Andrew Marcus over at BigGovernment has some excellent ideas for investigations in toning down rhetoric that Democrats are calling for:
….we think that Progressive Democrats are 100% correct when they call for action against factors leading to our toxic political climate…
…We are therefore openly calling for public hearings to look into the actions of political agitators in this nation.
Democrats have made it clear that they want to investigate and restrict Fox News, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Breitbart, and others to be sure. In fact, there are so many conservatives to investigate, we need to come up with a strategy to tackle the work.
We propose that any investigation begin with events that led to criminal behavior, like say the WTO riots in Seattle. Or the RNC riots in St. Paul. Or the angry mob protests that have taken place at the home of Bank of America executives. Or the Kenneth Gladney beating. That should provide a good start.
When would the Progressive Democrats like to schedule these hearings?
We even have a handy list of 5 easy steps the Government can take right away, steps which will have an immediate effect on the toxicity of our body politic:
In last Thursday’s column, Paul Krugman admitted to having fun watching “right-wingers go wild.” One of the things that apparently delighted him was this map which Sarah Palin posted on her Facebook page:
Each of the cross-hairs represents a Democrat from a conservative district who voted in favor of health reform. Immediately after highlighting the map, Krugman wrote:
All of this goes far beyond politics as usual…you’ll search in vain for anything comparably menacing, anything that even hinted at an appeal to violence, from members of Congress, let alone senior party officials….to find anything like what we’re seeing now you have to go back to the last time a Democrat was president.
Really, Paul? I’ll search in vain?
The map appears on this page of the Democratic Leadership Committee website (dated 2004 during the Bush years). I guess we could argue over whether the DLC counts as “senior party officials” but they’re certainly as much a part of the party as Palin who, after all, currently holds no elected office.
[….]
But wait, there’s more!
When Palin’s map became an issue, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, leader of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), rushed on MSNBC to denounce it, telling Chris Matthews:
I really think that that is crossing a line…In this particular environment I think it’s really dangerous to try and make your point in that particular way because there are people who are taking that kind of thing seriously.
Really, Chris? So what do you think about this map?
Each one of those red targets represents a “Targeted Republican” like this one:
Gateway Pundit has the View’s take on this, it goes as expected, after this video I want to post a few more videos:
Here is Nina Totenberg of NPR speaking about Republican Jesse Helms — take note she still works at NPR, but Juan Williams was fired for saying “less than this:”
Joy Behar herself has said many inflamatory things about Republicans:
Joy Behar repeatedly called Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle a “bitch” on “The View” Tuesday, and said that she is “going to hell.”
Behar’s comments came during a discussion of an ad that Angle released earlier this month. The ad, which focused on immigration and contrasted smiling white children with scowling Latinos, was called “the most overtly racist” ad of the entire campaign by Rachel Maddow on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” The “View” co-hosts were no less outraged by it, with Elisabeth Hasselbeck criticizing Angle for using children to stoke fear.
But it was Behar who really let loose on Angle.
“I’d like to see her do this ad in the South Bronx,” she said. “Come here, bitch! Come to New York and do it!”
“I’m not praying for her,” Behar shot back. “She’s going to hell! She’s going to hell, this bitch!”
Nancy Pelosi called Tea Partiers Nazi’s, even though no symbols were found like the one she describes:
Captain’s Quarters documented a time when Democratic Senator Byrd called Republicans Nazi’s:
Byrd Compares Republicans To Nazis On Senate Floor
Senator Robert Byrd, defending the minority’s right to filibuster on the Senate floor today, wound up his speech by comparing Republican efforts to eliminate the hijacking of the Senate on the Constitutional duty of confirming federal judges to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Not only did Byrd imply that the GOP equates to the worst mass murderers of the 20th century, he’s so proud of doing so he’s posted the speech to his own website:
Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.
But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that, “Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.” And he succeeded.
Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.
And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.
I just received an un-freaking-believable e-mail from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The entire Democrat machine has been tarring Tea Party activists and townhall protesters as Brown Shirts and fascists…and now they’re whining about Rush Limbaugh challenging their own fascist behavior. When in trouble, bash Rush.
