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U.S. citizen from Pakistan arrested in Times Square bomb case
Authorities said Faisal Shahzad, who lived in Shelton, Conn., had paid cash for a Nissan Pathfinder that was found packed with explosives Saturday night on a tourist-crowded block in midtown Manhattan. The vehicle was set ablaze but failed to detonate.
Officials located Shahzad after a sweeping two-day investigation that yielded what senior Obama administration officials described as a flood of international and domestic clues suggesting a plot involving more than one person.
Innocent until proven guilty, but having been identified as the purchaser of the SUV it is not looking like Shahzad will be making bail anytime soon. If he felt frustrated with some policy of the U.S. he should have been paying attention. Grabbed a sign and joyed the tea nuts. They stand for everything and nothing, they should know they had something or some people or some legislation which they have not bothered to read. Shahzad and his ignorant misdirected rage would have fit right in. Thus far the tea nut contingent has limited itself to shooting people, bricks through windows and cutting gas lines. So yes let’s give the tea smokers credit, by all means, for avoiding bombs. The rightie rage embodied in the anti-gov’mint movement – that spring to life like locust just as coincidentally the most anti-freedom right-wing president in our history was leaving office. Populism sounds nice and in the history of populist movements in the U.S. one can usually find a nugget of justification, but often times they fall short on exactly how to solve the problems. Both the real ones and the ones they imagine. History’s Mad Hatters: The Strange Career of Tea Party Populism
Above all, Goldwater was the avatar of today’s politics of limited government. In his opposition to civil rights legislation, he might be called the original “tenther” — that is, a serial quoter of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reserves for the states all powers not expressly granted to the Federal government, with which he justified hamstringing all efforts by Washington to rectify social or economic injustice. For Goldwater the outlawing of Jim Crow was an infringement of constitutionally protected states’ rights. Moreover, he was an inveterate enemy of all forms of collectivism, including of course unions and the welfare state.
As the Goldwater opposition sank its grassroots into the lush soil of the Sunbelt, its desire to restore an older order of things was palpable. At a time when New Deal liberalism was the reigning orthodoxy, the senator’s reactionary impulses seemed startlingly adrift from the mainstream, and so strange indeed.
Reaganites were a clever bunch. They used a wink and nod – the politics of implication with plausible deniability, but embraced much of Goldwater’s racism – the southern strategy – and gave income assistance a black face ( the “welfare queen”). The United States paper thin social safety net – The Nanny State – was not abolished, and why do away with things like public housing assistance when crony conservatism could make so much money from it – Reagan and the HUD scandal. The tea bags want to return to those nebulous good old days of Goldwater or Reagan or some original intent, the meaning of which can only be deciphered with special Konservative decoder rings.
Tea Party populism should also be thought of as a kind of identity politics of the right. Almost entirely white, and disproportionately male and older, Tea Party advocates express a visceral anger at the cultural and, to some extent, political eclipse of an America in which people who looked and thought like them were dominant (an echo, in its own way, of the anguish of the Know-Nothings). A black President, a female Speaker of the House, and a gay head of the House Financial Services Committee are evidently almost too much to bear. Though the anti-immigration and Tea Party movements so far have remained largely distinct (even if with growing ties), they share an emotional grammar: the fear of displacement.
That feeling of displacement is generally something most of us can agree on, but once again instead of blaming the large corporations that shipped their jobs off shore or those who lost the tea bagger’s savings running Wall St like a backroom gambling hall – they’re reverting back to the squalid populism of Goldwater and Reagan. This time its the poor, immigrants and once again the liberals who are responsible. That initial backlash against corporate America is a shadow of what it was back in early 2008.
Speaking At Trade Association Funded By BP, Gov. Perry Claims Rig Disaster Is An ‘Act Of God’ or just maybe it was because BP was negligent about adhering to safety rules and buying an emergency shut off valve. Perry is also popular with tea baggers. Tea bag populism is destined to go down in history as a movement with the uncanny ability to not be able to identify the root cause of a problem. So now its the poor, immigrants (FLASHBACK: GOP Voted Against $680M For Border Security In Recovery Act), liberals and God to blame.
Upping the ante: Limbaugh and Hannity’s falsehood about oil spill response keeps growing
Rush got the ball rolling last week, when he claimed that President Obama “waited eight days” to deal with the spill. At the time, Media Matters pointed out that this was false; the administration immediately dispatched officials and the Coast Guard to the area to work on the response.
Hannity, perhaps trying to one-up his fellow right-wing host, went on the air that night and claimed that the administration “sat back for 9 days and they did absolutely nothing.”
But that apparently wasn’t enough for Hannity, because tonight, he increased that number, asserting that “for 10 days the government did nothing” about the spill.
Limbaugh and hannity among others have formed the Gulf Oil Spill Right-Wing Truthers. All the innuendo and conspiracy laden language is exactly what loony conspiracy theorists always do. They imply an answer by “asking” a question in a way that already implies an answer. It probably doesn’t matter to the average Hannity sycophant, but to most people the inability to read a calendar and count says something about his credibility.
First it was Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and now John Boehner (R-OH) is taking credit for health care reform – even as Boehner vows to repeal it. The problem with Republicans claiming they had good ideas and no one would listen is they committed themselves to complete obstructionism. So trying to take credit now for any part of HCR is a lie – Former GOP Lawmaker Rips Boehner And Cantor For Their Crass Partisanship, Political Gimmicks
GILCHREST: For example, when Obama asked a large contigent of Democrats and Republicans to come to the White House to begin to talk about the healthcare bill, the whip — who I know well, my good friend Eric Cantor from Virginia, a Republican — brings in the bill. Now he didn’t bring in suggestions. He didn’t want dialogue about how to make this better, he brought in a bill. And when it was his time to discuss the issue, all he talked about was how big the bill, how complicated the bill is, how much they don’t have time to read the bill and all these things, which was really a waste of time. […]
It’s not too big to fail, it’s too big to read theory of public policy. Boehner was also dismissed a talk by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson about the financial break down. They could not be bothered with the meltdown because they had to think of ways to raise money for the 2008 elections.
The Long Goodbye 