Archive for February 8, 2010
South Carolina Tea Party Merges With GOP
I must say that I am not someone who thinks all Tea Partiers are crazy wingnuts. I share some of the frustrations the group has articulated — too much corporate power being the most significant. On the other hand, there is much that concerns me very deeply about the movement, yet I can’t help but respect citizens coming together to try to change the world — be they anti-war demonstrators or Tea Partiers or PETA people.
But part of the curiosity of watching this phenomenon left me today when I read that the South Carolina Tea Party has officially merged with the GOP. It’s a logical marriage I guess, given that the Republican party has moved so far to the right, but if the Tea Party as a whole is absorbed into the GOP, for all intents and purposes, the “people power” part of it will disappear and I think that’s too bad.
No, We Can’t All Get Along
A writer at the Yahoo site “Shine” called out Vanity Fair last week for the cover of it’s “New Hollywood” issue which featured a picture of actresses that were, “extremely thin and very, very white. Unless Vanity Fair considers one redhead to be diversity, we feel the need to cry foul.” … “Joanna Douglas, the writer of the piece, received a number of the threatening emails after the post was picked up by white supremacist sites and sources at the site say that the police have been contacted and an arrest is pending.”
We have a long way to go.
Rescue in Haiti — Four Weeks After the Earthquake
CNN is reporting that a person has been pulled from the rubble in Haiti — four weeks after the earthquake. Wow.
Fox Thinks We’re Really, Really Stupid
Sarah Palin got caught with notes scribbled on the palm of her left hand at the Tea Party Convention on Saturday night. Oops, how to spin that? Well, Fox wants us to believe that she did it on purpose, not to help her remember what to say, but to draw attention to Obama’s use of the teleprompter.
Yeah, right.
Private Acts of Terrorism: Bullying
William Rivers Pitt is one of my favorite political writers. His most recent column however, is about bullying. My father was a bully so I’m interested in the topic.
Pitts’ article begins:
I have a livid scar in the center of the back of my right hand. It is clearly visible, so I see it every day, and every time I see it, I am reminded of how I got it. One day, several boys in my junior high school class grabbed me and pinned me to the floor. They extended my right arm and held my hand flat to the floor. One of them took out a pencil and began violently rubbing it against the skin of that hand, until the skin broke, until little balls of my flesh stuck to the eraser, until the blood poured.
I did not cry, I did not scream, and with four larger boys crushing down on me, I could not fight back. See, that was the thing. They wanted to see how long I could go before I wept or cried out. These boys, and several of their friends, had been attacking me on a daily basis for more than two years at this point, and I had stopped giving them the satisfaction of my tears. They didn’t like that, so the eraser was meant to elicit the response they desired. They never got it, so they finally stopped ripping my hand open with the eraser, and the four of them settled for beating me up again.
John Murtha Dies
John Murtha (D-PA) the guy who some, like Ann Coulter, thought was the “leading liberal” in the House, has died. ( I consider myself a liberal but I hadn’t heard of him until the right started making a fuss.)
A special election will be held in his district in Pennsylvania on May 18. That district went to McCain in 2008.
Memo to Sarah Palin: Try These
Sarah, rather than writing all over your hand, try these. They’re much neater.
Break Time — Astronomy/Photography
Here’s a gorgeous amateur photograph of moon. (Doesn’t look all that amateurish to me!)
February 11 in Iran
Thursday marks the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and there could be violence there like we saw last summer.
Let’s keep the people in our thoughts.
Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal
Here’s a nifty interactive graph showing how the money’s allocated.
Why It’s So Important That Our Media Not be Stenographers
This from Greg Sargent, about a Sarah Palin who refuses to appear anywhere but on Fox:
One interesting consequence of Sarah Palin decision to remain part of the national conversation while refusing to undergo any media scrutiny or cross-examination is that her lying is growing increasingly blatant, casual and even effortless.
[...]
The point is that if you never subject yourself to any kind of media cross-examination, it gets easier and easier to lie, because there’s simply no downside, or any disincentive of any kind, to lying as much as you want to.
