The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
US elected to UN rights council
The United States has been elected to a seat on the UN Human Rights Council for the first time.It’s the freakin’ UN. This is like aspiring to sit on the chastity committee of a whorehouse.
Mostly Cajun – Membership
(Yes, I really am up this freaking early.)
Aside from Chris Muir’s Razor Wit . . .
. . . the best thing about Day by Day is its immediateness. There’s no three-week delay between what is topical and what gets published on dead trees.
To wit (pun intended):
I just saw the movie this afternoon. It was GREAT. And Chris takes it and twists it – as only he can – into this cartoon! Amazing!
Quote of the Day
We live in democracies. Rule by the majority. Rule by the people. Fifty per cent of people are below average in intelligence. This explains everything about politics. – P.J. O’Rourke, The ditch carp of democracy
Hat tip to Tam, who chose a different quote, but as usual for a P.J. piece, the entire thing is quotable.
Yup. The Other Side is Paying Attention
Right on schedule.
The Far Right’s First 100 Days: Getting More Extreme by the Day
Sometime back in February, about three weeks into Barack Obama’s administration, everybody on the left suddenly noticed that there was something different going on with the conservatives.
The outrageous screeds and paranoid delusions sounded pretty much as they always had — but there was a new fury behind them, a strident urgency that hadn’t been there before, and a very audible shift of the gears in right-wing behavior and rhetoric.
None of this came as a surprise to veteran right-wing watchers — we’d been predicting a bad backlash since the 2006 election — but more than three months into the new administration, it’s increasingly hard to ignore the fact that this ominous new trend is taking on a momentum of its own.
On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security ratified some of those observations. Fueled by bone-deep racism, an unnatural terror of liberal government, frustration over the economic downturn, and fears about America’s loss of world standing, they said, the militant right wing is indeed rising again.
Its numbers are up, its talk is turning ugly, and it’s not unthinkable that we could be in for a wave of domestic terrorism unseen since the mid-1990s.
I’ve been meaning for a while to talk about what changed after the inauguration, and why, and what it means to the country going forward. Our observance of the end of the first 100 days seems to be a good time to do that.
The DHS report laid out the history and the current drivers in straight factual terms and made some safe predictions about what might make the situation worse. But the report stopped short of taking the next step.
(Interestingly, the nightmare scenario for most right-wing watchers — a white-hot backlash in the wake of another major terrorist attack — appears nowhere in the DHS assessment. Perhaps they didn’t want to put ideas into paranoid right-wing heads.)
We need to look at what long experience has taught us about the past escalation patterns of right-wing rhetoric and violence and figure out where we currently stand within those patterns.
We actually know quite a bit about this. Most national agencies tasked with keeping tabs on political and religious extremist groups look for specific signs that help them sort out who’s just talking the talk and who’s actually getting ready to walk the walk.
The criteria vary from agency to agency; and our collective insights into these patterns changes and deepens every year. But there are some generally accepted principles — and applying them to the current state of conservatism gives a clearer view what’s changed in the past 100 days, what the shift really means and what could be coming next if the right keeps going down this road.
I want to make it clear: The DHS report emphasizes that there’s no specific evidence that any particular group is planning any particular action.
At the same time, what’s equally clear from the pattern analysis is that the upshift we heard was the right wing going into overdrive — the speed at which talk about revolution (which has been going on for years, but intensified after 2006) accelerates into concrete preparation for action.
Here’s why:
Go read the rest, you rightwing extremist! There’s quite a bit.
Oh, and here’s the blurb on the author:
Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006 and is a founding member of Group News Blog.
What the hell is a “trained social futurist”? Does this mean she predicts the future if you throw her an occasional herring?
Wait until you read tomorrow’s Quote of the Day!
Quote of the Day
“Corporate taxes” are, in the long run, just regressive taxes that don’t hurt progressives at the ballot box because the electorate is collectively about as smart as a colony of clams. – Tam, Follow the Money
Seen this?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJkXl4wG2eU&hl=en&fs=1&w=425&h=344]
(Embedding has been denied, and the only version available runs seven minutes. The portion of interest – well, of greater interest, comes at about 3:30-4:30.)
I am so confident in the superiority of the public health care option that I think he has every reason to be frightened.
I’m certainly frightened. P.J. O’Rourke nailed it long ago:
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.
Rep. Schakowsky said it out loud:
This is not a principled fight.
Indeed not.
I’m reminded of another quote, Henry Louis Mencken this time:
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
BOHICA
Bill Whittle is as Good in Multimedia . . .
. . . as he is in print! Go watch!
Ladies and gentlemen, we not only have an aristocratic imperial congress-for-life that no longer represents the will of the American people, we also have in place in the unbiased, dispassionate watchdogs that they claim to be, a wildly partisan and utterly unethical press corps who decides over cocktails who should win elections and who should lose them, and then prepares the appropriate narrative which they sell to you as unbiased news. But the current product of CNN, Newsweek and all the rest are as far from actual news reporting as our current Congress and federal government are from the ideals that our Founders had in mind at the very birth of this great nation.
Edited to add today’s Day by Day:
Here’s Your 1st Rightwing Extremist Suspect
Tax protester in hot water over tea bags
A Beeville grandmother who sent tea bag tabs to Washington and Austin earlier this month found herself at police headquarters Monday answering questions about her intentions.
