Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

any chance this will magically appear on youtube ?

google "daily show full episodes"

every show is online almost as soon as it airs on TV

[don]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

bad news for the pundits. If this holds, we'll have Wall Street vs Wall Street, without any excuses. Or as some of my fellow 'Tulipers frame the match-up, one socialist vs another. Note to self - catch up on political definitions . . . they seem to have undergone a radical change . . . oops, there's another one - radicals in Washington . . . . when I wasn't looking. "Control the language and you control the argument."

As New Hampshire Goes…
Election Industry in Crisis as Romney Romps Home

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

He stuck his foot in his mouth a couple of times in the final days, but on Tuesday millionaire Mormon Mitt Romney cantered past the winning post in the New Hampshire primary with 39 per cent of the votes cast. Libertarian Ron Paul ran second with 23 per cent. Another millionaire Mormon, Jon Huntsman, got 17 per cent. Floundering abjectly in the mire of defeat were Newt Gingrich (ten per cent) and the headline snatcher in Iowa a week ago, Rick Santorum (nine per cent.)

It was a big win for Romney who showed he could break 25 per cent. He wiped out the opposition and took a big stride towards the nomination. All the same, as New Hampshire primaries go, it was a very dull affair, at least for those of us who remember such excitements as the trickle of Ed Muskie’s tears – or was it merely snow – turning his 1972 front-runner campaign into a mighty river of defeat.

The much touted grudge debates last weekend between Romney and Gingrich were pallid. Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire Las Vegas casino mogul and fanatic supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, poneyed up $5 million for a Friends-of-Newt operation, which did produce a brilliant campaign ad against Romney, the Job-Slayer. No traction for Gingrich came of it, though maybe further outpourings from Adelson and friends could pump life back into his campaign down south.

Romney’s big foot-in-mouth moment came when he remarked in a campaign trail speech that “I like firing people”. He was actually talking about the freedom to fire your health insurance company, a luxury supposedly enjoyed by Americans until Obama passed his health bill, but he’ll be whacked over the head with the line for a while.

Now Romney heads down south to a likely victory in South Carolina and probably in Florida. Such triumphs, should they come to pass, will plunge the election industry into profound crisis. At this stage in the game, precisely one week after the presidential year opened with the Iowa caucuses on January 3, no one – except perhaps the candidate himself – wants to have the race locked up. The news business, led by the TV networks, wants cliffhangers. Campaign managers, dirty tricksters, and kindred consultants want volley after volley of campaign ads rolling dollars into their pockets. There are armies of “strategists” to be fed their campaign stipends.

At this stage in the game back in 1992, Bill Clinton was fighting for his life after his affair with Gennifer Flowers gradually seeped into public consciousness. In 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugged it out, round after round and well into the summer.

Will scandal breathe life into the campaign? Does the limber Romney have any dark personal secret still panting in the closet? Could he emulate the shameful John Edwards and be faithless while his wife Ann endures MS, just as Edwards’s wife Elizabeth fought cancer even as John carried on his romance with Rielle Hunter? It seems very unlikely, and even if some affair from Romney’s pre-marriage days doing his two-year stint as a Mormon missionary in Paris surfaces it probably wouldn’t do him any harm.

The same problem of being the locked-in nominee confronted John McCain in 2008. He won New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and then the super-Tuesday primaries, just as Romney is likely to do. Desperate to give his campaign a lift, McCain used the opportunity of the Republican convention to pluck Sarah Palin from her grizzly-skin rug in the governor’s mansion in Alaska. Last week, Tea Party queen Michele Bachmann, perhaps hoping for the Palin role, was notably restrained in her comments on Romney.

Ron Paul will fight on, and give the campaign season at least the semblance of life. In New Hampshire he won strong support from low-income Republicans and the young. It’s conceivable he could bolt onto the Libertarian third party ticket. It would certainly juice up the political year. High-level Republicans are reportedly threatening Paul that if he does bolt, they’ll make sure that his son Rand is not re-elected Senator in Kentucky in 2016.

