A county judge in Lubbock, Texas has caused a kerfuffle for posting anti-Obama notices on the courthouse wall. Actually, they are more about Obama T-shirts, but they are pretty offensive nonetheless.
One notice is a fake diary entry:
Let’s see here. I need to shower, shave, eat some oatmeal (it keeps my cholesterol down), put on my new “Obama: Change we can believe in” T-shirt, grab my 9 and a few rounds, hold up a convenience store, and then go buy some crack. Who knows, maybe I’ll slap the wife around a little bit too… if I have time.
Another notice shows nine arrest photos of people (almost all minorities) wearing Obama T-shirts, with the caption:
Just think about this for a second: Did you ever see anyone arrested wearing a Bush T-shirt, or for you older folks, an Eisenhower?, Gerald Ford?, Ronald Reagan?
There are other anti-Obama cartoons as well. Some people accuse the judge of being racist, but even if you think he isn’t being racist, I don’t think it is appropriate for him to be posting political materials like this in the courthouse.
Even so, I can’t help but have some fun, so here’s a few retorts that I would love to post below his notice:
For heaven’s sake, stop arresting only people wearing Obama T-shirts!
That’s what happens when you make it illegal to wear Obama T-shirts in your county. In addition to DWB, you must have DWWOTS.
Nobody is stupid enough to be caught wearing a Bush T-shirt.
The judge defended his actions, saying he didn’t think there was anything wrong with what he posted and that he had not heard from anyone who did. To which I would respond: Did you ever notice that as a judge, people might be a bit reluctant to complain about your offensive materials plastered all over your courthouse walls?
If you think of a cute retort, I welcome it in the comments.
UPDATE: A reader contributed this particularly good one:
Republicans don’t get arrested in t-shirts. They get arrested in suits.
[It’s] under the guise of quote, volunteerism, but it’s not volunteers at all. It’s paying people to do work on behalf of government. There are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people get trained in the philosophy the government puts forward and then they have to go work in these politically correct forums. As a parent, I would have a very, very difficult time seeing my children do this.
– Michele Bachmann talking about AmeriCorps on the Sue Jeffers radio show in April. So of course, Bachmann’s son, Harrison Bachmann, just joined Teach for America, which is part of AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps is similar to the Peace Corps, except it puts young people to work inside of America, teaching and helping the poor.
People who are fighting for health care reform should learn a lesson from their opponents and become less reality based. To help this, I modestly propose ten talking points that show how health care reform can appeal to everyone, including conservatives, insurance companies, and even the media:
Health care reform will immensely help the conservative cause by showing Medicare, the Veterans Administration, the Postal Service, public highways, national parks, the military, police, and fire departments as the evil socialist monstrosities they truly are; we will quickly abolish them all and revert to compassionate free market principles. Who needs a military when wars can be treated as corporate takeovers?
Who doesn’t want to see Sarah Palin stand in front of a death panel? Even her most fervent supporters would enjoy giving her another outlet.
It would help the economy to euthanize all those non-productive old people. It is their fault that health care costs are so high, anyway.
The money that the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are pumping into ads fighting health care reform is pretty much the only thing keeping most television stations afloat. Without health care reform to endlessly vilify, the Fox News Channel (if they even survive) would probably be reduced to reruns of interviews with birthers.
Three words: “Joe the Doctor”.
Investor’s Business Daily said that people such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t stand a chance under a nationalized health care system. Heck, this is a guy who fifty years ago was diagnosed with a terminal disease and given three years to live, who has solved many challenging mysteries of the universe while not being able to speak, authored a dozen books and papers without being able to write, and has a wife and three children despite being completely paralyzed. I’m sure he’s now bored and would welcome another challenge.
If our government is as corrupt and incompetent as conservatives want it to be, then any health care reform that makes it through Congress will turn out to be a big corporate give-away to the health insurance companies (just like the Medicare prescription drug benefit that Dubya got passed). So insurance companies will benefit! Why should banks get all the rewards of government corruption and cronyism?
The Liberty Counsel warns that the health reform bills in Congress will establish school-based ‘health’ clinics that will indoctrinate your children. Have you tried to talk to any young people lately? I say they could definitely use some heavy-duty indoctrination!
Pro-life groups say that the health care bills will fund abortions. Since a majority of Americans are pro-choice, this should be a big selling point. I say this even though none of the current bills would actually fund any abortions. After all, the pro-life crowd kept voting for neocons like Dubya, despite the fact that they never actually tried to outlaw abortions or did anything to reduce the number of abortions. Just the hint that health reform will fund abortions should make it popular with the pro-choice majority.
Our friends at Liberty Counsel also claim that the health care bill will likely cover sex change surgery. So even the LGBT crowd has something to like about reform.
Hal Turner is a white nationalist who promotes (among other things) the rounding up and killing of Jews. He also worked for Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign, served as campaign manager for libertarian party candidate Murray Sabrin, and was even a friend of Sean Hannity (even though Sean later tried to deny it). He also runs a website and does a weekly webcast espousing his views.
