Friday, August 21, 2009

Friday Mashup (8/21/09)

  • This Think Progress post tells us the following…

    The Texas State Board of Education review committee is preparing to vote on a draft of proposed standards for history textbooks. Noting that the draft has “nothing about liberals,” the Houston Chronicle reported:

    The first draft for proposed standards in United States History Studies Since Reconstruction says students should be expected “to identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority.” [...] Others have proposed adding talk show host Rush Limbaugh and the National Rifle Association.
    Oh, and did you guess that the 15-member review committee includes 10 Republicans?

    Well, with this in mind, please allow me to add the following historical “updates”:

  • General Robert E. Lee defeated General Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Appomattox, and thus the South was allowed to discriminate against African Americans and teach creationism as science.


  • The Texas Longhorns football team under coach Mack Brown defeated the Florida Gators to win the NCAA College Football championship last January.


  • The first oil well in the state was discovered in the back yard of former president George Herbert Walker Bush in Harris County in 1964.


  • Texas is the largest state in the Union, twice as large as Alaska and eight times as large as California.


  • Davy Crockett was elected the ninth President of the United States in 1821.
  • Please secede already.


  • Update 8/30/09: Yeah, more like this - hurry up, actually.

  • Also, the Bucks County Courier Times told us the following this morning here (in its “Thumbs Down” segment)…

    To Bucks County Commissioner Charley Martin, who seems to favor replacing outgoing county Chief Operating Officer Dave Sanko with a political operative.

    While doing so would maintain continuity, it's no way to run a government.
    Silly me, but I would say that suggesting that a political operative “maintain continuity” is no way to write an editorial.

    This is par for the proverbial course when it comes to Mr. “I Have A Semi-Open Mind” (with Martin’s co-commissioner Dem Diane Marseglia rightly calling for a nationwide job search to fill the vacancy), but instead of haranguing Martin (an easy target), I just wanted to extend a bon voyage to Sanko (pictured), who, as noted here, “harrassed” Deena Dean, Bucks County’s Board of Elections Director, for two years (her word, not mine) and participated in a GOP fundraiser here (not good since he's a worker in county government - when asked about it, he replied it was “no big deal”...how apropos).

    I’m not sure where Sanko is going, but if it turns out that he lands somewhere in Texas, don’t be a bit surprised.


  • Update 8/30/09: And why am I not surprised that our state senator Chuck McIlhinney is trying to get a bogus budget passed (kudos to Diane for calling him out on it here).

  • Also, I give you the following weekly lowlight from former Laura Bush employee Andrew Malcolm (here), who tells us that the New York Times corrected a TV program listing that "mistakenly listed MTV's ‘Jackass’ show on the MSNBC cable schedule at 7 and 10 p.m. where instead MSNBC's 'Countdown With Keith Olbermann' should have been listed" (with Malcolm wondering “what if nobody noticed the difference” if people were looking for “Jackass” but found Olbermann instead – ha, ha).

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t “Countdown” air at 8 PM EST and not 7PM EST? However, I realize it isn’t as much fun for Malcolm to dump on Chris Matthews, since “Hardball” airs at 7PM EST instead (though “Countdown” is rerun at 10PM EST).

    I know the original mistake was made by the Times, which they compounded by mixing up “Hardball” and “Countdown” at 7. However, Malcolm, not wanting to miss a chance to bash a liberal, apparently chimed in also without doing some rather simple due diligence.

    Oh, and by the way, Malcolm, I’m still waiting for the results of a poll on Dick Cheney’s alleged popularity which was commissioned more recently than the date of “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, OK (noted here).


  • And last but certainly least, I give you Christine Flowers in the Philadelphia Daily News today (here)…

    I’ll try to summarize…

  • Obama is a U.S. citizen already (sorry, but I don’t give her credit for pointing out something that has long since been debunked).


  • Harry Reid and “San Fran Nan” Pelosi (cute) maligned honest Americans who were legitimately questioning health care reform (not from this part of the woods they weren’t, with Flowers con-vee-niently dismissing the influence of Dick Armey and Rick Scott’s foot soldiers here).


