Just when you thought right wingers couldn’t get any more anti-rational, now they claim that Obama is turning us into a “nation of slaves.” Because driving a Suburban, drinking Starbucks, making $70,000 a year and enjoying the freedom to worship whichever imaginary spirit one wishes is identical to being forceably taken from your homeland, chained, deprived of your freedom while being made to work without compensation is pretty much the same.
That was the topic on today’s New Capital Show, which I hosted for the vacationing Leo Gold. Listen here.
On today’s Partisan Gridlock, we talk about amending the Constitution to get money out of politics, the corporate goons who’ve hijacked our policy and bought our politicians…my brother calls to get revenge for a childhood battle he can’t get over…plus listener calls.
Today’s show: Why do grocery stores guilt people into giving a dollar in the checkout line but not match the contribution? It’s not charitable of them to pass off our contributions as their own when they can afford to double whatever’s raised. Plus, of course, Joe Barton is a buffoon.
Today I interviewed my friend Asher Yarden, Israeli Consul General to the Southwest. As I wrote earlier in the week in the Chronicle, I believe that Israel is acting in an incredibly self-destructive way. The more it lashes out, the more whatever global support remains for the Jewish state evaporates.
For those of us who care about Israel, watching the right-wing Netanyahu government blunder in the name of security is immensely painful. Of all countries, Israel can least afford to suffer further isolation. But, Netanyahu is Netanyahu, so the entirely foreseeable and avoidable mistakes continue.
I talked to Consul General Yarden about why Israel feels it must do what it did this week. Here’s the interview.
Pro-Palestinian activists — hoping to embarrass and isolate Israel — dared the Jewish state to stop them on the high seas. Aware that it would face international condemnation, Israel took the bait anyway. Now the world is coming down harder on Israel than it has in years. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are no doubt thrilled.
I ask this as an unapologetic supporter of Israel’s: How arrogant and stupid can that country’s leadership possibly be?
Knowing the ships were carrying no arms, there is simply no set of circumstances in which the decision to attack would have been a good one for Israel. What could it have accomplished? Was the entirely foreseeable condemnation of Israel a price worth paying to keep a bunch of stoners with groceries away from the Gaza Strip?
The State Board of Education last week voted to rewrite history books. The new textbooks make American involvement in the slave trade sound less….what’s the word? Bad. They also rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy who has been unfairly vilified just because in the course of being wrong about everything he was a vile, belligerent drunk who ruined innocent people’s lives and was ultimately censured by the Senate. They also promote the totally rational belief that the UN is plotting to take over the country and impose a one world government.
Before they voted, though, SBoE members prayed. Worship was led by board member and Pat Robertson acolyte Cynthia Dunbar (R-Richomond). She said that America was founded as a “Christian land governed by Christian principles.
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The founders were so dense in fact that in their zeal to create a Christian land guided by Christian principles, they not only failed to describe the country that way, the word “Christian” doesn’t even make an appearance in the Constitution. The word “God” isn’t in there either. As if that kind of oversight wasn’t bad enough, they made other mistakes.
Paul’s theory is that if a business wants to post a “no blacks” sign, free market principles would ensure that the business went under. What a fascinating idea — one which was actually tried for over 200 years in this country at the expense of the dignity, economic well-being, and frequently lives of African-Americans. Inconveniently for Paul’s theory, in the racist south of the pre-Civl Rights era, businesses which didn’t discriminate went under.
Today’s conservatives are Tea Party Patriots, small government activists, and Scott Brown populists. Buchanan sounds like an escaped war criminal. It’s time for MSNBC to give him das boot and let him goose-step into the sunset.
It’s pledge drive time and KPFT needs your help. Go to http://www.kpft.org/pledge/, select Partisan Gridlock and give, give, give. Webcast of shameless begging will be here.
Update: No webcast this week. Here’s the shameless begging, though.
Yesterday’s elections in the UK produced no outright parliamentary majority for any party. David Cameron’s Conservatives won the most seats (no doubt to the delight of teabaggers everywhere), but still fell short. In order to become prime minister, Cameron will therefore need Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats to form a coalition. Is it possible? What will the Tories give up? What are the odds that Gordon Brown and his misspelled Labour Party will hold on to power?
On today’s show, we’ll talk to prominent writer, pundit, and actual British person Alex Massie about the results.
We will also discuss the case of Family Research Council co-founder George Rekers. Reckers is the minister who condemns homsexuals’ immortal souls in a rather unusual way — by having gay male hookers insert their penises into various of his orifices. You have to give him credit for originality. Or maybe not.
Finally, we’ll talk about the right wing getting all worked up because a high school prominently displayed a Mexican flag on Cinco de Mayo. After his mother’s complaint went unheeded, a student took matters into his own hands and tore down the flag and disposed of it. Now he’s a hero to the nutcase right — because they’re usually into destruction of school property by students. Xenophobia? Not here, that’s for sure.