But he’s now sitting in jail without bail. In a June 2 posting to his website, he wrote that three US appellate judges “deserve to be killed” because they upheld a Chicago ban on handguns. But the next day, he crossed over into crazy land by providing the names, work addresses, phone numbers, and photos of the three judges on his website.
At that point, the FBI swung into action and arrested Turner. And here’s when it goes beyond crazy. While Turner was in custody, he called in a posting to his website that threatened and named the three FBI agents who interviewed him.
And they said Skip Gates was nuts for yelling at a policeman.
Most of us know the propaganda technique called “The Big Lie” (which, as Hitler put it, is a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”.)
But I think that the health care debate has gotten to The Even Bigger Lie, which is a lie so stunningly huge that it sucks all the intelligence out of anyone who sees or hears it, a lie that cannot be disputed because it is self contradictory. A lie that you are afraid to dispute, because arguing against it repeats the lie and makes more people believe it, even though it is flagrantly unbelievable.
Case One: Investor’s Business Daily runs an editorial comparing Obama’s health care proposals to the British health care system (which itself is silly, since Obama is not proposing that we nationalize our health care system like the British did). They are trying to claim that getting the government involved in health care will put the government in the position of deciding who “deserves” health care (again silly, since the US government is already heavily involved in our health care, especially if we are in the armed forces, on Medicare, or Medicaid).
But their even bigger lie is when they say:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
Of course, Hawking was born in the UK, and has lived most of his life in the UK, under exactly that health care system where he “wouldn’t have a chance”.
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Second, why the hell is Palin dragging her family into the discussion yet again, just after attacking the media for dragging her family into the discussion?
Third, none of the bills working their way through Congress, nor anything Obama has proposed, has anything like “death panels” in it. Conservatives are claiming that in order to cut costs, the government will have to “ration” health care to decide who deserves it. But the big lie they are ignoring is that for-profit health insurance companies have a much bigger incentive to cut costs, which they already definitely do with a vengeance.
Palin warns that the people who “will suffer the most” when the government “rations care” are the “the sick, the elderly, and the disabled.” The exact opposite is true. It is the private insurance industry, not the government, that excludes the sick, the elderly, and the disabled. Insurance companies are in the business of making money, and it makes no economic sense for them to cover people who are likely to incur enormous health care costs over their lifetimes. Good luck trying to purchase private health insurance if you’re old, sick, or disabled.
And of course, if you are elderly, you are already on Medicare for this very reason!
And finally, how hypocritical is it of Palin to scare people with threats of a death panel, when during her (shortened) tenure as governor, Alaska’s Medicare and Medicaid elder care program was so incompetent that 250 elderly people died waiting for services. No other state had similar problems, and it got so bad that the federal government had to step in and force Alaska to make necessary improvements.
I have to agree with Ron Reagan (Ronald’s son) on his great response to this one:
UPDATE: Stephen Hawking responds to the claim that if he were English (which he is) he wouldn’t stand a chance because with his handicaps he would be considered worthless. According to Hawking: “I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”
UPDATE 3: Donklephant discovered that in April 2008, Governor Sarah Palin endorsed the same end-of-life counseling that she now calls “death panels”. I guess this is not too surprising, given her flip-flopping on the Bridge to Nowhere and other issues.
This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.
At the appropriate time as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issed by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to ny house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it’s valuables thanks to the local police department.
I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic and Fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.
Some of you may be wondering how Jon Stewart gets Neoconservatives (let alone conservatives) to appear on his show with such regularity. In fact, since Obama took office, Stewart has had more conservatives appear on his show than liberals. The answer can be found in conservatives own words. Bill Kristol said “He doesn’t take cheap shots. Jon is smart.”
Cliff May, a former spokesman for the Republican Party and a unabashed hawk appeared on the show to talk about torture and said “Literally, this is the best conversation I’ve had on this subject anywhere.” and “He’s a staunch liberal, but he’s a thoughtful liberal, and I respect that.”
John Bolton, Bush’s ambassador to the UN and a Fox News contributor says “He always gives you a chance to answer, which some people don’t do.”
But the bottom line is that Stewart gives conservatives the ability to reach an audience that normally tunes them out. The media in this country has become so polarized, that it has become something of an echo chamber. Or worse, the media dumbs down issues for the lowest common denominator viewer. As Bolton put it “Maybe he’s discovered that interesting discussion attracts viewers.”
Here’s to more spirited, intelligent discussion of issues!
In a bizarre twist to the ongoing reality inversion, where blacks and latinos are now the ones who are racist, the Boston Police officer who called Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates a “banana-eating jungle monkey” and said he would have sprayed Gates in the face with pepper spray, has filed a lawsuit against the police department, police commissioner, and mayor, saying the city violated his civil rights, causing him pain and suffering, mental anguish, emotional distress, posttraumatic stress, sleeplessness, indignities and embarrassment, degradation, injury to reputation, and restrictions on personal freedom.
A county judge in Lubbock, Texas has caused a kerfuffle for posting anti-Obama notices on the courthouse wall. Actually, they are more about Obama T-shirts, but they are 
