Republican Values

Not Just Greed

Bill Orly
So Bill-O, fresh off of threatening to lead a lynch mob against Michelle Obama if there was 'evidence', is now comparing Arianna Huffington, Republican Apostate, to... Hitler. Hitler and the KKK.

Summary: While discussing comments posted to an item on The Huffington Post, Bill O'Reilly said of the website's founder, "Arianna Huffington, I have no respect for that woman. I think that she is hurting the country." O'Reilly asked: "[W]hat's the difference between the Ku Klux Klan and Arianna Huffington?" and later stated: "I don't see any difference between Huffington and the Nazis."

This from the man who's amazed black people can eat at a restaurant without screaming obscenities, and who wants to lead an ideological purge against uppity black women.

Riiiight.

Source: Media Matters

Republicans Are Bad For Children
...and other living things.

Today, the Children’s Defense Fund Action Council released its 2007 Nonpartisan Congressional Scorecard. CDF reports some positive news, particularly that average scores for members of Congress “improved from the previous three years with more Members scoring 100 percent than in 2004, 2005 or 2006.”

Many, however, did not fare so well. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) received a 10 percent rating — the worst in the U.S. Senate.

Oops.

Source: Think Progress

Another Plagiarist
Right-wingers do love to steal other peoples' ideas, don't they?

The latest huckster is Tim Goeglein, a top White House staffer, who also writes a column for a newspaper. Naturally, he's also the liaison to their faith-based theocracy program.

Also, by 'writes', I mean, of course, 'steals'.

WASHINGTON - A Fort Wayne native and White House official acknowledged Friday he copied large portions of an essay that appeared in a Dartmouth College publication and presented them as his own in a News-Sentinel column.


"It is true," Tim Goeglein wrote to The Journal Gazette in an e-mail. "I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses."


He said he wrote to the author of the essay, Jeffrey Hart "to apologize, and do so categorically and without exception."


Nancy Nall, a former News-Sentinel columnist who writes a blog from her home in Michigan, detailed the nearly word-for-word similarities of eight paragraphs of Goeglein's 16-pargraph essay about college education, which appeared in the News-Sentinel on Thursday, and Hart's column, which was written about a decade ago.

...

Goeglein has worked in the Bush White House since 2001 as the Bush administration's liaison to religious organizations. He formerly worked for then-Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind.

Ahh, more of those famous Heartland Values.

This is hardly the first time either. From the Post, regarding the efforts of Nall and her readers to see how far back this goes:

Since then, one of her readers found passages in Goeglein's Nov. 5 column about Hoagy Carmichael that appears lifted from a Jonathan Yardley essay published in The Washington Post on Sept. 3.

Another reader found Goeglein's July 23 column on John Wayne's centenary containing passages from an article by Bruce Bennett published in the New York Sun on June 20. That same reader then found similarities between Goeglein's July 5 column and an article by Robert R. Reilly published in Crisis Magazine on June 13.

Wowie-wow-wow.

Sources: The Washington Post
Nancy Nall.com
Journal Gazette

Good Fences and All That
So the much-vaunted 'Border Fence' that Bush was pushing turns out to have gone completely to custard.

Actually it's so bad, it probably started out that way.

GAO investigators said that Boeing's software could not process large amounts of sensor data. The resulting delays made it hard for operators in a Tucson command center 65 miles to the north to lock cameras on targets. Radar systems were also triggered inadvertently by rain and other environmental factors. Cameras had trouble resolving images at five kilometers when they were expected to work at twice that distance, Stana said.

...

A nongovernment source familiar with the project said that the Bush administration's push to speed the project during last year's immigration debate led Boeing to deploy equipment without enough testing or consultation.

So we have an intruder alarm system that works at half the distance intended, meaning huge gaps, and triggers false positives whenever it rains.

Wonderful! This fence should help ensure that more illegal immigrants sneak into the country.

That will mean more delicious tacos for me. Everybody wins.

Source: The Washington Post

Finally for Budding Fascists
A Playmobil Security Checkpoint!

No, really.

The comments at Amazon are classic.

Educational and Fun!, February 27, 2008 By Zampano (New York City) - See all my reviews

Durability: Fun: Educational:
Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. Sometimes it's a hard lesson for kids to learn because not all pigs carry billy clubs and wear body armor. I applaud the people who created this toy for finally being hip to our changing times. Little children need to be aware that not all smiling faces and uniforms are friendly. I noticed that my child is now more interested in current events. Just the other day he asked me why we had to forfeit so much of our liberties and personal freedoms and I had to answer "well, it's because the terrorists have already won". Yes, they have won.

I also highly recommend the Playmobil "farm fencing" so you can take your escorted airline passenger away and fence him behind bars as if he were in Guantanamo Bay.