If Unions are the Devil and we railed against the UAW making (not true) $70 an hour, how come we aren’t railing against that other union that is protecting their workers by keeping demand high and supply low.  Their workers are definitely  making a few hundred thousand and up to a few million a year?  AKA the AMA?

People that have cancer and other really expensive health issues shouldnt NOT be allowed coverage in my helath plan.  The last fucking thing I want to do is have to spend my hard earned money on keeping them alive.  Besides, how is the CEO running that company supposed to make a living if we keep paying out on health care plans!?

Yawn.

When I get me some Army tanks rolling down main street to arrest a couple of fuktards with M-16’s and dvr’d copies of “Wolverine”!  bitches!!!!!

I’m speechless.  They just make up memo’s so they can/could break the law.

“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said.

The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.

The memorandum was declassified in March. But the White House debate about the Lackawanna group is the first evidence that top American officials, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, actually considered using the document to justify deploying the military into an American town to make arrests

It is just truly amazing to read this stuff. What sickens me even more are the apologists and defenders. How? How can people say this is acceptable? Can people see past their noxes and 20/30/40 years from now. Don’t they understand what this means for the citizens of the country and our freedoms? I mean, they have us fighting against ourselves. Morons arguing about the 2nd Ammendment? Are you kidding me? They have a merry band of lackies ready to accept and do whatever they are asked to do. It so blatantly obvious, yet, no big deal to some. Too many people find this acceptable and it is sad.

Still, at least one high-level meeting was convened to debate the issue, at which several top Bush aides argued firmly against the proposal to use the military, advanced by Mr. Cheney, his legal adviser David S. Addington and some senior Defense Department officials.

I think people forget that Cheney worked for Nixon. That point of fact can’t be lost on people. One of the most racist, xenophic, paranoid people to run this country. And here, some 30 years later, he is reincarnated as the VP. Thank god.

I can’t believe I am actually going to say this, but thank God for Bush. He really played a dumb SOB but when I read stuff like this, I just find it so hard to fathom that he had the brains to understand the limits of our military and that he understood the constitution.

Is it possible that Bush had a firmer grasp of the Constitution then we all are led to believe? He didn’t pardon Libby after all. It shows on some level that he was smart enough to know some things. He must have just been so powerless.

Should the Army be allowed to arrest US citizens?

Ist the Army allowed to arrest US citizens?

I don’t recall

From time to time you will start seeing guest posts from various commenters and other bloggers.   If you don’t read this first ever guest post then you are missing one hell of a post. Please comment and let DG know your thoughts.

On Conspiracies and Commentary

By: Dorian Gray

Their great need, their hunger, is for good sense, clarity, truth – even an atom of it.  People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to carry home when the day is done.  See how willing they are to accept the wildest nonsense.  – Herzog, Saul Bellow

In an interesting coincidence this week the Mike Castle “birther” video went viral on the 40^th anniversary of the first moon landing.  The latter, along with the JFK assassination and the 11 September attacks, have been the quintessential riddles of the lunatic fringe.  Birth certificate-gate is quickly catapulting to the Mount Rushmore of conspiracies theories and this got me wondering.  Why are some so prone to this type of thinking?  Are these people ill or stupid or what?  I don’t think so.  I think most are quite bright actually (the nutter in Georgetown as a potential exception).  So what then is clouding their thinking?

So I think I have had a breakthrough.  I stumbled across a brilliant essay written by Mark Oppenheimer in Tablet Magazine.  He interviews two of America’s leading holocaust deniers.  They historically have collaborated but have recently fallen out.  It is a fascinating read and illustrates how, although they champion the same issue, they do it for different reasons and have different goals.  It is most certainly worth your time.  It’s presented in four parts:

http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/7264/the-denial-twist/

One of the deniers just fancies himself a libertarian who takes unpopular and shocking opinions just, well just because he is a “skeptic” and wants to exercise his free speech.  The other is a very smart guy who is very well read and has an incredible breadth of knowledge.  He even has a Masters Degree in European history from Indiana.  This is the analysis that struck me and to my mind is analogous to conspiracy theorists in general.

But as one professor of mine, who had worked as a public historian, once told me: “Beware the history buff.” The buff—as opposed to the scholar, or the curious peruser, or the dilettante—eats up all this knowledge but can’t properly digest it. He (most buffs seem to be male) cannot keep facts in perspective; he fails at precisely the task the scholar is good at, figuring out which facts matter most, which pieces of evidence to privilege, what to weigh more than what. So a particular truth—that there are a lot of Jewish executives in Hollywood, or that African Americans commit more crimes, per capita, than whites—assumes an outsized importance. With no ability to create proper contexts for facts, the buff is in danger of becoming either a conspiracy theorist or a bigot, or both. This is why there is so much crossover between the communities of, say, 9/11 skeptics and anti-Semites. Conspiracy theorists and bigots are people with faulty judgment casting about for answers; but whereas the conspiracy theorist needlessly increases the complexity of the world, the bigot needlessly simplifies. “The Jews have secret meetings where they plan the world economy,” says the conspiracy theorist; “the Jews are treacherous, bad people,” says the bigot.

I think in our current 24 hour news cycle, a billion blogs, confirmation-bias driven discourse this commentary is right on target.   An argument can be made to support anything, but we are failing to properly evaluate the foundations for these arguments.  More often than not preconditioned ideology determines (predetermines?) conclusions and no one has the skill, the time, or the courage to challenge her or his own philosophy.

So we have a fundamental problem and I think we are all predisposed to this type of thinking.  The problem defined nicely by Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptics magazine.  “You want to have a mind open enough to accept radical new ideas; but not so open that your brains fall out.”  This is what happening to all of us.

We recognize this easily when it comes to wild conspiracy foolishness but not so much in daily political banter.  This to me is the biggest hindrance to finding some common ground.

CANTOR WANTS A ‘JUDEO-CHRISTIAN’ FOREIGN POLICY…. I don’t expect much in the way of depth from House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), but if he could explain what a “Judeo-Christian” foreign policy would look like, I’d sure appreciate it.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told Christian Zionists that U.S. policies in the Middle East must be “firmly grounded” in Judeo-Christian principles.

“Reaching out to the Muslim world may help in creating an environment for peace in the Middle East, but we must insist as Americans that our policies be firmly grounded in the beliefs of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which this country was founded,” said Cantor (R-Va.), the House minority whip and the only Jewish Republican in Congress, in a speech to the Christians United For Israel annual conference in Washington.

Did you like that last condescending statement? “Sure, listen, reaching out to those idiots ain’t a bad idea. They kill people with bombs on their retarded women. We do it with cluster bombs and drones. After all America was founded on a real religion.”

If you are going to have CEO’s making 20mm plus, people are going to have to die.