File this one under “How Wacky Can Those Tea Partiers Get?”: Dan Maes, the Tea Party candidate for governor of Colorado, says that a Denver program to encourage people to ride bikes is part of a United Nations / one-worlder / socialist / communist conspiracy.
It seems that back in 1992, Denver became part of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, an organization that promotes sustainable development and transportation alternatives. According to the Denver Post, more than 1,200 communities worldwide, including 600 in the US, are members of the ICLEI.
Anything that has the word “international” in its name sets off alarm bells in the brains of radical right-wingers, so naturally Maes sees the program as part of a sneaky effort by Denver mayor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper to turn Denver into Moscow in the Rockies.
“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” Maes told a rally of about 50 fellow wingnuts last week, according to the Post.
“These aren’t just warm, fuzzy ideas from the mayor,” Maes warned darkly. “These are very specific strategies that are dictated to us by this United Nations program that mayors have signed on to. … At first, I thought, ‘Gosh, public transportation, what’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with people parking their cars and riding their bikes? And what’s wrong with incentives for green cars?’ But if you do your homework and research, you realize ICLEI is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.”
Apparently Maes’s looniness is playing well with the Republican base in Colorado. The Post reports he has pulled ahead of former congressman Scott McInnis in the race for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, which will be decided Aug. 10.
Maes clearly is nuttier than a Snickers bar, but his hostility to the bike program isn’t surprising: The extreme right has always seen an evil commie conspiracy behind any effort to encourage people to use alternatives to the gasoline-powered private automobile, whether those alternatives are bicycles, public transportation or electric-powered cars.
On the conservative Oregon Catalyst site, for example, radio blabber Lars Larson and his fans are on a tear against the Chevy Volt, GM’s new electric car. And this morning’s Bulletin has a spectacularly stupid cartoon by Chip Bok showing a Volt driving along a highway labeled “Road to Serfdom,” with somebody in the car saying: “Fortunately, it will only go 40 miles.”
I never knew serfs had bicycles, much less electric cars. That zany Tea Party gang gives us a new surprise every day.
This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2010.
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“Local” and “International” are what set off bells for me…which is it? Local or International? If it was a local group with a local idea, I would be all for it. I do not support the international community stickingits nose into my local business. I am not a “wingnut” though I am a Capitalist American. What’s mine is mine…if I work for it.
“Local” and “International” are what set off bells for me…which is it? Local or International?”
The initiatives are on the local level and the organization is international. That’s how I understand it.
“I do not support the international community sticking its nose into my local business.”
Nobody’s forcing any community to take part.
Lets hope he gets elected, since our country is doing so well right now being run by people with your ideaology. God help our country.
“since our country is doing so well right now being run by people with your ideaology [sic].”
We are reaping the fruits of 30 years of conservative trickle-down economic policy.
No, We are paying for 40+ years of liberal ideas and thinking. the conservative ideas are what have kept us from sinking to depths that we would not be able to escape.
“We are paying for 40+ years of liberal ideas and thinking. the conservative ideas are what have kept us from sinking to depths that we would not be able to escape.”
Give it up Mr. Miller, as per usual with conservatives, they are operating on a different plane of reality. One can only take it Mr. Sala was counting forty years backward to around the time of the Voting Rights Act, which led eventually to the current black president. Which has led in turn to rampant communism, fecund socialism, and every other ‘ism’ the Tea Party has no idea of the definition of.
About riding a bike and getting your exercise whilst keeping the air clean, though: I wonder if the Tea Party is aware that 75% (yes, I typed 75%) of the health care costs in this country are driven by obesity. That means if everyone woke up with an ideal body weight tomorrow, two-thirds of this country’s health care costs would vanish. That means that the big communist plot o’ health care reform the Tea Partiers are wailing and gnashing over wouldn’t need to happen at all. Soooooooooooo the question is, are there any Tea Partiers out there who are being far too conservative with their bicycle riding and not nearly conservative enough with their food intake and thereby driving 3/4ths of the cost of health care in their precious U.S.of A.?
No way the tea baggers get on a bike. Their tricorn hats would fly away.
“are there any Tea Partiers out there who are being far too conservative with their bicycle riding and not nearly conservative enough with their food intake”
Judging from the photos and videos I’ve seen of Tea Party events, there are more than a few.
GeeJay writes: “I wonder if the Tea Party is aware that 75% (yes, I typed 75%) of the health care costs in this country are driven by obesity.”
Of course they know! That’s why they also know that obesity=prosperity for the pharmaceutical, insurance and “health” administration complex.
All the crap started before Obama. W ran us into the ground and the republicans [small r fo lack of respect] cannot seem to grasp that they are failures at running their own households let alone a Great Country such as ours. Bush gave away $800 billions to his buddies with no stipulations. Obama made stipulations with his. You can’t blame him for not wanting to eat a crap sandwich.
