Robart Drinks The Tea

The local chapter of the tea baggers were rockin' on the river in Cuyahoga Falls Wednesday. According to reports the place was packed with local patriots clamoring to get their freedoms back. The event featured remarkable speeches by pols including the king of sneer, Tim Grendell. He seems to be at all of these events.

Even Falls Mayor Don Robart got in on the celebratory berating of all things federal:

Robart said that former President George W. Bush's bailout ''has been a total failure'' and that President Barack Obama's stimulus bill ''has been worse.''

Uhh, yeah Don that stimulus bill thing has been so bad that your administration has opted in for millions of federal dollars. Someone should vet the mayor's speeches before he says something rash. While Don was busy riling up the crowd at the tea party his minions back at city hall were busy racking up ARRA funding.

To date the City of CF has applied for $138,527,132 in federal stimulus dollars. You can't make this crap up. Included in that amount is $50 million on behalf of the school district to build a new learning campus.

Robart has decided to water the trees of Cuyahoga Falls with the nickels and dimes of us tax paying patriots. Shhh, don't tell the gun toting loons at the rally you are actually big on spending federal dollars on roads, bridges and shopping center demolitions.

The request submissions are available at the State of Ohio's Recovery website.

The Fringe Benefits

A Democrat is president and that means the fringe elements of the hard right wing are busy at establishing a foothold in the American body politic.

The debate around health care reform has certainly highlighted what's in store for the next several years. If it's not the rampant use of the Hitler comparisons it's the unitelligible dribble permeating the mob scenes at town hall meetings that defines this latest resurgence of reactionary mouth breathers.

This persistence of lunatic fringe in public discourse will have consequences. As the SLPC has reported, we've seen this kind of social movement before and it's back in vogue,

Almost a decade after largely disappearing from public view, right-wing militias, ideologically driven tax defiers and sovereign citizens are appearing in large numbers around the country. “Paper terrorism” — the use of property liens and citizens’ “courts” to harass enemies — is on the rise. And once-popular militia conspiracy theories are making the rounds again, this time accompanied by nativist theories about secret Mexican plans to “reconquer” the American Southwest.

Surely not all of the screamers at health care forums are of the militant ilk. Some of them are just uninformed or unwilling to listen to the facts of the matter. You'll have that anywhere. The problem is that the influence of the re-surging militia or Bircher movement will bleed into the everyday right wing cadre of citizenry. What was once very fringe will become more prevalent.

I'm afraid that all of the very important debates to be had in the next few years, like health care or climate change, are going to transpire in the midst of these proto-brownshirts that have descended on the public square like a modern day lynch mob. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the election of a black man as president.

Divining Truth From The Palinisms

Sarah Palin is stepping down as Governor of AlASka and the talking heads on CNN are actually trying to discern some logical rationale for the move.

CNN also played the rambling ten minute speech given from the unofficial state capital of AlASka, the Palin residence. It went in more directions than a country crossroad at times sounding like a victory speech and then a polemic on Obamanomics. She's was also quick to lash out at the media and critics in her classic paranoid fashion even mentioning past ethics investigations of her administration.

I don't know what is more curious a thing to take away from the event. Trying to divine the actual motive behind Palin's quitting is perplexing enough. Then watching cable news guys assuming there is a calculated and strategic element to the announcement is just as curious.

I'm guessing she has either been offered her own show on Faux News or she is going to be indicted on some kind of ethics charges very shortly. Maybe she sees opportunity in a potential GOP contender for president being taken out of contention by his infidelity. Keep you eye on the ball.

Cheneyism Spreads To Israel

Iran is in the midst of political uprising that has revealed a collective desire for more moderate leadership. The mass demonstrations and calling out of the clerical leaders seems to be a good thing. You can see why the country's younger and liberal (socially) populace is so important. The young Iranians could serve as crucial catalyst for capitalizing on America's use of soft power with Iran to unwind their nuclear ambitions.

Leave it to the neocon elements in the U.S. and their Israeli counterparts to find a problem with the hopeful signs in Iran. First it was Diane Pletka's column in the NYT that threw cold water on the notion that the current upheaval will lead to anything good in the end.

Then there was this piece in the WSJ (s/r) that corroborates what the neocon line should be on this matter. Any signs of moderation in Iran are bad for the bomb-bomb-Iran-crowd. Case in point:

Meir Dagan, chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, told a closed Knesset ommittee hearing that Mr. Ahmadinejad's reputation as a Holocaust-denying rabble-rouser makes it easier for Israel to enlist international support against Iran's nuclear program, a committee member said. A victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad's moderate challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, in last week's presidential elections would have presented Israel with "a graver problem," Mr. Dagan said.

You see, we need crazy Ahmadinejad to stay in power so there is a reason to sell the hard line approach to Iran.

