Long viewed as the worst ‘newspaper’ in country, even by many conservatives the times embarrassed itself once again today, in multiple ways as usual. Only two stories came up on my radar through friends and blogs, and while i’m sure the rest of today’s paper is full of similar crap… these two stories are particularly ridiculous.
First they claim to have “breaking & exclusive” news… NSF employees looking at porn.
Which is interesting… Fox News picked it up as a new story along with a bunch of other sites… It fits perfectly into the far right narrative of “liberals are too irresponsible and immoral to lead the country”
oh but wait…
this isn’t an exclusive at all, matter of fact, this is regurgitated crap from a story that broke 9 months ago, just as Bush was leaving the White House.
Grassley launches [NSF] porn inquiry (politico 1/28/09)
oops… Maybe the Rev. Moon needs to spend a little more money on Lexis Nexis, though the completely free google news search worked fine for me.
The next great piece of Washington Times literature for the day is a piece by their editor emeritus Wesley Pruden.
Referring to the challenges currently facing the country and Obama….”The adoring cult, the 53 percent of the giddily oblivious electorate that took a flyer on Election Day, deserves most of [the blame].”
Wow… that’s great journalism. even for an opinion piece.
the next paragraph gets a little tricky….
This is the fine mess Barack Obama told us would never happen if Americans would elect him to soothe the fears of the frightened and bank the ambitions of evildoers of the world. Suddenly, the president has to deal with headaches, a thousand town halls, with hundreds of thousands of angry bigots, racists and Nazis of hysterical liberal imagination jeering his scheme to take over the health care of the nation, never prepared him for. He’s got headaches no speechwriter can cure.
I’m not sure what the middle sentence is… I’m not usually one to critique grammar… i often misspell, leave out words, use poor grammar, and am apathetic about proof reading. but… That don’t make no sense to me. I know what he’s trying to say, kind of. but it’s just a load of crap.
And once again… all this from the “Editor Emeritus” of the Washington Times. brilliant.
for the sake of shits n’ giggles – let’s just go on the premise that both are corrupt and poorly run.
ACORN, in attempting to help poor people, has been caught with helping people commit tax fraud and fraudulently using federal dollars.
Blackwater/XE has been caught in wide spread fraud, overbilling, smuggling illegal weapons and numerous allegations of murder. They are currently being investigated by just about every inspector general and the FBI.
So why the difference in coverage?
ACORN’s fraud case is much bigger, right?
Actually – ACORN has received $53 million in federal funding over the last 15 years… that’s an average of less than $4 million per year.
Blackwater/XE has received more than one billion in current federal contracts.
I’m still waiting for Darrel Issa to introduce legislation defunding blackwater/XE but don’t expect him or any other republican on the hill to act any time soon. Eric Prince – CEO of blackwater/xe is one of the largest contributors to the Republican party, which i guess buys you a pass from Issa, Boehner, Steele and the idiots at Faux news.
I have no problem holding ACORN responsible… but after watching no-bid government contracting explode under the Republican controlled Congress and the Bush Administration – the last people we can trust on the issue is Minority Leader John Boehner and Rep. Darrel Issa. The latter of whom happens to have been charged with numerous counts of auto theft and fraud.
If we’re going to go after fraud – let’s go after the no-bid contracts and the billions of mismanaged funds received by halliburton, blackwater and dozens of other contractors who not only cost U.S. soldiers and citizens their lives but billions of dollars.
I have no problem punishing fraud when found, i encourage it, but ACORN is all but irrelevant in the world of federal budgeting. I guarantee you Republicans have already spent more money fundraising on the issue of ACORN fraud than was ever fraudently spent.
Newt Gingrich has never been one to shy away from hypocrisy – whether it was leading the charge against Bill Clinton for the Lewinsky crap while Gingrich himself was screwing young staffers, to his latest adventure in hyprocisyville….
The same guy who said 
“We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people
learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of
prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.”
Just launched a spanish version of his website… El Newto Strangely it doesn’t mention that quote in the Sobre Newt section.
Well, yes and no…
I think Carter has a tendency to make strategically stupid comments that tend to create divides rather than bridge them, and this is yet another example.
Is there a racist undertone to some of the Obama protests? Certainly. It’s extremely distasteful and unclassy to wear a confederate flag in any manner, but to do so in protesting a black president – that’s horseshit. If you look at pictures from these protests you’ll find several blatantly racists signs including pictures of Obama dressed up as a african medicine man with slogans like “go back to kenya,” which is not only an indication of stupidity but also racism.