As for you being a conservative, you only conserve the money you pay to the people who made you rich. At least the Dems have tried to balance the budget. Obama can’t because a bunch of morons voted in bush (small b because he is a moron] and he ran us into the ground being the decider.
HBM: “Judging from the photos and videos I’ve seen of Tea Party events, there are more than a few.”
HBM, you’re no trip to the beach yourself. Muffin top.
As for “GeeJay”, you might want to read up on your history. LBJ could not get the Voting rights bill (or the Civil Rights bill)passed in the Senate even though he had an overwhelming majority (65 Dems).
It took a Republican to free the slaves and took more modern Republicans to pass the Civil Rights bill in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Senate was repleat with many who became the icons and standard bearers of the Democrat party, most notably Robert KKK Byrd, the Grand Cyclops/Wizard or whatever the KKK calls them and that southern racist who Bubba Clinton cited as his valued mentor, J. William Fullbright. Let’s also not forget who was running those southern states back then….Democrats; George Wallace, Lester Maddox and other paragons of Democrat values and virtue.
And now today, the real violators of the Voting Rights Act, the New Black Panthers, won’t be prosecuted by this administration for their uncontrovertible, undeniable video taped intimidation of black and white voters during the last election.
Yet I find it absolutely hilarious that while you shout racist at the Tea Party, it is today’s Democrat leadership that is throwing only black representatives under the ethics bus (Charlie Rangle, Maxine Waters, William Jefferson). No white congressmen. The black caucus is dwindling at the hands of the white Democrat leadership.
Obama has and will continue to play the race card. But isn’t it ironic that it was he who quickly pulled the trigger on the black Ag Dept. Sherrod lady (even before FOX put it out there). It is also Obama who told black Govenor Patterson of New York to get out of the governor’s race, the same goes for Harold Ford Jr. in his bid for a NY senate seat. He threw black Sen. Roland Burris under the bus and he won’t stand for re-election, as well as his black minister, the right Rev. Wright. Seems to me that the only racism being practiced in the political arena comes from the liberal left. (But you know what?..that’s how its always been).
Critic: Let’s look at more recent history, shall we? Over the last 50 years the two major parties have switched roles on the issue of race. The South was overwhelmingly Democratic up until the ’60s, when northern liberal Democrats embraced the cause of civil rights. That caused white Southerners to defect en masse to the Republican Party. The Republican Party starting in the late ’60s began to quite deliberately and consciously appeal to white Southern racists (the “southern strategy”). The strategy worked, resulting in the elections of Nixon (1968 and ’72), Reagan (’80 and ’84), Bush I (’88) and Bush II (2000 and ’04). Without the now-solidly-Republican South, none of those Republicans would have made it to the White House.
wait, shhhh i think i hear silent black helicopters hovering outside the bunker here in my mom’s basement.
but seriously aaychbee’em critic, that is a nice little compilation of crackpot boilerplate you have thrown together there.
i notice that instead of taking the opportunity to actually address the proposition that the country could reduce health care cost significantly thereby reducing the need or influence of the hated commie socialist facist maoist health plan, you chose to call some old dude who has spent his life doing the heavy lifting of sentence construction, “muffin top” wow, that is “repleat” as you would say, with insightful observation on your part. too bad you missed a golden opportunity to note the size of his bald spot(sorry HBM)
ah the old “democrats wouldn’t pass the civil rights act alone” canard. that is weak, dull tool that only works when you willfully ignore the historical transformation that occurred within the D and R parties as a direct result of the southern strategy. in fact the southern strategy was pretty much irrelevant. LBJ acknowledged as much with his famous quote about losing the south for the dems for a generation.
followed by the new black panther shibboleth of americas newest victim class:the tea party. for a story as stupid, about such a stupid topic to last this long is a real credit to the monumental victim hood you all must feel. too bad the case was dismissed by a bush appointee to the DOJ who made the astute observation that after extensive investigation they could not find a single person who was actually denied the right to vote or intimidated into not voting by the lawful but stupid and ugly action of two idiots at that single polling place. unlike the scores of black folk who were “accidentally” scrubbed from voter roles in florida by kathleen harris political hack from a long line of just the type of entrenched elites the tea party rails against. but since she is your elite hack she gets a pass, eh?
then you complain that the black congressional caucus is dwindling due to its members breaking ethics rules and a black president at the request of a white congress is repressing the political ambitions of other blacks. here, i’ll use the argument you and you’re fellow travelers use to explain why there are a higher number of blacks than whites in prison despite their minority status in society at large: they are the ones committing the crimes. did that lessen the bitterness you feel?