Meanwhile Obama is running the sort of campaign incumbent presidents usually wage, seeking to display mastery on the international stage, preferably by waging war or threatening to do so. With this in mind, Obama has been steadily driving Iran into a corner with boycotts and sanctions. It seems likely that what Obama is maneuvering towards is for a desperate Tehran, its back to the wall with a collapsing currency, to make the first bellicose move.

It’s nothing new. President Roosevelt pushed a desperate Japan into war with his embargoes and economic sanctions. For the attack on Pearl Harbor, substitute the Iranians mining the straits of Hormuz.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/...ey-romps-home/

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

It shouldnt be called propaganda, I think the more correct word is Agitprop

Agitprop ( /ˈædʒɨtprɒp/; from Russian: агитпроп [ɐɡʲɪtˈprop]) is derived from agitation and propaganda,^[1] and describes stage plays, pamphlets, motion pictures and other art forms with an explicitly political message.


The term originated in Soviet Russia (the future USSR), as a shortened form of отдел агитации и пропаганды (otdel agitatsii i propagandy), i.e., Department for Agitation and Propaganda, which was part of the Central and regional committees of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The department was later renamed Ideological Department.

[don]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

The department was later renamed Ideological Department.

Later renamed the FCC . . . .

[don]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

a Reaganite backs Paul . . .

America has one last chance, and it is a very slim one. Americans can elect Ron Paul President, or they can descend into tyranny.

Why is Ron Paul America’s last chance?

Because he is the only candidate who is not owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military-security complex, Wall Street, and the Israel Lobby.

All of the others, including President Obama, are owned by exactly the same interest groups. There are no differences between them. Every candidate except Ron Paul stands for war and a police state, and all have demonstrated their complete and total subservience to Israel. The fact that there is no difference between them is made perfectly clear by the absence of substantive issues in the campaigns of the Republican candidates.

Only Ron Paul deals with real issues, so he is excluded from “debates” in which the other Republican candidates throw mud at one another: “Gingrich voted $60 million to a UN program supporting abortion in China.” “Romney loves to fire people.”

The mindlessness repels.

More importantly, only Ron Paul respects the US Constitution and its protection of civil liberty. Only Ron Paul understands that if the Constitution cannot be resurrected from its public murder by Congress and the executive branch, then Americans are lost to tyranny.

There isn’t much time in which to revive the Constitution. One more presidential term with no habeas corpus and no due process for US citizens and with torture and assassination of US citizens by their own government, and it will be too late. Tyranny will have been firmly institutionalized, and too many Americans from the lowly to the high and mighty will have been implicated in the crimes of the state. Extensive guilt and complicity will make it impossible to restore the accountability of government to law.

If Ron Paul is not elected president in this year’s election, by 2016 American liberty will be in a forgotten grave in a forgotten grave yard.

Having said this, there is no way Ron Paul can be elected, for these reasons:

Not enough Americans understand that the “war on terror” has been used to create a police state. The brainwashed citizenry believe that the police state is making them safe from terrorists.

Liberals, progressives, and the left-wing oppose Ron Paul, claiming that “he would abolish the social safety net, privatize Social Security and Medicare, throw the widows and orphans into the street, abolish the Federal Reserve,” etc.

Apparently, liberals, progressives, and the left-wing do not understand that privatizing Social Security and Medicare and destroying the social safety net are policies that many conservative Republicans favor and are policies that Wall Street is forcing on both political parties. In contrast, a President Ron Paul would be isolated in the White House and would never be able to muster the support of Congress and the powerful interest groups to achieve such radical changes. Moreover, Ron Paul has made it clear that a welfare-free state cannot be achieved by decree but only by creating an economy in which opportunity exists for people to stand on their own feet. Ron Paul has said that he does not support ending welfare before an economy is created that makes a welfare state unnecessary.

