Saturday, November 6, 2010

6 November 2010 “Trouble ahead, lady in red.

Take my advice you’d be better off dead!

Switchman sleeping, train 102 is on the wrong track and headed for you”

The Great American Cleaving

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Published: November 5, 2010

“On Thursday, Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, delivered the opening salvo, saying “our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.” Not jobs? Not the deficit? Not the two interminable wars?

That ripping sound you hear is the fabric of a nation. “

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/opinion/06blow.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha211



The GOP's Sarah Palin problem



By Michael Gerson

Friday, November 5, 2010

“… What many Republicans, establishment and otherwise, don't like is this: The leading figure of the Tea Party movement seems increasingly indifferent to Republican fortunes and increasingly tolerant of disturbing extremism.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/04/AR2010110406628.html?nav=hcmoduletmv



Charles Blow’s column in the New York Times is accurate. While all the indications may be that the voting public wants Congress to cooperate and work with the nation’s best interests in mind; there is very little chance that the GOP will collectively display any cooperation. McConnell’s statement concerning GOP goals for the next two years predicts the utter lack of concern for the nation. When that mainline GOP behavior is combined with the teavangelists rabid demands to gut government it looks as if the nation will be sliding toward 3rd world status sooner than we previously believed it would.

The screaming demands to decrease the size of our government are not at all consistent with what the GOP and teavangelists demand from government. They want spending and taxation cuts. They want more law enforcement but less funding for public safety. They want stronger border control and larger defense budgets without the increase in tax revenues necessary to fund such programs. They want high end health care for their selves but are unable to realize that the insurance companies will only provide the lowest orders of care if left unregulated. The Teavangelist agenda is to gut education at the national level and return public schools to the grasp of local school boards that will banish science for religious mythology. Long-term health care for our aging will become non-existent. Sarah Palin’s “death panels” will come into being but with a GOP/Teavangelist bureaucracy driving the selections.

The GOP, at least some of its less irrational leaders, has begun to recognize the very real danger that is Sarah Palin. She has been allowed to gain more power over the voter base than anyone should have, let alone a poorly educated, intellectual and ethical vacuum like Palin. Her desire for power is far too suggestive of middle school girls cliques than it is healthy political thought. The GOP and the Teavangelists may be willing to put up with her seemingly bi-polar irrationality and her inability to discern fact from fiction generated in her apparently unbalanced brain. If they do, they will come to regret it more than any of them know.

She needs to be stopped now. Our media, particularly television, needs to band together and refuse to provide any coverage of her actions or pronouncements until she can be made to undergo questioning by real journalists, not the Fox News fakes that share employment and ideology with her.

Like most people who read science fiction for entertainment, I’ve read several novels that take place in a post-apocalyptic or post-economic-collapse United States. I’ve always regarded them as possible by not likely to occur in my lifetime. I wasn’t overly concerned with the Y2K scare, didn’t stock up on bullets, beans, or booze.

There’s a different nature about the nation now. There’s no common purpose, no common goals, and far too little willingness to accommodate the beliefs and customs of anyone who thinks or acts differently from the ways demanded by the tyranny of the majority.

We’ve avoided that tyranny for most of our national existence. While there have been outbreaks of religious intolerance and religion-based hatred before, the levels of intolerance displayed by the KKK, the racists, anti-Semites, and anti-Catholics were not fully accepted by the majority of our citizens as acceptable. Suddenly the Christianists, the militias, and Christian Identity groups have become acceptable parts of the populace and are behaving in a fashion that all too strongly suggests Europe in 1936.

It may be time to buy bullets, beans, and booze.

I know that I fear for this nation’s continued existence every time I see Palin in her red jacket and high heels. I keep seeing her in jackboots, leading the mobs looking for hidden Moslems.

It has been snowing all day. We’ve had approximately an inch of heavy wet snow. Not the best day for it. If one overlooks the inconvenience, it is quite beautiful.

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