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- Speck Fitted
- PA Job Numbers Out, The War On Unemployment Insurance, and Inequality
- Pennsylvania Hunger Games Diet: Cash for Corporations, Cuts for Kids
- The Incredible Shrinking Mayor
- Multi-tasking with the 1% … killing the schools AND making the poor pay for their funeral.
- Council Can Give the SRC the Money to NOT Privatize the System
- Predatory Payday Lending Bill Flies Out of Cramped PA House Committee
- Let the Games Begin: PA Senate Announces Details of Budget Proposal
- Good News on PA Revenue But Don’t Count Your Blessings Just Yet
What’s goin’ on: health care, what's not being taxed, Metcalfe's homophobia, and juvenile humor at the Inky
Submitted by HelenGym on Mon, 09/21/2009 - 9:18am.
Don’t miss this event tomorrow:
Because there just isn’t a more important national issue than passing a quality health care reform bill. And tomorrow is PA’s turn to shine on the national stage:
Health Care for America NOW rally
Tues., Sept. 22
4:45-6 p.m.
Dilworth Plaza
RSVP here.
Don't let the other side have all the fun.
The Pennsylvania Dim Bulb Award
This week’s winner: Butler County Republican Daryl Metcalfe for his opposition to a resolution naming October Domestic Violence Awareness Month because he claimed it “had a homosexual agenda.” The part he couldn't handle? The fact that one in 33 men are rape survivors or have been subjected to an attack. Again, for the bullhorn, that's rape - not consensual sex.
Those of us in the immigration movement recall Metcalfe’s other dim bulb honors, particularly his 2007 hysteria filled "Invasion PA" report where he claimed that the arrest of people with supposedly Hispanic sounding last names was evidence of a growing criminal illegal population. Even anti-immigrant blowhard John Morganelli thought the report was “deficient” and based on “irrelevant” information. Keystone Progress is urging phone calls – (717) 783-1707 – and emails to Metcalfe (dmetcalf@pahousegop.com) to demand an apology, though Metcalfe has already warned Keystone not to hold its breath.
What it takes
So the legislature finally ended the most embarrassing budget impasse in the nation, closing the gap not only with expanded gambling but a last minute tax on the arts. I’m not against taxes, but I do believe in sharing the pain. Brady and others have alerted us that the Governor and state legislators have chosen to forego a tax on the natural gas industry even though it could help pay for the crap they leave us and provide hundreds of millions in revenue from a billion dollar industry rather than sad sack gamblers and your average concert-goer.
Boys, boys boys:
And finally, Buzz Bissinger makes a subtle debut on the Inquirer opinion page (haven't they hit their quota of blowhard males yet?) with a dig at School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman. I’m hardly the last person to critique a schools chief, but really between Harold Jackson’s hit job on Heidi Ramirez and Bissinger’s piece today, there must be something about strong women that makes the Inky’s male columnists reach for the pacifier. I was hoping this would go somewhere, but in the end, it just became pretty juvenile. There’s a lot to say about Dr. Ackerman’s leadership but let’s leave the masturbation and feces references to the clubhouse rather than the news pages, OK boys?
That Moran in a mullet
still remains my favorite of misspelled tea party signs of the many examples traveling the internet, though this image of the guy in colonial garb to mangle a quote that some claim originated from either historian Howard Zinn or Vietnam war protests rather than Thomas Jefferson is very close second.
He's apparently such a big fan of Darwin's impact on evolutionary biology, he thinks its "the highest form of patriotic", though I would like to at least imagine Lucy and our other earliest communal human ancestors in East Africa did a better job of distinguishing nouns from adjectives. Also is our not-an-actual-TJ-quote-mangling "patriotic" wearing eye-liner? I swear he is. Perhaps life around old Monticello was even more lively than even Sally Hemings knew.
Anyhoo this particular internet "moran" has become such an internet sensation he's become his own entry in the online "Urban Dictionary". I mostly just feel sorry for the inhabitants of a small town in Kansas where absolutely everything they do is positively Moranic.
Anyway we all really would be "morans" to not make a stand for healthcare on Tuesday.
And yes Buzz Bissinger's hit piece on Arlene Ackerman is most striking in that rather than introducing even one iota of substantive criticism on any number of real issues about Ackerman's tenure well worth drawing out it detail, it instead all boiled down to what read more like an unending string of juvenile taunts. Note to Inky editorial board - if all you want is name-calling and "analysis" worthy of a middle school playground you could have called me. I could fill your quota on that for a 20% discount on what you are paying Buzz for this dreck. What a bunch of "morans".
Re:"stopping domestic abuse is part of the homosexual agenda" well I'm at a loss to disentangle the layers of "moranism" compounded into that series of leaps of logic. Thanks, Rep. Daryl Metcalfe for your consistently looney-tune example of excellence in the PA State House.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
who's that behind him?
is that jack kervorkian behind him? in the white teeshirt over the dark long-sleeve, i sweat to god he's waiting to load the pseudo-patriot into his deathmobile.
