Hippie roundup

I put on the hazmat suit and ventured into the wasteland of liberalism.

Daily Kos

On the heels of the Sharpton-Thurmond slavery story, Daily Krotch seems to be advocating an expansion of reverse slavery (affirmative action) and calling for reparations:

If looking back is uncomfortable, there's one question about race that's even more prickly: what are we going to do about it? What do we owe African-Americans for generations of slavery and torture? What's the bill for rights, education -- and in all too many cases, life -- denied? Are the weak programs in place really the best we can do? Is stamping "renewed" on legislation passed decades ago the limit of what we can accomplish?

Good question. What do we owe blacks? And what do we owe Indians for conquering them? And what do Italians, as descendants of Romans, owe the Europeans and Middle Easterners and Northern Africans? All were conquered and enslaved. What do the Macedonians owe to all the people mistreated by the army of Alexander the Great? Here are the answers: Equality and respect.

Another post beats the "run away" drum with zeal:

What the Democratic Congress, and particularly the Democratic leadership, needs to realize is that the American people are a few steps ahead of them on this one. That, as far as the voting public is concerned, getting us out is the major priority. They support Murtha's general plan, and would probably support a Wu/Ackerman plan as well, as long as it was getting us out. These plans don't endanger the troops--they reassert Congress's critical role in governing this country and forcing executive accountability.

Americablog

One "Chris" is lamenting that Europe has 113 "super-efficient" cars available, where the U.S. has only two:

Doggone socialists have all of the choices while the free market US economy has only two options. Sounds a lot like the old Soviet days when the Lada offered either with or without a radio. So where are all of the so-called free market Republicans? Oh that's right, they've been on the "let industry dictate policy" bandwagon and made sure they were lending a helping hand with the Soviet-ization of Big Auto, ridding them of any need to offer fuel efficiency. Who could ever forget Reagan starting the removal of fuel efficiency standards and then the Gingrich Congress implementing the final blow to any hope of minimum standards? Once again, witness Republican economics at work and try hard to figure out how it differs with Soviet style economics.

The GOP killed fuel efficiency standards? It seems Chris doesn't know why American cars changed from the heavy behemoths of the 1970s, with six liter engines, to the uncomfortable buzz-carts we have now. I don't expect him to exercise his mind by finding out, so I'll just tell him: CAFE.

Chris also comments on the world's stock market woes. You won't be surprised who gets blamed:

Plenty of mixed messages in the Asian markets with most of the trading down and China slightly up. The question today is whether this is a correction or the start of a downward trend. All of that said, we use the word "bubble" for a reason and bubbles do not last forever. As for the US market, the economics of funding a war with tax cuts and selling the debt to a bubble economy is certainly a novel idea and one that will no doubt be a case study in econ classes in the future.

And there's this:

So who owns this economy? What brain trust thought that Guns & Butter II would somehow work better than the original which sunk the US into an economic quagmire for years? Let's remember that there have been voices out there who have criticized this administration for waging war while handing out tax cuts to the wealthiest and just running a tab on China's expense account so now that China is stumbling and the war debt is increasing, this most recent fiasco falls squarely in the hands of the Bush administration. When the other shoe drops and the real estate bubble bottoms out, it will be another fine mess these clowns got us into. Republican economics in action, also known as the perfect storm.

Crooks and Liars

Nicole, who fancies herself an economics expert, weighs in on the stock market problems:

While I agree that we should be jittery by how closely tied our economy is to China, it's frustrating to see how little we look at the root causes of that. Since we have gone from the biggest creditor to the biggest debtor nation, what will happen if the Asian market continues its instability?

We are indeed a big debtor nation, and that is the norm for a Western, industrialized democracy. That's how it works, honeybunch. There's nothing to be scared of.

John is promoting Seymour Hersh's assertion that Bush is planning to attack Iran:

Sy jumps into the Situation Room after appearing with Wolf on Sunday to discuss his New Yorker article and the Pentagon's response to him. Isn't it interesting that they always put out statements trying to debunk Hersh's articles….I'm just saying….

It's ridiculously easy to debunk Hersh's articles. Go and read his story on Abu Ghraib. You remember, the one lefties claim broke the story, when the CIA issued a press release a month earlier? See how good old Sy puts a story together.

Plaid Adder mocks Fox's news parody show:

Obviously, challenging authority is a problem for a show which is trying to be funny while defending the agenda and worldview of the regime currently in power. "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" exists only in order to help the authorities consolidate their power, and the target audience for this show--hard-core FOX viewers--can be assumed to have a pretty strong authoritarian bent. So they're not going to want to see the show attack authority anyway.

Firedoglake

Eli tells us about his "nightmare":

One of the great things about a healthy democracy is that it has error-correcting mechanisms which prevent it from veering too far off course. They're not infallible or instantaneous, but if a politician or policy is really terrible, the odds are that he, she, or it won't be around for very long. Unfortunately, the Republican party has dedicated itself to sabotaging and co-opting these mechanisms, and over the last six years our government has been straying farther and farther from the ideals that this country was founded on.

If tough laws against terrorism are this guy's nightmare, he should stick to the monster under the bed.

His finale is strange:

As some of you may perhaps have noticed, the media's errors or omissions hardly ever seem to favor Democrats, in clear defiance of all the laws of probability. I see a lot of exasperated liberal bloggers appealing to the media to show some pride in their work and start living up to their journalistic principles, or berating them for their addiction to cocktail weenies, but I think they miss the point. Lazy, incompetent, shallow reporters and pundits are merely a symptom, not the underlying problem.

Eli apparently thinks most MSM are biased to the right. Ha, ha haha ha ha! As in, LOL. Nearly all newspaper and TV news reporters are card carrying Democrats, and we all know that. Even the liberal MSM can't ignore big Democrat problems like Clinton getting impeached, so perhaps it's these few stories negative of liberalism that has gotten Eli all confused.

Peterr sees conspiracies everywhere, even with Cheney's travel schedule. It's a tongue-in-cheek post:

It started yesterday on the art curator thread when Biodun noted that Dick Cheney is "stopping everywhere he can abroad, anything to delay his return to the States. I wonder what he’s afraid of back home." It continued this morning on the Condi thread when Redshift took it a step further, talking about what Cheney's scheduler might be thinking, trying to balance the jury with the Shooter's . . . ahem . . . diplomatic . . . ahem . . . travel options: “How long can they keep deliberating? I’m running out of countries!”

Hippies day dream about the darndest things, but Cheney being afraid to go home? I think Our Man Dick™ wants to get home ASAFP to have five or six rare steaks.

TalkLeft

"Withdrawal" and "redeployment" are still confused at this blog:

On June 19, 2006, Senators Carl Levin and Jack Reed introduced a resolution calling for the phased redeployment of US military from Iraq commencing in 2006.

TPM Muckraker

I find it very odd that people who deny there is terrorism in the world would be making a big deal out of the Alishtari story:

Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari, indicted two weeks ago for financing terrorists in Afghanistan among other charges, gave more than $35,000 to Republican campaign committees, not $15,000 as was reported earlier.

Why is this story important if we're not at war against terror, and 9/11 was our fault? Someone has to explain that to me.

Also at TPM Muckraker, Andrew Bielak is concerned about an "ethically questionable pizza luncheon" hosted by John Ashcroft. I've hosted a few of those myself.