There was once a listserv called “ReformNYS” that, for some time, was a collection of outrages and calls to action shared among the Ron Paul libertarian wing of the local tea party. It never really had many ideas about reforming New York State, and it’s managed to reform exactly nothing.
By contrast, the Palinist wing of the tea party has found multiple causes celebre about which to agitate, thanks in large part to the NY SAFE Act, which places restrictions on people’s ability to massacre, e.g., almost 2 dozen schoolchildren in a matter of seconds.
Now? The Ron Paul wing’s listserv has devolved into this:
Buffalo Tea Party organizer Allen Coniglio told me that Paladino is a “decent person” and that this story is a smear.
Coniglio made it clear that he and the Buffalo Tea Party denounced the content of the e-mails and “do not support any racist positions of any kind. ” This story, he said, was the kind of thing he’d come to expect from the media and liberal activists.”…
…People are different (ed. from the 18th and 19th century) because there are many more unproductive slackers due to big government, new slaveholder interventions and slave breeding programs. People of the type created by these programs would not have existed in any measurable quantity as there would have been little possibility of survival prior to the advent of the modern welfare state.
Slacking is now in the genes of the people who have been on welfare for 3 or 4 generations or more and these people are now, for all intents and purposes, societally worthless, ineducable and probably beyond redemption.
Yes, they are different because they have been bred to do nothing but slack and vote for Democrats by their slavemasters Jackson, Sharpton, Farrakhan, Reid, Kerry, Kennedy, the Clintons, etc..
Sounds eerily like what got cowboy hat welfare queen Cliven Bundy in trouble this past week.
Suffice it to say that one of the guys who was instrumental in bringing the Tea Party Express travel write-off to Buffalo is now circulating the crap reproduced above.
1. Congratulations to Mitt Romney, who won a couple of states in last night’s Super Tuesday. He appears to have become, at long last, the Republican’s nominee to take on Barack Obama in November. Santorum won a handful of states, and Gingrich won Georgia, which is enough to keep them around and just demolishing Romney day in and day out, but they don’t really have anywhere to go.
3. The debate over what is to become with the Trico building is going to be the big development/preservation fight for the first half of this year. It’s already getting going, as an earlier post will attest. What’s unique about this particular battle is that most people agree that the Trico building is an historically significant landmark, and also that the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus is something that’s great for the community and the source of a great many good jobs, and of a knowledge-based future Buffalo industry. It’s going to be a tough battle because it’ll be particularly hard for anyone to demonize or belittle anyone else. It’s also yet another ad hoc battle that we’re so used to, which pits people against each other, creates loads of rancor, and is generally sad and discouraging, regardless of who wins. While I recognize the historic importance of Trico, and the importance of its former factory, I also recognize that Trico is long gone, headquartered in Michigan, and making blades in Brownsville and Matamoros. The building is, to me, subjectively hideous – an eyesore, and refurbishing a former factory – regardless of how historically important – into a medical research facility is impractical, and something the BNMC simply doesn’t want to do. They want a 21st century facility, not a 19th century facility. This is before we even get to the environmental cleanup that any adaptive reuse would entail. My sympathies default to people, jobs, and the future.
4. The Valenti/Brocuglio dynamic duo is back in / still in WNY, depending on whom we’re talking about, and their residential landlord got shafted at Eden court in her eviction effort. The former owners of Valenti’s restaurant have until the end of March to move out of their home, and Judge Zittel did not order a judgment for back rent dating to December.
5. I remember watching the Little Rascals after school when I was a kid, those little unsupervised, depression-era scamps were often tussling with the truant officer. Perhaps it’s time that school districts with big absentee problems revisit this idea.
