Rick Santorum On Contraception (Hint: It's Bad!)

Santorum (runner-up to Romney in the 2012 Republican primaries):

One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before [hey, Rick, you're not president quite yet] is what I think is the danger of contraception. The whole sexual libertine idea that many in the Christian faith have said, well, it's ok, contraception's ok. But it's not ok.

It's a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. It is supposed to be within marriage. It is supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal and also unitive but also procreative and that's the perfect way that sexual union should happen. When you take any part of that out, we diminish the act.

If you can take one part out, if it's not for the purpose of procreation, that's not one of the reasons you diminish this very special bond between men and women. So why can't you take other parts of it out? It becomes deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure...

I'm not runnning for preacher, I'm not running for pastor. But these are important public policy issues. These have profound impact on the health of our society. I'm not talking about moral health, although clearly moral health, but I'm talking economic health, I'm talking about out of wedlock birth rates, sexually transmitted diseases.

These are profound issues that we only like to talk about from a scientific point of view. Well that's one point of view, but we also need to have the courage to talk about the moral aspects of it and the purpose and rationale for why we do what we do.

Lee Atwater Speaks: The Southern Strategy

According to Wikipedia: "Harvey LeRoy 'Lee' Atwater (February 27, 1951 – March 29, 1991) was an American political consultant and strategist to the Republican Party. He was an advisor to U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and chairman of the Republican National Committee."

Atwater was one of the first ruthless, take-no-prisoners Republican consultants who have done so much to poison political discourse. His "dirty tricks" in Republican political campaigns are legendary. He became a protege to Republican mastermind Ed Rollins, who says Atwater ran a dirty tricks operation against Democratic vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, including publicizing the fact that Ferraro's parents had been indicted on numbers running in the 1940s. Rollins also described Atwater as "ruthless," "Ollie North in civilian clothes," and someone who "just had to drive in one more stake."

As a prelude to the audio clip that follows, Wikipedia claims the interview began:

"Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964, and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

"Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?"

And the Atwater audio follows, with a transcript beneath. In the video, the captioning starts out: "In 1981, the legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater was working in Ronald Reagan's White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis."

The second frame says: "In this audio, made public for the first time ever, Atwater lays out how the Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves."



TRANSCRIPT:

"Here's how I would approach that issue as a -- as a statistician or a political scientist -- or, no, as a psychologist, which I'm not, is -- is how abstract you -- you handle the race thing. In other words, you start out -- and now y'all aren't quoting me on this, are you?

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968, you can’t say 'nigger'; that hurts you. It backfires. So you say stuff like 'forced busing,' 'states’ rights,' and all that stuff. And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all of these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously, maybe that is part of it; I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we're -- we're doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me? Because obviously sitting around saying 'We want to cut taxes,' 'We want to cut this,' and 'We want' -- is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'nigger, nigger.' You know.

"So any way you look at it, race is coming on the back burner."

Atwater is believed to have repented of his political sins on his deathbed before succumbing to cancer; others say he was being disingenuous, "spinning to the end."

Interesting guy. May he rest in -- whatever state he deserves.

Krugman Hits It Out Of The Park - Again

Click here for Elias Isquith's coverage at Salon -- entitled 'Paul Krugman blasts the GOP’s plutocratic “charlatans and cranks'” -- of Krugman's NYT article. Krugman kicks butt and takes names -- one name being charlatan and crank Art Laffer, a huge purveyor since the Reagan days of junk economics and trickle-down theory, the proponent of the totally discredited Laffer Curve -- see the Wikipedia article here.

Base Jumping (Slow Motion)

Words Of Wisdom From Sarah Palin

Taken from Princess Dumbass of the Northwoods (h/t, Charlie Pierce, Esquire) on Fox News, lamenting Sen. Thad Cochran's win in the Mississippi Republican primary over neoconfederate Chris McDaniel:

"We're going to be a bankrupt, fundamentally transformed country unless those who know what they're doing, and aren't going along just to get along with those in power, it being today the Democrats."

Well, you can't argue with that. Or as Charlie says, "The language of Shakespeare, ladies and gentlemen."

Ted Cruz (ex-Canadian)

Click here for a nine-page article in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin entitled "The Absolutist." Elias Isquith of Salon's comment on the article: "The clear takeaway: All that red meat he throws to the GOP base? He means every word."

Cruz was outstanding on debate teams at Princeton and Harvard, and soon became one of the best appellate lawyers in Texas. The skills of an appellate lawyer are different from those of a trial lawyer, who must constantly be open to negotiations and plea bargains. At the appellate level, there is no room left for bargaining: All that is left is to state your case in the strongest, most effective way possible. That appellate-level approach carries over to his politics. He does not negotiate. He is inflexible. It must be his way, all or nothing.

