Electile Dysfunction

Quigley's Blog in Cape Cod Today

Last Monday I was driving back to the cape. As I often do on long trips, I turned on conservative talk radio to see what stories had been skewed to incite the listeners.

Rush Limbaugh was criticizing President Obama’s speech at Ohio State University’s graduation the previous weekend. He was complaining that while the president listed some characteristics that made us Americans, he had not listed ones that Rush would have liked. Not listing everything should be understandable as the president was delivering a speech, not reading the dictionary.

As he usually does, while making sure we understood that he, himself, was not a “libarull”, Rush explained that he knew more about what “libarulls” believed than liberals did.

He announced with moral certitude that “libarulls” did not include self-reliance among those things that made Americans Americans.

I am a Liberal. During my teaching career I began every class on the first day of the school year by having my students copy lines from “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“There comes a time in each man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as is his portion. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what it is that he can do, nor does he know until he has tried”.

After this I would read the whole essay and explain its meaning.

I did this to set the tone for the year, emphasizing to my students that their futures depended on what each student did to bring about a successful future life without expecting that someone else would do that for them. It was why they needed to take care of their own education and not allow anyone to control what they learned. The worst they could do to other students was to limit their learning, and the worst they could do to themselves was to allow someone else to limit what they learned.

Rush said NO liberal would include self-reliance in American characteristics, nor would any liberal tell others about their need to be self-reliant.

I had mentioned in an earlier blog posting that the surest way to lose an argument was to appeal to absolutes such as “all”, “none”, “never”, “always” to name a few. The reason for the guaranteed loss is that if you based your argument on absolutes, if someone found one exception, your argument crumbles.

I am happy to announce that even if there are no others, I am a Liberal who not only explained, but emphasized self-reliance to the equivalent of two generations of American public school students, and that by virtue of this I can proudly point out that Rush is wrong. And, if he is wrong in this absolute statement, he is, most likely, wrong in many m

Frank Luntz, the media-friendly Republican consultant and word wiz, told a group of college students this week that Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio are "problematic" for the GOP and partly responsible for the stark polarization within the nation's political discourse. He only dared to speak so candidly about Limbaugh and other conservative hosts off the record. A secretly recorded video, though, captured Luntz's remark.

On April 22, Luntz was holding a talk at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, and providing his essential take on political communication: "It's not what you say that matters. It's what people hear." At this event sponsored by College Republicans, Luntz (class of '84) cracked a joke about Nancy Pelosi and face-lifts and acknowledged his party needs to interact more effectively with a wider swath of Americans: "We can't talk to 51 percent of America. It just doesn't work." And, he emphasized, words matter. (In 2009, Luntz urged GOPers to decry President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal as a "government takeover" in order to defeat it.) Voters, Luntz told the students, respond more positively when a politician refers to "hardworking taxpayers" than to "the middle class." He warned that if his party did not resolve its internal divides, it could lose the House of Representatives next year.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate on Wednesday rejected a bipartisan plan to expand background checks for gun buyers, dealing a sharp blow to President Barack Obama's campaign to curb gun violence after...

In order to retake the House in 2014, the Democrats need to pick up a net 17 seats to retake the House. Allowing for the fact that the Democrats could lose a handful of their own seats, any realistic attempt at a House takeover requires identifying 25 races or so that can be flipped from red to blue. Here are the top 25 races the Democrats might target in approximate order.

Top 25 Republican House targets....

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-most-vulnerable-republican-house-seats-2014

On Tuesday, Gawker published George W. Bush's private email address and encouraged readers to "wish George W. Bush a Happy Iraq War Day." They stated that readers should email him and "let him know that you're thinking of him today." 

According to the project lead at Harvard — as well as the study itself and the federal funding therein — the conservative hyperbole forgets all about gay men...

Glenn Beck is a lot like a toddler: if you don’t hear from him for a while, you can only assume that he is getting into some mischief.

