They know how to make the most of an Opportunity. They know how to rally their members.
AND Conservatives know how to boil down their Ideas into simple Talking Points, that they can easily repeat, and easily pawn off on their Independent friends, neighbors, and acquaintances.
Short, sweet, and to the point. Agree, or Disagree, one thing about Conservatives -- you always know where they stand. And you usually know Why, too.
As this year's Conservative Rally CPAC, winds to a close, some New Talking Points have emerged.
Question is, Will Dems sit idlely by, saying "Oh that's nice. Good for them," or will Dems take note, and respond forcefully, factually, and with good humor, to the "War for Hearts and Minds" that is about to take place?
If you DON'T Study, DON'T play by the Rules, and DON'T CARE who is hurt by your careless actions -- would you expect an "all expenses paid" Scholarship? ... or record Bonuses? ... or more free Mad Money than you know what to do with?
Hardly!
Yet that is exactly what the reckless Wall Street Bankers got -- HUGE Rewards -- FOR BEHAVING BADLY!
In some circles, this is call Co-dependency and "Enabling" ...
In America we call it "Too Big to Fail".
Well Alan Grayson and Ron Paul, are about expose this Trillion Dollar "reward for failure" system, for what it is ...
Rep. Alan Grayson on the Fed Bailing Out Big Banks:
"You Don't Give Scholarships to Kids Who Fail"
Back in late September, Alan Grayson (Big D-FL08) grilled Federal Reserve General Counsel Scott Alvarez on whether or not the Federal Reserve has manipulated the stock and futures market. Since this hasn't been diaried and Sunday is a slow news day, I thought it would be fun to watch Alan Grayson in action in a bit of a flashback.
(UPDATE: Unfortunately and oddly, the video is no longer working for some strange reason. Good thing I transcribed it when I did. I am looking for another version of the same vide, so hang in there until I can find it
The only thing Alan Grayson should Apologize for ...
was not having the Fed's Price List
for their services!
(imo)
Perhaps Grayson can be excused, since "The Fed" does favors for its clients, far from the scrutiny of prying eyes ... giving away Billions to their good ole Buddies, both Foreign and Domestic, without so much as a Receipt or and IOU exchanging hands ...
It's easy to see how this shady activity just might get "mis-construed":
Alan Grayson: Which Foreigners got the Fed's 500 Billion?
So, I've seen some comments here and elsewhere (DKos) that mock the people calling out and protesting against the crooked GOP agenda of Lindsey Graham (and the Elitist pro-Establishment interests that he represents).
But you all should be rooting for the protesters here, and not accepting the U.S. Media line that the status-quo GOP agenda is somehow to be perceived as less "extreme".
For it is the well heeled LindseyGraham-GeorgeBush-RushLimbaugh Republicans who are the fascists, the Human Torture enthusiasts, the buddies of the Wall Street crooks, the racists, and the War Mongering World Empire murderers -- not the people shouting out in protest at Lindsey Graham.
The protesters of Lindsey Graham, who Graham himself decries for calling Bush a "War Criminal" (which of course he is), are largely Libertarians and old-school Constitutional Republicans that disapprove of the GOP War and Wall Street agenda.
Meet Ron Paul supporter, tea party organizer, Idaho GOP official and now facing felony charges Challiss McAffee.
Idaho resident Challiss McAffee has been "charged with felony aggravated assault after police say he pulled a handgun on a resident whose home he told police he was photographing as part of a foreclosure investigation." When the resident began questioning McAffee about what he was doing, the confrontation escalated, culminating in McAffee brandishing his gun. McAffee is a member of the Ada County Republican Central Committee and "one of 231 voting members of the state Republican Central Committee."
I love the smell of People Power in the morning! The overwhelmin' tide of grassroots anger came to a climax yesterday with the Teabaggin' protests all over this great country of ours. Millions and millions of patriots were out there makin' their voices heard and scarin' the socialists silly with their message of "Stop Governing!" and by the way "Stop the Gays From Gettin' Married!" And don't think this is just talk -- we're forcin' action to be taken at the very highest levels of the liberal governing elite.
For example, you may remember the total sham from a few weeks ago when Docudharma took away my trusted user status under the laughable excuse of performin' "software enhancements." Well, I am happy to report that the Teabaggin' protests have so frightened our liberal Docudharma overlords that they have restored my trusted user status! We DO have the power to stand up to oppression!
And there is an even bigger victory as a result of the Teabaggin' protests. Ron Paul is takin' advantage of this populist anger and wants to heavily arm it. Paul's idea is to hire ordinary citizens and send 'em into international waters to fight pirates:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been one of the hot button issues for the current Congress controlled by the Democrats. One would think that the Democrats would be intrerested in defending our rights. We would be wrong in thinking so (IMHO):
Lest we think that opposition to the war and occupation of Iraq is limited to the left in this country, consider the lineup of speakers for a March 16 Iraq Moratorium event in San Francisco:
Several of the usual suspects: Sean Penn; Cindy Sheehan; the Rev. Gregory Stewart, senior minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church; Matt Gonzalez, ex-president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and rumored vice presidential candidate on the Green Party ticket.
