"Maybe we could just heat them up a little bit to let them see the errors of their ways." Sen Jim DeMint, saying gays should be put into ovens, but not murdered, just turn the heat up to teach them a lesson Link
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"There has been no attempt to reach out to people they don't see as their people," said the wife of a senior administration official who doesn't have Chicago ties. "They don't reach out even to people in the administration who aren't from their inner circle."
Is this why Obama has made more than his share of mistakes? He's getting advice from one small group and nobody else can get thru?
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Hateful Days - William Rivers Pitt
There is a great deal of hate in my heart today. Not the healthiest condition to find myself in, but these things sometimes cannot be helped. The hate is a free-flowing thing, expanding in all directions because, simply put, there is something to revile and despise in virtually every direction I turn. Sarah Palin's ridiculous reality show was a ratings blockbuster. Hateful. George H. W. Bush is getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom, because Mr. Obama just can't help sucking up to the very Republicans who are about to make a project out of throttling his administration. Hateful. There will be no punishment for those who destroyed CIA evidence of rampant torture during the Bush administration. Wildly hateful.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-rivers-pitt/32671/hateful-days
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Who ever would have guessed? So once again, Obama has proposed a Republican idea but suddenly, the GOP wants him to push more to the right. Meanwhile, liberals again are angry with yet another failed sell out. What a brilliant 2012 strategy.
Republicans were pleased, but they didn't want to sound too happy with something their arch-rival proposed. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said the freeze "is both necessary and, quite frankly, long over-due."
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the ranking Republican on the committee's federal workforce panel, called it "a step in the right direction. However, the proposal does not appear to curb step increases. If that is the case, this announcement is nothing more than a hollow press release. At the end of the day, this policy will serve only to frustrate current employees while doing nothing to curb our debts."
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Kevin Richardson, star of the new documentary "The Lion Whisperer", and his white lions.
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"Six NATO Soldiers Killed by Man in Afghan Border Police Uniform:" so the headline reads. Have you noticed how American soldiers killed in Afghanistan are now being described as 'NATO Soldiers'? Softens the blow, doesn't it? That's how propaganda works.
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Change we can believe in!
Blatant Polluters Welcome
In the name of job creation, the Obama administration has doled out billions in stimulus funds - and granted exemptions from even basic environmental oversight - to some of the country's biggest polluters, including Westar, DuPont and BP. From a Center for Public Integrity investigation.
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This makes me effing furious.
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Mario: Republicans on Republicans
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If the Obama Administration thinks John Boehner is a guy they can work with, one wonders how long it's going to take for them to throw reproductive self-determination under the bus along with everything else that's already there...
Palling around with terrorists
Staffers for the forthcoming Speaker of the House John Boehner met with confirmed and current domestic terrorists immediately following the midterm election.
Digby has the photographic evidence of the meeting with Randall Terry and his cabal of evildoers.
And, yes, Terry is a terrorist.
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'Plagiarized' GOP-Commissioned Climate Change Report Laid Groundwork For Climate-Gate
By the time a report purporting to debunk the science of climate change was discredited, it had already made the rounds and accomplished its main purpose: giving climate change deniers a peg to hang their hats on.
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Teabaggers are winning the war on Xmas.
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Not near as funny as "You might be a redneck if...", but then nothing about Repugs is funny except their sex lives. Those are funny and pathetic You might be a Republican if…
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Joe Scarborough is about to be excommunicated from the GOP:
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The warning bell of Democratic stupidity.
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Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives' response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm's secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.
Upon hearing that Sarah Palin had proposed that he be hunted like Osama bin Laden, Julian Assange said, "That's good to hear. Otherwise, they might find me."
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A message to all of those Arab nations who want Iran "dealt with"
So gather your armies, form a coalition, and do the job yourselves.
Leave us the frak out of it.
Very truly yours,
The U.S.A.
REPUBLICAN Joe Barton, who famously apologized to BP for the creation of a fund to help the survivors of the Gulf oil spill, says he'd shoot at Obama.
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Government is not your family
As we approach the next battle in the 75-year-long War to Save Social Security, we must beware of plausible-sounding analogies that undermine liberal positions.
Digby punctures one of the dumbest:
Gene Lyons made a good observation the other day about the "government is family" metaphor that describes the absurdity of it in a useful way:
"The American people are ahead of their government and their politicians on this," King said. "Because, Ali, you know this, over the past two or three years every family in America has had to make incredibly difficult choices and do things they didn't want to do. And so they look at Washington and they say why won't you do things that you don't want to do, why don't you ... do something about this and be grown-ups?"Yes, it's perfectly obvious. The thing to do is cut government spending, reduce demand, put more people out of work. Prosperity will come roaring back.
Look, Obama asked for this. "Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions," he said, announcing the Bowles-Simpson commission during his 2010 State of the Union. "The federal government should do the same."
Because the U.S. government is just like your family. And your family can't run deficits, can it? Apart from mortgages, auto and education loans, credit cards, stuff like that. Not to mention that it's the government that actually creates and maintains the money supply. Otherwise, yeah, your family's exactly the same as the Social Security Administration, the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health, all those. So get out and build some highways: pay as you go.
My head explodes every time I hear any of them use this stupid family metaphor. And it isn't just Obama using it. As everyone here is aware, there's a whole school of thought on the left about the dueling metaphors of government as family, with the Right allegedly preferring the "strict father" model and the Left preferring the "nurturing parent" (actually "indulgent Mommy", although the proponents of this metaphor will never admit that's what it is.)It's dumb. America isn't a family and managing a national economy isn't like managing a family budget. It isn't like a business either (the second most common stupid metaphor.) The government has a completely different set of responsibilities than other human organizing entities, and democratic government is designed to completely upend the authoritarian model of family, church and business and put the "kids" in charge. Forgetting that is what gets us into trouble.
It would be very helpful to people's understanding of how their world works if they understood the differences between our various organizational models instead of conflating them. It's confusing rather than enlightening.
The lines in this conflict could not be more clear:
Rich people, Wall Street, conservatives/republicans/teabaggers, and corporations are determined to steal the last nickels from the working people the rich have been exploiting for decades.
Working people, Main Street, liberals/Democrats and unions are fighting to make the obscenely wealthy pay their share of the taxes that make this nation strong.
Everything else is lies and distraction.
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Friend of children Mark Foley looking to run for offie again