Since his departure from Fox News a couple of years ago, Beck has largely kept out of the public eye. Recently, however, he seems to be back with another hare-brained scheme straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Last month he was in the news because he wants to start a walled, Libertarian, heavily armed city – named Independence. This new (and mildly hilarious) video released yesterday shows his latest venture. And boy, this is some straight up Daffy Duck shit.

Glenn now plans to hold some sort of science fair. In Utah. With giant robots walking amongst the crowd. And it has something to do with (I’m paraphrasing here) “America being the one true nation on earth forever always” or some other nationalistic xenophobic wankage, because Glenn is batshit crazy and has a case of the turn of the last century mad scientist thing going on. First, his own town. Now, his own science fair. The next thing on the mad scientist’s list is either sharks with lazer beams or a mountain with his face.

You have to – at least on some level – be in awe of the fact that this guy started out as a morning radio DJ back in the late 80s. Now he’s a gun-toting multimillionaire building death-towns and 30ft tall robots. His life story is straight out of a book. A shitty book, sure, but a book nonetheless.

Ten bucks says the robots turn on him once they become self-aware.

(with video)

Here's what Hannity leaves out...

.....

Even the most enthusiastic sharia supporters still favor religious freedom for people of other faiths, in part because they believe it should apply only to Muslims. That explains how 84% of Muslims in Pakistan want to enshrine sharia law, but three in four say non-Muslims are free to practice their faith.

Many Muslims want religious leaders to have some -- even large -- influence political matters: 53% in Afghanistan, 41% in Malaysia and 37% in Jordan, the research finds.

Similarly, many Muslims see no incompatibility with democracy, said Farid Senzai, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, at Santa Clara University, another adviser to the Pew Muslim research. "You can have a democracy and yet also have strong support for Islam to play a role in politics."

The motivation behind the world-wide economic con of austerity has been discovered. And, the source is none other than Pete Peterson – the debt-obsessed billionaire who stands to make billions off the privatization of our social safety net.

by STEVE VOGEL (W'ton Post)

After months of nervous anticipation, federal workers begin the first major round of furloughs this week, even as much uncertainty remains at some agencies about how much time, if any, employees will lose from their jobs because of mandated spending cuts.

About 17,000 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency also face furloughs beginning this week, as do 480 employees of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget....

Following in the footsteps of John "Abortionplex" Fleming, Glenn "Oligarhy" Beck has decided that the biggest tragedy of the attack on the Boston Marathon was President Obama's failure to explicitly use the word "terrorist."

"Our President yesterday wouldn't even come out and say that it was an act of terror," said Beck.

He then added "He had to have somebody make a statement after his statement. I found it reprehensible. I don't care who did it."

More reprehensible than exploiting a terrorist attack for petty political gain?

But this was not enough for Beck. He went on to accuse Obama of being someone who would eagerly capitalize on a terrorist attack just as Beck was doing.

"I don't care if it was the head of the Tea Party Patriots. If they did it, it was terror. Period. Because I have a feeling that if it was the Tea Party Patriots that did it, boy, he would, with glee, deem it terror."

With this sentence, Beck has delivered a stupid politics triple play. First, by trying to politicize a terrorist attack not even twenty-four hours after its occurrence. Second, by playing the language police; by attacking Obama for saying "attack" instead of "terrorist attack." And finally, by trying to reinvent Obama in his imagination as a petty, party-before-country lunatic.

"Labeling things 'workplace shootings' or 'workplace incidents' is not going to heal us," said Beck. But neither will twisting a national tragedy into an excuse to attack the President over a triviality.

Rep. Steve Stockman believes that giving guns to fetuses could completely change the abortion debate.

In a message posted to the congressman’s campaign Twitter account on Thursday night, Stockman wrote, “Our campaign bumper sticker: If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted.”

The image of a bumper sticker with the same message and the phrase “Vote Pro-Life!” was included with the tweet.

The 2016 presidential election is far off, but an early sign indicates that Republicans could face trouble if Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden becomes the Democratic nominee, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

Glenn Beck created a bit of a sensation this past weekend when he tweeted a photo of the Devil from The History Channel's The Bible mini-series and noted tha...