Banned?

In an addendum to one of my comments at Al-Arianna about the McCain campaign, I sarcastically noted that I had reached a milestone, 400 censored posts out of approximately 2200.

I snarked a few other times over the last couple of days about the heavy handed and arbitrary nature of their moderation and now I have noticed that my archived approved comments started disappearing as well as the ones that were blocked. I believe that is leading up to a ban for not meekly taking my soma and putting up with something that is anathema to progressives, snuffing free speech in the name of a moderator's personal predilections even when those posts don't violate their stated guidelines.

In fact, often what gets wiped are long and thoughtful posts about an issue. Then when I answer a conservative troll with a pretty vicious pithy and ad hominem shot, that is permitted to survive scrutiny. What the fuck is up with that?

HuffPo's moderators have their heads up their asses and it is eventually going to drive people away because nobody can figure out where the line is. The only reason I am there so much right now is because I am obsessed with the presidential campaign. Once that is resolved, I am mulling just staying away. I can only put up with so much frustration.

McCain Using Same Robocall Firm That Helped Smear Him In 2000

Story is here.

Note: This was a reply to the following ridiculous assertion:

"Tim Russert would have gone insane this election season with so many lies going around. I imagine him with anybody of the McCain campaign with the videos and the quotes to prove their contradictions in his very elegant and respectful way to cross examine. I believe that this election would have been a landslide by today if we would have somebody like him pressuring for interviews and confronting the politicians. I still miss him on sunday mornings!!!"

My reply:

Are you serious?

Russert would have kept every freaking GOP talking point roiling right up to election day. As Arianna said, he was a captive of conventional wisdom, a lazy thinker and largely AWOL in the runup to the Iraq War.

Please, he was weaker than a Shirley Temple.

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Note: Though shalt not criticize St. Timmeh.

BusinessWeek: Disney Is The Media Industry's Best Bet For Stability During Financial Crisis

Story is here.

Yet another laudatory Disney related article in Huffington Post.

Again, what is Disney's relationship with Huffington Post to keep getting so much favorable coverage here when that company is anti-labor, uses sweatshops to manufacture its clothing and toys and interferes with the electoral process in Anaheim? Not to mention that its ABC division broadcast that libelous movie blaming 9/11 on Bill Clinton.

You owe us an explanation.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/18/news/international/disney_china/index.htm
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/aug/15/local/me-disney15
http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/08/abc.movie/index.html

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Note: Disney is the holy of holies at Al-Arianna (my new nickname for HuffPo), so my protest against their whoring for the mouse was crushed yet again.

Federal Immigration Policy is Destabilizing Main Street USA

Story is here.

On the ground, where real America lives, illegal immigration is damaging K-12 education by filling schools with children who can't read even in their own language, more and more scarce resources have to be diverted to get them up to speed on english, they have high dropout rates and they bring increased gang activity to local schools.

Just so that you know, I voted AGAINST Proposition 187 in California because it was bad policy. It would have made the fallout from illegal immigration WORSE.

Communities I have lived in as well as those nearby have been turned into crime infested havens thanks to hispanic gangs. Illegal immigrants are swelling our prisons, driving up law enforcement costs and the houses and apartments where you have 10-20 illegals living in a single unit do little for local living conditions and home values.

This is exacerbated by illegals driving down wages in the construction industry and the meat packing industry you mentioned, among others.

The financial health of hospitals is also threatened by streams of illegals using emergency rooms as their health care when they can't pay.

Dealing with any of this (mass deportations are a needed good start) has become an electoral third rail and thus neither side of the immigration debate is likely to get anywhere, which only increases frustration among community members

There are practical matters of statecraft here. You can't slove anything on mere good wishes and idealism.

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Note: Can't inject any reality into HuffPo about this question, now can we. Especially if you are Anglo, as I am. What a crock of shit that it.

Vicki Iseman Denies McCain Affair

Story is here.

So she waits until three weeks before the election to say, "I did not have sex with that man"?

Plus the National Journals has a well established rightwing bias, though not quite as outright cuckoo as National Review.

If the NY Times was so off base here---and that story they ran does seem to have damaged her career as a Capitol Hill lobbyist, why isn't she suing? She wasn't a public figure, so there would be no Sullivan Test for any possible libel action she might want to file, making it easier for her to win a favorable judgment.

This is just part of a Republican campaign to look like they were victimized by the media they claim is in the tank for Obama. But my suspicion is that McCain had his fundamental was in a tank of a different sort and now they are trying to sing and dance their way around it. And that phone call to Lanny Davis? That was an act.

