Words Matter when talking about Terrorism and the Austin Suicide Bomber

Even without having cable, I'm well aware of the fact that the Fair and Balanced Fox News Network has absolutely no problem throwing around the words "terror," "terrorism," or "terrorist," when discussing the actions of dedicated extremists with malfunctioning explosives in their shoes or underwear (especially if those misguided souls are men of color with non-Anglo names). So why am I not surprised that I can't find any word with that terror- root used in any of the online Fox News articles about yesterday's Austin Suicide Bomber, the terrorist (and "normal, right down the middle kind of guy") Joe Stack?

The farthest their language seems to go when discussing this cowardly terrorist murderer is "tax protestor" or "domestic extremist." Their lead online article on him this morning ends with an attempt to understand to poor misunderstood criminal and put him into a larger historical context with which many of their viewers might empathize:

"Thursday was not the first time a tax protester went after an Austin IRS building. In 1995, Charles Ray Polk plotted to bomb the IRS Austin Service Center. He was released from prison in October of last year.

The tax protest movement has a long history in the U.S. and was a strong component of anti-government sentiments that surged during the 1990s. That wave culminated in the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. Several domestic extremists were later convicted in the plot."

Terrorism is terrorism. Corporate styleguides matter. Corporate styleguides help form the opinions of those who get their news from the channel of Cheney and Beck and O'Reilly and Palin. How many Teabaggers will feel free to take the next step and consider the Austin Suicide Bomber a hero, along with the murderers of abortion doctors and other criminal heroes of the radical right?

The Word of the Day is "Terrorism"

I'm just seeing the news now that a disgruntled taxpayer and private pilot (not usually an economically disadvantaged group) purposely flew his plane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, killing himself and possibly others. Though he may have failed in his attempt to take out IRS agents and employees, certainly the intent is there to kill other people when flying a plane loaded with fuel into the side of an office building. Some other suicide terrorists certainly expected to kill other people when they did the same thing by flying their planes into office buildings in New York City and Arlington, Virginia in 2001.

"We do not yet know the cause of the plane crash," the Department of Homeland Security said in a release. "At this time, we have no reason to believe there is a nexus to terrorist activity. We continue to gather more information, and are aware there is additional information about the pilot's history." (FROM CNN.com)

If a 53-year-old white American male cannot be called a suicide terrorist bomber just because his name is Joseph Andrew Stack III rather than Mohamed Atta, then the language has no meaning.

The Word of the Day is "Slumburbia"

"The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this [San Joaquin] valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums [...] this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live."

--Timothy Egan, "Slumburbia"

on nytimes.com, 10 February 2010

Click the link for his full short blog entry on the ghost towns dotting the Sunbelt that are filled with underwater McMansions and minimalls of cigarette stores and cash advance outlets, but I also love that Timothy Egan quotes another writer of the American West to sum up the religion of economic bubbles and development even more succinctly:

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

--Edward Abbey, The Journey Home, 1977

"Meet Your Meat"

I had read about the "Meet Your Meat" video when reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, but I avoided watching it until today. Not even the soothing familiar voice of Alec Baldwin as narrator makes the images more palatable, which, of course, is the point.
If you're thinking of giving up something other than Christianity for Lent, then you might be well-served by watching at least some of this (or finding more videos at the PETA TV archive).



Of course this isn't just about meat eating, or ethics. It's about corporations and the fact that, in the pursuit of dollars, EVERYTHING is permitted.
But we don't have to support it.

The Second Word of the Day is "Carnevale"

Who knew that Carne-vale is old Latin for "Farewell to Meat"?! Not me. But it's a great word to keep in mind as we approach Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday. "Farewell to Meat" is a thought that True Blue Liberal dot org can get behind for all the heath, environmental, and ethical reasons we've touched on in earlier posts.

I stumbled upon the history of the second word of the day this morning on a website called Meatless Monday, which is run in connection with the Johns Hopkins' School of Public Health and has the goal of reducing meat consumption by 15%. If it can't be seven days a week without meat, or five, or three, it's good to start somewhere. I just wonder when they'll be harassed and sued by those same cowkillers who went after Oprah in the '90s.

The Word of the Day is "Tea-publican"

First there was the "tea party" protester. Now meet the Tea-publican.
Conservative activists who once protested the political establishment are now flooding the lowest level of the Republican Party apparatus hoping to take over the party they once scorned -- one precinct at a time.