A horrible story that should hopefully finally get the Left to take a position… rather than suing Arizona over stopping this crime from coming across their border.
Mexican marines discovered the 72 bodies—58 men and 14 women —on Tuesday after the lone survivor of the massacre, a wounded migrant from Ecuador, stumbled into a Navy checkpoint the previous day and told of being shot on Monday at a nearby ranch, Mexican officials said on Wednesday.
When the marines went to investigate, they were met with a hail of gunfire from cartel gunmen holed up at the ranch, which sits 90 miles from the U.S. border. One marine and three alleged gunmen died during a two-hour battle, which ended when the gunmen fled in a fleet of SUVs, leaving behind a cache of weapons.
The Ecuadorean migrant told investigators that his captors identified themselves as members of the Zetas drug gang, said Vice Adm. Jose Luis Vergara, a spokesman for the Mexican navy.
“This illustrates that organized crime has no limits or moral qualms about what they are prepared to do,” Alejandro Poire, head of the government’s national-security council, told a news conference.
The incident highlights the extent to which Mexican drug gangs, which used to focus exclusively on ferrying narcotics such as cocaine to the U.S., have diversified into other lucrative criminal activities such as human smuggling and extortion.
At the going rate of $5,000 to $7,000 charged by smugglers to cross the U.S. border, the 72 people represented about $500,000 to the drug gang, said Alberto Islas, a Mexico City-based security consultant. The gang may have simply killed the migrants after they refused to give them more money than they had already given them, he said.
Mexican officials said they didn’t know why the migrants—believed to be from El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador and Brazil—were killed. Mexican newspapers, citing an unnamed federal official, speculated that the migrants were killed for either refusing to give the drug gang more money to cross the border, or for declining to join the gang’s criminal activities as drug couriers, gunmen or prostitutes….
This catch over at NewsBusters made me laugh while wagging my head, as you will see, Rachel goes through her throes of body language while weaving a capitalist and xenophobic conspiracy of a great order. Except, her own guest makes a few statements both times he is on (the second interview begins around the 1:56 mark so you know) her show that complete;y dismantles her beliefs about this whole “sorted” topic.
Here’s NewsBusters end to their post on this:
But after Maddow introduced Loew, and Loew rehashed the details of his reporting on Senseman, Coughlin and CCA, Loew mentioned this awkward fact right at the end of his interview with Maddow…
LOEW: In addition, in Arizona we have a mindset among a couple of key legislators that privatizing the prison industry is a good thing. As you mentioned, they tried to privatize the entire system last year. The governor did veto that after the state corrections director sent her a letter saying, look, we can’t imagine having death row inmates in private prison systems and having death row inmates being taken care of by the lowest common bidder.
Excuse me, did you say “the governor” — by whom you mean Jan Brewer, correct? — vetoed the bill to privatize nearly all of Arizona’s state prisons? Shortly before she signed SB 1070, the law that would create vast penal colonies of suspected illegal immigrants? Apparently Brewer missed the memo on this fine-tuned, lucrative conspiracy.
Maddow’s flimsy premise having been demolished before her eyes — by a simpatico guest, no less — she invited Loew back the next night to harrumph about links between Republican state senator Russell Pearce, a major backer of SB 1070, and the private prison industry. (full segment from Maddow show linked here). Once again, Loew served up an inconvenient fact right at the end of his discussion with Maddow (third part of embedded video, starting at 2:28) —
MADDOW: Morgan, am I also right that in thinking that Russell Pearce was the man behind the effort last year to privatize all of Arizona’s state prisons?
LOEW: He was. He sponsored that legislation and we looked through his legislative record and it looks like as far back as 2003 he was pushing legislation that was calling for the privatization of state prison beds, I think 1,000 beds back in 2003, another 1,400 before that. But the biggest one is the bill that you just referred to, which would have handed over our entire prison system to the private prison industry. Now, that bill was vetoed but another bill passed that essentially did the same thing. Last year, our prison system would have, in a sense, most of it, would have been handed over to the private prison industry, but none of those companies would come forward to bid on them.
Once again, this fine-tuned, lucrative conspiracy — thwarted by the alleged conspirators.
