In the Arena

Sedition

On the Chris Mathews Show Sunday, I said that some of the right-wing infotainment gasbags–people like Glenn Beck etc.–were nudging up close to the edge of sedition. This has caused a bit of a self-righteous ruckus on the right. Let me be clear: dissent isn’t sedition. Questioning an Administration’s policies isn’t sedition. But questioning an Administration’s legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it certainly is. A rally like this yesterday in South Carolina is a good example of seditious speech. It’s not illegal–unless actions are taken to overthrow the government in question–but it is disgraceful and the precise opposite of patriotism in a democracy.

On a related note, my phone’s been ringing with requests from cable news shows–left and right–to discuss Tea Party extremism. The same phone was silent last week when my cover story about the difficulties facing our troops in Afghanistan was published. I won’t be appearing on any cable shows to discuss the Tea Party extremists this week. I said what I said, and stand by it. But I do find the “news” judgment of the cable networks nauseating…and I can understand why, despite the yellow ribbons and “We Support Our Troops” blather, our young people in uniform feel abandoned by a bored, ignorant and self-involved public back home.

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  • http://www.pledge-drive.com bondwooley

    Are the far-right gasbags edging toward sedition or self-destruction? I feel, and old friends I keep in contact with from when I worked on the Hill agree, that the right is about to snap. But the question remains – is that self-destruction or destruction of the government?

    And an underlying question is whether or not there is, any longer, such a thing as self-destruction in politics. Take Sarah Palin. The deeper she digs her grave, the more room there is for people to jump in behind her. Self-destruction in the typical sense has suddenly taken on the element of empowerment.

    Anyway, if you have a sense of humor left, here’s a short satire video about kicking these clowns into exile so the rest of us don’t have to leave the country:

    The Last Straw:

    http://bit.ly/ahQTbl

  • tstar3

    Gosh Joe, If I were not a poor grad student who needs to get her Ph.D in less than 18 months, I could talk to you for days on end. The difference between you and a rag site like POLITICO is like deciding whether to eat a steak or rat droppings.

  • nflfoghorn

    What do these guys really want in office – people even more stupid than they are?

  • freekeir

    nice piece joe – it’s good to flag this up, this obsession the media have with blowing everything way out of proportion. clinton was right in what he said, but it’s the media (beck, limbaugh and swampland as well) that turns it into a national hoo-ha.

    afghanistan is just yesterdays news.

  • 53_3

    I think that this day is a day that every conservative who has not made an effort to reign in their peers’ irresponsible speech, and I do not mean dissent, to hang their heads in shame.
    .
    One hundred sixty eight Americans died at the hands of right wing terrorists on this day 15 years ago. Please honor those who died.

  • http://www.124monkeys.com Sean DeCoursey forgot his password

    “and I can understand why, despite the yellow ribbons and “We Support Our Troops” blather, our young people in uniform feel abandoned by a bored, ignorant and self-involved public back home.”

    Quoted FtW. Those stupid yellow ribbon stickers were the worst thing to happen to American soldiers since the second Bush administration and Don Rumsfeld keeping his job for six years.

  • nflfoghorn

    Why would neocons care? They don’t generate ratings :(

  • http://www.compuduck.com/cardcomp/ Steve Stein

    I do find the “news” judgment of the cable networks nauseating

    Just the cable networks, Joe? I don’t see the broadcast networks behaving any differently. Tea Party coverage is where it’s at, and the war is old news, happening far away.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    I hadn’t heard the word “sedition” since I was reading about Eugene V Debs or when I was reading about the Army’s code of conduct.

    I saw things go from Bush Sr’s presidency when things were becoming mildly rude through the “angry white men” of the 1994 midterm election when Republicans became more obstructionist, but, sometimes would cooperate with Clinton rather than do nothing at all for a living.

    The last two years conservatives got angrier and angrier no longer arguing about who’s opinions were right, but, believing a whole new set of facts they created themselves.

    I wouldn’t like the ultra right in the Tea Party to turn into some kind of militia group. Even though it would push election after election to Democrats and, specifically liberal Democrats, but, I always believed in reason and clear thinking.

    Maybe I am just old fashioned naively believing that everybody can be a part of a consensus in at least some small way.

    So, I guess that means Freeinpa and Newfreedomblog will soon show up on wanted posters. (I am kidding since I do not believe that either of them are going to rebel against the government, but, instead, be very annoying as usual).

  • 53_3

    You have a point. To them, it’s all a matter of note being able to bake a cake without breaking a few eggs.
    .
    Joe’s link is terrible, but it reaffirms again my contentions about what conservatives need to do.
    .
    The problem here is that this isn’t “fringe” stuff, it’s BAU for the Tea Party, the right wing South, and FOX. I wish that others, when they see conservatives complain, tell them that it isn’t our problem.
    .
    It’s theirs!

  • Matt

    Threatening to start militias and march on Washington isn’t “sedition”? Then tell me what is…

    http://www.political-buzz.com/

  • 53_3

    Damn Partick!
    .
    I thought I was the only one who remembered the “Angry White Male” persona the GOP honed in the late ’80s and ’90s!
    .
    I don’t feel so alone now when I comment on it!
    .
    My opinion is that there were two ways to go after health care reform. The first path was to just accept it and move on, realizing that ratcheting up the hate would be just too much, or, in the case of the likes of Beck, Limbaugh, Tancredo and others, escalate this thing into the stratosphere.
    .
    What I’m hearing from just the Tea Party is total, OOC* schizophrenia. They have lent their voices to two positions:
    .
    1. The Tea Party’s image needs to change
    2. The Tea Party is being smeared by the left (nevermind the videos like Joe’s!)
    .
    *Out of control

  • nflfoghorn

    Who, not what – sorry

  • Ohg Rea Tone

    People enjoy blaming BIG government for all of the ills of civility – but the reality is that we have a BIG centralized government because local and State governments have failed to protect the citizens. ……….

    http://thefiresidepost.com/2010/04/19/the-federal-government-is-big-because-locals-are-not-responsible/

  • newfreedomblog

    “Too Dumb to Thrive”
    .
    So, two thoughts:
    1. The Obama Administration has done a terrible job explaining the stimulus package to the American people…especially since there have been very few documented cases of waste so far.
    .
    2. This is yet further evidence that Americans are flagrantly ill-informed…and, for those watching Fox News, misinformed.
    .
    It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. It is impossible to be a citizen if you don’t make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government. It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you’re a nation of dodos.

    .
    Read more: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/01/25/too-dumb-to-thrive/#ixzz0lYukwRyf
    .
    I suppose we should continue to read the rants of a complete lunatic and believe what he has to say has anything to do with the truth.
    .
    Yes, Joe Klein can go on CNN, blather about “extremist Tea Party People”, and in the 2nd breath shout out how basically “Dumb and Stupid” Americans in general are today.
    .
    Well Joe Klein, Americans are not stupid or dumb. We are not the racists that you so dearly want to name us because we are 100% against the policies of an ill-informed, fully ill-logical and corrupt Government which is currently being led by a Black man. I understand that you and the rest of your demonic minions on the left as they represent themselves by their comments here want to marginalize this movement, but you fail.
    .
    You are a desparte old fool. Just like the teacher in Washington State who wanted his liberal loons infiltrate the Tea Party movement to make them look bad. That failed. You fail.
    .
    Well as I have said before Joe Klein. Go F-yourself. You are nothing, absolutely nothing more than a partisan, liberal-loving and biased HACK.

  • sevenoaks07

    I was surprised to see you coming on so strong on the sedition issue yesterday; and also by Heileman’s very clear support. And you are right about the MSM media/cable: they love the Tea party stuff because it appeals to the lowest common denominator and is a cheap way to let the gasbags give off synthetic indignation.

    For some time now it looks like our troops are in two forgotten wars. It seems that our “patriots” are against Washington, the third battlefield in the US. I agree with SdeC: our involvement in the two wars seems to involve yellow ribbons and stickers.

  • freekeir

    i love this place – rusty rips on joe because he’s too liberal, stuartzechman rips on him because he’s not liberal enough.

    dude, the partisan hack just came back from afghanistan. yes he doesn’t miss an opportunity to big obama up, but im assuming you understand that limbaugh, beck etc are just as partisan, conservative loving and biased..

  • michaelfury
  • newfreedomblog

    …but im assuming you understand that limbaugh, beck etc are just as partisan, conservative loving and biased…

    .
    I fully understand the difference between someone who calls themselves a “Commentator/Pundit” versus someone who calls themselves a “Journalist/Reporter”.
    .
    Do you know the difference?

  • michaelfury

    “our young people in uniform feel abandoned by a bored, ignorant and self-involved public back home”

    “Ignorant” indeed, Mr. Klein:

    http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/the-gas-must-flow/

  • http://42hinoon.wordpress.com 42hinoon

    Oooooooh, Glen Beck is single handedly destroying the ‘great American dream’!!!! What a CROCK of cow pies. This man, and one or two others have the balls to stand up, and tell the people the truth about is being done to what freedom you still have! Open your eyes, people, and your ears. I’m really tired of hearing how ‘evil’ Glen is, when the evil ones are in DC.

  • nflfoghorn

    He’s not ‘evil gratia eviltis’ but like his like brethren he misinforms, lies, and is unapologetic about it — that’s what’s evil.
    .
    RE Freep @ 11: What we wouldn’t pay to have you do the same as you’ve asked JK.

  • centfan

    Quote from a Tea Partier:

    “Terrorists are superhuman and I am terrified of them. Law enforcement can’t cope with them. Our troops have to stay in the field until all terrorists are dead and my family and I are completely safe. If our troops die they’re only doing their job by looking out for cowardly number one… namely me… “.

    “We don’t need big government. My eleven year old daughter would love to be chained to a machine 18 hours a day. Child labor laws interfere with my freedom. Rat poison in my corndog is a right of all Americans. I only hope more people die in flaming airliners that have no federally mandated maintenance records. Patriotic American miners love to die in explosions in mines with inexpensive safety standards and no government telling them how their employees should live… or die.”

  • queencersei

    Sorry to say it, but I will not be surprised to see another Oklahoma type bombing in this country in the next year or two. The hard right has whipped their base into such a frenzy with their overblown rhetoric, it seems like it is only a manner of time before something happens. I think that guy who flew his plane into that IRS building in Texas was just a harbinger. And when it happens the Cheney’s, Beck, Limbaugh and Palin will be shaking their heads and denying any responsibility.

  • http://42hinoon.wordpress.com 42hinoon

    ‘SHOW ME THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE’!!!!!!!!!! Wasn’t there some talk about ‘open and transparent’? What could be more open than to show one’s birth certificate?? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?! Pretty clever to cover up that ‘little’ matter with health care and stimulus, but we STILL haven’t seen it???!!!!

  • deconstructiva

    ….oh yes, do please tell us the difference, dear Rusty.
    (btw, stuart makes a distinction too)

  • jsfox

    Here’s what Glenn Beck really cares about in his own words -

    “With a deadpan, Beck insists that he is not political: ‘I could give a flying crap about the political process.’ Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage.”

    You are being had and lied to in order to benefit Glenn’s wallet.

  • joellongview

    You go, Joe! There really isn’t much else to comment about the tea-partiers, besides their crazy racist fear-mongering speech. I do worry that the increasing lax enforcement of gun laws combined with the zaniness of the tea-baggers has the potential for combustion..

  • m0mentom0ri

    Rusty, today: “We are not the racists that you so dearly want to name us because we are 100% against the policies of an ill-informed, fully ill-logical and corrupt Government which is currently being led by a Black man.”
    .
    Rusty, a little while ago: “Unless you are a big Labor Union, ACORN, welfare Blacks or Trial Lawyers Association, then forget it.”
    Link: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/01/10/california-bust/#comment-122301
    .
    I can’t imagine why we think you’re racist. It must be all those ‘welfare Blacks’ giving you a bad name.

  • deconstructiva

    Are you speaking of an African swollow or a European swollow? I mean, are you speaking of Barack Obama or Trig Palin? (not Trig’s fault if his mom – IF it’s Sarah – was too careless or lazy to get his records in prop. order. How the hell will he get a passport later if he still lacks the bc?)

  • apr2563

    Angry white man was just an off shoot of the “silent majority” from the Nixon era. If fact, you can bet a lot of the TPers are that same bunch. The Reps always have their victims they are defending and the immoral, unpatriotic opposition they demonize. It has been thus, in current political history, since the McCarthy, HUAC era.

  • freekeir

    good point, and you’re right, I missed that.

    i do know the difference between a pundit and a reporter, and as you just pointed out to me, so, obviously, do you. in fact, being that we’re exchanging views here i’d puff up and say we’re pretty news-literate.

    but you can’t with a straight face tell me there aren’t large portions of the population that view these guys AS newsmen. that take what they’re saying as gospel. and im not saying it doesn’t happen from the left either, but it’s definitely happening to a far larger degree now from the right.

  • http://42hinoon.wordpress.com 42hinoon

    It would be sedition if ‘lies’ were being spread to incite the public to reject the government, but, when TRUTH is being put out , it’s called…………’PATRIOTISM’!!!!!!

  • tstar3

    I’ll show you the birth certificate if you show me where you keep your lucky charms. Idiot.

  • apr2563

    Newrusty: You have just posted an example of hate speech, irrationality, and logical disconnect.

  • newfreedomblog

    Unlike the rest of the folks on this site that demonize the right, and the Tea Party movement. I do have a question for you freekeir. How would you think Joe Klein would justify Hillary Clinton’s statement during the last primary when she said…
    .

    “I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic, and we should stand up and say, “WE ARE AMERICANS AND WE HAVE A RIGHT TO DEBATE AND DISAGREE WITH ANY ADMINISTRATION!”

    .
    http://www.thelandofthefree.net/conservativeopinion/2008/11/11/the-right-to-disagree/
    .
    Do you also suppose that Joe Klein spoke out at that time and asked for Hillary Clinton to be muzzled? That he said she should not have had differing opinions about the Bush II Administration? To not question Government in general?

  • http://phd9.blogspot.com Paul Dirks

    Two thoughts.
    The first is that I find it ironic that the same people accusing you of ‘stifling’ free speech are responding to nothing more than your exercise of the very same right to free speech. Secondly, your use of the term ‘seditious’ strikes a nerve precisely because it helps highlight just how selective certain people’s patriotism can be. We are all Americans and we all want what is best for this country. The fact that certain factions seem to think that only their (shrinking) half counts is a very serious problem. (Even more serioius than the peculiar atttention spans of TeeVee viewers.)

  • apr2563

    As I mentioned on another post of yours Joe, I was watching as you denounced Beck and Hannity. There was no false eqivalency. The quote posted 14.2 was astonishingly frank by Beck. I have seen it before. He is a dangerous demogogue. I have no quarrel with reasonable people on the right. But, I think it is unforgivable when Rep. leaders do not denounce hate speech, fear mongering, and insinuations supporting violence.
    .
    I have been so disheartened when the traditional media does not speak up. I keep waiting for an Edward R. Murrow. Joe, you came close. Now be prepared for a rw swarm to land in swampland.
    .
    Thank You Joe!

  • freekeir

    hey rusty – first, i think the tea party movement is great. it’s necessary, and if it makes obama stop and look and think “hey, maybe i better put some brakes on here” thats wonderful.
    .
    I don’t see Joe Klein trying to muzzle anyone, neither was Clinton trying to stop dissent. A vocal protest against a government is something that makes America great.
    .
    But if you read Joe’s post at the top “Let me be clear: dissent isn’t sedition. Questioning an Administration’s policies isn’t sedition. But questioning an Administration’s legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it certainly is.”
    .
    It’s all this birther nonsense, the death panels, that sort of talk that IS dangerous, you have to recognise that, because it’s bull, shouting about that obama isn’t the rightful president isn’t dissent, it doesn’t help, it just fuels hate in people that don’t know right from wrong. And there are people out there that are nuts, that live in paranoid delusional fantasy worlds, and all it takes is one of them being convinced obama is indeed a commie kenyan fascist who is hellbent on destroying america to decide to take matters into their own hands.
    .
    Dissent is great. Spread lies – or not speaking out against the spread of lies – is dangerous.

  • megatronrises

    There’s a difference between debate and dissent and threatening to take up arms against a government. That’s the whole point.

  • m0mentom0ri

    Nobody’s saying you can’t debate, protest, complain, and moan to your heart’s content, Rusty. You can have your next Klan rally on the Capitol steps for all I care.
    .
    But when your side is advocating secession, you’ve crossed the line. When you advocate violence and armed revolution against the government you’ve crossed the line. It’s that easy.
    .
    Or do you think advocating armed revolution is patriotic, Rusty?

  • megatronrises

    What exactly is this ‘TRUTH’ again?

  • http://erieangel.wordpress.com erieangel

    Ok, so tell me, why did you feel the need to point out what everybody already knows–that Obama is black. AND type the word in all caps?? Sounds pretty racist to me.

  • helee

    My own thought is that most of the Tea Partiers just show up because they like to hold signs and yell with a bunch of other people. That is, they’re pretty much like some of the commenters you find on political internet sites — they enjoy expressing rage anonymously.

    Another thing that I’m pretty sure is driving the Tea Party movement is the long recession — yes, we’re told by many pundits that it’s now over and things are better, but my town and my state and my kids in Nevada are still being trashed by the lack of jobs. Wall Street has recovered nicely, thanks to the zillions of dollars we the people gave it, but ordinary people are still struggling to pay the electric bill and praying they won’t be evicted this month. Who can blame them for being upset? Not me. Anger about both points — the bailout of Wall Street and the lack of jobs — feeds strong discontent with the government, I’m sure. You have to have someone to blame.

    I think most Tea Partiers are not about to kill anyone, but the problem is, as always, that among any 100 people you’re probably going to have one or two whose minds are unstable and whose hold on reality is weak. They are the ones who listen to irresponsible idiots jabbering about taking guns to Washington, and they *do* it. They’re the Timothy McVeighs, and we never know what they look like until they’ve fired the shot or set off the bomb.

  • http://phd9.blogspot.com Paul Dirks

    As I said on another thread I’m far less worried about any random acts of violence than I am of widespread ignorance of the basic of Constitutional Civics.
    .

  • mredct

    Who’s on first.
    What’s on second.

  • helee

    As for our soldiers being forgotten, you’re absolutely right, Joe. And it is disgraceful. It’s largely the result of an all-voluteer military. Without a draft to spread the pain, most people just don’t care. I glad you and other actual reporters are there to keep directing our wavering and self-centered attention to those troops, and to the suffering citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan as well.

  • nflfoghorn

    …and they’ll all say “it’s not OUR fault.”

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    rusty,
    .
    http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/s020.htm
    .
    That is the legal definition of sedition. Fox and others have crossed that line many times.
    .
    Obviously there was a huge amount of complaining about your man Dubbya, but, it was about winning the next presidential election, winning congress seats to stop his absurd excuse for government, but not to attack anybody or anything.
    .
    Unless you have rocket launchers in your basement and meet with you militia every Monday and discuss overthrowing the government, you’ll only have one problem: everybody who hears your politics will just think that you are nutty enough to blow people up.
    .
    If you hate the left so much, stay out of the Swamp.
    .
    Also, considering that we are a random group of people not selected no selecting this blog by ideology, it is very reasonable to suspect that his is the actual majority of America.
    .
    OT Where has Stuart been?
    .
    My guesses: he’s off on a really cool vacation, his wife is making him build a new wing of the house or he is so busy trying to catch up with the enormous amount that I write he hasn’t caught up yet. (For his sake, I hope it’s the really cool vacation).

  • m0mentom0ri

    Beck, at his zenith, pulls about two and a half million viewers with his Fox News pantomime conservative act. That’s less than 1% of well over 300 million Americans.
    .
    By comparison, Spongebob Squarepants pulls almost twice that on Nickelodeon.
    .
    The networks average around 16 million a night for their news shows – more than 5 times Beck.
    .
    Now, tell me again how big Glenn Beck is. Tell me how his 1% share represents the majority of Americans.

  • freeinpa

    “I thought I was the only one who remembered the “Angry White Male” persona the GOP”

    As opposed to the whiny sniveling girly men of the left. Funny how the left is always quick to condemn “hate speech” against what they believe but go mute for decades on end with the radical groups of their parties. PETA, ELF, war protesters, Weatherman, SLA, the Presidential biographer Ayers, Schultz Olbermann Matthews etc.

    Since you have been silent for the past decades your request to ask anyone on the right to condemn what you deem offensive is well pathetic and comical. You are like the felon who gets shot in the commission of a crime then sues somebody for being shot.

  • toadtws

    I agree with Joe. Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and O’Reilly are ruining this country by getting the redneck, racist teapartiers all wound-up. They can’t get over the fact that we have a black president and they won’t stop until they bring down this administration. They are extremists who have to be stopped. Attorney General Holder should be taking whatever steps are necessary to shut these people up. Why is he not bringing sedition charges against these people? Also, can’t our President call out the national guard to stop these Teaparty rallies? They are nothing more than meetings for these right wing extremists to plan their violence against real Americans. Something has to be done soon! What am I missing?