6. There was a lot of hubbub yesterday about a map released by a special master appointed by a federal judge to try and resolve the ongoing fight over congressional redistricting in New York. Locally, the issue was the fact that both Brian Higgins and Kathy Hochul reside within the redrawn 27th district. Suffice it to say, the court’s map is not in any way final, but it will be the default map should the parties be unable to come to a separate agreement. It happens every time, and acts as a catalyst to move negotiations forward. What does seem likely, however, is that Louise Slaughter’s district will be re-drawn to return her influence to the Rochester area only, and out of the Buffalo metro. NYS Judicial Redistricting Map
7. Ron Paul has won a whopping 47 delegates during this primary season. The margin of Romney’s lead over Santorum in the delegate race is more than 200 delegates. Why the hell is he still in the Presidential race?
Well, not really. I received a press release that Schumer, Gillibrand, Hochul, Slaughter, and Higgins jointly released, reading as follows:
“We call on the Air Force to reverse this decision and to identify a new mission for the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station. As a united delegation, along with the support of Governor Cuomo, we will continue to fight to protect this base, the positions it supports, and the thousands of Western New Yorkers that rely on its services.
“The Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station is an essential part of our nation’s military force, and we will not rest in the effort to find a new mission.”
Furthermore, Republicans are usually very, very opposed to things like government stimulus of the economy and government employment vs. private sector employment. Somehow, those principles get thrown out the window whenever we’re talking about military spending. The truth is, the air base has a stimulative effect on the regional economy, and losing it diminish that. Also, it’s false to suggest that the local delegation isn’t working to keep that stimulus spending here.
The president was withering in his retort. “Those folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities,” Mr. Obama said. “They’re not commander in chief. When I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war” — for those who go into combat, for national security and for the economy. “This is not a game,” he added. “And there’s nothing casual about it.”
“If some of these folks think that it’s time to launch a war, they should say so, and they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be,” he said.
We need another war like we need another 2008 global financial meltdown. But not to be outdone, Senator John McCainsuggested that we ought to bomb Syria due to the political and humanitarian crisis being created by the fascist Assad regime’s brutal crackdown on a months-long popular uprising. It may soon become time for military intervention in Syria, as we took part in in Libya. However, this would need to be a multilateral effort, with the Arab League taking the lead in demanding the intervention. Efforts to do that through the UN Security Council were unsuccessful, due to China’s and Russia’s positions as the permanent member protectors of brutal authoritarian regimes, and the veto that goes with it.
Although the letter is undated, the US issued a dramatically redesigned $100 bill with a watermark in 1996. However, the letter also references “President Bush”, who was not in office at the time, so I am guessing it’s referencing the 1991 redesign which incorporated microprinting and a metallic security strip (THE SPY STRIP!!11!)
This document bears his signature, and is on his own letterhead. He has disavowed nothing and has absolutely not proven that he didn’t write or review the subject matter he was putting out in his own name through his fearmongering little conspiratorial newsletters.
Paul’s explanations and disavowals are too little, too late. This came up in 2008, and it’s coming up again now, and like Paul, I’m afraid too. Not about the new-style currency and tinfoil hat conspiracy theories about it, but about the fact that a conspiratorial freak who wrote this sort of incendiary garbage during the time in American life when gun fetishist militias acted out as racial-fascist domestic terrorists with alarming frequency.
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For some reason, Iowa frontrunner Ron Paul believes that he doesn’t deserve similar scrutiny. The copyright was held by “Ron Paul & Associates, Inc.” He’s busy having hissy fits when reporters ask him legitimate questions about the writings done by him, or in his name. He can say he “never read them”, but that can’t be true. He can say he “disavows them” but he didn’t do so then, when it mattered and when he was trying to make money off them. The press keeps asking him about it (because it’s important), and he’s getting testy about it.
As you might expect, the Paulists’ reaction to reporters asking questions has been perfectly reasonable:
I mean, she’s a woman – so, she’s a whore, AMIRITE?!
Part of believing in a free market is accepting the consequences of using one’s Constitutional liberty to think and write hateful nonsense.
This whole fascination with Ron Paul (whose prognostications on the one issue he purports to be expert – monetary policy – have been all wrong) is analogous to if Lyndon LaRouche actually, finally, managed to get the Democratic nomination, or be competitive in Iowa. But LaRouche stays on the fringe of politics where he belongs, a joke and an afterthought. Ron Paul is outpolling the inconsistent Romney, the unhinged Bachmann, the gay-baiting Perry, and the corrupt Gingrich.