would you be happier or less paranoid if the democrat congressional leadership ignored what appear to be pretty blatant violations of ethics regulations by the people you mention, regardless of their color?
how on earth can you even bring up wright in the context of obamas perceived racism? your side spent a lot of energy demonizing him as a racist america hater. now your saying obama is a racist for cutting ties with him and refuting (or is it refudiate, i can’t keep up, english is such a fluid and dynamic language as sarah likes to claim when she is trying to keep herself from looking like an idiot. although the definition of “marriage” is very static and is in fact, immutable) his narrow minded beliefs? can you even explain why you brought race into this topic? the original story made no mention of race at all.
this is just more proof for what i have suspected from the start: you guys like to have both ways.
Yeah, cheers, aaaychebeem, I’ll get right to reading up on that history. You employ here a common debate tactic of neo-cons which is to change the subject of the debate entirely when you don’t like what you’re hearing. I guess you didn’t like hearing about how 75% of the cost of health care was driven by obesity, huh? But with that Voting Rights Act mention, I was merely trying to get at the ?!?WTF?!? aspect of Mr. Sala’s claim that this country was laboring under the yoke of 40+ years of oppressive liberal ideas. Hahahahahahaha. O me o my. Just to review what he said…
‘We are paying for 40+ years of liberal ideas and thinking. the conservative ideas are what have kept us from sinking to depths that we would not be able to escape.’
Lessee here, 2010 minus 40 puts us in 1970. That’d be Nixon’s presidency. Then we had Ford, Reagan, Bush 2, Bush 1, and by golly, for 28 of those 40 years we were under Republican presidents. So Mr. Sala can’t mean 40 years in that sense, right? So that’s where I took a stab in the dark about the Voting Rights Act.
And hey, I was a history major in college, right, so I do okay with reading history. I’m sure it’s a different kind of history than what Texas is putting out nowadays. But just so you know, just because Abraham Lincoln was called a ‘Republican’ back in his day doesn’t mean that’s the same as a ‘Republican’ today. You see, time goes by and words start to mean different things because lifestyles change over time. Let’s just pluck a random passage from a letter written by Absolom A. Harrison during the Civil War:
“If I do not come home before next Thursday write and let me know how you are all getting along. This is a big day with us as one Captain is to be married today and two other officers are to fight a duel today. There is five artillery companies camped in sight of us having about forty cannon. They are firing with their cannon every day.”
See that? First of all the fella’s name was Absalom. Second of all he’s talking about Captain’s fighting duels, which doesn’t happen anymore. Third of all he’s talking about cannons, which don’t much exist these days, just like armies of men walking in picket lines across open fields…
Well, you see my point, don’t you? Things were DIFFERENT back then. And REPUBLICAN was not the same word as it is today. Any basic understanding of history would tell you Abraham Lincoln was the absolute exact opposite of any Republican alive today. I mean, really, Aayyahechbeem, don’t be so silly. And some sound advice: whatever you do, don’t ballyhoo to any right wingers you might meet in the Deep South about what a great Republican president Abraham Lincoln was for freeing the slaves.
It’s funny this re-branding that’s going on. I’ve even seen right wingers now claiming Martin Luther King was a Republican, which would be hysterically funny if it wasn’t so shockingly disgusting.
You know, bike riding is a great way to get out and about and let all these mixed up ideas flee the headspace. Plus, 75% of the health care costs in the country are driven by obesity. So again: if there’s any conservatives out there not being so conservative with their food intake, and being too conservative with their bicycle riding, then they can’t complain about why we need health care reform.
Finally, let’s wrap up this issue of race by following a link to the recent letter from one of the Tea Party leaders, Mark Williams, pretending to be the head of the NAACP writing to Abraham Lincoln. Have a read of this gobsmacker if you haven’t already and then ask yourself ‘Am I sure there’s no racists on the right? Am I positive about that? Am I really really absolutely surely positive that it’s the left wing that’s full of racists and not-at-all the right wing? Am I really really really totally positive that I’m not consorting with racists by being in the right wing? Am I really really really totally for sure absolutely positive that ‘reverse racism’ isn’t just something the modern far right wingers made up out of thin air to absolve their absolute guilt in being the descendents of the slaveowners? Really?!’
And without further ado here’s Mark Williams, disgraced and fallen Tea Party Leader, doing his very best Stepin Fetchit routine in letter form…
http://blog.reidreport.com/2010/07/tea-partier-mark-williams-writes-open-letter-to-lincoln-from-the-coloreds/
I’m so lucky to have cyber-friends like all of you. I apologize for roaming off the reservation a bit (not that it doesn’t happen infrequently here).
