Featured Posts
  • “We the Rich…”

    We the Rich...

    Few would argue the fact that Citizens United has been a major player in the Republican primary...and many if not most would concede that none of it has been healthy ...

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  • A Romney Victory Is Ensured With Trump’s Endorsement ()

    A Romney Victory Is Ensured With Trump's Endorsement ()

    As if you needed another reason to not vote Romney. Celebrity business magnate Donald Trump endorsed Mitt Romney for president Thursday, telling reporters he will not mount an independent campaign if ...

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  • Why I Love Newt Gingrich

    Why I Love Newt Gingrich

    In a perfect world, the Republican contest to find a nominee to face Barack Obama would go on forever...or at least until August. You cannot attach a number to the ...

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  • Republican Cannibalism

    Republican Cannibalism

    I suspect there are a ton of conservatives secretly agreeing with Begala and while it's too early in the game for Dems to get cocky, it's difficult to not smile ...

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  • Romney Hood

    Romney Hood

    One of our readers sent me an email with an idea for an illustration - Mitt Romney as Romney Hood. I thought it was brilliant and came up with the ...

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  • Why Do People Take an Instant Dislike To Newt Gingrich?

    Why Do People Take an Instant Dislike To Newt Gingrich?

    Quotes don't get much better than this one by Bob Dole. "Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?" asked a perplexed Gingrich, to whom Dole bluntly ...

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  • Gingrich Takes A Thrashing

    Gingrich Takes A Thrashing

    After the beating Gingrich took last night, it's hard to imagine under what scenario he can make a comeback.  Florida is going to Romney and for Gingrich to regain the ...

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  • SOTU

    SOTU

    There's a lot out there on the President's SOTU, so I'll keep my thoughts short and sweet. The speech did what it had to do which was target liberals and independents ...

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  • Just Another GOP Debate

    Just Another GOP Debate

    The highlights from last night's debate. - Newt Gingrich can't wait to become president so he can revisit the early 60s and overthrow Castro in Cuba. War, baby, war. - Santorum, who ...

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  • No More Mister Nice Guy for Mitt Romney

    No More Mister Nice Guy for Mitt Romney

    It appears that the South Carolina verdict is forcing Romney to start taking Gingrich seriously. “We’re not choosing a talk show host, we’re choosing a leader,” Romney said, saying that their ...

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  • Mike Huckabee Solidifies His Birther Creds

    Mike Huckabee Solidifies His Birther Creds

    Mike Huckabee offers advice to Mitt Romney concerning his unreleased tax returns. Let him [Romney] make this challenge: "I'll release my tax returns when Barack Obama releases his college transcripts and ...

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  • Late Night Political Humor

    Late Night Political Humor

    Via Political Humor... "Mitt Romney is coming under fire because even though he is a multimillionaire, he only paid 15 percent in taxes. That's not a tax, that's barely a tip." ...

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  • The Last Word On Jon Huntsman

    The Last Word On Jon Huntsman

    Good line. My guess is that after Romney fails to beat Obama in the general, Huntsman will be back in 2016.  The most electable guy in the field and he could ...

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  • Does Romney Urinate Straight Down His Leg?

    Does Romney Urinate Straight Down His Leg?

    I found this pretty funny...and accurate. It comes from a reader over at Balloon Juice. So, let’s review. The contenders for the GOP nomination are A vulture capitalist who believes that any ...

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  • The Constitution – Libertarian’s False Idol

    The Constitution - Libertarian's False Idol

    Lively little debate going on at one of last week's posts with Libertarianism put under the microscope. ocLiberal: I know I am in sketchy territory here, (start the indignant shouting now) but ...

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  • Gingrich’s Delusional Politics

    Gingrich's Delusional Politics

    In the contest to determine the winner of the Far-Right Politics gold medal, rack up a few more points for Newt Gingrich. “I think an intelligent conservative wants the right federal ...

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  • Late Night Political Humor

    Late Night Political Humor

    Via Political Humor... "Congratulations to Mitt Romney. He won the New Hampshire primary last night. See, this is proof that even the multimillionaire son of a multimillionaire can beat the odds ...

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  • What Do North Korea and Indiana Have In Common?

    What Do North Korea and Indiana Have In Common?

    Story 1: North Korea punishing those who 'didn't display enough sadness over Kim Jong Il's death' North Korean authorities are reportedly punishing citizens who did not display enough sadness over the death ...

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  • The Pope’s Hate Speech

    The Pope's Hate Speech

    In case you missed the story, Pope Benedict made headlines this week by doing what it is popes do best - putting the irrational fear of God into his followers. The ...

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  • Mitt Romney’s Idiot Quote of the Day

    Mitt Romney's Idiot Quote of the Day

    Romney was asked whether questions dealing with distribution of wealth and power were a matter of jealousy or fairness. You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class ...

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And The Winner Is…Mitt Romney!

quoteoftheday

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This hypothetical on the Republican 2012 primary made me laugh.

I do think the most likely scenario, though, as said before, is that Romney will win because the Whackadoodle vote will be split. Romney will be the new McCain. And of course, nobody actually likes Romney and his vast hollow wasteland he calls a soul, just like people don’t like McCain, but he’ll win a plurality on the basis of being somehow less batshit insane than the other guys. Which is not to say that Republican primary voters are not batshit insane, it’s just that their votes are split on the precise form the insanity takes. If you could consolidate the batshit insane candidates and pool their votes, that monstrosity would win instead.

Hard to refute the logic.

