Random 90s flashback: PM Dawn (1991)
Raise your hand if you miss the Daisy Age!
The GOP establishment vs. the Rogues
The Republican Party has two, mutually exclusive, strategies for picking up seats (and governorships) in 2010. One the one hand, they have the Palin/teabagger strategy, which is being pushed by the media wing of the party — people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, the winger netroots and Fox news. That strategy involves blowing up government itself, and even the Republican Party, in order to whip the jihadi base into an anti-Obama frenzy. You see it in the signs depicting healthcare as the Holocaust, the president as Adolf Hitler, and Michelle Bachman as sane. Glenn Beck is apparently preparing to formalize his “plan” for his faithful robots soon and very soon (and he’s got this weird movie out, which was premiered to a stunned silence before the “Twilight” movie I took my kids and their friends to yesterday, but that’s another post…)
On the other side, are the pragmatists: people who actually run Republican bureaucracies, and who see the model for victory in the newly elected New Jersey and Virginia governors. In short: run moderate, and avoid the jihadis at all costs. Read more
Spence Jones: “I’m running”
Ousted (for now) MIami commissioner Michelle Spence Jones brought the drama tonight, holding a press conference this evening, surrounded by about 50 supporters (mostly campaign workers from her recenet electoral triumph) and telling the world (and the prosecutors) that she will be a candidate in the special election for the District 5 seat Gov. Crist just dismissed her from. Read more
If you read this to Glenn Beck, his head will explode
Salon.com posts a brilliant history of the Pledge of Allegiance by Michael Lind, which explains why it’s so darned un-American:
Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s. Francis Bellamy was a progressive Baptist minister and a Christian socialist who composed the pledge for the 400-year Columbus anniversary in 1892 and published it in a youth magazine. His cousin Edward Bellamy, a socialist from Massachusetts (Glenn Beck, are you taking notes?), was the author of the 1888 bestselling utopian novel “Looking Backward: 2007-1887,” which described a collectivist America in 2007 in which everyone is drafted in an “industrial army” and dines in public kitchens. (Instead of an industrial army, the United States in 2007 had a reserve army of the unemployed and working poor, and instead of public kitchens we had Starbucks.)
The Bellamys, like many at the time, were inspired by the integral nationalist and statist ideals that were percolating in Europe. From the 1890s until the 1940s, American schoolchildren often accompanied recitation of the pledge with “the Bellamy salute,” a stiff-armed salute of the ancient Roman kind that was indistinguishable from the later fascist and Nazi salutes. Heil Amerika! It was Franklin Roosevelt who suggested replacing the salute with a hand over the heart.
In the course of the 20th century, support for the pledge migrated from the collectivist left to the reactionary right. The original Bellamy pledge read: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” In 1923 WASP nativists prevailed in having “my flag” replaced by “the flag of the United States of America,” to make sure that young Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, among others, knew they weren’t pledging allegiance to the old country. In 1954, Congress inserted the words “under God,” following an influential sermon by a Protestant pastor who argued that the model for the United States in the Cold War should be ancient Sparta.
Could anything be more foreign to America’s enlightened 18th-century liberal and republican traditions than this toxic compound of collectivism, nativism, Spartan militarism and theocracy?
Actually, no. Read more
Fox anchors getting testy over ‘fair and balanced’
Could the White House strategy of marginalizing Fox News be starting to rattle their anchors? Signs point to yes. Watch what happens when one of the network’s “news” men gets hit with the company slogan on the air:
That’s a lot of anger, anchor man with two Gs, two Rs and two Ts in your name!
