“What happened to the “Revolution” Republicans or Texas talked about? Tea Parties? That’s it?
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
My answer:
“Somehow it turned out that the glorious “Revolution” was just a publicity stunt designed for television. The Republican organizers of this debacle thought that it would be enough to design the event and tell people to show up. Not only would tens of millions of people attend, but they would be so encouraged by the outpouring of support that they would have become activists. They would exert political influence.
Republican leadership has forgotten how to organize, or even worse (not from the perspective of Democrats, of course) they have decided to shun it and vilify it. What better way to guarantee that they will never achieve grass-roots popularity again?
The overwhelming majority of radio listeners and television viewers are couch potatoes. Why would Rush listeners and Fox viewers be different? People like this have no connection to the political process. When they get angry, they don’t write their Congressman, they act as anonymous internet trolls. When they get really, really angry, they grab a gun from their arsenal and shoot someone.
The sentiment on the part of their target group seems to be vague agreement with principles, enough to keep them from switching the station but hardly the basis for a revolution from people who are by nature so unconnected with the political process that they can barely drag themselves to the polls to vote every couple of years. “
Alas, while I was distracted doing things like working and writing this blog, another answer was chosen. But there’s no point in wasting mine.
The issue is not really whether or not the Revolution will be televised, it is whether it will even happen if the only reason for a “revolution” is to generate television content.
What a curious question this was, part of a comment on an article that was posted to digg.com.
patosanpatosan
7 hr 16 min ago
“Want a level playing field? How about getting rid of private health insurer’s immunity to the sort of antitrust laws that prevent collusion and price-fixing.”
The government is a monopoly who cannot be sued in any case unless they say it’s ok and under specific circumstances (i.e. sovereign immunity).
“We’ve got an entire industry who is providing an essential service but their primary motive is profit.”
The same could be said of your local grocery store. Do you object to your local grocer?
How do you feel about this? Of course, you know I’m going to tell you how I feel…
The grocery store, what a curious analogy. I”m trying to picture a system where you pay premiums to a few big distributors that permit you to get partial reimbursements for the food you buy. You must pay your deductible before it kicks in, and there are co-payments that are so expensive that you often decide to go without in spite of your “food insurance policy”.
Food stores are required by the “food insurance industry” to maintain massive billing departments that examine each purchase to make sure it qualifies for reimbursement with the shopper’s “food insurance company” before deciding whether to bill the company or the customer. Often they need to make a great many phone calls to get approval for the customer’s purchase of some item.
People often go bankrupt because of food they must have despite the fact that they have policies, and policies are canceled simply because the companies decide people are getting too much food.
At the same time, people who have no “food policy” must pay 3-100 times as much for the same food. Sometimes when they are shopping the store will decide they must pay in advance before even allowing them to shop, and at other times the food stores will just round them up, put them in vans, and dump them on the street in another part of town in front of a competitor.
That’s where a sick person files a major claim on an existing insurance policy, a policy that they have been paying premiums for for years. Maybe the condition is some kind of cancer or other condition that may require long-term treatment to assure recovery.
The standard insurance company policy is to comb through all the patient’s records to see if there is something they inadvertently forgot to admit to when they first got the policy, something like acne or a sprained ankle. The company then claims fraud, denies the claim and rescinds (or cancels) the policy.
The person who is responsible for discovering justification gets a bonus, and if they cancel enough policies over a year, they get a big raise. For killing people.
At an insurance company hearing this past Tuesday, insurance company executives declared that they would continue this policy, even if they were taking part in a reform plan intended to increase coverage.
Hello? Thanks for clearing up the confusion. We here were under the impression that public mandates or taxpayer spending meant that abuses would be curtailed or, like, go away. Now that we know that bad faith is the plan, we can make out plans, too.
Watch Sicko to understand about how the health insurance industry takes advantage of sick policyholders to reap obscene profits. And kill them. I’m uploading now.
The right wingnuts are going after Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor for that statement she made in 2001 that a Latina judge could make a better decision than a white male.
“Was she right or wrong to say what she said in this way?” is the question they are all asking right now, and they are answering it for her, “I’m sure she would have worded it differently”, as though she should have been thinking ahead to what someone would think in the distant future, like when something important came up. Like now.
But first we must ask ourselves, “Was she right or wrong to think it?”
I think she was right. Here’s why:
Let’s indulge in stereotyping. I’ll take an older white male who righteously prides himself on his gender, color, religion, and social class. He is proud that he has no empathy for people who are not just like him, people of the wrong color, gender, religion, or social class, perhaps even someone who was born in the wrong geographical region of the country.
