Government Goons & Who’s a Citizen

Those crazy “Birthers” are getting an awful lot of ink and air time lately, offering good comedy fodder for late night television while occasionally making regular people turn away in revulsion. Like the “Teabaggers” weren’t hilarious enough to use the name of a sexual weirdness as their moniker, or to publicize their racist rants and ridiculous charges against the President, after being the very same wackos who accused those who questioned any illegal act of the last administration by calling them traitors.

CNN commentator Roland S. Martin has a piece up today (July 22) entitled, Obama birth issue is nutty that proceeds to make good fun of the wingnuts. But since one of George W. Bush’s first serious actions as President after 9-11 was to arrange the biggest government overhaul since the New Deal – by inventing the so-called “Department of Homeland Security” – there are Americans out in the hinterland who are suddenly quite confused about their legal status. I’m one of them, and so is recent Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Who, like me, actually wasn’t born in the United States of America.

McCain, like me, was a Navy brat. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, I was born in the Philippines. There used to be a clear law on the books that held the children of American citizens born in a foreign country are indeed ‘natural born’ American citizens, even if they automatically get dual citizenship for the country in which they were born. I had that until I was 18, though after that I would have had to formalize, and I was never very fond of Ferdinand and Imelda “Shoe-Lady” Marcos. So I let it slide. Still, if nobody questioned McCain’s citizenship qualification for POTUS, the fervor with which wingnuttia rants about Obama seems even crazier. I mean, even if Hawaii hadn’t been a state when he was born, did not all Hawaiians receive automatic citizenship when it WAS made a state? It was a territory, after all. Like Puerto Rico. Which apparently some wingnuts in Congress think is a foreign country too, thus Judge Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t be a citizen. Weird.

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Filed under 9-11, Barack Obama, COM, History, Humor, Intelligence, John McCain, Media, Military, Outrage, Racism, Slime Machine | Comment (0)

Notes to Sarah’s Ghost

Soon to be ex-Alaska governor Sarah Palin has an op-ed published in the WaPo today [July 14] that obviously wasn’t written by Lady SaladMaster, and which derides Obama’s cap and trade policy while promoting ‘the usual’. Drill, drill, drill plus mountain destruction for un-clean coal and going nuclear. While I understand this attempt to keep herself in the ‘Puglican lineup of erstwhile power brokers even in her new persona as a Quitter Extraordinaire, I’d like to take on some of her ghost-writer’s points.

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Filed under Biofuels, Climate Change, Economics, Energy, Humor, Hypocrisy, Media, Nuclear Power, Propaganda, Sarah Palin | Comments Off

The Palin Soap Opera Continues…

Despite beauty queen-like blustering, circular speech patterns full of airhead nonsense, and empty threats against bloggers (like me), Sarah Palin’s hilarious family soap opera got even funnier over the past week. It’s not “Troopergate” that finally ended her quest for national prominence and the highest office in the land – from whence she could dictate how the rest of America’s families should be just as dysfunctional as her own – it was that lovely free house she got in exchange for a cushy construction permit way back when she was just the Mayor of Wasilla.

Seems that fancy big sports complex and hockey rink built with ample taxpayer Pork looks suspiciously like the lake house hubby Todd says he built with his own two secessionist hands (with a little help from some ‘builder buddies’) used building materials ordered at the same time from the same suppliers by the same company that ‘won’ the contract for the complex. Same siding, same windows, same roofing, etc.

And while my grandson who voted for the first time last election thinks that’s rather a nifty perk for being a politician, we did have to explain to him that it qualifies as a bribe – quid pro quo – and is illegal and always has been illegal. As in breaking the law, even in Alaska.

Thus did Sarah hold a hastily called press conference on the weekday federal holiday we euphemistically call “Independence Day” and announce that she will not be finishing out her first (and only) term as governor of the Great State of Alaska. Her reasons were several, they are disjointed, they make no reasonable sense, and if the boredom factor is in any way true, she’s got no business ever having gotten into politics in the first place.

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Filed under Corruption, Hypocrisy, Sarah Palin | Comment (0)