Political quotes of the moment

[Jenne]

"In fairness, we've been building 'ground zeros' near Iraqi mosques since March 2003. ”
                — Twitter / Jason Mustian

SUH-NAP.

[Cain]

A truly righteous rant from HTML Mencken

IOZ is articulate on a subject near and dear to me:

Every farmer I've known, and there are a lot of them in Western PA, has loved farming and sacrificed greatly in order to keep farming despite the best efforts of state-subsidized industrial agriculture to deprive them of their vocation. The idea that families gave up their farms because "manual agricultural labor sucks" is laughable. The fact that your evidence of this is dubious publicity stunt designed to highlight the no-duh truth that people habituated to a certain level of income will refuse to work rather than accept work paying them too far below their accustomed wage is indicative that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. The whole sordid history of neoliberal intervention in the "developing world" is the decimation of subsistence economies, in which peoples produce locally most of what they need (subsistence doesn't necessitate "poverty," except to Nice Liberals and World Bank officials), via economic, environmental, and actual warfare, and the subsequent forced replacement of self-provision with economies of consumtion, in which people leave "manual agricultural work" for the sweat shop and the rural farm for the urban slum. The idea that you chalk these things up to individual choice rather than appreciating how they are necessitated by political and economic context only displays that it is you who holds the romantic notions, and the fact that any fifth-grader with a half-read copy of his Steinbeck can see the glaring flaws at the heart of the notion that agriculture stinks and it's great to get people off the farm and on the road ought to embarrass you.

A-fucking-men.

*By Brad DeLong I do mean the personally decent but ideologically execrable blogger/economist/free trade-enthusiast. But I also use "Brad DeLong" as an ankle-biting (at least to him, I hope) synecdoche to personify the type of cultural elitist Democrat whose "libertarianism with a human face" political economy, ethnocentrism (hypocritical at that: they love to accuse non-fans of their preferred policies of bigotry to the third worlders those policies make miserable but allegedly more wealthy), relative wealth (by which I mean personal insulation to the economic stresses their preferred policies have put on their less-fortunate countrymen) and total intolerance of anyone to their political left has, due to this type's total hegemony among the Democratic Party, utterly destroyed its ability to pursue the populist agenda needed to restore this country.

Why does the Democratic Party in general and the Obama Administration in particular suck? "Brad DeLong"!

Why has "social democracy" been so dumbed-down that it now means little more policy-wise than a progressive income tax and increased education spending? "Brad DeLong"!

Why does America not make anything any more? "Brad DeLong"!

How did the terms "leftist" and "liberal" get so diluted that they now mean, basically, "anyone who isn't a bigot -- at least, based on gender, ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation; beating up the lower classes is okey-dokey -- and who also agrees with the no-duh fact that Donald Luskin and Jonah Goldberg are stupid fucking idiots"? "Brad DeLong"!

Why does the Democratic elite constantly kick the Democratic base in the teeth? "Brad DeLong"! Why does it politically kiss the collective ass of the Wealthy Criminal Class at every opportunity? "Brad DeLong"! Why does it constantly search for a "good faith" opponent on the right with whom it can compromise -- or to whom it can cave -- but at the same time demonize, stonewall, or betray everyone to its left? "Brad DeLong"!

Why are desperate immigrants from Latin America pouring into our country? What happened to their countries' economies? "Brad DeLong"!

Why are western companies moving their manufacturing base to China where goods are made in working conditions somewhere between those of 19th century Dickensian squalor, the Gulag, and some Nineteen Eighty-Four nightmare? "Brad DeLong"! Have you seen the pollution in China? What kind of ecocidal nutbag would want to help export our basest model of production and consumption, the most wasteful on Earth, to a country of two billion people? "Brad DeLong"!

Why is 2010 gonna be a disaster for the Democrats? "Brad DeLong"! Why is the Tea Party able to gain the sympathy of so many economically-shafted Americans whose welfare it obviously will not improve? "Brad DeLong"!

Etc. Etc.

[Cramulus]

FROM http://eyeofthestorm.blogs.com/eye_of_the_storm/2010/09/if-i-were-going-to-seewaiting-for-supermani-think-i-would-need-to-see-it-alonemy-reaction-is-likely-to-be-severe-and-no-on.html via IOZ:

helpin janie with her homework last night; she was working on the mason-dixon line, which more or less runs through my house (well a couple miles south). but the procedure was simply mechanical. the first sentence re-states the question. re-state this, fuckhead. the next three give details from the text, in support (of your restatement of the question?). she didn't actually get to compose a single sentence, much less express some sort of independent response. it has to be mechanical to be measurable: the tests seek to create their takers in their own image. illiteracy is preferable, or this just is a new form of illiteracy.

by the time i'm teaching them as freshmen, they just want to be told what procedures to follow to get their 'A.' they really are often disappointed that i don't tell them how to compose each sentence. ( a few weirdos still slip through, of course.)

