Archive for the ‘politics’ Category
scariest words in the english language
“Today America is coming to help.”
— Barrack Obama
burn #2
“By his own admission, he lacks the charisma to be an accountant”.
-The Walrus on Stephen Harper.
stop sending killers
Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle (…) If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.
—Josip Broz Tito, from a letter to Stalin.
syria
I posted the same thing in a comment over at Obsidian Wings, but it’s worth repeating:
One U.S. official who has been briefed on the options on Syria said he believed the White House would seek a level of intensity “just muscular enough not to get mocked”
That’s what the goals of US wars are these days. To just barely avoid being mocked. Hardly sounds worth killing people over.
they can’t handle the truth
By law, the U.S. would be required to cut off the $1.3 billion in annual financial aid to Egypt if it determined that there had been a coup.
“We have determined that it is not in the best interest of the United States to make that determination,” Earnest said.
factoid of the day
Jimmy Carter is the only US president who lived in public housing.
When he told his mother he was running for president, she asked “President of what?”.
factoid of the day
Wyoming apparently has the same number of escalators as US senators.
A difference of opinion
Amid the deafening roar of abortion rights supporters, Texas Republicans huddled around the Senate podium to pass new abortion restrictions, but whether the vote was cast before or after midnight is in dispute.
Hundreds of protesters cheered, clapped and shouted for the last 15 minutes of the special legislative session in an attempt to run out the clock before senators could vote on the bill that is expected to close almost every abortion clinic in the nation’s second most populous state.
While Democrats as well as assembled reporters watched clocks on their mobile phones tick past midnight, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said the voting began just before.
–AP
conservatism, presented without comment
Anders Breivik, the right-wing extremist who has confessed to killing 77 people during a murder spree in Norway last summer, played the violent computer game World of Warcraft nearly seven hours a day for several consecutive months before his attack, prosecutors say.
Breivik, 33, already known to have a long history with the online role-playing game, was particularly absorbed by it between November 2010 and February 2011, when he played for an average of 6 hours and 50 minutes per day, according to prosecutors.
…
According to prosecutors, Breivik played Warcraft under the aliases “Andersnordic” and “Conservatism.”
–link
the state of europe
Over at the Browser, Anatole Kaletsky discusses the future of capitalism:
Everybody now recognises that the euro can only survive as part of a political project to create a new federal Europe. This was the point that many of us who were Eurosceptics were making in the early 1990s. It was also the point made by true europhiles back then too. [The former president of the European Commission] Jacques Delors, the most prominent among them, always described the euro, when he invented it, as the most decisive step towards political union. But for the next 20 years, the connection between currency union and political union was disregarded as an issue for the long-distant future. Well, we’ve now reached the historical crossroads where Europe must decide: Does it become a political federation and keep the euro? Or does it remain a community of independent sovereign states, in which case the euro has to be abandoned?
The United States will have to make the same type of choice someday, political polarization cannot continue indefinitely.
incivility
Willie Horton ads, Swiftboating, GOP convention-goers waving purple band-aids to mock a veteran’s war wounds, birtherism, Ann Coulter saying the “only choice was whether to impeach or assassinate” President Clinton, Coulter claiming 9/11 widows were “enjoying their husband’s deaths,” Rush Limbaugh mocking Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease, ads falsely claiming Barack Obama favored “comprehensive sex education for Kindergartners,” Rand Paul supporters trying to stomp the head of a protester, ads claiming Kay Hagen was “godless,” Michelle Bachmann calling for an investigation of ‘un-American views” among the Congress, “If ballots don’t work, maybe bullets will, etc., etc., etc….
Link.
chomsky
As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
–link
ayn rand
What kind of person was Ayn Rand?
The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented “the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.” She called him “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy,” shimmering with “immense, explicit egotism.” Rand had only one regret: “A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough.”
And what kind of people worship someone with this ideology?
hooray
It’s always worth celebrating when a new Fafblog! post is up. And one is!
Freedom! If there’s one thing America loves, it’s… well, war. But if there’s two things America loves, it’s war and torture. But if there’s three things America loves, it’s war, torture, and genocide. But if there are several dozen things America loves, they are war, torture, genocide, chattel slavery, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, assassination, poverty, institutionalized bribery, remote-controlled flying death robots and somewhere down the list, between prison labor and lagoons of toxic pig shit, there is almost certainly a special place in our national heart for freedom.
Yey!
democracy never
If you are not rich, your views have no impact whatsoever on the decision of politicians. Evidence is here.
Doesn’t sound like a democratic society to me.
D Clarity 
