Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Comments

  1. Very sad.

    <

    p>Unfortunately the violence is just beginning. FOX seems to enjoy whipping this wingnuts into a paranoid, rage-filled, frenzy and unleashing them on innocent people.

      • dangerous right wing extremists pour in some racism, a dash of “death panels,” flavor with a government takeover by Czars and stir.

        <

        p>This story is an example of the violence that the right wingnuts were able to instigate during the Clinton administration is beginning and may be even more severe than the hate that culminated in Waco, Ruby Ridge, the clinic attacks and of course the Oklahoma bombing.

        <

        p>They are bringing their guns to come speak with the President and their signs warn us they intend to do violence, right?
        “Try to disarm Texans at your peril”
        The stimulus package is designed to enslave us.”
        “Obama the enemy within”
        “Obama Care means forced drugging”
        “Obama’s Civilian National Security Force is his way of forcing us to pay for his private army”
        “Unarmed this time”
        “A revolution is Brewing. We will not subsidize your tyranny. Violate our freedom at your peril.”
        “Keep pushing us…find out what happens.”

  3. we shouldn’t jump to conclusions until there can be a full investigation. The story sounds horrible whether it was homicide or suicide.

    <

    p>Somehow trying to implicate FOX into it is an absurd stretch (which MSM company can we blame for morons hanging effigies of Sarah Palin last year?) Fox is certainly the voice of opposition to Obama (and liberals) as MSNBC and others are the voice of liberals but neither FOX, MSNBC and others stations can be blamed for the actions of American citizens.

    • Is Rush Limbaugh against the Fed? He has always seemed to be extremely deferential to money and authority to me, same for the Democrats. The progressive side is of course clueless… I would be very surprised if the scumbags who hanged “fed” meant the Fed and not the FBI.

      • so it is not strange that I may have missed the “go hang someone on a tree” show or even the “go out and do something violent” show. Conservative are relatively boring people and we don’t riot, burn or destroy property when we protest something… hell it’s hard to even get us to take a day off work and gather a crowd.

        • A segment of this “conservative” movement has a long history of lynching people. They are also known for attacking clinics, shooting US Marshalls and blowing up Government buildings in Oklahoma.

          <

          p>The videos of the rallies appear to have people fueled with rage. The signs they hold clearly contain language from Beck and friends. Today the radio message is comparing immigrants with a gangrenous poison infecting our country. An army of minorities are coming over to rape, murder and seal from normal (white) people – and nobody is doing anything about it.

          <

          p>Can you reasonably argue that such hate filled rants, delivered on a daily basis, do not instill fear to such a degree to instigate violence?

          • You and others can try to link the far right nut bags with the centrist conservative movement all day long but it won’t make it true.

            <

            p>The videos of rallies showing just the crazies or the inflammatory posters does not  transpose the entire group into crazies either. Simply get with the program that our crowd is not homogeneously composed of “birthers” wile your lefty crowd is not composed of “truthers”. Anything more is hyperbole.

            • I’m a good conservative. It’s the bad conservatives that are doing all this.

              <

              p>What are you doing to stop this? Any comment on the other loquacious – apparently “bad” conservative – our dear “Lasthorseman” above?

              <

              p>Or are you glad somebody finally “stepped up”?

              <

              p>Did you speak up when a Unitarian church was shot up because they were “gay” and “liberal”? Have you called Faux News to protest their hate spewing?

              <

              p>Have you done anything? Anything?

              <

              p>

              “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality” – Dante

              <

              p>If you and the other “good” conservatives continue to do nothing, you are complicit. Or, worse.

              <

              p>They do it in your name.

              • But it was attributed to him by none other than JFK, so I guess that makes it quotable in it’s own right.

                <

                p>http://quotationsbook.com/quot…

                <

                p>Another fictitious quote that is relevant here is the one attributed to Martin Niemöller:

                <

                p>

                “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist;
                Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist;
                Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist;
                Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew;
                Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

                <

                p>(While Niemöller did express this sentiment in several speeches, but the actual text is by Milton Mayer)

              • I love FOX and watch it often. I watch Morning Joe on MSNBC and occasionally watch Keith/Rachel is tune into the “other side”.

                <

                p>FOX has no connection to the “hanger” if he/she/they exist.

                <

                p>I am hard on crime and really don’t care what the ideology or party politics are of the criminals. I hope FOX continues to dig out stories and report the things that the complicit MSM ignores. Obama snubbing of FOX will be something he regrets in the end. Other than contribute to Joe Wilson’s campaign I have not done much of anything but I will be staying at the Hyatt whenever I can.