He honestly believes he is a self-made man, even though he may have been born wealthy, gone to the finest schools, and gotten every job in his life through family connections. And he believes that everyone else had the same opportunity, and having chosen not to be just like him, deserves to be exploited and underpaid.
Perhaps this guy is a Southerner, probably he prides himself in being a True Christian, and he looks down on women, blacks, and Mexicans for not knowing their place.
As far as he’s concerned, the fact that he is rich is the way it is supposed to be, just as much as he is white or male. The reason that Hispanics or blacks or women or poor people are not like him is because they aren’t supposed to be. They don’t matter. The only folks who matter are the older rich white guys. They get to make all the decisions about everybody’s life because they’re in power, and they’re in power because God wants them to be in power.
They are rich and imagine they deserve to be even richer, because this must be what God wants, or they wouldn’t be rich at all. It is their destiny.
Who do we know who thinks this way? I’m thinking Cheney, Bush, Rush, Beck, O’Reilly, Newt… The list is too long for me to more than begin, but you know exactly who is on it.
Guys like this do not have empathy. They don’t believe in having empathy. To do so is a weakness. To even want to learn about anyone else’s life experience is a character flaw, which could taint them.
They believe that the elite/rich/Southern white Christian male experience is the only one that matters. It is the default, and it is the natural order of things. To fail to accept this is, well, racist. Not to vote for a rich white male is racist. To presume that a woman, a black man, or even (God forbid!) a non-white woman could be the best, or even good enough for a top position is absurd to their thinking. To them it is obvious that women and minorities who have achieved success would never have done it without affirmative action, by playing the ‘race card’, or by cheating. Their qualifications are empty, meaningless. If there is only one elite white male who wants the job, even if he is not as qualified on paper, he automatically should have it.
A man like this has no idea what happens to a poor woman who gets pregnant and realizes she can’t afford to raise another child, or to a disabled person or minority who is discriminated against. He doesn’t care, either.
An educated Latina like Sotomayor, on the other hand, knows all about the rich white male experience, because she has run into it all her life. She has had it hammered into her all her life as the default experience, the only way to be, which is a lot more than Newt or Tricky Dick 2.0 can say about understanding what women or minorities experience. They have no idea what it is like to be a Latina, whether poor and struggling or a nominee to the Supreme Court with a stellar judicial record.
They have no idea whatever, and they do not care. It matters not a whit if they think that we should have more people just like them on the Supreme Court.
We do not need people on the court who do not care about Americans.
Maybe not really, not a lot of thoughts. Saturday Night Live did the definitive sketch on it, with George Bush giving advice to Dick Cheney on how he should handle the situation. There’s not much more a person can say about it, at least not if they have a real sense of humor, which nobody ever accused the real Dick Cheney of having.
And after you’re done with that, you can take a look at the coversheets that Donald Rumsfeld made for his daily reports to Bush after the invasion, to keep his spirits up by keeping him focused on the “religious crusade” aspect of the war.
Jonathan Mann, who is writing a song a day, and previously gave us “Hey, Paul Krugman” has outdone himself yet again by putting one of the infamous torture memos to music.
For all of you who were thinking that Fox News it a bit on the overexcited side, here is how a Brit portrayed it in a little documentary.
And a quote from Robert G Kaufman, speaking at the 61st Annual Conference on World Affairs on what Republicans should do to advance their party…
The fifth thing that Republicans have to do is understand the problem of communicating in a world where much of the television media, particularly, is hostile…If I had to recommend one single thing that the Republicans should be doing to help articulate the message, it is to acquire another television network so that there is not just FOX, but multiple sources of alternative information that will do a much better job than we did in 2008 to keep things honest.
Admitting that Fox News was bought and paid for by the Republican party.
What Cramer is saying is that the only consideration in determining the economic health of the nation as a whole should be stock market prices. This is an interesting perspective. Clearly a great many investors feel this way. That is why the administration has been putting so much effort into boosting investor confidence. The media, locked into worship of the market as a be-all and end-all, has responded by declaring that the depression is over and it’s back to normal for the country. It takes the pressure off announcements of continuing job losses, foreclosures, corporate corruption and looting, etc.
The administration “fixed” the stock market to get the media off their backs.
The stock market “creates wealth”? I thought that was the problem with investment in this country, money from nothing creating bubbles.
Bill Moyers did a show about the real problem, which is nowhere near being addressed: corporate fraud.
…as Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly and unapologetically said, what does this mean?
Spinmongers followed up by saying that he (or they) didn’t want “the President” to fail, but they wanted “his policies” to fail. Fred Thompson said it again, and so has Bobby Jindal. So what does that mean?
What does it mean to America if the President “fails”, or if his policies “fail”? What does it mean to “want” the President or his policies to fail? What do we think it means? What do the people who say it intend to convey? Does it matter?
