happy St. Patrick's Day

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Harper's Nixon moment

Well played, you baby-noshing election-stealing dead-eyed bastard, well played indeed.

I'm sometimes accused of being cynical about politics or seeing conspiracies where none exist and, up to a point, I will admit this is sometimes true. It is an occupational hazard for journalists and politics watchers. Sometime rather than reacting to the crisis or issue or outrage du jour, I like to take a broader view and look at how various events and actions interrelate and examine things on a purely tactical level.
And from a purely tactical point of view, I have to hand it to Stephen Harper and his communications brain trust this week for this.

PM: Duty of Canadians to remember Shafias

Harper has 'no plans' to discuss death penalty

By Giuseppe Valiante ,QMI Agency

MONTREAL - Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced funding for an education campaign against so-called honour killings on Friday but dismissed the idea of hanging honour killers.
Harper said the federal government will give $348,150 to the Shield of Athena Family Service, a Montreal-based women's organization.
Announcing the funding in Montreal is symbolic: The city was home to Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and son Hamed, who earlier this year were sentenced to life in prison for the 2009 drowning of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Mohammad Shafia's other wife, Rona Amir.

From a tactical point of view, this was a brilliant move. The government has been taking it on the chin over their voter suppression efforts and their usual rote repetition of "the Liberals did it first/too," "Scandal? What scandal?" and "We didn't do anything, nobody saw us and besides you can't prove anything" doesn't seem to be getting much traction, Michael Sona is refusing to stay under the bus and more dots are being connected and more damning information keeps coming out.
Harper and his  inner circles of advisors seem to realize they have tripped over their collective dicks and no amount of Dean Del Mastro haplessly obfuscating on Power and Politics is going to unfuck that particular goat.

In addition, the effort to appease their social conservative base via Kitchener MP Stephen Woodworth's attempt to reopen the abortion debate without reopening the abortion debate is going over about as well as a fart in church. The pro-forced birth "abortion is the same as murdering babies" crowd don't want to pussyfoot around the topic and are getting annoyed that the CPC isn't delivering on what they want. A sizable majority of women (and the men who love them) - even those who don't think of themselves as feminists - already stirred up by the Rush Limbaugh "slut-gate" episode down south, have been treating Woodworth's whole premise as the pile of crap it is and are pulling no punches, taking to social media in droves to vent their outrage.
The knuckledragger base are tired of high-fiving over getting rid of the long-gun registry and the Shafia conviction and want fresh red meat. Even conservative loyalists are having a hard time defending the government on the voter suppression issue. When the CPC loses the sensible media conservatives like Andrew Coyne, you know the ship is taking on water.
And on Thursday, the government had to admit that maybe, just maybe, they might have made an error in committing to the F-35 since it is going to cost twice what they said it would if it ever gets airborne in the first place.

Clearly, action was needed, a distraction had to be found.

And so Stephen Harper emerged on Friday with a tactically perfect speech.
It lets the knuckledraggers and Good Germans in the base get back into a lather about evil swarthy Muslim foreigners and crime. It lets the PM flex his "tough on crime" muscles. It lets Harper pose as a defender of oppressed women. He even managed to throw in the "of course we wouldn't dream of reopening the debate on capital punishment" bit of nudge-nudge-wink-wink.
Since he has delegated the public spinning and partisan House of Commons hackery in defense of voter suppression and election cheating to Del Mastro, giving this speech also allows Harper to try and show how Prime Ministerial and dignified he is, rising above partisanship and striding the high moral ground.

And woe betide any nay sayers - if you accuse the PM of simply trying to distract attention from the voter suppression scandal, you are comparing murdered young women to 'shiny objects' and are clearly a monster who hates women and loves terrorists, criminals and isn't a serious person concerned about a serious issue like philosopher-saint-poet-warrior-and-defender-of-civilization Stephen Harper.

