Chrysler: Look at yourselves Republicans
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| Sat, 12-06-2008 - 8:55am |
Looks like Chrysler, which is privately owned by rich Republicans, is pulling all its right-wing strings in DC to get it a piece of that auto bailout $$$.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/business/06chrysler.html?hp
Defense contractors. Big oil. Big pharma. Same thing for the past 8 years in which this Republican Administration has spent trillions and pulled every regulatory string to help its buds without any regard for everyone else. This is what you are about. While the top of the party goes on its personal feeding frenzy with your taxpayer dollars, they whip you up with issues like anti-stem cell research, anti-gay marriage, anti-liberal this and and liberal that. If you are a Republican making under 200K a year, you are getting played. Big time.
PS I am still for the auto bailout, but not to help rich Republicans. Rather I am strongly for it to help America because the terrible fallout due to one of these companies going under right now. I point this out to help Republicans understand their party's motivations and what their party is truly about.

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<<<Media Downplay Bigotry of Jesse Helms
8/31/01
News that North Carolina's Jesse Helms will retire from the Senate when his term is up in 2003 received polite coverage in mainstream media. USA Today (8/22/01) described Helms' views as "unabashed and outspoken conservatism." To the Washington Post (8/22/01), Helms is one of the Senate's "most ardent champions of conservative causes...a man of bold colors and few pastels." Curiously using the past tense, the Los Angeles Times observed, "he personified the unvarnished, uncompromising, attack-dog brand of conservatism." (8/22/01)
Most of the coverage alluded to Helms' unrepentant racism and homophobia--though few called it that. Some outlets presented his bigotry as merely accusations from political foes: "His opponents have accused him of using race to win elections" (CBS Evening News, 8/21/01). Overall, most outlets painted Helms as a conservative whose career has merely been punctuated by controversial episodes, not as a demagogue whose career has been defined by the politics of hate and reaction.
One exception was Washington Post columnist David Broder, whose August 29 column, headlined "Jesse Helms, White Racist," offered a glimpse into the public record that many other reporters were side-stepping.
Broder offered a few examples of Helms' bigotry. There are many.
As an aide to the 1950 Senate campaign of North Carolina Republican candidate Willis Smith, Helms reportedly helped create attack ads against Smith's opponent, including one which read: "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." Another ad featured photographs Helms himself had doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham's wife had danced with a black man (News and Observer, 8/26/01; New Republic, 6/19/95; Observer, 5/5/96; Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms, by Ernest B. Furgurson, Norton, 1986).
Ancient history? No. Helms remains unapologetic to this day. Forty years after the Smith campaign, Helms would win election against black opponent Harvey Gantt with another ad playing to racist white fear--the so-called "white hands" ad, in which a white man's hands crumple a rejected job application while a voiceover intones, "You needed that job...but they had to give it to a minority."
In columns, commentaries and pronouncements from the Senate floor, Helms sowed hatred and called names: The University of North Carolina was "the University of Negroes and Communists" (Capital Times, 11/22/94). Black civil rights activists were "Communists and sex perverts" (Copley News Service, 8/23/01).
Of civil rights protests Helms wrote (WRAL-TV commentary, 1963), "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights." He also wrote (New York Times, 2/8/81), "Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."
Over the years Helms has declared homosexuality "degenerate," and homosexuals "weak, morally sick wretches" (Newsweek, 12/5/94). In a tirade highlighting his routine opposition to AIDS research funding, Helms lashed out at the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill in 1988 (States News Service, 5/17/88): "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy."
Helms remonstrated ten female members of the House of Representatives to "act like ladies" when they interrupted a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing to demand support of a U.N. treaty against gender discrimination, and subsequently had them removed from the hearing by Capitol police. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 10/28/99)
And the man ABC News now describes as a "conservative icon" (8/22/01) in 1993 sang "Dixie" in an elevator to Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American woman elected to the Senate, bragging: "I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries." (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/5/93)
More recently, when a caller to CNN's Larry King Live show praised guest Jesse Helms for "everything you've done to help keep down the niggers," Helms' response was to salute the camera and say, "Well, thank you, I think." (Wilmington Star-News, 9/16/95)
Finally, Helms' strong if sometimes shadowy support for violent, anti-democratic forces abroad, from South Africa to El Salvador, might have given media outlets further pause in describing him as a mere conservative; few probed his ties to groups that would more accurately be described as fascist. One exception was an editorial in the Boston Globe (8/23/01):
With 17 months remaining in his Senate term, there will be many more "send-offs" dedicated to Jesse Helms. It remains to be seen whether he will continue to get kid glove treatment from the press, or if journalists will choose to tell the unvarnished truth about Helms' career.>>>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/06/AR2008070602321.html
<<<Jesse Helms, White Racist
RePosted
Monday, July 7, 2008; 12:00 AM
This column appeared in The Post Aug. 29, 2001 -- one week after Jesse Helms, who died Friday, announced his retirement from the Senate.