I generally don’t mind people wearing confederate attire… It’s kind of like the idiots proudly walking around on Mondays in Detroit Lions’ jerseys. There’s a slight bit of respect for someone that can boldly embrace a team that lost 16 games last year. Similarly, the Confederate flag symbolizes getting your ass kicked by a bunch of latte liberals from New England in a failed attempt at seccession. So when a confederate flag wearing jackass uses insults like “pussy” and “unpatriotic” they’re really just projecting… I’ll also venture a guess that there’s a strong correlation between marginal IQ’s and people who wear or tattoo themselves with confederate symbols.
All that said… Is Carter Right? No. Jimmy Carter has once again made a polarizing comment that will inevitably make even moderates dig in their heals. Rep. Joe Wilson is a disrespectful dbag, but i’m pretty convinced he’s not racist. The majority of people opposed to Obama’s plans are not racists. It is a fringe segment of the Republican and even Democratic party that embraces these hollow mentalities.
There’s about a quarter of this country that believes he isn’t a legal citizen – yes that’s clearly based on Obama’s skin color. There’s about a third of Texas that believes Obama is a Muslim – and yes that’s based in racism. About 1/4 of West Virginia’s democrats said they wouldn’t vote for him in the primary simply because Obama is “colored” to use the term many West Virginians used openly on national television. So yes – there is racism. Far more than I ever expected from a country that just elected it’s first black president, but Carter’s insinuation that these protests are based on race is hardly going to improve the situation – if anything it will make Obama’s opponents that much more stubborn and determined.
They’ve sure been in the news a lot but does anyone really know what they do? Rupert & Co. certainly have their opinions…
ACORN stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Corporations have trade organizations, fake non-profits and the US Chamber of Commerce all lobbying for their interests… Meanwhile, poor people in this country have close to nothing… ACORN attempts to fill some of that gap.
ACORN provides invaluable resources to some of our country’s poorest communities, filling in for the government in providing many basic services such as finding low-income housing, jobs, and improving schools and public safety. They also have another arm – organizing low-income communities into a political force to vote for better schools, more police offers, and improved public housing… I know what you’re thinking, terrible left-wing/communist social justice issues.
Yes. These issues tend to favor Democrats for the simple fact that Republicans are ideologically opposed to most policies that benefit lower income families. They wanted to dismantle the Dept. of Education for several years before deciding to cripple it with the unfunded mandate of No Child Left Behind – which has put an enormous financial burden on many public school districts throughout the country. Republican tax cuts were targeted at the wealthiest 2% of our country and when in power, Republicans consistently favored business over workers.It’s not a dishonest position that conservatives take, there is something to be said for encouraging personal responsibility and encouraging economic growth. I think the disaster that was the Bush era has exposed many of the flaws in their approach to these ideals, but alas… it is an honest opinion shared by millions.
This ideological divide is what gets to the heart of the Glenn Beck/Fox News attack on ACORN – not corruption or misuse of taxpayer dollars.
Controversy —
Voter Registration Fraud - Yes ACORN pays people to register voters. Hundreds of organizations on both sides do this and while perhaps a dozen ACORN paid canvassers submitted fake names such as “Donald Duck” – Those names were dismissed by county election boards. There is no evidence any of any voter fraud attributed to ACORN. Meanwhile, I have personally seen paid Republican operatives challenge the vote of every minority at urban polling locations – requiring them to show ID and and submit to questioning before being allowed to vote. In some areas Republicans go to even greater lengths to disenfranchise voters – from mailing out fake election day notifiers, even renting billboards, telling people to vote on a different date than the actual election, In some areas Republicans actually put fake cops at inner city polling centers to frighten/discourage the black vote – i’m not kidding, this happens all the time. Where was Glenn Beck’s outrage at this far more blatant corruption of the electoral system?
PIMP & HO Videos
First off – the filmmakers readily admit they were out to get 
ACORN. They went into this knowing nothing about the organization except for “i heard they were corrupt and liberal.”Okay… So they went into several offices, and found some pretty horrible examples of corruption. Yes. There is some pretty egregious content on those video tapes. What they failed to mention is they also went into several other ACORN offices are were either forced to leave or had the cops called on them. That doesn’t fit into the Fox News narrative though so it was of course left out.
Okay so there is fraud… butI guarantee you, it’s far more rampant among government contractors, insurance companies and the oil companies. Luckily those organizations support the Republican agenda. Meanwhile, Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney and Jerry Lewis have all been involved in wasting much greater amounts in government money. The amount of money that cannot be accounted for in Iraq alone dwarfs anything ACORN has done – how much coverage has Fox News given that?
