Cheny-Palin 2012: a dream come true

The Daily Kos recently hired non-partisan independent pollster Research 2000 to take a poll of over 2,000 self-identified Republicans. Here’s a cross-section of the results by category. For the full spectrum of astonishing responses, go here:

OBAMA and AMERICA

Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?
Yes 39
No 32
Not Sure 29

Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?
Yes 63
No 21
Not Sure 16

Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?
Yes 42
No 36
Not Sure 22

Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?
Yes 24
No 43
Not Sure 33

Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama?
Yes 53
No 14
Not Sure 33

Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates White people?
Yes 31
No 36
Not Sure 33

Do you believe your state should secede from the United States?
Yes 23
No 58
Not Sure 19

GAYS

Should openly gay men and women be allowed to serve in the military?
Yes 26
No 55
Not Sure 19

Should same sex couples be allowed to marry?
Yes 7
No 77
Not Sure 16

Should gay couples receive any state or federal benefits?
Yes 11
No 68
Not Sure 21

Should openly gay men and women be allowed to teach in public schools?
Yes 8
No 73
Not Sure 19

SCHOOLS

Should sex education be taught in the public schools?
Yes 42
No 51
Not Sure 7

Should public school students be taught that the book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world?
Yes 77
No 15
Not Sure 8

WOMEN

Are marriages equal partnerships, or are men the leaders of their households?
Men 13
Equal 76
Not Sure 11

Should women work outside the home?
Yes 86
No 4
Not Sure 10

Should contraceptive use be outlawed?
Yes 31
No 56
Not Sure 13

Do you believe the birth control pill is abortion?
Yes 34
No 48
Not Sure 18

To be fair, in another poll, Democrats couldn’t identify Harry Reid as the Senate majority leader. OTOH, I think that Reid has a problem with that as well.

As Kos pointed out, we should make every effort to find a place for those who want to secede, name it Bagofhammersstan, and move them all there. They aren’t real Americans, anyway.

To support us real Americans (this one, anyway), order your Cheney-Palin 2012 bumper sticker:

Leave it to our rightwing loons to make hay (and raise $$) from the disastrous earthquake in Haiti. Limbaugh was on the air yesterday claiming that Obama would use the catastrophe to his advantage.
News flash: Obama could do nothing for the next three years and STILL get 90% of the black vote. On the other hand, imagine the outrage if Obama did nothing.

Robertson Fun-Raising plea

This almost needs no comment:

Pat Roberson blamed 9/11 on the homosexuals and sodomites in New York. He came down on the side of death and destruction after Hurricane Katrina. He partnered with Congolese mass murderer Charles Taylor in a diamond mine, some proceeds of which went to find Al Qaeda. He Does anyone else think this person a waste of oxygen?

The repugnicants operate on fear. They thrive on it. That’s why they are so afraid of having the 9/11 hijackers tried in NYC. I can’t say for sure if they are personally afraid, or just fearful that the Bush family connections with Bin Laden will be revealed.
But what is more serious is the repugnicant drive to instill fear in the rest of us, the American people. It’s long been an operating principle of the fascist mentality that a fearful population is an easily-controlled one. The more vulnerable we feel, the easier it will be for them to “guide” is in the right direction.
Why else would Dick Cheney violate long-standing custom and keep bashing Obama? Fear.
Why else would Sarah Palin talk about how awful it’ll be to bring the hijackers into this country to be tried. Fear.
To what end? you may ask. I think it’s pretty simple: the repugnicants want a docile yet productive work force. There have been a few comments in right-wing circles lately about how the American work force is overpaid. Compared to much of the less-industrialized world this is accurate. The US per capita income is $40,000 per year. The average Chinese citizen earns $3,000 a year. How much bigger profits would be if we could pay our workers less!
The worst thing for neo-cons is a thriving middle class. In colonial America, it was the middle class – the merchants and artisans – who started the Revolution. Post WWII, the growth of the union movement created a strong middle class that resulted in the 60s anti-war and Civil Rights movements.
The repugnicants are determined to continue the importation of cheap labor from south of the border, and will continue to send ALL our manufacturing overseas. It is decimating the working class. And that’s the way they like it, uh-huh, uh-huh.

…has a new name. “Traitor Joe.” That may only be funny to people in California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut… and coming soon: New Jersey and Minnesota!

I woke up about three o’clock this morning realizing how much our thinking is imprisoned by the language of others. Case in point ‘Jobless Recovery.’ Even smart people like Thom Hartmann and Economics professors use the term.
Wikipedia defines jobless recovery or jobless growth as “…a phrase used by economists, especially in the United States, to describe the recovery from a recession which does not produce strong growth in employment.”
I think the idea of a jobless recovery just shows how screwed up our thinking is. Why is a recovery only measured by growth in the GDP, or rise in stock prices? If people aren’t working, then it doesn’t matter if the Dow is over 10,000. The economy is still sick.
Calling what we are in a ‘jobless recovery” is like calling a glass of orange juice a “vodka-less screwdriver,” or an empty platter a “meatless pot roast.”

I put together this short video because I’ve been thinking about political caricatures, and how important they are to American politics. One of the first was drawn by Benjamin Franklin in 1754 to urge American independence. Here it is:

The first known political cartoon in America

Pretty tame compared with some more recent ones, huh?

I’ve noticed with the current spate of Obama-as-[insert your villain here] cartoons floating around, people are shocked, shocked to see such disrespect to our President. But it’s been going on for a long time.
Here’s a cool one from Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly:

The Tammany Tiger

In 1871 the Republican New York Times ran a scathing
series of exposés of corruption in the Tammany Hall-controlled Democratic administration of New York City, and Harper’s Weekly and Thomas Nast quickly joined the campaign.
A bloodthirsty Tammany mascot has mauled the Republic, symbolized by Columbia, having broken her shield, the ballot, through corruption. The rotund emperor, Tammany Boss William Magear Tweed, enjoys the spectacle, sitting among other well-known Democratic politicians.
The allusion to the historic slaughter of innocent Christians in Roman arenas—Rome now being the center of Catholicism—was particularly powerful, as was the way Nast drew the rampaging tiger looking directly at the reader, clearly its next victim.
My contribution to this fine tradition… hopefully less tedious than the spate of Obama ones:

At a meeting of conservative activists, this was their reaction upon hearing the news that we had lost our bid to host the 2016 Olympics:

I guess I’m old-fashioned. I thought that real Americans rooted for their country, no matter what they felt about the President. Did the people who hated Roosevelt secretly root for the Depression to get worse? Did they cheer the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?
I confess it makes me a bit sick to my stomach. I didn’t like George Bush, but I would never cheer our country’s failure. Maybe those people really want an Al Queda attack on US soil so they can cheer Bin Laden. “A thousand Americans dead! Whoo-ho!”
A while ago, I would have said that’s bullshit. Now, I wonder.

Florida freshman Democrat Alan Grayson described the Republicans’ health care plan on the floor of the House.