The only non-lunatic Republican candidate, Huntsman, may do well in New Hampshire, where he’s been focusing his efforts.
All the news and views fit to consume during your “morning grumpy”.
1. Yesterday was “UB2020” day in Western New York. Dozens of local politicians lined up to take partial credit for or share in the glow of the UB2020 milk and honey festival. It’s always humorous to see self-described anti-government spending pols like Pat Gallivan and Jane Corwin show up in a gaggle to applaud the signing of massive public spending initiatives. I digress. Unfortunately, we’re the only ones still calling it UB2020, it’s actually NY SUNY2020 and this program is a watered-down stepchild of the original $4BN proposal.
The long-planned UB2020 bill that was defeated multiple times in Albany, provided for over $4BN in construction and investment in Buffalo, most of which would have come from state coffers and tuition increases. The plan called for massive investments in academic facilities, additional faculty, research facilities and huge swaths of new students as UB staked out new territory as an international research university. Now? We’re getting $35MM to assist in the cost to move the medical school a few miles down Main Street. We can also ask for more money for other projects on a piecemeal basis at a later date. Hooray! History!
The funding announced in a visit to Buffalo by the governor on Tuesday, accounts for about 10 percent of the current price tag of the new medical school, leading some to wonder if 2020 is no longer a date by which to measure progress – but rather a brand name the school is struck with.
“The move of the medical school will definitely happen before 2020,” Brown says. “You can count on that.”
UB will still need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for many of UB 2020’s projects, the biggest of which is the new $400 million medical school. That addition to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus has not been designed yet. In fact, the blueprints for the structure will not be ready for another year and a half.
Certainly, consolidation of the UB Medical School into a $375MM facility on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus is good news. But, let’s disabuse ourselves of any remaining notion that this is the UB2020 plan that was originally proposed as a “gamechanger” for the region.
The University of Surrey reports on the study (conducted jointly with researchers at Middlesex University), to be published in the British Journal of Psychology. Researchers gave a group of men and women quotes from the British lad mags FHM, Loaded, Nuts and Zoo, as well as excerpts from interviews with actual convicted rapists originally published in the book The Rapist Files. The participants couldn’t reliably identify which statements came from magazines and which from rapists — what’s more, they rated the magazine quotes as slightly more derogatory than the statements made by men serving time for raping women.
It’s a British survey but also valid in America.
Here’s an example, did this quote come from a convicted rapist or the pages of a men’s magazine?
You’ll find most girls will be reluctant about going to bed with somebody or crawling in the back seat of a car . . . But you can usually seduce them, and they’ll do it willingly.
Troubling and upsetting.
3. That crazy pinko, Barack Obama is at it again! Fighting to prevent our government from fighting the war on terror due to his muslim sens…wait, what? Oh, this just in, Obama reverses his position and intends to sign the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act once it passes both houses of Congress.
The Obama administration Tuesday reversed itself and said it would not veto a major 2012 defense bill that expands the American military’s authority to arrest anyone, including U.S. citizens, anywhere in the world and hold them indefinitely without charge or the right to a civilian trial.
Are you cool with that? Me neither. Here’s how “indefinite detention” is defined.
Section 1032 of the bill has garnered the most outrage because it requires the military to indefinitely jail any and all accused terrorists — the keyword being “accused,” not convicted. Hence, this mandate could potentially land someone in a military brig for life absent of any charges or convictions from an impartial judge, based solely on unproven accusations.
Anders points out, “The legislation is trying to work off the standards being applied to the Guantanamo cases.” Long before the NDAA of 2012, indefinite military detention was a hallmark of the Bush years with the creation of Guantanamo Bay in 2002, a legal black hole where “enemy combatants” — not only those caputured on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan — were sent for extrajudicial detainment, interrogation, and notoriously, torture.
