In other news, 3,699 to 13,999 Muslims serving in the U. S. military didn't go on a shooting spree yesterday.
It's not the religion. It's not the guns. It's the crazy. And no one group has a lock on crazy. Yeah, it'd be nice if you could single out the wicked and the dangerously loony with a simple survey. But it doesn't work that way and no amount of pointing-with-alarm will make it so.
I expect a certain degree of "Yes, but--" in response to this, plus a few accusing me of being dangerously blind. Nope; as terrorism, the Fort Hood shootings are singularly ineffective. The guy was a nutjob -- and managed to keep it under control for a good long while, if the reporting is to be believed.
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Under the right-wing rock
If you don't think Bush's and Cheney's embrace of torture-as-policy has not had a profound effect, check out this instant response to Fort Hood from Mark Noonan in the neocon camp:
A terrible event - but I don't want anyone to call it an "act of violence" or "a terrible tragedy". It was an attack - one or more men decided with malice to attack a US military base. We need to get right down to the bottom of this - and, liberals, if the stories of accomplices in custody are true, this is where harsh interrogation might be needed: whoever was involved in this most emphatically does not have a right to remain silent.
So we go from torturing a foreign terror suspect who may know the whereabouts of a WMD that is about to go off imminently (the original Krauthammer position) to torturing American suspects in a shooting spree (suspect, I might add, that subsequently turned out to be mirages).
This is not a slippery slope; it's a well-greased waterslide to throwing out the entire American system of government.
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Soldiers in other countries are allowed to carry arms on base and even when they are off-duty. In Israel, for instance, soldiers are issued a rifle and then . . . it's theirs. One sees slender 18-year-old girls, traveling from base, home to the suburbs for Shabbat dinner, still slung with a massive M-16 rifle almost as big as they are. The prevelance of arms doesn't mean the country experiences the kind of random mass murders seen in the United States. It means that the few times someone has gone crazy with a gun in a city street, he was taken down fast by bystanders.
The aforementioned idiot fails to realize that a soldier carrying a gun with live ammo was the reason that 12 people were killed yesterday.
Leave it to a freaking conservative idiot to presume to know more about gun safety and protocol than the goddamn US Army, and criticize those protocol as 'political correctness.'
My God, some people are just beyond f**king stupid.
I'm gonna stand with you and all freedom-loving Americans against this [health care] bill…this is my copy of the Constitution, and I'm gonna stand here with our Founding Fathers who wrote in the preamble: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." —Senate Minority Leader John Boehner November 5, 2009
Any United States legislator who claims to be quoting the Constitution but who is actually quoting the Declaration of Independence should be forced out of office IMMEDIATELY. Assuming, that is, that he doesn't have the decency and shame to resign on his own.
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The Inmates are Running the Asylum
They came from all over the country. From every middlesex village and farm. In terms of diversity, they ran the gamut from pink to beige. They joined together with a single purpose and raised their patriotic voices in a single message; stop the House healthcare reform bill! And taxes are too high. And Glenn Beck is awesome. And Barack Obama is black.These are the wingnuts, the teabaggers, the FOX-addled and the Limbaugh-confused. They're motivated, poorly informed, and -- let's face it -- pretty gullible. They're also dedicated to the cause -- whatever that might be. If you take a look at the signs they carried, what the cause was was a little unclear; no to healthcare reform, Obama's a commie, and hell no you can't take my guns. Shrill, angry, and a lot less than focused, they descended on on the Capitol to be shrill, angry, and a lot less than focused.
Now now, liberals, you can no longer smugly declare in political arguments, "the Republicans don't even have a health care plan," because they do! John Boehner released the GOP alternative plan a few days ago, and the CBO scored it, to much fanfare. It is but a modest (Very Responsible Centrist) plan to save America from the Muslims. One of its central tenets — and the health care thing you've been hearing Republicans blab on about most, after they've exhausted tort reform — is to allow consumers to purchase health care plans across state lines. Doesn't that sound nice, for competition and pricing? But what if… what if many of the health insurers then set up shop in the "state" of the Northern Marianas, where there is not a single law against anything?
Keep reading: http://wonkette.com/412071/heres-the-most-fun-aspect-of-john-boehners-health-plan
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WorldNut Daily reports that a group of Christian clergymen lead by Christian Anti-Defamation Commission head Gary Cass are planning a November 16th demonstration at the U.S. Capitol during which they intend to use inciting language in the hopes of being arrested for hate crimes, thereby proving the anti-Christian bias of the just-passed Matthew Shepard Act.
A coalition of food and consumer groups that includes Consumers Union and the Center for Science in the Public Interest has asked the Food and Drug Administration to ban the practice of feeding chicken feces and other poultry farm waste to cattle. McDonald's Corp., the nation's largest restaurant user of beef, also wants the FDA to prohibit the feeding of so-called poultry litter to cattle.
Members of the coalition are threatening to file a lawsuit or to push for federal legislation establishing such a ban if the FDA doesn't act to do so in the coming months.
There is no reason, ever, to invite racist ex-Congressman failure Tom Tancredo onto any television show, or at least the political ones. So thank you Tom Tancredo for graciously acknowledging your unimportance and leaving the set mid-interview!
The fun starts around 2:45 when Tancredo suggests that everyone in the military past or present hates their free government health insurance. Then that mean blogger Markos Molasses says, I was in the military, unlike you, who got a deferment from fighting in your beloved Vietnam War, because of sadness. Tancredo responds, yeah, well fuck this, I've got borders to patrol.
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Richard Blair wants to know, and so do I, why NOT ONE REPUBLICAN has taken a similar stand of outrage against the lunatic frothing teabagger who went to Washington the other day carrying a poster of dead Holocaust victims and calling it "National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau Germany - 1945". This is the same rally at which Eric Cantor spoke and said nary a word about it, nor did he say anything about the poster which read "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" -- "Rothschild" being code for "Jew" that was used by Jew-haters before they elected George Soros to be their all-purpose Jewish scapegoat.
Yes, folks, Eric Cantor, a Jew, sides with Jew-haters against the president for no other reason than political power.
…Geraldo is the one making sense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTESOlPavIA&feature=player_embedded
Kilmeade: Do you think it's time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim Army officers — anybody enlisted?…Because if I'm going to be deployed in a foxhole, if I'm going to be sticking in an outpost, I got to know the guy next to me is not going to want to kill me.
The look of shock on Geraldo's face, just for a second, is so revealing and he suddenly becomes aware of the long, slippery slide into hell he has been on. But then, the daft lady that looks like uncooked ham on the hoof speaks:
Gretchen: Could it be that out military was also exercising political correctness — even though he had a poor performance report, even though he spoke openly about being a radical and had those supposed postings online — could it be that the military was exercising political correctness in not approaching as seriously as they would have if he had not been a Muslim?
Ah, the noise machine recovers as one of their favorite memes gets played, and Geraldo grasps at the life preserver that she offers.
Next up on Fox: Eugenics Today!
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One night only! http://www.mockpaperscissors.com/?p=25620
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Virginia Foxx: "I want to say I believe everybody wants all Americans to have affordable health insurance and good quality health care. I just take that assumption."
But Americans shouldn't "just take that assumption." In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, under the Republican alternative, the number of uninsured Americans would increase to 52 million by 2019. The plan would provide coverage to only 3 million more uninsured Americans. Earlier in the hearing, Foxx suggested that it's better to be uninsured than enrolled in the government's Medicaid program. "I want to ask you if you know that Medicaid patients visit the emergency room at twice the rate of uninsured patients in this country," she said. "More government paid insurance is going to increase the number of people going to the emergency rooms."
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