In the Space Child’s Mother Goose, a wonderful old book of poetry parodies ostensibly for children, but full of allusions to contemporary life and fiction (as of course the original nursery rhymes were), there is a poem that goes something like this: See the little phrases go,
Watch their funny antics.
The men who make them wiggle so
Are teachers of semantics.
The words go up, the words go round,
And make a great commotion.
But all that lies behind the sound
Is hebetudeBeotian.
Hover for a tooltip.
Here’s how I see it: For the President to fail, it means his policies have failed. If his policies have failed, it means he has failed too.
But his policies are the only thing that can pull us out of this mess. The Republican “plan” is a pamphlet with lots of pictures with circles and arrows. It has no numbers in it.
If the plan fails, America fails, and American people suffer. They lose more jobs and homes.
But wanting the plan to fail is a very different thing from thinking it will fail. It is acknowledging that it may succeed. And if the plan succeeds and America gets pulled out of this morass, the Democrats get credit and the Republicans will have an epic fail on their hands. So they have to make it fail, or they are doomed.
All the people who are trying to claim that wanting Obama to fail is not the same as wanting the country to fail are just playing games with words. They know exactly what they mean, and so do we.
Or, how it suddenly became all Obama’s fault. Everything that happened is Obama’s fault, from daily fluctuations in the stock market (but only when they are in the downward direction), to the market and economic slide that began long before the election, to continued participation in two wars of highly dubious origin that he has not yet been able to extract us from.
There was a bombing in Iraq yesterday and people died! Impeach him for war crimes!
Any of the deregulation that the Republicans fought so hard for was actually Barney Frank’s or Ted Kennedy’s or Harry Reid’s or Nancy Pelosi’s fault. The administration that rammed though endless such policies with full Republican support and Democratic acquiescence (can you say “bi-partisanship”?) actually played no role, and was forced against its will to do all these things. That’s why Bush wrote all those signing statements that he was actually going to ignore deregulation and continue to enforce the laws as they previously stood, right?
No, wait! It was Bill, Clinton’s fault, Jimmy Carter’s fault! It was all FDR’s fault!
The banks were manipulated by poor people who forced them to make loans without asking for their income or verifying it! And now those poor people have lost their jobs and and want to collect unemployment, how dare they try to get something for nothing! Get off their lazy butts and find a job, there’s plenty of work for everybody who wants it!
And of course, my favorite: We don’t need to have regulations enforced, because anybody who would permit themselves to be ripped off deserved it!
Ahem.
Bush didn’t have anything to do with any of the disaster! And he’s not really a conservative anyway! He was actually a puppet, a President who sat helpless as the minority party around him controlled him like a puppet!
It has gone beyond “sore loser” into irrationality with a good dose of mental illness thrown in. Watch Glenn Beck cry on television sometime and tell me he doesn’t recall Howard Beale, the mentally ill newscaster in the movie Network being manipulated for news ratings.
Some amazing psychological delusions are taking place around us, not just on the right, of course. After reposting yesterday’s blog entry on how Rasmussen is perceiving the true political divide to be between not Republicans and Democrats, nor liberals and conservatives, but rather between two groups they term “Populists” and “the Political Class”, my diary there was filled with snarky comments from people who didn’t even read it or the links. They ignored the point, which was nothing more than “This is really interesting. It could mean something. We should keep an eye on it” and wrote comments on how polls actually don’t mean anything if they don’t agree with you, and Rasmussen polls are worthless.
There then followed a long diary complaining that those on the left should stop criticizing Obama’s choice of Geithner, because (a little sketchy here) it doesn’t matter who is Secretary of the Treasury or whether they have the confidence of the American people or their unpopularity is dragging down the entire administration. It doesn’t matter what the policy of the Treasury or the administration is. And besides, we couldn’t possibly understand what those people do. They are much smarter than us. Blah, blah, blah. And that Paul Krugner is an idiot, something only a moran, thought processes paralyzed with self-delusion, could say with a straight face.
But getting back to the “It’s all Obama’s fault” delusion, these people are finally recognizing what a mess the country is in. They voted for that guy twice, they supported him fully, they viciously attacked everybody who didn’t support him fully. He did exactly what he said he was going to do. They got what they asked for, what they were told to demand, and it didn’t work. It was not a disaster, not even a catastrophe, but a cataclysm. As Jon Stewart said, “He broke the world.” So now they need a way to absolve themselves from the shame of their collusion.
For 8 years he was their man. It is weighting them down like a ton of bricks, and truth and reconciliation can only come from within, and not from the voices on the radio.
The stages of grief:
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
