Archive for the 'Hypocrisy' Category

This future farmer has already mastered the most important agricultural skill: crying about inadequate subsidies

The Wall Street Journal reports that California farmer are getting their panties in a wad because EPA officials are doing their jobs and enforcing the law:

California has a new endangered species on its hands in the San Joaquin Valley—farmers. Thanks to environmental regulations designed to protect the likes of the three-inch long delta smelt, one of America’s premier agricultural regions is suffering in a drought made worse by federal regulations.

The state’s water emergency is unfolding thanks to the latest mishandling of the Endangered Species Act. Last December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued what is known as a “biological opinion” imposing water reductions on the San Joaquin Valley and environs to safeguard the federally protected hypomesus transpacificus, a.k.a., the delta smelt. As a result, tens of billions of gallons of water from mountains east and north of Sacramento have been channelled away from farmers and into the ocean, leaving hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land fallow or scorched.

Whatever. The only reason that California farmers have enough water to grow their crops is because of government-built aqueducts and federal subsidies. Only a year ago, these same farmers were selling their subsidized water to the cities at inflated rates instead of growing crops with it.

And now they’re whining because federal environmental regulations are preventing them from defrauding taxpayers and gouging people in the cities? Give me a break.

Also, the folks at the Wall Street Journal are ignoring the fact that the Endangered Species Act is not a set of optional guidelines, it’s the law of the land. The editorial writers at WSJ love to squawk about the Rule of Law when they feel that they can use that principle to defend a fascist coup d’etat in Honduras (despite the fact that there is no Honduran law which would permit a military takeover of the government). When it comes to protecting the environment, though, enforcing the law becomes a “mishandling of the Endangered Species Act”.

John Ensign, the Nevada senator who called on President Clinton to resign over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, now refuses to resign over his own affair:

Sen. John Ensign told The Associated Press on Wednesday that his affair with a friend’s wife was different from former President Bill Clinton’s relationship with a White House intern because he didn’t lie about it under oath.

“I haven’t done anything legally wrong,” the Nevada Republican said.

That’s a pretty weak defense, given the fact that President Clinton didn’t break any laws, which is why he was never indicted.

I guess this is the kind of behavior we can expect when we allow sanctimonious heterosexuals to get married.

In other hypocrite news, professional sack of shit Eric Cantor, who opposed Obama’s stimulus package, did a little grandstanding at a recent job fair. Among the companies hiring were contractors, school districts, and police departments that received some of the stimulus money that Cantor worked so hard to block.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, is not allowed to have an opinion

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, recently wrote a thoroughly misguided and uninformed attack on the idea of paying for health care with government money. In response, the folks at Single Payer Action and other lefties are calling for a boycott of Whole Foods.

Is that fair? I don’t shop at Whole Foods myself because I’m allergic to high prices, but I can’t imagine boycotting the chain because the CEO wrote an editorial that I disagree with. It’s unreasonable to assume that Mackey opposes universal healthcare because he wants to see his fellow citizens suffer, so I have to conclude that he genuinely believes, despite the evidence, that giving all Americans access to health care would be even worse than the system we’re currently enduring.

To assume that everyone who disagrees with me is a scoundrel who wants to hurt America is to fall into the same pattern of thinking that causes people to believe that Barack Obama is a closeted Muslim who hates America and is trying to destroy the nation by offering affordable health care to its citizens. It’s the same pattern of thought that we’ve come to expect from the likes of Michael Savage, who thinks that Democrats are sabotaging his meatballs.

It’s a pattern of thought that people who support universal healthcare would do well to avoid, unless they want to wind up staying at a mental health facility somewhere. That’s the kind of place you don’t want to live, even if it’s free.

See ya, Todd!

Rumors swirling around Alaska indicate that Todd and Sarah Palin may soon divorce over the issue of mutual infidelity. No doubt Palin and her supporters will continue to tell us that we should be funding government programs that tell people to abstain from sex until marriage, and stay faithful to our spouses after marriage.

And for everyone who thinks it’s unfair to jump on a rumor about Sarah “pals around with terrorists” Palin, here’s a special message from the Wicked Witch of the North:

Sarah Palin on “hurt feelings” from Dennis Zaki on Vimeo.

First Mark Sanford governor of South Carolina simply vanishes for a week, and then comes back to admit an affair with a married woman in Argentina…

This is so weird you just can’t make this stuff up.

Sheesh not even your northern liberal press even and they got the Emails, too.
This outdoes anything that ever happened in Minnesota. Not even Jesse the Body did anything this flamboyant while he was in office.  Sanford didn’t even leave a way for his staff to get a hold of him had there been an emergency. Gone over Father’s Day on top of everything else.

To be perfectly honest I couldn’t give a rat’s ass whom he pokes.  That is for his wife to clean him out on in divorce court.  As far as I am concerned that is for her to make whatever hay on she decides to.  But if the state of South Carolina lets him get away with simply vanishing for a week, completely out of touch, without forcing him out of office, then SC does a real sloppy job of running its affairs.  Conservative or liberal this guy is a sleaze bag, and no more deserves to retain his office than Elliot Spitzer did in New York.