Candidate Paul cannot take any steps to reassure Americans that he would not throw them to the mercy of the free market, because his libertarian base would turn on him as another unprincipled politician willing to sacrifice his principles for political expediency.
If libertarians were not inflexible, candidate Paul could endorse Ron Unz’s proposal to solve the illegal immigration problem by raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour, so that Americans could afford to work the jobs that are taken by illegals.

Economist James K. Galbraith is probably correct that Unz’s proposal would boost the economy by injecting purchasing power and that the unemployment would be largely confined to illegals who would return to their home country. However, if Ron Paul were to treat Unz’s proposal as one worthy of study and consideration, libertarian ideologues would write him off. Whatever liberal/progressive support he gained would be offset by the loss of his libertarian base.

Why can’t libertarians be as intelligent as Ron Unz and see that if the Constitution is lost all that remains is tyranny?

In short, Americans cannot see beyond their ideologies to the real issue, which is the choice between the Constitution and tyranny.

So we hear absurd accusations that Ron Paul, a libertarian “is a racist.” “Ron Paul is an anti-semite.” “Ron Paul would favor the rich and hurt the poor.”

We don’t hear “Ron Paul would restore and protect the US Constitution.”

What do Americans think life will be like in the absence of the Constitution? I will tell you what it will be like, but first let’s consider the obstacles Ron Paul would face if he were to win the Republican nomination and if he were to be elected president.

In my opinion, if Ron Paul were to win the Republican nomination, the Republican Party would conspire to refuse it to him. The party would simply nominate a different candidate.

If despite everything, Ron Paul were to end up in the White House, he would not be able to form a government that would support his policies. Appointments to cabinet secretaries and assistant secretaries that would support his policies could not be confirmed by the US Senate. President Paul would have to appoint whomever the Senate would confirm in order to form a government. The Senate’s appointees would undermine his policies.

What a President Ron Paul could do, assuming Congress, controlled by powerful private interest groups, did not impeach him on trumped up charges, would be to use whatever forums that might be permitted him to explain to the public, judges, and law schools that the danger from terrorists is miniscule compared to the danger from a government unaccountable to law and the Constitution.

The reason we should vote for Ron Paul is to signal to the powers that be that we understand what they are doing to us. If Paul were to receive a large vote, it could have two good effects. One could be to introduce some caution into the establishment that would slow the march into more war and tyranny. The other is it would signal to Washington’s European and Japanese puppets that not all Americans are stupid sheep. Such an indication could make Washington’s puppet states more cautious and less cooperative with Washington’s drive for world hegemony.

What America Without the Constitution Will Be Like

In the January 4 Huff Post, attorney and author John Whitehead reported on the militarization of local police. Some police forces are now equipped with spy drones. Whitehead reports that a drone manufacturer, AeroVironment Inc., plans to sell 18,000 drones to police departments throughout the country. The company is also advertising a small drone, the “Switchblade,” which can track a person, land on the person and explode.

How long before Americans will be spied upon or murdered as extremists at the discretion of local police?

Recognizing the privacy danger, if not the murder danger, the American Civil Liberties Union has issued a report, “Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance.” https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/pr...rveillance.pdf

The ACLU believes, correctly, that liberty is threatened by “a surveillance society in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinized by authorities.”

The ACLU calls on Congress to legislate privacy protections against the police use of drones. I support the ACLU because it is the most important defender of civil liberty despite other misguided activities, but I wonder what the ACLU is thinking. Congress and the federal courts have already acquiesced in the federal government’s warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency. The Bush regime violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act many times, and all involved, including President Bush, should have been sent to prison for many lifetimes, as each violation carries a 5-year prison term. But the executive branch emerged scot free. No one was held accountable for clear violations of US statutory law.

The ACLU might think that although the federal executive branch has successfully elevated itself above the law, state and local police forces are still accountable. We must hope that they are, but I doubt it.

