Archive for the ‘God’s Own Party’ Category

ND Republicans demand…

Thursday, April 18th, 2013

…that these children be born with their recent legislation.

But they are too stingy with tax dollars to pay for their medical care. That’s God’s problem.

As its compassionate physician author notes:

“It is one thing for families (or a mother) to [choose] to take this on; it’s quite another to force them.”

Demographics # 2

Friday, April 5th, 2013

Also on the Daily Dish was a graph that blew me away. A longer version of it from the World Bank can be found here.

This is another trend I’ve heard about. The flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico has been seizing up. It might be natural to think this is because of the hazards of crossing our newly heavily patrolled borders but that may be an illusion. For one thing the Mexican economy seems to be improving despite the the drug war.

More tellingly the birth rate hass changed drastically from my youth. when I was in high school Mexican women averaged close to 7 children. Today they are having just a little over 2 children.

If women suffering in the current GOP oriented free enterprise exalting, universal health care resistant, economy doesn’t make a difference then reduced paranoia about illegal immigration over diminishing numbers of illegals will. The GOP still has gun control to worry voters about but gays bashing doesn’t cut it so much anymore.

The GOP’s 80 billion, oops – 2 trillion, oops – 6 trillion war

Friday, March 29th, 2013

Back in 2002 Newsweek’s economist Robert Samuelson shrugged at the estimated $80 billion cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’ve never forgotten that poor prediction which helped assure me we could handle Iraq. He was very wrong and he admitted this in 2007 in a column I’ve only now just discovered.

But even his 2007 mea culpa was off by 100 or 200%.

Scotty Walker’s jobs program has put Wisconsin….

Friday, March 29th, 2013

in 44th place for job development.

Meanwhile the new Republican hero Walker is following exMinnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty’s lead by preparing for a run for the next presidential nomination.

How the GOP’s private enterprise health care costs stack up against the world’s socialist models.

Friday, March 29th, 2013

There are 20 more graphs here that compare other medical costs. They are all just as bad or worse.

North Dakota’s blankety blank Republicans

Tuesday, March 26th, 2013

North Dakota’s GOP has taken the lead on fighting abortion having made it illegal from six weeks after conception.

That’s one part of their recent legislative action.

The law that really cranked my chain was the one the forbade the abortion of any fetus because of a disability. Its supposed to be a high minded Godly law, proof that the GOP cares about children. Tosh. The GOP doesn’t give a shit about children or their parents. The story I was sent about the state of Minnesota doing its best not to fund special education proves my point.

North Dakota Women carrying disabled babies must now give birth to them but can expect no help from taxpayers to help them raise or educate their disabled children. That’s the GOP today. Its a party of no-nothings, hypocrites and assholes. They’ll spend tax money like Indiana to give well-heeled parents a way to avoid public schools that are stuck teaching the disabled children that Republicans are unwilling to levy taxes to educate. Or like in Nebraska they will refuse to fund neo-natal care if there is the smallest chance some wet back from Mexico might have her fetus examined at public expense.

Don’t worry I haven’t offended by Buddy. He told me he stopped reading my blog because I was so unfair to Republicans.

If I do go to the next GOP precinct caucuses I’ll have a couple questions.

BTW. If I do run for the School Board I hope someone throws my line about no-nothings, hypocrites and assholes at me. Its just the kind of thing I would expect from an asshole.

Oh, and how can I resist mentioning the efforts of the GOP to protect children from their Gay parents. The GOP may no longer want to be tagged with that public stand but there is little doubt the protesters against gay marriage out in front of the Supreme Court today are all Republicans, Senator Portman be damned.

Indiana School Vouchers

Tuesday, March 26th, 2013

I don’t know if this USA Today story on voucher payments in Indiana has all the details in the story I first read but one thing about it makes me cringe. It plays into the hands of the worst elements of the Republican Party which took over Indiana in a landslide two years ago. Every blue or purple state where they got such a Tea Party landslide has been using that muscle to enforce all the GOP Dogmas in the book.

I’ve had a lot to say about vouchers on Lincoln Democrat over the years. I’m for them when public schools are cesspools. I’m not interested in them when a state has allowed its funding mechanism to shortchange poor neighborhoods. Sadly my search function no longer seems to go back far enough to find any of my old posts on the subject.

The Dixiecrat GOP has brought among its many perverted legacies like voter suppression, and allowing the poor to be strip mined by usurious pay day loans. Now its added to this the abandonment of public schools with lots of poor and black students.

While it is as yet unclear to me whether this will happen in Indiana I suspect it will happen. In Minnesota it would be like giving money to the many well to do folks who send their children to Breck, Blake or Marshall School.

Its intended as one more nail in the coffin of unions, in this case teacher’s unions. My posts have been none too charitible where the Duluth teacher’s Union leadership is concerned. In my case its not a zero sum game of union destruction. Its contempt for the union leaders acting in concert with previous administrations to stifle dissent.