            • Centrists do not listen to Glenn Beck, or say, “where’s my gun, I’m going to the Town Hall with the President.” It’s not an anomaly, that’s the crowd attracted to your message.

              <

              p>1.8 million of the lefty crowd turned out for the Inauguration. No guns, no hateful racist signs, just real Americans: white, black, hispanic, asian, gay, lesbian, straight,Christian, Jewish, atheist. You know, Americans.

              • Republican leaders from congress showed up and spoke at Tea Parties. Not one cautioned against the heated rhetoric and implied threat of lethal force – “we came w//o gun (this time).”  

                <

                p>912 was allegedly Glenn Beck’s gig but Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, a front group for industry lobbying, actually organized it. FOX advertised it.

              • The Inauguration was a celebration; one of the brightest days of a dismal era.  The teapartys are DEMONSTRATIONS just like the ones going on in Pittsburgh.  Is there any hatred and violence being expressed there?  You are very eloquent and persuasive, you don’t need the hyperboly.

                • Whether the fairest comparison is between the pro change Obama “Celebration” to the anti-Obama demonstrations protesting all those changes,
                  Or as you are suggesting,
                  A comparison between the anti-Obama demonstrations and the anti-G20 anarchist’s demonstration?

                  <

                  p>Well both the Teabaggers and the Anarchists are out in opposition to Obama’s position, true.

                  <

                  p>But my point was to compare the pro vs. con side of the same issue – Obama.

            • John, you can try to deny them. But the fact is that you guys dated during the 60s and 70s, got completely in bed with them in the Reagan years. With The Worst President Ever, you married, and we got an extended look into your married life.

              <

              p>You conservatives thought you were marrying for money, but didn’t realize that you were selling your soul at the same time. If you didn’t deserve your winguts, I’d feel sorry for you.    

          • is a funny thing.  There were decades of well known Democrats who worked not only against the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, etc, but participated in some very ugly actions.  I can link it if you want me to.  

            <

            p>The point is, I just don’t consider the words of a few knucklhead commentators to be emblematic of an entire party.  I certainly wouldn’t want my party to be broadbrushed by the actions of a few of our own.  And you should also note that anti-government fever has been alive and well in this country since its earliest days.  It started with the anti-Federalist movement of the 1780s and has yet to abate.  The Unibomber wasn’t exactly a pro-centralized government kind of guy, and he started his rage in 1978, thirty-one years ago.  

            • Although the Unibomber, Ted Kaczynski was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, it doesn’t matter whether he was a Methodist or a Democrat. He was not. Ted was an Anarchist.  As I previously wrote, if you find some need to keep playing this game, surely you can find some bad Democrats, because bad people come in all shapes, sizes and political persuasions. But the Obama movement is about hope, not hate.

              <

              p>Thank you for the history lesson on the Dixiecrats, the pro slavery folks, who became pro segregation and rallied behind those in white hoods as they lynched people…the ones I referred to above who were recruited by the Republicans as part of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips, in a 1970 New York Times article discussed the strategy:

              <

              p>

              From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

              <

              p>A 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Prof. Alexander P. Lamis, in which Lee Atwater discussed politics in the South:

              <

              p>

              You start out in 1954 by saying, “N….., n….., n……” By 1968 you can’t say “n…..”-that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
              And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me-because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N….., n…..”.

              <

              p>Sound familiar? Like the current conservative teabagging movement. Those interviewed repeated say they have no insurance or have difficulty affording it, but are willing to forego health care to insure those lazy people don’t get health care.  You know who the “welfare queens” are and this hatred towards immigrants.  The coded language is all about the “politics of resentment” which is fueled by racism.

              <

              p>In 1981, Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Time,

              The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.’s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks.

              <

              p>The core of the Tea Party Movement is racism.

          • How about this story… Pro-Life Advocate Murdered Outside Michigan School While Protesting Abortion?

            <

            p>Some Pro-Choice crazy shoots a Pro-life protestor. So what? He was a loony. He wasn’t incensed by listening to Keith Olberman or Rachel Maddow! He was just a nut who acted out his aggressions. Stop trying to assign the public’s anger to either talk shows, the conservatives, racism or any other deflecting factor you can think of. Why can’t we have a genuine anxiety, anger or fear about the sweeping changes occurring and being proposed?

