This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Blue Dogs and VSOs saved vet health care in House

    For those of you skeptics (namely Brandon Friedman, formerly of VoteVets) who said that Democrats wouldn’t harm veteran health care, take a look at this morning’s Wall Street Journal;

    We’re still sorting through the health-care deal Henry Waxman struck with Blue Dog Democrats recently, but one 11th-hour revision stands out. Namely, veterans will now be “exempt from the requirements of the legislation.”

    That’s how Mr. Waxman’s staff put it in a memo to reporters earlier this month, announcing amendments that the House Energy and Commerce Committee included before passing the bill 31 to 28. These changes were designed to assuage the “grave concerns” of the American Legion, Amvets and others about how their members could be penalized by new taxes and insurance regulations.

    We’re delighted service members will be let off this particular hook, but why doesn’t everyone else warrant the same dispensation? Or to put it another way, Mr. Waxman is conceding that his plan will interfere with all insurance arrangements that aren’t exempted, including private options that are working well.

    Yeah, see, if the Blue Dogs (and Republicans, btw) hadn’t held out, and if the American Legion and AMVETs hadn’t made such a stink, the Democrat Congress would’ve gone merrily on their way to make veteran healthcare too expensive for most of us. I’d like to think that it was out of ignorance, but I tend to think it was completely thoughtless.

    For decades, Democrats have attempted to fund their attempts to buy political patronage with money meant for veterans and the military. I’ll admit that so far, this administration has been very good to veterans, but that hasn’t come without vigilance as regular readers of this blog know.

  • Obama death threats up…or not

    Drudge links to this ABC story under this headline;

    obama-death-threats

    Of course the article has the fingerprints of Mark Potok from Southern Poverty Law Center all over it;

    “I don’t think these are simply people who are mentally ill or off their rocker,” Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told ABC News of those behind the threats. “In a very real sense they represent a genuine reaction, a genuine backlash against Obama.”

    Heh- SPLC’s Intelligence Project. It obviously needs more funding because I can’t find any intelligence at SPLC – especially in the project’s director.

    ABC takes up Potok’s scare mongering tone by recounting the swastika painted on the sign outside of Congressman David Scott’s office – without mentioning that Scott taunted his constituency and that the perpetrator hasn’t been found yet – so who can responsibly discuss the motivations yet given the large number of fake noose scares and swastika spraypaintings in recent years?

    Oh, and Rush Limbaugh said that the Obama White House logo for the healthcare plan looks like a Nazi symbol. I don’t see it, except for wings over a circle. Sounds like blather to me;

    obama-healthcare-logo

    nazi-logo

    But I remember that the Left said Homeland Security sounded like a Nazi or a USSR nomenclature.

    Anyway, race-baiting, fear-monger Potok says we’re all racists;

    “I think the president has, in effect, triggered fears amongst fairly large numbers of white people in this country that they are somehow losing their country, that the battle is lost,” Potok told ABC News. “The nation that their Christian white forefathers created has somehow been taken from them.”

    Yup, that has to be it. The thing is the article has buried among the ads, on the second html page says the White House hasn’t noticed any increase in death threats, but they put that paragraph next to a photo of the jackass who took his handgun to a protest against the President;

    obama-death-threats2

    So we should be worried about death threats on the President because Potok is the only guy in the whole country who thinks “right wing hate” is on the rise.

  • Townhall protests take their toll

    Financial Times reports that some of the newly elected Democrats are beginning to waver on the health care proposal in Congress;

    Mr Kratovil, who was hanged in effigy by a healthcare protester at a town hall meeting in his state of Maryland, said he would have voted against legislation if it had come to a vote last month.

    Tom Perriello, another new representative from neighbouring Virginia, also says he is not yet ready to support the current proposals in the House of Representatives, partly because he is “still getting feedback from?.?.?.?constituents”.

    Neither man has ruled out voting for a revised package.

    The Hill says Harry Reid coined a new adjective for the town hall protesters. Yes, we’re all “evil-mongers”.

    Reid coined the term in a speech to an energy conference in Las Vegas this week and repeated it in an interview with Politics Daily.