"Both of them pose the same threat. But it's better for Israel that you have a leader [in Iran] with a very dangerous ideology who speaks clearly so that nobody can ignore him," said Knesset deputy speaker Danny Danon, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party. A more careful, soft-spoken Iranian president who promised better relations with the West "would have made it harder for us to recruit the world to our side," Mr. Danon added.

You got that? More crazy leadership equals better chance of starting yet another war in the Middle East. That's what the crazies in our neck of the world think. Good if you are an oil company or a defense contractor. Not so good if your son or daughter is the one that will be thrown into another needless military engagement.

Convention Busting Bumpers

Finding unconventional bumper sticker pairings is becoming a slight obsession on my part. The daily sojourn to C-town gives me a decent size pool of bumpers to sample from.

I saw this combination on the way up north, a good sized Ron Paul sticker and right below it a "Abortion: One Killed, One Wounded". Now I'm always interested in the followers of Dr. Paul. I can never tell exactly what the essence of Paulism is.

On one hand an abhorrence to central government and strict observance of the constitution is required to be in this camp. On the other hand there never seems to be a strong outcry from Paulites on torture, warrantless surveillance and other government intrusion into reproductive rights. Is Dr. Paul an opponent of birth control? Don't they consider the choice a woman may make about her body and pregnancy her own? I really don't know.

In unrelated news I'm still looking for the bumper sticker that reads, " I drive like an a-hole".

Convention Busting Bumpers

I've had a chance to catch some of the media coverage of Obama's commencement speech at Notre Dame. The piece in the NYT was decent. It did seem to reference the common use of graphic imagery on the part of the anti-abortion protesters. The rampant hyperbole used to describe the president's supposed hatred for the unborn was a close second.

Opposition to abortion on religious grounds is not hard to understand. What I have always been troubled with is the primacy placed on this one issue above all other moral questions. Wars built on lies and unbridled greed don't rile the lifers as much these days.

Making the daily drive up to Cleveland today I noticed a car with two bumper stickers. The sticker on the left side read, "Former Fetus Opposed to Abortion". Prominently displayed on the upper right bumper was an Obama 08 sticker.

There it was, a glaring contradiction to the conventional wisdom purveyed by the insurrectionists at Notre Dame. Pro-life is more than a stance on abortion. Supporting a Democrat for president and opposing abortion do not have to be mutually exclusive beliefs. Obama didn't manage to win an election and not grab a portion of the devout Christian vote.

Now, I don't wear my bumper stickers on my sleeve but that driver was a voter I can respect.

The Unsinkable Ken Blackwell

You have got to credit Ken Blackwell for his unwavering fealty to the tenets of hard right conservatism.  The man who brought us the Patriot Pastor movement and capitalism through Christ surfaced for air time on cable network MSNBC this week.

The latest chapter of the world according to Ken had him debating Christopher Hitchens on the role of Christianity in American politics.  That point was lost on Blackwell who spent most of his response time defending Christianity as the official religion of the United States.

I do appreciate the MSNBC producer who came up with the idea of pitting Blackwell against Hitch.   The segment contrasts the dogmatic persistence of Blackwell's nutter philosophy with the cynical contrarianism of Hitchen's intellectual conservatism.

Catch the highlights here.  Blackwell manages to remind us of the fanatic viewpoint of his movement's governance style in two distinct sound bites.  The first is at 3:20 into the segment where he explains how Judeo-Christian precepts and principles lay the moral foundation to allow for a free market enterprise.  From what I understand Jesus wasn't too big on the power of capitalism.  

At around 7:50 in he extols movement conservatism's favorite red herrring argument that Christianity is perpetually the underdog of America's religions.  He attempts to quote someone named W. E. Archer when he  says:

"...it might take a crucified church to take a crucified Christ into the view of the eyes of the world.."

I can't figure out what Blackwell is calling for here.  I think he means his buddy Rod Parsley needs you to quickly pick up the phone and buy a DVD to prepare for the end of days.  I'm not quite sure.  

It was good to see Ken get some exposure none the less. I didn't realize he had a gig with the Family Research Council .  It reminds me just how blessed Ohio was when we were granted a reprieve from his theocratic master plan for our State.

Husted's Creative Destruction Gambit

Former Republican House Speaker Jon Husted has announced his intent to save us by destroying an elected State Office.  The on again off again "resident" of Kettering has offered an ageless right wing tennet of governance as a campaign promise,

“I may be the first person in Ohio history to run for an office with a plan to eliminate it," Husted, 41, now a state senator, said in announcing his candidacy today at Ohio Republican Party headquarters.

Husted is going to save the Office of Secretary of State by deconstructing it and replacing it with a weak kneed version of a bi-partisan committee.  Don't they ever learn?  That "I must eliminate government in order to save it" has lost it's luster.  