And one Justin Raimondo, libertarian and paleoconservative (look it up; we did) author who also runs the website Antiwar.com, where he writes things like:
Our foreign policy has put us in mortal danger, and not only because it empowers the worldwide Islamist insurgency that aims to attack the American homeland, but also because the "Iraq recession" is fast threatening to become the Iraq depression. The U.S. is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and the $3 trillion war is going to sink us if it isn't stopped.
It's an interesting mix, to say the least, and helps explain how Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich could at least agree on one thing - that the invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake, and we should bring our troops home now. (It was interesting, at the Oct. 27 regional antiwar march in Chicago, that Ron Paul's was the only presidential campaign represented, with signs, campaign material and even an airplane flyover with a banner.)
When I posted this on another unnamed blog, some commenters pointed out that Raimondo's politics leave a little to be desired, and that I probably wouldn't agree with him on much besides the war. OK, granted. My whole point here (aside from some shameless promotion of the Moratorium) is that if antiwar sentiment in this country includes nearly two-thirds of the population, the Iraq Moratorium must be a big tent -- or big umbrella, if you will -- that brings together people who have the common cause of ending the war and occupation of Iraq. That single issue unifies us. I met a Ron Paul enthusiast at our March Iraq Moratorium vigil in Milwaukee, so it's not just hypothetical; people are uniting to end this war.
Embracing the conspiracy theories presents it's problems. End Game states the purpose of secret organizations is to cull the population of the earth down to 500 million. Now I could just take the blue pill and dismiss all of this as the rantings of insane people but the NWO paragidms actually match and align perfectly with the last 20 years of American history, even longer.
Homeland Security claims to protect the Homeland yet www.spp.gov meets several times over several years to merge the "Homeland" into a three nation union.
www.projectcensored.org documents the media blacklisting of verboten topics.
The US population is a mere 300 million out of the world 6 billion. We consume and waste far to many resources. The technology has been developed and exported. Our moral fiber is under continuous attack and the founding principles of law are being deliberately discarded at alarming rates.
Not something left to the random statistical arena of a series of chance events, it must be by plan and design.
Now if you take all of that in as fact and a black guy, a woman, and a war mongering pyschopath are presented to you as the potential next leader of the "free" world you will chalk the whole affair up the the planned destruction of America it is.
What is the answer then? Have fun. In these, the last of days not having the financial resources for that remote survivalist bunker way back up in the woods I might as well have fun. Send an encrypted message to your international friends, spell Fuck You NSA in laser pointers on your front lawn, take the battery out of your cell phone on long trips and "cheating" on your taxes is American Patriotism at it's best. Educate your loved ones.
God says the Biblical Apocalypse need not involve fire and brimstone and the elimination of all on earth, He may accept the refusal of soldiers to fire upon other people because they were ordered to or perhaps even a sizable portion of fully awake people with a concern about their fellow man.
Hey, you will grant me one last Horse Ride though, won't you.
And was Bush the third anti-Christ?
http://www.crystalinks.com/mab...
The following is what I wish Rep. Ron Paul would say, in what is surely soon to come, his concession speech as he withdraws from the race for the Presidential nomination of the Republican party:
"My fellow Americans, each of us, myself included, is here because of a lie. The most immediate of these is the lie that the war our government is currently waging in Iraq is one which is necessary and vital to our national security. I have sought the nomination of my party for the office of President of the United States because this lie is both outrageous in its sheer falsehood, and one which has helped contribute to the continuing decline of both the Republican party and the conservative movement in America.
Despite the fact that now the overwhelming majority of Americans have come to agree with us that the war in Iraq is an illegal and abysmal failure, the powers that be of the party and the media have strived to silence and belittle this view, along with my campaign for the nomination. They do so in a large part to perpetuate the many lies they have given to justify their failed and failing policy in the Middle East, but also because they have a bigger lie to protect.
Our nation's so-called leaders have long been struck with a terrible affliction. While composing paeans to our democracy, they adore the power they wield and fear the people, who might take it away from them. They seek to concentrate more and more power at the federal level of government, giving the smallest number of your representatives the greatest power over your lives. Under the leadership of our own party, they have decided that granting near-absolute power over us in the federal government is not enough, but that even greater power over each and every American should be granted to an unaccountable "Unitary Executive" They seek to grant that executive power to imprison Americans without trial, spy on them without warrants, and torture them to compel them to give evidence against themselves. They seek to wrest the power to declare war away from the Congress, and to put it in the hands of a single person, who you elect in a process allowed only once every four years.
There is no depth to which they will not descend in this quest. They go so far as to claim that these powers, which King George the Third could never have dreamed having at his disposal, are in the Constitution of the United States.