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My Lai

my_lai

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William Calley, the only man convicted of one of the worst war crimes in US history – the My Lai massacre – apologizes.

“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai, “  William Calley told members of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus today.  His voice started to break when he added, “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed,  for their families,  for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”

I find it difficult if not impossible to feel anything but moral outrage over Mr. Calley and his hallow words when reminded of what happened at My Lai on that day.

The Wikipedia entry…

The My Lai Massacre was the mass murder conducted by a unit of the U.S. Army on March 16, 1968 of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, all of whom were civilians and a majority of whom were women, children, and elderly people.

Many of the victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, and some of the bodies were found mutilated. The massacre took place in the hamlets of My Lai and My Khe of Son My village during the Vietnam War. While 26 US soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at My Lai, only William Calley was convicted. He served only three years of an original life sentence, while on house arrest.

When the incident became public knowledge in 1969, it prompted widespread outrage around the world. The massacre also reduced U.S. support at home for the Vietnam War. Three U.S. servicemen who made an effort to halt the massacre and protect the wounded were denounced by U.S. Congressmen, received hate mail, death threats and mutilated animals on their doorsteps. Only 30 years after the event were their efforts honored.

I’ll choose to believe that the vast majority of men and women who serve in the Armed Forces are decent people out to do a job.  It’s the William Calleys as are the people behind Abu Ghraib who are a disgrace to the country.  The following from the comment section expresses it well:

I was also stressed when I served as an infantryman with the 25th Division in 1968, but I never understood how an American soldier could have participated in the large scale killings than occurred that day in My Lai. Awful things occur during battle, of course. But for me, I would have rather put a bullet in my own head than push dozens women and children into a ditch and shooting them. Calley, his chain of command, and the others responsible should have paid for their crimes.

Your thoughts?

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Open Thread

openthread2-sun

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Finally relocated to sunny Miami.  At some point I’ll actually unpack…but not today.

Open thread…

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The Number 60

Senate 60  http://mariopiperni.com/

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With the death of Ted Kennedy, attention is focusing on the 60th Senate vote which might be crucial in passing a health care bill.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said Wednesday he would support changing state law to allow him to appoint an interim successor to Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat while a special election is held.

Unlike most states, a successor to a vacant U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts is chosen by special election, not appointed by the governor.

Republicans who hold 10 percent of legislative seats in Massachusetts are naturally opposed to any change in the law.

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Wingnuttia

http://mariopiperni.com/

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Remember Barney Frank telling a lunatic right-winger who was holding up an image of President Obama in Nazi gear that talking to her was like talking to his dining room table?  Well, here’s the psychology behind Frank’s statement.

Some people form and cling to false beliefs about health-care reform (or Obama’s citizenship) despite overwhelming evidence thanks to a mental phenomenon called motivated reasoning, says sociologist Steven Hoffman. “Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief,” he says, “people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.”

“For the most part,” says Hoffman, “people completely ignore contrary information” and are able to “develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information.”

Hoffman describes another psychological phenomenon which I believe is commonly found in the right, lunatic fringe or otherwise.

“We refer to this as ‘inferred justification,’” says Hoffman. Inferred justification is a sort of backward chain of reasoning. You start with something you believe strongly (the invasion of Iraq was the right move) and work backward to find support for it (Saddam was behind 9/11). “For these voters,” says Hoffman, “the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war.”

For an explanation of this behavior, look no further than the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory holds that when people are presented with information that contradicts preexisting beliefs, they try to relieve the cognitive tension one way or another. They process and respond to information defensively, for instance: their belief challenged by fact, they ignore the latter. They also accept and seek out confirming information but ignore, discredit the source of, or argue against contrary information, studies have shown.

After reading the above, anyone following the health care debate would have to come to the conclusion that a good 90% of Republicans in Congress suffer from cognitive dissonance.  I imagine the other 10% are just liars.  Don’t know.  But hey, what about the whackos attending the town hall meetings? What’s the story with these people?

Which brings us back to health-care reform—in particular, the apoplexy at town-hall meetings and the effectiveness of the lies being spread about health-care reform proposals. First of all, let’s remember that 59,934,814 voters cast their ballot for John McCain, so we can assume that tens of millions of Americans believe the wrong guy is in the White House. To justify that belief, they need to find evidence that he’s leading the country astray. What better evidence of that than to seize on the misinformation about Obama’s health-care reform ideas and believe that he wants to insure illegal aliens, for example, and give the Feds electronic access to doctors’ bank accounts?

Obama’s opponents also need to find evidence that their reading of him back in November was correct. They therefore seize on “confirmation” that he wants to, for instance, redistribute the wealth, as in his “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plumber—finding such confirmation in the claims that health-care reform will do just that, redistributing health care from those who have it now to the 46 million currently uninsured. Similarly, they seize on anything that confirms the “socialist” label that got pinned on Obama during the campaign, or the pro-abortion label—anything to comfort themselves that they made the right choice last November.

Most of us are already aware that birthers, teabaggers and Bush apologists, to name a few, are first class wingnuts but it’s kinda nice to be able to give their mental condition a highfalutin sounding medical term .  Very cool I think to be able to look at one of these people directly in the eyes and say, “Hey bud, I think you might be suffering from inferred justification.  You might want to get that looked at before it develops into something more serious, like cognitive dissonance perhaps.”

In any case, it’s reassuring knowing that psychologists are studying this mental disorder.  Also, it helps to absolve us from any guilt associated with having to call wingnuts wingnuts repeatedly.

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