Meanwhile, Michael Wolffe figures it out: Read more
Frank Rich joins me in defense of balloon dad
I wrote last week that the Balloon boy spectacle was as much the fault of our declining, “reality show” based culture as it was the fault of current “worst dad in the world” contestant Richard Heene. Now, Frank Rich adds this:
There’s also some poignancy in his determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream. As a freelance construction worker and handyman, he couldn’t find much employment in an economy where construction is frozen and homeowners are more worried about losing their homes than fixing them. Once his appetite had been whetted by two histrionic appearances on “Wife Swap,” an ABC reality program, it’s easy to see why Heene would turn his life and that of his family into a nonstop audition for more turns in the big tent of the reality media circus. Read more
Bill Sparkman’s son speaks out
… and says he believes his father was murdered (oh, and Dan Riehl, he didn’t accuse his dad of being a child molester…) From the AP:
Josh Sparkman told The Associated Press in a phone interview that he is frustrated investigators still have not ruled out suicide or accidental death.
“I look at it as disrespectful to be still throwing suicide and accident around,” he said. “He didn’t do this to himself. That’s dishonorable. My dad was a good man. No person on this planet is going to fight cancer like he did, then turn around and kill himself a year or so later.”
… Josh Sparkman, 19, said he learned of his father’s death Sept. 13, a day after his body was found. Bill Sparkman adopted him when he was a baby.
“I completely broke down,” Josh Sparkman said. “It’s always just been me and my dad. It’s all I have, and I don’t have him anymore. I’m just kind of by myself.”
The younger Mr. Sparkman says he doesn’t have the money to bury his father, and that even if he did, the FBI has not released the body (they also searched his father’s home but haven’t told him anything.) He plans to move back to London, KY to try and find a job, and pay the $600 mortgage on his father’s home.
What is the difference between the Rockefeller, Schumer amendments?
FDL’s Jay Walker has a helpful summary of the Jay Rockefeller public option amendment (that was just defeated in the Senate Finance Committee) and the Chuck Schumer version, which is being debated now. In short:
The best and most robust public option is the one submitted by Senator Rockefeller. It resembles the robust public option originally proposed in the House. It would pay Medicare rates plus 5% for the first three years. Medicare providers would automatically participate in the public option unless they choose to opt out. There is no penalty for providers opting out of Rockefeller’s public option.
The second public option is the one submitted by Senator Schumer and Senator Cantwell. It would add to the Senate Finance Committee’s bill the same public option that passed in Senate HELP Committee. The public option in the Senate HELP Committee’s bill is called the “Community Health Insurance Option.” This public option does not pay modified Medicare rates but its rates “shall not be higher than the average of all Gateway reimbursement rates.”
The final and weakest public option amendment was also submitted by Schumer. It would be his national “level playing field” public option. The government would only provide start up funds to help create a new public option that must follow all the same rules as private insurance companies. Like any private insurance company it would need to negotiate rates and create it’s own provider network from scratch.
RiehlWorldIdiot: Winger solves the Bill Sparkman murder
Census worker Bill Sparkman was found hanged on September 12.
Dan Riehl of Riehlworldview, never one to let a little thing like class get in the way of a good right wing screed, floats his crack theory about the murder of Census worker Bill Sparkman, who was found bound, gagged, tied to a tree with his feet on the ground, a rope around his neck, and the word “fed” scrawled across his chest in a rural Kentucky national park. The evidence in the case points to anti-government activity. But since anti-government activity (including toting guns to town hall meetings and encouraging the unhinged to literally arm themselves for a “bloody battle” against the democratically elected president…) is now the “conservative movement’s” stock and trade, that theory just won’t do. Ipso facto: accuse the dead man of being a child molester. Seriously. Now, Riehl claims that he’s not accusing anyone of anyting, of course, but his post title kind of says it all:
Was Census Worker Bill Sparkman A Child Predator?
Yeah. Not accusing anyone of anything at all. Read more
Parent alert: British girl dies after HPV vaccination
This is disturbing for any parent who, like myself, has a teenaged or pre-teen daughter. From the Guardian:
Natalie Morton was a pupil at the Blue Coat Church of England School in Coventry, where she was given the human papilloma virus (HPV) jab yesterday. She was taken to Coventry University hospital, where she died at lunchtime. Read more
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