Only a terrible, awful mean-spirited person like a Liberal would be so cynical as to think this speech was anything but the proud, brave wonderful Stephen Harper talking seriously about a serious issue of grave seriousness that is a terrible, terrible problem in her majesty's dominion. St. Stephen the Wise and Powerful would never ever politicize the deaths of these young women, that's the kind of thing horrible leftists would do.
If you commies can't even admit that honor killings are a terrible problem in Canada then you probably hate justice almost as much as you hate the troops, babies and kittens. Shame on you all and no, the Prime Minister will not be taking questions or reopening the debate on capital punishment, we are too busy not reopening the debate on abortion right now.

Nope, from a tactical point of view, that speech was brilliant and bulletproof.

With the voter suppression scandal snowballing, and curtain being pulled back on the CPC's fraud and sabotage, some are saying that this is Harper's Watergate. Some are comparing him to Richard Nixon. They are not wrong. I won't be surprised if a secret CPC memo (or clandestine tape recording) surfaces one day referring to the four Shafia women collectively as "Checkers."

Because to Stephen Harper  and the CPC brain trust politics is war by other means and winning is all that matters. This is all just tactics.
In the long run, they know that the so-called robo-call scandal will eventually play out to their benefit as long as they can make sure the mud gets sprayed around on their opponents, too. The more people who throw their hands up and turn their backs on politics in disgust, the better the CPC likes it. Now they don't even have to call them to tell them where their polling station has been shifted, because they don't want any part of voting anymore. As long as there is a solid, unstable mass of  hardcore knuckledraggers who will come to the polls for when the conservative throw them  a few hateful bones, Harper and his happy band of fascist wannabes are delighted if they can turn everyone else off of politics.
Morality, ethics, and respect for the dead? A sense of shame? Respect for democracy and the rule of law? Those are for losers, you silly dirty hippie. 

But then, I'm sometimes accused of being cynical.


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OMFG! SPACE NAZIS ON THE MOON!

Looks like Newt Gingrich got his moon colony after all



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Credit where credit is due

While I fundamentally disagree with Andrew Coyne on many, many things I think he may be the last sane small "c" conservative in the public marketplace of ideas. He is unquestionably a conservative who favours smaller government, lassiez faire economic policies and fiscal conservatism and no fan of the "dirty hippies." He is not a doctrinaire "my-party-right-or-wrong" movement conservative who toes the party line, but a reasonable, educated and generally sensible man, the kind who disappeared from the Conservative Party of Canada along with Joe Clark and Robert Stanfield.
Speaking on the weekend at the Manning Centre's conservapalooza, he took a horsewhip to the Conservative Party of Canada.

Nevertheless, there was a party, once, that believed in these things, to a somewhat greater extent than the other parties. That party called itself conservative, whether with a small or a large C, so I suppose you could call the things it believed conservatism. But you are no longer that party.

(snip)

That party was against breaking election promises. That party was against patronage and pork-barreling. And that party was against corruption and political dirty tricks. I don't know whether you are still that party.

This isn't a question of incrementalism, but of going in entirely the wrong direction. It isn't just that you failed to do the things you should have. It is that you did things you should not have. And, what is worse, you did them, not reluctantly or shamefacedly, but enthusiastically. You didn't just sell out. You bought in.

How long before the CPC-SunNews wurlitzer starts calling him a Liberal stooge?

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At long last sir, have you left no sense of decency?

Senator Fatass steps waaaaay over the line.

Harper-appointee Percy Mockler told the Senate it had to stop the interference of foreign foundations who were "muddling" in the business of our country. "I believe they do abuse the laws of Revenue Canada," he said. Not all foundations, of course, were "evil," Mockler said. "Just some of them." The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did good work, as did The Rockefeller Foundation and the Canadian Tire Foundation for Families. But others were "qualified bad, not to mention ugly, foundations," Mockler said, listing: The David Suzuki Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Greenpeace International Foundation, the Sierra Club Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Ecojustice Canada Bullitt Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Tides Canada and the MADD foundation. "They are all anti-Canadian," said Senator Mike Duffy, a former television personality and another Harper-appointed Tory.

Keep in mind that conservative shills such as the National Citizens Coalition, the Manning Centre for Teaching Conservatives How to Get and Keep Power Democracy and the Fraser Institute are all non-profit tax-exempt foundations.