--Kathleen Hennessey,
Los Angeles Times, 15 February 2010

I hope I'm not the only liberal who sees great promise in this attempt by the teabaggers to infiltrate the grass roots of the Grand Old Party and complete the process of rotting it from within. The potential for more Republican defeats as right-wing extremists attack more Deirdre Scozzafavas as being insignificantly orthodox on questions of God and Marriage and Abortion seems great. The GOP is in danger of becoming as marginal as it was under Goldwater in '64. To avoid this fate, the few remaining moderate Republicans might actually try to find their backbones and emphatically repudiate the Teapublican agenda (but I doubt it).

the first Quote of the Day on TrueBlueLiberal.org to contain one of those emoticon things

Jim Carrey tweeted this about ten minutes ago on Twitter, giving us yet another reason to feel good about our decision not to pay a cable or satellite corporation for the privilege of watching other corporations' television programs. And if you're reading this blog on a device that doesn't show the image up above, Mr. Carrey's tweet reads:

television is weirdos judging weirdos viewed by weirdos who are just glad there are weirder weirdos out there. like me DAMN IT! %^(

Kill Your TV!

Tests confirm that True Blue Liberal continues to list toward port.

The visual representation of my results is to your left (where else?), but take the World's Smallest Political Quiz yourself to see if you can possibly be as liberal as me!

(h/t to @angryliberal for the link)

Another Quote of the Day from Another Prominent Republican

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.

--Abraham Lincoln (letter to William F. Ekins, 21 November 1864)

This quotation from the Great Emancipator seems especially appropriate in this week when the five conservative members of the Supreme Court fully removed the previous restrictions on corporate speech in political contexts andgave the corporations of America -- and the rest of the world -- "corporate personhood" that called for the protection of corporate "free speech" rights, with all the money that they can throw behind that speech. Imagine how sponsored speech will drown out real human speech when fully unleashed. The Fox-sponsored Tea Parties will seem like a tea party when there's so much corporate "grass roots" Astroturf covering the American landscape that we'll never need another lawnmower.

Though it's nothing to laugh about, it was very hard not to play with the idea of giving corporations even fuller personalities under the #CorporatePersonhood hashtag on Twitter a couple of days ago:

1. TrueBlueLiberal Is the GOP so wedded to its capitalist orthodoxy that they're happy about Hugo Chavez's Citgo having a political voice? #CorporatePersonhood 1 day ago
2. TrueBlueLiberal When Beef Products, Inc. was a little kid, he did unspeakable things to neighborhood cats. #CorporatePersonhood 1 day ago
3. TrueBlueLiberal it's no longer hog heaven at the Smithfield Corporation home since the kids have read Foer's "Eating Animals" #CorporatePersonhood 2 days ago
4. TrueBlueLiberal The wife of FedEx has more complaints than compliments about his single-minded obsession with speed. #CorporatePersonhood 2 days ago
5. TrueBlueLiberal Archer Daniels Midland was a stuck-up Waspy jock in high school & he got worse with age. #CorporatePersonhood 2 days ago
6. TrueBlueLiberal Young Waldo Martinsburg was an extremely unpopular nerd until he took his nom de rap of "WalMart" #CorporatePersonhood 2 days ago
7. TrueBlueLiberal Were the Baby Bells committing incest when they remarried? Don't any basic taboos apply when we're discussing #CorporatePersonhood ? 2 days ago
8. TrueBlueLiberal I hope the real census counts all the corporations too! #corporatepersonhood RT @TCDL GOP CENSUS SCAM IS AN OUTRAGE http://bit.ly/8qgA0l
9. TrueBlueLiberal Or when you first conceive of incorporating. RT @ZenobiaDTC I guess life now begins at the moment of incorporation. #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
10. TrueBlueLiberal AIG's schoolmates always believed that milk-money thief Abner Ignatz Golddigger would end up in jail one day. #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
11. TrueBlueLiberal Bob&Carol&Ted&Alice have nothing on Proctor&Johnson&Gamble&Johnson. #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
12. TrueBlueLiberal Do corporate persons have genders? Is Coca-Cola a Girl and Pepsi a Boy? Or vice versa? #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
13. TrueBlueLiberal Kraft is accusing Cadbury of being a real bridezilla about their pending nuptials. #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
14. TrueBlueLiberal Microsoft is thinking of switching to a new - cooler - pocket protector #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
15. TrueBlueLiberal Young ExxonMobil could never take a bath without leaving a ring around the tub. #corporatepersonhood
16. TrueBlueLiberal Wells Fargo's favorite game is still "Cowboys and Indians" #corporatepersonhood
17. TrueBlueLiberal General Motors is still worried about the stigma of being demoted to Corporal Motors. #corporatepersonhood 3 days ago

The Quote of the Day about the double standards regarding religious extremists

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and I sent a letter to President Obama Friday, urging him to override the DoJ’s decision to try the Christmas Day Bomber in civilian court and designate him as an enemy combatant, so that he might still be interrogated in order to glean critical intelligence that might avert a future terrorist attack.