“I’m just a normal person. I’m a single grandmother raising two granddaughters,” said Faye Freeman Tuesday morning.
So imagine her reaction when Texas Ranger Andy Lopez and Beeville Police Department Staff Sgt. Richard Cantu came to her door Monday and told her they wanted her to go to the police department for questioning.
The reason? Freeman had mailed the tags from 64 tea bags to different elected representatives in Austin and Washington on April 4 to protest government spending. And one of the recipients had called the authorities to report her, saying he or she had received something suspicious in the mail from a woman in Beeville.
“If you were on the receiving end of something like that, what would you think?” Freeman said Lopez asked her.
“If I’d got something like that, I would have called the person back and said, ‘Can I help you?’” was her response.
But you’re not a clueless politician. No fair!
When investigators asked if she thought she would open a suspicious envelope that had no return address, Freeman said, “The envelope had my return address on it.”
Later she asked this reporter, “How did they find me if there was no return address?”
Wouldn’t “DUH?” have been an easier reply?
Freeman was doing what thousands of working taxpayers are doing this month as part of a protest against increased government spending and coming tax increases.
Instead of sending tea bags, the grandmother decided to send the tabs from the bags and use the tea herself.
This saves .gov money since they don’t have to run a mass-spectrum analysis on the contents of the teabags to determine if they’re Earl Gray or just Lipton like the tag says.
When she was asked why it was that she did not include a note in the letter explaining why she was sending the tabs, she had a simple answer. “That would have been an awful lot of writing.”
And we know our elected officials can’t be bother to even read the legislation they vote on, so what would have been the point?
Freeman sent the envelopes to everyone in Washington and Austin she thought might listen. That included President Barack Obama, her U.S. senators and a number of representatives, state senators and representatives.
“When you do something like this you want to cover the chain of command,” she said.
But she never expected lawmen to show up at her door asking her to go downtown.
“I’m really surprised it happened,” Freeman said. “You should have seen my neighbors. I’m just a normal person and when the Texas Rangers came looking for me, they said, ‘Oh my goodness, what’s going on?’”
“I was stunned to start with,” Freeman said. “I didn’t have any idea. They kept assuring me that I wouldn’t be arrested.”
As long as she cooperated.
But if she stepped out of line . . .
“They were polite. I didn’t have any problems answering their questions,” Freeman commented.
Never answer their questions. Ask if you are under arrest, and get a lawyer. The police are not your friend, and they are not there to help you. And yes, I’m serious. I know there are a lot of good ones, but I also know you can’t count on that. Lawyer up.
She said she planned to attend the tea party scheduled for the Bee County Courthouse lawn this morning. The entire tea bag tab incident was related to that event, a protest against the government for spending big and taxing big at a time when regular people are trying to make ends meet.
Other Bee County residents also mailed off tea bags to state and national representatives, but unlike Freeman most included a note of explanation with theirs.
“It seems to me that they keep wanting to tax people but they aren’t listening to what we want,” Freeman said. To her, that is taxation without representation, the reason the first tea party was held in Boston at the beginning of the American Revolution.
It is to a lot of us, Ms. Freeman. (OUTSTANDING name, BTW. That’s probably what set the pol in question off. “Freeman? Can’t have THAT!“)
Lopez said he cannot comment much on the investigation. He said he received a call from someone who was concerned about the letter received from Freeman.
Lopez said he believes if she had included a letter explaining her feelings in the envelope there might not have been a complaint.
“I was asked to look into it, to see if there was anything fishy about it,” Lopez said of the envelope. “I was enlightened by Mrs. Freeman.”
Lopez did suggest that she might have been more clear with her intentions by including a note or letter of some kind. He said that when she said it would have taken a lot of writing to include a letter in each of the 64 envelopes, he simply suggested that she could have written one letter and made copies.
See above. Only a moron or a legislator (but I repeat myself) could have misinterpreted what a tea bag tab meant.
Lopez admitted that he had not kept up with the news regarding the tea party movement but he understands the intent now.
“She’s articulate and she seems sincere and genuine about that,” Lopez said.
As far as the tea bag letters and tea party protests planned for Wednesday across the nation, Lopez said he could understand the intent.
“This is America,” Lopez said. “Whatever makes your boat float.”
Here’s a picture of this dangerous subversive:
Be afraid. Be very afraid!
Preach It!
“Concerned American” writes of his observation of cognitive dissonance en mass at the Atlanta TEA Party he attended. Excerpt:
As I stood listening to the speakers, I kept listening and looking around for any signs (literally and figuratively) that folks actually understood politics in Comrade Barry “We Won” Soetero’s America, circa 2009.
The closest I saw?
One woman I spotted on my way to the transit station holding a sign which simply said, “Peaceful Attempt”.
But if I gotten up on stage and said, “Do you understand that by demanding the elimination of socialism from this country — which you claim to want — you are implicitly and necessarily demanding the end of
– Social Security;
– Medicare;
– Medicaid;
– the new prescription drug benefit for geezers;
– Federal aid to local schools;
– the deductibility of mortgage interest;
– subsidized student loans; and
– a myriad of other government transfer payments?”,I would have been booed off the stage, at best.
Read the whole thing. Twice. Then pass it around.