Local Control

Tuesday, March 12th, 2013

Every third person in Mississippi is obese. Drinking super-sized sodas with 51 sugar cubes worth of sweetness in them is one reason why. But the GOP controlled legislature wants to protect their diabetes prone voters from having any local community deny them the right to chug those sodas down like the “nanny state” Mayor of New York attempted to do.

A Judge recently overturned New York’s right to impose its anti super size rule because it unfairly imposes the limit on only some soda vendors. Even so the Mayor and the city council were exercising another notion that has been popular with Republicans – “local control.” I had to agree with the Mississippi City Councilor who resents the state legislature clipping his municipality’s wings.

Local control has been a big deal in discussions of Education. Nationally Republicans moaned about how Federal Education rules kept tying the hands of local school boards. GOP Governor Tim Pawlenty used “local control” as his ultimate justificatioin for letting the Duluth School District push through its Red Plan without a routine referendum. I always thought that that was a shoddy excuse for letting the community decide the fate of the Red Plan. The School Board of 2006 that gave us the Red Plan never campaigned to institute the near half billion dollar monstrosity whose costs have continued to creep up over the last six years.

I don’t demand pure consistency from politicians. I’m not always consistent myself. Times change and flexibility has its virtues. Still, when its just an empty slogan its not much to hang one’s hat on.

The America the GOP is trying to preserve and bolster

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

God forbid we have a “death tax.” It will interfere with the creation of an aristocracy. More Plantations please!

Statuary Hall mystery partly answered

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

I presumed in an earlier post that Each state got to choose which of its citizens would represent it in Statuary Hall. That got me thinking. What were the politics behind Rosa Park’s being chosen for Alabama.

I’m not sure the Alabama State legislature had anything to do with it at all. Turns out the Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson authored the law that got the Congress to pay for a statue of Parks.

Recent news stories I’ve found suggest that some in Alabama think she should be simalarly honored in their state legislature. They were given the right to replace one of their two statutes six or so years ago. They had Helen Keller and General “Fightin Joe” Joseph Wheeler. Helen took her place in 2009

Ah, I gave Alabama’s Republican regime too much credit. Rosa was authorized by Congress.

Each state can send two statues of famous citizens for display in the Capitol, but the 2,700-pound Rosa Parks statue was commissioned by Congress — the first since 1873, and at nine feet tall, the first full-sized statue of an African-American in the Capitol complex. A bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has been displayed in the Rotunda since 1986.

I guess they get three statutes whether their Republicans want one or not.

I checked out Minnesota’s two statue representatives. I couldn’t recall anything about either of them except that one had a county named after him.

Ditto Sully – on the waste of taxpayer’s money in Iraq…

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

…under GOP management.

Other contracts went to cronies: the top contracting officer in Hilla awarded $8.6 million to a contractor, Philip Bloom, in exchange for “bribes and kickbacks, expensive vehicles, business-class airline tickets, computers, jewelry, and other items.” Still others got needless cash infusions: one unspecified school requested $10,000 for refurbishments and got $70,000. Government contracting databases didn’t even have “an information management system that keeps track of everything built,”

Mitch McConnell’s sense of history

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

In the NY Times story about Rosa Park’s statue being placed into Statuary Hall there was passing mention of what Republican Senator Mitch McConnell had to say about Rosa:

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said that Mrs. Parks’s decision to get arrested rather than to give up her seat helped unite the country.

“For some, Rosa Parks served as an inspiration to stand up against injustice,” he said. “For others, she was a spur to reflection and self-examination, and the reconciliation of cherished ideals of freedom, democracy and constitutional rights with the reality of life as others lived it.”

Helped unite the Country?

Well, if it had I would have expected the Senator to say something other than that the GOP’s top priority at the beginning of the First Obama Administration was to see that it was a one term Presidency. Now that’s a call to unity.

I realize that GOP congressman might have a better chance to show their decency if they hadn’t let the dogs of demagoguery out in the Tea Party. But the GOP, the Party of Lincoln gambled everything on a “southern strategy in 1964 and 1968. The Dixiecrats became Republicans and purged the folks who’d invitved them to the party in the first place calling them RINO’s.

For all I know Mitch was being very brave to say nice awkward things about Rosa Parks what with all the folks in his party who are convinced that Obama is a communist. That was very much the message in the 1960′s from stellar folks like J Edgar Hoover. The NAACP was a commie front and you know what that made Rosa Parks. A dupe.

Mitch represents a Party that has taken that attitude to heart. Abraham Lincoln! Who’s that?

I suppose I ought to give Alabama more credit. Their legislature authorized Park’s inclusion in the pantheon of great Americans and that meant its Jefferson Davis inspired Republican Party approved it. That required some of the self reflection McConnell talked about. I’d be less caustic if I thought she wasn’t just being used to hide behind like Herman Cain.

Here are some of today’s Republicans in more candid moments.

