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NYT > Dow Jones Stock Average NPR Topics: Business NPR Topics: World Philosophy Bites NPR Topics: Culture NPR Topics: Opinion NPR Topics: Economy NPR Topics: Law NPR Topics: Religion Covers.com: general News and Stories Covers.com: general News and StoriesFox and Friends, the morning show on Republican Party Television, has long been the place where IQs go to die, but what it did on Wednesday set a new low it won’t soon surpass, unless, of course, it one day calls the President a nigger during one of its fair and balanced segments.
As you watch the following, keep in mind that in the lower left corner of all Fox programming is that little, slowly spinning Fox “News” box, which makes a mockery of journalism 24-7:
Posted by R. Duane Graham on May 31, 2012
https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/ff-is-fuped-up/
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?“
—Jesus
esterday, as I wrote about Mitt Romney and Donald Trump, I made a somewhat reluctant distinction between Romney the (“detestable”) politician and Romney the man.
I can no longer do that.
On a day when Romney and Trump were raising money together in Las Vegas, on a very special day when Romney finally found himself the Republican nominee, we find that the Romney campaign did this:
Now, because campaigns are nothing if they are not a series of scripted events, with little left to chance, it is impossible not to believe that Mr. Romney’s timing in releasing his birth certificate was designed to validate, 
in the minds of those possessed by intense hatred for Barack Hussein Obama, Donald Trump’s birther lunacy.
There just isn’t any question about it. Mitt Romney has endorsed Trump’s race-bating conspiracy about Obama’s legitimacy as our president.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. The Romney endorsement of Trump’s racist delusion was intended to be a bit more subtle than simply saying it straight:
Get that illegitimate nigga out of the White’s House.
But to those distracted and disturbed Obama-haters out there who Romney is trying to reach—remember he said, “I need to get 50.1% or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people“—he got his message across: he is endorsing their derangement.
Let the record show that I don’t believe for a moment that Romney, the good Mormon he is, believes he is actually selling his soul by doing this and other ungodly things—like, say, lying beyond political norms—in his quest to become president.
I believe that deep down, way down under all the years of political shellac that has been applied to make him attractive to the various constituencies he needs, Romney thinks he is not selling his soul but merely pawning it.
He will, he believes, go get it back some day. After he has served his two terms, after he has finally retired with all his money and his place in history, he will repent of his un-Christian, un-Mormon behavior and go to that mephistophelian pawnbroker and get his soul out of hock.
But perhaps Mephistopheles will have the last word:
Vainly he’ll seek refreshment, anguish-tost,
And were he not the devil’s by his bond,
Yet must his soul infallibly be lost!
Posted by R. Duane Graham on May 30, 2012
https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/romney-for-rent/
You know, I find Mitt Romney a most detestable politician, whatever are his personal qualities. And I find Donald Trump to be, as I have related many times, a cretinous buffoon who continues to hold, for reasons I cannot comprehend, a grievous grip on a segment of the Republican Party that either fears him or worships him, or both.
So, because I find both men abominable as public figures, it’s not surprising that I am gnashing-my-teeth annoyed by what Romney told reporters:
(CNN) – Mitt Romney said Monday he wasn’t concerned about Donald Trump’s commitment to the “birther” conspiracy, one day before the GOP presidential candidate hosts a fund-raiser alongside the celebrity business magnate.
Asked on his charter plane whether Trump’s questioning of President Barack Obama’s birthplace gave him pause, Romney simply said he was grateful for all his supporters.
“You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in,” Romney said. “But I need to get 50.1% or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”
Now, we have here a situation in which a man, who on Tuesday in Las Vegas may wear sacred skivvies to a high-priced campaign fundraiser with Trump and Newt Gingrich, has admitted to the world that he will keep the company of anyone, so long as it might bring him a vote or two.
Romney’s entire political life has been organized around that one principle, which is why, throughout his various campaigns, his position has traveled from one end of an issue to the other, in search of that moment’s electorate. And which is why there are still more than a few conservatives out there who simply don’t trust him.
But for me the issue goes deeper. There is something stunningly insensitive about the way Mitt Romney conducts himself, beyond the simple political reluctance to not offend even the tiniest pocket of voters. When given a chance to publicly correct Rush Limbaugh for calling a Georgetown student a “slut” and a “prostitute,” Romney said with cowardice aforethought:
I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used.
