443 Digby weighs in on a few issues

Thursday, April 28, 2011

 

He's just an old country aristocrat

by digby

David Swanson has posted a blockbuster piece about a panel he attended featuring Alan Simpson, David Walker, Larry Sabato and Dean Baker on the subject of the debt and the economy. He notes Sabato's fuzzy-wuzzy affection toward Simpson, a common occurrence among Villagers --- they love to portray his countrified aristocratic misanthropy as Real American folk wisdom and pretend that means that even the plebes agree that class warfare only runs one way:

There were more questions from the audience, but Simpson addressed himself to me when he explained what was wrong with taxing wealthy people. We have to get away from talking about the rich versus the poor, he said. For one thing, when you talk about who's responsible for something, the commission you're working on can't come to any agreement. The Iraq Study Group, for example, had to set aside who was to blame in order to propose what should be done. (Of course, most of us don't spend our lives serving on bipartisan commissions, and taxing the rich is as forward looking a concept as any other; blaming the rich was a straw man Simpson created.)

See, we can't get anything done if wealthy and powerful people are held accountable for their crimes (unless it involves unsanctioned fellatio, of course.) He's just being pragmatic. It's just a plain fact that Very Important People will be Very Seriously Upset if they and theirs are forced to pay and that means they won't let our allegedly democratic government do its job. Surely you can understand the problem.

Swanson got footage of the event and I highly recommend that you take a look at it when you get a chance. Apparently, Baker was there to give the others a break from their mutual snogging since nobody seemed to pay any attention to the fact that he vehemently disagreed with everything they were saying. (Village consensus means never having to listen to anyone who doesn't validate your biases.) Everything he says is true and important.

Be sure to also click over to the link to read Swanson's full account and see some classic footage of Simpson being an ass. He's all for cutting defense --- and by that he means cutting funding for the Veterans Administration. Seriously.

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digby 4/28/2011 02:30:00 PM Comments (1)

 

Conspiracy Clerics

by digby

In case you thought that the lying documentary hoax was invented by James O'Keefe, here's a reminder that it has been a thriving wingnut industry for years.(Remember The Clinton Chronicles?) Here's a new one coming from the infamous Coral Ridge Ministries featuring a couple of alleged ex-employees from Planned Parenthood who say the clinics routinely give out defective condoms and weak birth control pills to girls so they can meet their abortion quota and become millionaires. Apparently, it's something like selling Mary Kay or Tupperware.

CORAL RIDGE MINISTRIES NEWS

Ex-Planned Parenthood Clinic Director and Former Abortion Clinic Owner Expose Business of Abortion on Cross Examine TV

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL (April 27, 2011) – Two former abortion industry insiders talk candidly about the business of abortion this week on Cross Examine, a nationally aired television program featuring Dr. Del Tackett.

“If you want to keep the doors open, you better sell a lot of abortions,” says Abby Johnson, who left her post as executive director of a Texas Planned Parenthood clinic in 2009. “I was probably the best in my clinic. I sold abortions to girls as young as twelve.”

To view “The Business of Abortion” online now, please visit www.crossexamine.com. (After April 29, log in for free as a “Cross Examine Insider” to watch the show.)

Carol Everett, an owner of two abortion clinics in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the 1980s, wanted to become a millionaire. “And the way for me to be a millionaire was to sell 40,000 abortions a year.”

It was easy money. When she opened a new clinic, “In the first month that clinic would pay for itself, and the second month it would be a cash cow.”

Johnson charges on the program that Planned Parenthood, a $1 billion corporation which took in $363 million from government sources in 2008-2009, sets abortion targets for each clinic.

“Planned Parenthood absolutely has quotas that each center has to meet,” Johnson says about her former employer which performed 324,008 abortions in 2008.

“They have an abortion budget and they have a certain number of patients that you have to perform abortions on every month, and there’s a dollar amount attached to each woman.”

Everett’s business plan included outreach in schools with talks given to break down children’s natural modesty and promote Everett and her clinic associates as trusted authorities for all things sexual.

Everett wanted students to “come to us with their sexual questions so we could put them on a low dose birth control pill we knew they’d get pregnant on. Of course we passed out condoms but we never passed out high quality condoms; we always used seconds or defective condoms. Our goal was to get the kids pregnant.”