The militarization of local police has received some attention. What has not received attention is that state and local police are also being federalized. It is not only military armaments and spy technology that local police are receiving from Washington, but also an attitude toward the public along with federal oversight and the collaboration that goes with it. When Homeland Security, a federal police force, comes into states, as I know has occurred in Georgia and Tennessee, and doubtless other states, and together with the state police stop cars and trucks on Interstate highways and subject them to warrantless searches, what is happening is the de facto deputizing of the state police by Homeland Security. This is the way that Goering and Himmler federalized into the Gestapo the independent police forces of German provinces such as Prussia and Bavaria.

Homeland Security has expanded its warrantless searches far beyond “airline security.”
The budding gestapo agency now conducts warrantless searches on the nation’s highways, on bus and train passengers, and at Social Security offices. On Tuesday January 3, 2012, the Social Security office in Leesburg, Florida, apparently a terrorist hotspot, became a Homeland Security checkpoint. The DHS Gestapo armed with automatic weapons and sniffer dogs demanded IDs from local residents visiting their local Social Security office. http://www.dailycommercial.com/News/...y/010412shield

Thomas Milligan, district manager for the Social Security Administration office, said staff were not informed their offices were about to be stormed by armed federal police officers. DHS officials refused to answer questions asked by local media and left with no explanation at noon, reports infowars.com.

The DHS gestapo justified its takeover of a Leesburg Florida Social Security office as being an integral part of “Operational Shield,” conducted by the Federal Protective Service to detect “the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.”

One wonders if even brainwashed flag-waving “superpatriots” can miss the message. The Social Security office of Leesburg, Florida, population 19,086 in central Florida is not a place where terrorists devoid of proper ID might be visiting. To protect America from the scant possibility that terrorists might be congregating at the Leesburg Social Security office, the tyrants in Washington sent the Federal Protective Service at who knows what cost to demand ID from locals visiting their Social Security office.

What is this all about except to establish the precedent that federal police, a new entity in American life, the Federal Protective Service, has authority over state and local police offices and can appear out of the blue to interrogate local citizens.

Why the ACLU thinks it is going to get any action out of a Congress that has accommodated the executive branch’s destruction of habeas corpus, due process, and the constitutional and legal prohibitions against torture is beyond me. But at least the issue is raised. But don’t expect to hear about it from the “mainstream media.”

Americans in 2012, although only a few are aware, live in a concentration camp that is far better controlled than the one portrayed by George Orwell in 1984. Orwell, writing in the late 1940s could not imagine the technology that makes control of populations so thorough as it is today. Orwell’s protagonist could at least have hope. In 2012 with the erasure of privacy by the US government, protagonists can be eliminated by hummingbird-sized drones before they can initiate a protest, much less a rebellion.

Never in human history has a people been so easily and willingly controlled by a hostile government as Americans, who are the least free people on earth. And a large percentage of Americans still wave the flag and chant USA! USA! USA!

The Bush regime operated as if the Constitution did not exist. Any semblance of constitutional government that remained after the Bush years was terminated when Congress passed and President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. One wonders how the National Rifle Association, the defender of the Second Amendment, will now fare. If there is no Constitution, how can there be a Second Amendment? If the President, at his discretion, can set aside habeas corpus and due process and murder citizens based on unproven suspicions, why can’t he set aside the Second Amendment?

Indeed, it is folly to expect a police state to tolerate an armed population.

The NRA is very supportive of the police and military. Now that these armed organizations are being turned against the public, how will the NRA adjust its posture?

Many NRA members, pointing to the “Oath Keepers,” former members of the military who pledge to defend the Constitution, and to police chiefs who support the Second Amendment, believe that the police and military will disobey orders to attack citizens.
But we already witness constantly the gratuitous brutality of “our” police against peaceful protesters. We witness military troops all over the world murder citizens who protest government abuses. Why can’t it happen here?

If you don’t want it to happen here, you had better figure out some way to get Ron Paul into the Presidency and to get him a cabinet and subcabinet that will support him.