(Are there other newly relevant Post opinion columns you'd like to see RePosted? Do you wonder what The Post had to say about a historical event with parallels today? Send ideas to reposted@washingtonpost.com.)
By David S. Broder
Those who believe that the "liberal press" always has its knives sharpened for Republicans and conservatives must have been flummoxed by the coverage of Sen. Jesse Helms's announcement last week that he will not run for reelection next year in North Carolina. The reporting on his retirement was circumspect to the point of pussyfooting.
On the day his decision became known, the New York Times described him as "a conservative stalwart for nearly 30 years," the Boston Globe as "an unyielding icon of conservatives and an archenemy of liberals." The Washington Post identified Helms as "one of the most powerful conservatives on Capitol Hill for three decades."
Those were accurate descriptions. But they skirted the point. There are plenty of powerful conservatives in government. A few, such as Don Rumsfeld and Henry Hyde, have been around as long as Helms and have their own significant roles in 20th century political history. What really sets Jesse Helms apart is that he is the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country -- a title that one hopes will now be permanently retired. A few editorials and columns came close to saying that. But the squeamishness of much of the press in characterizing Helms for what he is suggests an unwillingness to confront the reality of race in our national life.
My own paper, The Washington Post, carried three stories about Helms's departure. In their 54 paragraphs, exactly two -- the 10th paragraph of one story and the last paragraph of another -- alluded to the subject of race.
Let me be clear. Helms has fought many battles in his career, and whether you agreed with him or not on small issues such as the funding of the arts or large ones such as Cuba, China, the Panama Canal and the United Nations, you had to respect his right as an elected and reelected senator to fight for his beliefs.
Even if you thought, as I did, that he was petty and vindictive in using his power as a committee chairman to block the appointment of former Massachusetts governor William Weld as ambassador to Mexico and, just this year, to force concessions from President Bush on textile imports before the top Treasury officials could be confirmed, you had to admit that other senators also have used their leverage to advance personal political agendas.
What is unique about Helms -- and from my viewpoint, unforgivable -- is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.
Many of the accounts of Helms's retirement linked him with another prospective retiree, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Both these Senate veterans switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party when the Democrats began pressing for civil rights legislation in the 1960s. But there is a great difference between them. Thurmond, who holds the record for the longest anti-civil rights filibuster, accepted change. For three decades he has treated African Americans and black institutions as respectfully as he treats all his other constituents.
To the best of my knowledge, Helms has never done what the late George Wallace did well before his death -- recant and apologize for his use of racial issues. And that use was blatant.
In 1984, when Helms faced his toughest opponent in Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, the late Bill Peterson, one of the most evenhanded reporters I have ever known, summed up what "some said was the meanest Senate campaign in history."
"Racial epithets and standing in school doors are no longer fashionable," Peterson wrote, "but 1984 proved that the ugly politics of race are alive and well. Helms is their master."
A year before the election, when public polls showed Helms trailing by 20 points, he launched a Senate filibuster against the bill making the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. a national holiday. Thurmond and the Senate majority were on the other side, but the next poll showed Helms had halved his deficit.
All year, Peterson reported, "Helms campaign literature sounded a drumbeat of warnings about black voter-registration drives. . . . On election eve, he accused Hunt of being supported by 'homosexuals, the labor union bosses and the crooks' and said he feared a large 'bloc vote.' What did he mean? 'The black vote,' Helms said." He won, 52 percent to 48 percent.
In 1990, locked in a tight race with an African American Democrat, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, Helms aired a final-week TV ad that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, while an announcer said, "You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota." Once again, he pulled through.
That is not a history to be sanitized.>>>
Sopal
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Is there no blame for the car companies here?
"Is there no blame for the car companies here?"
Huh, you didn't get the latest Republican talking point memo? You are stuck on the old excuse. Now the new one is that the Republicans blocking the bailout are labor's fault for not taking pay cuts.
You really need to keep your Republican blame scorecard more up to date LOL!
PS Both your old pass the blame talking point and the current one miss the point. This is not about blame. This is about the simple fact of the badness to our economic we need to avoid that would be involved in one of these car cos crashing.
You are faulting the Republicans for not bailing out an industry that has done such a terrible job of remaining competitive and managing their funds well?
I'm thinking that it's high time the Republicans in gov. start looking at corporate welfare and questioning throwing good taxpayer money after bad.
I did hear this am that the big 3 will most likely see the $ coming out of the $700 Bil., it's better than spending yet another $15 bil we don't have. I guess we could always start those printing presses 24/7 though.
****
Why should they look at corporate welfare now - when they didn't look at it the last 7 years 11 months???
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