Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? – William O. Douglas
President Barack Obama has declared that a group of moderate Muslims have the right to build a community center in lower Manhattan, two blocks from the site once occupied by the World Trade Center towers. Yet representatives of a wholly US government-funded outfit have joined the vociferous opposition to the Park51 or Cordoba House project that critics have dubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque.” A leader of this group—which receives $4.3 million a year from the government—has even proclaimed that the community center could be a front for Islamic terrorism. That’s not all: the same agency, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCRIF), has been the subject of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint for allegedly discriminating against Muslim employees.
One of USCIRF’s was appointed by John Boehner ( the orange conservative from Ohio). Leonard Leo is a member of the extreme right Federalist Society. Leo is working with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia Thomas is helping to organize rallies against Park 51. A Supreme Court justice’s wife is fighting and organizing against religious freedom. Conservatives really don’t get irony. The commission recently booted one Muslim member. Tax payers and fans of the Bill of Rights are both getting a kick in the teeth, and paying for the privilege.
Dan Foster has a new piece at National Review on the supposed problems caused by fire and police unions. It pins the blame for local and state budget deficits on public sector unions. And while it does make a few salient points about boondoggles, it uses some shoddy statistics to misidentify the source of deficit woes: Foster would have you think that public sector unions drive the fiscal problems in the states, but what we’re really seeing is bad fiscal management of public employee compensation, wage stagnation in the overall population, and evidence that unions are in fact a pretty good idea.
Start with the broader problems. Foster cites statistics that show state and local public-sector employees earn more than those in the private sector. But that’s an old straw-man: Once you control for factors like education and duties, you find that on average state and local public sector workers are paid 6.8 to 7.4 percent less than their private sector counter-parts…
Republicans have so much bizarre idiocy flying through the culture-sphere at all times its difficult to keep track of it all. Than once you pin something down, they just make up some more. They’re like a political petri dish of ever multiplying spores. Foster – using some deceptive numbers – which he probably took some effort to carefully massage in order to “prove” his case. What’s remarkable – in an abhorrent way – is how they won’t ever bother to come up with numbers which prove letting tax rates for those making over $250K revert back to about what they were under Saint Ronnie will hurt the economy. A fire fighter or a cop making a few dollars more a year which conservatives feel deeply in their black lying hearts is too much – that becomes something to start the shrill whining.
He’s organized protests online, and is the owner of the Tea Party Professionals group on Linkedin. He was also identified as a “LP [Libertarian Party] campaigner and everyone’s-facebook-friend” by a libertarian blog. He also appears to have written for the American Spectator, among other publications.
A frequent commenter on progressive blogs, Majors describes himself on his OpenSalon.com profile as an “Anarcho-capitalist revolutionary sharpening his guillotine.” On Talking Points Memo — where he was flagged with a “Troll Alert” and the subject to a lengthy profile — his bio states that he is “[l]ooking for employment as guillotine operator for citizens’ tribunal.”
Indeed, elsewhere in Majors ‘extensive online presence, there is a clear flirtation with violence as a political tool. In a Facebook note titled “We will remember in November,” Majors listed the names of all the members of Congress who voted for the Affordable Care Act — dubbed the “The Executioner’s List” — followed by a picture of a guillotine and accompanied by this call to action..
Bruce Majors
Conservatives keep claiming tea nuts are perfectly normal everyday Americans. I know that some of them are look outwardly normal enough because I know some. That doesn’t mean the wrapping doesn’t conceal the nutty nugget filling inside. Majors sells real estate – which apparently gives him too much free time. Regular trolling is not enough for Majors, he has stolen screen names to return to blogs where he has been banned for harassing commentors.
It looks like Apple, Inc., is exploring a new business opportunity: spyware and what we’re calling “traitorware.” While users were celebrating the new jailbreaking and unlocking exemptions, Apple was quietly preparing to apply for a patent on technology that, among other things, would allow Apple to identify and punish users who take advantage of those exemptions or otherwise tinker with their devices. This patent application does nothing short of providing a roadmap for how Apple can — and presumably will — spy on its customers and control the way its customers use Apple products. As Sony-BMG learned, spying on your customers is bad for business. And the kind of spying enabled here is especially creepy — it’s not just spyware, it’s “traitorware,” since it is designed to allow Apple to retaliate against you if you do something Apple doesn’t like.
Beck’s discussions of the rally’s supposedly crucial role in American history have included frequent invocations of the civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular. According to Beck, the rally will “reclaim the civil rights movement” because “Martin Luther King’s dream” has “been distorted” and “massively perverted” by progressives. In attacking the people he claims are “perverting” King’s legacy (i.e. progressives), Beck has suggested that he and his followers are the “inheritors and the protectors of the civil rights movement.” In Beck’s words, they will “take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place.”
Beck is completely rewriting history.
King forcefully advocated for drastic action by the federal government to combat poverty; supported “social justice”; called for an “economic bill of rights” that would “guarantee a job to all people who want to work”; and stated that we must address whether we need to “restructure the whole of American society” — all ideas that Beck has vilified.
Beck once claimed that anyone who took him seriously is an “idiot“, proving even a utter assclown will offer up some sage advice once in a while. Beck – conservative pundits in general – are like brilliant sociopaths in their reinvention of the snake-oil salesman. They’ve got a bottle of cure-all and if you buy it all the problems in the world will magically disappear. All liberals have on their side is facts, reason and caring about the average American.
US songwriter George David Weiss, who helped write chart-topping tracks such as Can’t Help Falling In Love and What a Wonderful World, has died aged 89.
The musician died of natural causes at his home in Oldwick in New Jersey, his wife Claire said.
Weiss also co-wrote songs which were recorded by Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Elvis Presley.
The Long Goodbye 