Look, if her and McCain's relationship was so on the up and up, his aides wouldn't have been concerned about keeping them apart. So there was indeed some kind of smoke there, but we just haven't seen a definitive fire out of it yet.

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Joe The Plumber: Obama Tap Dances Like "Sammy Davis Jr."

Story is here.

Joe the Plumber appears to be Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.

According to Lucas County, Ohio court records, there is a Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher who has a state income tax lien of $1,182.98. According to the court record he lives on a street that is part of the Lincoln Green subdivision.

And Joe the Plumber's Father appears to be Robert Wurzelbacher right wing fanatic and contributor who is the son in law of..... you're not going to believe this. Charles Keating.

This just gets better and better.

Oh there's also a Joe the Twice Divorced Wife Beater.

And The Joe I Haven't Had a Plumbing License Since 2002.

I wonder which of these will turn out to be the guy doing all the talk shows?

I'm sure we'll know by the end of the day.

****Update: Joe the "undecided voter" appears to be a registered Republican. He voted for McCain in the primary.

*** Update 2: There's another Wurzelbacher. Doug Wurzelbacher. Doug is active in competitive dog sled racing. Guess where he lives? Wasilla, Alaska. What are the odds? I wonder if he's related to "Plumber Joe"?

These questions need answers.

# posted by The Punisher @ Thursday, October 16, 2008
Comments:
An FYI--

A search on ancestry dot com turns up a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher at some point in the last twenty years living at - get this - 1960 W. KEATING Dr., Mesa, AZ!!!!

http://theobfuscationreport.blogspot.com/2008/10/joe-plumber-nope-joe-tax-dodger.html

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Note: I don't know why this was censored, though HuffPo has been censoring a lot of longer posts lately. Later on, I did put in a post with a short blurb about this and a link to the story, so this time around was a mixed bag. However, that only further exoses the arbitrary nature of the HuffPo censors.

An Old Boxer Who Has Been in One Too Many Fights

Story is here.

McCain's performance was not worse than that of Stockdale nor was it as horrendous as Cruz Bustamante's debate performance trying to replace Gray Davis as California Governor, but the fact remains that his fly by the seat of his pants style makes McCain perpetually ill prepared to take on sharper operators such as Obama.

He can blame his dad and wife for that since McCain has never had to pay a consequence, until now, for his laziness, impulsiveness, gutlessness and sense of entitlement because dad or his millionaire wife was there to bail his butt out or buy him what he wanted.

The McCain campaign was just a pathetic spectacle of privileged mediocrity that had never had to work for anything in his life. So he never developed the toughness and cunning that one learns from the experience of having to fight and claw for what one has.

McCain thought of himself as a downmarket aristocrat (just like Bush) and he reached the end of that rope Wednesday just as the Navy wouldn't make him an Admiral. His life is now a complete failure. I hope he is man enough to admit it and maybe he, like Jimmy Carter, can now do something constructive to save his reputation before he passes from this life. Don't count on it, though. He has always been an inertia kind of guy.

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Note: ??? Maybe they didn't like the shot I took at Bustamante?

The Conservative Purge Has Begun

Story is here.

While we're on the subject of conservative purges, Virgil Goode has some 'splainin' to do to conservatives about earmarking $150,000 in federal funds for a film involving his closeted gay press secretary called Eden's Curve. That piece of cinema features drug use and bisexuality. Yes you conservatives out there, your tax dollars are funding a non-family fare film thanks to ol' Virgil:
http://airamerica.com/blog/2008/oct/15/virgil-be-goode-bad

Of course, you're going to punish him for it, right? I mean, you wouldn't be moral relativists, now would you?

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Note: I took an earlier shot at a conservative using this fact, but then they censor it in a different article? Now can you understand why people are frustrated by Arianna's little fiefdom?

Colin Powell Is Ready To Endorse

Story is here.

Bradley was the black Gerald Ford, a slow witted tool of the L.A. westside political machine (which whored itself out to local developers). A nice enough guy to be sure, but just not exactly what I would call a leader. L.A. had already started deteriorating under Mayor Yorty, so I don't totally blame Bradley for the frightening level of homicides in L.A. at the time, but he sure didn't do much to ameliorate it.

That therefore made that gubernatorial election a Hobson's choice because George Deukmejian hated anyone who didn't make into seven figures. Not exactly swift upstairs himself, but his staid conservatism apparently made him more palatable to the electorate. I held my nose and voted for Bradley.