What is an enemy combatant? Good question, evidently everyone has the potential to be one and the military will know them when they see them.
4. In other news, Congress is poised to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act. You’ll probably want to read up on this and call your Representative and Senators. Absolute bullshit law that will destroy innovation and internet freedom. Don’t believe me? Well, perhaps you’ll believe the founders of Google, Craigslist, Netscape, Twitter, LinkedIn, eBay, Wikipedia, PayPal, YouTube, and hundreds of other massive Internet companies.
5. Well, that was a miserable stream of news, eh? Let’s lighten it up a bit with the latest video from the awesome team at “Bad Lip Reading” featuring Ron Paul.
Fact Of The Day: Step 1.) Be handsome. According to the author of “Beauty Pays“, Daniel Hamermes, people with above-average looks will earn $230,000 more in a lifetime than their below-average peers. The economist calculates that a good-looking man will earn 4% more over a lifetime than an average-looking man, and that an average-looking woman will earn 4% more than a below-average-looking woman. There are outliers (Gates, Bill), but being handsome does help.
Quote Of The Day: “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their own selfish purposes.” – Andrew Jackson
Song Of The Day: “Underwater Moonlight” by The Soft Boys
All the news and views fit to consume during your “morning grumpy”.
America, F*CK YEAH!
1. The future of journalism is on the web. That may seem like an odd statement for someone who plies his trade for an outlet primarily known for its print product, but it’s not some dirty little secret. Print will always have a place, especially alternative weeklies that focus on feature reporting. But day-to-day transactional beat coverage? It will be web-based. Covering events and beats and reporting them the following day in a print product is a wasteful and expensive proposition. I’m roughly the 351,450th person to write this on a blog in the last year, so I’m not going to pretend this is some big revelation.
Print coverage of local events is expensive and lacks timeliness. Local broadcast television coverage is typically shallow and glib. Radio coverage is nearly non-existent, with the exception of local non-profit, public radio. Ah, wait, I sense a point coming!
Ten NBC-owned television stations across the nation will team with nonprofit news outlets in an attempt to beef up their enterprise and analytical reporting, the network announced Monday.
NBC affiliates in Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia will work with work with non-commercial outfits in those cities — KPCC public radio, the Chicago Reporter and WHYY public radio and television, respectively — while all of the network’s owned-and-operated stations will get early access to investigative reports from the independent, nonprofit newsroom Pro Publica.
Television outlets doing enterprise coverage? Wow, that would be refreshing around these parts, eh? Now imagine extending this idea to a traditional print daily. What if The Buffalo News partnered with a local non-profit web outlet on beat coverage, enterprise projects, and multimedia stories? It would extend the newsroom, better inform the public, and create a better product. Seems like a natural fit.
We try to go beyond the press releases and press conferences to bring you the stories that our leaders and powerful don’t want to announce — the kind of stories that result in positive change, uncover vital information for San Diegans, and bring us together as a community. And we put perspective and analysis into the things they do announce. We don’t report with any right- or left-wing agenda. But we are inspired by passion to expose what is right and wrong, to drive reform and to spur solutions for the best of the community as a whole.
Damn, that sounds excellent! I want this to happen right here in Buffalo. It seems that an enterprising group of young reporters in this town might want to think about partnering up with some of the quality talent The Buffalo News has laid off in recent years and copy the San Diego model. I know I’d like expanded and timely coverage of local news events, dedicated fact checking, and “explainer” articles. I’ll put some money on the table to make this happen, anyone else want in?
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning…
Corporate America is sitting right on top of the solution to the nation’s employment crisis, according to a new report from a group of University of Massachusetts economists.
If America’s largest banks and non-financial companies would just loosen their death-grip on a chunk of the $3.6 trillion in cash they’re hoarding and move it into productive investments instead, the report estimates that about 19 million jobs would be created in the next three years, lowering the unemployment rate to under 5 percent.
In fact, according to the Federal Reserve (Table L.109, line 28), banks are sitting on $1.6 trillion in reserves — about 80 times the $20 billion they held in 2007.