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “Since you have been silent for the past decades your request to ask anyone on the right to condemn what you deem offensive is well pathetic and comical. You are like the felon who gets shot in the commission of a crime then sues somebody for being shot.”
    .
    Earth Liberation Front number of killed: 0
    Government reaction: Prosecutions.
    Protests or arguments against prosecution by elected Democrats and mainstream Democrats: None.
    .
    PETA number of people killed: 0
    Government reaction: arrests for harassment.
    Protests or arguments against prosecution by elected Democrats and mainstream Democrats: None.
    .
    I love animals! I eat them every day. Like most Republicans, most Democrats eat meat. Not all vegetarians are liberal and few vegetarians are political about being vegetarian. They, usually, just want to be thin.
    .
    We’re more like a kid in high school who made bad jokes about the teacher being very appalled at the murderous rampage in Columbine High school.
    .
    April 19th 1995: “The Oklahoma blast claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6,[3] and more than 680 people were injured.[4] The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered building glass in a three mile square area.[5] The bomb was estimated to have caused at least $652 million worth of property damage.[6]”
    .
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing
    .
    So, some groups supporting issues that very few Americans believe in is similar to right wing terrorism, Freeinpa?
    .
    You are way off.
    ——————————————————————————–
    m0mentom0ri,
    .
    “Tell me how his 1% share represents the majority of Americans.”
    .
    I think it is obvious that the far right has a few academic topics they are not very good in: Biology, climatology, history, economics, law and, of course, basic math.
    .
    I think Republicans fear making American schools better will cause the complete destruction of their party.

  • http://phd9.blogspot.com Paul Dirks

    The word ‘troll’ gets significantly overused theses days meaning someone who argues against the grain of a thread in dishonest ways. However it USED to mean someone who impersonates someone with the opposite viewpoint in order to put forward an easily discredited argument. I’m willing to bet that this is such a post.

    Either that, or we really need to bone up on our C-Civics around here.

  • http://www.davesromanticpiano.com durangodave

    Freedom of speech and the press is, of course, guaranteed by the First Amendment, and we should all be glad for that. The question about sedition turns on the “yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” metaphor, at least for those of us who aren’t lawyers. It certainly seems that all the talk of “taking our country back” and coming “armed and dangerous” etc. etc. certainly passes the yelling fire test. It’s a delicate line to walk in a free society. As ignorant and offensive as I find rusty’s comments to be, he(?) is well within his rights to say such things. Does that also apply to elected officials calling, even metaphorically, for the violent overthow of the elected government?

  • newfreedomblog

    I so love it when the liberal loons all shout out in unison, “the Racists are coming!!”.
    .
    Put your tin-foil hats back on my dear liberal loons. We will not put you into a concentration camp just because you act like a socialist, talk like a socialist and advocate for socialism. That was your heros Stalin, Mao and Lenin’s way to deal with dissidents. We’ll just relegate you to pig farming.

  • freeinpa

    JK

    You and the cast of characters on Chrissy Tingles show may even the looniest Tea Party folks look downright Ivy League. You are a dynamic combination of arrogance and ignorance all wrapped in one piece of leftist trash.

  • newfreedomblog

    LOL@”Chrissy Tingles show”. I was thinking more like the muppets, but hey, this works too.

  • nflfoghorn

    [insert one-handed...
    clap here]

  • m0mentom0ri

    Pig-farming. Along with all those ‘welfare Blacks’, right Rusty?
    .
    Link: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/01/10/california-bust/#comment-122301

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “The word ‘troll’…USED to mean someone who impersonates someone with the opposite viewpoint in order to put forward an easily discredited argument. I’m willing to bet that this is such a post.”
    .
    Obviously we have to wait for the first few bombs to explode and attacks on government buildings and/or progressive organizations before we can find exclusively those involved and take them into custody and, as we did with the American Communist Party and with the KKK, have the FBI infiltrate them for surveillance purposes.
    .
    If nothing blows up this time (as McVeigh was one year after the Angry white men of the 1994 election) next year, then the Tea Party can be upgraded to extremely annoying, woefully misinformed a-holes.
    .
    BTW: when it comes to Angry White men in 1994, I remember looking at that saying how that type of explanation could be misinterpreted and lead to misunderstandings. I am not an Angry White man. I am a sarcastic white man who, accordingly votes Democratic.
    .
    I was worried about racial profiling and failure to distinguish between Sarcastic White Men voting for Democrats and the Angry White men voting for the Newt.

  • shepherdwong

    Yes, you are exactly correct. It is the constant lying about Democrats and the Obama Administration that provides the “manner intended to undermine or overthrow” the democratically-elected government. It proves that the motive is traitorous, not patriotic. I wonder if the media truth-tellers will ever be able to tell the public that the entire Republican Party and most “conservatives” are no better that professional liars and no worse than outright traitors.

  • toadtws

    Name-calling is the right-wingers do. Far from being a “troll” or uneducated, I am educated in the law sufficiently to know that the administration has the power and the right to prosecute those who use language to seek the overthrow of the government. Sedition “often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent (or resistance) to lawful authority.” Isn’t that what the Teapartiers are doing. Secretary Holder used these powers recently against the Hutaree group which is probably related in some way with other right wing groups. There is a long history of using laws against sedition to prosecute dangerous people in this country (and sometimes misused to prosecute people who were not dangerous such as during the McCarthy era). That’s what needs to happen again today.

  • freeinpa

    I am sure you were trying to make a point but as usual it was more in the form of obfuscation. If you want to follow your lame analogies for OK City Government arrests followed by jail and execution and I don’t recall any protests by any elected Republican either.

    You managed to skip the damage, destruction and careers ruined by PETA, ELF and no mention of Ayers. Let’s not forget Theodore Kaczynski a left wing nut job. You somehow try to minimize the left wing radical groups as a minor nuisance and not really like the rest of the left but manage to equate a couple of guys in OK City with the entire conservative movement. You want to talk way off base? You stepped off the field.

    It is typical of the left to create somebody or something to hate. The Tea Party was first labeled an orchestrated “astroturf” organization, then you tried racism (Tea Party is more diverse than the board of the NYT), now violence (Only violence at Tea Party events comes from the lefts thugs). 80% of the the people are discontented with government and that makes the gung-ho government weenies afraid that the nonsense they sell is over. The arrogance is only used to mask the fear.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Response to
    24.3
    .
    Oh, the Hutaree group. Those were “Christian Warriors” plotting to kill a cop and then blow them up at the police funeral.
    .
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutaree
    .
    The Tea Party, as far as I can tell, do not yet – yet – meet that standard. We haven’t seen Palin as drill instructor.
    .
    Politically, until there is a cache of weapons and/or videos explaining how to do a terrorist act, arresting the Tea Party would be a nightmare and, even in my POV very heavy handed.
    .
    I do not know exactly when speech becomes sedition, but, the Tea Party seems to stand on that line with both toes touching it but not yet – yet – going over that line.

  • http://phd9.blogspot.com Paul Dirks

    Ok. Lets try another tack. Perhaps you are too young to recall what the Church commision found about the tactics the FBI used against the antiwar movement but trust me when I say that a heavy-handed DOJ response to Tea partiers would be both a Constitutional AND a tactical blunder.
    .
    Free speech is an important Constituional value and the more the Tea partiers use it, the more most Americans recoil at their bigotry. OTOH if they succeeded in getting the FBI to go after them in any significant way, then they would suddenly win the argument. After all, their whole MO is to complain about an oppressive Federal government. The last thing we want is for them to be right.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    At the Reagan Library Sean Hannity is calling his people McVeigh Wannabees.
    .

    .
    Does Rachel Maddow call her audience ELF Wannabees? How about the Chicago 19th century Haymarket bomber Wannabes? No?
    .
    The SLA and the Weathermen were seditious and had not been around for about thirty five years.
    .
    How about the the KKK in the 1960s? Weren’t they seditious, since you want to go through history.
    .
    How about the Whiskey Rebellion, protesting taxes and put down by president Washington. They were anti-tax and seditious. Why not go back there while we have the chance?
    .
    Half of all Americans were not born 35 years ago.
    .
    The topic is who is committing sedition now.

    The Unibomber was not liberal.
    .
    He wanted to go back to an agrarian society. This is not anything like liberals, but, with the concept of “good ole days” was somewhat more like a conservative.
    .
    So, as usual, you have to go back to the Vietnam War, when you, apparently, last left your house, to find examples of sedition on the left and imagine that they are not grandparents by now.

  • freeinpa

    “By comparison, Spongebob Squarepants pulls almost twice that on Nickelodeon”

    All registered Democrats I am sure.

    I find it amazing that you now try to minimize Beck’s audience just as Patrick does with the viewers of Fox’s O’Reilly and Hannity.

    I ask again if these folks are so inconsequential and so far out of the mainstream why does the looney left here spend so much time, calories and megabytes denigrating, name calling and generally just trying to diminish everything they do?

    Could it be the issues and positions they take strike a cord with more Americans than anything the left can conjure up?

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “I ask again if these folks are so inconsequential and so far out of the mainstream why does the looney left here spend so much time, calories and megabytes denigrating, name calling and generally just trying to diminish everything they do?”
    .
    First, we are trying to figure out the cause of the mass psychosis of people like you.
    .
    Second, in order not to put on weight, our choices are to burn calories here or become vegetarians and have you call us terrorists.

  • http://keironjackman.wordpress.com keiron Jackman

    Well I was kinda hoping not to open my mouth on this cause the this article says it all but leaves out one thing. Rush got Obama elected trying to implement a political stunt, but what do you expect from a college drop out who is driven by $$$, Check the story out

    http://bit.ly/ch10Lg

  • FlownOver

    Certainly not ignorant enough to fall for your self-serving blogwhoring.

    Nobody cares what you say, because it’s always an excuse to post a link to your own tripe.

    To quote Smeagol, “Leave now, and never come back.”

  • FlownOver

    Joe Klein:

    So, do you have the stones to identify those “cable news shows?” I’m guessing your employer’s corporate affiliate CNN would be at the top of the list.

  • shepherdwong

    “Free speech is an important Constituional value and the more the Tea partiers use it, the more most Americans recoil at their bigotry.”
    .
    Yes, social approbation is the way to confront the rank-and-file bigots and the angry partisans among the Teaparties. We should remember, these people are the biggest victims of the professional liars who are leading the right-wing media and the “conservative” movement. They have, quite literally, had their sanity stolen by them.

  • deconstructiva

    Could it be the issues and positions they take strike a cord with more Americans…
    .
    What “cord” are you thinking of, freepa? Rope, perhaps? As in Western Justice™ …or Southern “justice”? (but I digress) Please don’t give a lameass typing excuse. Chord is spaced too much across the keyboard to blame on adjacent keys / etc. typing errors. This must’ve been either a lack of spelling / grammar skills or a subconscious revelation. If the latter, don’t blame us us for any racial overtones in your thoughts here. Thanks.

  • freeinpa

    “Attorney General Holder should be taking whatever steps are necessary to shut these people up.”

    “ruining this country by getting the redneck, racist teapartiers all wound-up”

    “Name-calling is the right-wingers do”

    “I am educated in the law sufficiently to know that the administration has the power and the right to prosecute those who use language to seek the overthrow of the government.”

    ==

    You can’t make this stuff up. Here is a left clown wanting peaceful dissent silenced because he doesn’t agree with it while claiming to know the law. Apparently his education missed the days on Free speech.

    Then he proceeds with name calling while then claiming that is the province of the right. This is priceless stuff. It is beyond irony and goes straight to the stupidity of the left. For eight years we heard it was patriotic to voice dissent. Now its seditious.

    ==
    “Something has to be done soon! What am I missing?”

    A brain Scarecrow a brain.

  • Art Pepper

    O’Reilly said in ~ 2007 or 2008 that the war in Afghanistan was over. I remember he got very angry about it. It was only liberal kooks who kept bringing it up, in an attempt to discredit then-president Bush.

  • tlman2

    Joe Klein:

    Once again, you you have hit the nail on the head. Thank you for being consistently on point the last several years and continuing to blog. You always manage to concisely articulate the issues underlying other “news” reports. There are people, believe it or not, who appreciate it.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Freeper,
    .
    “‘troll’ USED to mean someone who impersonates someone with the opposite viewpoint in order to put forward an easily discredited argument. I’m willing to bet that this is such a post.”
    .
    Paul called you out before anybody else did. toadtws is one of your other logins, isn’t it?
    .
    This isn’t the first time I saw somebody online claiming to be somebody that they are not. One nut said that I was so small to him that he needed the Hubble Telescope to see me (which would mean that I am unbelievably large like a cluster of stars but light years ahead of you) rather than an electron microscope and claimed he was a chemical engineer.
    .
    Oh, wait, that nut was you!
    .
    Am I am still so unimaginably large and so many light years ahead of you, or do admit that online you are full of

  • freeinpa

    Hannity was referring to a quote my Democrat Rep. Brian Baird, who said the tea party people were reminiscent of Tim McVeigh.

    Nice try
    ==

    The SLA and the Weathermen were seditious and had not been around for about thirty five years.

    Not publicly maybe but how many McVeigh accolades launched the political career of a Senator and President as one “former” Weatherman has. And how many of these “old” seditious folks still function as advisers for the Democrats?

    ==
    “How about the the KKK in the 1960s? Weren’t they seditious, since you want to go through history”

    Yes they were and one is a leading Democratic Senator from WV.
    ==
    “The Unibomber was not liberal”

    Another liberal fact! He started the bombings because of industries encroaching and destroying the environment. Two main dogmas of liberalism; despisement of business (except for taxes) and genuflecting before environmental regulation. His manifesto was Algore’s book.
    ==

    The topic is who is committing sedition now.”

    Liberal sedition as been around for decades and they are still here. Ayers, Fonda, Byrd, Leahy, Clinton etc

  • freeinpa


    First, we are trying to figure out the cause of the mass psychosis of people like you.”

    More high minded drivel. The only goal of the left is to silence and dispense with those who disagree.

    You got to stop lying to yourself.

  • newfreedomblog

    Those who appreciate Joe Klein; Mickey Mouse, Donald and Daisy Duck. All Looney Tune characters from the far left extremists junta.

  • hazelmeade

    Okay, Joe, but what about Bill Ayers? Now there’s a guy who actually planted bombs in an attempt to overthrow the government. How can you question Glenn Beck’s speech without questioning Obama’s connection to Ayers?

    And if “questioning an Administration’s legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it ” is seditious then there’s a hell of a lot of Democrats out there who were seditious when carrying “Impeach Bush” and “Re-elect Gore” signs at anti-war rallies.

    And I’m not even getting into the half of it.

    Why is it that when Democrats criticize the government dissent is “the highest form of patriotism”. But when Republicans do it, it’s “sedition”?

    Especially since the Republicans are calling for more liberty and less government, not to have a revolution imposing a totalitarian state, like people like Ayers and the lefty ilk supported.

  • deconstructiva

    Rusty, sorry sweetheart but you got Disney and Warner Bros. mixed up. I’d bet WB’s Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd weally are gun-totin’ TP-lovin’ R’s. Just tryin’ to help ya out there so you won’t get facts wrong (again).

  • newfreedomblog

    “Okay, Joe, but what about Bill Ayers? Now there’s a guy who actually planted bombs in an attempt to overthrow the government. How can you question Glenn Beck’s speech without questioning Obama’s connection to Ayers?”

    .
    Good question. I would imagine Joe Klein was too busy sitting in his dorm room masterbating instead of helping Bill Ayers out with the explosive devices they wanted to plant at the Capitol and Pentagon.
    .
    How about it Joe, are you a former ex-SDS’er? Is that why you hate the Tea Party so much now? Do your buddies Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones still put you down for not having the stones to actually go out and blow something “official” up in the day? In Psychology, we call that projection, Joe.
    .
    But, never fear Joe, I am sure once TIME.com figures out what a stooge you really are and kicks you to the curb, George Soros will have you write all his new propaganda fliers for the libfest rallies I hear he is planning to counter the Tea Party Movement.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Nine of the sixteen targets the Unibomber hit were Universities and, since Republicans hate Universities since they are, supposedly, where liberal ideas all come from and two of them were directed computer people, that sounds even more like a conservative.
    .
    You on this post were mocking the Ivy league.
    .
    Liberals almost never do that.
    .
    So, the Unibomber must have been a right winger.
    .
    Liberals seek tax money to pay for State Universities.
    .
    Hannity just talking about McVeigh as a joke is frightening and repulsive.
    .
    So, please do tell us who was a part of a homicidal group who helped Obama. I am eager to hear about these people since it sounds like another of your delusions.
    .

  • newfreedomblog

    Oh yes, Decon. How terrible of me to mix up Disney characters with Warner Bros characters. But, I knew I could count on you to differentiate between cartoon characters on the left.
    .
    Hey, you haven’t sucked up to the TIME.com staff yet today, or did I buzz by the vast majority of your comments today as usual?

  • newfreedomblog

    As well as you like to threaten people with violence, patricksartor, I am surprised you would even think of commenting on this at all.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “I would imagine Joe Klein was too busy sitting in his dorm room masterbating…”
    .
    Newfreedom, you must be homosexual or just sick if you imagine men masturbating.
    .
    Bill Ayers met Obama at UC. Milton Friedman, also was at UC.
    .
    So, if Ayers being a Communist makes Obama a Communist, then does Milton Friedman being at the University of Chicago make Obama a conservative?
    .
    (Friedman was an economic adviser to Barry Goldwater).

  • deconstructiva

    Hell yeah I did, Rusty! Twice to Katie, once to Jay. Pay attention already. Do you ever read the comments (or the original posts)? I read yours, love a good laugh. Thanks.

  • hazelmeade

    “Free speech is an important Constituional value and the more the Tea partiers use it, the more most Americans recoil at their bigotry. OTOH if they succeeded in getting the FBI to go after them in any significant way, then they would suddenly win the argument. After all, their whole MO is to complain about an oppressive Federal government. The last thing we want is for them to be right.”

    I’m afraid the bigotry expressed by the Democratic mainstream towards the tea-partiers, including yourself, has already proven them right.

    For example, presuming them to be racists without ever actually meeting and speaking to them in person. Presuming that you know everything about them when your entire experience of the movement is mediated by people who hold them in contempt – not for their bigotry, but because of their political views.

    The reality is that the liberal-democratic establishment is simply using these transparent charges of racism and sedition to *suppress opposing speech* without addressing it. They feel they’ve had their “revolution” and their goal is to try to shut up Republicans so as to assert total political dominance and get their way.

    It’s not honest. And it’s not about racism. It’s about politics. It’s about *winning*. It’s about blackening and smearing your enemies rather than addressing them in a reasonable fashion. It’s about stigmatizing people and denigrating them so as to dominante them and drive them out of the poltiical landscape. And it’s not about race – it’s about economic policy. It’s about asserting the dominance of a more socialistic political paradigm by branding free marketeers as racist so you don’t have to deal with them on the ground of economic theory.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    12
    “Thanks for irritating new rusty. It is a worthy pastime.”
    So going out of your way to piss people off in the course of political discourse is a “worthy pastime”?
    No wonder no one in this country can have a useful discussion anymore; everyone treats it like Tupac vs. Biggie.
    sasquatch08
    March 28, 2010
    at 6:45 am
    Reply to this comment
    • 12.1
    Sasquatch,
    Sometimes I think of this as a part of a bipartisan think tank.
    .
    Other times I think of being like the Machine Gun Kelly for the Democrats.
    .
    Freeinpa and Newfreedomblog are just trying p o everybody.
    .
    After a long debate, freeinpa was offline for a week.
    .
    He was going off about the late Senator Moynihan but didn’t know what he was talking about.
    .
    I put back in his place.
    .
    I think he is changing his pastime to watching old movies instead of coming up with random things about Democrats.
    .
    Newfreedomblog/rusty is next in my cross hairs. He is either going to learn to come up with valid explanations for what he says or change his hobby to stamp collecting.
    .
    Yesterday Newfreedomblog was trying to say that Herbert Hoover was a liberal.

    Read more: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/03/27/obama-announces-15-recess-appointments/#ixzz0jaFcf8l4
    .
    Sorry rusty, since I didn’t cause Freeper a paper cut, then that does not qualify as a threat in the slightest.

  • hazelmeade

    Ayers and Obama didn’t just happen to boh be in hicago ta the same time. Ayers was closely involved in Obama’s early political career. They knew each other personally, and Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Obama at his house.

  • hazelmeade

    “It is the constant lying about Democrats and the Obama Administration ”

    How much do you want to bet that the tea partiers would say the exact same thing about you?

    What counts as a “lie” depends on which historical narrative informs your world view. And I’m afraid there are plenty of half-truths and outright lies informing both sides.

    It’s factually true that Obama and the Dems cooked the books to come up with budget numbers on the health care bill. You may disagree, but calling me a “liar” because I don’t buy the administrations budget estmiates is a bit rich.

  • newfreedomblog

    Oh poor Patrick the liberal enforcer Sartor, here from FactCheck.org.
    .

    “According to an Obama spokesman, the two men first met in 1995, when Obama was tapped to chair the board of the newly formed Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Ayers had been instrumental in creating the organization, which was to dispense grants for projects that would improve Chicago’s schools.

    The Challenge was one of 18 projects supported by a $500 million grant announced at a White House ceremony Dec. 18, 1993, by the Annenberg Foundation, founded four years earlier by Philadelphia publisher Walter Annenberg. It was the largest single gift ever made to public education in America. The Chicago project received a $49.2 million grant in 1995, and officials administering the grant funds at Brown University announced at the time that the Chicago proposal was developed through discussions among “a broad-based coalition of local school council members, teachers, principals, school reform groups, union representatives and central office staff” convened by three educators – one of whom was Ayers. Mayor Richard M. Daley, a Democrat, and Gov. Jim Edgar, a Republican, took part in a ceremony announcing the grant.
    .
    There are other connections between Obama and Ayers: The same year the two men met through the Annenberg Challenge, Ayers hosted a meet-and-greet coffee for Obama, who was running for state Senate and who lived three blocks away from him. Obama and Ayers also were on the board of an antipoverty charity, the Woods Fund of Chicago, where their service overlapped from 2000 to 2002. And Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s campaign for the Illinois state Senate on March 2, 2001.