That's cause "Death panels" are only bad
if they implemented by the government. If private citizens do it they are just "watering the tree of liberty" like this guy plans to do.
That bit of thinly veiled threat of violence is based on an actual Jefferson quote albeit one often taken out of context. Kevorkian above is just helping people still led astray by the "liberlal mainstream media" speed up their trip to heaven.;)
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Some of the yahoos live in our state
Ready for what is the real question.
Apparently, this spelling thing is a trend
From last year's Republican convention:
Mavrik's abound
My concern with these folks is I wish they could be just a little more geographically specific. Asia is an awful big place.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
If ignorance is bliss
why are right wingers so angry?
Result of lack of Infromation
Or perhaps a case of badly malfunctioning bedazzlers. But its apparently nothing good old Joe McCarthy couldn't fix. Click to enlarge.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
I would wonder how people get so stupid...
... but, as I've said elsewhere, one reason for the GOP's war on public education funding over the past 40 years is that dumb people are easier to manipulate.
-Z
Karl Rove said it best
I think you are on to something.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
As I've said elsewhere, in a
As I've said elsewhere, in a somewhat different context, the 3 things which prevented a true proletarian revolution (as Marx had thought would occur) were universal public education- which gave the poor a way to work their way up, the labor union- which evened the balance of power between employer + employee, + the redistributive income tax- which explicitly kept the richest members of society from accumulating all of its wealth.
If you look back over the past 40 years, you'll see that the GOP has explicitly attacked these three programs with a vengeance. Clearly, they are orthodox communists, working towards the great proletarian revolution.
In all seriousness, a cursory look at history will reveal that capitalism works best when fitted with a governor. Take away the governor, + you get precisely the kind of unrest that you see today in Tea Partiers + their ilk.
-Z
So lets all go to Dillsworth Plaza tomorow
because I'm not sure if I'm excited or scared by this one. Either way it sounds like a memorable event.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
What the frak does that sign
What the frak does that sign even mean?
Oy,
-Z
it expresses worry
"tea bagging" is a colloquial expression that refers to a sexual practice in which the "teabagger" gently dips his scrotum in the mouth of his partner, the presumed "teabaggee", in the manner one would imagine of an English gentleman enjoying a spot of Earl Grey with his crumpets.
Thus, the signholder is proposing that the men of the hard right (no pun intended) collectively place their scrotums in the mouths of the left before the men of the left collectively place their scrotums in the mouths of the hard right (again, no pun intended).
Personally, I think placing such a vital and sensitive part of my anatomy in the toothsome mouth of my political enemy isn't the best of ideas but, as we have seen over and over again, conservatives have a clinical lack of foresight (see, "Iraq, Invasion of" as but one example) so perhaps that's not so surprising.
Sorry, but not really, for the colorful description.
No need to appologize
And I was lamely trying to make a bad joke about misreading the sign as a bunch of doofuses inadvertantly holding up a sign that says in effect "If you do me, then I'll do you" on a giant scale. Brendan's interpretation is probably closer to what was intended but a debatably a sort of funny thing (probably slightly offensive to some) to do with a deliberately crude protest sign is to read it as one giant come-on to all "liberal dem" men of all persuasions and preferences. Sorry if I offended anyone with the lame humor. I think I actually warned upthread that I was capable of engaging in middle-school level humor so there's proof positive.
Interestingly the wiki page on the sexual practice mentions this exact photo as proof that at least some of the tea-party tax protestors embrace the term "tea-bagger" despite the sexual connotations. Some of course bristle at the term for exactly that reason. Libertarian activist Russ Diamond took offense to the someone using the term I think innocently here exactly because of the sexual connotation in the thread a few weeks back where he attacked Marc Stier for pointing out that at least some of the town hall protestors calling Arlen Specter "a lying Jew bastard" about health care reform were basically folks like the some "mavriks" with the confederate flag in the picture up thread.
Though honestly I think Marc was right, quite a few of them are. I'm one of those people who has a really hard time ignoring racial undertones in the underline in "OUR America" in the sign below. Click to enlarge.
Or in the toungue-in-cheek reference to Malcolm X. Click again.
In the popularity of images like this with that crowd [edited].
These people are not just "fiscal conservatives" concerned with high taxes by any rational measure. There's something else going on there.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
WE GET IT!
All right, this is too much for me. As i said above, juvenile humor has its place, and this one has definitely run its course. Sean can you please take down the horrifying Obama photo - this is no place to re-post and re-highlight other people's racist garbage when it's not adding more to the discussion. I know it's no reflection on your politics and that you're trying to make a point - it's just that your point doesn't need 25 hammers to go with it. Thanks.
It is the America we live in
sadly. For every step forward there has often been a corresponding step back. We would like to imagine that populist movements in this country have always been ones that brought us closer to justice and equality. Historically thats not always been the case. I think there is different history of populist movements in this country crystalized around the politics of fear and intolerance that runs deep. Today's "tea-party patriots" tap into that tradition.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
I agree completely
I posted that first photo above after all. I just felt re-posting the Obama photo was too much. Thanks for editing.