The target, Everett says, was “three to five abortions between the ages of 13 and 18 from every girl we could find.”

Cross Examine co-host Dr. Del Tackett said it is “shocking to realize that this industry actually attempts to increase the number of abortions, rather than a desire to make them rare as we are led to believe.”

Fox News is Walter Cronkite compared to these people. But they are all playing in the same fetid pool of conservative lies and propaganda.

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digby 4/28/2011 01:30:00 PM Comments (14)

 

After-birthers running through the fever swamps

by digby

I'm so sick of this birther BS that I can hardly stand it. But since the right wingers seem to be ratcheting up the crazy on this, I guess it's necessary to at least bring attention to the aggressively stupid nonsense that's out there. Here's Media Matters:

A lot of attention is being paid to last night's Follow The Money on Fox Business Network, during which host Eric Bolling and crew had themselves anextended wallow in the birther swamp, in spite of the release of Obama's birth certificate, and in spite of Fox News' Shep Smith exhorting the media to "just freaking stop it."

Monica Crowley was on Bolling's panel and she eschewed the spittle-flecked lunacy of co-panelist Pamela Geller, instead going for a more high-brow justification of birtherism, bringing up the question of whether Obama qualifies as a "natural-born citizen".

Gateway pundit Jim Hoft is full-on on the kerning watch, with charts and graphs and Youtubes like this "proving" that the birth certificate is a fake:

And this "expert" opinion:

And he also flogs Monica Crowley's nitwit garbage about Obama not being a "natural born citizen":

Finally, also wanted to make the point that regardless of where Obama is born, he’s still not a Natural Born Citizen since both parents were not born on U.S. soil but I won’t hold my breath waiting for the media to educate the public on this fact.

This has been floating around the fever swamp since 2007, when the morons suddenly caught up with the fact that McCain was born in Panama, so he "must be born on American soil" part of their argument got dicey. So, they came up with a few other back-up theories to prove that Obama couldn't possibly be legitimately elected to the White House.

The first was the "natural born parents" theory, which is obviously just made up fantasy since seven former presidents had parents of foreign birth, including one of the founders:

• Thomas Jefferson‘s mother was born in England
• Andrew Jackson‘s parents were both born in Ireland
• James Buchanan had an Irish father
• Chester A. Arthur had an Irish father
• Woodrow Wilson‘s mother was English
• Herbert Hoover had a Canadian-born mother

And needless to say, unless the 14th Amendment has been repealed when I wasn't looking, this whole argument is utter nonsense since Obama was born in America.

US v. WONG KIM ARK (1898)- the 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship to all persons born in the United States, regardless of their ethnic heritage

The foregoing considerations and authorities irresistibly lead us to these conclusions: The fourteenth amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes. The amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born within the territory of the United States of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States. Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States. His allegiance to the United States is direct and immediate, and, although but local and temporary, continuing only so long as he remains within our territory, is yet, in the words of Lord Coke in Calvin’s Case, 7 Coke, 6a, ‘strong enough to make a natural subject, for, if he hath issue here, that issue is a natural-born subject’; and his child, as said by Mr. Binney in his essay before quoted, ‘If born in the country, is as much a citizen as the natural-born child of a citizen, and by operation of the same principle.’

And:

To hold that the fourteenth amendment of the constitution excludes from citizenship the children born in the United States of citizens or subjects of other countries, would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage, who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.

Another stupid right wing trope is that Obama couldn't possibly be an American because his mother was only 18 and therefore hadn't fulfilled the citizenship requirements that would allow her to confer citizenship on her son if his father was another nationality. (Look it up --- it's too dumb to even try to explain.)

I'm sure there are other theories about the "usurpation" I haven't run across. But the fact that there are so many proves that these people are determined to find a way to defend their primitive belief that this man is not a legally elected president. And that belief lies in their fundamental, bedrock definition of what constitutes a Real American -- a white, Christian conservative. There's no way they will ever be able to reconcile the idea that a black Democrat could legitimately represent a majority the American people. Clearly, they will rewrite history and the constitution if they have to in order to make that case.

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