    Such “evil-mongers” are using “lies, innuendo and rumor,” to drown out rational debate, Reid said.

    “It was an original with me,” Reid said of the term. “I maybe could have been less descriptive,” he said, adding that “I doubt you’ll hear it from me again.”

    Our buddy, DanNY, confronted some SEIU thugs up in Long Island today.

    In Los Angeles, cops cornered a guy suspected of threatening the White House.

    A man suspected of making threats against the White House led police on a chase Thursday then holed up for hours in a car outside the Federal Building in West Los Angeles.

    The building had been locked down since noon, and employees were told to stay inside, FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said.

    The unidentified suspect made a threat against the White House, but details were not being released, U.S. Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said.

    I guess SPLC will be adding him their domestic terrorist list. Fox News reports that Democrats are erecting “roadblocks” to protesters;

    Americans who want to express their opinions on health care reform at town halls across the country are encountering a host of roadblocks, ranging from fake schedules to a demand that they show their driver’s licenses or photo identification.

    Supporters of President Obama’s plan say they are pushing back against opposition that is disruptive and designed to shut down debate. But opponents say the supporters’ tactics are underhanded and designed to undermine democracy in action.

    So I guess every one we see that oppose the health care plan are legit now. You sure you guys want to do that? Wasn’t it easier to just say they were outsiders than it will be from now on? A new Fox News poll says that 52% of the outrage is real – wanna make it 100%?

  • We owe Ralph Nader an apology

    CRaisi sent me a link from Truthdig in which they lament not listening to the brilliance and intellectual depth of such thinkers as Ralph (Unsafe at any Age) Nader and Cynthia (Does my hair make me look insane) McKinney;

    They were right. If a few million of us had had the temerity to stand behind our ideals rather than our illusions and the empty slogans peddled by the Obama campaign, we would have a platform. We forgot that social reform never comes from accommodating the power structure but from frightening it. The Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists who battled for women’s rights, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement knew that the question was not how do we get good people to rule—those attracted to power tend to be venal mediocrities—but how do we limit the damage the powerful do to us.

    Of course, all it’s really just a way to absolve themselves of the shit-stain that is the Obama Administration;

    The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

    They act surprised. The far-Left lives in a fantasy world where the laws of nature and economics don’t apply. Every Left administration that gets in office gets gob-smacked by reality when they discover that their campaign rhetoric would probably drive the nation right into the ocean if applied in the copious amounts that they’ve promised.

    At least the partisan Democrats don’t just crouch down and cry in the middle of the street like the hippies do.

  • Chasing down the SPLC

    Yeah, so I’m obsessed with the SPLC today. The Associated Press has written a really sorry POS article on the report. For example, as proof that militias are growing, they offer this YouTube video;

    Aside from the guy in the video being a big, fat douche, the video was put on YouTube on Oct 6, 2008, a month before the election – before we knew we were going to have a Black President. So what does it prove? This doofus clown wanted us to buy legal semi-automatic weapons BEFORE the election.

    Oh, but here’s the ultimate proof;

    A series of domestic terrorism incidents over the past year have not been directly tied to organized militias, but the rhetoric behind some of the crimes are similar with that of the militia movement.

    There’s nothing to tie crime to domestic terrorists, so that proves that militia influence is growing. The militias aren’t saying anything that Ron Paul supporters weren’t saying last year. The only thing that’s changed is the Black President. Stupid AP.

    They ended their article with the only real example of “right wing terrorism” this year;

    One alleged example of a lone-wolf offender is the 88-year-old man charged in the June shooting death of a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

    Not surprisingly, the SPLC found another domestic terrorist in Jason E. Bush, who I wrote about a few months back. He was a career criminal who lied his way into the Minuteman movement and convinced a woman to help him murder a man and his child for what they thought was drug money.

    Also present at the Cochise County muster were members of Minuteman American Defense (MAD), the Everett, Wash.-based group led by Shawna Forde, who was arrested less than a month later in the May 30 double murder in Arivaca, Ariz. Also arrested were MAD Operations Director Jason Bush and a third MAD member.