It may well be that the Tory members of the chamber of sober second thought are throwing this bit of agit-prop in an attempt to deflect the attention of the media and their political opponents away from the ongoing scandal over Conservative voter-suppression efforts in the last election. We bloggers and media types have notoriously short attention spans and love us some shiny objects. And who among us doesn't love to hate Mike Puffy, especially when he purposely says outrageous and offensive things like this? 

The truth, though, is that we can be mad about more than one thing at a time and will not be distracted from the so-called "RoboCon" scandal over illegal voter suppression and electoral fraud by the Conservatives until some people - and I use the term loosely - from the upper ranks of the CPC get the jail time they so richly deserve.

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amazing video for 3/11

from Adrian Storey at Uchujin



Also, check out the new book from the gang behind Quakebook

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But...but...lefties use bad words on the internet

Dear people who like to claim "both sides do it"  and bemoan the use of strong or obscene language on the part of the lefty and progressive bloggers and claim that calling people "fascists" is hyperbolic vilification.
Go read what Dr. Dawg has brought back from the conservative swamp and then you can come back and apologize. And be sure you click all the "again" links.

addendum, with a hat-tip to Driftglass

"Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare--Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami, Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He's alive because through these things we keep him alive."

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Killing time

Much is being made by folks on the left in the U.S. from Glenn Greenwald to the Rude Pundit about the speech this week by Attorney General Eric Holder on the legality of the President killing American citizens without any sort of trial or other judicial process. As Stephen Colbert described it, Holder's argument is that the U.S. constitution promises "due process" not judicial process - that as long as there is a standard process followed in every case, everything is nice and legal. And that due process at the moment is that the president and his advisers discuss matters and decide which American citizen they want to kill. And then they kill them.
Pretty nasty stuff, to be sure and I agree with Glennzilla and his Rudeness that Obama's dogged continuation of some of the worst excesses of the Bush regime is despicable.
But speaking as a not-American, welcome to our world U.S. citizens! Your government has been killing us clearly inferior not-Americans all over the globe for many many years now - sometimes by proxy, sometimes with drones, sometimes with airstrikes, sometimes with your military and espionage agencies, sometimes for commercial considerations, sometimes for revenge, sometime just for shits and giggles - with near total impunity. And most of the time, the vast majority of you have been okay with that.
I'm not saying that every instance of the United States government killing people is wrong. We were quite pleased you finally pitched in and helped defeat Hitler after a couple of years of watching from the sidelines. What I am saying is that it is tough for us not-Americans to get too upset about the U.S. Government deciding that it is going to level the playing field and start killing Americans just like it kills everybody else. 
I know this is upsetting for some of you what with that notion of American exceptionalism and all that, but I figure maybe, just maybe, if you know you are in the same boat as the rest of the world when it comes to the U.S. government being able to whack you at the drop of a hat for any reason at all, no questions asked, you might start to think that letting the government kill people, any people, isn't such a hot idea. You might even start to think that its a bad idea to threaten to bomb countries just because it's an election year and the yahoo contingent want a "strong" leader.



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I don't usually read the horoscopes, but this one is spot on

 Sagittarius It's true that no man is an island, but all bullshit humanistic hand-wringing aside, it's totally okay to be happy that malignant Breitbart asshole is gone forever.

 My sympathies to his wife and children. By all accounts he was a devoted family man and I'm sure they will miss him. It is always sad for friends and family when someone dies at such a  relatively young age.

It is also sad that this is the only nice thing I can think of to say about Andrew Breitbart.
Smart Patrol, who is considerably less sympathetic,  has much, much more to say over at A Drop of the Hard Stuff
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He's cheesy and he's greasy

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Dumb and Dumber

Who is a clumsier liar and stupider spin merchant - Dean Del Mastro or Maurice Vellacot?

 In this corner....IT WAS THE LIBERALS!