This looks like an act of desperation or a political Hail Mary pass by Husted.  It's got to be one of the worst ideas since Ken Blackwell announced stringent specifications for voter registration forms.  It is on par with the hapless proposal to phase out the income tax being thrown around by prospective gubernatorial candidate John Kasich.

The fact that Husted's main campaign promise is to abolish the position of SOS is an indication of   the GOP's recognition of the sea change in Ohio politics.  Gone are the days in which the GOP could rest assured they would hold a majority of the executive offices, the governorship and both houses of the general assembly at once.  One way to slow the influence of a more progressive leaning electorate is to decapitate the position that has been instrumental in neutralizing Ohio's voting impediments.  Free and unfettered elections are the true objective of SOS oversight.  So take that away and we're back to the problems experienced in the Blackwell years.

We saw the difference in how election law and voter protection are carried out under Jennifer Brunner as compared to her insincere predecessor Lord Blackwell.   To further that point just look at the impetus for and success of the Secretary of State Project implemented nation wide.  That  initiative was based on the realization that equal protection of voter rights and providing unhindered access to the polls free of absurd rules and red tape are vital to increasing voter turn out.  Removing the Secretary of State position would hamper the ability to act swiftly and directly in matters of protecting voters and the voting process.

Now you could say the Ohio GOP has never been fond of high voter turn out. It doesn't mesh well with their priorities.  So what John Husted has proposed is a Bizzaro Secretary of State Project.  He wants to replace the one strong leadership position that can assure fair electoral results (when they want to) with a gimmicky government by committee.  

Cloaking this work of right wing fancy in a bi-partisan veneer is just a way of making it seem palatable for unsuspecting voters.  As much as Husted and the Ohio GOP may laud the idea there is no real need for this State Committee. The County Boards of Elections already have leadership by committee and that always works out well.

Story courtesy of the Daily Briefing

GOP Finds A Saudi Problem, Finally

Obama's choice of Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council has generated some criticism. Freeman is known as a devout realist which places him on the opposite end of the spectrum as the neoconservative scum that once lurked in the halls of the White House. John Chait opined in the WaPo editorial that an extreme realist approach has earned Freeman the ire of the pro-Israeli groups on the right and left.

The latest knock on Freeman comes from a group of newly enlightened GOP House members who are concerned about his ties to Saudi Arabia. John Boehner and nine of his colleagues have requested a review on the new chairman's affiliation with the Saudi Government. In their words:

Freeman's past and current commercial, financial and contractual ties to the Kingdom to ensure no conflict of interest exists in his new position.

Yes, Freeman ran a think tank called the Middle East Policy center that received money from Saudi interests. He was also the ambassador to the Kingdom from 1989-1992. Naturally his concentration in middle east policy has placed him in the same orbit as Saudi stakeholders.

Never mind that the guy who occupied the presidency for the past eight years had his head up the royal family's dishdasha. Never mind that his father and his father's father were tightly intertwined in Saudi business ventures involving oil. In fact entire books have been written on the Bush family's close ties to the House of Saud. As far as I know Freeman doesn't have an adoptive cousin named Bandar.

So why now is having an affiliation with the Saudis an issue? Is the GOP just trying to shore up its stance among Jewish voters. Did protecting Saudi hegemony through military and diplomatic maneuvering suddenly go out of style the minute W. left office? It looks like the GOP's foreign policy agenda is as spastic as it's domestic offerings as of late.

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Tea Bagging The Stimulus

The people streaming through Public Square today were not protesting the violence in our city streets or the Kellen Winslow trade. The fifty or so protesters parading around in the rain with home-made signs were there to voice anger over taxes and government spending and communism and the long slow march towards collectivism. It kind of looked like a mini McCain-Palin rally.

The hatred for the stimulus bill and revocation of Reaganomics it represents were the inspiration for the series of nation-wide Tea Party's that were held in America's city's. The events were championed by a coalition of conservative groups and bloggers and held in numerous cities. Even ones that are in desperate economic straits and could use a boost from federal spending.

Michelle Malkin even went as far as to brand the movement as a counterculture of fiscal responsibility . Such parlance is typical to movement conservatism. Where was the fiscal restraint the past eight years? The winger histrionics have started and we're only five weeks into the Obama era.

Apparently there are some people in the greater Cleveland area that took Bobby Jindal's tuesday night speech seriously. Why use the power of government action to sand off the rough edges of the recessionary downturn? Tax cuts will make things all better.

So get out there Cleveland and stand up for your right not to have new roads and bridges. Don't let the government increase the tax burden on your wealthier friends. Surely we can have our never ending war in Iraq and not pay for that either. Tea Party!