Somebody forgot to tell Hillary Clinton the Democratic presidential race is over and Barack Obama won. Obama has captured more state contests, more votes and more of the pledged convention delegates who will help decide which Democrat faces Republican Sen. John McCain in November’s presidential election.
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What you need to know to prevent a corporate takeover of the final, truly public, sphere.
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Rush Limbaugh has engaged in voter fraud, and in my opinion, treason.
No, seriously.
Here’s why:
I’ve commented a few times on this Rush Limbaugh phenomenon, but I don’t think I’ve really expressed my feelings. In case you haven’t heard, Limbaugh called on his listeners to change party affiliation and vote for Hillary in Ohio and Texas because, apparently, he’s terrified of Barack Obama.
A lot of Republicans went out and did just that. The problem is that at least in Ohio, they engaged in voter fraud, which is a felony.
But forget for the moment that they broke the law. Let’s look at it from a strictly intellectual standpoint.
Democracy is great. It is so great in fact, that millions of Americans have died to protect it over the years, from the Revolutionary War, to Iraq today. Our country was founded on the notion that the private citizen was to hold the power, not a monarch or a select minority of rich elitists. The vote is our greatest gift and weapon against fascism.
The Republicans who call themselves good Americans and threw their votes away in an attempt to maintain power over the White House should be ashamed of themselves, because they’ve betrayed the very idea of democracy.
You have a chance to vote for the person who you want to be the most powerful man or woman in the world, you have a chance to shape the reality that we live in by exercising your voice honestly and openly. But the knuckleheads in Limbaugh’s audience decided it was more important to preserve Republican power than to engage in democracy. The urge to supress all political opposition regardless the consequences is called fascism, my friends. The political spectrum is not just about left and right; there are other things to take into account. The up and down struggle is between freedom and fascism.
For example, you can be a liberal fascist, or a conservative fascist. An example of a liberal fascist could be Stalin, or Castro. An example of a conservative fascist could be Henry the 8th, or Dick Cheney. Forcing your own political agenda on the populace and supressing the opposition through fraud or violence is appealing to both the left and the right. This leads to massive disenfranchisement, and sometimes millions of people being killed.
There are freedom fighters on both sides of the aisle. Ron Paul is an example of a conservative who leans towards freedom, rather than fascism. If more liberals and conservatives got their views from reading rather than the radio or TV then no matter who gets nominated, we would be veering away from fascism. It’s frightening how much power one maniac with a radio show can wield in our society. Make up your own minds and vote based on your values, no matter what they are.
I have friends who are fighting in Iraq right now because they believe democracy is worth fighting for. But Rush Limbaugh and his ilk don’t seem to care, as they’re so willing to squander that sacrifice and throw away their votes. That kind of reckless disregard for American principles is not only voter fraud, it is treason.
Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, resulting in millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005. They don’t think they can get them back. Things that make you go… hhmmmmmm….
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EU official blasts contemporary Chinese human rights record; says the West needs to speak with one voice.
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Deployment of the 160 square-meter towing kite offset up to 20% of the engine
’s power (and carbon emissions), saving an initial $1000 per day in fuel costs.
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Federal drug regulators, in announcing Wednesday that the mystery contaminant in heparin was an inexpensive, unapproved ingredient altered to mimic the real thing, moved closer to concluding that Americans might be the latest victims of lethal Chinese drug counterfeiting.
Governor Bill Richardson has today decided to endorse presidential candidate Barak Obama.
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Messing with the Minds of my Maoist Classmates
Full disclosure: I go to an arts school that is overwhelmingly liberal in student and faculty terms. And by overwhelmingly I mean Maoists march on our campus nearly every week, without too much hassle.
(Even further disclosure: most of them do not know the organization is Maoist. Nor who Mao was.)
In my creative non fiction class students are supposed to pick a creative non-fiction piece for the class to read as an assignment. Last week a fellow student assigned a portion of Al Franken’s “Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot.”
Entertaining as it was and as much as I agree with the kid’s politics, I find it hard to stomach his man-crush on Barack Obama, who is featured in 99.896 percent of his “political blog”’s posts.
My teacher has assigned a number of articles about the corruption of big businesses, malpractice cases, and articles condemning the Surge.
For those of you who have wondered, or speculated about liberal bias on college campuses, here is your answer.
Yes, it does exist.
But I can only speak from my experience: going to school in a hardcore Democratic state and the base of operations for Obama’s campaign. Chicago is as Democrat as Democrat can get. (U of C is on another planet.) If I went to school in a red state, things might be very different. Because I don’t know what the curriculum is all about there I can’t say that there is a conservative bias there. If anyone has any thoughts or experience on that, let me know.
Anyway, in order to balance things out and to annoy my bleeding heart colleague I assigned the class the longest current profile of John McCain I could find on the web, courtesy of the New Yorker.
Does that make me bad?
btw: To all of the people who have voted for Hillary Clinton because Rush Limbaugh told you to, because you think that she’d be easier to beat in the GE…
I could write a sermon or a novella on why you should not be allowed to vote or drive an automobile, but, please, for all our sakes,
get a life.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080324/vonhoffman
Here is my favorite quote: “Nonetheless, Obama has a signal accomplishment to his credit, a substantial one, which may change the shape of politics. If elected he will be the first to enter the office without financial backing from the major business, industrial or professional groups with their PACs, their contribution bundlers and lobbyists.”
Are you fucking kidding me? Here is a list of Obama’s top contributors, courtesy of Open Secrets:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.asp?id=N00009638&cycle=2008
At the top of the list, you see Goldman Sachs. Later followed by J.P. Morgan, Google, and Time Warner.
To claim that Obama will owe nothing to big business interests is to wedge your head so far up your own ass that it comes out on top of your neck where it should be, so that everything seems perfectly fine, when in fact it is not.
I can go on and on about things that conservatives do and ideas that they have that drive me nuts, but this is one of my major bones to pick with the liberal establishment: They are so naive that a word doesn’t exist in the English language to describe its extremity.
The Nation, like so many of the Democrats, liberals, and Progressives in this country have gotten so desperate to drive Bush and his ilk out of office that they’re willing to worship anyone with a decent chance of beating them. This used to be my favorite magazine, I felt that they really represented my values, but now they have lined up behind Obama and won’t take him to task for anything. They maligned Ralph Nader when he announced his candidacy. Again.
Nevermind that the mainstream candidates do not reflect true liberal values, the Nation will still support them. You can call Hillary and Barack liberal all you want, it doesn’t change the fact that they are both Clintonite Centrists whose real devotion is to Wall Street, not the average Americans who will be voting them into office.
The left has been blinded by the big, bright shiny lights of Barack’s campaign rallies, and turned tone-def by the grandiosity of his speeches, so that when scandals like Rezko and Nafta come out, they can say with all plausible deniability that they have neither seen nor heard any evil regarding their chosen one.
At times like this I wish I could stomach a Republican candidate. I really do.
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