Ex Cathedra

Home happy from great Thanksgiving with our  family in Pasadena & the high desert.

Patrick and Christine gave us the most amazing Thanksgiving ever.

Kelo v New London broke blood pressure gauges all over the political Right, with libertublicans calling for Justice Souter’s neck.

Mother Jones reports the rest of the story:

A neighborhood torn down to build Pfizer an R&D facility. Now Pfizer has bugged out, leaving the city with a demolished neighborhood and a 90 acre plot with nothing but weeds.

I’ll wait right here for the outrage from the Right. < crickets/>

Sarah Palin and the teabaggers are just saying things. They don’t have any consistency, logic, or even meaning. They’re just noises.

They’re hollow like balloons. All we need to do is care. And be pins.

Huge article by Digby. Obama needs to read it.

Don’t move to the center. Move the center to where you are.

Point out the most obvious examples of extremism and obstructionism as extremism and obstructionism.  Call them by their proper names.  Challenge the ridiculous claims of the Right to represent anybody close to the mainstream,  and show that they only represent corporate lobbyists and teabaggers.

There’s a battle on for the center.  Let’s win it with our best friends: mockery, reframing,  and resistance.

Our chief weapons are pointing, mockery, reframing, resistance, and pulling the center out from under them. Amongst our weaponry…. But the center is ours. Keep it.

We’ve been giving the American South a bum rap.  The South was never driven by white supremacy. It was driven by revolutionary socialism.

The Civil War was a proletarian revolution against Yankee capitalists.

Plantations were prototypes for collective farms.

Any day now we’ll see old southern white guys joining hands with their fellow Bolsheviks around the world to smash the state and launch the Soviet Republic of Dixie

Mark Morford poses the question. It’s better if you read it first.

I will hereby give each of you [pro-death-penalty conservaclone honkers]  $1 million if you agree that we will not kill this insane, murderous criminal, and instead just let him rot in prison for the rest of his life without a chance of parole. A million bucks, all for you. Or, we kill him, waste the $30 million [it takes on average to execute a prisoner] and you get nothing.

Do you know how many would accept? Of course you do. All of them. Which means, for most, support of the death penalty is no serious moral conviction at all; it’s merely an ugly, black hunk of reactionary spittle, the bleak human vengeance synapse writ large, something reptilian and small and just about as far from our often hypocritical concepts of God and forgiveness, compassion and understanding, as you can possibly get.

Digby shows how corporate vocabulary, assumptions, and framing tilt the playing field to make liberalism nearly impossible.

But something remains unsaid. If you adopt our opponents’ vocabulary, assumptions, and framing, you don’t just enable our opponents. You become one of our opponents.

“Socialism” is the new “Hitler”
Calling somebody or something “socialism” or “socialist” is a sure sign you’ve caught bat shit fever.

The Right’s antipathy toward ACORN goes beyond their long history of poll taxes, literacy tests,  and minority voter suppression.  It goes beyond their dislike of scary Negroes and how Negroes getting uppity will raise money from the crackers and hillbillies in the Republican Southern White People’s Jesus Party.

And mirabile dictu, it turns out Michele Bachmann may actually know something.

Conservatives’ 25-year goal of ‘defunding the left’ revealed by ACORN controversy | Raw Story.

Read it, visit ACORN’s website, and give them a contribution.

Why do for-profit health insurance companies even exist?

Just asking.

Who decided it was a good idea to fatten the wallets of stockholders on Wall Street by denying claims and raising premiums and copays year after year?

Who decided inefficiencies and overheads at insurance offices and peanut buttered over every medical provider was smart?

When will we pull those parasitic weeds out and stuff therm in the yard waste bin