As for you GeeGay, I’m surprised HBM didn’t crawl all over you for not citing your source of the 75% obesity thing. But then again you and he see things the same way. So please cite a respected medical journal for your source for me. I’d love to learn more. BTW your story about Absolom was just riveting.
And BTW, Knut-Wing, your observation regarding the white democrat leadership is right on: “then you complain that the black congressional caucus is dwindling due to its members breaking ethics rules and a black president at the request of a white congress is repressing the political ambitions of other blacks. here, i’ll use the argument you and you’re fellow travelers use to explain why there are a higher number of blacks than whites in prison despite their minority status in society at large: they are the ones committing the crimes. did that lessen the bitterness you feel?”
Isn’t it ironic though that if this was a republican led house, the media template as well as the liberal elite would view these same ethics actions as racist. And re: the pass from the Obama Justice Dept. given the New Black Panthers for their voter intimidation, you know the same racist template would used by the media and liberal elite against a republican president and attorney general who refused to pursue federal criminal or civil prosecutions against a couple of KKK members taunting voters with a billy-club in hand outside of some southern voting poll.
Thanks for making my point.
Marxism, Communism, Socialism,…. has failed, everywhere. It wont work here either. People don’t escape communist countries to go to more communist countries.
o boy….. Thanks for the entertainment. This procession of idiocy(in the comment section) is priceless, and proof we need to split this country down the middle. Lefty loons on one side, Kooky right wingers on the other! Ah screw it……i’m going fishing!
There will never be a citation that backs up the 75% claim. Like most stuff in passionate assertions, “common nonsense.” It’s increasing as a cost driver, but still constitutes less than 20% (as if that’s a good thing.) Besides, everyone knows tobacco causes 75% of the cost of healthcare–or was it eating meat?
Yeah critic,
For a critic, it appears that your thinking isn't all that critical. You essentially cite an entire quote from me then say that it is ironic. But you never address the fact that I used that example not as a case of irony but as an example of your perception that the actions of the leadership in the house of representatives are racially motivated is wrong and just another example of the celebration of victimhood that you and you fellow travelers love to display. So let me ask again: would you be happier or any less inclined to holler “racism” if the democrat leadership had ignored Maxine Waters and Charlie Rangle? Or would you just be posting that they were corrupt and trying to maintain the façade that the democrat party is the party for African Americans to support?
Basically you are saying that the investigation of these individuals is motivated by racism in the democrat party and not a desire by the democrats to rid the house of representatives of corruption. Your probably wrong
And you never deny that your use of the lame argument that the republicans are not the racists because it was Lincoln that wrote the emancipation proclamation and it was southern democrats who would not give it enough support to ensure passage without republican votes as well. Whatever. The bottom line is that it was a powerful democrat president who was driving the agenda on the passage of the civil rights bill. Why don't you tell us the names of all those republicans who were out rallying votes for its passage.
Your citation of William Jefferson as an example of alleged democrat racism is misguided and self defeating. Jefferson was investigated and indicted under the bush administration. Do you remember your tormentors in the liberal media crying “racism” back then? Doubt it.
For your final bit of sophistry. you once again portray yourself as the victim (do you never tire of that motif?) of “the media template as well as the liberal elite” in regards to the new black panther incident. But then you use an inaccurate analogy to support your contention that it was racism that determined whether or not to prosecute. To you it is proof of racism if demos prosecute blacks (in congress) and proof of racism if democrats don't prosecute blacks.(in the new black panthers) Which is it? or is it like I said at the bottom of my post: just another case of a conservative who likes it both ways?
for your analogy to be correct you would have to have a democrat appointee to the DOJ, working for a republican administration who DID prosecute the imaginary kkk members in spite of the fact there was no evidence that anyone was actually prevented from voting. That would be racist (maybe). You do understand that it was a bush appointee to the DOJ who decided there was not enough evidence to support a criminal case against the idiots from the new black panthers, right?
‘Critic’ questions others’ grasp of history and racism, but here’s what’s most offensive about his far-right revision of why the Voting Rights Act passed:
Easily the strongest reason behind final passage of the Act was the deaths of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. One of them, the one who was buried alive, James Chaney, was black, and that was no big deal, black people disappeared all the time (when they were dragging the river during the investigation they turned up seven other bodies unrelated to the case). But in this instance the Klansmen made the huge mistake of killing two whites, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. That’s what truly woke up the public to the hundred year old horror that was the Deep South’s unrepentant racism. That’s what finally swung the Voting Rights Act.
We’re only fifty years out from that particular crime. It happened in my lifetime. It’s going to be at least another fifty years before every weak, unevidenced, unsupported, childish, bullying, wacko cry of ‘reverse racism’ coming from the far right isn’t anything less than disgusting.