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dumb and dumber -- no, dumber than that. a lot
Wanna know the breathless latest about Sarah Palin's interview with Glen Beck? Simon Maloy's got the poop, if you can swallow it, on the excellent Media Matters:
I'm watching the Glenn Beck interview of Sarah Palin, and it's really leaving me speechless that two people who are so woefully and determinedly uninformed have such an impact on the national discourse.
Beck just asked Palin if she'd heard about the Federal Reserve's record profits for last year, and then bemoaned that "nobody's having hearings on the Fed, nobody is looking for a windfall profit tax on the Fed, we can't even open the Fed's books." Palin responded by thanking Beck for "bringing this to light," adding: "I don't know anybody else who is."
There's a very simple reason why no one else is talking about taxing the Fed's profits or having hearings or even discussing this -- because people who care to know what they're talking about already know that 100 percent of the Fed's profits go to the Treasury. Every single cent. There is no talk of a windfall profits tax because it's already effectively at 100 percent.
Beck just asked Palin if she'd heard about the Federal Reserve's record profits for last year, and then bemoaned that "nobody's having hearings on the Fed, nobody is looking for a windfall profit tax on the Fed, we can't even open the Fed's books." Palin responded by thanking Beck for "bringing this to light," adding: "I don't know anybody else who is."
There's a very simple reason why no one else is talking about taxing the Fed's profits or having hearings or even discussing this -- because people who care to know what they're talking about already know that 100 percent of the Fed's profits go to the Treasury. Every single cent. There is no talk of a windfall profits tax because it's already effectively at 100 percent.
Indeed, so wonderful are our rightwing media and punditocracy that FOX News is largely ignoring the earthquake disaster in Haiti, Pat Robertson is blaming the disaster on the Haitians themselves for incurring the wrath of God (they made a literal pact with the Devil, you see, in order to get rid of their French overlords), and Rush Limbaugh is advocating that none of us send any aid donations because ". . . we've already donated to Haiti. It's called the US income tax" -- part of perhaps the most disgusting piece of propaganda in billionaire Scumbaugh's long career of racist, neo-Nazi hatemongering.
I subscribe, for research reasons, to a bundle of faux-Christian rightwing organizations as well as a few more moderate ones. Today I've been bombarded with exhortations to donate funds by appallingly godless secular organizations (e.g., Alternet, MoveOn, Care2, Color of Change) and by out-and-out accursed rationalist/atheist ones (notably the Center for Inquiry, which has a subdivision, SHARE, precisely to funnel funds to Medecins sans Frontieres in emergencies like this). Moderate sites (e.g., Religion Dispatches) are at least putting links online to the aid charities.
Meanwhile, however, from the Christian rightists (e.g., the AFA, Focus on the Family, OneNewsNow) there's been an absolute bloody deafening silence. I find it impossible to reconcile this with their repeatedly bellowed claims that by definition atheists and agnostics -- indeed, anyone outside their own particular little cult -- lack the very possibility of a moral compass. Are they themselves so entirely devoid of moral values that they cannot recognize a correct course of action when it's standing there right in front of them?
By contrast, those disgusting secular degenerates at The Nation have mounted a useful resource page for those seeking the best way to send funds: it's here.
ETA: I'm not a huge Keith Olbermann fan, but sometimes -- as in this comment on the Robertson/Limbaugh obscenities -- he hits the nail right on the head.
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David Icke is in really quite a different category from faux-pious jerks like Robertson. Icke's a cult leader, recognized by all as having a tiny following and being Way Out There in his beliefs. Robertson, by contrast, is supposedly a pillar of a mainstream majority religion, has consulted seriously with and been talked of respectfully by US Presidents and other major political figures, has a massive following and a massive business empire, and once himself ran as a Presidential candidate. In other words, he is, unlike Icke, no mere extremist-fringe figure, even though his ideas -- because of both their counmter-reality loopiness and the degree of venom that powers them -- are obviously extremist and fringe . . . if we define "fringe" as "on the most tenuous fringe of sanity".
they do not do the image of the US good
I know this very well. A surprising number of Americans, though, including intelligent and well meaning people in among the boneheads, are startlingly unaware of the devastating damage these hatemongering creeps do to the international image of their country, and thereby to its foreign dealings overall.
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And a startling number are proud not to care.
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And a startling number are proud not to care.
Yeah, that's the part that's truly startling: "I'm damaging the interests of my country and myself and THIS IS A GOOD THING, so I'M GOING TO DO MORE OF IT."
It's like the cretinous TeaBaggers who're fighting like hell to shorten their own life expectancies.
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