Some classy folks at a Palin rally in Johnstown, PA:
100,000 people see Obama in St. Louis:
Can’t Bring Yourself to Type the Word “Ass”?
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Jesus Christ didn’t hate. He came here to teach us not to hate. These people are reprehensible and an embarrassment to Christianity. Saying that God hates Barack Obama and Joe Biden reflects political beliefs, not religious tenets. Yikes. McCain should disavow these people. He won’t, though, of course. They are the base for Sarah and him.
The differences between the two campaigns are being played out right here, right now, in Seattle.
I received a knock at my door a few hours ago from a Good Samaritan, who had found my completed, sealed, and signed absentee ballot ripped up and trampled upon on the street late this afternoon. Evidently, some zealot thought my Obama/Biden yard sign gave him/her righteous permission to rummage my mailbox, and remove and
tear up my vote in an apparent fit of rage. I would have never known, save for the good person who returned it.
Who knows how widespread this is, but that fact that it happened the day after absentee ballots arrived in the mail makes me think it was no random, spontaneous event. If you have Dem signage, bumper stickers, etc. at your home (and even if you don’t), it’s probably a good idea to take your absentee ballot to one of the
designated dropoff locations or to a post office. Report any similar malfeasance to your local County Elections Office.
Yeah, I’ll be dropping my ballot off AT the post office. Thankfully, there are more folks like the one that knocked on your door than there are that steal peoples mail.
@2
That’s seriously fucked up. You need to report it to the police, just to make it legit. I know they can’t do anything about it, but report it anyway. It used to be a federal offense to tamper with someone’s mail…back when there was a judicial system.
We’re seeing some seriously ramped up emotional energy coming to a boil. This could get ugly.
Early voting started today here in Nevada. I can go to my neighborhood grocery store to vote (a three-block walk), so why bother mailing it in? And as always, I have my cell phone with a video camera to catch anyone in the act of intimidating voters.
Blue Tsunami, baby!
That first video is pretty shocking. I have been watching and that stuff seems to run much deeper than I had given it previous credit. Palin and the flames of hate she has fueled are a disgrace to this country. As an average white guy I just don’t understand where the rage comes from. I mean I do understand, but I don’t really.
I wasn’t alive in the 60s but I have the suspicion that the tensions are no where near where they were in those tumultuous times. But as bad as it may get I am not afraid in the slightest. I still believe in the power of song.
Good vibes all around.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkNsEH1GD7Q
Even more powerful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE0TrL5Vo8o
@2
That is seriously alarming. You should most definitely contact the police over it.
Yes–EVERYBODY. Use designated ballot dropoff sites or take your ballot to your polling place on election day and drop it off then. Taking it to the Post Office is better than leaving it in your mailbox to get picked up, but you’d quit doing it if you had ever been an elections observer and seen some of the mangled ballots that had to be duplicated. Sort of like one of my college classmates who had a job pulling sodas with visible crap in the bottles from the assembly line–she quit drinking dark-colored sodas permanently.
2 – Great! Dino’s thugs at work.
That second image is really powerful for historical reasons. The crowds really are historically momentous. But more importantly is the backdrop. That copper top building in the background is the St. Louis Federal Court Builidng notable as the origin of the Dread Scott v. Sanford case. Surely Sarah Palin when asked about Supreme Court rulings she opposed, could have mentioned this one. Surely it is politically viable to be against the Dred Scott ruling.
If Palin wasn’t so busy trying to secede from the union she might have time to study some American history and she would know about the Dred Scot case.
But the backdrop of the court house with a charismatic black leader is a powerful testament of how far we have come forward in this country. Great days of promise lay ahead.
As MLK once said:
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
@11
Thanks for that comment. Well said.
@1 History is full of religious wars and cruelty springing from religious intolerance. Too bad these people have no respect for knowledge and therefore are incapable of learning anything from history. The Nazi horror taught me that owning guns and knowing how to use them is necessary insurance against people like this. Liberals must arm!
@2 Have you reported this to the news media? I think you should. They’ve been featuring vandalized yard signs in news stories. This is far more serious, because it involves stealing mail and directly interfering with a person’s vote.
@6 The most prominent violence of the sixties was the violence against civil rights activists and demonstrators by police and white racists, not the anti-war protests. Most of the anti-war protests were peaceful, and in those that turned violent, the violence sometimes was instigated by police or counter-demonstrators. For example, in the southern town where I was attending college at the time, a group of Quakers who conducted peaceful anti-war picketing of the local federal courthouse were violently assaulted by a group of axe handle wielding redneck farmers — and it was the injured Quakers who were arrested and jailed.