Here (in bold) are the subheadings in Isquith's Salon article:

He thinks Republican presidential candidates lose because they’re insufficiently right-wing.

“It is amazing that the wisdom of the chattering class to the Republicans is always, always, always ‘Surrender your principles and agree with the Democrats,’” he told me. “That’s been true for my entire lifetime. The chattering classes have consistently said, ‘You crazy Republicans have to give up on what you believe and become more like Democrats.’ And, I would note, every time Republicans do that we lose.”

He thinks last year’s government shutdown went just swell.

“Many voices in Washington say the fight that we had last fall was not successful,” Cruz told me. “Like any good litigator, at times you think of a battle as a long-term battle. You don’t always accomplish everything in the first skirmish. As a consequence of millions of people last summer and fall getting engaged in that battle, I believe we dramatically elevated the national debate over the harms of Obamacare. And today Democrats are running scared, and the prevailing wisdom is Republicans are quite likely to win control of the Senate because of Obamacare.”

He was nurtured by the conservative movement from a young age.

When Cruz was in his early teens, in Houston, his parents enrolled him in an after-school program run by Rolland Storey, a retired energy executive who wanted to instill the values of the free market in young people. At the Free Enterprise Institute, Storey had his young charges read Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and other authors revered by conservatives, and then give speeches at Rotary Clubs and similar venues around the state.

“Ted was just an amazing speaker at fourteen, by far the most impressive student we ever had,” Winston Elliott III, who became affiliated with Storey’s organization when Cruz was a student and now serves as its president, told me.

When he was young, his father, Rafael — a pastor and Cuban émigré — would warn him that then-President Jimmy Carter was like Fidel Castro.

“It all started for us in 1980, when Ted was nine years old,” Rafael Cruz told me. “I was involved with a group called the Religious Roundtable, which was working with the Moral Majority to help mobilize Christians to elect Ronald Reagan. All during that year, we talked every night about how important it was to get rid of this socialist-leftist President Carter and replace him with a constitutional conservative, Ronald Reagan. I must have told Ted a dozen times, ‘When I was in Cuba and they took away our freedoms, I had a place to go. If we lose our freedoms here, where are we going to go?’”

He adores the Federalist Society, a group of conservatives dedicated toward promoting a strongly conservative reading of the Constitution, and considers it his “home."

Founded in 1982, the society is a forum for discussion of conservative legal ideas. It takes no formal positions on issues, and members don’t agree with each other on every topic, but it has long operated as the network for potential Republican judicial nominees and executive-branch officials. In practice, the Federalist approach has meant an “originalist” view of the Constitution, which, in turn, reflects the priorities of the modern Republican Party—including an expansive view of an individual’s right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, a rejection of constitutional protections for a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, a porous barrier between church and state, and a narrow conception of the power of the federal government to intervene in the economy.

Apparently he's not a charlatan pandering to the rubes: He's the real deal. Scary thought.

Both Sides Do It -- NOT!

Click here for an article in the National Journal by the estimable Norm Ornstein entitled Setting the Record Straight on a Polarizing Debate." According to Wikipedia, Ornstein is "a political scientist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a [conservative] Washington D.C. think tank. He was the co-writer (along with Thomas E. Mann) of It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism." Here's a quote from that article in "Both Sides Are Not To Blame" at Taegan Goddard's Political Wire:

"Does it matter whether the polarization, and the deep dysfunction that follows from it, is equal or not, including to the average voter? The answer is a resounding yes. If bad behavior--using the nation's full faith and credit as a hostage to political demands, shutting down the government, attempting to undermine policies that have been lawfully enacted, blocking nominees not on the basis of their qualifications but to nullify the policies they would pursue, using filibusters as weapons of mass obstruction--is to be discouraged or abandoned, those who engage in it have to be held accountable.

"Saying both sides are equally responsible, insisting on equivalence as the mantra of mainstream journalism, leaves the average voter at sea, unable to identify and vote against those perpetrating the problem."

Here's neocon cheerleader Ron Fournier's take on the "both sides" situation:

“This is my fundamental disagreement with partisan journalists and political scientists who dedicate their careers to measuring increments of fault—the GOP’s share of blame is 20 percent or 60 percent or 80 percent. Who cares? Not the average voter who merely wants her leaders to work together and get results.”

Ornstein gives an illustrative citation from a Pew Research Center survey:

82 percent of consistent liberals say they believe in compromise, compared with 32 percent of consistent conservatives.

More Music: Time Of Your Life (Green Day)

The only time I ever heard this song (I'm not a radio guy) was on the finale of Seinfeld, with its joyful montage of shots celebrating the highlights of the series. I didn't realize the Green Day song was about a breakup, and the true title is Good Riddance:

Go Your Own Way!

