Showing posts with label Sarah Palin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sarah Palin. Show all posts

Friday, August 12, 2011

“Corporations Are People” Gaffe Dooms Romney’s Presidential Bid

These days, Mitt Romney has the haunted look of a mountain climber who just heard half the strands of his lifeline snap while hanging only a few yards from the peak of Mt. Everest. He can’t turn back from his life-long quest to reach the peak, yet he knows there’s a good possibility the rope will break before he reaches his goal and he’ll go plummeting down the side. Along with the overstuffed carload of gobsmacking flip-flops on everything from women’s rights to income taxes to health care that Mitt carries with him like a mummy’s curse, his sure-thing Golden-Haired Boy 2012 GOP presidential nomination is now showing its dark roots, and it’s all the fault of Romney himself.

At the Iowa State Fair the other day, Romney attempted another of those tedious ‘Ask Mitt’ torture sessions where he is forced to extemporize to answer questions from the overly-corndogged locals. This is a dangerous zone for the Mittster, who has a hard enough time getting through his soporific stump speeches without sweating through his magic underwear. Romney no doubt figured he was on safe ground -- it’s Iowa and Republican runs here like boiling grease through a deep fryer. But the rubes were having none of it -- missiles of verbal pyrotechnics, along with derisive laughter, always deadly for a serious candidate, pierced the hot air as oldsters in the crowd fusilladed Romney about Social Security, Medicare, and raising taxes on corporations and his own top one-percent tax bracket to help pay for them. After taking the standard Norquist stupidity pledge never to raise taxes, which is akin to vowing never to move out of your house, even if it’s burning down around you, Mitt then exhibited the complacently haughty behavior that has appealed to his party’s Christopublican-Teabagger base by serenely patronizing his irate interrogators with “Corporations are people, my friend,” a phrase that will follow Romney like a dead skunk chained to his leg for the rest of his doomed quest for the Republican presidential nomination.

Consider that prior to this gaffe, Romney’s thin hold on the nomination was threefold: First, Wall Street reptiles with ice in their aortas and gin-embalmed country club Republicans embraced Mitt as a fellow-traveler -- a man willing to make the hard decisions before lunch of how many American jobs to cut or send to foreign shores and live without guilt on the proceeds. Secondly, others in the party elite thought Romney was an agreeably vacillating vessel who could easily be packaged as a caring ‘moderate conservative’ with a chance of beating Obama in 2012. Third, he has a pile of his own money to sink in his campaign, always a relief and comfort to the political investment class.

But with his ad-lib proclamation on the personhood of corporations, which comes as close as Romney gets to a core principle, he tossed it all away. Mitt might as well have announced he’s a Communist who worships Joe Stalin. To most Americans, unschooled in the prevailing hallucinations of five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, the ruminants of global high finance, the silly supply-side economists of which there seems to be an endless supply, and the curdled cognoscenti of the Federalist Society, corporations are clearly nothing like flesh-and-blood human beings and should not enjoy the same rights. Aside from the obvious that corporations cannot vote, or be hauled into court, or put in jail, and can only be fined for their wrongdoing. (They could also be put out of business, but in corporate-beguiled Washington that happens about as often as Sarah Palin submitting to an interview outside of Fox News.) Unlike Shakespeare’s Shylock, the modern corporation never suffers from cold nor heat nor injury from wounds physical or emotional and represents a unique eternal legal construct -- the front-office executives may change from death and retirement, but the corporation can go on forever. Ambrose Bierce aptly defined this swindle a century ago in “The Devil’s Dictionary”: "Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility." Adding to the legalized larceny, the multi-national corporations take advantage of tax loopholes that are not available to the average American citizen, nor even small businesses, which gives these artificial abstractions unequal and superior rights to real people.

Most Americans are only vaguely aware of any of this, but they do have the fed-up feeling, rightfully, that those at the top of the corporate pie are making out like bandits, and forcing them to work longer hours at less pay to keep their jobs, and they don’t appreciate that ugly pie smashed into their faces by a spoiled multi-millionaire who thinks he should be president. Uttering “Corporations are people” with the passive-aggressive condescension of “my friend” appended removed any chance of Romney reaching the summit as he publicly tried to flim-flam the Iowans into believing that having a mountain of reeking manure in your backyard is the same as owning a prize racehorse.

In another era, a bland and malleable aspirant such as Tim Pawlenty would have taken the top spot after Romney implodes, but this is not that era in GOP politics as the pathetic two-percenter Pawlenty bends over so far backwards trying to appeal to the Teabaggers he appears to be engaged in a bizarre perpetual circus trick and the Republican base rates his conservative sincerity barely above that of Mitt’s.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin’s presidential ambitions will be confined to wistful private moments inside her ridiculous tour bus; Ron Paul will, as usual, fade as quasi-libertarianism and oligarchic corporatism actually don’t mix well; and Gingrich, Cain, Santorum, Huntsman and the other GOP stragglers will depart with vanity-wall photos of their brief moment on the national stage.