Conservative demand Liberals release phone records, but won't release their own
Dean Del Mastro, the parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister, blamed the Liberals over and over again during question period Monday.
"When those records are made public the Liberal party will in fact have fingered itself for each and every one of those calls," he said.
However, when asked by reporters if the Conservatives would release their own records, Del Mastro said they didn't need to because they are not the guilty party.
"No, because obviously our party is not behind the calls. We know that. We believe the Liberal Party has in fact made these allegations and they've made these allegations knowing full well that they've paid these companies millions of dollars to makes calls to hundreds of thousands of households across the country," he said.
Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae said his party has agreed to release all phone records, including scripts, from last May's election.
"We're hoping to release stuff as soon as possible," Rae said, following question period.


And in this corner...IT WAS ELECTIONS CANADA!

Tory backbencher lays blame for robocalls with Elections Canada

OTTAWA — A Conservative backbencher is suggesting Elections Canada may be to blame for the robocalls affair.
“I suspect that at the end of the day, if Elections Canada has the resources to do a proper investigation, they’ll find they’re themselves significantly responsible,” Saskatchewan MP Maurice Vellacott said in a statement.
“That tech issues with marrying (Elections Canada) lists to available, electronic phone lists is part of the problem, and in a few instances there may have been malfeasance by one party or the other.”
Vellacott says there have been numerous address errors by Elections Canada in each of the six federal elections he has contested.

 
Ahem

From the CBC May 2, 2011 story:

Susan Friend, an Elections Canada official, said the agency never calls voters directly to warn them that polling stations have moved.

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Why Stephen Harper really wanted those pandas

I fully expect to see these hairier versions of John Baird knocking on doors for the CPC in the next election

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Running the government like a business

“I'll simply say that our campaign was run with the same standards, the same structure, the same processes that any modern progressive company would use to ensure that its employees, and its agents operate ethically and in compliance with the law,” Mr. Giorno said. 

 Any company, like say Enron or Haliburton or Bre-X.
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Harper's the One

What the hell are those things on the side of Dean Del Mastro's head? They can't be ears, because he clearly isn't listening to a word that is being said to him. Del Mastro is probably sitting down in the video linked above because he has been spinning so much lately, he is too dizzy to stand up. What a maroon.

As Stephen Lautens pointed out on Twitter the other day, the Tory have a sort of standard response anytime they get their tails caught in a crack. I've amended his list slightly:

1. It's a smear
2. It's not worthy of a reply
3. It's a rogue
4. But...But...ADSCAM!
5. Look over there! A shiny object!
6. The Liberals did it/the Liberals did it first
7. But the NDP are SOSHILUSTS! OMG!
8. Sure it happened, but REAL Canadians don't care about all this insider political stuff, just ask Don Cherry
9. Prove it, copper!
10. Everyone does it
11. Plead guilty and pay a fine

Let me be perfectly clear, and I'll use small words so people like Del Mastro can understand.   There is nothing wrong with using robocalls to ask for support for your party, whether the calls come from Canada, the United States or Timbuckfreakingtu.
The only time the point of origin becomes an issue is when the calls contain illegal content, because if the company making the calls is outside the country, it is more difficult to compel them to provide information to investigators.

Calling voters and claiming to be from Elections Canada or claiming to be calling on behalf of a party other than the one paying you, is ILLEGAL.
Lying to voters with the intention of preventing them from voting is ILLEGAL.

With the vast number of ridings now reporting illegal calls intended to suppress the vote, it is becoming clear that it this could only have been put together by someone with access to significant amounts of both money and data. It is also pretty clear that the vast majority of the illegal calls across the country were made to try to suppress the votes of identified Liberal supporters, with NDP supporters being a secondary target. The fact that a handful of identified CPC supporters now claim to have received such calls is irrelevant. Why are they only coming forward now? Why are there so few of them and so many complaints from Liberal and NDP supporters?

In investigating a crime, one looks at who had means and motive. The Conservative Party of Canada has a massive database of voter information going back several elections. Their people regularly brag about it. They have shown, at the highest levels of the party, their willingness to break election law in the past. They had the means and the motive. It is simply a matter of finding the fingerprints on the knife sticking out of the back of democracy at this point.