So long Sanford…

Today we intended telling the terrible tale of the ‘take what you want when you want’ culture of (apparently), tons of turdy Brit members of parliament.

But then, somebody anonymously sent us this particularly odious porker-picture…

…which, suddenly made us stop and wonder why we should bloomin‘ be bothered to.

Since ‘The Telegraph‘ is already doing such a sterling job of explaining and exposing exactly what sort of absolutely stinking stuff has (seemingly, serially) been happening in our old Brit House of Commons.

So, click here to see lots & lots about some of said shocking smelly shenanigans for yourself.

Shame?

This shower of SOBs simply possesses none.

(Cross posted from across at How This Old brit Sees It)

Remember how Robert Bork, crusader against lawsuits, filed a ridiculous million dollar suit over a slip-and-fall injury? It would appear that Justice Antonin Scalia is following in Bork’s footsteps.

After Scalia questioned the need to protect private information, law professor Joel Reidenberg of Fordham University had his students collect a 15-page dossier filled with some of Scalia’s private information. Scalia was not pleased:

“Professor Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any,” the justice says, among other comments.

In response, Reidenberg tells the ABA Journal that the information gathered by his class about Scalia was all “publicly available, for free,” and wasn’t posted on the Internet by the class or otherwise further publicized.

It looks to me like Reidenberg was perfectly responsible. His class broke no laws, and didn’t publicize their findings. They didn’t violate Scalia’s privacy, but instead alerted Scalia to the scope of his own vulnerability. What upset Scalia is not irresponsibility, but the fact that personal details that the general public has no business knowing are freely available to anyone who wants them.

But even though Scalia doesn’t seem to think it’s right for people to be snooping into his personal information, he still supports their right to snoop into yours.

The media is having a field day with the latest scandal: 23-year-old Michael Phelps was caught drinking alcohol in a New York bar, kissing his girlfriend, and shaking hands with a black man. Laura Schreffler of the New York Daily News, who was recently excommunicated from the Mormon Church for being too uptight, gives the details:

Tsk, tsk, Michael Phelps. Partying your face off in public is not the way to reclaim your good-guy image.

“Michael was definitely having a good time,” an eyewitness tells us, “When the deejay started playing M.I.A.’s ‘Paper Planes,’ he got up and started dancing!”

Dude, Phelps partied his face off! I can’t even imagine how hard a person would have to party in order to dislodge his face from his head.

But the worst was yet to come. Phelps proceeded to kiss his girlfriend! On the lips!:

Read the rest of this entry »

Sarah Palin always seems to think that people are out to get her. Maybe they wouldn’t be so eager to point out her many shortcomings if she’d stop trying to inflict her dysfunctional family values on the rest of us.

Another day, another Palin scandal. The patron saint of the know-nothing wing of the Republican party, who made her family and her commitment to abstinence-only education a centerpiece of her campaign (see photo below), is now faced with the newly-broken engagement between single mom Bristol Palin and baby-daddy Levi Johnston.

Palin dragged her daughters to center ice for an NHL ‘hockey mom’ photo-op

Read the rest of this entry »

That the awesome Aussie and giant among a mire of mediocre, midget, so called journalists, the great John Pilger has been permanently on our blog roll since it’s ‘birth’ - should surprise nobody.

Nor should it surprise anybody to learn that this hero, and we use that word advisedly, once again dares to tell it shout from the rooftops how it really is.

Recently, perhaps we could have spent a little less time reporting in our own amateurish (yet no less sincere and urgent) style, tirelessly trying to warn the wider world of the terrible truth re; Palestine and Israel. Had we done so, we may have caught up with Pilger’s recently published pieces somewhat sooner. But to coin a corny and well worn phrase, better late than never.

How does this sound for starters?

Holocaust denied: the lying silence of those who know

8 Jan 2009

Writing in the New Statesman, John Pilger calls on 40 years of reporting the Middle East to describe the ‘why’ of Israel’s bloody onslaught on the besieged people of Gaza - an attack that has little to do with Hamas or Israel’s right to exist.

(snip)

In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as “Hamas’s seizure of power”. Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce as a historic recognition of the “reality” of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, 99 per cent of humanity concurs. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a “monstrosity”.

When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a “1948-style solution” – the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller “cantonments” and perhaps finally into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed…

Now, read the rest of these truths that hurt : or remain an ignorant, rabid Pro-Israel, Middle East Master Race enabler. And/or an actual criminal accomplice to ethnic cleansing, mass murder, mayhem, madness, collective punishment and suffering on a massive scale, cold blooded, completely & clearly premeditated, meticulously planned massacres and a virtual barrage of blatant bloody war crimes.

Be said pitiful personal ignorance having been brought about by accident or by design.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)