“There is no greater force for economic growth than free markets. But markets work best with rules that promote our values, protect our workers and give all people a chance to succeed,” she said. “Fairness doesn’t just happen. It requires the right government policies.”
There are plenty of examples around the world of societies where the rich got richer on the backs of the poor – and none of them are very nice places to live for most people. The wingnuts want us to become one of those places, and in fact are taking steps to ensure it happens.
Here’s a lovely little story. For a week now, I’ve been hearing that the wife of Scott Pullins, Kathryn Elliott Pullins, has been contacting several bloggers and trying to get them to delete comments and posts, and generally intimidate people into not blogging about Scott – especially in a bad light. I didn’t think much of it until we got a call on Monday.
Phone rings. I pick it up. Female voice. “Is Holly there?”. “Sure, hang on”, I say, figuring it for a massage client or a friend of Holly’s whose voice I didn’t know. I don’t start paying attention until Holly starts raising her voice saying something about not appreciating the caller calling our home and threatening her. The following are several exchanges that Holly and Kathryn had. They are not in chronological order according to Holly and there are other parts of the conversation that happened but are not included here:
Kathryn: You don’t know me, but my name is Kathryn Pullins, I live in Knox County, my husband is Scott Pullins.
Holly: OK
Kathryn: Your husband owns a website called Plunderbund
Holly: Yes
Kathryn: On that website your husband has continually posted things about my husband. Is your husband an attorney?
Holly: No
Kathryn: Are you an attorney?
Holly: No
Kathryn: Do you have a job?
Holly: Yes
Kathryn: Does your husband have a job?
Holly: Yes
Kathryn: Are you homeowners?
Holly: Yes [Eric says: Ladies and gentleman, my wife has spectacular patience]
Kathryn: OK. Well my husband IS an attorney and I have asked your husband to remove a post that is attacking our business, and I have not heard back from him. I am a calling you to let you know that if the post is not taken down, we will file a lawsuit against you, and we can garnish your wages, and your husbands wages, and take your home.
1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control are not natural.
2. Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Infertile couples and old people cannot get legally married because the world needs more children.
3. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children because straight parents only raise straight children.
4. Straight marriage will be less meaningful, since Britney Spears’s 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.
5. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and it hasn’t changed at all: women are property, Blacks can’t marry Whites, and divorce is illegal.
6. Gay marriage should be decided by the people, not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of minorities.
7. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are always imposed on the entire country. That’s why we only have one religion in America.
8. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people makes you tall.
9. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage license.
10. Children can never succeed without both male and female role models at home. That’s why single parents are forbidden to raise children.
11. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven’t adapted to cars or longer lifespans.
12. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a “separate but equal” institution is always constitutional. Separate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as separate marriages will for gays & lesbians.
Given that Bill Todd is a lawyer, you’d think he’d take a look at the law i.e. the relevant Ohio Revised Code (ORC) sections prior to throwing out accusations against the Strickland administration and Mayor Michael Coleman.
Here’s the video from yesterday
In it, Bill Todd claims that Mayor Coleman hired his own wife while serving as the voluntary chair for Strickland’s transition team. But, according to the ORC (Sec. 107.29 Gubernatorial transition committee), the voluntary chair has no hire/fire authority- he merely assists with recommendations for cabinet-level appointments.
Bill Todd also charges that the Strickland administration and Mayor Coleman are stonewalling his Freedom of Information request even though the ORC provides the state 30 days to reply. It’s been one week.
It also seems worth mentioning that Frankie Coleman has over twenty years experience in human resources and workforce development- but Bill Todd charges she had no business being hired because she was not “eligible, competent or qualified.”
So did Bill Todd fail to do his research? Or is he just a big, fat liar?
The “culture of fear” fomented by our current government and the media seems to have really taken hold in Boston.
In a scene reminiscent of the Cartoon Network bomb scare that paralyzed the Boston area in January, police shut down a strip mall yesterday in this small western suburb after employees at a Bank of America branch mistook a botched fax for a bomb threat.
The phrase “enhanced interrogation” has been used by the Bush Administration to justify the torture of Iraqi insurgents, often with the claim that since they are not uniformed military, they are not subject to the Geneva Conventions. This is not the first use of this kind of this kind of language to defend this kind of act:
The phrase “Verschärfte Vernehmung” is German for “enhanced interrogation”. Other translations include “intensified interrogation” or “sharpened interrogation”. It’s a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their “enhanced interrogation techniques” would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan.