[Adios]

FROM http://eyeofthestorm.blogs.com/eye_of_the_storm/2010/09/if-i-were-going-to-seewaiting-for-supermani-think-i-would-need-to-see-it-alonemy-reaction-is-likely-to-be-severe-and-no-on.html via IOZ:

helpin janie with her homework last night; she was working on the mason-dixon line, which more or less runs through my house (well a couple miles south). but the procedure was simply mechanical. the first sentence re-states the question. re-state this, fuckhead. the next three give details from the text, in support (of your restatement of the question?). she didn't actually get to compose a single sentence, much less express some sort of independent response. it has to be mechanical to be measurable: the tests seek to create their takers in their own image. illiteracy is preferable, or this just is a new form of illiteracy.

by the time i'm teaching them as freshmen, they just want to be told what procedures to follow to get their 'A.' they really are often disappointed that i don't tell them how to compose each sentence. ( a few weirdos still slip through, of course.)

A teacher wrote that?

[Cramulus]

his bio says

Prof of political science at Dickinson College and opinion columnist distributed by Creators Syndicate.

[Adios]

A spokesman for Sen. Jim DeMint tells CNN the South Carolina Republican was merely stating his position that school boards should be in control of hiring decisions when the senator reportedly said Saturday that gays and unwed mothers should be banned from teaching.

"Senator DeMint believes that hiring decisions at local schools are a local school board issue, not a federal issue. He was making a point about how the media attacks people for holding a moral opinion," a spokesman for DeMint said Tuesday.

Speaking at a church rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina, DeMint told attendees people quietly told him he should not back down from a position he took in 2004 that openly gay individuals and single mothers who are involved in a sexual relationship should not be allowed to teach. He did not weigh in on whether unwed men should be allowed to teach.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/

I wonder when he will get caught in a gay act?

[Adios]

his bio says

Prof of political science at Dickinson College and opinion columnist distributed by Creators Syndicate.

Wow. Is it just me or did that read like it was written by a drunken monkey?

[Cramulus]

well he didn't take a lot of care with grammar or capitalization but I think that sort of underscores his point: We are teaching form, not substance.

[Adios]

well he didn't take a lot of care with grammar or capitalization but I think that sort of underscores his point: We are teaching form, not substance.

Okay, if he was making a point then I get it. 

[Juana]

I definitely agree with his assessment. I used to grade papers for my old boss (both as a student and her assistant), who taught English, and I wanted to kill things after each essay. They all expected the formula for the A and refused to write proper essays...which is what she required. The seniors she taught from my graduating class almost all failed, or would have if the principal hadn't forced her to pass them, because they never wrote the papers they were supposed to and they had time in class to do so.

[Juana]

It's cute that modern political backroom dealings are now "I spent all morning working on a Facebook post about you. But now I'm not going to use it and I'm also not going to help you level up in Mafia Wars."

A comment on Gawker's article on some leaked emails between Todd Palin, Joe Miller, and one of Sarah's underlings.

[Cain]

I love this quote.  I cherish and protect it, only quoting it when someone is not ready for it, to ensure maximum impact:

From the mid-1990s, bin Laden funded Chechen guerrilla leaders Shamil Basayev and Omar ibn al-Khattab to the tune of several millions of dollars per month, sidelining the moderate Chechen majority. US intelligence remained deeply involved until the end of the decade. According to Yossef Bodanksy, then-Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Washington was actively involved in 'yet another anti-Russian jihad, 'seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces'. US Government officials participated in 'a formal meeting in Azerbaijan' in December 1999 'in which specific programmes for the training and equipping of mujahidin from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon', culminating in 'Washington's tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) and US "private security companies"... to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing jihad for a long time.' The US saw the sponsorship of 'Islamist jihad in the Caucasus' as a way to 'deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism'.

[Telarus]

I fucking knew it. Johnny Brainwash and I had discussed the probability a while ago when it hit the news again.

[Cain]

Remember after Beslan, when Putin was pissed at America and the media were like "lol, Putin is spazzing out over conspiracy theories"?

Yeah, exactly.

Incidentally, Russia picked up Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1996, travelling on a fake passport.  They didn't know who he was though, so they let him go.

Also, if you look into the relationship of Neoconservatives with Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan's relationship with the Mujahideen it transported over to fight their war with Armenia (aided by the ISI, and Turkish Grey Wolves), and who later formed the core of the Chechen sepratists, a very nasty picture begins to emerge...

[Cain]

One of these things is not like the other:

The smile, affable and empty, could be that of a small-town gas-station attendant or a hired assassin."

The man in question?  White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.