Willie Brown is a no good hustler. There is an analogy I have always made of Brown, but it would probably be censored even though it is extremely appropriate. He was a big water carrier for the insurance industry and should have been locked up for it.

Again, I am a Democrat, but I calls 'em as I sees 'em.

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Note: There was another post I wrote parodying the "Obama is too exotic" cant of McCain by applying it to Colin Powell, whose parents are Jamaican. I even put an emoticon with it to let everyone know I was joking. That one got censored. Again, the HuffPo moderators are humor challenged.

Global Economic Crisis Likely To Have Profound Consequences For US Politics, World Relations

Story is here.

The Bush Administration had failed to heed history and mired us in a three front war of terror (that in Afghanistan, Iraq and against the American people with increased surveillance, eroded civil rights and at times overweening increases in public security), piled up debt that made us vulnerable to the machinations of Japan, China, the Saudis and even Mexico, as well as a crippling of defense mechanisms geared to protecting the public from corporate swindlers.

The Katrina disaster was a result of that, exposing the conservative penchant for an "I'm alright jack, too bad for you" mindset. Too the rest of the world, that is when the wheels really seemed to begin falling off of the American cadillac.

Our infrastructure was already deteriorating and we needed substantial reinvestment in it anyway. That will happen under Obama even with the onerous bailouts the financial mismanagement has engendered.

What is further required is raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour, making bonuses given to executives available to regular employees on the shop floor, and caps on the ratio of executive pay vis a vis what the lower rung workers receive.

So it just isn't a structural problem, it is a cultural one and the mentality of wilfull rapine has to be curbed in favor of encouraging more of an esprit d' corps between workers and bosses rather than the state of war we have now.

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Note: Did I use too many big words and the moderator didn't understand them? So to be safe he/she deleted my post? Or they think "machination" is an obscenity?

Should Obama Have Picked Hillary As His Running Mate?

Story is here.

George .H.W Bush won with Quayle as his VP nominee. What killed his chances for a second term was a combination of Bill Clinton's smarts and charisma and a sense by the American public that Bush was out of touch when that recession hit, something that was exemplified by the supermarket scanner incident.

You don't mention Geraldine Ferraro, whose pick by Walter Mondale was seen as a desperation move by the press and the public. It later turned out that her husband had some unsavory baggage that didn't do their campaign any favors.

But Mondale was going to lose anyway. Palin is the first VP nominee in my lifetime that I can remember where people were passionately citing a running mate as a compulsion to vote for the opponent. This move will be remembered as an indication of McCain's colosally craven submission to the GOP business as usual crowd when he really wanted to pick Joe Lieberman.

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Women Should Beware the Male Spinster

Story is here.

First, minding one's own business is a virtue.

Secondly, different people have different definitions of happiness and snearing, petty and overweening articles such as this one are no doubt born out of envy of the free man by those who are stuck in marriages whose expiration date has long passed and where the only exit is through a courtroom. It is like the old joke you hear from comedians: he should be miserable like the rest of us [by getting married]. No thanks.

After breaking up a three year relationship, I have dropped out of the dating market because I want to be selfish with my time. I have a lot of different interests, a web site to tend to and I don't have to worry about pleasing anyone other then myself. And I cannot be happier.

Now maybe somewhere down the road I might want to start dating again, but then again, maybe not. My life is mine and I don't owe it to anyone else to live it a certain way in order to submit to their absurdly outsized control freak tendencies.

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One Reason Race May Not Derail Obama: The 'Do the Right Thing' Effect

Story is here.

"It's different," John Turturro's Pino Frangione insists. "Magic, Eddie, Prince are not niggers...They're not really black. They're black but they're not really black. They're more than black. To me, it's different."

Spike kinda blew that, actually. It's not that Magic, et al are "more than black," for some people, it is that they are ENTERTAINMENT, which gives a certain kind of white person permission to either laugh at blacks or to vicariously have blacks work for them while being free to slam them without social reprobation if they don't deliver on the court, etc.

The problem for some white people about Obama is that he has stepped outside the socially and culturally approved envelope they cubbyhole blacks into (there's a badly formed metaphor for you). Since many whites don't know black folks socially, it is scary for them to see one in a position of authority when they have never had a black boss or perhaps even coworkers.

And the GOP has been playing up the fear angle non-stop since 9/11, supplying the American public with more ready made terror than Osama Bin Laden. So anyone who doesn't see the McCain campaign as a racist carnival is in denial. No matter how much of a victory Obama wins, the GOP will see him as a glorified burglar breaking into "their" White House.