McCain and Palin want to make a big deal of Bill Ayers, but the Weather Underground was small potatoes compared to what was going on in the South — murders and assassinations of civil rights activists, church bombings and burnings, arbitrary jailings, and use of fire hoses, police dogs, and clubs against civil rights marchers on a massive scale.
Throughout our history, racism and terrorism have been Siamese twins. They have always gone together. If McCain & Co. want to talk about domestic terrorism, that’s what they should talk about. Ayers and his pals were penny-ante revolutionaries who didn’t hurt anyone but themselves and inflicted minimal property damage. Violent racists — who were terrorists under every definition of the word — murdered thousands of blacks and destroyed millions of dollars worth of property.
As dramatic as the anti-war protests were, the civil rights struggle was far more dramatic, and the two happened at the same time. Baby boomers may remember the counterculture and anti-war protests, but history will mainly remember the civil rights struggle.
@11 “If Palin wasn’t so busy trying to secede from the union she might have time to study some American history and she would know about the Dred Scot case.”
She might also read up on “Bloody Kansas” to gain an appreciation of what the politics of hate and division can lead to.
That video almost makes you hope they lose their 401(k)s, health insurance, social security, and medicare, doesn’t it?
@15 Thanks for the comment. When I referred to the tumult of the 60’s I was not referring to the anti-war movement. No, I was referring to the dark repressive forces that you mention here. I watched that PBS special on the weather underground a few years ago. They came across as a bunch of idiotic, privileged, hipster, middle class kids who became so bored with their lives that they wanted to “get involved”. Penny-ante revolutionaries indeed. But when I think of the tumult of the 60’s I think of the political assassinations, an unchecked CIA, and a repressive local police apparatus in the South hell bent on maintaining the status quo in spite such of great injustice. All amount to massive violence in the service of the state.
As for the present I think the police force, and terrorist efforts are not as dramatic domestically. The above crowds are a pathetic shadow of the axe wielding thugs that you encountered. That being said it doesn’t mean all is right with the world. In many ways we have deployed our violent elements abroad. Exercising the demons in the battle for oil. But the forces of repression and violence have become much more sophisticated. And in a certain sense this makes our current times more perilous. Because the face of the violence is unseen. I would rather live in a world where the violence is overt and obvious, than in a world of legitimated torture, and violence behind closed doors. The threat to the individual is more significant.
But the lies that enable this state of affairs together can’t hold forever. As the great moral philosopher Thomas Carlyle once said:
@17 mercy for all god’s children. Many of these people are passed over by massive globalization. Destabilization is not a condition that we want for the long term. Justice and opportunity for all, even the pricks who denounce those that bring it too them. Anything less is immoral.
But I must confess there are a couple of fat slobs of men in that crowd who might very well deserve a little stint on the chain gang. At the very least the exercise could turn them into able bodied men, and not the whiny piss ants that seem to be in this video.
Specifically that one guy at 1:28 who yells “Born in Kenya, citizen of Malaysia. Kill some more babies you bastards..”. Man oh man does he have a gut on him.
@18 “The above crowds are a pathetic shadow of the axe wielding thugs that you encountered. That being said it doesn’t mean all is right with the world. In many ways we have deployed our violent elements abroad.”
For the record, I think today’s rightwingers are potentially just as dangerous as yesteryear’s southern racists; and I don’t consider our trained and disciplined troops to be “violent elements.” That phraseology arguably could be applied to the rightwing politicians who deploy them, but I think is more aptly applied to the elements who support and elect such politicians — the people you see in videos like the one above.
@19 Nah, I believe in kicking wingnuts to the ground, then stomping them when they’re down.*
* Just kidding! Ann Coulter humor! I’ll settle for their unconditional surrender.
@21 Yeah, that’s the thing about these guys. They imagine themselves running through the woods with M-16s playing at “God’s commandos” but in actuality these pus guts can barely make it up a flight of stairs.
“Barack Obama is a Can’t.”
a response to a popular leftist t-shirt…
An incredibly pus-gutted response, at that.
You can tell those Palin supporters’ hearts are filled with the love of Jesus Christ.
Shouldn’t our right wing troll friends be stepping in to defend the words of their brothers and sisters in arms?
Wow, obama drew 20,000 more than john kerry did 4 years ago.
I wonder if they were all registered voters from acorn.