        • He sounds like the mob boss who says, “I never ordered the hit?”

          <

          p>Beck is sending his listeners a message:

    • It was a homicide.  Authorities have not commented on whether it was a suicide or murder.

      <

      p>You must admit, it would be odd for a school teacher and census-taker to write FED on his own chest before hanging himself or off for someone to write it on his chest after the fact.  

      <

      p>I think the better question is whether this murder was inspired by anti-government rhetoric being stoked in right-wing media or if the deed was done by local pot growers or meth cookers who work in remote parts of the park.

      <

      p>The fact the homicide occurred on 9/12 is really disturbing.

      <

      p>

      CONSERVATIVE RAGE: Even as “the recession and the election of the nation’s first African-American president” fuel a resurgence in “right-wing extremism,” according to a new Department of Homeland Security report, conservative media used the Tea Party events to fan the flames of anger against government and Obama. “They want failure!” Rush Limbaugh said of tea party participants. “Of course they want him to fail!” he said. Tea party protesters carried signs with racist and violent messages and accused the federal government of heading “toward fascism” and “toward socialism” — anti-government rhetoric promoted by Fox News’ Glenn Beck. CNBC’s Rick Santelli, whose on-air meltdown against poor homeowners in February helped spur the tea party campaign, argued that “this tea party phenomenon is steeped in American culture.” The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart put this minority rage into context, telling conservatives, “I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing.” LINK

      <

      p>

      Right-Wing Extremists Threaten The Nation

      Last week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report warning that the economic recession and the election of the first African-American president could mobilize right-wing extremist groups inside the United States to gain new recruits. To bolster their ranks, the groups may target veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the analysis. The report concluded that while the DHS “has no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence,” right-wing extremists — or movements that it defined as “primarily hate-oriented…and those that are mainly antigovernment” — “are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda.”  

      • I agree it would be odd and the chances of it being suicide seem small. I would also say the list I compiled of Charlie Rangel’s tax evasion and income reporting evasions also was very “odd” but I have agreed with BMGers here that we should withhold our condemnation until the Ethics committee conducts and investigation. I’m trying to be consistent.

        • …to equate tax-dodging and murder.  Mind you, the conservative movement has spent years attempting to equate needless war with loveless fellatio, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

          • I will stick with KBusch’s advice of waiting for the facts to come out on news stories but especially ones which have very few “facts” like this event which Beck haters jumped all over blaming any vocal conservative. If partisan pundits like yourself want to jump to conclusions then by all means go for it. When the facts come out that this person was murdered (and not committed suicide) then I will morally condemn whomever it is without regard to race, creed or politics. I am hoping the partisan here like yourself will do the same for Charlie Rangel when those facts come out (and any other crimes that fall between tax-dodging and murder or do I have to present the full spectrum of crimes when I ask for consistency?).

            • And you do it again in this comment.

              …do I have to present the full spectrum of crimes when I ask for consistency?

              No, you have to stop yelling about ‘consistency’ when talking about two completely different things. It’s the false equivalency we keep telling you about.  

              • One of the ways to eliminate partisanship and ideology from right/wrong “is” to be consistent. We just went through a huge process in MA where elected officials had to “reverse” a vote they made a few years ago concerning replacing a US Senator which screamed of hypocrisy. It was done completely along party lines and some tried to even include “party” wording in the replacement law.

                <

                p>In my examples I used Rangel because I was “all over him” a few weeks ago asking for him to step down. Some people calmly told me to wait for the facts to come out and see what punishment comes with it. Now we have a case of a person possibly being murdered and partisan comments abound about blaming Beck, Limbaugh and Tea Party protestors who may have had “nothing” to do with this terrible murder. I am not trying to equate the crimes since they are clearly far apart in their scope but I am trying to say let’s be adults and “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”. I also mentioned the Pro-lifer who was shot not long ago and yet the “right” didn’t over-react and start blaming Olberman/Maddow… which would have been asinine IMO.

                • In fact, you’re just regurgitating the same “Democrat hypocrisy” BS which causes  99% of BMGers to tune you out.

                • The murder of the anti-abortionist was a terrible thing. The shooter was not a pro-choice lefty acting out his political or religious beliefs. The nut job was on a shooting spree of random unrelated people who irritated him.

                  <

                  p>Keep trying. One thing I’m quite sure of is that not all progressives are good people. That being said, violence, racism and hatred are not part of the movement.

            • to master irony. If you were smart, you wouldn’t venture into hyperbole just yet.