Do not be misled or confused by the ink the CPC is spraying like a frightened octopus. Do not let them sidetrack you with arguments about whether Elections Canada has received 31,000 complaints or 31,000 contacts or 30,999. Do not be misled or confused by the endless speculating on who 'Pierre Poutine' is or might be. He will be found eventually. There is a going to be a paper trail of some kind. The people directly involved in the illegal calls in Guelph and other Kitchener area ridings will eventually be identified.
In looking at the local players in CPC politics and the history of ratfucking among a few of these Segeretti wannabes, I have my suspicions about who might have been involved. And no, I'm not going to name any names so the aforementioned ratfuckers can stop dialling their lawyers for now.
Do not be misled when the culprits are finally identified and the Prime Minister and his inner circle of advisors and cabinet colleagues all disavow any knowledge. That is how espionage works  -- when you or members of your team are captured - the secretary will deny any knowledge etc etc. This was not done by a few rogue operatives, working on their own without supervision of any kind. There will be an apparent organizational firewall of plausible deniability. Some of the people at the sharp end of things may even be prosecuted.
But do not for one instant think that the final responsibility for this does not lie with Stephen Harper. He is the King Ratfucker.
This is his crime in the same way that Watergate was Nixon's crime.
At worst, he personally ordered it done and chose the people who executed the plan. At the very least, he fostered an attitude within the party that winning - by any means necessary - was all that mattered, chose the managers of the people who committed these crimes and completely and utterly failed to exercise any oversight, supervision or leadership.
In the end, it doesn't really matter where Harper's actions or lack of them fall on that scale. He is the leader and a leader is responsible for the actions of the people he leads.
If he had a right or honourable bone in his body, he'd admit that and resign immediately.
But what do we get?
Stephen Harper first claiming the Liberals did it and finally, if not in so many words, saying "Prove it, copper!"




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More surprising news!

 A Liberal party staffer has admitted to being behind the @Vikileaks30 campaign on Twitter. As observed at the time, apparently it is okay for Vic Toews to push a bill he hasn't read that would allow warrentless access to Canadians' internet usage and history, but repeating already published information about Vic Toews' love child, divorce and romance with his kids' babysitter or the fact that the former justice minister and current minister of public safety was convicted of breaking the campaign finance laws in 1999 is apparently worse than a thousand Hitlers squared because that is a personal attack on a politician.

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the buck stops where?

Illustration stolen from Alison at Creekside, an excellent place to start learning about Robocon or Suppressiongate or whatever we are calling the latest bit of epic malfeasance on the part of the Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada

The conduct of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada is now being described as Nixonian in some quarters and I would find it hard to disagree. They have certainly copied from the Nixon playbook in that they like to claim to represent the 'Silent Majority' and accuse their opponents of being elitists and radicals. They are profoundly anti-intellectual, to the extent that they mistrust science. They are hawkish on foreign policy and love to tout their support for the military.

But most of all, Harper will deny, deny, deny and throw on advisor after another under the bus. Nothing will ever be his fault and he will never acknowledge any error, any awareness of wrongdoing and will never admit to anything, no matter what the evidence.

It kind of reminds me of this song from the Watergate era.




I am willing to take Stephen Harper at his word that he knew nothing about the fraudulent phone campaign that helped him win a majority. But if he didn't know about that one, what else didn't he know?

No one voted for his advisors or campaign staff. He picked them himself, or picked the people who appointed them. He chose the people who decided that it was okay to for the CPC to lie, cheat and steal their way into power and he is the one who must take responsibility.
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how do you think they got rich in the first place?

I'm shocked - shocked I tell you!- to learn that a study has confirmed what we kind of always knew in our hearts.

 Rich people less ethical, more likely to cheat and lie, study says
MONTREAL - A new study says rich people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviour than their poorer counterparts — like cutting off motorists, lying in a negotiation and cheating to win a prize.
That's the finding from researchers at the University of California and the University of Toronto, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Now, I haven't seen the methodology used and I suspect that it would be a difficult thesis to prove experimentally and the researchers are careful to say that this doesn't mean all rich people are crooks, just that there is a 'tendency' there.

