The rightwing complains about Sharia? What about “Born Again” fantasies? Sharia is no threat to America or to its institutions… “Born Again” fancies like the Manhattan Declaration are clear and present dangers to America and all Americans (especially, real Christians not contaminated with Sectarian notions)… end of story.
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It’s cheaper to invest in politicians than in pollution controls…
Cynical Texas saying
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Read these:
http://www.thenation.com/article/162875/rewrite-sugarcoat-ignore-8-ways-conservatives-misremember-american-history
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162913/rick-perry-governor-sale
Note this:
Conservatives’ view of history is either a warm, patriotic tale of American exceptionalism or a tale of Big Government oppression. It glides over or misrepresents progressive triumphs like the New Deal or Great Society and ignores unpleasant episodes like the Jim Crow era. Only studying the United States’ “best hits” ignores the contributions of minorities, labour, and other groups. “Historians constantly challenge each other, and understandings of the past evolve (for whatever reason). However, these people are different in that they aren’t really reality-based and don’t have much standing or credibility among scholars”, William Link, a professor of history at the University of Florida, told The Nation. …
Perry has been elected governor three times, and has proclaimed his state a model worth replicating at the national level. Yet, Texas has the highest number of residents without health insurance in the nation, among the worst-ranked food stamp programmes, one of the highest child poverty rates, the lowest percentage of residents with a high school diploma, and one of the highest teenage birth rates. These are stats that deserve swears, not swagger.
Texas’s political system is also as brazenly capable of corruption by money and special interests as that in Washington, and unabashedly so. Long before the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United allowed unlimited contributions to begin flowing into national super PACs, Texas had some of the most lax campaign finance laws anywhere. At the state level, there are no limits on the amount of money individuals can contribute to candidates, allowing wealthy donors to directly bankroll campaigns. In such an environment, Rick Perry didn’t just survive, he flourished. He didn’t just embrace the system, he shattered records with it, raising more than anyone in Texas history. Indeed, for as long as Perry has been governor, the governor’s mansion has been ostensibly for sale.
Instead of commenting myself, here’s what I saw in the comboxes:
- Wow. That doesn’t even include Jonah Goldberg’s masterpiece Liberal Fascism, which claims that Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were all leftists and that Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Jimmy Carter are just “softer” versions of these monsters.
- Right-wingers lie and make stuff up. We all do that a little, but the talking crotches on FOX make it an art form. More worrisome is their appeal to the perpetually-dim bullies among us.
- While both left and right use history to further their own agendas, I find the right’s message to be more insidious. The left tends to focus on the historical warts such as genocide, exploitation, unjust wars, economic inequality, and minority struggles. The right on the other hand glosses over the dark side and paints a picture of American exceptionalism where manifest destiny is triumphant and we always advance towards the light.
- They look at the economic growth during the period of 1950-80 and see nothing but the failure of unions and liberalism. They see a 10 percent drop in poverty rates as a failure. They see the rise of the middle class as being related to only taxes, not wage growth. They look at the end of segregation and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and see nothing but total failure. They see the War on Drugs as a money-saving success, but the War on Poverty as a complete failure. They see cleaner air and water as job killing, regardless of the fact that “green tech” is going to create jobs as energy prices climb. Moreover, they see a divorced man who was the father of a dysfunctional family, an ex-union president, a signer of liberal abortion rights in California, a guy that raised taxes and added national debt as a hero of Family Values, a deficit hawk, and uniting force.
- What the neocons can’t either remember or choose not to remember was that the economy sucked royally when their Messiah Ronnie Raygun was president. I don’t know how old these guys are, but I recall the job market back then, it sucked. If you wanted a job and you didn’t have a rich mommy and daddy, the military was pretty much one of the only options there was, unless, of course, you could flip burgers or scrub toilets for a living. Reagan’s “ramping up military spending” destroyed the US job market in that time.
- George Orwell summed it up thusly, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”. There’s not much more to be said on the subject, except that we must be alert to the re-writing history and to the motives of those who’re doing it.
Keep this in mind… the Republican Party wants the entire USA to be like Texas… lowest in the country as far as education goes, first in the country as far as putting people to death goes (it’s fair to point up that there’s good Texans who stand against the Republican Moloch… they’ve been squashed so far, but they’re there). That’s a “nasty, brutish, and short” Hobbesian future… yet, that’s what the New GOP advocates… I don’t think that’s hard to fathom, is it?
Barbara-Marie Drezhlo
Wednesday 24 August 2011
Albany NY
Voices from Russia 
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