              <

              p>Since when do KO or Rachel incite fear, or even talk much about abortion? I don’t watch them much, but I can’t remember them talking about pro-choice politics except for when the anti-abortion guy killed Dr. Tiller. Tiller incidentally had been shot once before by anti-abortion activist Shelley Shannon. Or how about James Kopp who shot Dr. Bernard Slepian and was helped by fellow activists after the fact.

              <

              p>The problem with your wingnuts is that you see not getting your way as an existential threat. They’re driven by fear. You’re somewhat guilty of it, it’s why you spend most of your time attacking the character of liberal politicians, rather than calmly and rationally discussing policy. Your political ilk is neurotically obsessed with identity, and political opposition to your positions is a threat to who you are. It’s dangerous and counterproductive. It’s what the Republican Party has wrought on the United States.  

              • I’m impressed.  

                <

                p>

                The problem with your wingnuts is that you see not getting your way as an existential threat. They’re driven by fear. You’re somewhat guilty of it, it’s why you spend most of your time attacking the character of liberal politicians, rather than calmly and rationally discussing policy. Your political ilk is neurotically obsessed with identity, and political opposition to your positions is a threat to who you are. It’s dangerous and counterproductive. It’s what the Republican Party has wrought on the United States.  

                • In spite of history, we are still condemned to repeat it, but at least we can see where we’re coming from.

        • I learned tonight his death happened on 9/11. He was found on 9/12. That makes me feel better because it makes me feel like its less likely the incident it was related (in the mind of the perpetrator) to the Beck/FreedomWorks/Fox 9.12 project.

          <

          p>He was no hanging in the traditional sense.  He was tied to a tree and his feet were on the ground.    

    • The media reported the attendees of these tea parties feel they have lost control.

      <

      p>Well, yes. In fact they lost the elections and the control that goes along with losing election to the Democrats. “Together We Stand” has been replaced by “we want the President to fail.”

      <

      p>The right wing media personalities are unashamedly using bigotry to whip up angry hysteria.

      <

      p>It began actually before Inauguration Day which was called Reparations Day. They instruct listeners that Americans have a patriotic duty to stop the non-citizen Obama from turning the country over to the pygmies in pajamas at the UN.

      <

      p>None of the issues are debated on the merits, costs or effectiveness, but as another example of fascist takeover with couched racial language.

      <

      p>Right now you can tune into Jay Severin 96.9 FM, and hear how “illegal aliens,” are transforming our country in a negative way and Obama is planning to grant them amnesty.  How Southern California has essentially become a part of Mexico…the continuous fear of the US becoming a majority minority country.

    • It’s getting better. Apparently there is a “foreign army” coming across the border to phoenix “raping, killing, stealing and grabbing normal people”, dragging back across the border anyone with “a job or a 401k”.

      <

      p>*This is in response to the story about Deval Patrick’s support of the fired employees of the Hyatt. You weren’t expecting a discussion of the pros and cons, loyalty vs. costs were you?

      <

      p>Anyone who puts paid advertising on these programs is sponsoring these types of messages. Understandably most folks are too busy or sensible to listen and know what is said on these programs. Do you know anyone who would like to pay for this message? Maybe their supporters, customers and patrons can make them aware and encourage them to spend their advertising dollars elsewhere.

      • for his race-baiting and paranoid fear-mongering.

        <

        p>Sick of Glenn Beck’s paranoid race-baiting? Spend the hour from 5-6 contacting his sponsors here-> http://bit.ly/YwaqO

        <

        p>We’ve got 62 to quit do far.  

        • I certainly hope any company I’ve invested in is advertising on Beck’s show. Look at the numbers and compare to their competition. FOX pays him $23 million and I’m sure he’s worth every penny. I watched his show the other day and he doesn’t sound like he’s slowing down at all which makes me think FOX is ok with the boycott threat. His new book will surely go to #1 where his previous book was for a long time (still #1 paperback on NYT list).

          <

          p>

          5PM – P2+ (25-54) (35-64)
          Glenn Beck- 2,874,000 viewers (728,000) (1,258,000)
          Situation Room-790,000 viewers (224,000) (283,000)
          Hardball w/ Chris Matthews-450,000 viewers (104,000) (230,000)
          Fast Money-219,000 viewers (59,000) (111,000)
          Prime News-314,000 viewers (107,000) (193,000)

          <

          p>But you go Neil… enjoy your phone calls.

Archives