Bailey Manuscript Brouhaha

It would have been enough, in fact more than enough, at least in my mind ... had the Mudflats people simply said,

It appears that a manuscript we have been working on for over a year has been distributed well beyond what we intended when we sent it to our publicist. Several outlets, news organizations and blogs included, are writing about one or another aspect of the book we hoped to publish.

Those we know have had access to the manuscript, either through their publishing stories about it or through their statements that they received it from one or another individual, will be contacted by our attorneys and asked to cease and desist and also asked to reveal from whom they received a copy and to whom they themselves distributed a copy.

In the meantime, we ask for our readers' patience while we determine our next best course of action to publish this critically important manuscript.

Now, wouldn't that have been better?  The high road, people, the high road.  You only get a chance to take it once.

One More Reason (as if we needed another regarding Mrs. Palin)

There are SO many professions and even mundane-type jobs where it is essential to think before acting. Would your employers or customers or co-workers forgive you when time and again you jumped to conclusions? Even carpenters can't afford to be hasty (measure twice, cut once), much less CEOs and Presidents.

But then, we have Mrs. Palin, who wants to help the media become more truthful because she has a degree in Communications or Journalism or something. Getting those pesky whos, whats, wheres, whys and whens is difficult, you betcha!

I wonder who made this mistake.  Someone jumped the gun and someone tweeted as SarahPalinUSA that the White House was only proposing a very small budget cut.  Someone grabbed this information from a site called The Blaze and ran with it!

FYI,

The Blaze is a news, information and opinion site brought to you by Glenn Beck and a dedicated team of writers, journalists & video producers.

The article that no doubt inspired Mrs. Palin to tweet her little chastisement of her arch-enemy, President Obama, even put up several great graphics showing just how tiny the current administration's budget cuts were.

Unfortunately, The Blaze shares premature-conclusion-jumping syndrome with Mrs. Palin today, since the pie chart is egregiously incorrect. The cuts proposed amount to at least $75 billion (with a B), far more by several magnitudes than the $775 million all the RWNJ's are cackling about.

Not only The Blaze, but dozens of other Beck-groupie sites are screaming about this paltry $775 million set of cuts.  Just Google "775 million budget cuts" to see who all ran with this false story.

CBS explains,

[Glenn Beck's Web site] uses an op-ed by White House Budget Director Jacob Lew to suggest that Mr. Obama was proposing to cut $775 million from the budget, and goes on to mock that amount as insignificant.

The problem? Lew wrote in his op-ed that he was only discussing "a small fraction of the scores of cuts" in the budget proposal, not the total proposed cuts, as a Democratic official pointed out to Ben Smith. Now, it's difficult to quantify the exact total of those first year cuts, and there is new spending that actually increases the deficit projection for 2012. But the cuts themselves are certainly more than Palin suggests: there are $2.5 billion in cuts to the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program alone, for example. Smith writes that the proposed cuts, in total, add up to about $75 billion.

I can't begin to imagine what a nightmare it would be should Mrs. Palin ever, ever get into a position of having to make decisions for the country. She can't even fact-check what she tweets because she is so damn eager to blast President Obama.

Quickie Time Again

This time it's about abortion.


The major hypocrisy with those who want the Government to step in and tell women they may not terminate a pregnancy (yes, the very same big bad get Government off our backs people promote this) is this:

1. If they themselves (women of course) get pregnant and don't want to deliver, they have the means to discreetly get rid of the problem thanks to their financial resources, regardless of whatever law may be in place.  That's the reason Roe v Wade still exists, actually. Do you really think these women want to be lawbreakers?  No.  They just want to reserve the privilege for themselves.
2. These same people, male and female, almost universally support the death penalty. At what point in "life" does a human being cease to deserve preservation? Why does the pro-life crowd hunger for killing, especially when we know our justice system is imperfect and those convicted are not always guilty? Is it only the mass of cells inside a woman's uterus that is sacred?  Not the mass of cells that walks down the street?
3. They also are, almost universally, gung-ho for the Bush doctrine (listen up Sarah...), which basically asserted that we have a right to invade anywhere in the world we think someone may be thinking about doing bad things to Americans.  Invasions mean killing.  People dying.  Children and other innocents with guts ripped out, dead. The numbers of innocents slain in Iraq since 2003 is staggering.  The legacy of our phosphorus and our depleted uranium arms and armaments will continue to devastate the land and its peoples for many generations to come.
4. They basically support the military-industrial complex which runs on OIL and creates jobs only in the weapons manufacturing industries. They also basically support guns and high-volume clips for automatic weapons, even though a hunter never needs this firepower, and even though our police chiefs fight against the overpowering weapons.
5. They turn a blind eye to the horrendous civilian body counts that result from "war" and never have a thing to say about the tens of thousands of infants born with horrific deformities due to our use of illegal munitions.

In short, the pro-life crowd acts as if it is anti-Jesus and anti-life in every form other than that of the unborn fetus. Their hands are so bloody in every other aspect of human and mammal life that their feigned disgust at the thought of someone aborting a fetus is laughable.

People are certainly entitled to their opinions.  But if what you voice out loud cannot be supported and sustained, due to the hypocrisy in the rest of your life, you basically lose.  Make sure that by protesting of abortions you do not also inspire someone to gun down the medical professionals who provide this vital, legal service.  Bill O'Reilly will forever be on my personal a-hole list for broadcasting, day after week, "Tiller the baby killer."

If you feel ultra-strongly about abortion, revisit how you feel about other kinds of involuntary life termination.  I'd be a lot more likely to give you space if you also oppose the death penalty and wars of choice.

Time for a Quickie

I don't want to let my own blog have an atrophy (lol, h/t to Sarah Palin who frequently uses verbs as nouns) while I'm writing for Politicalgates.  Once in a while, therefore, also too, I'll try and post on H&HT a simple phrase that boggles my mind.

Today's phrase is the frequently heard justification by politicians, "The American People want.... [fill in the blank]."

Since when do the American people speak with a unified monolithic voice? More often than not, the pol who prefaces his statement with "The American people want..." does not, in any shape or fashion speak for me.  I do not want the recently passed Health Care bill undone, for instance.  I do not want us to stop looking at ways to control guns, their ownership, their ammunition.  I do not want to get any more proof of President Obama's citizenship than what has already been proffered.  I do not want us to strip mine in West Virginia or send jobs overseas to India or drill for oil in sensitive environments like ANWR or encourage parents to pull their children out of public schools in favor of home-schooling or private schooling.

In short, any pol who declares that he/she knows what the American people want is trying very hard to pull the wool over our eyes.  They haven't got a clue.  Even when they poll us they don't ask the right questions.  And no poll can reflect the depth of opinion that exists on any single topic.  I am very wary of a talking head or a politician trying to support his or her own viewpoint (be it conservative or liberal or libertarian or whatever) by telling me on the TV that he or she knows what the American people want.

They don't.  They can't.  They should simply be responsible to their own communities, their own constituents (and NOT to the lobbyists), and quit with the all-encompassing "I'll tell you what you feel and think" nonsense.  They should say, out loud, "MY constituents by a whatever % margin feel like this:..."

They don't speak for me.  Don't let them speak for you or tell you what you think, either.