrats who “want the federal government controlling the Social Security like it’s some sort of federal program.” (Read about it HERE.)
UPDATE: Nate Silver has a FEW THOUGHTS of his own regarding Medicare and health-care reform, including this observation:
To compare the President’s current reform efforts to Medicare is for all intents and purposes a Democratic talking point. That Republicans saw fit to include it in what was surely supposed to be a boffo editorial outlining their new plan suggests that they may talk their way out of stopping health care reform yet.
July 29th, 2009
Thom Hartman is the host:
July 29th, 2009
Former Judge Andrew Napolitano (above), a legal analyst for Fox News, told the network’s viewers the other night something they probably didn’t want to hear — namely that POLICE ERRED in arresting Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates.
July 29th, 2009
As a growing number of semi-respectable conservatives quietly slink away from the birther movement so as to avoid further embarrassment among polite society, their nuttier brethren have come up with a new theme:
Health-care reforms sponsored by Democrats are PART OF A PLOT to euthanize sickly old folks.
Gee, at the rate things are going, these loonies will soon be impossible to satirize. I mean, how can you parody the deathers? Not very easily. They’re parodies of themselves.
UPDATE: Wow! The Republican retreat from birtherism has become a STAMPEDE.
July 29th, 2009
A Baptist church in Florida is pushing this video, which strongly implies that Barack Obama is the Antichrist:
July 29th, 2009
Jonathan Chait BLOWS THE WHISTLE on the penchant among conservatives for peddling falsehoods about health care.
As Chait puts it: “[I]t’s very frustrating to debate public policy with people who are unaware of the basic facts. The problem seems to be especially acute on health care, an issue conservatives have just never paid much attention to. Thus an enormous swath of right-wing commentary is based on simple factual misunderstandings.”
UPDATE: Nate Silver has a LIKE-MINDED TAKE on the matter.
July 29th, 2009
Fox News blowhard Bill O’Reilly argued the other night that the reason life expectancy is lower in the United States than in Canada is that we have 10 times as many people and therefore more deaths.
Mind you, this was no slip of the tongue. It was sheer dimwittedness.
Paul Krugman had an APPROPRIATE REACTION to O’Reilly’s idiocy.
July 29th, 2009
An item I posted here yesterday regarding global warming inevitably drew several comments in which Al Gore was mentioned, including one that alluded to the popular myth that Gore falsely claimed to have invented the Internet.
This fiction about Gore and the Internet pops up regularly in letters to the editor, in talk-radio conversations and otherwise in contexts in which a point is made about delusions of grandeur.
And, of course, the myth is commonplace in the rhetoric of global-warming skeptics who want to denigrate Gore for his views on climate change, as was the case here yesterday.
But the reality is that Gore never made any such claim about inventing the Internet.
In an interview on CNN in 1999, Gore, who was then the sitting vice president and a candidate to succeed Bill Clinton in the White House, said this by way of reviewing his record:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Notice that Gore took credit for leadership in Congress in creating the Internet. He never said he “invented” the Internet. Was his claim to such leadership legitimate? Well, here’s what Republican Newt Ginrich said about that:
(I)n all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is—and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a ‘futures group’—the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the ’80s began to actually happen.
Way back in 1988, The Guardian, a British paper, reported this:
American computing scientists are campaigning for the creation of a ’superhighway’ which would revolutionise data transmission. Legislation has already been laid before Congress by Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, calling for government funds to help establish the new network, which scientists say they can have working within five years, at a cost of Dollars 400 million.
Years later, when Gore was vice president, computer scientist Vinton Cerf, widely known as the Father of the Internet, had this to say:
I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president.
History shows that Gore’s claim on CNN that he played a leading role in congressional action regarding the Internet was ignored by most other media for the first few days and wasn’t distorted into a claim that he invented the Net until the Republican Party cooked up that falsehood a few days later.
A useful chronology of the controversy can be found HERE (you have to scroll down a little to get to the good part).
July 29th, 2009
Kurt Anderson has come up with a PROVOCATIVE ESSAY in which he argues that the nation’s economic future is not as dire as it seems.
Here’s a little excerpt to whet your intellectual appetite:
Every now and then…an abrupt and severe end of flush economic times happens to coincide with the natural end of a conservative political era, making the historical waves fall powerfully into sync. That’s what happened in the 1930s, following three straight conservative presidencies, a period of whiz-bang technological progress—electrification, radio, automobiles, aviation—and a culture of bon temps rouler. And that’s what’s happening now.
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