Thursday, August 12, 2010

TEA PARTY Update: Randie On the Hot Seat Over Kidnapping Charge, AQUA BUDDHA Worship

Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul, darling of the TEA PARTY, had more embarassing questions to answer about his alleged college prank involving the kidnapping of a female swim team colleague, making her bow down at a creek to worship the AQUA BUDDHA while high on pot -- they were, she refused to take bong hits at their apartment.



Following is a recreation of the AQUA BUDDHA worship mantra as Randie and his NoZe brother tried to take their kidnapped female subject to a higher level of consciousness:

'What Me, Worry? Let's Play Another 18.'


Ladies and Gentlemen, The Tan Man Who Would Be Speaker:


Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Adventures in TEA PARTY Campaigns: Rand Paul’s Sane and Lucid College Daze

He’s a wild and crazy guy now:

He wouldn’t have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because he thinks business owners should discriminate against patrons on the basis of race. Tell that to a black family driving through the heart of Dixie who can’t find a restroom to relieve their bladders, (Ayn) Rand. Following the West Virginia and Kentucky mine tragedies, Paul would oppose regulating the mines. He also said mountaintop removal isn’t too bad: “Most people would say the land is of enhanced value.”

More rapid-fire looniness from Rand Paul, the wingnut: He claims smoking in restaurants is a “God-given liberty;” shunned MTP to go on a 9/11-conspiracy show, Russia Today; he came out in favor of repealing the 14th Amendment; said President Obama was “un-American” for criticizing BP; and so on.

Back in college, though, Rand Paul almost straddled the line of normalcy. In this endearing article by GQ, we learn that while a student at Baylor (he dropped out) Randy (as he was known then) belonged to a “secret society” called the NoZe Brotherhood. According to a Baylor president, NoZe brothers practiced “lewd, crude, and grossly sacrilegious” activities. The Brotherhood was suspended from campus and anyone discovered to be a NoZe brother was automatically expelled. One of Paul’s former brothers said they liked tweaking the school’s religiosity and “aspired to blasphemy.” (Now there’s something Sister Sarah and Sharron Commandment can get behind.) Cool!

But then Randy got into some extra weird stuff like, oh … alleged kidnapping:
“The strangest episode of Paul's time at Baylor occurred one afternoon in 1983 (although memories about all of these events are understandably a bit hazy, so the date might be slightly off), when he and a NoZe brother paid a visit to a female student who was one of Paul's teammates on the Baylor swim team. According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, “He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They'd been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was 'Aqua Buddha' and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to 'Aqua Buddha' in the creek. I had to say, 'I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.' At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”

Nearly 30 years later, the woman is still trying to make sense of that afternoon. “They never hurt me, they never did anything wrong, but the whole thing was kind of sadistic. They were messing with my mind. It was some kind of joke.” She hadn't actually realized that Paul wound up leaving Baylor early. “I just know I never saw Randy after that—for understandable reasons, I think.”

When I asked [Paul’s campaign manager Jesse] Benton late last week if Paul remembered any of these episodes from his Baylor days, he replied in an email: ‘During his time at Baylor, Dr. Paul competed on the swim team and was an active member of Young Conservatives of Texas.’”
Interestingly, the Paul campaign never denied the episode until the next day. Were they trying to get all their ducks in a row with frantic calls to NoZe brothers -- the old “her word against ours” defense? “Randy” was still vague about his alleged excellent kidnapping/bong adventure: “Well, I'm not really going to try to go back 27 years and remember everything I did in college…. I don’t think that really politicians should be asked to answer anonymous accusers from 27 years ago,” Paul said. “But I will categorically deny that I ever kidnapped anyone or forced anybody to use drugs.”

Here is exclusive video of Rand Paul and NoZe sidekick listening to their favorite Rush tune, “The Spirit of Radio”... getting in the spirit. No? But the link came from Breitbart.



Rush, a great progressive Canadian rock trio, is furious and demanded that the Paul campaign stop playing its songs.

TEA PARTY Continues To Create Havoc ... YAY!