Implicit in all of these actions are two messages, which cannot be denied. The first is that you, the American people, cannot be trusted. Our nation, which supposedly is governed by we the people, is simply too important, they claim, for you to be allowed to be made aware of its administration. From the secrecy with which they attempt to conceal their multi-million dollar earmarks to that which they use for even the legal arguments supposedly justifying their spying on you, they show their distrust and contempt of the American citizen. The current leader for the nomination of our Republican party is a man who has not only stated but had written into a law bearing his name that you cannot even be trusted to not be swayed by political speech.
As sure as these people are that you are fools and traitors, they are sure that you will believe that they are trustworthy and benevolent in all things. At every turn, they suggest that you need not worry, that you can allow them to run your lives by fiat, and that they would never deceive you or harm you. Even when their lies are laid bare, when their lies about the war and terrorism, about the economy and their own spending are right there for everyone to see, they continue to insist that you simply take them at their word.
What they did not count on was the American people they despise. We remember the legacy of our founders, who questioned a ruler who declared that the people were fools. We remember that they taught us to question our government, and that we had the right to decide its actions for ourselves. And what they forgot what that they left us a blueprint for how to create such a society: the Constitution of the United States of America.
They will hope that this quest for the nomination of the Republican party was not merely a battle, but the entirety of the war over the nature of our country. They are wrong. While this fight is over, the true battle is only beginning. We know that we are a good nation of reputable citizens, and that they are the brigands and liars. And we will not surrender this nation to the likes of them.
We will do this by trusting our fellow citizens and refusing to accept the empty promises of known miscreants and liars. We will do this by reclaiming the legacy our forebears left to us: our Constitution.
I cannot thank all of you, who have supported my campaign in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, nearly enough for all that you have done. What I can do is promise you that this is not the end of our journey, but merely the end of its beginning.
This nation belongs to us: the American people. Our message has been stated loud and clear: we are coming to take it back!"
One of the key buzzwords of this Presidential race is change. The voices of change cumulated in a Democratic victory in 2006, and since then, the voices of change have only gotten louder and louder. Supposedly. And yet, when we look at the front-runners for the election, we see that the conventional candidates -- Hillary Clinton and John McCain -- are poised to take the nomination starting with Super Tuesday. A showing below 15% in South Carolina could doom John Edwards, while both Hillary and John McCain are leading by substantial margins in California. While the Republican primary is a lot messier than the Democratic primary, it seems that with his wins in South Carolina and Louisiana, Mike Huckabee's home turf, it seems that McCain is an odds-on favorite to take over the Republican nomination.
This brings us to the question of change -- do we really want change? The buzzword of this election has been change, yet we see the two establishment candidates, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, establishing themselves as frontrunners in the primary. It seems that people on both parties say that they want change, yet saying that they want change and actually having the courage to vote for change are two different things. It is a lot like a bad relationship -- we say that we want to break up, yet when it comes time to actually do it, it is much more comfortable to stay in the relationship than it is to make a clean break and start over. We say that we don't like where we are and want to move and make a fresh start; however, when it comes down to do it, we are more afraid of the unknown than we are of staying in a bad situation.
While the campaign pundits frame health care exclusively around the single issue of who pays there are several other unmentionable elephants in the room.
With the new advances in genetic testing proving "you will get" disease X,Y or Z will insurance comanies deny coverage. Do you see a marked increase in the promotion of medical screenings?
Marketing study. Pick up any woman's magazine. Count the ads dedicated to drugs, along with the legal disclaimers in number two font. Can you throw a rock toward the next CVS?
On this next one I'm just going to give you the Google keywords
Bill Frist+immunity for big pharma
And thus begat it's ugly cousin
http://www.hhs.gov/aspr/barda/...
Now the obvious answer is to require people to buy health insurance just like mAssachusetts did.
http://www.zwire.com/site/news... I do, I have a 5000 per year policy and they routinely deny claims using a systematic basis. Zero information is available about what is and what is not "covered" beforehand, you don't get that until the benefit denial statement.
Because he is against the war, even some Democrats and liberals support Ron Paul's candidacy for the White House. That's because they're not taking a close look at Paul. Unfortunately, it is necessary to help some do that. Fortunately, Paul makes it easy.
There are so many things wrong with this line of argument that I don't even know where to start. Oh wait, yes I do. Let's begin with: Lincoln didn't go to war to "get rid of the original intent of the republic." You have to know even less about history than Tim Russert - I wouldn't have thought it possible - to say such a ridiculous thing. Or you have to be a bit too willing, eager even, to marry libertarian political ideology with neo-Confederate historical revisionism. Just to be clear: Lincoln went to war to preserve the Union. That's it. End of story. Full stop.
Also: Lincoln didn't start the Civil War. To clarify his position throughout the 1860 campaign and well into 1861, long after he was elected president without his name having appeared on a single Southern ballot, Lincoln said that slavery shoudn't be allowed to expand into the West - a position that was part of the Republican Party (Paul's party) platform.
March on Washington
Lest we think that opposition to the war and occupation of Iraq is limited to the left in this country, consider the lineup of speakers for a March 16 