Apparently there is a nicer, more Mormon way of calling a girl a whore.
Earlier this month a supporter prefaced a question to Romney with the suggestion that Mr. Obama “should be tried for treason,” a comment that provoked not even the slightest moral twitch in Mitt’s Mormon flesh.
So, given what we have seen, who would expect Romney to paddle away from Donald Trump?
Yet, if Trump were selling, say, radical Islam instead of his asinine birther conspiracy, would Mitt Romney and his campaign sell chances—three bucks a pop—to have dinner with him? Well, no, and that is the point: Romney just doesn’t find Trump’s creepy fascination with birther fanaticism all that creepy. He’s “appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people,” he told us.
Except that Donald Trump is not “good people.” Nobody can be who is trying to do to President Obama what Donald Trump is trying to do to him. Through his promotion of 
birtherism and his assertion that Obama wasn’t good enough to get into Harvard Law School on his own merits, Trump is using racism in a wretched attempt to stigmatize the President, to do to him what was done to the black man at the time of our founding: regard him as a being “of an inferior order,” who has “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
That’s it, you see. Our black president, sitting in the White’s House, has no rights which palefaced people like Donald Trump—and now by extension, Mitt Romney—are bound to respect.
It is a sad state of contemporary American politics that we find the soon-to-be head of the Republican Party sharing a campaign bed with such a man as Donald Trump, cuddling up with his conspiracies.
But given who Mitt Romney is as a politician—and I am beginning to think who he is as a man—it by now surprises no one.
Posted by R. Duane Graham on May 29, 2012
https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/romneys-one-principle/
Perhaps you have heard:
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — The Missouri House has spent more than $1,100 in taxpayer money on a security camera to keep watch over a new bronze bust of conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, the House clerk said Thursday.
Now, I have not written much about the embarrassing fact that Rush Limbaugh, whose colossal intolerance is robust enough to give bigotry a bad name, is now firmly ensconced in the Hall of Famous Missourians, thanks to Missouri House Speaker Steven Tilley, a Republican from Limbaugh’s part of Missouri.
Recently calling a college student a “slut” and “prostitute” for daring to speak her mind on the availability of contraception, Rush apparently upgraded his credentials for admission into what we will now definitely have to call the Hall of Both Infamous and Famous Missourians.
When Rush was officially inducted this week, the event, which traditionally is open to the public, was a secret affair attended only by Republicans—because only Republicans were invited! That’s some honor! Congratulations, Rush! You’re such a special Missourian that only other special Missourians understand what you mean to the state. The rest of us just understand that you’re mean.
In any case, as police stood guard to make sure the orgy of adoration was not interrupted by reality, Limbaugh, never missing an opportunity to show off his Missouri humility and humanity, said of his critics:
They’re deranged. They’re literally deranged.
Ah, a proud moment in Missouri history!
Finally, I learned today that not only will taxpayers foot the bill to keep Rush’s marble head under surveillance every minute of every day, it is the only marble head in the place that actually needs a security camera! Kudos, Rush!
House Clerk Adam Crumbliss told the Associated Press:
We recognize that there was a level of controversy around it, and we want to make sure that property is protected.
No, no, no. That’s not what the camera is for. It has nothing to do with “controversy.” As everyone knows, marble is susceptible to acidic substances, and I have it on good authority that the real reason for the camera is to keep adoring Republicans from making love to Rush’s mug when the lights go out.
Smoooooch!
Posted by R. Duane Graham on May 25, 2012
https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/keeping-an-eye-on-the-rush-bust/
Congressman Mike Coffman, a Colorado Republican, said some nice things about President Obama yesterday:
I believe President Obama loves this country and wakes up every morning trying to do what is best for our nation, even if I disagree with his approach.
Ah, what a great American is this Mr. Coffman. How diplomatic he was to express such cordiality toward the President of the United States, a man who is often accused of not loving America and, heck, of not even being an American.
With civilized Republicans like Mr. Coffman in Congress, there is hope of getting things done—What? What is it you say? Congressman Coffman said what? Oh, my:
I don’t know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America, I don’t know that. But I do know this: that in his heart, he’s not an American. He’s just not an American.