    .
    Despite all the distance Obama has tried to move his relationship with Ayers away from him since running for President, he does have a connection to Ayers. Has been at minimum “friendly” with Ayers, and has to this day not denounced Ayers as a former, unrepented domestic terrorist.
    .
    Yes, Joe Klein should be worried about those “mean, nasty Tea Party People”. I mean, look at the President himself who has terrorist friends, Joe has never written a single word about that relationship. Imagine that!

  • hazelmeade

    “More high minded drivel. The only goal of the left is to silence and dispense with those who disagree.

    You got to stop lying to yourself”

    Completely 100% true. It’s not about race. It’s about silencing dissent on economic policy.
    They would rather brand people as racist than debate the budget deficit. Because they know that the budget is a serious problem and they don’t want to concede anything to the Republicans.

    I mean, is they admitted that, then the terrorists (read:Republicans) would win!

  • hazelmeade

    Quote from Nancy Pelosi:

    “We have to pass something, or else the Republicans win!”

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “Gov. Jim Edgar, a Republican”
    .
    So, according to your line of thought, Jim Edgar must, also, be a communist terrorist.
    .
    Obviously Ayers is no longer a Communist and was not one for many years before 1995.
    .
    Palin is giving out addresses and, among other things, fake anthrax is being sent to those offices. I find that much different than somebody who once believed in one thing now believes in something far more reasonable being a friend of Obamas but not in the administration.

  • hazelmeade

    It’s not even so much about Obama and Ayers. The point I want to make is that the left has been “questioning an Administration’s legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it ” for literally decades.

    Now all of a sudden a bunch of right-wingers start questioning the government, and suddenly we hear calls of sedition!

    Personally, I don’t see anyone calling out the troops, but the intent of this kind of rhetoric: calling people “seditious” calling people “racist”, the INTENT is to SILENCE DISSENT.

    They don’t have to literaly call the cops. All they have to do is scare people enough, make them afraid enough, make them self-censor to have a chilling effect on speech.

    Only a couple of years ago, the exact same kind of speech was extolled as patriotic dissent by the very same people. That tells you right there that their ciriticism isn’t honest. They just want to shut people up.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Rusty,
    .
    You still have not explained why you imagine men masturbating.
    .
    Are you like Ted Haggard or why would that and “you haven’t sucked up to the TIME.com staff” or why are you making so many references to a male Time reporter’s genitalia?

  • hazelmeade

    “Obviously Ayers is no longer a Communist and was not one for many years before 1995.”

    Actually , Ayers pointedly refuses to disavow his past support for communism.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_ayers#Political_views

    “In an interview published in 1995, Ayers characterized his political beliefs at that time and in the 1960s and 1970s: “I am a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist … [Laughs] Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it. [Laughs] We have always been small ‘c’ communists in the sense that we were never in the Communist party and never Stalinists. The ethics of communism still appeal to me. ”

    He’s also never publicly disavowed his activities with the Weathermen.

  • fhmadvocat

    Yes, Rusty.

    We all remember how 40 years ago, numerous leftists groups were violent and attempted to blow up buildings and fight against “The Man”.

    But that’s the point, Bill Ayers era of terrorism was 40 years ago. Now Ayers is an old man who sits on non-profit boards. He is hardly a danger to anyone.

    The crazys today are right-wing groups, some who advocate the violent overthrow of the American government. These people are TODAY armed and dangerous.

    You can talk about Obama association with Ayers, but you completely ignore that Sarah Palin as recently as 2007 gave greetings to a group with wants Alaska to leave the United States. Heck, her husband used to be a member. The group’s founder hated the U.S. so much that when he died, he was buried in Canada because he did not want to be buried under an American flag.

    Yet, this woman who associated with a group which did not want to be a part of the U.S. wanted to be Vice-President? And now, there is talk of her running for President in 2012? And you are worried because Obama associated with some guy some 20 years after the guy’s terrorist days?

  • hazelmeade

    Oh please, there are plenty of left-wingers who bandied about the notion of California seceding during the Bush administration. Were they seditious?

    There were plenty of anti-war protestors comparing Bush to Hitler, and openly fantasizing about Bush being assassinated just a couple of years ago.

    Plenty of anti-war rhetoric that called America an imperialist terrorist state and extolled the virtues of Hamas fighters and insurgents in Iraq.

    Don’t pretend to be stupid.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    hazelmeade,
    .
    “And if “questioning an Administration’s legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it ” is seditious then there’s a hell of a lot of Democrats out there who were seditious when carrying “Impeach Bush” and “Re-elect Gore” signs at anti-war rallies.”
    .
    “Peace Group Infiltrated By Government Agent
    Kilner

    Peace Fresno was infiltrated by an agent working for the Fresno Sheriff’s Department and local anti-terrorism unit. Aaron Kilner, known by Peace Fresno activists as Aaron Stokes, died in a motorcycle accident in late August. Peace Fresno activists learned his true identity in the local paper’s obituary.”
    .
    Liberal groups were infiltrated under the Patriot Act.
    .
    “..Republicans are calling for more liberty and less government, not to have a revolution imposing a totalitarian state..”
    .
    No, Democrats have been calling for more liberty for individuals rather than corporations and Republicans using things like the Patriot Act were creating a totalitarian state.
    .
    Republicans infiltrated. Democrats are waiting for the machine gun and hand grenade caches to be found first.

  • yhtmstr

    Sedition? Really? And what would the Liberals say if Conservatives stood up and called Van Jones a Seditionist? Klein at Time needs to do a little more digging into history. But hey, we always knew CNN stood for the Clinton News Network

    This virulently anti-government song published by a very prominent political activist: Mr. Van Jones himself, Mr. Ex Green Jobs Czar (Thankfully no more) appointed by President Obama himself until the truth came out about him and he stepped down. Read the lyrics and tell me, has the Tea Party ever made comments as harsh and as anti-government as the ones here in Mr. Jone’s song? No wonder CNN is the LOWEST rated news network and it is no wonder Time keeps losing out as well.

    If you don’t like Beck or Palin thats fine. But to accuse them of sedition, well lets look at everyone then including this administration’s people too. Even though CNN still has not learned to be ‘fair and balanced’ why don’t you try to with this before running off at the mouth. Now read below what an Obama appointee published for all of us…………………

    F*ck the government, they never done sh*t for me
    For my people their defeat is a victory
    “The man” wants the whole world under his thumb,
    Plunders the globe and tries to buy us off with the crumbs…
    That’s not your flag, not your government
    Not your war, not your President
    Now is not the time to be silent
    Raise your voices, raise your fist
    Against the real terrorist – Uncle Sam.

    Whoa – the American government is the “real terrorist”?

    Now I’d say that this is going beyond reasonable political discourse. Except of course this song was not published by any tea party activist. And far from generating any concern within the mainstream media, they completely ignored it when the discovery of this song spread like wildfire throughout the conservative blogosphere just a few short months ago. In fact, far from being condemned, the man most responsible for financing and promoting the album in which this song appears is now a senior fellow at the most prominent liberal think tank in the nation, and will soon be teaching at Princeton. Oh, and he was also recently awarded the highest honor given by the NAACP.

    I’m referring of course to the former White House green jobs czar, Van Jones.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    hazelmeade,
    .
    Then explain why Republican governor Jim Edgar is not a communist, too?

  • hazelmeade

    Yeah, liberal groups were infiltratred by the feds. Clearly, this proves that the federal government doesn’t have enough power, isn’t oppressive, and anyone who thinks so is a seditious traitor!

    Also, you need to get out more if you think tea partiers are calling for more liberty for “corporations”. Stop reading the socialist lefty propaganda. There’s more to capitalism than big, bad “corporations”. In fact, the corporations just got bailed out by a bunch of socialists. Socialists don’t hate corporations. They just want the government to run them.

  • hazelmeade

    A) I’m not calling Obama a communist. I’m pointing otu that many respected (to the point of being friends with the president) leftists have in fact engaged in actual sedition.

    B) As far as I know Jim Edgar hasn’t called himself a communist. Ayers has.

  • hazelmeade

    “So, as usual, you have to go back to the Vietnam War, when you, apparently, last left your house, to find examples of sedition on the left”

    You just blocked out the entire Bush Administration, didn’t you?

    of course, those anti-war protestors never said anything that might count as “questioning an Administration’s legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it”. Nope, never happened. Nothing to see here. Move along.

  • fhmadvocat

    “Sedition” is a very strong word, Joe. As much as I don’t care for the Tea Party, and other such-minded groups. They have a right to protest and for all the crazy statements made, it is the fault of the mainstream media to give them such attention.

    Can I understand the Tea Party movement? Yes, middle class people are frustrated as their economic security slip away and the government spending going way out of control. The problem is it while they complain about Washington and about Washington not listening to them, the opposite is the problem. The politicians in D.C. do listen to the people.

    The vast majority of Americans, liberal, moderate or conservative, Republican, Democrat or Independent want low taxes and high government spending. That is why we have huge deficits. Have you seen what happens to those politicians who propose cuts in spending? See how long they last in office.

    I find it ironic that Republicans raked Obama over the coals when he proposed cuts in Medicare spending, yet the Tea Party is mad at Obama. Look what happened to Republcans when they proposed cuts in Social Security! They lost both houses of Congress.

    I am a Liberal, but even I recognize we can keep spending money like we do. I challenge my Conservative friends on this blog to propose where we can cut spending. I would love to hear your ideas.

    Some of mine? First, in Social Security, raise the retirement age each year up to you reach 70 years of age. We are all living longer, and the Social Security Ponzi scheme is about to bust with the baby boomers. Another is cut payments to hospitals and doctors in Medicare. We should pay for results not fee for services.

    Why cuts, well, I had a client who had a medical bill for over $200,000 and Medicare paid a little over $26,000. That’s what’s wrong with the current medical care in this country.

    I can see cuts in the military. We currently have more weapons systems than we can use and many are just pork projects for congress that the military really does not want.

    So, Conservatives, what would you cut! Take it to your representatives and see what their response is. I am especially curious about what Republicans who say.

    One last thing, one reason I vote Democratic is because when it comes to spending my money, I would much rather have professionals than amateurs!

  • shepherdwong

    “It’s about stigmatizing people and denigrating them so as to dominante them and drive them out of the poltiical landscape.”
    .
    You say that like it’s a bad thing.
    .
    “It’s about asserting the dominance of a more socialistic political paradigm by branding free marketeers as racist so you don’t have to deal with them on the ground of economic theory.”
    .
    We don’t have to deal with the free marketeers’ economic theory because our 30-year experiment with it destroyed the economic circumstances of millions and devastated the entire global economy. Your “theory” is sh!t. The racism charge is something you earn every time you show up at a political rally with a picture of the President with a bone through his nose.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Got eight minutes?
    .
    Here is what they are all about:
    .

    .
    He advocates being a “martyr for God”.

  • westiluv

    Joe, I am a 62 year old grandmother who for the 1st time feel I need to stand up and be heard. I am NOT a Nazi or a radical killer. I am an American who LOVES this Country and feel this Administration is leading this great Country down the road of destruction. But, this Administration is not listening to me. It is through the Teabag group (taxed enough already) I am NOW being heard. So, I will continue to listen to Glenn Beck and other conservative commentators. You, Joe, are just another Kool-aid drinker with a platform to spread your liberal propaganda.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “Stop reading the socialist lefty propaganda. There’s more to capitalism than big, bad “corporations”. In fact, the corporations just got bailed out by a bunch of socialists. Socialists don’t hate corporations. They just want the government to run them.”
    .
    If a tax on corporations which choose not to provide health insurance for people is proposed and the Tea Party protests against it even though no individual who is not self employed will be subjected to the tax, who’s rights are the Tea Party standing up for? Individuals who get insurance cards? You are protecting a “right” for individuals not to be handed an insurance card by their employer?
    .
    It only stands to reason that only the self employed (like myself) and corporations would have any change because of this bill, you must not be standing up for individual rights, but, for corporate “rights” not to be providing health care insurance or to be taxed.

  • morgenr

    So is this an example of sedition?

    “That’s not your flag, not your government
    Not your war, not your President
    Now is not the time to be silent
    Raise your voices, raise your fist
    Against the real terrorist – Uncle Sam.”

    I don’t remember seeing Klein condemn the person responsible for publishing and promoting the song in which these lyrics appear…liberal “green jobs” darling, Van Jones.

    http://tinyurl.com/y833wsk

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    hazelmeade,
    .
    “USA PATRIOT Act

    Under §224 of the USA PATRIOT Act, several of the surveillance portions originally expired on December 31, 2005.[2] These were later renewed, but expired again on March 10, 2006, and must be renewed in 2010. The USA PATRIOT Act is set to sunset the following provisions:

    * §201 Wiretapping for terrorism cases
    * §202 Wiretapping for computer fraud and abuse
    * §203(b) and (d) Sharing of wiretap and foreign intelligence information
    * §§204, 206, 207, 214, 215, 218, and 225 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act related sections including roving wiretaps
    * §209 Warranted seizure of voicemail messages
    * §217 Computer trespasser communications
    * §220 Nationwide service or warrants for electronic evidence
    * §223 Privacy violation civil liability”
    .
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_provision#USA_PATRIOT_Act
    .
    “Yeah, liberal groups were infiltratred by the feds. Clearly, this proves that the federal government doesn’t have enough power, isn’t oppressive, and anyone who thinks so is a seditious traitor!”
    .
    Democrats are the ones letting this expire because we do not believe in infiltrating political organizations.
    .
    Most of us expect to see the Tea Party or a branch of it commit a terrorist act.
    .
    If you don’t you will not be a threat, but just a bad joke and will not be investigated for terrorism.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Martyr to God takes the cake on anything that has been said by liberals.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “…and extolled the virtues of Hamas fighters and insurgents in Iraq.”
    .
    You do know that Hamas is in Palestine, don’t you?
    .
    Fine one – just one – anti war group that extolled the virtues of Iraqi insurgents.
    .
    You are LYING.
    .
    You can’t help it, it’s something they put in the Tea.

  • hazelmeade


    If a tax on corporations which choose not to provide health insurance for people is proposed and the Tea Party protests against it even though no individual who is not self employed will be subjected to the tax, who’s rights are the Tea Party standing up for? Individuals who get insurance cards? You are protecting a “right” for individuals not to be handed an insurance card by their employer?”

    Where exactly do you get the idea that corporations should be obliged to provide health insurance?
    The employer-based system is responsible for creating much of the problem with the health insurance industry.For one thing, it creates the situation where people lose their insurance when they lose their job. For another thing, it only exists because there is an employer tax deduction for buying insurance, but not an equivalent one for individuals, and the income is tax-free to the employee. (i.e. if you pay the employee, not only does he pay taxes on the income, he also doesn’t get to deduct the cost of insurance – doubel whammy). A self employed person does not get an individual deduction for buying insurance, and still has to pay taxes on all his income.

    Secondly, having employers pay for insurance produces inflationary effects that drive up the cost of care. These days, few patients know or care how much they are spending, which gives doctors and hospitals an incentive to do unnecessary testing and charge exhorbitant rates. If indivudals purchased their insurance directly, and paid out of pocket more, it would help to control medical costs by restoring price signals to the market.

    By mandating emplyoers provide insurance, the health care bill effectively entrenches this defect and makes it an institutional feature of the health care system.

  • shepherdwong

    “You may disagree, but calling me a “liar” because I don’t buy the administrations budget estmiates is a bit rich.”
    .
    I didn’t call you a liar, I usually reserve that for the professionals. Those would be the people from whom you get your “historical narrative [that] informs your world view”. That just makes you gullible (in the extreme) and, at this point, functionally insane.

  • newfreedomblog

    You make me proud, wetiluv! You go grandma!

  • hazelmeade

    “You do know that Hamas is in Palestine, don’t you?”

    Um yeah. You know what your problem is? You think you’re sooooo much smarter than those stoooooopid tea-baggers that you don’t even bother to think for a few seconds. But one of the key characteristics of someone who isn’t as smart as they think they are …. is the erroneous assumption that others are idiots.

    “Fine one – just one – anti war group that extolled the virtues of Iraqi insurgents.”

    Here’s the comments of the director of Code Pink:

    “We must begin by really standing with the Iraqi people and their right to resist. I can remain myself against all forms of violence, and yet I cannot judge what someone has to do when pushed to the wall to protect all they love. What does the Iraqi resistance have to lose? They are fighting for their country, to protect their families and to preserve all they love. They are fighting for their lives, and we are fighting for lies.”

  • Mr. Nice Guy

    I agree – completely. They’re in the same vein as those meaningless flag-pins.

  • Mr. Nice Guy

    To address this, I’d really like to see the various outlets showing the _real_ carnage, and people being brought home in body-bags and coffins. Not that I’m looking for our soldiers to die, but, rather, to have the honesty to show what it’s costing us to be there. By “toning down” the hell that is war, people back home hardly find it objectionable to keep it going indefinitely. It’s just background “noise,” now.
    .
    I’d also like to see the draft re-instated. But while I’m wishing, I’d like to see either Buffalo or Minnesota win a Super Bowl.

  • mycophile

    @ 14.7 ~~

    I lied. I wrote before I would ignore you. But this one calls me.
    .
    In respones to patricksartor writing: “First, we are trying to figure out the cause of the mass psychosis of people like you”, you wrote:
    .
    “More high minded drivel. The only goal of the left is to silence and dispense with those who disagree. You got to stop lying to yourself.”
    .
    I am neither a “left” nor a “right”, but it is 100% clear to me that it is YOU that are lying to yourself, and about way more than that characterization you made about “the left”, which, in my observation, is NOT true for self-described “Liberals” like patricksartor.
    .
    Yes, he makes statements such as in his 11.2, “If you hate the left so much, stay out of the Swamp”, but also such as in his #8, “Maybe I am just old fashioned naively believing that everybody can be a part of a consensus in at least some small way.”
    .
    I have posted at length at him about my goals of promoting constructive discourse, and I see his attempts to do so. Unfortunately, it is really difficult to do that with posters such as yourself, who almost 100% resort to name-calling and exhibit not one iota of interest in broadening your world-view.
    .
    You really are poisonous to collaborative community discourse. If we lived in the same town, I would engage you directly in the public square until the cows came home, and, unless you are certifiably mentally ill, I 100% guarantee that you and I would have found common ground from which to have been progressing together by now. But in an online forum, you are too much of a boat anchor and a sharp corner Thus, I endorse patricksartor’s treatment of you described in his 8.10: “Newfreedomblog . . .is either going to learn to come up with valid explanations for what he says or change his hobby to stamp collecting.” I predict he will fail to get you to come up with vaild explanations of what you say, so I can only hope that you go away so as to lessen the poisoning of progress towards that “consensus” of which patricksartor wrote.
    .
    No, I don’t mean a “consesnus” on what patricksartor’s (or your) pre-conceived “solutons” are — I mean a concensus on entitrely new solutions that we collectively come up with after putting our heads together — solutions that avoid all fo our worst fears from coming to pass and try to make all of our best outcomes come to pass. If you do not know what I am talking about, I am not surprised. If you think it is singing kumbaya, I am not surprised. But it is not. I have seen it and done it (for instance, once in a group of bible-thumping, nudity-is-a-sin-under-any-condtions folks and of aetheist, nudity-is-a-right-and-to-prove-it-we’ll-march-naked-down-your-street folks. And the issue being discussed was nudity at a hotpsrings on public land. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.)

  • hazelmeade


    Those would be the people from whom you get your “historical narrative [that] informs your world view”. That just makes you gullible (in the extreme) and, at this point, functionally insane.

    And whom, do you presume, those people are?
    Where do *you* get your history? Did you read “The Shock Doctrine”? Or perhaps watch “The Corporation”? Were you taught “The People’s History of the United States”? Or did you see “JFK” ? Or maybe even “Zeitgeist”?

    What makes you think that *your* version of history is THE TRUTH?

  • mycophile

    @ 24.4~

    Not quite hanging ten yet, eh?
    .
    Well, maybe the wave will crash before they can, or they’ll enter the pipeline for the endless ride.

  • freekeir

    I’m new here, but I’ve been reading swampland for a year… Rusty, I gotta say, I respect your tenacity, and that you stand up for the right, that you ignore the hate speech. This IS a left wing blog, and fighting the morons that eff at you (thats you kevin) makes me happy.
    .
    keep at it bro, we need dissent

  • hazelmeade


    We don’t have to deal with the free marketeers’ economic theory because our 30-year experiment with it destroyed the economic circumstances of millions and devastated the entire global economy. Your “theory” is sh!t. The racism charge is something you earn every time you show up at a political rally with a picture of the President with a bone through his nose.”

    And your theory is, what? Keynianism? The law of money attaction? Spend a lot and magical money fairies will appear and make more money? Have any of you actually *read* any Keynes? Your multiplier effect doesn’t even work *in theory* unless the jobs are actually productive. Throwing money around is just … throwing money around.

    So you focus on the guy with the bone isntead of 50,000 people saying “balanace the budget”. Because you don’t have a real reply.

    These will always be crises. If they could be predicted, people would make money on them. The regulators will never know when to “short” the market until after Wall Street does. Governments will always promote bubbles. They want to create the illusion of prosperity. if you were President in the midst of a bubble would *you* magically know it, when the market does not, and choose to deliberately pop it when everyone else thinks it’s a boom?