According to Dr. J at Daily Kos, Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" was written by Lindsey Buckingham and about the breakup of his relationship with Stevie Nicks: "It's interesting to watch the looks both shoot at each other when this is performed in concert."





You can understand the emotion they're putting into it.

An Iraq War Refresher

Well, the neocons who engineered the Iraq disaster are all over the media; John McCain is claiming that the Bush team won the war and Obama lost it. He's advising Obama to ditch his entire foreign affairs team and replace them with "people who know how to win" (I guess he means Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wofowitz, Feith, and the rest of W's insane clown posse.)


Click here for a link to 10 Lessons from Bush's Fiasco in Iraq by John Perr at Daily Kos.

Cantor's Resignation (The Onion)

The following article, entitled "Resigning House Leader Cantor Reflects On All The Accomplishments He Thwarted," is from The Onion:

WASHINGTON—Looking back on his 13-year tenure in the House of Representatives with reverence, resigning House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) reflected on the long list of accomplishments he had thwarted during his time in office, sources confirmed Thursday. “From obstructing a jobs bill to put Americans back to work in 2011, to derailing gun control measures any time they reached my desk, I feel blessed to have had such an incredible run of preventing productive policies, and even a few pieces of landmark legislation, from ever passing,” said Cantor, explaining that as a young man, he “never would have dreamed” that some day he would be in a position to hinder the entire American lawmaking process and completely neuter dozens of bills. “Of course, I’m disappointed because I thought I had many more years of impeding accomplishments ahead of me, and I’ll be the first to admit that I never quite managed to stall environmental policies as much as I would have liked. But at the end of the day, I’m very proud of how I helped Congress accomplish so little during my time in office.” Cantor added that he took solace that his legacy of hampering federal policy was secure, and trusted that “many, many more” in his party would be inspired to follow in his footsteps.

Send Text Messages For Free

Click here for a link to a post from Bob Rankin,

"Deserter Storm" - Stewart Kills Fox

Stewart hits it out of the park with this devastating takedown of Fox's savage attack on returned POW Bowe Bergdahl and his father. (I thought the Jiminy Cricket portion was uncalled for, but ...)


Jon Stewart 060914 by lookatmyshirt

I don't know who to credit with this -- Crooks & Liars? -- but I saw someone who said that Fox's approach was "Let's not jump to conclusions; let's wait until all of the facts are distorted."

The Canonization Of St. Ronald Of Reagan

The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project was hatched in the spring of 1997 and launched by Grover Norquist's merry band of conservative radicals. Click here for the story.

Joseph Stiglitz With Bill Moyers: Fair Taxes

Bobby Kennedy On The Importance Of GDP

"Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

Web Privacy

Click here for a Bob Rankin article about web secrecy; especially the use of Tor to keep your Internet activity private.

Dylan At Newport Festival, 1964

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man:

Sinister Genius ...

Click here for an excellent article by Hunter at Daily Kos entitled "How Karl Rove, Rich Lowry and Politico are damaging America."

In short, the execrable Karl Rove lies, and says that those lies cast doubt on Hillary's fitness to be president. The execrable Politico gives the execrable Rich Lowry a platform to say that if you disregard the lies, Rove's underlying point -- Hillary may be unfit to be president -- is a good one that deserves honest debate.

The correct response? "Karl, you are telling obvious lies, easily debunked; your argument is without merit, unworthy of public debate."

But no, now that the question has been raised, "debate" has actually begun; Fox News and others chime in to amplify what Rove and Lowry have said. So Rove's lies have created a "debate" on Hillary's fitness to be president -- and the right-wing position in the "debate" is premised on lies. Nevertheless, the nattering nabobs of negativism bring the debate to a crescendo. In the words of that silver-tongued orator George W. Bush: "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

So blatant lies prompt earnest discussion among the pundits. Hunter says:

And this is how it works, chapter and verse. The professional liar pipes up with a bald-faced lie. Though it is quickly and easily disproven, other professional liars pipe up to say that if we ignore the fact that the liar is lying, the liar raises a good point. The liars take to the op-ed pages to note that the liar is just asking the question, and now the question is out there. And they will make damn sure the question is out there for as long as it takes to get a flock of morons and dunderheads to believe that there is a conspiracy to not answer the question, even though "the question" was a lie to begin with and no less a lie through each of the various iterations meant to sanitize it enough for the public to forget that the whole thing was a fiction from the start.

He concludes:

This is how it works, and this is why we are now a nation that sees the ghosts of conspiracy in every corner. This is why there is a Bundy ranch standoff, and why Benghazi! will get more hearings than all other attacks on American diplomatic outposts combined, and why climate change will continue to be disputed even as large parts of Antarctica cave off into the rising seas. This is why we fought a war in Iraq, and why those that peddled it have faced no professional repercussions. Because we continue to treat truth and ideologically laced falsehood with exactly equal merit, as if they are two equally worthy opponents for our attention and our respect, and govern ourselves with notions taken just as liberally from the falsehoods as from the facts.

