I’ve got me a couple of campaign slogans for the Barton-BP team already. Can you help me come up with a few more?
]]> http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2010/06/18/the-barton-bp-2012-presidential-ticket-needs-your-slogans/feed/ 0 http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2010/06/18/joe-barton-is-a-tragedy-of-the-first-proportion/ http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2010/06/18/joe-barton-is-a-tragedy-of-the-first-proportion/#comments Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:59:20 +0000 Jim http://irregulartimes.com/?p=19708 What do you say to a politician who rakes in more than 15% of his campaign cash from the energy industry? What do you say to that same politician after he identifies the “tragedy of the first proportion” of the BP oil spill as a government requirement that BP pay the costs of cleanup?

You say “Hello, Mr. Chairman,” if the Republicans win back the House. Joe Barton would become the chair of the Energy and Natural Resources committee. For Joe Barton, the oil slick and landfall is just second order. Do you want Joe Barton directing congressional oil policy?

Joe Barton is a tragedy of the first proportion.

David Cozad is struggling to challenge Joe Barton in the 2010 elections as a congressional candidate against the big oil agenda. He’d be struggling a little bit less with your contribution.

A year later, however, there’s no sign of decreased activity by designers. Between midnight and 8:45 AM on the morning of Thursday April 15, 2009, 11288 new graphic designs had been introduced for sale at CafePress. Between midnight and 9 AM this morning (a sleepy early summer Saturday), 15730 new graphic designs were introduced. That’s not a slowdown. It’s an acceleration.

But did you notice the “pending” sign under those stickers? “Pending” means that an image has been removed from sale. CafePress, the company that prints our stickers, has agreed with the religious fundamentalists that images of Mohammed ought to be banned… and so we can’t sell you those stickers through CafePress any more.

Let’s put CafePress’ decision in context. On their website you can buy designs reading Club Liberals, Not Seals and Burn a Liberal. You can get yourself a Liberal Hunting Permit bumper sticker. You can sell a message saying you want to waterboard Congress. These calls to violence are permissible forms of free speech to CafePress — but “Drawing Mohammed is Not a Crime” is impermissible.

Fortunately, CafePress hasn’t cornered the market. Now that it’s come to it, we’ll make and sell you a Drawing Mohammed is Not a Crime lapel sticker ourselves.

It takes some gall to offer a “Free I Don’t Believe the Liberal Media Bumper Sticker” on a web page serving up not one but two fraudulent claims. Make that three, because in addition to the false quotation of Barack Obama and the “free” credit score scam, Newsbusters serves up the ridiculous “liberal media” nonsense with that bumper sticker of theirs.

Would a liberal media have spent the last few weeks cuing the snare drums and red rotating graphics for constant TV coverage of a guy who pathetically failed in the attempt to burn his car?

Would a liberal media have served up a newspaper reporter to write affectedly that after someone didn’t burn his car in Times Square, life would never be the same again?

Would a liberal media have reported without factchecking that people can live on air and sunlight if they just tried hard enough?

Would a liberal media mistake stock market fluctuations on one day for the end of the world in everyday America?

Would a liberal media be so valiantly trying to assert that “the blame game” must be avoided when it comes to BP’s role in the vast new oil spill?

Would a liberal media utterly ignore a congressional hearing on the accelerating deployment of robotic weapons of war?

Would a liberal media pretty much ignore John McCain’s bill to lock up Americans indefinitely without trial?

Would a liberal media ignore the passage of a Senate rule to require supermajorities for any reform of the Patriot Act?

I think a rework of the Newsbusters bumper sticker is called for:

These were our ten most popular designs during the month of March 2010:

1. I Support Health Care Reform bumper sticker

2. I Support Barack Obama bumper sticker

3. Share the Road bumper sticker

4. Big Blue Planet Earth stickers

5. Progressive Moose t-shirt

6. Yellow Barack Obama 2012 bumper sticker

7. Dissent is Still the Highest Form of Patriotism button

8. Bill of Rights poster

9. Like Jesus Would Own a Gun and Vote Republican bumper sticker

10. Lose the Lawn, Plant a Garden Instead bumper sticker

Impeach Soro’s Trained Monkey
Impeach the funky Monkey
Impeach the Marxist monkey
IMPEACH the TURD

and according to John, the genius of putting these stickers on your car is that you don’t have to defend yourself “because they don’t know who you are talking about exactly and gives You plausible denial if you are verbally of physically confronted you can say it was from the Bush years.”

John goes on to ask us for compensation: “all these ideas I should get some free ones if you make money using them– what do you think? Yes I hope, John”

So what do you think? Are these anti-Obama — oh, excuse me, what a giveaway! — I mean, are these anti-Bush, wink wink, bumper stickers worth producing and selling?

Do you agree? Has Barack Obama earned your support for his re-election in 2012?

State your political philosophy, and then explain your reasons for supporting or opposing the re-election of Obama as President in the election cycle starting at the end of this year.

When dysfunctional political leaders are involved, I think it’s okay to indulge in a little schadenfreude now and then. The recent history of the seat of Governor of New York brings us a terrific example of this.

After years of pathetic failure by George Pataki, New York voters elected Eliot Spitzer to be Governor, and breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that, finally, they had a Governor they could trust… and who knows, maybe he could become President some day. Then Spitzer had to step out on his wife, and pay for the privilege. Americans will forgive corruption, and abuses of legal rights, and tremendous waste, but they won’t stand for sexual infidelity in someone else’s mate, so Spitzer had to go.

David Paterson wasn’t elected Governor, but as Lieutenant Governor, he stepped in to take Spitzer’s place. Now Paterson has been caught in political quicksand of his own. First, he alienated all his political allies by slashing spending like a Republican while refusing to increases taxes on the Wall Street wealthy. Then, Paterson started abusing his power in some very personal ways.

Will Paterson step down as Governor, to have yet another politician step in to be chief executive of the Empire State? We can’t say for certain, but it certainly does seem like a good time to break out this particular bumper sticker: Is it my turn to be Governor of New York yet?

Holding on to her ticket as the line gets shorter,
Mother Davis

I voted for Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party candidate, not because Cynthia McKinney would make a good President, but in order to make my vote a protest of the abandonment of progressive values that, even then, the Obama campaign had become. As we recorded throughout the second half of 2008, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign offered several prominent reversals of the progressive promises he made as a Democratic primary candidate.

Since Obama became President, the disappointment has grown worse. Obama is now supporting the “clean coal” hoax, devoting billions of dollars to the development of new nuclear weapons, expanding the corrupt Office of Faith Based Initiatives without reform, continuing Bush’s unitary executive policy of President-as-Dictator, keeping Guantanamo open, and continuing massive spying operations against law abiding Americans. Obama has worked to cover up torture by the American government, and most recently there are revelations that Obama lied about a torture coverup that was begun under Bush but continued by the current White House.

For a while, it seemed that most Democrats were determined to be willfully oblivious to these betrayals by Obama. “He needs more time,” they’d say. It’s clear by now, though, that time isn’t the problem. Obama is the problem.

So, Democratic voters are feeling pretty glum about their own political party, and especially about their Democratic President. Obama is doing many of the same rotten things they used to hate George W. Bush for doing. But what can the Democrats do about it? He’s their candidate, right?

So, Democratic activism these days is pretty limited. The Democratic grassroots is halfhearted, sitting on its hands, sighing deeply, profoundly reluctant to give strong support to any Democratic politician, out of fear of being betrayed again.

Resignation is the new hope.