    You can’t “create jobs” by making things less efficient. More people working doesn’t equal more prosperity. It just means less free time. And only proper price signals, created by real consumer demands, can direct investment towards productive labor. Someday, perhaps soon, we will rediscover this.

  • shepherdwong

    “What makes you think that *your* version of history is THE TRUTH?”
    .
    See, that’s the thing. Liberals don’t have our own version of history or the truth. That’s something you need to support and rationalize your false beliefs. We prefer the real thing.

  • http://2thirdsrocks.wordpress.com 2thirdsrocks

    Been to several tea parties and read a few thousand signs, but I havn’t seen that one yet. Not saying it ain’t there, but I havn’t seen it. I’ve no doubt you can produce a picture of that picture, and of course go on to proclaim that it represents the majority of the tea partiers, but whatever shepwang. Those of us who actually attend know what we’re about. Go ahead and rely on heresay.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    hazelmeade,
    .
    “Where exactly do you get the idea that corporations should be obliged to provide health insurance?”
    .
    Answer #1, we have been debating it for 98 years since Republican Theodore Roosevelt wanted to copy the 1883 German health care bill. We, the significant majority who elected Obama and the Democrats in both houses consider it a right.
    .
    Answer #2, Unlike care, nice places to live, tasty food (rather than basic nutrition) cars, TV, movies and other fun things, medicine is a means to keep on working. Given one billion dollars, how much would one want to spend on doctors and hospitals for fun? $0 since nobody wants to be ill. Since it is a means to staying alive, it fits the Declaration of Independence like a glove “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. (Being ill, also makes one unhappy).
    .
    So, when the government makes corporations take personal responsibility for the well being of their workers, the Tea Party objects. Hence, who’s “rights” are being interfered with?
    .
    Corporations.
    .
    Who’s gaining the right to decide if they are ill enough to see a doctor or not?
    .
    The individual.
    .
    So, if you are too into the your fears of government to see it otherwise, you are fighting for the rights of corporations over the rights of individuals.
    .
    “A self employed person does not get an individual deduction for buying insurance, and still has to pay taxes on all his income.”
    .
    I am self employed and will have to check next year, but, it is a raise in corporate tax which is deducted from.
    .
    “Secondly, having employers pay for insurance produces inflationary effects that drive up the cost of care. These days, few patients know or care how much they are spending, which gives doctors and hospitals an incentive to do unnecessary testing and charge exhorbitant rates. If indivudals purchased their insurance directly, and paid out of pocket more, it would help to control medical costs by restoring price signals to the market.”
    .
    Answer #1, Germans live longer but pay only about 55% of what we pay in taxes. Their health care insurance companies are non-profit but in competition and, otherwise very similar to ours.
    .
    Answer #2, did you ever notice that there are not ill, uninsured people wandering city streets or even poor small towns? Do you know why? It is because the emergency rooms treat them as they are obliged by law. It is done on a sliding scale based upon income. Who pays the rest? You do with your insured coverage. Doctors, nurses, orderlies, electric companies… everybody collects full payment no matter who comes in the door to a hospital. So, the hospitals who subsidize the poor the most bill it to the insured.
    .
    Answer #3, employers, unless it is either a part of a union contract or as a part of executive perks go with the lowest priced health insurance of all at all times in order to maximize profits. So, these people will be getting the health care likely to have less perks, not more, than ones they would select themselves given a choice.
    .
    Answer #4, with the poorest already on medicare or medicaid since they are conditionally too ill to work, the uninsured will be mostly relative young, healthy people.
    .
    Once hospitals get paid for every single patient who is or has recently been employed, is under the age of 26 and have had at least one parent who is or has recently been employed, or married with the same conditions, their costs drop for everybody except for the homeless who have no employment nor government benefits.
    .
    Answer #5, When uninsured people go to emergency rooms, it is almost always when their conditions are far, far, far worse than if they had gone to a doctor months earlier, but, with the long lines and humiliating request for discounts and forms to fill out, uninsured people hold off until their illness is much more expensive than had the gone to a doctor a week later.
    .
    Since employers for lower middle up through top income jobs already provide health insurance, it is only places like McDonalds or, as they say, McJobs who do not pay.
    .
    So, the Tea Party convinced you to stand up for low wage, non-union, often exploitative employers “rights”
    (Look for the word corporation in the constitution and you will discover that corporations do not have “rights” since they are not people.)
    .
    So, here you stand, flag in one hand and bible in the other defending corporate exploitation of workers.
    .
    You’ve been had.
    .
    You’ve been had so badly that you believe I am not telling you the truth.

  • conservativechik

    I love Glenn Beck! I support what he says. I like Sarah Palin. Do I think she should be President, well no. But to me she speaks the truth. I totally disagree with Joe Klien. As a matter of fact I actually get quite amused by the liberal media’s reaction to Beck and Palin. But, the only thing that keeps us from being Iran is our Constitution. So Joe go ahead keep talking! I vehemently disagree, but will go down swinging for your right to say it. Even your right to say it on Chris Mathews. Cant stand Chris. But God bless a country that allows him as well as Glenn Beck to say what ever they want! I for one don’t want to ever be Iran! I have never posted on here before, and most likely never will again. Not the biggest fan of Time magazine. I just wanted to make it known this conservative chick (ultra conservative , lover of the Tea Parties) supports your right to speak! God bless our founding Fathers!

  • mycophile

    hazelmeade @ 24.12~~
    .
    I am a known critic of exaggeration and rhetorical heat purely for heat’s sake, no matter what ideology it is attempting to promote or denegrade.
    .
    And I am very good at finding human common ground when in person with anybodies. I have been around Tea Partiers, and, amongst the ones I have been around, while they are not monolithic in their attitudes and biases, I have found them 80% at least covertly racist, and 25% overtly racist
    .
    Just reporting. But I bear in mind that I have discovered that, regardless skin color about 66% of ALL people in this country are at least covertly racist.
    .

    Even in the back of MY mind, I sometimes hear a little voice telling me someone I am looking at cannot be as capable as if they were of my same race. It is not a pretty admission, and I have many good friends of different races, but even people I know that grew up in multi-racial environments and had not conciously felt racism until they moved elsewhere as adults tell me that they have a little voice like that speak to them once-in-a -while.
    .
    Racism is a fact of our lives. Best we put it on the table and shine some sunlight on it than pretend it not to be there. Wishing it to go away will not make it better, it will only allow it to fester in the shadows.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “I can remain myself against all forms of violence…
    They are fighting for their country, to protect their families and to preserve all they love…”
    .
    Watch a World War II documentary and the veterans said the same of the teens from the Hitler Youth league who defended Germany. All of them despised the ideology of the Nazis, but felt bad, when they reflected, on enemies killed.
    .
    This isn’t Jane Fonda in 1972. Also, everybody except, perhaps Fonda herself, since I was a one year old baby in 1972 was upset with her.
    .
    Fonda did not even meet the standard for sedition since she did not convince anybody to attack Americans who were not already at war with Americans.
    .
    Saying that you should be a martyr for god against the US government is very close to sedition since it could very well result in right wing bombers blowing up the US like McVeigh, Joe Stack and Eric Rudolph did.
    .
    To say that you respect those who fought against you is not the same as saying that you like it when they kill your friends in war. Outside of uniform, it is not sedition. Military sedition is much different than civilian sedition.
    .
    “…extolled the virtues of Hamas fighters and insurgents in Iraq.”
    .
    So, you know that Hamas was many thousands of miles away and call this extolling the virtues?
    .
    It is an understanding of why they are getting shot at!

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Hazel,
    “Keynes? Your multiplier effect doesn’t even work *in theory* unless the jobs are actually productive. Throwing money around is just … throwing money around.”
    .
    You are totally wrong about that.
    .
    1st 80% of all economists follow the New Keynesian school of thought.
    .
    Second, the point of the money multiplier is not about building bridges (literally, not metaphorically). It is about coffee break when they buy so much coffee combined that the coffee shop has to hire many new employees, the burger joint has to do the same as the video store… etc, etc. If the job is productive, that is just a bonus.
    .
    You don’t know Keynes.

  • http://funks2.wordpress.com Michael Funk

    You may find an interesting read on the Fox News and other gasbag bunch at:

    http://funks2.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/a-barfly-is-a-barfly-is-a-barfly-limbaugh-beck-levin-and-hannity/

    I find it entertaining. I wrote it. Enjoy.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Hazel,
    .
    “It’s about blackening and smearing your enemies rather than addressing them in a reasonable fashion. It’s about stigmatizing people and denigrating them so as to dominante them and drive them out of the poltiical landscape”.
    .
    The Tea Party has made it it’s official policy to disrupt peaceful political meetings with yelling and chanting.
    .
    If that does not ruin you to the center, moderate Republicans and all Democrats and liberals, what else will.
    .
    If the government wanted to make you look bad (which it does not) they could not do a better job than your party is doing for itself.

  • freeinpa

    Patrick

    You are now playing the ultimate game of Twister. Seek help and medication

  • hazelmeade

    “See, that’s the thing. Liberals don’t have our own version of history or the truth. That’s something you need to support and rationalize your false beliefs. We prefer the real thing.”

    Yeah, because historians never disagree about anything ever. All academicians in all fields are in complete agreement at all times about what is correct, and of course, these are the liberal positions. I mean everyone knows that.

    Noam Chomsky’s history is the TRUTH and anyone who disagrees is a LIAR.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “Patrick

    You are now playing the ultimate game of Twister.”
    .
    From Rusty’s new remarks, I thought that was what he wanted to do with Joe but got turned down.
    .
    The Unibomber was not liberal.
    .
    I am not sure if he could be classified as conservative.
    .
    He was not advocating more government.
    .
    He was advocating less government.
    .
    As for right wing violence, there have been several which have resulted in many deaths.
    .
    The few leftist group bombings do things IRA-style: call first and the bomb goes off later.
    .
    McVeigh and Stack killed Al Qada style: big surprise with an attempt to maximize deaths.
    .
    I do not and have never advocated or supported the tactics of the IRA, but, I would rather be evacuated from a home, school or workplace and, after I am safe, see it explode than to be the building when it gets blown up.

  • http://2thirdsrocks.wordpress.com 2thirdsrocks

    Hmm. Lock and load. Makes perfect sense to me. Save this one Patsy. A year from now (or less), while you’re sitting on your a@@ hoggin’ and bloggin’ and still not selling any real estate, maybe this video may have a different meaning for you.
    .
    And another word or two of advice. Respond less frequently and shorten your responses. Maybe the other bloggers will actually read them. Unless of course you are trying to get in the Guiness book of world records for the the most blogs in a 24 hour period. You’re bloviations are becoming quite boring and repititious. There are those who may get the wrong idea and advise you to get a life.

  • shepherdwong

    “Noam Chomsky’s history is the TRUTH and anyone who disagrees is a LIAR.”
    .
    Noam Chomsky is a Linguist.

  • hazelmeade


    the point of the money multiplier is not about building bridges (literally, not metaphorically). It is about coffee break when they buy so much coffee combined that the coffee shop has to hire many new employees, the burger joint has to do the same as the video store… etc, etc. If the job is productive, that is just a bonus.

    Utter nonsense. The fact that people paid to do make-work spend the money is irrelevant. The money is being taken from someone else, who is hence NOT spending it on coffee breaks, or whatever else he might spend it on. Possibly someone in the future.
    Money borrowed must be paid back with interest, which means even *fewer* coffee purchases down the line.

    Keynes’ theory is based on the idea that during a recession there is a lot of labor not being utilized and a lot of idle capital sitting around. So you take the capital through taxes and put people to work doing something useful like building a road that provides something of value to people. Thus you get a net benefit to society.

    There are two great differences today. A) There isn’t a lot of underutilized capital lying around in banks. The problem is that the banks blew all their capital building useless houses, and now don’t have any. This is disguised by the government’s efforts to keep housing prices inflated, and remains unaddressed. B) The money is being borrowed from future generations, rather than taxed from people with unproductive capital … because there’s no capital to tax. This money will have to be paid back with interest, which negates any multiplier effect that mgiht exist.

    Finally, there are serious issues with corruption and perverse incentives which even correctly applied Keynesianism fails to address. Namely, how do you make sure that the jobs are actually productive, and not inflated with make-work and graft, and how do you deal with the political interests that will be created by the new stream of federal revenue?

    Any time you get people hooked on the government teat, you have a hell of a time getting them off it. Look at farm subsidies.

  • hazelmeade

    Noam Chomsky is a Linguist.

    Somehow that doesn’t prevent him from writing historial fiction.

  • hazelmeade


    The Tea Party has made it it’s official policy to disrupt peaceful political meetings with yelling and chanting.

    You do realize this has been a standard tactic amoung leftwing campus activists for, oh, the last 30 years or so, right?

  • rover27

    I don’t read this blog often, but are you trying to tell me that the right wing extremist commentor know as “newfreedomblog” is the same guy that used to post under the name “rustyreturns” or something close to that??

    What a disgusting piece of s…I mean humanity! Unfortunately i know others like him. They are obsessed with politics and ABSOLUTELY cannot stand having Democrats in power and specifically having a Democrat in the White House. ABSOLUTELY can’t stand it and will do anything in their power to undermine that Dem president..

  • hazelmeade


    To say that you respect those who fought against you is not the same as saying that you like it when they kill your friends in war.


    It is an understanding of why they are getting shot at

    How about you take some of that understanding and apply it to your fellow countrymen. You know, the “tea-baggers”.

  • shepherdwong

    “Somehow that doesn’t prevent him from writing historial fiction.”
    .
    Anyone can make up fiction and call it history. That was point in the first place. But a liberal would get his history from a H-I-S-T-O-R-I-A-N. This seems difficult for you.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    hazelmeade you are wrong.
    .
    The spending of the money is how it multiplies.
    .
    The coffee shop hires a new waitress. The Waitress buys new shoes. The shoe store salesman buys a a new DVD… etc, etc.
    .
    It multiplies with people earning an average income $2.50 increase to GDP to ever $1 spent.
    .
    While that money is borrowed for that year, the interest is about five cents.
    .
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics
    .
    Capital plays a minimal role since the new oven won’t go out and buy an Ipod, but the new cook may.
    .
    That is why the jobs were designed to be “shovel ready” and not the top priority of things neglected in the past since those would involve more capital in the form of equipment and more highly trained workers, who may not be unemployed.

  • mycophile

    hazel @ 31.13
    .
    Maybe patrick will know what you mean by that, but it is far from clear to me.
    .
    Would you please explain?

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “How about you take some of that understanding and apply it to your fellow countrymen”
    .
    If I had a dollar for every time I said “woefully misinformed” about your group I would have gotten as much money I would have leasing 2,000 square feet in midtown. I could please Twothirds brains by spending much more time blogging, too.
    .
    Except for Freeinpa and Rusty, I wait until I am insulted before I insult back. They make insulting people into a full time job.
    .
    There are a huge number of ways far worse than “tea baggers” to insult you, but I say “tea partiers” most of the time (as in it’s members).
    .
    BTW: I never followed much about Code Pink. I believe that they are more liberal than I am. If the right didn’t bring them up here in the Swamp, I would not remember that they exist.

  • hazelmeade

    The spending of the money is how it multiplies.
    .
    The coffee shop hires a new waitress. The Waitress buys new shoes. The shoe store salesman buys a a new DVD… etc, etc.

    You’re still not getting it. The money that is TAXED to pay for the spending program is money NOT spent. The coffee shop *doesn’t* hire a new waitress, because they are being TAXED to pay for the make-work project. The waitress *doesn’t* buy new shoes.
    Any dime spent by the government is a dime taken from somewhere else. Any dime spent by a government supported worker is a dime NOT spent by a private worker. And government supported workers can *vote* themselves more money.


    Capital plays a minimal role since the new oven won’t go out and buy an Ipod, but the new cook may.

    No, but a new oven increases the supply of ovens. Which reduces the price of overs. More ovens to go around. More people can afford ovens.

    So when the government takes money away from the over factory to pay a bunch of people to dig ditches, you have a new ditch, but you have fewer ovens. in which situation is society better off? With the ditch? Or with the ovens?

  • http://erieangel.wordpress.com erieangel

    I love that teapartiers want the less government, but turn around and say stuff like “keep your hands off my medicare”.
    .
    Also, I’d like all the conservatives on this blog to tell me about a spending program they ever didn’t want AND were willing to pay for before Obama became president.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “The Tea Party has made it it’s official policy to disrupt peaceful political meetings with yelling and chanting.

    You do realize this has been a standard tactic amoung leftwing campus activists for, oh, the last 30 years or so, right?”
    .
    First, liberal (please do not use the term “left wing” unless you mean the Communist Party USA down to about 100K members nationwide) activists often planned things to be more organized, but, with college students, it usually got messy that way.
    .
    Second, I think I would hold a seventy year old grandmother of six to a higher standard than an eighteen year old who just moved away from home for the first time and, also, just discovered beer this week.
    .
    Third, look at the results of chaotic protests starting thirty years ago: Reagan, Bush Sr. “third way” (middle of the road) Bill Clinton and Dubbya.
    .
    So, you expect to succeed as middle aged people and senior citizens by mimicking the failed tactics of college students?
    .
    Bad idea!

  • http://erieangel.wordpress.com erieangel

    Ayers was a member of the Weathermen. But if I remember right, he never did PERSONALLY plant any bombs anywhere.

  • sacredh

    No…they’ll say “See what you MADE us do?”.

  • firebatfox

    Give me a break, Joe Klein. Let’s face it: things haven’t turned out quite the way you expected. Obama’s election was supposed to be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Large majorities were supposed to support all of his policies, with conservatives being consigned to the ash heap of history. But instead, Obama finds himself embattled – he’s sub 50% in most polls, the GOP has taken a lead on the generic congressional ballot and is sure to pick up lots of seats, and the economy – well, let’s face it, way too many people are out of work.

    So, what does Joe want to do? He wants to accuse those who criticize his beloved president – tell the truth, Joe, did you cry on Election Night 2008? Did you? – of sedition. Of treason. And treason, one might recall, is a capital crime.

    So that’s Joe Klein: a man who wants conservatives charged with a crime for which the ultimate penalty is death.

  • http://erieangel.wordpress.com erieangel

    I gladly would have paid more taxes if the health care legislation had anything to do with single payer. The taxes on that would have been far less than what I and my employer (a non-profit, community based mental health treatment facility) pay on a monthly basis in premiums and co-payments.

  • mycophile

    hazel~~

    Is THAT (31.15) what you were refering to?
    .
    ’cause, if so, I don’t get it. I mean “tea baggers” is, like, so mild and I knd’a like the convenience of tea bags, myself, so I knda’ wouldnt; see any derision in the use of that term unless someone esle told me why it was derisive to them.
    .
    I used to have a real problem with certain groups of friends calling themsleves niggas and hoes, and it took me a long time to beleive them when they said that it was OK for them to do that — that it was cultural, but that if someone from outside of their group used those terms, biy, watch out!
    .
    Is there somethnig like that going on here with the TPs? And does my use of that abbreviation conjure up images for you of injuns or privies? If I was naming an organization or movement I would think hard about what its acronym and possible nicknames might be in theis age of information marketing, before I hung out my shingle. (I did so long and hard before I chose my company name.)
    .
    Nanny, nanny. Names are as irrelevant as are wardrobes, vehicles, and hairstyles. Let’s stick to talking about ideas and real-world experiences.

  • hazelmeade

    But a liberal would get his history from a H-I-S-T-O-R-I-A-N.

    A) A liberal would pick a historial that agrees with him, and ignore the rest. It’s called “confirmation bias”, look it up.

    B) Lots of liberals get their history from Noam Chomsky. Try looking up “What Uncle Sam Really Wants”. You’ll find the thinking very familiar, and for good reason. Chomsky’s “history” is very influential on the left.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Keep in mind that I am telling you what I have studied to be fact and am not saying I played on part per million discovering this.
    .
    Yes, there is a tax, but, the money multiplier works most effectively on low budgets and this is why:
    .
    I = X + (E-x) + (S-x).
    .
    I is income
    .
    X is expenditures needed to stay alive, basically, the poverty rate.
    .
    E is optional expenditures as a percentage of income
    .
    S is savings as a percentage of income.
    .
    So, even a miser when not earning X will spend all of X.
    .
    So tax people at a high income and hire people at a low income so that the money gets spend as soon as possible.
    .
    Put in $30,000 a year about the poverty rate for a family for four as X and you’ll notice that the larger I is that the larger S is.
    .
    Also, savings does not equal investment since people do not usually start a business venture when they save money. They usually buy stocks, bonds, derivatives, futures and existing buildings which just transfers money back and forth among people buying securities or, sometimes, investment real estate.
    .
    “No, but a new oven increases the supply of ovens. Which reduces the price of overs. More ovens to go around. More people can afford ovens.

    So when the government takes money away from the over factory to pay a bunch of people to dig ditches, you have a new ditch, but you have fewer ovens. in which situation is society better off? With the ditch? Or with the ovens?”
    .
    First, the tax increase needed is not large enough to impact many inelastic, durable goods ability to sell and gets passed onto consumers with very minimal dead weight loss.
    .
    Second, Obama and the Democrats have proposed tax incentives for businesses to hire.

  • hazelmeade

    Anytime someone seaks about economic theory, pulls out a mathematical formula, and claims it to be a “fact” they are revealing a grotesque level of ignorance.