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Calling you

A little required reading for your Monday and the resumption of Parliament:

• More and more reports coming out about fraudulent telephone campaigns by the Conservative Party of Canada to undermine democracy and steal the election
• This campaign voter suppression robocall kerfuffel isn't a scandal that is just popping up now, some people have been on it for quite a while 
• And it is definitely part of a pattern of underhanded sabotage and infiltration that has been going on for some time and is well documented
• When the CPC has lost Post Media, it is clear that they have stepped over a line
• And it isn't just robo calls either, it is the use of phone banks to systematically mislead voters and suppress democracy
• CPC hack Dean DelMastro does his best to keep the vital "both sides do it" narrative alive, but given this admission his complaint is a bit rich
• I understand campaign cheats do their best to provide leaders and candidates with plausible deniability, but apparently the CPC and Canada are now being led by Sgt. Shultz

As an editorial aside to my learned colleagues in the media: Can we please stop referring to these incidents as crank calls? If you pick up the phone and someone asks to speak to Amanda Hugginkiss or wants to know if your refrigerator is running or you have Prince Albert in a can, that's a crank call. If someone claims to be calling on behalf of Elections Canada or a political party and lies to you about how or where to vote, that's a crime.
And let's not just write it off as political pranksterism or dirty tricks either. Putting a bag of flaming dogshit on somebody's porch, ringing the bell and running away is a dirty trick, a whoopee cushion is a prank - an orchestrated effort to suppress the vote by lying to people about how and where to vote is a crime.




Keep that soothing music going as you read these links, you're going to need it.


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If thinking that knowing things is good makes me a snob, then fine, I'm a snob

Evan McMorris-Santoro clearly has a strong stomach and the ability to keep a straight face no matter what. Watch as he wades through the river of willful ignorance that is a Rick Santorum - Americans For Prosperity - Tea Party rally. (warning - link contains weapons-grade stupid)
Apparently knowing stuff other than how to chew tobacco, scratch and vote for Rick Santorum is snobbish elitism of the worst sort. The amazing shit-ton of wrong chronicled in this short piece is so astounding its hard to know where to begin. According to the people quoted people who do manual labour are inferior, money is the only measure of success, colleges are totalitarian liberal fascist brainwashing factories, diversity is communism, and schooling is only for job training so no one should be encouraged to learn anything that doesn't directly apply to their job.
I'm honestly shocked that none of the people quoted in the story used the phrase "fancy-pants book learnin'"

“President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college,” Santorum said. “What a snob!” Santorum started by saying some people don’t need to go to college: “Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands.” 

Yes and god forbid that someone who  has "incredible gifts with their hands" should get a chance to learn to appreciate literature, learn to think clearly and logically, find out the earth revolves around the sun, learn a language other than 'American' or gain an appreciation for anything other than beer, wrasslin' and "reality" TV (thought to be fair, I did learn a lot about beer in university). Extrapolating from what they are quoted as saying, I'm guessing most of them regret having learned to read and write, assuming they can read anything more complex than TV guide or a stop sign. These folks are not just wallowing in willful ignorance, they are insisting others be forced to as well. 

I know some of this is simply right-wing contrarianism and that the Tea Party people are against higher education simply because Obama advocates it, but still it is amazing to me that a political candidate, let alone an entire movement, would come out in favour of curtailing opportunities for people. I await the day when Obama goes on national television and tells the American people that it is a bad idea to hit themselves in the head with a ball peen hammer and that under no circumstances should any American stick their tongue in an electrical outlet. Because just know that a bunch of the same yahoos who attend CPAC and think Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are wise and wonderful are going to end up in the emergency ward.

I am not saying that higher education is necessary to be a happy and successful person, or that smart is the same as educated, but learning for its own sake is to be encouraged. It is always better to know more than to know less. For most of us, knowledge is power, but I guess for the Teabaggers, ignorance is bliss.

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If it's Friday, it must be time for Tom Waits

With a tip of the tattered fedora and a raising of the chipped juice tumbler full of cheap fortified wine to Driftglass


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