Closing Thoughts…
I readily admit there is room for improvement at ACORN. It has become too close with minority political machines in several urban areas, and the organization’s mission is sometimes lost in a clusterfuck of money, politics, and corruption. But that’s not the reason it’s under attack. The yelling and screaming is purely political. Republicans see the potential power in organizing a community that until the last election, turned out in frustratingly low numbers. And while Obama boosted black and hispanic turnout to record numbers, there’s still an enormous gap in turnout rates for those demographics. ACORN’s efforts in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, combined with changing demographics, could eventually put those key battleground states firmly on the Democratic side.
That’s not an excuse though to engage in an aggressive, semi-crazed, and thoroughly disproportionate attack on an organization. Fox News, with their dramatic music and straw man narrative, has switched from a Bush administration echo chamber into an powerful and dishonest republican attack machine – in an attempt to derail any and all liberal efforts. They pick targets and start firing… It’s almost impressive – though disgustingly dishonest.
This picture of the 9/12 rally on the capitol has been featured several times throughout the websites/blogs/listservs of Teabagging Jackasses…
“Wow” that’s a lot of people maybe the mainstream media really did miss out on this amazing, enormous event as the right-wingers claim – except for ABC of course which according to Michelle Malkin (known liar, jackass, and moron) & FreedomWorks, estimated the crowd to be around 1.5 million… Several other conservative organizations passed along reports that the police were estimate was 1.2 million. Someone even started the rumor of 2+million.
That’s all fine a dandy – except, like the rest of the numbers they discuss, all those estimates were flat out lies. And unless they decided to shed their confederate camo and completely cover the Native American museum - the picture is at least 10 years old. ABC never estimated the crowd to be that high, the police never released an official estimate though one fire official at the scene estimate the crowd to be around 70,000.
Oh and for those that don’t have the pleasure of being friends with el fat kid on facebook and are curious to learn more about these teabaggers… here are some pics i was forwarded from the rally.
Whoever let this piece by Erika Lovley be published obviously skipped their coffee this morning, to put it nicely.
Having worked with several dozen congressional offices and studied the inner workings of the hill for several years I can say that without a doubt there are 1,000 things that have more correlation with performance than gender. This article is a load of crap citing a joint study by Stanford and U of Chicago and some irrelevant ancedotes as cover to relay some pretty stupid misconceptions of how Congress works.
First off, let’s admit some fun truths – roughly 50% of the members on both sides of the aisle shouldn’t have been elected in the first place. Seriously, it has always amazed me how many absolute morons there are in Congress. For every smart and articulate member, there’s at least one absolute idiot. Furthermore it’s highly unfortunate that many of the most unqualified members are from relatively safe seats – it’s decidedly tougher for a moron to survive in a 50/50 battleground seat. What does this mean? Well basically the morons get to rise to the top in house seniority. During the 90’s Dem Leadership decided to place most of these clowns on financial services – a lucrative committee to be on for fundraising purposes, but until recently not a significant policy-making committee. I know some of my conservative friends love to hate Barney Frank, but honestly – if he goes the committee/country is kind of screwed with known idiots Kanjorski (D-PA), and my next subject Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), next in line. Of the top ten members on the committee only Maloney (D-NY) and Moore (D-KS) have the brains and know-how to be an effective Chairman.
Maxine Waters has served in Congress 18 years – yet she is one of the most ineffective, and perhaps clinically insane, members out there. She’s absolutely crazy… here’s her explanation of the 1992 LA riots -
“If you call it a riot it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason. I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable. So I call it a rebellion.”
and despite being name one of the most corrupt members of Congress by the left-leaning CREW, she has never faced serious opposition. She’s a corrupt moron, but happens to sit in one of the safest Dem seats in the country and will likely do so for the forseeable future. This has lead her to be listed as a “African-American Women’s Leader” – and a “leader” in most “quantitative studies” – but that’s a joke for the same reasons Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee being listed as “leaders” is a joke…
You can sponsor a million bills and accomplish shit. In addition to Waters, my favorite examples of this are the California dynamic duo of Lynn Woolsey & Barbara Lee – two of the most liberal and ineffective members of Congress out there. (besides the leprechaun of cleveland)
Lynn Woolsey is described as a “leader” by most legislative tracking software because of the number of bills she’s sponsored(121) and the number of cosponsors those bills have gotten – similar methodology to the Stanford and University of Chicago Study.”
The researchers also found that women introduced more legislation than men who served in their same districts, often hitting the ground running in their first terms.
“We find that, on average, women sponsor about three bills more per Congress per term than their male counterparts,” said Anzia. “They co-sponsor more bills than other members, and they also obtain more co-sponsors for their own bills.”