  • shepherdwong

    “A liberal would pick a historial that agrees with him, and ignore the rest.”
    .
    It’s not that difficult. Good history, like reality, has well-known liberal bias.

  • hazelmeade

    Also, savings does not equal investment since people do not usually start a business venture when they save money. They usually buy stocks, bonds, derivatives, futures and existing buildings which just transfers money back and forth among people buying securities or, sometimes, investment real estate.

    I shall continue. Despite your extreme ignorance combined with overconfidence in your own knowledge.

    All of those stock bonds and derivatives are ultimately tied to *something*. For instance, the housing market. The money people spend on mortgage backed securities, and the derivatives they were based on ? Ultimately, it went to build houses. It’s only unproductive capital if you’re sitting on a hard asset, such as gold.

    .
    First, the tax increase needed is not large enough to impact many inelastic, durable goods ability to sell and gets passed onto consumers with very minimal dead weight loss.

    Yes it is. Statistically speaking, even if there is only a slight marginal increase in the price of ovens, that marginal increase will be *just enough* to tip some percentage of the population away from buying an oven. It also extracts a small amount of additional income from every individual that does buy one, which leaves *them* with marginally less disposable income to spend on other things.

    Again, If government spending has a positive multiplier effect, then government taxing has an equivalent negative multiplier effect.

  • mycophile

    Hazel~

    Did you see the 62-yr old grandmother @ #36, and the response from a certain infamous insutler? Why did she use the term “Teabag group” endearingly, and why did not her usually-disrespectful responder not take her to task for that?
    .
    I think that question is rhetorical, of course, and coroberrates my point nicely (the one I made as 31.17, but that somehow technology posted as if the number of it was the phrase:”Your comment awaits moderation”, which I did not type. Should I suspect a left-wing conspiracy to use my postings to inflame “conservatives” such as yourself?)

  • sacredh

    If a doctor has to sell seeds to supplement his income, how well is his practice doing?

  • hazelmeade

    Maybe patrick will know what you mean by that, but it is far from clear to me.
    .
    Would you please explain?

    It seems odd to me that some Democrats are more capable of understanding and sympathizing with radical Islamists then they are of sympathizing with Republicans.

    Who is a bigger enemy? The opposite political party? Or people that hate all Americans and want to kill as many of us as possible?

  • husein11

    For the first time in my life I am NOT proud of my country.

  • mycophile

    hazel @ 31.18 ~~
    .
    You wrote: “It seems odd to me that some Democrats are more capable of understanding and sympathizing with radical Islamists then they are of sympathizing with Republicans.”
    .
    That is much more clear, thank you. That would seem odd to me too–just as odd as when I would perceive a similar capabiltiy/incapability amongst some Republicans. And, while I have perceived both, I do not understand why you brought that up in response to patricksartor. Can you point out where he demonstrated more understanding and sympathy for “radical Islamists” than he did for “Republicans”
    .
    patrick has pointed out to me recently that I am not as “assertive” as other posters here, and thus my own views are not as easily discerned in my posts. So, afer you answer me, I may give you my own opinion about Islamists and Republicans. It will give you far more to snip at than anything patrick has writtten on the subject, I assure you

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “Anytime someone seaks about economic theory, pulls out a mathematical formula, and claims it to be a “fact” they are revealing a grotesque level of ignorance.”
    .
    So, economics without math?
    .
    That’s like literature with no words.
    .
    And you are saying that I am ignorant?
    .
    So, if you are my next client who wants to buy a building rather than lease space and you have forty million. The person bought the building at (and this is before the meltdown, now it is almost the opposite with the Keynesian thesis that prices are sticky working – but that is another story) thirty five million ten years ago. The building is real. The owner maintained it but did not build a single inch of interior space because they do not own the air rights. Five million dollars in profit the other person has earned, but, how was that a gain for the economy if leasing rates have not gone up?
    .
    It hasn’t it is just an inflation of land prices. That is the beginning of a bubble: paying more and more for financial instruments and land providing the same income.
    .
    Using the money multiplier bring 10% unemployment down to 0% unemployment with a risk of overheating the economy, the stimulus package should be 4% of GDP.
    .
    At 4% if it were all done through taxes the crowding out would be less than 1% due to increased prices on elastic goods.
    .
    In reality, using debt allows the government a chance to pay off the debt with increased taxes and decreased spending to prevent overheating and inflation.
    .
    You are trying to make a NeoClassical argument but do not know it well enough to do so and ignoring that Neoclasical arguments are often complete failures.
    .
    It disturbs you to see make work.
    .
    It disturbs all of us that with low spending, there are low profits, low wages and 16% vacancy in Manhattan office space among other things.
    .
    So, let the ditch diggers dig away until the money circulates around enough until we have our economy back as far as I am concerned.
    .
    Because you object to make work as a matter of principal, you expect the rest of America to suffer in a recession with you for your ideals against less productive jobs hiring unemployed people.
    .
    I do not want the 18% Tea Party members holding 82% of America hostage since they do not believe in using the government to solve problems despite decade after decade of success relative to the previous century and centuries before that.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “It seems odd to me that some Democrats are more capable of understanding and sympathizing with radical Islamists then they are of sympathizing with Republicans.”
    .
    Well, the sympathy for Iraqis (who are seldom fundamentalist Muslims but just have sectarian fighting) is only so much as to say, “Please don’t blow their house up and kill their families.”
    .
    Not only is nobody going to blow your house up. All we do to you is tell you how ignorant you are and, I, for one, try to explain things to you.
    .
    So, even comparing yourself to somebody who has had their house blown up with their family inside, no work, no education and no means of survival because you won’t get a tax cut tells me how much Republicans are cry baby victims. “Taxes on my $500,000 a year income might go up waaaaaaaaaaaaah.”
    .
    Sorry, honey. I feel bad for the woman who had her husband, eight in-laws and four children blown up when their house, next to a US target that they did not know about, got killed over you and your possible tax increase.
    .
    If you aren’t earning over $250,000 per year, you won’t face a tax increase and are, instead, defending the money of the very wealthy against the greater good of the country for no known reason.

  • dcred

    Since 1900, sedition has been aimed only at leftists. Right-wingers get a free pass (except Nazis, who were agents of a foreign power).

  • sacredh

    I’d watch out if I was a right winger. They don’t want to forget what happed to Zod and his cohorts in Superman II. Sedition is seriously bad juju.

  • jwswiftredux

    Joe Klein doesn’t rub up against stupidity, he wallows in it. His comments (and all of his writing, in general) reveal a frightened and insecure leftist. He is not only on the wrong side of history, he is on the wrong side of reality. But I encourage him (and the other lefty wackos like Olberstrasser, Rotten Rich, Maureen the Tart, and the man without a mind, Chris Matthews) to keep it up. Their version of what America is about and what the Tea Party movement is about is hateful, shrill and totally rejected by people with eyes, ears and common sense. We become stronger the more lies you tell. Three words, Klein: Remember in November!
    P.S. Hasn’t Time magazine been flushed yet?

  • mycophile

    “Remember in November” Why did you not just say “I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down!”?
    .
    So, I’m not making predictions, but I do have a question:
    .
    IF (and I say IF) the predictions folks like you are making about November do not come to pass, what are you going to say/do?
    .
    There are people who have sworn on their mother’s graves that Rapture was to begin at a particular time, or that Jesus was going to return, or that the aliens were going to land, or that the comet was going to hit, or that the poles were going to switch . . . and when it did not happen, they went on preaching about something else as if they were people who should be listened to.
    .
    Point being, why waste your breath? It’s just schoolyard taunting.
    .
    Unless you want to put in writing that if you are wrong, you will donate all your disposable income to the New World Order and forever cease offering opinions on politics due to have been a proven blowhard when it comes to politics. THEN, it will be worth paying attention to, ’cause a lot of folks would want to be able to hold you to it.

  • ohiolib

    Or it could just be that you can’t possibly admit you’re wrong.

  • hazelmeade

    So, economics without math?
    That’s like literature with no words.

    Economics is far to complex for any macro economic effects to be summarized in a simple formula and have that asserted as a “fact”. All macro is based on a huge set of assumptions and simplifications, all of which are open to challange.

    And you are saying that I am ignorant?

    Dude, if you pull out a formula with five variables, and assert that it’s a “fact” that economies follows this formula, you are displaying enormous ignorance. I can’t help it. Any real economist is going to use a statistical analysis over hundreds of variables, not pull something as oversimplified as that garbage out and assert it as THE TRUTH. Economies are complex, non-linear organisms not crankshafts.

    In reality, using debt allows the government a chance to pay off the debt with increased taxes and decreased spending to prevent overheating and inflation.

    As if spending ever decreases. Every time the government starts a new spending program, it creates an entrenched interest that will fight for dear life to keep that money coming. Why are we still paying farmers not to plant crops, 80 years after the dustbowl? The idea that counter-cyclical spending policies will ever be implemented is a fantasy.

    You are trying to make a NeoClassical argument but do not know it well enough to do so and ignoring that Neoclasical arguments are often complete failures.

    You’re still getting Keynes wrong. He did not advocate make-work. He would not have endorsed most of what is in the stimulus package.

    It disturbs you to see make work.
    .

    It disturbs me to see money taken away from productive enterprises and assigned to unproductive ones. All government spending eventually will have to be taxed away from productive employment. if the money is spent on make-work it is a net loss to the economy.


    So, let the ditch diggers dig away until the money circulates around enough until we have our economy back as far as I am concerned.

    This isn’t even Keynes. It’s degenerate corrupted Keynes. Making the money “circulate faster” does not increase the GDP. This is: “Two guys in burlap sacks selling each other hats for a living. ”

    You don’t get to prosperity by digging eachother useless ditches. You make things or do things that other people want and are willing to pay you to do.


    Because you object to make work as a matter of principal, you expect the rest of America to suffer in a recession with you for your ideals against less productive jobs hiring unemployed people.

    I expect Americans to find something productive to do. Something that other people WANT and are willing to pay them to do. Or else suffer the consequences. Enough people have lived on government make-work jobs not producing anything of benefit to society for long enough.

  • maverick2k9

    The Bottom line: The difference between Joe Klein and Rush/Bleck/Shannity
    .
    Joe goes off to Afghanistan and does some real reporting on the real American patriots – the American soldiers out there.
    .
    Rush/Bleck/Shannity sit in their respective armchairs and preach sedition and report on the fake patriots – the mindless tea baggers
    .
    Shannity and Ollie North of “Iran Contra” infamy, even floated a charity in the name of helping the soldiers and paid only a tiny percent of the proceeds to the families while spending the rest as expenses.
    .
    Then there is the small matter of snake oil ads that support Rush/Bleck – Gold, survival seed bank and what not.

  • groenhagen2

    Joe Klein calling someone else a “gasbag” is like Rosie O’Donnell calling Miss America fat and ugly. The limp-wristed Klein should put away the dictionary and study the history of bogus sedition charges in this country. As a fifth great-grandson of Rep. Matthew Lyon, the first person imprisoned under the Sedition Act of 1798, I can tell you that the case that Beck, Palin, and Limbaugh have committed sedition is as weak as the case made against Lyon. The government eventually returned Lyon’s fine plus interest. Rebellion comes from the word “rebellare,” which means to return to a state of war. If anyone is rebelling today, it’s Obama and the Democrats, who are acting against the will of the people and who have lost the trust of the American people. According to Chapter 20 of John Locke’s “Second Treastise of Government,” under those circumstances the people have the right to dissolve the government.

  • groenhagen2

    It must be nice to be a little coward who posts lies anonymously.

  • groenhagen2

    It has been my observation that Sarah Palin’s critics are either very unattractive women or very effeminate men. I have seen few, if any, exceptions to that.

  • http://birosc.wordpress.com birosc

    Thank you for speaking out and calling the right wing rhetoric what it is – seditious. When the purpose of their opposition is not based on their beliefs, but rather to weaken the government and they talk of violence and a potential civil war, seditious is a mild word for their behavior.

  • http://www.spwise.com Steve and Pam Wise

    I don’t know’s running Fox News

  • maverick2k9

    ROFL about the “anonymous coward”.. Pot calling kettle black?
    .
    ohhh never mind…please feel free to point out the lies in my comment.

  • megatronrises

    Tea Partiers have accused Democrats and Obama of being Nazis. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been the other way around. Obama and Democrats love this country too. Hell, they were elected by a vast majority of the American people. They received a mandate. The administration hasn’t even done anything so radical. The die-hard liberals are pretty pissed.
    .
    Care to explain the road of ruin Obama is taking us down? Maybe you should lay off the Glenn beck for a while…

  • libertyguy

    I guess that I was dreaming during last 10 years when I saw some of the most vile and over-the-top protest speech and imagery aimed at George Bush. I did not hear the left chattering about sedition when people burned and hung George Bush (a sitting President) in effigy. I did not hear outrage from the left when protesters carried signs where Bush was made to look like Hitler or shown with bullet hole in his head. I don’t hear outrage from the left when someone burns a flag even though that act when performed on foreign soil is symbolic of the desire to overthrow and/or destroy the US. The left had nothing to say about these acts of protest that were more “seditious” (using the Joe Klein rating system) than any Tea Party protest. Instead, the left made it a point to put bumper stickers on their cars reading “dissent is patriotic.”

    This whole discussion illustrates what I have always known. The left’s call to freedom and “support of speech” ends when they encounter speech they don’t like.

  • hazelmeade

    Here’s a great blog post sumarizing my point about Keynesian economics:

    How might the plight of the unemployed person be alleviated? There seem two answers: 1. Goods could be transferred from the other individuals to the fourth, i.e. redistribution of the total output.* 2. The fourth individual could work and add to the total product.**

    Now let’s subject our little economy to a couple of thought experiments. In Experiment 1, suppose we take additional units of currency and give them to the unemployed fourth individual. It doesn’t matter whether we take them from the other three, create them, or borrow them from abroad, just that we stimulate this economy. What happens? The individual purchases goods from the other three, redistributing the total product; if we’ve created or borrowed new currency in the process, prices ought to increase as well. Regardless of how we finance our stimulus plan, the total output is unaffected, and the fourth’s gain is offset by the reduction in the others’ consumption.

    Next consider Experiment 2. We take the additional units of currency and give them to the fourth individual, with the proviso that s/he produces something the others will want to consume and sell them in the market as well. In this case, the total output is increased, and the fourth’s gain isn’t accompanied by a reduction in others’ consumption, so long as her/his product now available to the others offsets the reductions in their consumption of food, drink, and clothing.
    ….

    The only way to get a multiplier is to produce more – it is not increasing purchasing power, it is not putting people to make-work, it is producing more. And it can only do this by putting unemployed inputs to productive work, and underemployed inputs to higher valued work. And no matter how many individuals we add to our model economy, this remains true.

  • groenhagen2

    You’re an idiot.

  • mycophile

    hazelmeade and patricksartor~~~!
    .
    I think you are both incorrect and correct. To me, Economics is philosophy masquerading as science by using Mathematics, just like computer modeling provides a look of science to the predictions of systems behaviorists. hazelmeade, I think you correct that a simple equation is, well, too simple, and patrick has indicated in other posts that he ascribes to multivariate calculus for economics as a means that can capture the whole of an economic system, but as one who used to be quite facile with multivariate calculus, I say its omniscience is false. It is just a tool. How one sets up the equations has a lot to do with the outcomes of running them, just like all the assumptions in a computer modeling program do.
    .
    I know, ’cause I’ve been there. And so have physical scientists who made such a calculus with the structure of the simplest atom, hyrdogen, wihiuch has but one proton for a nucleus and one electron. They painstakingly re-designed the equations until the results of running the equations matched every conceiveable actual physical measurement to an ungodly number of decimal places. Then they applied it to the next most simple atom, Helium, which has one proton and one nuetron for a nucleus, and two electrons. After about a year, and untold hours of computer time at a cost in today’s dollars of maybe 30 million, the answers came out — and they were wrong.
    .
    hazelmeade, heads-up. You may not have caught that when patrick writes Keynesian , he means “New Keynesian”. I am sure he will explain what he means by that. patrick, you probbaly don’t have to be too hard on hazelmeade about that, i’ll bet just clarifying will do.
    .
    I would not be calling patgricksartor ignorant, hazelmeade, without admitting that you are, too (and me), for there is infinitely more to know about even one thing than anyone of us could ever discover in an entire lifetime.
    .
    Clearly, you both know a lot. I’d rather see you two figure out a way to put your knowledge together, instead of assuming that each of you has a monopoly on the truth. You might find that, if you do, other people will add things to the story, and one day, you might find yourselves arriving all together at brand new conclusions. There is a saying in paradox study: “Paradoxes are evidence that one has reached the limits of one’s belief system. Change the belief system, and the paradoxes can dissappear.” When it happens, it looks like a miracle. I’ve seen some of those miracles.
    .
    hazelmeade, I think one vaild reason why farmers are still paid to not plant ground is to avoid getting even close to the possibility of another Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl didn’t happen just because of weather patterns atop of short-term farming effects. It happened because of weather patterns atop of a century of farming effects from things such as “tilling”. Letting land lie fallow is extremely neccessary if one is going to conduct agriculture for any length of time. I’m not a believer in the Bible being the word of a God, but the advice in it to let land lie fallow every 6 years for a year probably came from experience about how poorly it works if one does not, Paying farmers to let land recover from agriculture is absurd in a world where most farmland is not even lived on by its owners (instead owned by mega-agribiz) so we should find another system to minimize soil destruction and demise of native plant occurrence.
    ..
    I do agree that there IS a place for calling out ignorance here, though. I ‘d like to see hazelmeade join patricksartor in calling such relative boars — you know, the ones that patrick insults before they insult him?
    .
    That’s enough. I have an important crusade going on that I really ought to put all the time I have been spending in Swampland into, instead. I have enjoyed my time here, and I shall return (although I can imagine I hear some groans at that.)
    .
    Thanks to all (especially patrick) for enduring my longer posts, and, it seems to me, finding some benefit in them. Tomorrow I will look for any responses to my recent posts, and then unsubscribe so that I don’t get tempted further, though

    .

  • groenhagen2

    Groenhagen is my actual ame, Tinkerbell.

    First lie: I’m not sure about Hannity, but Limbaugh has been to Afghanistan.

    Second lie: You lied about Freedom Alliance.
    http://www.freedomalliance.org/images/pdf_and_largepics/freedom_alliance_response.pdf

    You’re just a little, liberal worm who is incapable of thinking for himself and instead parrots nonsense you have read on Salon, Media Matters, and other organizations whose only purpose is to smear others.

    Get out of your mother’s basement and get a life.

  • mycophile

    same goes for the “right”, libertyguy (and I am neither “left” nor “right”, nor “centrist”, nor “Third Way”, nor, nor, nor)

  • groenhagen2

    “Tea Partiers have accused Democrats and Obama of being Nazis. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been the other way around.” – megatronrises

    Were you in a coma during the Bush administration. I compiled these examples in just a few minutes:

    http://www.sinsofthehusband.com/bushhate.html

    And have you forgotten that Sen. Dick Durbin compared our troops at Gitmo to Nazis?

  • apr2563

    groenhagen2: You really are a most unpleasant person. Sorry you are so sour on life.

  • maverick2k9

    Dear groenhagen2
    .
    okk.. So groenhagen is your name. What does the “2″ at the end stand for? Your IQ?
    .
    So you want me to to rely on the words of Ollie North, the seditious convicted felon who sold weapons to Iran??
    .
    Also, I got the info about Ollie/Shannity joint scam from a RIGHT WING blog – > http://www.debbieschlussel.com/6938/sean-hannitys-freedom-concert-scam-only-7-of-charitys-money-went-to-injured-troops-kids-of-fallen-troops-g5s-g6s-for-vannity/
    .
    okk.. so Rush has gone to Afghanistan.. You are not sure about Shannity, and chose to skip mentioning Bleck entirely.
    .
    what did Rush do when he was in Afghanistan? How many days was he there? Did he venture out of Kabul or even Kabul’s version of the green zone? What provinces did he visit? What units did he embed with and report on?

  • jetsoja

    I believe that your idea of civility is embodied in your comment(s) and i quote “I suppose we should continue to read the rants of a complete lunatic. . .Well Joe Klein. . . You are a desparte (misspelled by you) old fool. . .Well as I have said before Joe Klein. Go F-yourself. You are nothing, absolutely nothing. . .”
    I am curious, how do you qualify your comment(s) if Joe’s are, according to you, “the rants of a complete lunatic” ?
    The foremost thing in public discourse, which Tea Party activists and their Republican (Al)lies should understand is that, a sound argument does not include insults, name calling, and incivilities, which have become part of their (a)political propaganda.
    Then, it is hard to govern when you are angry, mad and resentful as your comment(s) revealed.
    Last but not the least, inflamed rhetoric and vitriol have caused mentally and emotionally challenged individuals like Timothy James McVeigh to commit atrocities that caused untold lost to many families out there.
    We can agree and/or disagree on a whole host of issues, but remaining civil and courteous in our tone does not discredit our arguments.

  • subframer

    Klein -

    On the opportunity to read your unabridged “thoughts” here, let me take my own opportunity to tell you to go straight to hell. And ditto for the liberal loons overpopulating this blog. You can employ Alinsky-style propaganda all you want; the FACT of the matter is that protest, from either direction, invites the fringe. Perhaps you’d like to comment on the behavior of the fringe protesting the Vietnam war. Did that behavior invalidate the position of all protestors, or invalidate the movement? Because you don’t like THIS protest, you attempt to invalidate it by calling it names. And you’re aided by scum like Klein, essentially in the role of government propagandist. Funny how you end up on the side of “the man” here, isn’t it, liberal lemmings. Whoops, how did that happen??…..