Meanwhile, the police state grows. On January 4, 2012, the Obama regime announced by decree, not by legislation, the creation of the Bureau of Counterterrorism which will among other tasks “seek to strengthen homeland security, countering violent extremism.” http://newsok.com/obama-launches-bur...le/feed/332475

Take a moment to think. Do you know of any “violent extremism” happening in the US?
The regime is telling you that it needs a new police bureau with unaccountable powers to “strengthen homeland security” against a nonexistent bogyman.

So who will be the violent extremists who require countering by the Bureau of Counterterrorism? It will be peace activists, the Occupy Wall Street protesters, the unemployed and foreclosed homeless. It will be whoever the police state says. And
there is no due process or recourse to law.

Given the facts before you, you are out of your mind if you think Ron Paul’s rhetoric against the welfare state is more important than his defense of liberty.

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/

[don]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

Beneath a Deeply Silly Campaign, a Deeply Serious Performer

By JASON ZINOMAN

Stephen Colbert teasing South Carolina about a run for the presidency is becoming one of America’s great political traditions, right up there with awkward photographs of candidates eating corn dogs at the Iowa State Fair.

On Thursday night he said he was setting up an exploratory committee after a Public Policy Polling survey put him ahead of the Republican presidential hopeful Jon M. Huntsman Jr. In 2007 Mr. Colbert made even more elaborate forays into a possible candidacy during the Democratic primaries, outpolling Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico at the time, and Christopher J. Dodd, the senator from Connecticut. He didn’t get on the ballot then, and he won’t this year. (He missed the Nov. 1 deadline, and South Carolina doesn’t provide a space for write-in candidates.) But of course that’s not the point. His latest presidential flirtation is an attempt at something even more ambitious: making campaign-finance laws funny.

By putting Jon Stewart in charge of his “super” political action committee, renamed the Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC, Mr. Colbert provides a study in the absurdity of laws governing campaign spending. It’s what’s fresh about a Colbert joke that seems a little tired on the second go-round. We’ve seen these elaborate teases and the celebratory balloons before. Then again, the potential (and unpredictability) of Mr. Colbert’s stunt derives from his uncanny ability to draw the rest of the world into his comic conceits.

Seeing poor Mr. Huntsman’s face on Fox News after he was asked about trailing Mr. Colbert, a former Second City performer, made for delightful cringe humor. And the media attention is an incredible spectacle. Last time Mr. Colbert did so many news programs (he was on “Meet the Press,” for heaven’s sake) that there was even a media backlash inspiring another wave of reports.

Now he is starting the cycle again: he is scheduled to appear on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday morning. Even writing this column shows how I’ve become part of his joke, which is expanding into the media landscape the way the Blob attacked a small town.

This all makes you realize something that has been a longtime thematic undercurrent of “The Colbert Report”: Mr. Colbert is a serious performer playing a silly character, while the media and political world are deeply silly but pretending to be serious. That was never more clearly illustrated than in the most triumphant part of his show on Thursday, when the respected Politico writer Mike Allen offered a (mock?) serious analysis of his prospects, citing polls and strategy. With little prompting, he started game-planning the nonexistent and probably never existent campaign, becoming part of the joke as well. The journalist Joshua Green played a similar cameo role last election.

You’ve heard of fantasy baseball? This is fantasy politics. And it’s perfectly suited to a cycle in which journalists spent weeks obsessing over the political future of the host of “The Apprentice.” Incidentally, one of the funniest moments in the current campaign occurred when Rick Santorum told Politico that he would not draft a player on his fantasy baseball team who is a known steroid user. (I want to be in his league!)

The most remarkable thing about prominent political journalists speculating about a fake candidate is that it seems so normal now. What makes Mr. Colbert such an ingenious satirist is not just that he exposes political fantasy but that he also takes it to its illogical conclusion. After all, the first issue ad that he made with “funds” from his super PAC starred a theoretically real candidate, Buddy Roemer, standing on a fake set with fake books, and ended with Mr. Colbert on a unicorn proclaiming, “To Narnia!”

Stephen Colbert in 2010 at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/ar....html?ref=arts

[oddlots]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

Well that's a toss-up. Vote for Paul because he understands the centrality of civil liberties. Don't vote for him because he's spouting the same "government is the problem" mantra that has enabled moneyed interests to increasingly treat the government like a hand puppet.