This attitude permeates public discussion. A widely accepted figure is that 97% of publications in peer-reviewed scientific papers support the position that significant harmful climate-changing effects are man-made. No matter; right-wing politicians, bereft of scientific knowledge, their wallets stuffed with petrodollars, loudly trumpet a contrary view based on ... nothing. An overwhelming body of scientific evidence shows that dinosaurs first appeared 230 million years ago and ruled the earth for 135 million years; Christian fundamentalists thunder from their pulpits that the earth is 6,000 years old, a belief based on ... faith in the Bible. Rather than dismiss these radical, baseless views, pundits "evenhandedly" give them equal space in public discussion.

Such is the state of American journalism today.

UPDATE: Here's a segment I transcribed from a Fox News clip on Crooks & Liars. I don't know the names of the Foxers, but they're clearly quite happy with the situation:

FOXER 1: Michelle, of course Hillary Clinton's health and her age are fair game, like anybody who runs for president, if indeed she does that. But did Rove go further than that, and did he overstate the case?

FOXER 2: It's what he does. And I think there is a certain sinister genius to it. He'll get a lot of blowback now, but the issue will be out there, and people will focus on it, and they'll forget why they even brought it up to begin with. And as we go along, it will be in there, and people will discuss this -- a lot.

FOXER 3: I couldn't agree more with you, Michelle. Because what they did was they floated -- he floated a trial balloon for political coverage for 2016 elections, and even though that balloon was being shot down by liberals, it's still -- the issue is still being talked about. Politico, on the day that this happened, had eight different stories talking about this. And I checked, and MSNBC, as of Thursday night, in its prime time schedule, was still talking about it on four of the five shows.

I rest my case.

Operation American Spring - Comedy Gold

Such an easy target for mockery, but just irresistible. Click here for an article entitled "35 Top Excuses for What Happened to the 29,999,000 People Who Didn’t Show Up for Operation American Spring," by Dan Simpson. (The "leader" of OAS, a nutbar ex-officer, Col. Riley, apparently didn't show up; one suggestion was that he was home burgling the houses of the people who came.)

Here are the top 35 excuses for the missing 29,999,000 freedom-loving patriots who were nowhere to be found today.

1. President Obama ordered FEMA to round them up and put them all in concentration camps.

2. President Obama declared martial law and ordered them to be herded and executed.

3. BENGHAZI!

4. It’s meth-cooking season, so couldn’t leave their meth labs.

5. They all went to Washington state, instead of Washington D.C.

6. They used Apple Maps and ended up protesting in a corn field in Iowa.

7. They couldn’t figure out a way to get there without using a government-built road.

8. Cliven Bundy’s cattle was blocking the roadways.

9. It was national discount day at Golden Corral.

10. There were too many puddles to navigate around.

11. The 15 or so big rig drivers who showed up for Truckers for Truth back in October are still clogging up the interstates in the area.

12. They tried to make signs to bring to the protest, but couldn’t get all the words spelled right in time to show up.

13. They were all looking for that Ben Ghazi fella they always hear about on Fox News.

14. They found out that neither Ted Cruz nor Sarah Palin would be there, and didn’t bother.

15. COPS was being filmed in their trailer park that day and didn’t want to miss an opportunity to be on television.

16. There was a Duck Dynasty marathon on A & E all day.

17. They couldn’t get their tractors started.

18. They couldn’t miss their weekly KKK meeting.

19. Same reason why every other previous battle for freedom and liberty was halted – it rained.

20. Saw a rainbow over Washington, and turned around, thinking that getting near it might make them gay.

21. They were given ultimatums by their cousins that they’d break up with them if they left for a day or two.

22. They all accidentally shot themselves.

23. Had to stay home to defend their trailer parks from a rumored Bureau of Land Management takeover.

24. Washington-area stores ran out of Twizzlers, so they panicked and went back home.

25. Cliven Bundy gave a live lecture on the Negro on the same day, couldn’t miss the chance of being enlightened.

26. Found out that Washington-area liquor stores don’t carry Old Milwaukee or Pabst Blue Ribbon.

27. Illegal to ride lawn mowers on the streets of Washington.

28. They couldn’t find their teeth, and they don’t go out without them.

29. If you count the voices in the heads of the people who showed up, there were 30 million people there.

30. It’s square dance night at the VFW hall, and they promised their sisters they’d take them.

31. Got caught up at Waffle House, had their buffet for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

32. Their dogs were in heat.

33. Can’t leave Cliven Bundy’s ranch quite yet.

34. They were all raptured.

35. Their government disability checks weren’t enough to get them to Washington, which is all Obama’s fault.