Also: the use of hypothermia, authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld, was initially forbidden. ‘Waterboarding” was forbidden too, unlike that authorized by Bush. As time went on, historians have found that all the bureaucratic restrictions were eventually broken or abridged. Once you start torturing, it has a life of its own.
Andrew Sullivan has more (a lot more) documenting exactly what was going on under German supervision, and how shockingly similar it is to what is going on under George W. Bush. He closes with this critical observation (emphasis mine):
Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I’m not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture – “enhanced interrogation techniques” – is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.
Americans need to understand exactly what they support whentheysupport “enhanced interrogation”.
The Toledo Blade has an interesting article today about students at a Toledo charter school demanding fair treatment for their teachers.
Their school, like many other Ohio Charter schools, has been horribly mismanaged and the school is in debt.
As a result, the school cancelled teachers’ health insurance, and cut back the hours of other teachers.
The students are demanding that they be able to attend their school next year (i.e. the school won’t be closed) and that their teachers be paid through the summer.
Despite repeated claims by high officials of the Bush Administration that fighting terrorism has been the central mission of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) since it began operating, the data show that in the last three years a claim of terrorism was made against only 12 (0.0015%) out of 814,073 individuals against whom the DHS has filed charges in the immigration courts.
Government rhetoric is about how the threat of terrorism requires vigilance in monitoring our borders. In fact, that canard is often thrown about by anti-immigration wingnuts.
Yes, preventing terrorists from entering the US is a noble goal. But it’s hardly the primary reason for DHS’s existence, and overstating the threat of terrorism is not healthy for a democracy (exhibit 1: George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection, and the continued erosion of civil rights for American citizens). Perhaps the most interesting thing about the report is not the disparity between the number of terrorism charges brought and the government rhetoric, but the fact that there is little discernible difference between pre- and post-9/11 numbers when it comes to terrorism and homeland security charges.
In other words, the rhetoric is meant to scare the citizenry. There is no other reasonable explanation.
Neuroscientists Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman of the National Institutes of Health say experiments they conducted have led them to conclude unselfishness is not a matter of morality, The Washington Post reports.
Rather, the two say altruism is something that makes people feel good, lighting up a primitive part of the human brain that usually responds to food or sex.
Grafman and Moll have been scanning the brains of volunteers who were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.
They are among scientists across the United States using imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass.
The results are showing many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, opening up a new window on what it means to be good.
In honor of our beloved Matt Naugle – so that he might learn to feel more comfortable around the brothers. Don’t be skeered Matt. Don’t be skeered! Tho some dees on dat bitch!
Seer (s?’?r)
1. One that sees: an inveterate seer of sights.
2. A clairvoyant.
3. A prophet.
Sounds about right.
Though I am taking whatever they say with a grain of salt given that they also linked to every other lefty Ohio blog. Well, that and, uh… well… they sound CRAZY!
Sure, I say I’m going away for the weekend and then something cool happens. Two things really. One, I’m deep in a big poker tourney, and Jerid is spotted on the MSM scene. This is pretty cool. WCAX in Burlington VT gives a mention to Buckeye State Blogger Jerid Kurtz and his ongoing work covering the ‘08 Prez Primary.
Stump speeches on the road to the White House don’t seem to have changed much since the days of the old whistle stops.
But look closely, and you’ll see bloggers like Jerid Kurtz.
“I can pretty much post as soon as the event’s over, just pull it off my camera and put it up,” Kurtz said. He’s shooting video of presidential candidates in New Hampshire, posting them online on his own blog and on the video sharing site YouTube.
“All the campaigns really have to be on their toes,” he said,”because they never know when someone who has a blog is going to be around with a video camera to catch something they may not necessarily mean to say or mean at all.”
Kurtz is evidence of how campaigns are changing in the internet age.
Good stuff. Keep it up Jerid. I hear he has some good stuff coming with Tommy Thompson as the victim!
Hanging together.
by Brian on May 31, 2007 · Comments
Ben Franklin: “We must hang together, gentlemen…else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.”
RABid: “Eww, collectivism!”
This was RABid’s response to a speech by Hillary Clinton where she said this:
There are plenty of examples around the world of societies where the rich got richer on the backs of the poor – and none of them are very nice places to live for most people. The wingnuts want us to become one of those places, and in fact are taking steps to ensure it happens.
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