Idaho Speaks

(I wrote this for another site, in 2008.  I still think it’s a valid question in this current election year.)

Post Register employees can’t publicly express a partisan political opinion, apparently.  Because they are a news organization, (and possibly especially because they have been accused a million times of being too liberal for the citizens they serve), they have a code of ethics that prohibits their employees from being publicly partisan.

What good does that requirement do?  They can’t prohibit private partisan viewpoints.  And the employees have ways around the rules. 

Case in point:  They didn’t force an employee to remove political signs from his yard because he said the signs were there by right of his wife, (who was not a Post Register employee), to express her political opinions.  So, the employee who is single can’t put signs up, but an employee who is married can do so, as long as the spouse says the signs really belong to them.

An editor (obits, opinion page) had to resign a minor position with the local Democratic Party, lest she be seen as partisan if she elected to exercise any editing discretion on a letter to the editor.  Okay, that seems reasonable, in that it becomes a matter of perception, if the letter being edited was a letter of support for a Republican candidate.

But what I do at work is not the same as what I do after hours.  I am able to make that distinction.  I do not speak for my employer when I am not on the clock.  So as long as I comport myself with reasonable dignity and don’t bring shame or disgrace to my employer through criminal activity, why would my personal time need to be regulated against the ethics of my employment time?

Do you agree that employees of the Post Register (or any news organization) should refrain from partisan activity? 

Tags: partisan employee activity, Post Register

“The Coffee Party”.   From their Facebook page -   We recognize that the federal gov’t is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will…As voters & volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, & hold accountable those who obstruct them.   - beats the snot out of obtusely fighting AGAINST oneself, like the Teabaggers do.  (Does anybody else inadvertantly spell it “Teagagger” then have to go back and fix it?…or it is just me?)   And remember to remind your Teabagger (I did it again) friends that unless they make enough to buy their own island, they just got a tax cut under Obama’s rein.  (The mainstream “news” isn’t advertising this too damned much…gee I wonder why.)  Let’s do what we can to educate the Teabaggers with actual facts, shall we? . Join on Facebook - .  Thanks for alerting me to the existence of this site, Darlene.

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Tags: Coffee Party Movement, facebook, teabaggers, Teagaggers

Dan Henry as the local host of Drinking Liberally sends out a weekly email newsletter.  This man is tremendously talented, smart, funny, and makes you think.

This week, he makes me want to cry.  Well, actually, not because of something he said, but something he asks us to read.  He gave a link to a really cool website called “Balloon Juice”…specifically, a John Cole blogpost from last week.  It’s a dead-on treatise that explains perfectly what many of us have noticed in the past year-that we as a society, as a country, are screwed.  It paints a grim picture that is both accurate and horrible, which is what makes me want to cry.

So many things are so badly out of whack, it’s overwhelming in scope.  And when something is broken so thoroughly, it’s impossible to fix because it’s impossible to know where to start, what area to focus your attention on, to effect positive change.  Usually, you need a flood of Biblical proportions to wipe it all out and start over.  The amount of energy needed to remodel would be almost the same as the amount needed to build again new…isn’t that a call for revolution? 

Any ideas?  Or must I be a nihilist, without hope, cynical that nothing can be done because the tides and forces of society are aloof and pitiless in their ceaseless onslaught, caring naught for the likes of puny individuals and their pipe dreams?

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Tags: balloon juice, Dan Henry, IF Drinking Liberally, John Cole, nihilism, obstructionism

If people vote against their own interests…it is because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.

As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing.

“Obama’s administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans’ Depression…“

Reverse revolution

 

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite…The result is that many of America’s poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Notice that it’s from the BBC News (not anything Rupert Murdoch owns).

 

By the way, please enjoy my new siggie (thanks Darlene).  If there was ever a quote to fit me like a glove, this one is it.  Lucky you, who are loved enough by me to receive my regular rants. 

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“I’m selfish, impatient, and a little insecure, I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”

~Marilyn Monroe

Today, we have people (Teabaggers) whose heart is in the right place, but their heads are firmly implanted upside their rear ends. 

 

This is a nice, short article about how non-thinking, half-baked comprehending, irrationality is overtaking our country.  It makes we wonder if we’re not like vicious dogs that bite before assessing the actual threat.

… the tea party movement has passion. Think back on the recent decades of American history — the way the hippies defined the 1960s; the feminists, the 1970s; the Christian conservatives, the 1980s. American history is often driven by passionate outsiders who force themselves into the center of American life.

Notice how the movements went like this - civil rights, hippies, feminists, christian conservativism, and now teabaggers.  We started out sane and with great ideals, but in the eighties, when REAGAN took over (and started to cut funding for education), all of a sudden, our lunatic fringe instantly began to grow less reasoned and more reactive.  Coincidence?  Not a chance.

 

It’s the passion from the people that does ultimately drive the movement of our government.  What sucks now is, our passionate people are also our most ill-informed…largely thanks to the very tv “news” programming they watch, and then rail against.  (Irony alert.)