In the middle of an epoch-defining economic crisis, that really seems like an uncomfortable choice.

FWIW I think Roberts' calling out liberals for their apparent disinterest or complacency in the face of the developing Homeland Security hydra is right on the money.

[davidstvz]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

This is kind of random, but does anyone here remember anything about Ross Perot? Was he anti-FIRE? I assume Nader was (kind of like a left leaning Ron Paul).

[don]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

This is kind of random, but does anyone here remember anything about Ross Perot? Was he anti-FIRE? I assume Nader was (kind of like a left leaning Ron Paul).

As I recall his major campaign issue was outsourcing. NAFTA was on the table at that time, which he referred to as the "Great Sucking Sound taking away American jobs". Quaint, in retrospect.

[davidstvz]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

I've kind of been wondering what would have been the result if we had forcibly stopped all outsourcing with high tariffs in the context of FIRE back in the late 80's or early 90's. How would things be different now?

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

As I recall his major campaign issue was outsourcing. NAFTA was on the table at that time, which he referred to as the "Great Sucking Sound taking away American jobs". Quaint, in retrospect.

Boy do I remember THAT.

Great soundbite.....but not so sure it worked in his favor as I recall it being used as ammunition against him as if it was laughable.

I've always thought of Perot as a very successful patriot(with the best interest of most folks at heart), with integrity(I think....maybe just situational integrity), but a personality like incredibly abrasive sandpaper.

I'm not sure where I stand when it comes to 3rd party politics.....he smashed a 3rd party onto the radar(leading in polls at one stage), but did he suffocate it after his loss and fail to let it live beyond his cult of personality?

I respect what he did on behalf of POWs/MIAs in Vietnam....as well as his successful efforts to rescue his employees imprisoned in Iran during the 79 revolution.

Perot's running mate Admiral James Stockdale was ripped to shreds by the media and entertainment industry. It's a shame a man who sacrificed so much in service to his country as treated that poorly.

A guy who tutored Astronaut John Glenn in Math and Physics, graduated from US Naval Academy and Stanford, suffered being tortured as a POW, served as a test pilot and reached the rank of Admiral, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, President of the Naval War College and defined the word integrity was destroyed by the media.

This:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKpX-5jQjQ0

Gets turned into this:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7m...de-with-pe_fun

But maybe that's why people with integrity are lacking in the political ring.....

[cjppjc]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

Boy do I remember THAT.

Great soundbite.....but not so sure it worked in his favor as I recall it being used as ammunition against him as if it was laughable.

I've always thought of Perot as a very successful patriot(with the best interest of most folks at heart), with integrity(I think....maybe just situational integrity), but a personality like incredibly abrasive sandpaper.

I'm not sure where I stand when it comes to 3rd party politics.....he smashed a 3rd party onto the radar(leading in polls at one stage), but did he suffocate it after his loss and fail to let it live beyond his cult of personality?

I respect what he did on behalf of POWs/MIAs in Vietnam....as well as his successful efforts to rescue his employees imprisoned in Iran during the 79 revolution.

Perot's running mate Admiral James Stockdale was ripped to shreds by the media and entertainment industry. It's a shame a man who sacrificed so much in service to his country as treated that poorly.

A guy who tutored Astronaut John Glenn in Math and Physics, graduated from US Naval Academy and Stanford, suffered being tortured as a POW, served as a test pilot and reached the rank of Admiral, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, President of the Naval War College and defined the word integrity was destroyed by the media.

This:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKpX-5jQjQ0

Gets turned into this:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7m...de-with-pe_fun

But maybe that's why people with integrity are lacking in the political ring.....

I too remember how he was savaged, and ignored in a debate. MLK reminds us to judge a man by the content of his character.

[flintlock]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

Definitely worth the read on all of those. There is something I see repeatedly that bothers me about the "99 percent"

[SIZE=-1]

I find this very misleading. I don't know the actual question posed to him, but I found this phrasing elsewhere:



I find that kind of journalism lacking in integrity.