  • Nobody should be depicting Obama as a Nazi (again, incredibly obvious stuff).


  • But (ha ha, how clever!) then Flowers uses that as an opportunity to dump on “the dank, smelly recesses of Daily Kos, Huffington Post and MoveOn” who “liken(ed) President Bush to Hitler and Saddam Hussein.”


  • Also, Howard Dean apparently said that the Repugs want to “kill” the health care bill and “kill” the president; I’ve checked online a bit, and apparently that’s a reasonably accurate quote. Though it was obviously a poor choice of words, somehow I’m sure a reasonably minded person would understand that Dean was speaking figuratively (however, I don’t know in what universe Flowers could be considered a “reasonably minded person”).


  • And to top it off, Flowers refers to progressives as dismissively as possible for good measure, and resurrects the whole “guns, clinging, bitter” business with that speech Obama gave (and by the way, the fact that Karl Rove later said that Obama was right here is pretty much ignored because IOKIYAR).
  • God, so much stoo-pid…

    First of all, MoveOn never ran an ad that compared Bush to Hitler (another zombie lie – click here for more information).

    Another thing…The Great Orange Satan is powerful enough to defend itself, so I won’t do so here (as usual, people criticizing The Daily Kos end up revealing the fact that they don’t have the first clue as to what the site is about). And my main criticism with HuffPo is its preoccupation with brainless celebrity piffle (Alec Baldwin writes a post telling us that Republicans are bad…zzzzzzzzzzz).

    Also, allow me to say a word or two about the whole “Bush/Hitler” thing (Bush was compared to Saddam Hussein? WHAAA????).

    This is a post I wrote over four years ago in which I was still more than a little clueless about this whole blogging thing (only slightly less so now) in which I said that Bushco was pretty much following the same propaganda playbook as Adolf and his pals, and I stand by that. I did not say that Bush was Hitler, and as near as I can tell, I do not have a pic with him depicted as such on this site (kind of hard to check this stuff across more than 4,500 posts, but I don’t believe that is the case…if I do, I will take my proverbial lumps for it).

    However, as you can see above, I happily used a parody pic of former Senator Man-On-Dog to that effect; as noted here, Santorum had no problem comparing the Dems to the Nazis, so I thought he deserved to be responded to in kind.

    But of course, in the end, these are still more smokescreens and diversions from Flowers, who really isn’t interested in correcting bad behavior by people who share her political opinion.

    And that’s a shame, because there’s a lot of that “outreach” work still to be done among conservatives, and if by some miracle Flowers ever decided to do that instead of propagating misinformation, our dialogue would subsequently become a lot more informed and a lot less stupid.

    Through one of the easiest Google searches of my life, here is a "pot, meet kettle" example for Flowers that I found from July 2008, including this excerpt…

    There are many abhorrent crimes and criminals who deserve no less than the death penalty. Yet many liberals, a future candidate for President included, show more concern for the rights and comforts of genuine evil (terrorists included!) than they do for the victims of such terrible crimes. Victims whose lives have been taken by such malicious people. While a vast majority of liberals tend to sympathize with the evil-doers, conservatives do not. Murderers, rapists, child molesters, etc. should be punished, not coddled.
    I suppose in the end, Flowers is to be pitied and not despised for practicing her literary deceit. As is her employer, who, in their latest reorganization scheme, (re: one bunch of Philadelphians stepping forward to spend too much money and waive pixie dust on behalf of another bunch of Philadelphians - never a bad thing if it saves jobs, though) attempts to stay afloat for the purposes of legitimizing her garbage.

    This post from last week told us of individuals crying and praying for the survival of Philadelphia’s newspapers. Were I disposed to do so, I might do so for an altogether different reason (hard to believe that Flowers continues to be published on pages that once ran columns by Chuck Stone, Pete Dexter, and Jack McKinney, but there you are – I will grant, though, that Flowers is a subject matter expert when it comes to “dank, smelly recesses”).
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