The Democrat Thread

[bmags]

no biggy, those people keep me employed.

 

Love how they pick and choose when to follow the constitution.

 

[BigSqwert]

From The Detroit News: http://www.detnews.com/article/20100328/ME...p#ixzz0jWtLFrlQ

 

 

More scary details

 

Nine suspects tied to a Christian militia in the Midwest are charged with conspiring to kill police officers, then attack a funeral in the hopes of killing more law enforcement personnel, federal prosecutors said Monday.

 

Once other officers gathered for a slain officer's funeral, the group planned to detonate homemade bombs at the funeral, killing more, according to newly unsealed court papers.

 

According to the indictment, the idea of attacking a police funeral was one of numerous scenarios discussed as ways to go after law enforcement officers. Other scenarios included a fake 911 call to lure an officer to his or her death, or an attack on the family of a police officer.

 

After such attacks, the group allegedly planned to retreat to "rally points" protected by trip-wired improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, for what they expected would become a violent standoff with law enforcement personnel.

[Cknolls]

That's an email that went out this morning to the RNC's donors.

 

The RNC is raising money for Sean Hannity.

 

That is all.

 

 

How so? By raising money for children of wounded and killed vets to go to college? Yeah, f*** Hannity, doesn't he know the gov't is the only one that can do s*** like this.

[bmags]

ahh, i can just see it, an email from Tim Kaine to supporters saying he just watched michael moores sicko and how awesome it was.

 

And how cknolls would not miss the point on that email.

[southsider2k5]

ahh, i can just see it, an email from Tim Kaine to supporters saying he just watched michael moores sicko and how awesome it was.

 

And how cknolls would not miss the point on that email.

 

Didn't Michael Moore speak at the Democratic national convention?

[BigSqwert]

Of course not. These are white people. Terrorists = brown skinned Muslims

Have any large media outlets used "suspected Terrorists" to describe the Christian militia broken up by the FBI Joint TERRORISM Task Force?

 

via

[bmags]

speak? I think he spoke at a forum but not a speech.

[Balta1701]

One of these expenses stands out.

Once on the ground, FEC filings suggest, Steele travels in style. A February RNC trip to California, for example, included a $9,099 stop at the Beverly Hills Hotel, $6,596 dropped at the nearby Four Seasons, and $1,620.71 spent [update: the amount is actually $1,946.25] at Voyeur West Hollywood, a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex.

 

RNC trips to other cities produced bills from a long list of chic and costly hotels such as the Venetian and the M Resort in Las Vegas, and the W (for a total of $19,443) in Washington. A midwinter trip to Hawaii cost the RNC $43,828, not including airfare.

[BigSqwert]

Balta playing role reversal and ignoring someone in the thread.

[Balta1701]

Balta playing role reversal and ignoring someone in the thread.

Ah, you win. Missed the fact that the page had flipped while I was @ the gym.

[HuskyCaucasian]

One of these expenses stands out.

The RNC responds with a statement:

We are investigating the expenditure in question. The story willfully and erroneously suggests that the expenditure in question was one belonging to the Chairman. This was a reimbursement made to a non-committee staffer. The Chairman was never at the location in question, he had no knowledge of the expenditure, nor does he find the use of committee funds at such a location at all acceptable. Good reporting would make that distinction crystal clear. The committee has requested that the monies be returned to the committee and that the story be corrected so that it is accurate."

[bmags]

god how dumb could you be to put that on your expense account. Ha

[HuskyCaucasian]

god how dumb could you be to put that on your expense account. Ha

Here's my impression, let me try and extrapolate this out based on what we know at the moment:

The person who did this was probably under the impression that everything he expensed was rubber stamped with no over-sight. The expense was not discovered until some searched into the FEC fillings... so, the person was right. No one called him out on it. He very well may not have know all his expenses were public record.

[bmags]

Here's my impression, let me try and extrapolate this out based on what we know at the moment:

The person who did this was probably under the impression that everything he expensed was rubber stamped with no over-sight. The expense was not discovered until some searched into the FEC fillings... so, the person was right. No one called him out on it. He very well may not have know all his expenses were public record.

 

I don't think that doesn't make him stupid. "I didn't think I'd be caught" doesn't mean it isn't dumb. ANd wrong.

[HuskyCaucasian]

I don't think that doesn't make him stupid. "I didn't think I'd be caught" doesn't mean it isn't dumb. ANd wrong.

It's very dumb and wrong. I'm just trying to dissect how it could have happened. Maybe it makes him more ignorant than dumb.

[HuskyCaucasian]

That's an email that went out this morning to the RNC's donors.

