kpete
kpete's JournalTop Ten Reasons Operation American Spring Went Flat
Operation American Spring, the Tea Party protest which was expected to draw 10-30,000,000 people to the nation's Capitol yesterday, turned out to be a huge flop. Rather than the tens of millions hoped for, only a few dozen showed up and the turnout was so dismal, even the conservative outlets The Blaze and the Washington Times couldn't even begin to spin it. But there were several excellent reasons why yesterday's protest in Washington DC wasn't quite what was hoped for. What were they?
9) Klan costume got yellowed when washed with Gadsden flag.
8) You try driving a Rascal scooter to DC from Alabama and tell me how easy it is!
7) Turns out free pizza from Arab nations was just a vicious rumor.
6) It's not the quantity, it's the quality.
5) Investigating who put the bop in the bop shoo bop. It was Obama, to distract from Benghazi.
4) Most of them went west by accident to Washington state.
3) Overestimated the number of insane asylums that would grant furloughs.
2) Discovered Ted Nugent concert and NASCAR race around the White House another vicious rumor.
1) Sign shop got all the spelling right.
http://www.welcomebacktopottersville.blogspot.com/2014/05/top-ten-reasons-operation-american.html
American (?) Spring?:“I didn’t see the Civil War-But I’m from the South & we’re still fighting it"
From the Raw Story's summary of the American Spring events...
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201...
“I’m so fed up with the tyranny I sold my jet ski,” the caller said. “I’m so fed up with the way the government is manipulating the water with the chemtrails, I’m afraid I can’t even use my jet ski.”
.........
One of the demonstrators suggested they sing the national anthem, and he initially led off with the opening words to “America The Beautiful” before joining the others in “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
...............
A woman in her 60s compared the demonstration to the wars she had lived through, going back to the Korean War.
“I didn’t see the Civil War,” she said. “But I’m from the South, and we’re still fighting it.”
...
A caller from North Carolina said he feared Obama would declare
martial law and begin executing Christian citizens as a prelude to civil
war.
...
MORE:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/16/watch-live-operation-american-spring-warns-of-fema-roundup-civil-war-chemtrails/
This Is Why Bernie Sanders Is Pissed - By Charles P. Pierce
This Is Why Bernie Sanders Is Pissed
By Charles P. Pierce 5/16/2014 AT 1:45 PM
Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog
Vermont's Bernie Sanders presided over the hearing of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee yesterday at which Eric Shinseki got roasted over a slow flame. Sanders was in fine form, thundering away, not merely at Shinseki, and not merely at the likely criminals who fudged reports and shredded documents to cover their own incompetence, but at the way this country has treated veterans in general, especially those returning from the wars launched by the Avignon Presidency.
Cranking up the ol' Wayback machine, this put me in mind of a day back in February, when I was at a press conference in the Capitol, and Sanders had to come out and explain that a carefull crafted piece of legislation regarding veterans benefits had been sunk as part of the ongoing Republican strategy of stalling everything until the country collapses and they can all become Lords Of The Rubble. (I'm paraphrasing a bit.) He was not happy that day, either.
Only two Republicans were willing to vote with Sanders, and the bill died a procedural death. The final straw was an attempt by Republican legislators to hang an amendment onto the bill calling for increased sanctions on Iran. There was also some cheap bullshit thrown around about the budget, most notably by Senator Jefferson Davis Beauregard Sessions of Alabama. There also was, spectacularly, some debate time taken up by, believe it or not, Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI!
There was a lot of talk yesterday about how bipartisan the outrage is at the blossoming VA scandal, and how bipartisan the agreement is that we have to do better by the people we send to make war in places around the world. In February, the Republicans had a chance to put up or shut up. They shut up. They should continue to do so.
MORE:http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Please_Listen_To_Bernie_Sanders_About_This
Newtie as the Good Cop has to be one of the funniest gags I've seen in years...
Newtie and Karl's comedy routine
by digby
I don't know if you've noticed but the Republicans have a couple of problems facing Hillary Clinton in 2016. They have to go after her for being a dithering old broad, of course, but it's a dicey prospect. As much as their base hate her and want to attack her on the most base level, they also have to be careful about going too far with the sexism. And since their own voters tend to be on the elderly side, they can't get too insulting about her age and health. It's a problem.
So, they're going to have it both ways by staging a little pageant. I wrote about it for Salon this morning:
He was then pushed aside as a more responsible member of the GOP immediately stepped up to criticize Rove’s indelicate comments. That would be the very sensitive good cop and new age guru Newt Gingrich:
I have many policy disagreements with Hillary but this kind of personal charge is exactly whats wrong with american politics. he should apologize and stop discussing her health. i was angry when people did this to Reagan in 1980 and I am angry when they do it to her today.
That’s so true. It’s just shocking that we’ve come to this. How do you suppose that happened?