  • subframer

    100% correct.

  • subframer

    i meant that liberty guy is 100% correct. the right does not attempt to limit speech in the same way.

  • mycophile

    subframer @ 52,3~
    .
    Huh?
    .
    What do you mean by; “the right does not attempt to limit speech in the same way.”?
    .
    liberty guy wrote that: “The left’s call to freedom and support of speech ends when they encounter speech they don’t like.” I have seen people who self-describe as being on “the right” try to personally cut me and others off when they didn’t like what was being said, so are you gonna’ now call me a liar or are you gonna’ propose that I was mistaken that those people who tried to do that weren’t really on “the right” (even if they said they were), or are you gonna’ say that cutting people off does not constitute ending one’s support of speech, or are you gonna’ say that they didn’t cut me and others off because they didn’t like the content of the speech, but instead they didn’t like the way the speaker smelled or maybe they had to pee real bad or something but were embarrased to say so but afterwards somehow found the strength to hold it in ’cause I’m here to say that they had no trouble letting other “right” speech continue and they participated in it, too?
    .
    And was it or was it not stock-in-trade of the Bush/Cheney years for all Bush speeches and events to bar anyone even remotely suspected of possibly having anything to say or hold up on a sign at the event or to publish afterwards that was less-than-glowingly positive about Bush or whatever Bush said? That is but one example, but I think it should be good enough.
    .
    Perhaps, though, you didn’t mean to include Bush/Cheney in your definition of “the right”? If not, then please define who you were referring to as “the right”.
    .
    Or perhaps you thought libertyguy wrote something he did not write or perhaps you had a differeent interpretation of what libertyguy wrote than I did. Either way, would you please explain what way of attempting to limit speech were you refering to that you claim “the right” does not engage in?
    .
    Remember, the subject here is not what kind of speech the right does not ENGAGE in. The subject is what WAY OF LIMITING speech does the right not engage in. Those are distinctly different topics. Maybe you got confused?

  • mycophile

    wow. I sure have seen plenty of attractive women and burly dudes who vocalized that she was a complete joke. I know of a particualar redneck trucking company that has all kinds of mocking picutres of her on their walls, most too silly or crass to even describe.
    .
    Maybe your and my images of what is attractive in a woman or masculine in a man are very different? Hard to imagine, though, since I grew up in the Southern California megaloplolis Playboy culture and my relatives were in oil and film.
    .
    Maybe all the good-looking women and manly dudes with brains don’t hang out where you do.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    2thirdsrocks,
    .
    If you have reading comprehension problems, that’s fine. But because your political cohorts know so little about the basics of economics, US History and law among other things that a complicated answer is the only way to answer them it takes a few more words than you can handle.
    .
    Why don’t you go to a conservative blog where they use the same hollow catch phrases again and again until you can sing along?
    .
    That should make you happy.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “Economics is far to complex for any macro economic effects to be summarized in a simple formula and have that asserted as a “fact”…Any real economist is going to use a statistical analysis over hundreds of variables, not pull something as oversimplified as that garbage out and assert it as THE TRUTH.”
    .
    You, clearly do not understand what I wrote for that Keynesian equation. Those economists run numbers through that among many other equations. That is one of the simpler ones.
    .
    About economics as a science: an economy is a function of billions of people interacting, being born, dying, getting married, getting divorced… all kinds of things. So, it is impossible to have laboratory conditions for economics. So, using exactly the same numerical analysis as, say, chemistry (my Mom is a chemist) but, with no lab to, as my first econ teacher in high school said, put an banker in a test tube and ask him “what will you do if interest rates go up 2%”. If the conditions arise in real life, Economists get out the calculators and figure it out.
    .
    First, Keynes created his theories in 1936. During this time we had the WPA here in the US and similar programs in England.
    .
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
    .
    This was “make work”.
    .
    This is what Keynes and other have studied.
    .
    Also, the stimulus package is a copy and paste version of that.
    .
    So, the Keynesian money multiplier is all about make work done by Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 onwards.
    .
    Second, I do not call myself an economist since I have only the undergraduate classes and do not ever seek to get a PhD.
    .
    Third, unless you are over ninety years old, you never worked for the WPA.
    .
    That specific type of work is either disbanded after the economy improves or has a sunset clause.
    .
    Just like Roosevelt, conservatives attacked every program Obama has and were proven totally and completely wrong.
    .
    Also, just like Roosevelt, the programs are run by cities and towns and funded on the basis of being “shovel ready”. So, things like dry walling, landscaping, pothole fixing and low skill tasks will get done first and at the discretion of the governor or mayor. Grants are given to governors and mayors using a complex system of how “shovel ready” the project is and the local unemployment rate.
    .
    You do not even seem to know what Keynes was looking at when he discovered the money multiplier and that this is, using much more accurate statistics (unemployment statistics were not kept by the government until the Great Depression since it was considered a private problem) this is like Obama and the Democrats pulled out those same laws and changed the years and a few other bits of information and passed 1933 legislation again.
    .
    As for farm subsidies, I do agree with you, but, that would be the problem that Republicans even more than Democrats in farming regions (because farmland is nearly always very conservative, nothing special about either party in that case) are in the pockets of corporate agriculture. The Tea Party is not creating any solution to that that I know of.
    .
    Maybe you should spend more time on that instead of trying to pretend that this stimulus package is exactly – exactly – what Keynes and later followers of his school of thought were observing and approving.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    I have no idea what other people here look like, but, effeminate is the last possible way I could be described. I’m 6’2″, 255 pounds.
    .
    Only if you consider showering being effeminate, I, clearly, could not fit your definition.
    .
    Also, see NYC. Some of the women are so damn hot and almost none are conservative or think Sarah Palin is brighter than a night light.
    .
    In other places the women are chocolate or vanilla. In NYC it’s all 31 flavors and incredibly few consider Palin more than a bad joke.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    As for the equation I showed you it was the mathematical proof (understand mathematical proof does not have to do with debate and does not mean per se that this debate has to end with a math problem) that if you want the money to be spent, give it to the lowest wage earners rather than a tax break for the highest paid.
    .
    During recessions, household savings is not good on a macroeconomic level even though it is good on a microeconomic level.
    .
    To make your investments worth more and more, businesses must sell, sell, sell. This make commercial buildings worth more with increased lease prices, stocks worth more with increased profits as well as all other parts of secondary markets.
    .
    That is not to say that secondary markets are bad. They produce liquidity. However, if the revenue is not there to support the prices of land or secondary markets, then all you have is people trading back and forth the same thing for more money.
    .
    Right out of a textbook was the joke about the two men who had yard sales and kept on selling back the same broken lawn mower to one another. Each time the other paid more and more for it until one man’s wife told him to stop it. “Why,” he said, “I was making so much money from it”.
    .
    If the underlying revenue is not there, trading stocks, bonds, derivatives or even investment real estate is just like selling back and forth a broken lawnmower until a man’s wife taps him on the shoulder and asks “why are you buying stock in lookatmyoldshoes.com? It lost money for five years now and is getting worse! Stop it!”.
    .
    That was the dotcom crash.

  • newfreedomblog

    My fellow Tea Party Patriots: Enjoy this video, there’s more to come, Mr Klein.
    .

    .
    Look through the agenda of the radical leftists. See for yourself what the Tea Party represents. Don’t be the last sane Democrat who gets off of the insanity bus people like Joe Klein and Company are taking you over the cliff.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    It caught me totally off my guard when in the video at 1:20 a person walks past the woman being interviewed with a sign saying “Poop”.
    .
    BTW: Newfreedom, I, myself, never said that the Tea Party was guilty of overt or even conscious racism.
    .
    For that matter I never accused the Tea Party of being conscious of anything besides, Poop. In case you wondered if the Tea Party was full of Poop, for some unknown reason they walk around with signs saying the word “Poop”.
    .
    ROTFL
    .
    Thanks, Newfreedom, I needed a laugh. The rest of the video is the 1% of Tea Partiers who are black being interviewed.

  • groenhagen2

    Patrick:

    “have no idea what other people here look like, but, effeminate is the last possible way I could be described. I’m 6’2″, 255 pounds.”

    Well, sure. There are no obese AND effeminate men. Couldn’t happen. Your BMI is nearly 33. Maybe you should consider less time on this blog.

    “Also, see NYC. Some of the women are so damn hot and almost none are conservative or think Sarah Palin is brighter than a night light.”

    The irony here is you insult Palin’s intelligence while showing us that you cannot even manage basic English. Have a conservative explain your error.

  • sacredh

    6’3″ and 190 here. My 5 o’clock shadow comes in at 2 . I look more like a redneck cop that most redneck cops. I work with mostly ex-military. The strange thing I’ve noticed is that the big guys can’t stand her and the shorter guys with the beer guts love her to death. Forbidden fruit syndrome.

  • groenhagen2

    sacredh:

    “6’3″ and 190 here. My 5 o’clock shadow comes in at 2 .”

    My comment also noted “very unattractive women,” which would apply to you, regardless of when that shadow comes in.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Trust me groenhagen, if you didn’t know me but saw me in a dark alley, you’d run. When I worked security in Boston, it was easy even with no legal authority to arrest and no weapons, I could clear out trespassers with no problem. My boss used to assign me to particular duties because I was “big and imposing”.
    .
    I wonder if I should put on my resume “talented at imitating brick wall”.
    .
    Also, the gays know I am not one of theirs from about fifty feet. I guess that’s why I am not especially homophobic since they don’t come on to me.

  • amethystium123

    can’t agree with you,actually.

    http://www.sharevaluegoods.com/

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    57 is an advertisement: do not click.
    .
    57: do not click.

  • groenhagen2

    patrick:

    “Trust me groenhagen, if you didn’t know me but saw me in a dark alley, you’d run.”

    Odds are that that would not be the case. You’re talking to a former Marine who has done much more than work a security job for minimum wage.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    I was trained by a former Marine sharp shooter and trained many ex-military guys working security.
    .
    I was at about double the minimum wage because I was promoted after a few months.
    .
    It sounds like you need training in many things Greonhagen.

  • groenhagen2

    patrick:

    Yes, being trained by a former Marine is better than actually being a former Marine.

    The image of me “running” from an obese guy who would get winded after a few steps gave me a good laugh. Have you considered a becoming a stand-up comic, Hurley?

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    You obviously know nothing about security if you are still earning minimum wage.
    .
    You, obviously, no nothing about the outside world if you are trying to argue for the Tea Party.
    .
    Since you are making minimum wage, try not to waste too much time on your mom’s computer.
    .
    At a 42 inch waist I am not too big. The Marines takes men my height at 225 pounds.

  • groenhagen2

    Hurley:

    I don’t know which is sadder–your lack of intelligence (as evidence by your poor reading comprehension) or your denial regarding your weight. Your BMI is nearly 33. That’s obese, i.e., you are too big. The Marines may take someone at 225 pounds, but they certainly would not take you. You’re not even Coast Guard material.

  • sacredh

    I enjoy gratuitous insults. I have to run some some errands now but we’ll play later. I’m going to tear you a new ass later. Clown. This should be fun.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    You’re not a former Marine.
    .
    I know that from your last statement.

  • groenhagen2

    patrick:

    Saying you’re not even Coast Guard material proves that I’m not a former Marine. You’re cracking me up, Hurley.

  • groenhagen2

    sacredh:

    Careful. If someone hits me, I hit back twice as hard.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Define: MEPS
    .
    If you can’t you either enlisted before 1986 or you are full of it.
    .
    You have two minutes or I’ll know you are looking it up.

  • groenhagen2

    It shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to look that up, Hurley.

    I served from January 1982 to January 1986 with the MOS of 0231. Served on Camp Foster from September 1982 to September 1983, and then on Camp Futenma during the remainder of those years. Look those up.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Well, you came up with names of bases, but, since it was so long ago, you don’t remember anything about those standards.
    .
    Five pounds and five years ago I passed the medical for the NYPD.
    .
    If you were 18 in 1982, then you were born in 1964 or earlier. That makes you 46 years old or older.
    .
    And you are still working minimum wage and living with your Mom.
    .
    BTW: Military Enlistment Processing Station. I was there in 2003 and 2004. All of the Armed forces share processing stations. All of the Armed forces take people my height up to 225 pound and, then being 217, I had no problem. Except for the Marines, all of them allow an exemption if the width of your neck is proportionally correct to your waist such that the extra weight is due to muscle.
    .
    No, try to make $8 per hour before you turn 50 years old Groenhagen.

  • bent7474

    Klein you ever think of going to a Tea Party and talking to someone before painting an entire movement with one brushstroke? Why don’t you try bucking the mainstream media trend and try some journalism for a change. You lefties expect everyone to stand by and watch our freedoms be swallowed up in the big government totalitarian impulse of the left, otherwise it’s “sedition” if we want to oust them… I suppose you were all up in arms over the Bush-haters constant stream of vile rhetoric? Oh no, wait, then it was “patriotic to dissent,” right? Oh, did I say up in arms? Is that seditious?
    You media lapdogs keep pushing against our freedoms and just watch what happens Klein… in the meantime, why don’t you give us your current definition of “patriotism in a democracy” you hypocrite.

  • groenhagen2

    Hurley:

    Nothing wrong with my memory. I don’t know you age, but I suspect that I stand a much better chance of reaching 50 than you, with your BMI of 33, of reaching 40.

    I make far more than minimum wage, and I expect that part of my tax bill is going towards supporting you.

  • fritzb43

    Right Wing Radio shouting idiots – guilty of sedition.

    Most “militia” groups – guilty of sedition.

    Paranoid gun nut “patriots” – many guilty of sedition.

    Tea Party shouters – many guilty of sedition.

    Mainstream media – guilty of contributing to sedition.

    So. Where is the outrage? Where are the indictments?

    Of course, you are allowed to say any darned thing you want; that’s called free speech.

    But, you must be ready to accept responsibility for your words.

    If you yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, there damn well better be a fire.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “I expect that part of my tax bill is going towards supporting you.”
    .
    Your town or state is leasing office space in Manhattan through me?
    .
    I just finished sending a property report to a client. Let me know your town manager or mayor’s name and how many square feet they need if they are supposed to be sending money to me.
    .
    I know Texas has a tax office in NYC, but, I didn’t close that deal.
    .
    At 39 my chances of making 40 are about 99% with most of that 1% being hit by a bus or struck by lightening.

  • groenhagen2
  • apr2563

    Groenhagen2: This site is just dripping with testosterone since you joined us. Or maybe it is that you profess your manliness out of a sense of insecurity. Or maybe you are a bully because of your insecurity. Or maybe you are just a ugly spirited, unpleasant person due to insecurity.
    .
    My sympathies.

  • groenhagen2

    apr2563:

    No security issues on my part. Can you, posting anonymously, say the same?

    Is this Patrick “Hurley” Sartor posting under a different user name? You’ve got that same odd period between your paragraphs.

  • apr2563

    groenhagen2: Does that period make you insecure. I post anonymously because of sick, insecure people like you. It is used in honor of my daughter who was killed by an insecure man who was a bully.

  • groenhagen2

    apr2563:

    Perhaps you need to find a better way to deal with your grief. Insulting others on online blogs does not appear to be the best option for you.

  • apr2563

    groenhagen2: I have dealt with my grief in my own way a long time ago. Insulting you is a pleasure all on its own. Your posts on this thread are pathetically inadequate. Using your real name seems to give you some undeserved bravado. Posting about your manliness may help you convince yourself.
    .
    Oh, there is that darned, annoying period that so many use on this site.
    .
    Wake us when you have something constructive, documented, or generally intelligent to contribute.

  • groenhagen2

    apr2563:

    Obviously, you moonbats are a bit inadequate when it comes to reading comprehension. I’ve posting nothing about my manliness. I merely noted that it has been my observation that Palin’s critics are overwhelmingly very unattractive women or very effeminate men. Joe Klein is merely one example of that observation.

    It was your fellow moonbats who came here to claim that they scare people in dark alleys and get their 5 o’clock shadow three hours early.

  • apr2563

    groenhagen2: Sadly all of your posts have been Freudian in nature. They speak to your male insecurity. Get some help.

  • afguy

    groenhagen2,
    .
    You haven’t a clue what you’ve just bitten off..
    .
    Trust me.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    I post under my own name.
    .
    Is this your picture?
    .
    http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.thelondontraveler.com/files/2008/12/drag-queen.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.thelondontraveler.com/2008/12/its-a-drag-drag-queens-and-pantomime-dames-in-british-culture/&usg=__piuJBGTlU-NU-sujzh0uUS56VKs=&h=500&w=375&sz=131&hl=en&start=100&itbs=1&tbnid=gWP0uXVcG7MaNM:&tbnh=130&tbnw=98&prev=/images%3Fq%3DDrag%2Bqueen%26start%3D84%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D21%26tbs%3Disch:1
    .
    BTW: The picture of me is overexposed so I look a little bit albino and my hair looks lighter than it really is. No sane man would say that I look effeminate.
    .
    When most people see me, they would say that I look more like 220 than 255. Notice no double chin nor any obvious sign of obesity.
    .
    I go by my real name since I am not ashamed of who I am.
    .
    The other poster is a woman in a different age group than I am (I do not care her exact age, etc).
    .
    I never hide my identity and pretend I am anybody other than who I am.

  • http://erieangel.wordpress.com erieangel

    Hey Nice Guy, we can thank Bush for the “toning down” of the his wars. I grew up during the Vietnam War and I remember seeing the ceremonies almost every night on tv. Fallen soldiers being returned home. Nowhere do we see that these days. Bush had kept the press away from Dover AF Base for the returns. And since Obama has come into office, I’ve only seen it once.
    .
    Neocons might say Obama has continued the practice of not allowing the press to video the returns, but its more like the press isn’t interested since they hadn’t done so all along. It was Bush’s precident.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    I found your Camp Foster”
    .
    http://www.campfosterymca.com/
    .
    The Okinawa is called Camp Butler:
    .
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Corps_Base_Camp_Smedley_D._Butler
    .
    You’re not claiming that you flew airplanes are you?
    .
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Corps_Air_Station_Futenma

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    It looks like Groinhugger is just another pathological liar online.
    .
    apr was annoyed with me once when 3X claimed to be the winner of an award when the only award winner of that year, time and place that could be found had a biography completely different than what he claimed was his.
    .
    Now that Groinhugger has given far too much contradictory information, we know who he is not: anybody vaguely impressive to anybody at all.
    .
    For me, I could do better, I could do worse. I meet small business owners all of the time as a part of my job and, at least in Manhattan, where I do leasing, it is nothing at all like what Republicans say about people fleeing taxes, a city in turmoil, total financial disaster, etc, etc.
    .
    Rural conservatives often hate NYC. Why? Because it is successful and liberal at the same time.

  • justmy02cents

    @11.17
    .
    “Last but not the least, inflamed rhetoric and vitriol have caused mentally and emotionally challenged individuals like Timothy James McVeigh to commit atrocities that caused untold lost to many families out there.
    We can agree and/or disagree on a whole host of issues, but remaining civil and courteous in our tone does not discredit our arguments.”
    .
    I cannot agree with you more about the civility, BUT I cannot accept your statement about the CAUSE of TMV’s attack….leaving that assertion unchallanged affirms it…so please provide attribution.

  • groenhagen2

    Patrick:

    Just shared your posts with Larry Link, Tubby. Thought he would be impressed with the way you’re representing his company. Gee, I can’t understand why a fat loser like you hasn’t gotten a wife yet. You’re obviously quite a catch.

  • oiacja

    Do they send you a Kool-Aid recipe or do they just ship it out to you in pre-mixed drums?

  • broknbuddha

    If anyone is rebelling today, it’s Obama and the Democrats, who are acting against the will of the people and who have lost the trust of the American people.

    You mean the American people who voted them into office?
    Obama has certainly lost the trust of the Angry White Men, but then, he didn’t have a lot to lose there anyway.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    It will probably go into his junk email.
    .
    Even if it doesn’t, I am independent.
    .
    I have no idea where Larry stands politically but, it is really not something any reasonable person should be involved with.
    .
    You are now starting to stalk me.
    .
    Keep it up and I will press harassment charges.

  • broknbuddha

    Its funny how, other than the minority in front of the camera, you can see nothing but white people everywhere else

  • broknbuddha

    Wow, there is a reason to remain anonymous. Petty little tit. Up until your last comment, I’ve never thought that posting under your real name (Ryan Moore) was all that brave – what, are we going to meet at the grocery store sometime? What is the point?
    But then, you took it to the next level. An actual attack at someone’s real life because you have an ideological disagreement. You’re a piece of sh@# groener. No class.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    Joe, or to whomever it may concern,
    .
    I would like to make a complaint about the person known as groenhagen2. I can not find the rules of Swampland, however, I would like this person to be taken off the Swamp due to his claim that he, apparently, is using the Swamp to contact my work associates.
    .
    If anybody else knows how to make a complaint within the Swamp, please advise me since that will be course of action I will take prior to filling criminal charges.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    In my job we do not talk about anything controversial including politics. In NYC, from off the job, I am aware that a huge percentage of the public is liberal, but, on the job both client and representative wait for the other to make a comment and, if you agree with it, you specifically say so, but do not bring up more out of concern that you may disagree on something. Out of all the stupid ways to break a good deal is to get involved in something totally unrelated to the transaction.
    .
    The number one reason I am online is that I can not and do not talk politics on the job.
    .
    On the way home from work I met a woman who I might have worked with. She made comments about being unhappy with the way things are going in government and, once I discovered she might be a client, I responded the way my now late father (our immediate family’s only Republican) responded to many things “mmh”. More or less, it means I heard what you said, but vaguely sounds like agreement.
    .
    In that one situation, I never did find out if she was politically conservative or liberal. As it happened we did not do business because she didn’t have the funding.
    .
    Look at what I have said and, outside of ROFL when randomly and unexpectedly seeing a sign saying the word “Poop” in rusty’s video, I can’t see anything I have said that is embarrassing.
    .
    Sure, racists and (if there are any left) Communists should be embarrassed about what they say, but I have nothing to be ashamed of.
    .
    If you just wanted to see my picture, I know don’t believe I am a homely man and don’t mind.
    .
    Your intent was very evil and out of line Groinhugger.
    .
    I believe you may be taken out of the swamp should I find the right person to complain to.