 

The RNC is raising money for Sean Hannity.

 

That is all.

Not that big of a deal really. This is a slightly bigger one:

CREW, VoteVets File IRS, FTC Complaints Against Sean Hannity Charity Freedom Concerts

Freedom Concerts, Sean Hannity's scholarship charity for the children of fallen soldiers, has violated its charitable tax status, according to a Washington advocacy group.

 

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington alleges that Hannity's Freedom Concerts has "engaged in deceptive and illegal marketing practices by suggesting that all concert ticket sale revenue goes directly to scholarships for children of killed and wounded service members."

 

CREW will host a joint press conference Monday with VoteVets.org discussing complaints with the IRS and the Federal Trade Commission about Freedom Concert, Freedom Alliance, and Lt. Col. Oliver North.

 

Freedom Concerts, which is part of Freedom Alliance, is operated by Premier Marketing, according to conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel and CREW. Premier Marketing is operated by Duane Ward, the speaking engagement agent for both Sean Hannity and Oliver North, according to Schlussel. North is the founder of Freedom Alliance and its honorary chairman.

 

A little more than a week ago, Schlussel called out Hannity's charity for what she described as a "huge scam":

...less than 20%-and in two recent years, less than 7% and 4%, respectively-of the money raised by Freedom Alliance went to these causes, while millions of dollars went to expenses, including consultants and apparently to ferry the Hannity posse of family and friends in high style. And, despite Hannity's statements to the contrary on his nationally syndicated radio show, few of the children of fallen soldiers got more than $1,000-$2,000, with apparently none getting more than $6,000, while Freedom Alliance appears to have spent tens of thousands of dollars for private planes.

[Balta1701]

No wonder Chairman Steele was helping him raise book sales.

[lostfan]

My census form was "who are you and where do you live" and nothing more.

My wife filled ours out right away but I looked at it first, it just asked how many people lived at my house, age, race, and gender and I think that was all. People are acting all uppity about the race block and being a smartass "I don't see American so I'm leaving this blank" but that was on the first damn census in 1790... that f***ing President Washington, ignoring the constitution!

[StrangeSox]

I was part of the supplemental census a few years back, and it was a little more in-depth than this one IIRC. But still, I don't get why anyone* gets so bent out of shape about it.

 

*I do get the fears of illegal immigrants but I don't think they're well-founded.

[lostfan]

Isn't the supplemental census voluntary?

[BigSqwert]

Is America ‘Yearning for Fascism’?

By Chris Hedges

 

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

 

“We are ruled not by two parties but one party,” Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. “It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.”

 

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die.

 

The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient scapegoats from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They set in motion movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and self-immolation. There is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet Radovan Karadzic, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war, and the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is little difference between the Oath Keepers and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these people, but they are not the fools. We are.

 

The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and they are right. Only 25 percent of those polled said the government can be trusted to protect the interests of the American people. If we do not embrace this outrage and distrust as our own it will be expressed through a terrifying right-wing backlash.

 

“It is time for us to stop talking about right and left,” McKinney told me. “The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this. I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by people who benefit from the way the system is organized.”

 

We are bound to a party that has betrayed every principle we claim to espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy, to a demand for quality and affordable public education, to a concern for the jobs of the working class. And the hatred expressed within right-wing movements for the college-educated elite, who created or at least did nothing to halt the financial debacle, is not misplaced. Our educated elite, wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique activism of political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs. The shouting of racist and bigoted words at black and gay members of Congress, the spitting on a black member of the House, the tossing of bricks through the windows of legislators’ offices, are part of the language of rebellion. It is as much a revolt against the educated elite as it is against the government. The blame lies with us. We created the monster.

 

When someone like Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats, when she says “Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!” there are desperate people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts “baby killer” at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of the violence they endure.

 

These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration.

 

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and blood.

 

LINK

[Balta1701]

NY Times conservative columnist David Brooks spent a whole column today telling us why Sandra Bullock should have been staying at home popping out babies to keep her marriage solid rather than winning an Academy Award.

[BigSqwert]

*shakes head*

[CrimsonWeltall]

NY Times conservative columnist David Brooks spent a whole column today telling us why Sandra Bullock should have been staying at home popping out babies to keep her marriage solid rather than winning an Academy Award.

 

C'mon, Balta.

 

Sandra Bullock was a trivial lead-in to a piece about how the quality of one's marriage is a greater factor in happiness than professional success. At no point does he imply people (much less women, or Bullock specifically) should stay home and make babies rather than work.

[BigSqwert]

Barack Obama looking at awesome things