Damn, I thought we had a decent Republican in our midst for a second. But nope, what we have is a man who received so much criticism
for his Obama-is-not-an-American routine, that he was forced to write a column apologizing for his shtick, even calling his comment “boneheaded.”
You see, Congressman Coffman’s previously safe district (he has demolished his Democratic opponents) has been, uh, made unsafe through redistricting. As CBS Denver put it:
Coffman’s turf now is divided roughly evenly among Democrats, Republicans and independents.
So, that explains the newly-found cordiality, the admission of boneheadedness. And the constituents of Colorado’s 6th Congressional District should reward Coffman’s boneheadedness by giving him a permanent vacation from Washington.
If you want to see Coffman’s boneheadedness on full display, watch this report from 9News in Denver, which includes a weird interview he did with a reporter:
________________________________
All of which reminds me of a local Obama-hater named Mark D. Edmonson, who has been a “guest columnist” for the Joplin Globe. He has written things like this:
No one poses a greater threat to America and to our way of life than the man who currently occupies the Oval Office… All one needs to do is look at the people with whom Obama has surrounded himself. They are among the most radical people on Earth who have no great love for this country.
And, prophesying what Congressman Coffman would say about a year later, he wrote:
Barack Obama may have been born in Hawaii, but he is no American.
That sort of has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? But you have to have the right kind of ears to really enjoy it.
In any case, we know that whatever it is that makes right-wingers say such boneheaded things, it’s a disease that infects across state lines.
Posted by R. Duane Graham on May 24, 2012
https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/bonehead/
E. J. Dionne was on Morning Joe this morning discussing his new book, Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent. The book’s argument is:
from the very beginning, our country has been characterized by a deep but healthy tension between our love of individual liberty and our devotion to community. Yet we seem to have forgotten our own rich history of balance, one reason for our poisoned political atmosphere.
This morning Dionne said:
In the U.S. we have been governing under a kind of a long consensus that we really established at the beginning of the progressive era. It was a consensus that saw a strong role for the market and a strong role for government. And I think now politics is roiled because one side of our debate wants to end that long consensus.
Now, that’s a legitimate position for them to hold, but I think it’s untrue to what made us succeed as Americans, which is a sense of balance: public-private, individual-community, national-local. We’ve always kept things in balance and I think there’s an attempt right now to push everything over on one side.
E. J. Dionne is one of my favorite left-leaning pundits, but he said something here I don’t agree with. He said that someone who wants to end the “long consensus” that “made us succeed as Americans” is holding a “legitimate position.“
I don’t think so, and I think we need to metaphorically pound it into the heads of Americans that it is not legitimate.
Okay, let me backtrack just a bit: it is legitimate in the sense that it is completely legal to argue for a return to the era of the robber barons, this being a free country. But it is not legitimate in the sense of it being a reasonable position to hold. Scuttling that long-held consensus—which is the product of numerous ideological compromises—would bring ruin to the America we know and therefore is not a legitimate argument to make.
And, as I said, we need to keep reminding Americans that compromise and consensus are good things, and that the radicals in our midst who abhor them are not to be respected as holding “legitimate” positions.
Posted by R. Duane Graham on May 24, 2012
https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/the-long-consensus/
Here was the headline on HuffPo on Wednesday afternoon:
Jay Carney: Don’t ‘Buy Into The B.S.’ From GOP About Obama’s Spending Record
That story began:
WASHINGTON — White House Press Secretary Jay Carney had some advice for reporters on Wednesday when it comes to covering President Barack Obama’s record on spending: “Don’t buy into the B.S.”
And then there was this headline from ABC News on Wednesday evening:
President Obama Denounces Republican ‘Wild Debts’: I’m Not an Over-Spender
Obama was quoted in the story:
I’m running to pay down our debt in a way that’s balanced and responsible. After inheriting a $1 trillion deficit, I signed $2 trillion of spending cuts into law. My opponent won’t admit it, but it’s starting to appear in places, like real liberal outlets, like the Wall Street Journal: Since I’ve been president, federal spending has risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years. Think about that.
What was all the fuss about? What was Obama referencing? It was the following, from The Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch early Wednesday morning:
Obama spending binge never happened
Commentary: Government outlays rising at slowest pace since 1950s
Here’s how the story began:
As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”
Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.
But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.
