There was no truly salient issue this past week for Daily Kos bloggers. Instead, they took on a wide range of topics from the urgent need for a federal crackdown on Rush Limbaugh and other conservative "hate-talkers" to a portrayal of America as sort of a global Grampa Simpson. Each headline is preceded by the Kossack's name or pseudonym.
Stranded Wind: Congress must crush righty talk radio
...Convicted drug addict and probable sex tourist Rush Limbaugh leads a thousand bellowing buffoons on the AM dial, hating blacks, Mexicans, gays, Muslims, women, and any straight white male that dares disagree with his world views. That’s about 80% of America, and yet Congress has not crushed this pack of hate-talkers...
...[R]egulation of our corporate media is long overdue...
Vyan: Kyl lied, Grayson didn't
...The problem that the Right doesn't understand is that It's Not TRUE that 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is Abortions, that is in fact only 3% of their services. But is it true that the Republican Health Care plan last year - which was essentially NOTHING except Tort Reform - was "Don't Get Sick and if you do - Die Quickly?"...
Jon Kyl was LYING, Alan Grayson Wasn't...
Seneca Doane: Under the GOP Social Security plan, Soylent Green is old people
...Durbin says that Obama's position is the liberal boundary of the field of compromise with the preferred right-wing option. As Republicans have more or less explained, this option is:
* Processing the elderly into Soylent Green
* In plants with non-unionized labor
* Without health or safety inspections
* With exemptions from environmental regulations
* With government subsidies for building the plants in the United States.
This is not a favorable field of play. It makes "elderly shall subsist on cat food" into a moderate position...
Chris Chasteen: Republicans' success sets them up for failure
...[B]y allowing the repubs feel as though they had a mandate, allowing them to put forth, sometimes even insane, legislative ideas, the dems are setting the right for up a complete humiliation. It’s like someone at a party that gets a bit too wild, but no one stops them because the phones are out and recording and it will make a great YouTube video—the dems are letting the wing-nuts strut their nuts in front of the camera...
Spencer Troxell: Today's liberals = yesterday's moderate Republicans
...If you're expecting today's american liberal to shout down speakers in townhall meetings and flood into the streets demanding evidence of Paul Ryan's citizenship, you're going to be disappointed.
The modern American liberal--like the current American President--isn't the leftist streetfighter the modern American conservative paints her to be. She is a much more moderate, maintenance-minded citizen who pays her taxes, works her job, expects competence from her public officials, and exudes competence in her daily life...
The modern American liberal would probably have voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower, and maybe Teddy Roosevelt. The modern American liberal is...well, much more moderate...
The modern American liberal is too busy working to take time off to throw a conniption fit in the street, and is not under the illusion that she is being led by some divine being to restore America to it's 'former glory'...
Hunter: America the nostalgic grouch
...Today believers in American exceptionalism seem to believe America is exceptional in the inverse way: America is the only country that cannot succeed at what other nations might be able to do...
The conservative agenda, the one proposed by Ryan...or various state governors...seems to lead, in the end, to nothing but a rather banal, milquetoast dystopianism. America as an entity is not supposed to do anything; it is supposed to merely be the flesh upon which our various native organisms can feed. We shall extract our resources, and we shall provide a market for products. We will provide a government that is as pliable as possible towards the encouragement of those two things, and all else is communism...
...Perhaps America has just entered the grumpy old man phase of its life, in which we keep to ourselves, think back to our better past, and occasionally venture out to tell other, younger countries to get off our damn lawn...
Noise of Rain: For thirty years, we've consumed the waste of the wealthy
Several mushrooms...possess hallucinogenic effects. [One type of mushroom] has been used as a psychotropic drug by Siberian shamans for centuries...[A]s the active agents of the hallucinogen are passed unchanged through the urine, common villagers would collect the affected urine for ingesting. In this way, whole villages could get high on one rich man's piss.
We've been waiting around with a cup on a stick since the days of Ronald Reagan. I understand that the man who affords the mushroom isn't interested in the piss. What I don't understand is how the deluded cascaded classes don't comprehend that they are getting pissed on. What motivates the Tea Baggers to fight the rich man's war?...