--Sen. John Cornyn
Texas GOP Vote blog, 24 January 2010

So if the Republican right-wing leadership and their teabagger shock troops were intellectually consistent in any way they'd want Scott Roeder waterboarded at Guantanamo to find other murderous Christianist terrorist cells, wouldn't they? I guess that, in certain world views, successfully shooting a doctor in a church is much less of a crime than unsuccessfully lighting your underpants on fire.

But there are many on the Right supporting the murderer of Dr. George Tiller during services at his Lutheran Church back in May. Just look at the comments on this Fox News article supporting Christianist extremism and murder. Even the judge is considering allowing the jury to consider a verdict of voluntary manslaughter if this admitted murderer can prove he held an "unreasonable but honest belief" that he had to use force to protect another. What if Islamist extremists were allowed to make the same argument in an open court? Imagine the volume of the squeals from Cornyn and the teabaggers.

#3wordsconservativeshate, visually

The hashtag #3wordsconservativeshate took off on Twitter on Friday night, so I just wanted to preserve a few of them as a snapshot of the state of the hate in late January of twenty ten:
The triplets of words used in the Wordle up above : national public radio - john fitzgerald kennedy - public library funding - strong public schools - strong public option - Reagan rose taxes - #3wordsconservativeshate - true blue liberal - corporations aren't people - teabaggers teabaggers teabaggers - Franklin Delano Roosevelt - immigrants are people - gay marriage tolerance- gay feminist mother - hillary rodham clinton - Obama is president - Blackwater are mercenaries - Yes, Obama won - Yes We Can - Yes We Did - Dick Cheney's Daughter - Liberal policies Work - peace, equality, freedom -Universal Health Care - Rational Thought Process - Public Healthcare Option - Justice for All - Share the wealth - Basic Human Compassion - Proud American Liberal - Greed is Bad - Equal Rights Amendment - Liberté Egalité Fraternité - I'm Gay Mom! - and I left out hundreds and hundreds more, but these contributions seemed (to me) representative.
Unfortunately, #3wordsconservativeshate never came anywhere near the quantity of #3wordslibhate as shown here at Trendistic.com. So here are three more words: Quality Not Quantity.
Images of Wordles from Wordle.net are licensed by a Creative Commons License.

You Need Another Reason to Kill Your TV? How about people who mistake their psychoses for "God's Voice"?

... and blame the devil and the Haitians who fought for their freedom for the earthquake that devastated that nation last night:

Media Matters for America also has the Pat Robertson transcript for the segment up above on their website, but here's the important bit: " ...They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." True story. And so, the devil said, "OK, it's a deal." And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.... "

Hey, maybe they just should have remained slaves. Right Pat?

As an example of the complete intellectual (if not financial) bankruptcy of these money-grubbing TV preachers, the Revolution in Haiti at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries was fought against the French revolutionary government and THE Napoleon -- Napoleon Bonaparte -- not "Napoleon III and whatever" who ruled fifty years later. I'm also not sure where Pat Robertson got his "facts" about and direct quote from "the devil," but I'm pretty sure that's a mythological creature incapable of speaking directly to non-psychotic humans, and I haven't seen his (its) name mentioned in any history books as being a key player in the events of 1791-1804.

Despite the ridiculousness of these claims though, the reanimated zombie that used to be Jerry Falwell rose from its grave today and said of Pat Robertson's attempt to link earthquakes to pacts with the devil, "I totally concur!"

The Quote of the Day: Maureen Dowd Describes Hell in Less than 100 Words

Here's yet another reason to kill your television. In her column in this morning's New York Times, "The Biggest Loser," about the wrong-headed scheduling moves of NBC chief Jeff Zucker, Maureen Dowd describes the television norm against which Mr. Zucker has sinned by shuffling Jay Leno between traditional late night and primetime slots:

"… older Americans … have always watched the networks in a particular way. The kids come home, do their homework, the family has dinner. They’re in front of the TV by 8, and 8:30 is known as the dog-walking slot. At 9, it’s time for more comedy. As they get tired, they like to watch a fictional drama that leads into the real drama of the late local news. And then they like to laugh again so that those images of war or a local murder are not the last thing they see before bed."

Hell in 95 words, and one of the reasons explaining why so many Americans would prefer to work late at the office.