In Colorado, Ken Buck formed the third leg of the terrible three -- Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada, the first two -- as the Tea Party Axis of Evil angles to terrorize the nation and wreack havoc with the political establishment. In a sense, one can say that the Tea Party is getting some wins as a counterinsurgent, counter-revolutionary movement in sliming the millions of voters for change who turned out to elect our first African American president, simply by occupying a vaccuum (90% of life is showing up, as they say). With the administration failing to deliver the change people voted for, the forces of reaction, well funded by corporate money, stepped into the breach like modern-day brown shirts brandishing copies of the Constitution eight years too late, as Gibby bitched about the “professional Left” (“I’m not sure I should take offense at that,” quipped Michael Moore) and the punditocracy elites bemoaned the Left’s impatience with incremental steps (Jon Alter) that look like a sellout to Republicans and corporate interests from where we stand.

And Gibby, it’s not that the President is like George W. Bush. It’s that he’s too much like Adlai Stevenson, the wonkish professorial liberal who twice carried the Democratic banner in the 50s against Dwight Eisenhower -- and lost. The Kennedys mocked him for not being tough enough. In the last century, there were only two Democratic agents of change -- real change: FDR and RFK. President Obama is like neither, although Jonathan Alter may disagree. It’s inconceivable to progressives that Bobby Kennedy would have caved to Republicans and corporate interests as often as President Obama has. Bobby would never have given up on the public option -- ever. And he would have called the Republicans on the carpet for obstructionism and the teabaggers for racism without hesitation or prevarication. Progressives are pulling for President Obama, waiting for more of that Trumanesque fire on the stump, railing (rightly) against a “do-nothing Congress.” We’ve given up on anything approaching FDR or RFK proportions -- which is a shame.

Meanwhile, “numbers guy” Chuck Todd was making silly predictions (if Obama’s candidate loses -- he didn’t ... then, “ekes out a win” -- he didn’t ... in what planet is 54-45% a squeaker? Only in the jaded world of the A-holes at POLITICO) to gin up MSNBC’s ratings with mischief-making. The low-down on the “authoritative” Chuck Todd is whatever he predicts, take the opposite view and you’ll be closer to reality. Todd was last seen mangling an interview with a Republican supply-sider in which he bought the “historical” fantasy that deficits do not grow under Republicans as a result of tax cuts for HIS tax bracket, and that such tax cuts would produce significant jobs and economic activity. Mr. Todd needs serious schooling in economics from Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and Robert Reich. It’s not hard; all he has to do is read Krugman’s analysis of the economic disaster that began with Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich and subsequent exploding deficits. Then, he might mention that Bill Clinton, a Democratic president, raised taxes on the rich, created 22 million jobs, and left GWB a surplus.

Speaking of 2012, Todd joked with a Democratic analyst, I take it you'll have “no horse in this race” (of course not, since the President is surely running for re-election). But it does point to an obnoxious pattern in Todd’s mischief-making M.O., which is to hope for maximum political disruption, and almost wistfully, for a Republican tsunami, because it’s good for his business and bottom line. And for his tax bracket, too. But, in fairness, he’s not any different from the vast majority of the useless punditocracy (with a few notable examples).

If anyone wants to know who’s in it for the right reasons, check out journolist. End of rant.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

AWWW … “One Day, Son, You’ll Be the Lion King”

This is too CUTE to pass up: Lion and his baby cub survey same terrain that inspired Disney’s “The Lion King.”
“Standing tall this proud lion leads his cub over their home terrain. His mane streaming back in the breeze, the father looks over his tiny cub as they stand on a barren rock in Tanzania. The little cub -- just old enough to walk -- took his first steps following his father on the Serengeti plains.”


Adventures in TEA PARTY Campaigns: Sharron Angle's COMMANDMENT Unto the Rest of Us

Thou shalt not worship a false God, the god of government, so said Sharron Angle: “And these programs that you mentioned -- that Obama has going with Reid and Pelosi pushing them forward -- are all entitlement programs built to make government our God. And that’s really what’s happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We’re supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government.”

