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Right wing candidates behaving like drug cartel thugs

Some of the loudest squawking about illegal immigration is coming from the Right and specifically Tea Party types. Those same types are also using the drug cartel violence as a major reason for supporting moves such as mass deportation or imprisonments of illegal immigrants not to mention locking down the borders.

So perhaps it is ironic that some Tea Party candidates are using the same type of intimidation against reporters that has led to the deaths of more than 30 Mexican journalists in the past four years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalist. Nothing so extreme has come from the Right as killing reporters on el Norte side of the border, at least yet. But the recent roughing-up of an Alaska journalist who dared to ask Republican and Tea Party Senate Candidate Joe Miller a valid question at an event shows that the Right is not  above using violence to intimidate U.S. reporters.

Then you have the Republican and another Tea Partyier running for New York governor who threatened to “take out” a reporter. GOP candidate Carl Paladino became engaged in what was described as a near scuffle with a columnist who had been writing about his out-of-wedlock daughter.

What is even more shameful is the American public is letting this kind of behavior become the norm. Perhaps some in the public dislike the press or at least those who don’t report subjects slanted in their favor like the GOP state-run TV channel Fox News. Will this country have to resort to protection details for reporters like in Mexico? I can’t see U.S. journalists allowing that to happen because they rightfully don’t want to be subsidized by the government.

Yet, until some Americans start complaining about the behavior of these thug politicians and their entourages, we will tread more and more down the path being traveled by those journalists down South of the border. And where those reporters are increasingly ending up is not at all a pleasant destination.

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Here is for change, or at least a stack of Benjamins

The Christian Science Monitor has a very good story I would suggest anyone who wants a real gut check on politics should read. The article is about the race between Democrat Andrew Cuomo — of the New York Cuomo’s — and Republican nut job Carl Paladino. Then you probably need to read the related story about just who this Carl Paladino is and why his campaign mail literally stinks. Now my recommendation isn’t because I give two hoots about the New York governor’s race. Albany is a nice town. I went there once, but I don’t think I want to live there.

Instead, the article looks at how the disillusioned voters in the country are grasping at straws for someone different, someone who will shake things up. I understand that but you have people like Carl Paladino, a rich real estate developer who is trying to buy a governorship, and whose solution to the “Ground Zero mosque controversy” is to take over the property by eminent domain. Who does that remind you of? The Ballpark in Arlington? Iraq? Torture? Spying on American citizens? You guessed it, Gee Dubya Bush.

Christine O’Donnell, running for the U.S. Senate seat on the GOP ticket in Delaware, is at least giving us some red-faced chuckles a minute. Witchcraft? Masturbation? Jeez, her campaign needs to come with an “R” rating.

The crux of the biscuit is that people do want genuine change. They elect whomever is different, or at least who they think is different. But then the person they elect turns out to be the same old crook  or the same old hack doing the bidding for his or her special interest. It’s all the same Brothers and Sisters. Why I didn’t even know our “illustrious” Congressman Judge Ted Poe has a Libertarian opponent. But he does, David Smith, who is described by political guide Politics1.com as a “software developer and Tea Party activist.” I am not a Ted Poe fan. I think he spends too much time railing on whatever is the right-wing cause of the day, mainly those danged Mexicans, when he could be helping his district. So a Libertarian doesn’t sound all that bad. Smith even has some great ideas, more Utopian than reality, when it comes to veterans health care. How he proposes to pay for these great ideas make no sense whatsoever. Plus, there is the Tea Party thing. Man, let me tell you when you have someone to the right of Ted Poe running against him, it is like Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I know you want change. I want change. Actually, I’ll take big bills even. Hundreds if you got ’em. I had no illusions Obama was going to bring any major change to the office of president and politics in Washington. I was right. But at least we don’t have President John McCain, or God Forbid, President Sarah Palin. Just don’t be fooled when your Tea Party stamp-of-approval candidate gets elected and gets caught with his or her hand in the cookie jar or with his foot in the adjacent men’s room stall. The more things change in Washington, the more they remain things.

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Teach your children well. Just listen to SBOE’s Bradley instead of President Obama

Those who live where I do — Beaumont, Texas, — can find a lot to be proud of here slightly more than a half-hour’s drive from the Gulf of Mexico. Pass by on Interstate 10 and you can see an aging, paint-needing, Air Force jet poised next to a curious looking cylindrical building. The small cylinder building is home to the memorabilia of the hometown legend Babe Didrikson Zaharias. I hope they still teach her in school because she was the greatest athlete of the 20th century. Track and field, a founding womens’ professional golfer, basketball player, baseball, you name it, Babe was in it and she was the best. A number of great musicians call or called Beaumont home, Johnny and Edgar Winter, trumpeter Harry James, R &B queen Barbara Lynn,  and country stars Mark Chestnut, Clay Walker, and Tracy Byrd grew up nearby and made their name playing Beaumont watering holes. For football greats, you had the Smith boys, Bubba, Tody among other sports stars like the Celtics’ Kendrick Perkins who grew up in or near Beaumont.

What Beaumont shouldn’t be proud of is its member on the nut-laden Texas State Board of Education. Republican David Bradley has dodged questions of his residency on a number of occasions. He votes with the ultra conservative block on the board, the same block that plays down Thomas Jefferson’s contribution to America and if they had it their way would ban evolution from Texas schools. Bradley, a Realtor who owns a number of apartments in Beaumont’s Old Town district, also wanted the state to show in its social studies books the “unintended consequences” of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation. Civil rights be damned!

Bradley now has the gall to say Texas schools should be excused from this year’s address to school children by President Obama. The reason? The state  has initially been denied millions in emergency jobs funding by the Obama administration. But I thought the GOP was against federal funding? Especially our governor with the great hair.  Bradley told the Houston Chronicle that Obama was “playing politics with public education” in withholding in a partisan manner the emergency funding.

Pot, Member Bradley? Not marijuana. I mean pot calling the kettle black. No pun intended. You can’t tell me that Bradley does not play politics every time he uses his board of education position to comment on something that doesn’t fit in his prim little, small-minded conservative world. Why does Bradley and his group of  puritanical holy rollers want to set Texas back centuries? Politics. Playing politics, my eye. I realize that if hypocrites were banned from the GOP then they would have a very small party. But this, is just a bit too much.

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Tea anyone?

If you want an analysis about the elections today in the Northeast then get it here on the Washington Post’s site. Those folks might be a bit biased, but so what? You need to know what all sides are thinking if you are going to be informed about politics. And right now, cable TV just isn’t cutting it. Sure, you get both sides, but I am talking all sides because there are more than two sides to politics, especially this year.

You have your defined left and moderates in the Democratic Party, no matter that Limbaugh says all Democrats are far left radicals. You also have moderates in the GOP, although their own sometimes will call them RHINOs, Republicans in Name Only. Then, there is the Tea Party, which has, unfortunately, become known as the insane arm of the Republican Party. I say unfortunately because those Tea Partyiers who started off with fairly reasonable ideas now have become lost in the crowd of the real nut jobs. And in reality, the nuts are not really going anywhere except down in defeat this November. The GOP will be fortunate if the TPs don’t take them along for the ride.