Rather than working the system as our Founders intended, the teabaggers are grabbing their pitch forks and running the monster out of the village, claiming that this is how America all started. 

 

But, “America” is not just starting now.  The teabaggers are cutting off their nose to spite their face.

 

Without a healthy government of, by, and for the people then we will get the oligarchy these teabaggers so desperately fear (as do most of us).

 

A person with a passion and a half-assed comprehension is a dangerous thing. 

Tags: Sheeple, tea party, teabaggers

I’m tired of the wingnuts out there who believe we’ve become a socialist country.  We are so far from socialism!  What we are is one step away from being an oligarchy.

Wikipedia defines an oligarchy as “a form of government in which power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society distinguished by royal, wealth, intellectual, family, military, or religious hegemony.”

Don Herbst of Rigby has a letter to the editor in today’s Post Register.  He says that rather than capitalism or socialism, what we have is an oligopoly where a relatively small number of sellers control the market. 

Think of “banks that are too large to fail,” insurance companies that carve up health insurance markets state by state with almost no national competition, oil companies, agribusiness conglomerates and all of the other major market segments in this country that are almost completely dominated by a handful of companies.

I am in complete agreement with his assessment!  And if you wonder why this is a bad thing, he continues with how this impacts our political process and our form of government:

As long as we allow political campaigns to be determined by the huge amounts of money spent on almost never ending campaigns and a campaign finance system that essentially allows the very wealthy to literally buy our politicians, there will be precious little liberty or free markets to embrace.

I have said for a long time that we are not a capitalist country, that we are more to the right than those who decry the “advance of socialism” realize (or else they’re just being politically disingenuous).  We have been an oligarchy for far too long, and the biggest proof of that is the fact that we can’t get real health care reform.

Tags: Oligarchy, Post Register Letters to the Editor

Eh.  Facebook “friend” (very conservative, I don’t know her except on facebook) offered to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh if I stopped listening to Rachel Maddow.  Now, what she doesn’t know is that I only listen/watch when I’m in a hotel room while out of town, as I don’t have cable at home…and therefore rarely get to see/hear Rachel.

But I was tempted to agree to stop listening to Rachel, if she would be willing to stop listening to Rush.  I’d take one for the team, there!  Wonder if I should take her up on it?? 

Tags: facebook, Rachel Maddow, Rush Limbaugh

This piece is so powerful.  It totally explains what’s wrong these days, why the country seems to be in the middle of a terrible political upheaval, and why it’s WAR for the conservatives.  Per Neal Gabler in the LA Times:

You cannot beat religion with politics, which is why the extreme right “wins” so many battles. The fundamentalist political fanatics will always be more zealous than mainstream conservatives or liberals. They will always be louder, more adamant, more aggrieved, more threatening, more willing to do anything to win. Losing is inconceivable. For them, every battle is a crusade — or a jihad — a matter of good and evil.

It’s incredibly right-on.  You have to read the entire thing.

Tags: Neal Gabler LA Times, Politics as religion in America

Oh good hell.  Check it out - Rude Pundit. 

What’s next - the moral majority marching in the gay parade?  Actually, that scenario makes more sense than a smitten Hitler, gah-gah gazing into the eyes of a BLACK man. 

This is just sad.  These people have NO idea the ironic message they are sending to rational, thinking individuals.  It is also scary.    It proves beyond a doubt that a formidable portion of our nation has NO clue about history.  Instead, they watch the FOX News (one vowel movement away from what it does to real information), they see the pretty pictures, they hear the propaganda-pontifications, they feel the outrage, and, in a fit of ramped-up rage, they go out, en masse, into the streets of our nation, heck-bent on practicing  their First Amendment right.  Let us just hope they don’t lose their grip entirely and decide to pull out their  Second Amendment right.  Like this guy.   Be a responsible citizen, keep it in your pants, America. 

There are those whose head is firmly ensconsed deep within the recesses of their anal cavity.   They drive, they vote, they are our fellow citizens.  Without them, the right would still have a voice, it just would not have a lunatic fringe.  People of the right - have you any respect left for your side of the aisle?  If you do, now might be the time to stand up and speak out rationally.  Hitler snuggling up to Obama?  Threats of violence over healthcare?  Outrage over the evils of the government?  Where the hell was the outrage when W. sent our soldiers tromping in like a herd of elephants to attack a country upon which we waged an illegal war?  Where were your swaztikas and bill-of-rights uproars then?

Truly, we as a collective need to remove our heads from our own read ends and start READING and LEARNING and best of all - UNDERSTANDING.  I love a nice, healthy debate - but what we have here (and I know, I recently attended a healthcare rally) is a group of infuriated people who want to be heard, but do not care to hear.  Suck it up.  Listen.  And stop comparing Obama to Hitler.  It just makes your side look stupid.

Tags: healthcare, Obama, socialism

We did out healthcare rally Thursday afternoon and guess what?  One of the participants had an act of vandalism visited upon thier house. 

Why it is that the left is supposed to tolerate abuse because the fringe right thinks abusing others is part of their “right” to free expression?

Tags: healthcare, rally, vandalism