  • oiacja

    Leave it to a liberal to: (1) beg for someone to help him instead of finding the rules himself (2) threaten litigation – that’s what makes the progressive world go ’round. But, thanks for answering my question – the Kool-Aid has to be delivered pre-mixed – a liberal would never be able to do something on their own without assistance from the government.

  • justmy02cents

    dear sheperdwong,

    I was going to jump in here but see that Hazelmeade has opened a can of whopa$$ on you already….
    .
    let’s ask some simple yes or no questions.
    .
    1. have you read the Declaration of Independence [ ] yes [ ] no
    .
    2. have you read the Constitution of the United States (including amendments) [ ] yes [ ] no
    .
    3. have you read the Federalist Papers [ ] yes [ ] no
    .
    4. have you read “The Communist Manifesto” [ ] yes [ ] no
    .
    5. have you read the “Magna Carta” [ ] yes [ ] no
    .
    6. have you read the “Bible” [ ] yes [ ] no
    .
    7. have you read the “Holy Quran” [ ] yes [ ] no
    .
    8. have you read the “classics” [ ] yes [ ] no
    .
    my point about the reading, admittedly of limited scope, is that history informs our position and world view and the above-mentioned titles are relatively un-impeacheable by any standards.
    .
    try to understand the Tea Party “movement” rather than regurgitating leftmedia POV.
    .
    I have not attended a single rally, but feel deceived and tricked by the current elected government of the United States.
    .
    The HCR that was passed, was not vetted for public input although it is the largest financial impact on America except delclaring war.
    .
    The methodology of passing it depended on slight-of-hand and parliamentary perversions that stink like a dead-fish on a dock at noon in the summer.
    .
    I posted weeks ago for someone to list exactly which bill we are referring to i.e. HR3200 and still there is no response, allowing me to believe that none of the posters here know what they are talking about.
    .
    I believe that the “hated Karl Rove” is no less a hatchette man than Rob “the hit man” Emanual.
    .
    I believe that Speaker Pelosi is no less strident than Speaker Gingrich.
    .
    Unfortunately, I believe that VP Biden is a fool, a tool, and stupid…completely the opposite of VP Cheney.
    .
    So the point is, your attempt ( un-original as it is ) to throw the bucket of home-grown terrorism over the a broad-based and heartfelt movement is short-sighted at the very least and false at the worst.

  • justmy02cents

    @24.14

    Dear mycophile,

    “Racism is a fact of our lives. Best we put it on the table and shine some sunlight on it than pretend it not to be there. Wishing it to go away will not make it better, it will only allow it to fester in the shadows.”
    .
    It would ALSO be better not to blame everything that one does not agree with on racism….being there or not…it is most often a crutch for lack of a more cogent comment than it is an actual cause of an unfortunate occurrence.

  • groenhagen2

    broknbuddha:

    You’re obviously not that sharp if you cannot distinguish between an ideological disagreement and an ad hominem attack. Note how quickly Patrick changed his tune after he thought someone had contacted his boss. His tough talk turned to whining about being “harassed.” The guy’s just another liberal wimp.

    If everyone used their real names here, the conversation would be much more civil.

  • ak331

    Let me refresh memory of Joe Klein who said few years ago about BHO

    “Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President,” Joe Klein described Obama as “the political equivalent of a rainbow–a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy.”17 I’m sure being compared to a rainbow was even a first for Obama. Klein’s exaltation really had no limits. In fact, B.H.O. would eliminate all discord in America, according to Klein.
    also “There aren’t very many people–ebony, ivory or other–who have Obama’s distinctive portfolio of talents. . . . He transcends the racial divide so effortlessly that it seems reasonable to expect that he can bridge all the other divisions–and answer all the impossible questions–plaguing American public life”

    Now questions is whether Joe Klein or the right are the rumor mongers and somebody who elevated BHO to the level of Rainbow now has got to defend him otherwise all previous comments will appear to be phony and Joe Klein can not let that happen esp who know was kind of ties he has besides time magazine and MSNBC who who write his check but he is guided by the Rainbow of BHO which does make sense in retrospect as was I would expect him to do till the end of time as he has seen the guiding light of man from rainbow.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    oiacja,
    .
    I am working and could not find the rules easily. So, I asked.
    .
    I also did not threaten litigation like you perceive to be liberal. I am threatening criminal charges, just like law and order Republicans do.
    .
    Besides, would you find somebody getting involved with your work as a means of trying to get back at you for an ideological disagreement acceptable?
    .
    Would be acceptable if one of the progressives here were sending emails to your work?
    .
    No, if I took this to authorities outside of Time, I would not win money. He would face criminal prosecution, instead.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    .the Content is not pornographic, libelous or defamatory (more info on what that means), does not contain threats or incite violence towards individuals or entities, and does not violate the privacy or publicity rights of any third party
    .
    http://en.wordpress.com/tos/
    .
    You either have or claim to have violated the rules for wordpress.

  • justmy02cents

    sheperdwong @24.10
    .
    “We don’t have to deal with the free marketeers’ economic theory because our 30-year experiment with it destroyed the economic circumstances of millions and devastated the entire global economy. ”
    .
    .
    Do you even know what the Community Redevelopment Act did to the mortgage business?
    .
    30 years ago, mortgage lenders where “black-mailed” into approving sub-par borrowers in the name of the “American Dream” of owning a home.
    .
    Good lending practices were subordinated to feel good economics of every poor schlep should have his own home, no matter that he/she did not have the income to support the payment, the credit history to grant approval, or the upbringing to know that paying your debts is a sacred pledge of honor.
    .
    This is not about racism, racism caused this debacle. Racism on the do-gooders partCAUSED the mortgage crisis and the subsequent financial melt-down.
    .
    It was YOUR experiment that FAILED.
    .
    holy unintended consequences…you really screwed up on this one.

  • mycophile

    oiacja @ 75.1~
    .
    That post is WAY off base.
    .
    Never mind that you write of “liberal” and “progresive”, as if they are the same thing. There is a much more important matter to attend to.
    .
    Are you suggesting that the more proper response of a Person A to an attempted, legally-defined “harrassment” by a Person B would be for Person A to take matters into their own hands? By what means? Are you a proponent of vigilante militia justice, instead of the Rule of Law?
    .
    Along with your clear and explicit answer to those questions, please post your full, legal name and home address.

  • kurtl56

    The problem isn’t with your analysis, it’s with your perspective. “Language inciting rebellion….”? The language you speak of certainly doesn’t incite me to any sort of violent rebellion. Might it incite someone to violence? Maybe. More so than when politicians (equally on both sides of the aisle) make campaign promises with no intention of following through on any of them that don’t server their agendas? Lieing to me is much more likely to incite me to rebellion than any nutcase (left or right) spewing nonsense. “Rebellion” is easily as subjective as “inciting”. My idea of rebellion is quite a peaceful process. Our system provides the perfect mechanism for rebellion, it’s called the ballot box. I intend to exercise my constitutional privelege to rebel this November. How about you?

  • groenhagen2

    patrick:

    Wrong, Tubby. I violated no part of the user agreement. Looking at your photo, the only reason I can imagine you walking in a dark alley is to pick a prostitute.

  • mycophile

    groenhagen2~
    .
    You, too, please (as in my 75.3).

    And I’ll help motivate you
    .
    I agree with every comment that apr2563 has made to you on this thread. I feel that your comment to sacredh @ your #56 was extremely childish (as were most of your posts, but that one is a clear and concise example of it.) I consider your retort to his response to your taunt to be the making of a threat.
    .
    Show your cards.

  • sacredh

    “It has been my observation that Sarah Palin’s critics are either very unattractive women or very effeminate men. I have seen few, if any, exceptions to that.”

    groenhagen2, you do know how ridiculous that sounds don’t you? Are you implying that virile men and attractive women are the ones that support your ex-beauty queen runner-up? I’ve seen some of your teabagger rallies. Her supporters must be in disguise. They look like disgruntled older white guys waiting for their Social Security checks that have to buy a date and the women look average at best. There’s nothing wrong with being average. You even have a computer evidently.

    You attack a person and mock what you imagine they look like or their masculinity because they don’t think like you. How very Master Race of you. Do you see the country slipping away from you? Does it scare you? It should. There’s not a place in it for people like you much longer. Not in a position of authority anyway. You can have your little tea parties in DC and carry your mis-spelled signs while the rest of us are working. We don’t mind. You have the attention of the media and that lets the rest of the country have a good look at you.

    It’s not a fear of Palin that makes us comment upon her endless antics. It’s amazement and disgust. She’s a clown and the people following her are just a step below. I worked to get Obama elected right up until McCain made her his running mate. An hour on Google and I knew McCain was through. I didn’t have to do anything else. Sarah was a buffoon then. She’s a buffoon now. She’ll be a buffoon in the future. There is no cure for stupid. She is what she is and we’re ready to keep reminding people of it.

  • mycophile

    groenhagen2~
    .
    I posted to you @81 by mistake.
    .
    Don’t miss it.

  • mycophile

    apr2563~~
    .
    I read that you have dealt with your grief a long time ago. I hope you will forgive me, if necessary, for processing a little myself right now because this is the first I have learned anything about your daughter.
    .
    It brought tears to my eyes, and I know that very statement will be fodder for groenhagen2 to consider me “effeminate” and demean me for it.
    .
    It is. literally, a crying shame that there are so many males so twisted up by their upbringings and hormones that they do not realize how empathy, sympathy, and other feelings than anger and aggression and a sense of physical power are essential components of being a real, whole man.
    .
    (I do not mean to suggest that there are similar problems in the female population, but I am focusing on what groenhagen2 presents to us today.)

    The things that groenhagen2 wrote in response to you were crass, mean things that should have earned him a time-out. Perhaps he is even the kind of male that our court system should give a very long time-out to. I can only hope he is simply full of hot air and would not act out his expressed mysogyny on any flesh-and-bone females.
    .
    Please know that you have the full support of many men.
    .
    (and I appreciate and benefit from reading all your posts, even if I ever fail to respond to any of them in a manner that makes that clear.)

  • oiacja

    Joe – contrary to your personal beliefs, the rally in South Carolina was neither “disgraceful” nor “the precise opposite of patriotism in a democracy”. What is disgraceful and the precise opposite of patriotism in this country is the attitude and sarcastic rhetoric President Obama uses when speaking about the people he was elected to represent. And, Patrick Sartor, I’ve read and re-read your rantings about health care reform. The problem is, to support your argument, you have to redefine words which is a very bad habit of members of the progressive movement.
    #33 -”Since it is a means to staying alive, it fits the Declaration of Independence like a glove ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness (being ill also makes one unhappy).
    Are you kidding me?
    PURSUIT of happiness. You don’t have a RIGHT to happiness, you have a right to PURSUE happiness. But, you don’t have a right to infringe upon the LIBERTY of others to PURSUE your happiness. Pick up a dictionary from time to time. PURSUE: the act of pursuing; an effort to secure or attain; quest. But, we do have a right to LIBERTY, not to pursue liberty. My LIBERTY means the freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions, etc.; power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice. I have the RIGHT not to choose to buy health insurance. I have the RIGHT not to be forced to make a purchase I don’t want to make. Thankfully, we have election cycles and an opportunity to undue some of the craziness thrust upon us over the past century. The next time you tell someone “you have been had” it better be you looking into a mirror. Everytime a Progressive Kool-Aid drinker attempts to support “social justice” with the Declaration of Independence, I hear Thomas Jefferson rolling over in his grave.

  • fzat

    You truly are stupid. It’s not the people who you denigrate, but you who think you are a superior being. Get with it, you are really really stupid.

  • mycophile

    pure BS
    .
    I am normally quite civil here, even though I use a handle. I have posted on other sites with more “real” names (including mine), and none of them have had a greater percentage of civility as this one. It is posting styles and content like what you use that incite uncivil posting — you could call yourself Micky Mouse (not to give sacredh any ideas) and still encourage civil discourse by keeping it in your pants. Your original post that started this current flak was sexist in the extreme, and you knew darn well that it would incite what it incited — it was your purpose.
    .
    I’ll save you the trouble of writing : “No, it wasn’t. I was just stating an observation.” I’ll tell you right now my answer will be “Hogwash!”

  • mycophile

    my 76.2 was to groenhagen2

  • mycophile

    bent 7474 @ 63~~

    Juxtapose two statements from your post:
    1) ” . . .ever think of going to a Tea Party and talking to someone before painting an entire movement with one brushstroke?”
    .
    and
    .
    2) “You lefties expect everyone to stand by and watch our freedoms be swallowed up in the big government totalitarian impulse of the left”
    .
    Now ask yourself: Have I ever met Joe Klein and talked to him? Why do I paint a movement I call “the left” with a broad brush stroke? Am being hypocritical? Is that how I want to be?
    .
    Maybe you were just sloppy. It’s OK, that happens to me sometimes, too. It happens to everybody.

  • melissa6280

    Joe,

    Any credibility anyone in the “lame-stream” media still had when you did your interview with Chris Matthews went out the window in a flash with that cocktail napkin. You had absolutely nothing, not ONE example, to back up your accusations. It is so typical of liberals to play all the “scary” cards. Racism, extremism, bombings, violence, militias. The only people talking about these things are liberals. The people trying to get these things to happen are the liberals. You want them to happen. You are trying to get the random crazy person to trip off the line and do something horrible. I suppose the Republicans should still be talking about Hinckley, and how the Liberals hatred of Reagan made him shoot Reagan. Doesn’t matter if it’s true, right. There hasn’t been a hint of truth in anything you or any of those sinking network news stations are saying. And the fact that you “won’t be doing any interviews”, well, that’s just a shocker! When you can’t defend what you’ve said because it had no basis in fact and you had to look up the definition to be able to even make the one false statement about it, well, lets just say someone higher up than you must have told you to sit down and shut up. And if they didn’t, you must have had a solitary moment of clarity…God does work miracles after all. Now, as the wife of a 22 year veteran, the most offensive thing I read in your piece. To act like you give two craps about our military is just insulting. Do not EVEN use our servicemembers as a “cover” for your stupidity. All of you liberal journalists weren’t praising our military when Bush was in office. You didn’t care a lick about the troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. Or any of those at sea for months at a time.You weren’t covering their homecomings, concerned about their hardships, worried about their morale, concerned for their families and children! NO! You were covering the anti-war protests! Giving code pink coverage. Give me a break. The military and the veterans see right through you hypocritical liberals. You see, they have something you would probably have to go and look up in your trusty dictionary…..honor, courage, and integrity. Congrats on your contribution to the bastardization of journalism. If it weren’t for the folks at Fox the true profession would cease to exist at all.

  • sacredh

    R.I.P. dysfunctional thread.

  • oiacja

    mycophile 75.3
    I am not posting on Facebook – I am participating in a discussion on a public blog. If someone wants to post their personal information on a blog, they should accept responsibility for providing their personal information to anyone who wants to look him up.

    I have made the personal (and wise) choice not to post my full name and home address. It adds no value to post such information to participate in a public discussion.

    If you choose to draw a line in the sand for someone, you can’t be shocked when someone crosses it. Out here in the “real” world, throwing yourself in front of a car traveling down the interstate doesn’t make you a victim, it means you’re an idiot.

  • mycophile

    2cents @ 24.20~
    .
    I agree, as you might have suspected I would, that to place incorrect blame on ANYthing for anything that one does not agree with is a poor idea. And since racism is such a charged and important issue, caution in that regard is even more called for.
    .
    However, I am not as sure as you seem to be that cries of racism are “most often” crutches for lack of a more cogent comment. Too often, yes.
    .
    “Most often”? Well, I do think, as my 24.14 would suggest, that racism most often does play at least some role, even if it is not “an actual cause of an unfortunate occurrence.” But I do think that going directly at the underlying cause is a better first response than falsely elevating the role that racsim is playing.

  • mycophile

    oiacja@ 75.5~~
    .
    Interesting ideas, but I noticed that you did not answer my questions. Might it be because you did not want to lie, and the truth would not put you in very good standing?
    .
    Your interesting ideas suggest that me that you feel patricksartor dared groenhager2 to look up his personal information and contact his business associates in an attempt to disparage patricksartor and damage his livelihood. That is quite a stretch.
    .
    But even if it were so, that is not a legal defense to harrassment of someone
    .
    There is a thick line, if not a chasm, between looking up someone using personal information they gave you vs. trying to interfere with their livelihood as a personal vendetta for derogatory comments in a blog commentary forum.
    .
    Your interesting ideas also sugggest to me that you disagree with groenhager2′s assertion that posters in puiblic forums using their real names would be of significant value to the discussion. Correct?
    .

  • mycophile

    and to all, a goodnight
    .
    happy trails

  • oiacja

    Response to Patrick’s personality #2, post 75.6 – I agree with your personality #3, post 86 – this thread is dysfunctional. This is not only no longer fun, its actually a bit scary. Good luck with your criminal charges – you’re going to need it.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    groenhagen2,
    .
    I made a complaint right before my last post about it.
    .
    It was before 5:00 PM.

  • bent7474

    mycophile @ 63.1: I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and say that it is you my friend who is sloppy. I am not a journalist nor have I claimed objectivity, nor do I need to speak with Mr. Klein when offering a comment on his one article. This is very different from reporting on the “extremism” and “sedition” of the tea party and conservative commentators.
    More importantly, the “left” is a movement driven by its totalitarian impulse, which has absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Klein, although his charge of sedition is an example of this impulse. This impulse is swallowing up our liberties, through big government, Obamacare, ACLU, Acorn, pursuing the Brady campaign, the fairness doctrine (just to name a few channels). This is the impulse that has always driven the left. Although not every lefty agrees with every idea, it is at the core of the ideology, as opposed to hunting down a few fringe statements and displaying them as representative of the right. These “seditious” statements are in no way a core of conservatism.
    So, before you accuse others of hypocrisy in an attempt to defend Joe Klein, you should think through what is behind your juxtaposition.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    oiacja,
    .
    I took a risk.
    .
    Looking me up once got somebody here to try and refer work to me, much to my surprise. But, it didn’t work out (which is fine). If I had done business with that person, i would know that person’s name, address and, possibly, under slightly different circumstance, their income.
    .
    I just was making a limited dare for this idiot to see my picture and know that I have a responsible job. If he really did or if he did not attempt to cause harm by contacting people at my company. Harm from that is incredibly unlikely, but, it malicious in intent.
    .
    I feel like a guy who left his front door unlocked when dropping off his kids at the bus stop three minutes away to find a burglar at his breakfast table trying to find the silverware.
    .
    Sure, I took a risk.
    .
    But are you going to blame the person who has the unlocked door or the burglar who unsuccessfully tried to steal his good silverware?
    .
    This man made a bad mistake and I will see if he will be forbidden from posting.
    .
    Criminal charges will take some serious work and I am not sure if he is worth my time.

  • maverick2k9

    patrick, the most probable reason that groenhagen has a “2″ suffixed to name as his WordPress id is because WordPress banned id’s groenhagen and groenhagen1 for similar violations in the past.
    .
    So I half-expect groenhagen3 to turn up shortly.

    BTW, groenhagen2, you still haven’t replied to my earlier post. Why? Banned already? LOL.

    So you want me to to rely on the words of Ollie North, the seditious convicted felon who sold weapons to Iran??
    .
    Also, I got the info about Ollie/Shannity joint scam from a RIGHT WING blog – > http://www.debbieschlussel.com/6938/sean-hannitys-freedom-concert-scam-only-7-of-charitys-money-went-to-injured-troops-kids-of-fallen-troops-g5s-g6s-for-vannity/
    .
    okk.. so Rush has gone to Afghanistan.. You are not sure about Shannity, and chose to skip mentioning Bleck entirely.
    .
    what did Rush do when he was in Afghanistan? How many days was he there? Did he venture out of Kabul or even Kabul’s version of the green zone? What provinces did he visit? What units did he embed with and report on?

  • http://erieangel.wordpress.com erieangel

    groenhagen, you can’t come up with a BMI based solely on weight and height. Those are the starting points, yes, but muscle is also taken into the equation. It is very reasonable that a muscular man at 5’7″ would weigh 225.

  • diecash1

    The correct action when you haven’t a clue as to what you’re talking about it to just shut up.
    ..
    The Act to which you are referring is the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 and it had nothing to do with the drivel which you posted:

    Good lending practices were subordinated to feel good economics of every poor schlep should have his own home, no matter that he/she did not have the income to support the payment, the credit history to grant approval, or the upbringing to know that paying your debts is a sacred pledge of honor.

    Utter rubbish. Perhaps you’ll next tell us that the CRA caused the collapse of the financial markets. Well, fools do carry on ad infinitum.

