Category: National Politics

Ron Paul Shills for that Newsletter He Never Wrote or Reviewed

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Turning again to the Ron Paul newsletter controversy, Reuters uncovered a solicitation letter for that very newsletter, where Paul goes into great detail puffing his strategies for you to survive the “New Money”, his war against the moneyed elites in Washington who are beholden to the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the coming “race war”, and the “federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS”.

Although the letter is undated, the US issued a dramatically redesigned $100 bill with a watermark in 1996. However, the letter also references “President Bush”, who was not in office at the time, so I am guessing it’s referencing the 1991 redesign which incorporated microprinting and a metallic security strip (THE SPY STRIP!!11!)

This document bears his signature, and is on his own letterhead. He has disavowed nothing and has absolutely not proven that he didn’t write or review the subject matter he was putting out in his own name through his fearmongering little conspiratorial newsletters.

Paul’s explanations and disavowals are too little, too late. This came up in 2008, and it’s coming up again now, and like Paul, I’m afraid too. Not about the new-style currency and tinfoil hat conspiracy theories about it, but about the fact that a conspiratorial freak who wrote this sort of incendiary garbage during the time in American life when gun fetishist militias acted out as racial-fascist domestic terrorists with alarming frequency.

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Why We Regulate

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Anyone else think it’s ridiculous that we need congressional legislation to force airlines to give their airline pilots enough rest so as to, for instance, not be too tired safely to fly a plane full of people?

When private industry refuses to police itself, and treats labor more as a commodity than a human being, government has to step in to regulate it.

Oh, and FedEx and UPS are excluded from the law, and their pilots aren’t thrilled with that.

Will this prevent crashes? Nope. Will it hopefully eliminate one of the risk factors that lead to pilot-error crashes? Yep.

Norquist Clarified

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It’s not every day the teabagging wing of the Republican Party decides to overrule an 89-10 bipartisan Senate compromise over the payroll tax holiday.

It would appear, therefore, that the Grover Norquist pledge never to raise taxes to which GOPers have beholden themselves is voidable in the event (a) that the tax hike disproportionately affects middle-class wage-earners; and/or (b) the President isn’t a Caucasian.  I’m glad that the 112th Congress was able to clear that up for us.

You see, under the Republican supply-side sect of trickle-down theory, only tax cuts on the wealthy are acceptable. The middle class, working class, and poor looters must be made to pay more.

The Constitution. Let’s Follow It.

9 comments

Title X, Subtitle D of the National Defense Authorization Act is neither well-considered, nor do I think it’s Constitutional – even foreigners on American soil are entitled to basic Constitutional protections.

If the government uncovers an al Qaeda cell that plotting some attack on US citizens, it already has myriad tools at its disposal to detain and try the accused.

And that’s the key here – the NDAA doesn’t really call for trial. Indefinite detention and interrogation of people on American soil is a complete abrogation of the Constitution that ought not stand (given an apolitical Supreme Court).  I’m not one to jump on the “police state” bandwagon, because I’ve had the experience of actually spending extended periods of time living in one. But giving the military and police agencies the power to indefinitely detain people based on mere accusations and suspicions brings us ever-closer to an America where people are detained arbitrarily and capriciously based on denunciations and evidence which may not be adequate to convict someone in military or civilian court.

A decade of paranoia and a lousy economy aren’t making anyone any freer, and codifying the indefinite pretrial incarceration of enemy combatants on de jure American soil is contrary to our national interests.  The full text of the provisions in question is after the jump. Read more

The Constitution. Let's Follow It.

9 comments

Title X, Subtitle D of the National Defense Authorization Act is neither well-considered, nor do I think it’s Constitutional – even foreigners on American soil are entitled to basic Constitutional protections.

If the government uncovers an al Qaeda cell that plotting some attack on US citizens, it already has myriad tools at its disposal to detain and try the accused.

