a taco shy of a combination plate

Maybe he just needs more warm, fuzzy things in his life. Maybe, when he was just an obnoxious kid, his favorite movie was “Harvey.” Maybe he was just wanted to cement his reputation for being an obnoxious, obtuse prick.

Or maybe he just got a wild hare up his ass.

Either way, Bill O’Reilly is at it again.

Mr. No Spin Zone has launched an all-out effort to protect the Easter Bunny.

Right.

According to the Loofa Laird, Liberals have launched an all-out offensive on Easter. I suppose after that successful campaign to make sure Christmas came on December 25, it’s only natural to debut a sequel.

The premise is the same: Liberals are so anti-Christian that they are trying to destroy a religious holiday that Christians originally co-opted from Pagans.

He just leaves out the part about how Easter was originally a Spring Pagan celebration of fertility (the bunny and the eggs are key symbols of the Pagan rite, by the way).

Actually, this whole issue is a sad case for how difficult it is to satirize Right Wing idiots like Bill O’Reilly.

Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report is an O’Reilly spoof – at times a dead-on satire of the falafel king himself. Early on, the show poked fun at O’Reilly’s whole “War on Christmas” shtick by blowing the lid off the “War on Easter.”

It’s hard to poke fun at people who have no shame.

One of the keys of Springtime fertility is a healthy application of fertilizer, and Bill O’Reilly has plenty of that to spare.

More soon.

stupid is as stupid does

Every day I inch closer to making a suggestion that detests me.

I inch closer to suggesting that Liberals come up with a new supply of glittering generalities to lob at Conservatives.

Every time I hear someone who should be smart enough to know better spout off about how Liberals hate America (That one makes me want to bitch slap Rush Limbaugh). Or suggests that Liberals would turn the country over to Osama bin Laden (Which makes me want to stuff Ann Coulter right up Tom DeLay’s ass). Or that Liberals don’t have ideas.

Liberals aren’t the ones who have pushed our national debt to the brink of bankruptcy and treated the Bill of Rights like toilet paper. Liberals didn’t send American armed forces into Iraq because there were better targets there than in Afghanistan.

Of course, Conservatives don’t want you to believe that Liberals have ideas – since it’s those ideas Conservatives are trying desperately to deconstruct before the American Electorate kicks them out of office on their overly padded wallets.

Ideas like creating a social safety net in this country. Social Security is a Liberal idea. It was enacted by a Democratic majority over a kicking and screaming Republican minority.

Medicare is a Liberal idea.

And remember that it was a Democratic Administration that put forward a workable plan to create universal health care. Republicans torpedoed that plan with lies and distortions and character assassination (sound familiar). Today the majority of Americans would love to see a program just like the one Hillary Clinton spearheaded during her husband’s first term in office.

The 40-hour work week was a Liberal idea. Child labor laws were Liberal ideas. Collective bargaining was a Liberal idea. Anti-trust legislation was a Liberal idea.

But hey, Karl Rove’s sock puppet would love to roll back those ideas. His corporate string-pullers don’t like a work force demanding a living wage. They want a workforce willing to undercut itself because it’s desperate for a job – any job. A work force like the ones in Third World countries. They want Free Trade Agreements that allow companies to use a Chinese workforce willing to work for pennies on the dollar just like Wal-Mart does.

Liberal ideas are to bring our troops home from this ridiculous debacle in Iraq instead of planning to use tactical nuclear weapons against Iran to ignite World War III.

Liberal ideas are to reinforce the levies in New Orleans, begin a concentrated effort to reduce the number of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and protect both our environment and natural resources.

Liberal ideas are to allow each and every voter to cast their ballot safe in the knowledge that their vote will be counted. That they will be allowed their day in court when they need one and not have that court stacked to favor corporations against any and all comers, no matter how valid the complaint.

Liberal ideas are to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. It’s about upholding both our Freedom of Religion as well as the separation of church and state.

Liberal ideas are about expecting our leaders to be honest and truthful. Expecting them to put the men and women of the Armed Services in harm’s way only when absolutely necessary and not when Exxon and Chevron need a little corporate boost.

You don’t come up with ideas like these for a country you hate.

Loving your country is not about knee-jerk loyalty to anyone waving a flag and holding an office. It’s about expecting your country to live up to the ideals set forth by the founding fathers. It’s about a constant movement to make this country better for the generations coming behind us.

So the next time someone spouts off about Liberals hating America, tell them they should know better. Tell them they should be ashamed of themselves for saying something so stupid and uninformed.

It’s time we all knew better than to believe Limbaugh and Coulter and Savage and Hannity and the endless supply of blow-hard air-heads the Conservative Right lob at us.

More soon.

hold the phone

In less turbulent times, this might well have been a front-page scandal. But honestly, how can a little New Hampshire phone jamming compare with a concerted White House effort to discredit a critic (read today’s New York Times)? With a growing list of misdeeds in the halls of Congress? With the most powerful lobbyist indicted?

What is getting harder and harder for Right Wing pundits to pull off is an effort to compartmentalize all of these scandals. Even without an independent press to investigate, there is growing recognition that all of these scandals, all this corruption, links back to a centralized source.

Never mind the efforts to pounce on Democrats. The Right Wing all but bannered headlines of “Cynthia McKinney Attacks D.C. Cop with Razr!” These days, the sounds of the echo chamber fall on deaf ears.

You may remember the New Hampshire case. Republican operatives coordinated an effort to jam the phone lines at Democratic headquarters on Election Day 2002, hoping to shut down Get Out The Vote efforts and handcuff the opposition.

A flood of hang-up calls tied the Democrats phone bank in knots on Election Day. The key race saw Republican John Sununu defeat Democrat Jean Shaheen by a 51-46 margin.

Court records now show that key figures in this scheme were in regular contact with The White House and national Republican Party headquarters in the three-day period around Election Day.

James Tobin, a Bush campaign operative, recently was convicted in the case. His phone records show two dozen calls to The White House during the time the plan to jam the Democrats phone bank were finalized, carried out and, suddenly, shut down.

According to the Associated Press story:

“The national Republican Party, which paid millions in legal bills to defend Tobin, says the contacts involved routine election business and that it was ‘preposterous’ to suggest the calls involved phone jamming.”

It should be noted that virtually all these calls were to the White House political affairs office – an office headed in 2002 by current RNC chairman Ken Mehlman.

I will grant you that, in the course of running an election, phone calls from ranking political operatives on the ground in the many states to party headquarters is not out of the ordinary. Then again, a major operation like this one does not hatch itself without notice.

The bigger story, and one that should be noted by one and all, is the overall Republican election strategy: block the vote.

Key to George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign was a plan to thrown voters off the election rolls and prevent them from going to the polls in Florida. When it looked as if that might now work, they sent armies of white-shirted lawyers to both the Sunshine State and the Supreme Court to block the recount.

Ohio in 2004 was awash in efforts to prevent voters from getting to the polls – spearheaded by a state Secretary of State who doubled as the state campaign chair for Bush (sound familiar?). Predominantly minority voting districts, traditionally Democratic strongholds, were forced to far fewer voting machines than are mandated by state law – which turned into huge lines of voters unable to get to the polls. And while those lines of voters waited patiently to cast their ballots, Republican lawyers rushed into courtrooms around the state to find a judge willing to close the polls.

This nation was built on the idea of One Person, One Vote. The Bush (mis)Administration and the fraying Republican majority in Congress is built on the idea of One Republican, One Vote (and screw as many Democrats as possible).

More soon.