Meanwhile, non-financial companies are keeping their profits liquid, rather than plowing them back into investments, to the tune of about $2 trillion.
Together, that amounts to almost a quarter of the U.S. gross domestic product.
Let’s get it together, fearless corporate barons. Spend some money, hire some people and get this fucking train moving.
Rep. Ron Paul rarely makes news, and his candidacy is frequently ignored by Beltway reporters. But headlines, his aides say, are overrated. In fact, the Texas Republican’s low-key autumn was strategic. As Paul’s competitors stumbled and sparred, he amassed a small fortune for his campaign and built a strong ground operation. And with January fast approaching, his team is ready to surprise the political world and sweep the Iowa caucuses.
While several GOP candidates have taken their turn at the front of the pack, Ron Paul and his ill-fitting suits have hung back, waiting to strike. He has a rabid base of supporters and the race will inevitably give him and them their moment once Newt Gingrich steps on his arrogant dick in the next month or two. While those rabid supporters are a blessing for Paul, they’re also a curse. One of the least appealing things about Paul is the glib assholes who scold America for not agreeing with them. If he can overcome the Jim Ostrowskis of the world and positions himself as the reasonable fallback/compromise/not-Mitt-Romney option, Ron Paul just might end up the nominee.
6. How many times can a Christian be “born again”? Good question.
Bishop Eddie Long, the Atlanta-area Baptist megachurch leader accused of sexual misconduct with several young men, announced on Sunday he is taking time off to focus on his family. His church, like many evangelical Christian churches, exhorts sinners to be “born again,” accepting Christ as their savior on the path to redemption. If a born-again Christian like Long has already been reborn, can he later become born again again?
Does government have the right to regulate air safety and maintenance, or should the people have the freedom to choose an airline that prides itself on lax standards but low prices?
Now, as the GOP surveys the landscape after a devastating loss in the 2008 general election, they must take stock of who they are as a party. Will they return to their roots as the party of small government, tax reform, and a prudent and cautious foreign policy? That was the party of which I was a member. Or will they continue their march towards being a regional party with a big government mindset and christianist values? When you define your party platform, I think you have to define from the fringe and work your way back to the center. For all intents and purposes, the Republican Party has two fringe factions at this point.
Essentially, who will they model themselves after, Ron Paul or Sarah Palin? It is the choice of a generation for Republicans.
While Paul was marginalized by many members of his own party during the primary as some right wing whackjob, his platform was right out of the paleo-conservative constitutionalist playbook as written by Barry Goldwater.
Oddly enough, the actual right wing whackjob, Sarah Palin, was embraced by her party with nearly the same fervor with which they rejected Ron Paul. Palin is a neo-con (a dumb one at that) and shares in the big govenment ideology of her party with a heavy focus on the churchin’ (wink). Palin herself represents the logical follow-on to President Bush, with a heavy dose of high school bitchiness and condescending religion. Her wing of the party is populated by the likes of Bobby Jindal, Mitch McConnell and Mike Huckabee. While Ron Paul is a christian, he does not make it the centerpiece of his campaign identity or platform.
So, the GOP is at a crossroads. The Democrats hold the Presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the majority of Governorships and the GOP is stumbling about like Rush Limbaugh in a pharmacy. The smart play would seem to lay the foundation of an opposition party which would be everything an Obama Administration and a Democratic Congress is not.
Can Ron Paul be a leader in the way that Howard Dean was after 2004? Does the GOP sense a need to change course from their big government, christianist platform? If not Paul, who can the GOP look to as a ;eader on policy and platform? Mitt Romney? Tim Pawlenty? Chalie (Definitely not gay) Crist? Newt Gingrich?
There was once a listserv called “ReformNYS” that, for some time, was a collection of outrages and calls to action shared among the Ron Paul libertarian wing of the local tea party. It never really had many ideas about reforming New York State, and it’s managed to reform exactly nothing.
What’s great about Rand Paul’s 
The Buffalo Record 