Now, we have discussed all this several times, but here is yet another graph from the WSJ piece to refresh your memory:
As you can plainly see, Obama is in the Little League of federal spending growth (and, by the way, so was Bill Clinton; the Big Leaguers, Reagan and both Bushes should all be in the spending Hall of Fame).
Let’s face it, being a Little League spender ain’t good for a President who is night and day labeled by right-wingers as at least a socialist, if not a secret Communist who will, if given a second term, unleash his diabolical European fury on the country.
Joe Scarborough blathered on this morning about how “government keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger” and referenced “the explosive size of government.”
Well, if that is true—and don’t forget that federal revenues as a percentage of our GDP in the Obama years is lower than any time since 1950 and state and local revenues have been fairly consistent since 1990—it is not Barack Obama who has made it so.
He is simply the dubious beneficiary of policies the basis of which relied on voodoo economics: cut taxes and, voilà, the economy and government revenues will grow, grow, grow enough to pay for two protracted wars, a brand new—ever growing—Homeland Security bureaucracy, a new prescription drug entitlement program, as well as the rest of what government does.
Let’s quickly look at federal spending since 2002, also from the WSJ article:
Clearly those blue lines were dictated by the red lines that came before and not some devilish creation of that wicked, big-spending socialist in the White’s House.
So, as Jay Carney said, don’t “buy into the B.S.” because, as the President said himself:
Posted by R. Duane Graham on May 24, 2012
https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/obama-a-little-league-socialist/
Perhaps this past week you have seen or heard about three strange stories related to preserving Iron Age dogmatism, which is the root of much mischief, if not evil.
First, we have Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, who is upset that Catholic employers might be required to follow the law and provide to their employees access to birth control. He metaphorically gave Jesus a divine dope-slap by uttering this rather ungodly threat:
If these mandates click in, we’re going to find ourselves faced with a terribly difficult decision as to whether or not we can continue to operate…As part of our religion, it’s part of our faith that we feed the hungry, that we educate the kids, that we take care of the sick…We’d have to give it up because we’re unable to fit the description and the definition of a church by, guess who? The federal government.
Ah, that evil federal government, from which the Cardinal and his Catholic Charities and its affiliates received nearly $3 billion dollars from taxpayers in 2010. But how weird is it that Dolan would hold “the hungry, ” the kids,” and “the sick” hostage in order to retain unsullied the Church’s rather creepy dogmatism on contraception?
Second, and speaking of creepy dogmatism, there is the story of yet another nutty North Carolina pastor, Charles Worley, who a few weeks ago in a well-received sermon (lots of amens and other affirmations) offered a Bible-supported Final Solution to nature’s tendency to produce non-heterosexual folks:
Build a great, big, large fence—150 or 100 mile long. Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out, feed ’em, and you know what, in a few years, they’ll die out. Do you know why? They can’t reproduce!
At least Pastor Worley offered to “feed ’em,” which is more than Cardinal Dolan offered to do for the hungry his Church is supposed to be serving.
Finally, since creepy dogmatism always comes in threes, there is the following story, courtesy of our Missouri legislature:
Disturbing a worship service could become a crime in Missouri under legislation headed to Gov. Jay Nixon.
The House gave final approval Friday to a bill making it a misdemeanor to intentionally disturb or interrupt a “house of worship” with profanity, rude or indecent behavior or noise that breaks the solemnity of the service. The Senate passed the bill in March…
Violators could face fines of up to $500 and six months in jail. Repeat offenders would face increasingly harsher penalties of up to five years in state prison.
Now, I don’t know whether this law would cover profane preaching, like Pastor Worley is guilty of, or rude or indecent preaching, like Cardinal Dolan is guilty of, but if it does, I’m all for it.
Posted by R. Duane Graham on May 23, 2012
https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/creepy-always-comes-in-threes/
“And I, John, saw these things, and heard them.”
—Revelation 22:8
In case some locals haven’t seen it, here is recently released footage from the emergency waiting room inside Joplin’s St. John’s Hospital on May 22, 2011:
And here is a photo I took this morning, 5-22-12, showing the slow demolition of the iconic hospital:
Posted by R. Duane Graham on May 22, 2012
https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/st-johns-witness/
The Erstwhile Conservative: A Blog of Repentance 