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Sweet Papa Crimbo

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Posts posted by Sweet Papa Crimbo

    General Political Thread

    in Tongue-Tied Lightning

    Posted

    See when your write the things you do, you sound foolish and you do no good for anything.  Disagree and hate what the GOP all you want, but in my mind you don't seem to have an intelligent thought in your head.  I always felt that when you argue and passionate about something you need to rise above those debating.  If some calls you a liar, why call them a big fat liar.  Explain why they are wrong.  

     

    Case and point.  This weekend Issa called Jay Carney a "paid lair" then Jay used twitter to bring up Issa's sorted past and called him Mr. Grand Theft Auto.  http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/06/03/18720608-mr-grand-theft-auto-gets-a-brush-back-pitch?lite.  Which is a stupid exchange between two grown men who are supposed to be working for the people of the United State.  

     

    We as a nation have lost the notion of respect.  And with petty comments like this the story moves from the issue to the name calling.  Just like when you post whatever the hell you post it derails the conversation.  

     

    Facts will always beat the psychos.  Also whereas I don't agree with Hixter, bleedorange, and other conservatives here, I respect them, enough to let them have their say and not to spew nonsensical phrases at them.  If you talked to us like your GOP friends in DC,  maybe your frustrations would be heard and understood, but right now you sound like a clown and far worse than anyone on the right.  At least Palin, Rush, McConnell can put together an intelligible sentence.

     

    Ad hominum attacks say more about the person doing the attacking than they do about the intended target.

    Who's at your imaginary dinner party?

    in Tongue-Tied Lightning

    Posted

    Darth Vader

    Obi Wan Kenobi

    Emperor Palpatine

    Luke Skywalker

    Han Solo

     

    Dwight Eisenhower

    George Patton

    Bernarl Montgomery

    Erwin Rommel

    George Kesslering

     

    Jesus

    Moses

    Confucius

    Siddhārtha Gautama

     

    Paul McCartney

    Bob Dylan

    Bruce Springsteen

    Brian Wilson

    Neil Young

     

    George RR Martin

    JRR Tolkein

    CS Lewis

    Robert Jordan

    Robert Howard

     

    Jeff Tweedy

    Jay Farrar

    Jay Bennett

    Morrissey

    Johnny Marr :badger

     

    Paul Westerberg

    Alex Chilton

    Michael Stipe

    Tom Verlaine (Television)

     

    Mick

    Keef

    Brian Jones

    Mick Taylor

    Andrew Loog Oldham

    daft punk - Random Access Memories

    in Someone Else's Song

    Posted

    It's funny you mention that one. I was listening at work and thought I heard "Who brought the Mexican" over and over in a robotic voice which I thought odd and perhaps a bit racist. It's at about the 3:28 mark. I'm actually not sure what he is saying there although I think it's "we're up all night again" or something. Maybe it's just me.

     

    I'm really liking this. Has a great contemporary 70's vibe whatever the hell that means.

     

    "We're up all night to get lucky"

    General Political Thread

    in Tongue-Tied Lightning

    Posted

    The what?  Are you saying the highest-rated shows are not indicative of what the mass public would rather watch?  It goes beyond politics, too.  It's why ESPN has been unwatchable for me for the past decade.  It's been reduced to talking heads arguing over the stupidest things just for the sake of the argument.

    If you didn't quote him, those of us who have him blocked for his blockheadedness wouldn't have to read his posts.

    General Political Thread

    in Tongue-Tied Lightning

    Posted

     You can ignore this, scoff at it, belittle those who are concerned; but you are engaging if a fool's game. This administration is showing the same signs of paranoia that made Richard Nixon the most villified man in America for a generation.

     

     

     

    By Peggy Noonan

     

    We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don't look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.

    Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.

    As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.

    The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you.

    But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.

    A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.

    The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.

    In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the Second Amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution.

    The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare."

    Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're afraid of saying they were audited.

    All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit.

    It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved.

    Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.

    The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal. But why? Were they so highhanded, so essentially ignorant, that they didn't understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn't know how Americans would react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein's cellphone number.

    And why—in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too—does no one in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder doesn't know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant at only one thing: that he's being questioned at all. That he has to address this. That fate put it on his plate.

    We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work. That it not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the government's life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business.

    But that bias does not fit these circumstances.

    What happened at the IRS is the government's essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position's powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don't, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn't stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.

    And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It's not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.

     

    General Political Thread

    in Tongue-Tied Lightning

    Posted

    The Federal Government using its coercive powers in a partisan way should scare the hell out of you. If the Democrats go after Conservative Groups with impunity, what in the world do you think the Republicans will do when they get the White House?

    Tit for Tat...Eye for an eye...what's good for the goose...that shit makes for the beginnings of a banana republic.

     

    It doesn’t matter whom the IRS was targeting or what specific beliefs they held: the fact remains that for years the agency used its power to discourage and intimidate Americans from speaking out against what they viewed as bad policies, stifling the First Amendment right of every citizen to hold government accountable. 

     



     

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