Sotomayor in session(s)

I was out driving around in the heat this afternoon, listening to the car radio, and decided to skip the usual AM radio crap. Instead I flipped over to National Public Radio on FM and listened to some of Sotomayor's interrogation by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was the first time I'd actually heard her voice, and she sounded like a pretty bright individual.

The senator attempting to make her life miserable today was Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Whenever I'm compiling lists of the most repulsive Republicans, Jeff is usually nowhere to be seen because he's been too insignificant to make much of a ripple on the surface of the pond. Sort of like John Cornyn was for a long time. If what I heard today is an indication of what this worthless dogturd has to offer, he'll never be overlooked on future lists.

When I was in the public welfare business I always thought of Alabama and Mississippi as buffers. As long as those two were around, it was a fairly safe bet Texas would never hit the bottom of the barrel. Bammer and Miz-sippy would always be there to soften the landing when Texas began another of its drives to be ranked 50th of fifty. And now, as long as Alabama keeps re-electing Jeff Sessions, Texas will never have the worst United States Senator.

Added 11:42 am, Wednesday: Here's a surprise. The National Rifle Association and the Southern Baptist Convention have serious misgivings about Sotomayor. Hmmm... she's looking better to me all the time.

Patriotism galore

I came across this picture on one of the rightwing blogs promoted by the Houston Chronicle. It was apparently taken at another of the so-called tea parties that have become the trendy way for conservatives to bond with each other and swap sob stories about how much they hate Obama. The alleged impetus behind the movement is excessive federal taxation. You can check out the guts and butts on the guys in the foreground of this shot and quickly see their tax burden has left them so impoverished they're starving to death. Poor babies.

Today's gripe

This afternoon my sister sent me an e-mail that some unnamed soul had sent to her, apparently one of her friends. The content was a lengthy diatribe by an individual claiming to be David Kaiser, historian, professor, and author of more than a dozen books. Though it was written in a superficially scholarly style (no major errors in grammar or punctuation), the text included enough inflammatory rhetoric to arouse my sister's suspicions concerning its legitimacy. The basic thrust of the piece was to draw a radical parallel between the rise of Barack Obama and the rise of Adolf Hitler, with powerful suggestions that America is headed toward the same destiny as Germany in the 1930s.

Since I have access to Google, it took less than a minute to find what I needed. David Kaiser is a blogger, among his other talents, and has denied writing the screed in question. As I pointed out to my sister in one of several e-mail replies, the "Kaiser" hoax has been discussed on several blogs better than mine.

In the version I skimmed over in the original e-mail, several sentences were highlighted in vivid shades of yellow and violet. Someone apparently wanted to make sure the reader didn't miss those parts. They dealt with the failure of the American public education system, unelected judges legislating from the bench, media bias, the threat of Islam, etc. All of which is simple regurgitation of the same points that Limbaugh, Hannity, and Boortz discuss daily with their pea-brained listeners on AM radio talkfests. The idea that a learned scholar would repeat this bilge in writing he expected would be taken seriously was preposterous. There were also veiled defenses of Wasilla Wondermom, a dead giveaway that this goddamned crap was cranked out by a fucking idiot.

Okay, these viral internet chain letters piss me off. I've written about it before and make no secret of the fact that anybody sending me one is going to hear from me in negative terms. As a rule of thumb, I believe this trash is forwarded by idiots who think the people they're sending it to are idiots. When a fucking idiot treats me like an idiot, it's insulting.

What makes the chain letter in question especially offensive is the implied parallel between Obama and Hitler. I'm no historian, but I'm not buying that. In my opinion, the closest parallels between the U.S. and 1930s Germany occurred from election day 2000 until election day 2008, and Republicans were in charge while it was happening.

Healthy discussion

Mrs. bee and I have affordable health insurance, so our personal stake in the issue of universal health care revolves around our children and people we know who aren't as fortunate as we are. I haven't kept up with the progress of Obama's health care proposals as closely as I could have, but the impression I'm getting from internet reports is that it's turning into a major clusterfuck.

The Democrats are hopeless as a governing entity and are only tolerable when compared to Republicans, who are significantly worse. Democrats want to do good things that benefit most people, but have the organizational skills of brain-damaged pissants. Republicans, on the other hand, can unify into a well-oiled machine at the drop of the hat but have an agenda that makes my skin crawl.

Imagine a Republican president in the White House who had just won the office with Obama's popular vote and Electoral College margins. Imagine that president with Republican majorities in the House and Senate equivalent to the current Democratic majorities. Imagine universal health care as a Republican priority. Can you say DONE DEAL ? I thought you could.

R is for Republican, Rush, and Ronnie

It can be summed up with three R words: R stands for Republicans, Rush, and Reagan. The present Republican icon is Rush, but the icon of bygone glory days, Ronald Reagan, wields even more influence than Limbaugh among people whose heads are up their asses and who want to live in the past. This item in the Dallas Morning News illustrates the point as well as anything I've seen recently. Only among numbskull conservative Texans would shit like this matter.

Rick Perry, who started life as a Democrat but found his proper home in the GOP, is distinguished among conservative lowlifes in Texas by his combination of incompetence and ambition. Rarely does an individual with such stunning limitations strive to do so much, and mostly it's bad. The developing mess at Texas A&M University is typical of what happens when a dipshit like Ricardo is given the power to appoint political hacks like Mike McKinney and Don McLeroy to positions of authority.

I expect anyone who watches this video clip will see some strong similarities between Ricardo and W, the last guy who had that mix of incompetence and ambition.

A failure, on the topic of failure

The Republican strategy is obvious, as revealed in this article. Newt Gingrich is the featured speaker at a big event intended to raise money for next year's congressional races. This is a clue that he's probably the top dog in the current GOP hierarchy. Add his name to those of Wondermom, Joe the Plumber, and Limbaugh as the most recognizable Republicans in America.

The highlight of the past fifty years of Republicanism was Reagan's defeat of Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. That was as good as it got, or ever would get, for the people who make up the 21st century version of American conservatism. Reagan is still the golden idol they worship, although his term ended two decades ago. The GOP has been trying to recapture the magic for a long, long time.

Second on their list of highlights was the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. Since Reagan is long gone, the GOP is apparently turning to the runner-up Blast From The Past to restore the glory of their Good Old Days. Palin is the closest thing they have to a rising star, but at the moment she's the punchline of a thousand jokes. The backup plan seems to be slapping a coat of fresh paint on an old corncob and hoping to pass it off as gold bullion.

The cold, hard facts seem to be that the Republican Party isn't going anywhere in the near future on the strength of fresh faces and new ideas. Their freshest faces are two clowns, and their best ideas brought the country to its current predicament. All that's left is to be The Lesser of Two Evils, and for Republicans to win elections on that basis, the Democrats have to fail on a massive scale.

Since it's likely to take more than two years to rebuild what it took eight years of W. to destroy, even assuming Obama guesses correctly every step of the way, the Republican strategy may work in 2010. For the Republicans to restore what they had from 2001-2006, though, they'll really need a constant drumbeat of bad economic news and maybe even another terrorist attack.

Added 11:53 am:

Stuff like this is what has Republicans puking up blood. What if consumer confidence continues to rise, and people start feeling optimistic and begin spending money again ? What if that causes the economy to improve, and as a result businesses increase their profits and start hiring, and the stock market rebounds, and government revenue increases and the deficit is smaller than anticipated ? Oh, God ! The horror ! The horror !