What a relatively small group of people say does not automatically equal "the views of the 99 percent".

Just because I'm an American doesn't mean that every opinion I hold is the "views of the American people".

I knew right away that quote was misleading. Anyone who knows Bernie Marcus knows he is not like that. Plenty of douchebag CEO types out there. So why does he pick one of the good guys, who was famous for making millionaires out of cashiers and clerks?

[don]

Re: Taibbi: and so the show begins . . .

New Breeding Program Aimed At Keeping Moderate Republicans From Going Extinct

February 13, 2012 |



A rare moderate Republican is safely tranquilized before being brought to his breeding pen.


WASHINGTON—Saying the now critically endangered species of politician is at high risk for complete extinction within the next 10 years, Beltway-area conservationists announced plans Monday for a new captive breeding program designed to save moderate Republicans.

According to members of the Initiative to Protect the Political Middle (IPPM), centrist Republicans, who once freely roamed the nation calling for both economic deregulation and a return to Reagan-era tax rates on the wealthy, are in dire need of protection, having lost large portions of their natural terrain to the highly territorial Evangelical and Tea Party breeds.

"Our new program is designed to isolate the few remaining specimens of moderate Republicans, mate them in captivity, and then safely release these rare and precious creatures back into the electorate," said IPPM’s Cynthia Rollins, who traces the decline of the species to changes in the political climate and rampant, predatory fanaticism. "Within our safe, enclosed habitats, these middle-of-the-road Republican Party members can freely support increased funding for public education and even gay rights without being threatened by the far-right subgenus."

Working within a narrow three-election-cycle window to reverse the decline before extinction becomes imminent, political conservationists told reporters they have already begun the arduous process of tracking down members of the elusive breed of sensible, non-reactionary public officeholders, which a generation ago was one of the most plentiful GOP species in existence.

IPPM officials also said that while there is no guarantee they will ever be able to restore the moderate-Republican population to its once-teeming levels, "every effort must be made" to forcibly breed the species and at least keep it alive in the Midwest and Northeast, where its chances for survival remain highest.

"Last week we shot Gov. Mitch Daniels with a tranquilizer dart from a blind we'd set up near the Indiana Capitol, and we plan on mating him very soon with a senator we trapped up in Maine," said IPPM reproductive expert Gabriel Burke, adding that forced breeding of centrist Republicans in captivity is a humane, carefully regulated procedure designed to simulate mating in the wild. "While captive specimens tend to be wary around each other at first, once they sense they're both opponents of labor unions yet also willing to make tough compromises on collective bargaining rights, the sexual ritual begins almost instantly."

Added Burke, "In fact, one of our specimens, Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, has already been mated with five or six other regional lawmakers in the past week alone."

Though hopes for the captive breeding program remain high, many leading political conservationists note the number of optimal habitats for moderate, freethinking Republicans across the country has shrunk drastically, with studies showing the species may never again be able to recover in areas where it has been totally eradicated, such as the South and the GOP caucus in the House of Representatives.

As they continue to search for nonextremist conservatives with the vaguest ability to compromise on social issues like abortion in cases of rape and incest, IPPM officials acknowledged they may be fighting a race against time.

"The most difficult task we have is preserving members of this disappearing breed before the desperate need for votes forces them to begin parroting borderline racist anti-immigration ideologies and accusing their opponents of being socialists," tracker Phil Gandelman said. "We thought we had captured and tagged a truly exemplary specimen a few weeks ago, but when we studied the creature more closely, we realized it was just John McCain."

"The poor little guy was so far gone we had to put him out of his misery," Gandelman added.

Representatives for the IPPM said they hope their current effort will prove more successful than past attempt to propagate moderates by crossbreeding highly liberal and extreme conservative politicians, which ended in tragedy when Vermont senator Bernie Sanders was physically mauled and torn apart by Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-KS).

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new...ce=patrick.net