And that’s the key here – the NDAA doesn’t really call for trial. Indefinite detention and interrogation of people on American soil is a complete abrogation of the Constitution that ought not stand (given an apolitical Supreme Court).  I’m not one to jump on the “police state” bandwagon, because I’ve had the experience of actually spending extended periods of time living in one. But giving the military and police agencies the power to indefinitely detain people based on mere accusations and suspicions brings us ever-closer to an America where people are detained arbitrarily and capriciously based on denunciations and evidence which may not be adequate to convict someone in military or civilian court.

A decade of paranoia and a lousy economy aren’t making anyone any freer, and codifying the indefinite pretrial incarceration of enemy combatants on de jure American soil is contrary to our national interests.  The full text of the provisions in question is after the jump. Read more

Gingrich: Give Millionaires a Leg Up!

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The Palinist wing of the so-called “tea party” is just a front group for superwealthy conservatives. As further proof of that, their favored Presidential-candidate-of-the-month, Newt Gingrich, is proposing a reformation of the tax code to codify a lower marginal income tax rate on millionaires than on middle-class families earning $40 – 50,000.

It’s all part of the Republican Party’s war on the middle class, and the social safety net that Americans fought for throughout the course of the last century. A tax cut of this magnitude on the superwealthy would starve the federal government of revenue, resulting either in a fiscal crisis or massive cuts to programs like Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and other things on which people depend when they are elderly or in the midst of a personal financial crisis.

It’s part of an ideology that treats any public expenditure as redistributionary socialism and represents a real danger that the country slips back to conditions extant during the times of the robber barons.

Right down to Gingrich blaming America’s underclass for being poor.

Right down to Gingrich’s support for an abolition of child labor laws.

All-American Muslim Nontroversy

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This past weekend, home improvement megachain Lowe’s caved in to pressure from some reactionary Christianist organization in Florida to pull its advertising from a new TLC series called “All-American Muslim.” The show is especially designed to show people that the overwhelmingly vast majority of American people of Muslim faith are perfectly normal, just like any other American person of different faiths. It’s a point that’s not only true, but truly important to get out there in the face of a growing right-wing Islamophobia / xenophobia.

The Florida Christianist group is the same one that boycotts Walt Disney World over Gay Day.

Anyone who has listened to WBEN’s troubled mulleted talkmeister Tom Bauerle at any point in the last few years knows what I mean. If you are aware of last year’s Park 51 nontroversy, or know the name “Pamela Geller,” you know what I’m talking about. In bad economic times, it’s easiest to blame it all on some enemy, like Hitler blamed Germany’s post-Versailles decline on “international Jewry”. Former right-wing Islamophobe Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has reformed himself and now devotes much time exposing these neofascists for what they are.

Yes, there are very bad Muslims in the world who want to kill you and your way of life. But that isn’t the basis for an indictment of an entire religion and all its adherents. There are many bad people out there, and if you live your life in fear of them, you’re not really living much of a life at all.

In the same weekend that Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich went out of his way to assail the Palestinian people of the former Ottoman Empire as “invented”, American ignorance of Islam is on full display with this Lowe’s nonsense.

Buzzfeed posted what it considers to be the 25 dumbest comments. Wading through them, you begin to lose all hope for America. When you realize that at least one or two people you know who consider themselves to be tea partiers think the same way, you realize how pervasive this ignorant xenophobia has become.  The Muslim families depicted on the TLC program are better Americans than, e.g., this guy:


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Email me at buffalopundit[at]gmail.com.

Invented People

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At the Republican debate where multimillionaire candidate Mitt Romney bet slow candidate Rick Perry $10,000 as to whether Romney was a member of the Obama revolutionary socialized medicine cadre or not, book hawker and corrupt former Congressman Newt Gingrich averred that Palestinians were (a) all terrorists; and (b) an “invented” people.

Setting aside the tea party pandering about all Muslims being terrorists, I’m more fascinated by the “invented people” crack. Members of, say, the Navajo or Seneca Nation might very well ask what the hell Gingrich thinks “Americans” are.

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