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Note: what did I write that was wrong? Or aren't white people allowed to address these questions?

McCain Co-chair Calls Obama "A Guy Of The Street," Raises Drug Use

Story is here.

This just in from the home office in Phoenix Arizona:

The Top Ten Reasons to Vote for McCain:

10. McCain has a kung-fu arm flap!
9. A Republican voter will be chosen at random for an all expenses paid party with the board of AIG!
8. Will make "Those Were the Days (The All in the Family Theme)" the national anthem!
7. Depressions mean big dividends for owners of Big Pharma and cardboard manufacturer stocks!
6. Free tickets to the Ron Silver Film Festival for all Republican voters!
5. But we still hate Hollywood!
4. Get back at those ungrateful grandchildren by shouldering them with the debt you created!
3. McCain gaurenteed not to shout "BooYa!" when he signs a bill!
2. Freepers and N R A members don't s h o o t old white Republicans!
1. Secretary of Defense Dick Armey!

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Bill Maher's Fundamentalism

Story is here.

Sorry, you would be wrong.

Your statement about Maher's "black and white" religious beliefs inherently justifies the existence of all purported religions, be it Christianity, Zoroastrianism, the Rev. Moon as a new improved version of Jesus and even a religion that I want to start using Harold Robbins novels as our holy text. Hey, if a bad science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard, can do it, I can too.

How about you give me some seed money? The more religions the better, right?

Look, religion provides comfort to people who are afraid of death because we all want to believe that after we use up our corporeal shells (is that redundant?) we will somehow carry on anyway. And it has also mostly been used as an instrument of governmental control (go to Wikipedia and look up "the Verdict of Verdun," to see one such atrocity early in Christianity that illustrates my point). Our Constitution is partly a reaction to what occurred in the English Civil War brought about by Cromwell and his buddies.

To not look at religion in this way is pure delusion. And Maher is thus much more on the right side of reality than you are.

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Ouch! McCain's Housing Solution Is a Gift from Taxpayers to Banks

Story is here.

That's all well and good, except if you read the Village Voice article on the mortgage crisis and Freddie and Fannie, HUD was one of the catalysts that ultimately necessitated the bailout of those two public-private entities.

I would also like to see a time limit put on this new layer of government bureaucracy so that it doesn't become a permanent burden on the taxpayer. I was also against the creation of the Department of Homeland Security not just on taxpayer grounds, but for fear that it would become an American oppression palace. I have been proven right on both counts.

We need a top to bottom reorganization of the DC bureaucracy anyway to put it on a 21st century footing and not the WWII one it is currently on.

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Biden: Palin Must Condemn Supporters' Hateful Obama Attacks

Story is here.

I saw that McCain had his wife out today attacking the Democratic ticket. However, there was something wrong with her and, at least to me, it was pretty obvious.

You see, because of the neighborhood I grew up in, I learned to tell when somebody had an undercover buzz on (that is, they were high and trying to not look like it).

And Cindy, I can say with some certainty, was definitely furtively freakin'. She is back on the meds and in dosages not recommended by any competent and ethical physician.

This McCain just gets sadder and sadder.

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My Name Is Bill Swadley, And I Work For Fox

Story is here.

Hey, Tom Brokaw is fine with Fox News (apparently anyway; he never criticizes it, saving his barbs for his own network instead) so you should be, too. After all, if news colossus Brokaw sees them as being on the up and up then they must be, right?

I call Rupert Murdoch's outfit News Corpse for what it has done to electronic journalism.

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Nuclear Power's Opponents Accused Of Being Stuck In The 80's

Story is here.

Sorry HuffPo, but Tierney is just another version of John Stossel:
http://www.motherjones.com/blue_marble_blog/archives/2008/08/9200_fact_checking_j.html

Also, up in my neck of the woods, the Trojan Nuclear Plant might provide a good object lesson in why nuclear is too expensive (not to mention the security risks of producing radioactive waste, among which is plutonium, an A-bomb fuel) for ratepayers to tolerate: http://www.trojandown.com/history.htm

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Where Was Tim?

Story is here.

What is up with this continuing lionization of Tim Russert, someone Arianna herself called "a conventional wisdom monkey"? Why does there seem to be this need by HuffPo writers to rehabilitate a man that was Dick Cheney's favorite echo conduit?

Come on you guys, this is absurd.

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