    Bush and Forde and one other person are proof that the whole Minuteman movement are racist, domestic terrorists, according to SPLC. Using SPLC’s reasoning, Carlos Bledsoe is proof that all Muslim converts are domestic terrorists. I’ll probably get TAH labeled as a hate site for writing that, won’t I?

    But trolling around, I think I found Spooky 8 over at Democratic Underground going by the name formercia in a discussion on the SPLC report;

    du-formercia1

  • SPLC’s connections to the DHS report

    I’m sure you all remember TSO’s work on the Department of Homeland Security report in which DHS warned that veterans returning from the wars should be deemed possible terrorists. In his post, TSO wrote;

    But Part Two of what pisses me off is the second bullet up there, to wit:

    A prominent civil rights organization reported in 2006 that “large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the [U.S.] armed forces.”

    And what “prominent civil rights organization” are they citing to? The Southern Poverty Legal Center, SPLC.

    Well, our friends at Americans For Limited Government and NetRight Nation filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the sources of that DHS report and guess what they found in the initial response. It was rife with Southern Poverty Law Center links;

    splc-links

    So I’m tooting TSO’s horn for him…well, maybe not – it depends on how you interpret that line.

  • Scott’s office vandalized

    I linked to this video Sunday wherein Congressman David Scott melted down because he didn’t believe there were any white doctors in his district;

    The local news reports this morning that someone spray painted a swastika on a sign in front of his office;

    Employees discovered a Swastika allegedly spray-painted on a sign by vandals at Rep. Scott’s office in Smyrna.

    The motivation of the vandals is still under investigation.

    He claims there’s some hate mail involved, too;

    Scott held up a sheet of paper to Watson that had a picture of President Obama on it, his face made to look like the joker in Batman, a swastika on his forehead. Then he read what it said.

    “They address it to n—– David Scott, ‘You were, you are, and you shall forever be, a n—–‘,” Scott said, reading from the letter. “I got this in the mail today. Somewhere underneath this, bubbling up, is the ugly viscissitudes of racism.

    Yeah, so we’re all racists because ONE racist sent him some mail and possible ONE OTHER person painted a swastika on his sign. That’s the simple answer.

    David Scott was on Fox News this morning. He claims that the video from channel 11 was re-edited somehow. “Judge me right”. Since the video wasn’t a news camera, it isn’t true;Because the news isn’t coming from the media, somehow we can’t trust our lyin’ eyes.

    Photo of the sign below the fold thanks to CRaisi;
    (more…)

  • Specter’s townhall meeting

    In Lebanon, PA Arlen Specter is holding a standing-room-only townhall meeting that’s being broadcast on Fox News live. He’s an idiot.

    The first question from the audience was in reference to the abortion clause in the health care plan. Her question was whether the tax payers would be forced to to pay for abortions. Specter told her that there were two plans available – that you could choose whether you wanted to have abortions included in your plan or not. But that wasn’t the question, was it? So the answer, I guess, is “yes” – taxpayers will be forced to pay for other people’s abortions.

    The next question was about the single-payer option. The voter asked Specter if he’d vote for the single-payer option – Specter said that “no” he wouldn’t vote for the health care bill if the single payer option was part of the plan. Then he turned around and said he’d work hard to keep the single payer option “on the table”.

    He says that according to the Hyde Amendment, public money cannot be used for abortion, and that he’ll never vote for anything that raises the national deficit. So you tell me how he’ll vote. His defense is that there’s no bill in the Senate right now so he can’t tell us whether he’ll vote for the bill or not. So if he doesn’t read it, I guess he won’t for it.

    Here’s a link to the live video

    Added: The whole townhall meeting was pretty civil except at the end when one guy got upset because he didn’t get an opportunity to speak. So what part of the hour-long meeting got highlighted on RealClearPolitics and Drudge? The first few minutes of this video;

    The one guy who was upset gets the headline “Specter shouted down over health care”. Even though the rest of the questioners and the crowd was civil, the one loudmouth gets the news.