Well, it turns out that back in the 1990s a self-described Republican revolutionary promoted a new way of talking about politics and trained an entire generation of politicians in its dark practice:
Read on ...http://www.salon.com/2014/05/16/newt_and_karls_latest_trick_inside_their_good_cop_bad_cop_routine/
Charles Pierce: No People On Earth More Deserving of Liquid Plum'r Enema Than Upper Echelons of NYT
THE TIMES SCANDAL IS AN EMBARASSMENT TO JOURNALISM
By Charles P. Pierce on May 16, 2014
Pierce:
MUCH MORE:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/new-york-times-jill-abramson-051614?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1456_58904713
Greenwald Rips NYT Editor:'Disturbing History' Of Journalism 'Subservient' To Nat'l Security State
Glenn Greenwald On Dean Baquet: A 'Disturbing History' Of Journalism 'Subservient' To National Security State
HuffPost Live
Posted: 05/16/2014
Glenn Greenwald joined HuffPost Live Friday to discuss Edward Snowden, the latest news on NSA spying and his recent book "No Place to Hide." The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist weighed in on the turmoil at the New York Times this week and had some choice words for incoming executive editor Dean Baquet, who with the LA Times in 2006, was accused of killing a story about collaboration between AT&T and the NSA.
HuffPost Live host Alyona Minkovski asked Greenwald what kind of leader Baquet will be for the New York Times. "I think of all the executive editors of the New York Times," Greenwald began, "at least in recent history, or I'll say in the last 10 years since I’ve paying extremely close attention to how the New York Times functions, Jill Abramson was probably the best advocate for an adversarial relationship between the government and the media. I don’t know if she’s always been that way but in her stewardship of the paper as editor in chief I think that was definitely the case."
Greenwald did not have kind words for incoming executive editor Dean Baquet. He said, "By contrast, her successor Dean Baquet does have a really disturbing history of practicing this form of journalism that is incredibly subservient to the American National security state, and if his past record and his past actions and statements are anything to go by, I think it signals that the New York Times is going to continue to descend downward into this sort of journalism that is very neutered and far too close to the very political factions that it's supposed to exercise oversight over."
VIDEO and more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/16/glenn-greenwald-new-york-times_n_5337486.html
Obamacare Caused This Clinic To Close, And Its Doctors Couldn't Be Happier
On the last Wednesday in January, the RotaCare Tacoma free clinic in Washington state put away the chairs in the university janitor's lunchroom where it had made its home and closed its doors for the last time.
The clinic, served by volunteer physicians and registered nurses, had carried 150 patients at any given time to serve the uninsured population in this city of about 200,000. But after Obamacare took full effect in January, and this clinic completed its drive to enroll all of its patients in coverage, it didn't have anyone left to serve.
So they shut down at the end of January, the first month that health coverage under Obamacare kicked in. The people who worked there don't seem too torn up about it.
"It happened very quickly. We had to start telling our providers not to come because we didn't have enough patients," Mary Hoagland-Scher, a Tacoma family practitioner who served as the clinic's medical director, told TPM. "It just dried up. Poof."
............................
MORE:
alkingpointsmemo.com/dc/washington-free-clinic-closed-obamacare
KRUGMAN: GOP's "Intellectual Evolution (DEVOLUTION) Has Reached A Point Of NO Return"
Points of No Return
MAY 15, 2014
Paul Krugman
............Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — much of whose state is now fated to sink beneath the waves — weighed in on climate change. Some readers may recall that in 2012 Mr. Rubio, asked how old he believed the earth to be, replied “I’m not a scientist, man.” This time, however, he confidently declared the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change false, although in a later interview he was unable to cite any sources for his skepticism.
So why would the senator make such a statement? The answer is that like that ice sheet, his party’s intellectual evolution (or maybe more accurately, its devolution) has reached a point of no return, in which allegiance to false doctrines has become a crucial badge of identity.
...................................
..............Once upon a time it was possible to take climate change seriously while remaining a Republican in good standing. Today, listening to climate scientists gets you excommunicated — hence Mr. Rubio’s statement, which was effectively a partisan pledge of allegiance.
And truly crazy positions are becoming the norm. A decade ago, only the G.O.P.’s extremist fringe asserted that global warming was a hoax concocted by a vast global conspiracy of scientists (although even then that fringe included some powerful politicians). Today, such conspiracy theorizing is mainstream within the party, and rapidly becoming mandatory; witch hunts against scientists reporting evidence of warming have become standard operating procedure, and skepticism about climate science is turning into hostility toward science in general.
It’s hard to see what could reverse this growing hostility to inconvenient science. As I said, the process of intellectual devolution seems to have reached a point of no return. And that scares me more than the news about that ice sheet.
the rest:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/opinion/krugman-points-of-no-return.html?ref=opinion&_r=1
The New York Times Busted Lying Through its Teeth
THU MAY 15, 2014 AT 08:06 PM PDT
The New York Times Busted Lying Through its Teeth
byJames Hepburn
I got an email from a friend with an image comparing two news reports on the big FCC vote that moves us closer to gutting net neutrality. After reading the Times' quote, it was so shockingly dishonest that my first response was, "it must be fake."
Wow. So I went to the NY Times website to confirm, because even I, who has known for years that the Times was nothing but a PR operation for the 1%, couldn't believe they fallen this low.
But it was real. The version they have up now is slightly scrubbed. But the version in the image apparently went out on the Times' wire service and is still available from scores of small newspapers.
THE REST:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/15/1299692/-The-New-York-Times-Busted-Lying-Through-its-Teeth
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