    The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 seeks to address discrimination in loans made to individuals and businesses from low and moderate-income neighborhoods.[7] The Act mandates that all banking institutions that receive FDIC insurance be evaluated by Federal banking agencies to determine if the bank offers credit (in a manner consistent with safe and sound operation as per Section 802(b) and Section 804(1)) in all communities in which they are chartered to do business.[3] The law does not list specific criteria for evaluating the performance of financial institutions. Rather, it directs that the evaluation process should accommodate the situation and context of each individual institution. Federal regulations dictate agency conduct in evaluating a bank’s compliance in five performance areas, comprising twelve assessment factors. This examination culminates in a rating and a written report that becomes part of the supervisory record for that bank.[8]
    ..
    The law, however, emphasizes that an institution’s CRA activities should be undertaken in a safe and sound manner, and does not require institutions to make high-risk loans that may bring losses to the institution.[3][4] An institution’s CRA compliance record is taken into account by the banking regulatory agencies when the institution seeks to expand through merger, acquisition or branching. The law does not mandate any other penalties for non-compliance with the CRA.[6][9]

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act
    ..

    This is not about racism, racism caused this debacle. Racism on the do-gooders partCAUSED the mortgage crisis and the subsequent financial melt-down.

    Yeah because redlining was such a fair and noble practice.
    ..
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

  • fladvl43

    Joe, a little advice:

    Try winning on the merits of your argument against the tea party platform rather than intimidating the Tea Party’s right to dissent. I see this as a desperate attempt to make yourself relevant (as if you ever were), albeit by showing how much of a political hack and a coward you really are.

  • liberalsarehacks

    klien is an idiot. ROFLMAO

  • justmy02cents

    mycophile @ 24.21
    .
    Nice response and we do agree, unfortunately we’ll need to stay here typing for a couple more generationsw and then that problem “goes away”…can you wait….
    .
    Otherwise our alternative is to tolerate the modest racist within each of us and vilify the open and extreme racism of the extreme minority of Americans.
    .
    The last chapter of James Mitchner’s “Hawaii” is titled “The Golden People”…how ironic that as we approach becoming those “golden people” we lose sight of the exceptional opportunity that has been given us by our ancestors in this wonderful country.
    .
    America is truly exceptional and we all must strive to continue that legacy.
    .
    Broadening the pervasiveness of government only interferes with that process…you CANNOT legislate feelings of one person towards another, but the attempt to do so caused the financial crisis, created polarization of the population’s politics, and now threatens to crush personal liberty.
    .
    Less government allows individuals to do what they do best…..better their own lives and by default their communities and by further default the entire country.
    .
    can I have a verse of Kumbya from our audience.?
    .
    So in my mind, taking over GM, AIG, Citibank, Chrysler, Healthcare Insurance, and Energy Production interferes with American ingenuity, innovation, hampers small businesses, and squashes job creation.
    .
    For the past 234 years we have suffered “scope creep” by the federal government…I believe that we are at the tipping point….thus the Tea Party movement born of this same feeling….they are NOT wild eyed loons, just regular folks who are coping with a situation that they have never encountered and are bound to make some mistakes.
    .
    The leftmedia and the crazed left’s vilification of the movement, indicates their fear of a groundswell of formerly silent differing opinion.
    .
    If BIG government IS the answer, time will bear out the correctness of that position.
    .
    November 2, 2010 may be our first real indication of the true sentiment of Americans and the validation or rejection of the current administration….
    .
    It is really interesting time we live in.

  • http://holocaustnews.wordpress.com/ holocaustnews

    Dissent has become Sedition.

  • disgustedwithitall

    Nice to see the the moral high road is being taken here with all the derogatory slams at the Republicans. By the majority of the posts here you consider yourselves to be enlightened and non-prejudicial. And yet you lump all Republicans into the Tea Party masses. You should be ashamed of yourselves for the name calling and degradation of a group that you accuse of doing the same thing you’re doing here. I would guess that the majority of “americans” regardless of which party would have a suprising amount of issues in common and would and could work together if the far left and the far right would just SHUT UP!

    All the news media, print and TV, have turned into prostitutes for ratings instead of reporting the facts.

    Have you noticed how rude everyone has become since the reality shows? the chef screaming at his apprentices, Trump “you’re fired”, and all the others. It’s become acceptable and it’s saddening.

  • bach43gt

    Joe,

    It seems as if you definitely are an Obama fan (not that I’m surprised from someone who works with CNN). “Let me be clear”? Wow, it’s as if Obama is talking. As far as I’m concerned, you are a radical socialist just like Obama. All you people can focus on are the far-right republicans. Why not focus on what the independent center are thinking and wanting. Those are the ones who will cause the Democrats to lose their seats. Get the blinders off your head and open your ears.

  • justmy02cents

    patrick @ 31.2
    .
    I might have missed it, but did Friedman also jump-start BHO’s State Senate run from his livingroom?
    .
    just asking?

  • justmy02cents

    place a “means” test for receiving Social Security benefits.
    .
    I know a building in NJ where most of the residents are multi-millionaires.
    .
    They residents lineup near the mailboxes to collect their Social Security checks along with their dividend coupons….
    .
    Doesn’t see fair to me. These people are already finacially secure.
    .
    I do not know whether this is a drop in the bucket…but it would be a start.

  • justmy02cents

    In the small town I live in there is waste, fraud, and corruption.
    .
    I am certain that this exists at many levels of government service….eliminate 10% of it this year….how many times have you seen a county road crew sitting in their truck with the engine idling and doing NOTHING. call it in, and find out what was supposed to be done and make an issue about it.
    .
    Like all things, it is impossible to completely eliminate waste, fraud, and corruption, but can we at least take a chunk out of it.
    .
    Once public employees KNOW we are WATCHING, I believe that productivity will dramatically increase.

  • northpoleresident

    I love it when Joe Klein gets all the nut jobs worked up in a collective hissy fit. Must have hit a sensitive spot.

  • abbydelabbey

    Klein is correct and (if you pardon the expression) right on.

    The comments that are being made on Fox (aka faux) news among other media are very disconcerting and very close to sedition.

    People like Beck, Limbaugh, and Palin are doing their utmost to foment unrest for their own personal gain and in the process encouraging the least mentally stable of society to do something radical and dangerous to the well-being of others.

    Think they are not overloading their mouths without engaging their brains?

    How about Palin’s comment about “not retreating but reloading.” Now, some folks may say she had no intention of suggesting any violent action; however, someone who is unstable may take her literally.

    When someone is in the public eye, online, or hosting websites, etc. that person has a responsibility not say or do anything that would encourage behavior/actions that would cause harm to others.

    However, Fox news (if you really want to call it a “news” network — it’s more of a propaganda machine for the radical right) and those like Palin do not care one bit if they cause political/social unrest. They only care about their personal ambition and financial rewards and their radical, extreme right-wing ideology that is unsettling similar to the rantings of a demagogue with a funny moustache from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s who brought war and death to millions –

    Think it can’t happen here?

    Think again.

  • desertbill

    Hmmm!
    Isn’t it interesting that sedition is a one way street and that only conservatives are seditious? I believe the Messiah’s words, “We are only a couple of days away from FUNDAMENTALLY transforming America,” come dangerously close to proclaiming the overthrow of the very principles upon which this country was founded, namely, hard work, industriousness and responsibility for one’s own actions. You are right! There is sedition afoot, unfortunately, it is NOT just found amoung “Right Wing Gasbags.”

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    oiacja,
    .
    Our founding fathers, in a time without modern medicine had “forced down our throats” (since that is the new conservative term for creating something innovative against the will of the minority) a nationalized package delivery system to help commerce and individual communication and even allowed, if needed, for this “Government takeover” of package delivery to get subsidized by tax payer money.
    .
    This was done in the name of a more perfect union, supporting life and the pursuit of happiness while, at times, taking away tax payer money.
    .
    If you want to be healthy enough to pursue happiness or just stay alive, you need medical care.
    .
    So, please try and tell me why a postal service is more vital to forming a more perfect union (of course the preamble to the constitution) and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
    .
    If my bills never got to my door without businesses bringing it here themselves, I’d be happier!
    .
    Modern conservatives are nothing at all like our founding fathers. Our founding fathers were, in many terms, much, much more liberal.

  • http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

    “I believe the Messiah’s words…”
    .
    You are wrong! Ronald Reagan, AKA, the Messiah, never said that.
    .
    He was the one who said “government is the problem”.
    .
    How could you confuse that guy who agrees with the huge majority of Americans with the Messiah, Ronald Reagan.
    .
    But, both are equally seditious since Ronny “Dutch” Reagan did try to destroy government, but, as the winner of the election could not be stopped since he was the almighty cheiftain who used the word God all of the time inspiring worship from the right, he really wasn’t committing sedition.
    .
    That guy who agrees with the majority of the Americans and never talks about his Christian faith since he is a private man not trying to make show out of his prayers was talking about building up, strengthening government and bringing it closer to the will of the people, instead of how the Messiah Dutch “the Gipper” Reagan, his right hand man George “Poppy” Bush and his son, known as W, had been taking government to the will of the corporations.

  • jbaustian

    It is amusing to hear ignoramouses like Joe Klein alleging “sedition”, “wingnuts”, and/or “fascist”.
    .
    Not illuminating, not informative, and not really entertaining. Just vaguely amusing, because someone actually pays him to write. I think that’s funny, in a sad way, like the English teacher who told her students that “famous” and “infamous” could be used interchangeably.

  • maverick2k9

    I read the dead tree version of the Time article on the soldiers in Afghanistan and the school they are trying to rebuild. Great job there – That is what real journalism is all about.
    .
    So Joe, Ignore the ignoramus jbaustian. For people like jbaustian, ignorance is bliss indeed!! LOL :)

  • spokedoke

    The on-going cycle of reporting the spread of mis-information and the activities mis-informed people as news is (to quote Jon Stewart) “..hurting America.”

    I applaud the attempt to point out that there is real news going on in the world, and it isn’t happening on soap boxes all over America.

    Also, from the humble perspective of a now-in-the-closet-from-shame fundamentalist republican, the constant reminders that people protested under the Bush administration are not helpful. Namely because those protesters where right, Bush really was lying about his reasons for driving the country into a record deficit. At least Obama has told the truth about his reasons for driving the country into a record deficit, I can give him that.

  • fladvl43

    I have a homework assignment for you:

    Part 1: Look up the word “metaphor”

    Part 2: Look up the “Reichstag Fire Decree of 1933″ which nullified civil liberties deemed “seditious”

    Fast forward to 1945…30 million Europeans dead as a result of Nazi tyrrany and aggression.

    Part 3: Look in the mirror and call yourself and idiot

  • justmy02cents

    broknbuddha @ 54.1.
    .
    .
    Please explain exactly why that has any relevance today?
    .
    Seems like you are stuck in a racist environment, when many are trying to put it into the rear-view mirror.
    .

  • desertbill

    How the heck did Reagan get into the mix? The ONLY Messiah I know of calls himself Barack Hussein Obama. His very presidency is by his own words “Seditious”. He is right about one thing though, and that is his assumption that the American people are stupid, fickle, gullible and easily persuaded to change by any snake-oil salesman.

  • justmy02cents

    diecash1 @ 78.1
    .
    I have read the CRA and since you offer yourself as an expert please describe YOUR actual experience in the IMPLEMENTATION of that legislation.
    .
    Before you begin, I’ll caution taht I was there and part of said implementation and KNOW that the bank I worked for was pressured into granting loans to individuals who were unqualified. We actually KNEW the loans would not perform and built it in to the cost of doing business in deterioriating inner city neighborhoods.
    .
    If you believe the HCR legislation as literally as you do the CRA you are either naive or a fool…
    .
    both legislations PROMISE a great outcome if we only do xxxx….well 33 years later we can look back and actually see the result of that promise.
    .
    I do not think that we’ll have to wait that long for HCR to crash and burn….our children and grandchildren will feel it a lot sooner.
    .

  • justmy02cents

    go for it melissa…..
    .
    regarding Joe’s definition, seems he left out the word “legitimate”….which is certainly relevant here.
    .
    .A necessary requirement to prove sedition is that the “legitimate” authority of the state MUST be what is challanged.
    .
    .I am not certain that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that this administration is legitimate.
    .
    Is the government legitimate when the leader cannot/will not prove his compliance with a Constitutional requirement?
    .
    Is the government legitimate when supporters perpetrated fraud to to elect the leader?
    .
    Is the government legitimate when long-standing legislative processes and subordinated to “back-room” deals and corruption.
    .
    I’ll keep the list short for our A.D.D. radicals and coolaide drinkers that have a hard time focusing.

  • mviker

    Seems to me the majority of ACTUAL violence that you infer is being carried out by the left. Just take a look at the SEIU workers beating a black man and calling him names. How about Bertha Lewis prepping her future socialists with her assertion that if the tea party has it’s way there nwill be internment camps? Violence happens, but I think you truly need a REALITY CHECK. The falsehoods, propaganda, and outright lies are indeed originating from the far left, not the tea partiers or conservatives. Folks like Keith and other left leaning “journalists” such as Chris Matthews and Keith Olberman spout far more vitriol and outright propaganda than your seditious Glenn Beck. You folks are hell bent on demonizing a HUGE majority of Americans that truly do feel this great country of ours is being sold out to socialism. I happen to be one of them and rest assured, the last thing on my mind is NOT violence, but fending off an ever invasive government that has sold out it’s citizens to the likes of ACORN, SEIU, and all the left wing ideologs that think we should give our hard earned pay to those that don’t or won’t contribute anything to this country. Simply put, there are too many out there that only care about playing the system and want a free ride. We don’t need our government catering to this crowd.

  • sasquatch08

    “Let me be clear: dissent isn’t sedition. Questioning an Administration’s policies isn’t sedition. But questioning an Administration’s legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it certainly is.”
    .
    Klein, you might just be an idiot if…
    .
    Other arguements aside, let me take this to it’s logical conclusion. Questioning the legitimacy of a President or Administration “certainly is” seditious. We agree right, because you said it, not me.
    .
    So wasn’t it sedition when people called for the assassination of George W. Bush? Said he wasn’t a legit President because he “stole the Florida election”? Were they not openly calling for his death and questioning if he was a legitimate President? Where were you then? Where was your pompous windbag butt defending him? I never liked the guy, but are you REALLY going to try to argue that the people saying that were not doing so in a manner “..intended to undermine…” his Presidency?
    .
    You sir are a self-righteous charlatan, and a hypocrite.
    .
    Either Bush had/has the same rights as Obama, or he doesn’t have them and therefore Obama doesn’t either. You can’t have it both ways just because you like one person and not the other.

  • sasquatch08

    Patrick-

    What “Government takeover” is it of which you speak, and what taxpayers? The income tax didn’t exist until 1894. “For most of our nation’s history, individual taxpayers rarely had any significant contact with Federal tax authorities as most of the Federal government’s tax revenues were derived from excise taxes, tariffs, and customs duties.” (http://www.ustreas.gov/education/fact-sheets/taxes/ustax.shtml) So your postal service analogy is wrong.
    .
    Hence most of the rest of your argument goes out the window.
    .
    The bills you pay are for the goods and services you use. Would you really be happier in the “state of nature” without any of them? Of course it would be wonderful if they were all free, but then you’d be happy at the expense of the happiness of the people who provide them. Then again maybe people would be happier beating each other to death on a daily basis for what they need to survive…
    .
    If you really want to know about how “modern conservatives” and “modern liberals” fit with the Founders I suggest two books for you. First, “American Political Though” by Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Micheal S. Cummings. It’s a Political Science text which is a collection of writings from the Revolutionary Period through 2004, and it even has writings from members of the Green Party. The second book I recommend is by a French author (holy God, he must be ultra left!) “Last Exit to Utopia” by Jean-Francois Revel. It’s an examination of European and American leftist political thought from about 1900 until 2001; it compares and contrasts them as well as points out that none of it has ever actually worked. It’s full of these scary “right wing conspiracies” called “facts”.
    .
    I actually used to be a liberal before I became a libertarian. Why did I change? Because I found out that almost everything I thought I “knew” that made be believe so strongly in American liberal “progressive” stuff is a myth if not an outright lie. At least 180 million people died in the last century in search of the perfect society, well actually they were put to death by the people looking for it, and it’s happened 100% of the time that Socialism or Communism was followed. I urge every liberal here to take what they say on these blogs and go to Ukraine, mention the Holodomor and then lecture those people about being “progressive” see if you make it back alive. The Holodomor is what happens when centralized government runs things.
    .
    The Democratic leaning politicians today apparently believe that ideas with an unblemished record of failure will succeed if only they are put into the right hands – theirs.

  • diecash1

    since you offer yourself as an expert

    No, I offered some facts that were lacking in your post. I have a pretty fair knowledge of the CRA while you seem to not even know what the acronym stands for, let alone what it has done or not done. Rather than concern yourself with my qualifications, you should stick to attempting to dispute my argument if you can.

    Before you begin, I’ll caution taht I was there and part of said implementation and KNOW that the bank I worked for was pressured into granting loans to individuals who were unqualified

    Thanks for the warning but using some facts in your post to substantiate your spurious claims would be preferable. You’ve yet to prove any of what you stated in your original post.
    ..
    From Randall Kroszner, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago:

    Some critics of the CRA contend that by encouraging banking institutions to help meet the credit needs of lower-income borrowers and areas, the law pushed banking institutions to undertake high-risk mortgage lending. We have not yet seen empirical evidence to support these claims, nor has it been our experience in implementing the law over the past 30 years that the CRA has contributed to the erosion of safe and sound lending practices.
    ..
    Over the years, the Federal Reserve has prepared two reports for the Congress that provide information on the performance of lending to lower-income borrowers or neighborhoods—populations that are the focus of the CRA.3 These studies found that lending to lower-income individuals and communities has been nearly as profitable and performed similarly to other types of lending done by CRA-covered institutions. Thus, the long-term evidence shows that the CRA has not pushed banks into extending loans that perform out of line with their traditional businesses. Rather, the law has encouraged banks to be aware of lending opportunities in all segments of their local communities as well as to learn how to undertake such lending in a safe and sound manner.

    Link to ***LARGE** PDF previously quoted
    ..
    From BusinessWeek:

    Not surprisingly given the higher degree of supervision, loans made under the CRA program were made in a more responsible way than other subprime loans. CRA loans carried lower rates than other subprime loans and were less likely to end up securitized into the mortgage-backed securities that have caused so many losses, according to a recent study by the law firm Traiger & Hinckley (PDF file here).

    Link to BusinessWeek article
    ..
    There’s plenty more out there if you care to actually look though I suspect you would prefer to spout more fact-free drivel than to objectively look at the facts.

  • diecash1

    .I am not certain that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that this administration is legitimate.
    .
    Is the government legitimate when the leader cannot/will not prove his compliance with a Constitutional requirement?

    Wow…….I didn’t realize that you were another ignorant birther too. I thought you were just a garden variety troll badly lacking in facts and reason. Absolutely pathetic.

  • justmy02cents

    diecash1 @ 78.1
    .
    you can quote these academics and non-bankers until the cows come home.
    .
    I wrote and managed the software used in a major money-center bank that tracked the performance of these loans….
    .
    I have first hand knowledge of the CRA induced failures.
    .
    I sat with loan officers and branch managers to discuss these matters as part of the design of the branch sub-ledger tracking system of these loans.
    .
    Obviously I cannot divulge the bank, you’ll have to take that at face value.
    .

  • diecash1

    Given the range of nutty positions you have offered thus far, (evil CRA, that fact that you’re a birther, etc) I won’t give too much weight to your experiences and anecdotal musings.
    ..
    Perhaps you could try a novel solution — you could actually provide evidence to the contrary. If you had bothered to examine the PDF that I posted, you would have found just that.

  • http://paulkanter.wordpress.com paulkanter

    Anyway, priorities, priorities, priorities. They say two contradictory things at the same time: “Gov. is the problem.” and “Follow the Constitution!” The Constitution is all about Government!!

    Today on Glenn Beck’s TV show on Fox News, which is free of any actual facts or news, Glenn Beck stated that Joe Klein is a “minion” of Obama’s and he stated that Joe’s comments on The Chris Matthew’s show was a part of the Obama Administration trying to silence freedom of speech and dissent. Everyone who criticizes Mr. Beck are now mindless agents working for Obama and his radical center-left agenda.

    You are right Joe, Tea-partiers should be supporting our troops and giving Obama credit for Afghanistan and Iraq and many other things. “The Audacity of Hope” still is a good, relavent anti-polarizing book.

  • http://paulkanter.wordpress.com paulkanter

    Can it be called infotainment if not a single fact is reported? Everything out of Glenn Beck’s mouth is double-speak and lies. I think a new word for such stuff is needed.

  • rightwayannie

    Why is it that when a conservative dares to disagree with the current party in the Oval Office they are seditious.? Why is it that the democrats were free to hurl insults and death threats to President Bush and they were considered as exercising their free speech?

    Why is it that the Supreme Court says it’s free speech to show videos of animal cruelty but yet the left says The Tea Party movement is unAmerican, racist and seditious? Aren’t they just exercising their right to free speech and peaceably assembly as guaranteed in the First Amendment?

    It appears the Democrats have one set of Rights for themselves and another for the conservatives. If all else fails, they’ll pull the “race” card.

    Mr. Klein is not appearing on cable news channels to discuss his comments. It appears he is unwilling to debate his opposition to Glenn Beck and The Tea Party, but instead attempts to discredit them with his rhetoric.

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