Only problem is – you know how many pieces of legislation that Woolsey has authored that have gone on to become law… 10? 20? 50? nope… a grand total of ONE bill. For the record the other “leaders” Waters – has sponsored 169 bills since 1991 a grand total of 1 has become law, and Barbara Lee has sponsored 119 bills – again, a grand total of one has become law.
They’re all complete outsiders and have little, if any, impact of the legislative process, but are listed as a “leaders” under the self-described “quantative studies” on Congress.
Point is – there’s no quantative way to measure congressional performance accurately. Yes, earmarks and federal funding levels are valuable – but measuring those quantatively doesn’t work either… The person with the most control over earmarks, Congressman Obey, isn’t even a top-ten recipient. It’s more of a “yes, they’re effective” or “no, they still haven’t figured out the request process,” than a dollar amount relating to performance.
For all my feminist friends, no i am not trying to bash on women MoC – for example i think Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is one of the most brilliant and effective Members currently serving. She’s only been around 4 years but has already worked her way up to being a Cardinal on House Approps – something most members only dream about.
Okay, so – that’s where Lovley put her qualifer – second to last paragraph – two sentence blurb. Basically there’s a ton more shit to go into but i’ve got to finish work and pack for my trip.
Once again CNN.com has posted a poorly argued, factually misleading, and all around stupid article. Katrina Browne has penned an article titled “Slavery needs more than an apology” to promote her film “Traces of the Trade” in an attempt to rid herself of the guilt of her family’s past.
This is tricky territory and honest debate is often mistaken for crude generalizations and even racists beliefs… I try to avoid both, and in no way espouse the belief that there are inherent differences between races beyond variations of skin color.
Basically Browne argues white America owes more to black families than just an official apology from the government. It’s not the typical pro-reparations argument that is flawed in every aspect but rather a ‘let’s all hold hands and help our neighbors approach.’ Okay, I suppose….
Unfortunately we’re already doing that to a significant degree. A point Browne disputes…
Meanwhile, many African-Americans are upset about the disparate outcomes that persist and want to see everyone step up to address them. There are so many lingering “structural inequalities,” as President Obama put it — ones without clear racist villains but that are embedded, like the fact that schools are funded with property taxes, so poor black neighborhoods, the legacy of earlier eras of discrimination, are not able to fund the quality schools that we say all our children deserve.
This is a stupid argument made by some neo-liberal who hasn’t ever looked at the details or admitted to some difficult truths. For example DC public schools spend an outrageous amount per student compared to other districts… Why can’t they perform as well?
The simple and ugly truth is that a large portion of the black community has hid behind these structural inequalities, despite increasing levels of spending on education and other social programs that should encourage upward mobility. Black parents in the district are failing their children. It would be ignorant to ignore the fact that the community deals with irregular work shifts, lower family incomes, and lower adult education levels.. However, at some point parents need to start reading to their kids, implementing some level of structure and discipline at home,and being active in their child’s life – attending school conferences, checking homework, making sure they’re in bed by a certain time and, the simple item that is most overlooked, providing their child with proper nutrition. If you can’t be a parent… Don’t have a kid.
I know there are a thousand excuses and rationalizations for this behavior. Bill Cosby was called a racist for telling his community to step up, I can only imagine what some of the feedback here will be. However, at some point it needs to be said.
While attending school in the inner-city i gave significant amounts of time to the community, from tutoring to volunteering at shelters. I’ve sat for hours trying to teach a 5th grader how to read when her parent’s could care less – they just thought of me as a free babysitter. I’ve also had the pleasure of handing out meals at a shelter to a family, then seeing the father drinking $4 beers at the bar later that evening. I wonder what his kids were doing.
Honestly, Katrina Browne has no idea what she’s talking about in her philosophy of ‘lending a helping hand’ – the helping hand is being lent. I’m a full blown lefty on economic issues… I think we should do everything we can to provide equal opportunity for all classes, races, etc. However, I’ve also seen a limit to this money can do. Welfare, LIHEAP, and other social programs aren’t being widely defrauded the way some right wing nut job like Newt Gingrich would like you to believe, however — the opportunity these programs offer is widely being lost.
Something needs to change. It’s not apologies, or more social spending… We’re maxed out on both of those right now. There’s a reason though Hispanic unemployment is significantly lower than african-americans. The first thing that needs to happen is the black community needs to acknowledge those reasons and start doing what it takes to overcome.
Please note: I know many of the arguments I make are transferable to poor whites/hispanics/etc… If you look at poor white communities in rural areas, where school and social spending far exceeds student performance and economic mobility, the same mentality prevails. The problems that persist in these black and white areas have nothing to do with race, slavery, or what have you. Simply put – It’s the failure of parent’s and the failure of the communities to establish successful cultural values.