According to “Tea Party” orthodoxy, government is our enemy, tyrannical, with those evil entitlement programs –- Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- the teabaggeers rely on. The “Tea Party” doctrine says, do away with government, even if it means large classroom sizes, laying off teachers, firefighters, and police, unpaving our roads, turning off our lights, allowing the interstate highway system to go to rot, defunding the Department of Education, the EPA (who needs safe drinking water and unpolluted air and streams –- let the corporations decide what are necessary safety regulations (for their bottom line) –- what’s a few worker deaths and higher cancer rates to thin out the herd of liberals, not to speak of the uninsured, in the bigger scheme of things…?), and last but not least, garbage disposal.

For Sharron Angle this would mean shutting her up, which is an infringement on her “god-given” First Amendment right to make a fool of herself. After all, in the teabaggers’ revisionist, Texas textbook history, Jefferson never said there was “a wall of separation” between church and state.

One could mention most of the other Commandments, too:

Thou shalt not kill, except in the prosecution of unnecessary wars in which the innocent dead are “collateral damage;”

Thou shalt not commit adultery, except that Sharron’s prospective caucus colleagues John Ensign and David (diaper boy) Vitter in the “family values” party didn’t get the memo from on high;

Thou shalt not steal, and teabaggers opposing stricter regulation of lobbyists and corporate contributions really moves the ball forward on this Commandment;

Thou shalt not bear false witness … hmm, where to begin, teabaggers collecting Social Security -- ON MY DIME -– calling the president a socialist, or Sharron Angle LYING about her extremism;

Covet thy neighbor’s house, or Senate seat -– why is Angle running to be part of a tyrannical government? – Is it her Christ complex and missionary zeal to cast out of the Temple all those who “sold and bought” in it … psst Sharron, best to start with your own party and vote straight line Democratic;

... wife (covered), nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass (hmm … covered (?)).

Sharron Angle and her extreme religious fundamentalism is the reason the Founding Fathers fought so hard to separate religion and state. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Autobiography, in reference to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom:
“Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that it would read ‘A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;’ the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”

Monday, August 09, 2010

Beck's Latest Racist Rant Scrubbed by Fox

I have a question for Glenn Beck fans. I’d really like to know how you can justify his latest racist rant:



Planet of The Apes? How can you justify this and continue patronizing this paranoid lunatic, this untrammeled racist? I honestly don’t get it. Beck may call the AFL-CIO and unions “special interests” because they represent millions of workers, contribute to political campaigns, and lobby Congress. But unions are much more than that. They represent and protect working people from abusive employers, negotiate contracts, monitor safe working conditions, and fight tooth-and-nail to keep jobs in America.

Some special interest. Setting aside the despicable racism, this is an ironic (and predictably stupid) line of attack from Beck, given that President Obama’s camp had named unions “special interests” during the 2008 primary campaign -- a real no-no for a Democrat. Had Beck done his homework, he could have properly criticized the President for hypocrisy without the incendiary language, and worse, plunging headlong into the racism gutter.

Even Fox News recognized the racist nature of Beck’s statement and scrubbed the language from its website; it’s amusing how they haven’t caught on to YouTube. This is the second time in so many weeks YouTube’s burned Fox News. Fox’s posture is not to acknowledge the truth of Beck’s racism. Rather, Fox wants to limit the number of eyes that can actually read it, by scrubbing the original language and substituting it with something innocuous and false (because it’s not what Beck said).

Goebbels and the Nazis were pretty good at such deception, but this can’t be mentioned in polite society because it’s supposed to be over the top, even if it’s a spot-on target critique. So much for political correctness on the LEFT giving the RIGHT cover to be outrageous racists and Nazi re-enactors. Progressives should stop behaving like ninnies and call a spade a spade. The right wing is populated with fascists imbued with the rhetoric of fascism, and proto-Nazi eruptions in symbiotic “Tea Party” fringe supporters. Just pick up a book and read about the weak Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi Party. The historical comparisons between our current political climate and Weimar Germany are trenchant.

The truth is, Glenn Beck lacks the character and intelligence to make cogent critiques that will actually advance our political conversation. So, to those who continue to watch Glenn Beck’s racist, paranoid rants uncritically (because an ounce of skepticism and a sense of fairness would keep you away): Shame on you.