“Chocolate Eggs”

Friday, March 1st, 2013

My sorry contribution to cartoon polemics:

Burning my house down

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

Some kids have been talking about burning my house down. So says Robin Washington of the DNT. He got a call from someone in the know who said a lot of children on the school buses are angered by my snow sculpture. Unlike the Republican who jumped to the conclusion, quite rightly, that my pachyderm was meant to twit the right these kids see the old confederate flag and think I’m cheering on the Dixiecrats who still can’t get over the Civil War.

Robin and I had a long cordial talk. He thought that there were a lot of folks in Duluth who wouldn’t get my point, a point which he surmised right away. Well, I did make a snow sculpture four years ago of Obama’s campaign logo. I made a snow sculpture of Obama himself pondering a globe. I’ve spent six years writing spiteful posts about the Grand Old Party. Heck the year this blog started I made a snow sculpture of Old Abe as he sits under the shelter of the Lincoln Memorial. (more…)

My Favorite Movie Pt 3 – ctd. (another unedited late night mental ramble)

Thursday, February 21st, 2013

Its eleven PM the night after I began the above named post. I’ve watched two more great hours of the British series The Hour. This season is every bit as engrossing as the first season. But now on to ramble and postpone sleep for another hour despite the likelihood that my grandsons will wake me early tomorrow.

I suggested that my sculpture and not movies would launch this late night ramble. Yeah, and I found more unexpected back up on the Daily Dish which I will link to before I go to bed.

I mentioned that my sculpture led to a single pro and con email. I’ve posted the pro in full. I won’t do the same with the con. I opened it the moment it came in my in box and just skimmed it. It was full of outrage which was over the top. The lead sentence gives a fair hint at its author’s appoplexy:

“Can you imagine a Duluth where a DFL mule was displayed sporting the Stars and Bars?  The city would be in an uproar. But slandering a symbol of conservatism is a cause to celebrate?  Perhaps a more appropriate sculpture would be one of the DNC Donkey sporting a swastika.”

I was delighted (more…)

My favorite movie – Pt 2 (another unedited late night mental ramble)

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

Author Harold Holzter makes a strong case for the Cooper’s Union speech being the event that made him President. You could read Doris Kearn’s Goodwin’s book and not come to that conclusion. You would be right to say that had it not been for the Lincoln Douglass Debates, Cooper’s Union would not have happened. You could go back further and say that had Lincoln not seen the slave markets of New Orleans on his one visit to the City in his youth he would never have become President either. But he did become President and he had to grapple with ideas that were foreign to all but a very few Americans and reshape America’s beliefs in the process. What was at the core of this change is what makes me love Groundhog’s Day. Not reinvention, for America was not reinvented by the Civil War. It was redemption. Thomas Jefferson felicitous claim for human rights was hoisted upon Abe Lincoln’s shoulders and given new life. And that is what Harold Holtzer’s book begins to explain. It is a story in part of Abraham Lincoln the historian. (more…)

My favorite movie – Pt 1 (another late night unedited mental ramble)

Tuesday, February 19th, 2013

I’ve been watching and rewatching some marvelous British Television series lately. Tonight I watched two more hours of “The Hour” on Amazon’s live stream for $1.99 an episode. Its a steal. Last week I finished watching the first season of “Island at War” almost as good. Last night I rewatched the sixth episode of “Call the Midwife” with my daughter who is seeing it for the first time. Like all the other episodes, both first and second time, I teared up. I also got the first season of a good American series finished the other day at about two episodes a night. Its Netflix’s American take on the British political thriller “House of Cards.” The American version stars Kevin Spacey who I saw as an extra in the Disney movie “Iron Will.”

(Will is a so-so movie but it was filmed in Duluth and Two Harbors and it will be at the Zinema some Saturday soon.)

This little post, is an introduction of sorts to a few more to follow. (more…)

Mel likes it

Tuesday, February 19th, 2013

Most of the people who have looked at my current snow sculpture don’t know what to make of it. I have, however, gotten two emails regarding it – one pro and one con.

Here’s the pro:

Hi, Harry,

Thanks for your marvelous snow sculpture mocking the current Republican Party. You did a great snow job on the party that is all snow job:) I posted my comments about your sculpture at ” G.O.P. – The revenge of the Confederacy” at
http://magree.blogspot.com/2013/02/gop-revenge-of-confederacy.html

You might be interested also in my blog entry ” Elephants sue GOP” at
http://magree.blogspot.com/2013/02/elephants-sue-gop.html

I hope the weather stays below freezing for a long, long time so that your sculpture lasts a long, long time.

- Mel

When symbolism falls on deaf eyes

Sunday, February 17th, 2013

I’ve been quite amused at how opaque my sculpture’s meaning is to most people. I console myself with the knowledge that most can tell its an elephant lofting a Rebel flag. To what purpose apparently mystifies but that’s OK. Head Scratching is helpful in more than just itch suppression.

White Elephant

Friday, February 15th, 2013

or Southern Strategy. Take your pick.