Predictions at this early stage are foolish, but here’s one anyway: I don’t think Romney will last beyond the South Carolina primary, if that far. If Obama was counting on running against Mr. Corporate Personhood, he might want to recalculate -- the vacuous but wingnut-popular Rick Perry is about to announce, and the Ed Rollins version of Michele Bachmann is taking it seriously now, and both are ready to genuflect to the Republican party establishment to get a crack at the White House.

Any progressive or liberal Democrat who takes either the Texas Governor or the Minnesota Congresswoman lightly does so at their peril. Remember the lesson of the 1970s when Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a buffoon too far right to be electable -- we are still paying for that mistake.

Copyright 2011 RS Janes.
http://www.fishink.us/

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Emperor Christie Fiddles at Disney World While New Jerseyans Burn

Left click on image to enlarge.
Clueless Christie's Katrina Moment and Palin Takes a Dive

"Hanging out with Mickey Mouse while backs all over New Jersey ache under the strain of shoveling two feet of snow will probably not help his [Christie's] poll numbers at home either. The Hill also reports that Christie's popularity in New Jersey slipped five points in a Quinnipiac poll released this month."
-- Joshua Norman, "Chris Christie Under Fire for Disney World Vacation During Blizzard," CBS News, Dec. 28, 2010.

Is Snowstorm Aftermath NJ Gov. Chris Christie's Katrina?
-- Sara Kugler Frazier, AP, Dec. 30, 2010.

"Alaska doesn't care for Sarah Palin. In fact, other than (predictably) Massachusetts, the ex-governor's home state has the 'dimmest' view of the reality TV star in the entire nation. That's one of the takeaways in Public Policy Polling's new report, which paints a discouraging portrait of the Sarah Palin's drooping favorability ratings across America and on her home turf. Only 33 percent of Alaskans have a favorable opinion of Palin, and only 60 percent of Alaskan Republicans have embraced her (as opposed to 80 percent of the GOP faithful in 'most places' across the country)."
-- Erik Hayden, "Palin Loves Alaska, But the Feeling Isn't Mutual," The Atlantic Wire, Dec. 29, 2010.

Poll: No Longer 'Sarah Palin's Alaska'
-- Jordan Fabian, The Hill, Dec. 28, 2010.


Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Sarah Palin Has Some 'Work Done' Over the Holidays

"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."-- Ben Franklin

Left click on image to enlarge.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

The Tattlesnake – Things That You're Liable to Read in the Bible, Part Huh? Edition

"And thou shalt eat it [as] barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight."
-- Ezekiel 4:12

Drop another log on the fire, so to speak.

"If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel."
-- Deuteronomy 22:22

And yet those pious C Street gentlemen John Ensign and Mark Sanford still walk among us. (I forgot; Old Testament rules only apply to gays.)

"These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, a false witness that speaks lies, and he that sows discord among brethren."
-- Proverbs 6:16-19

Has anyone told Fox News?

"Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?"
-- Matthew 6:25

Has anyone told Sarah Palin?

"But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil."
-- Matthew 5:36-37

Has anyone told Bush – or his ghostwriter?

"If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property."
-- Exodus 21:20-21

Walmart has this sign hanging over the desks of their factory managers in China.

"And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people."
-- Leviticus 17:10

So much for that trip to the dentist.

"Moses assembled the whole Israelite community and said to them, "These are the things the LORD has commanded you to do: For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it must be put to death."
-- Exodus 35:1-2

But it's the busiest shopping days of the year!

"Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things."
-- Genesis 9:3

Grandpa, get in here – it time to start supper! And 'green herb'? Paging Willie Nelson!

"This shall be the law of the leper in the day of his cleansing: He shall be brought unto the priest: And the priest shall go forth out of the camp; and the priest shall look, and, behold, if the plague of leprosy be healed in the leper; Then shall the priest command to take for him that is to be cleansed two birds alive and clean , and cedar wood, and scarlet, and hyssop: And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water: As for the living bird, he shall take it , and the cedar wood, and the scarlet, and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water: And he shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose into the open field."
-- Leviticus 14:3-7

You don't even want to know about the cure for hemorrhoids.

"And the people spake against God, and against Moses, Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? for there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this light bread. And the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD, and against thee; pray unto the LORD, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived."
-- Numbers 21:5-10

That's right, don't worship any graven image except this here brass snake on a pole! More cosmic comedy courtesy of the Bible.

Biblical quotes from Bad Bible Advice and the Crazy Bible page.

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Sarah Palin's Alaska -- The Edited Version

Left click on image to enlarge.
Stay tuned for the uncut version tomorrow.