The stupidity accelerates
I’m way behind on links and pressed for time today, but I really do think the National Journal has a must read article in “It’s George Wallace’s GOP Now.”
Everything I’ve been saying about the Dixiefication of the GOP for years, but summed up in an indelible way:
The history of the modern Republican Party in one sentence: Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller got into an argument and George Wallace won.
Racism is, of course a big part of that even if author Jonathan Rauch discounts that aspect of Wallace’s allure and current GOP practices. This isn’t an article about dog whistles so much as the demagogic hypocrisy of the populism of expediency and whatever works today.
In case you don’t click, here’s Rauch speaking to my POV:
Fast-forward to the present. The hottest ticket in the Republican Party is Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and the party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee. In a recent column, George Will compared her insurgent libertarianism to that of Goldwater’s, which electrified the Right in 1964. Fair enough. But Goldwater served for 30 years as a respected insider in Washington’s most exclusive club, the U.S. Senate; he was never interested in cultural and social issues; resentment and rage were alien to him. Palin’s style and appeal are closer to Wallace’s.
The Party of Lincoln is now more like the Democrats that Al Capp used to mock: full of contradictions and belligerent accusations. Nixon’s Southern Strategy has backfired. The Grand Old Party is now home to Grandstanding Old Pols and Grouchy Ornery Pricks.
Oh, and Gov. BridgeFail earns a graf all his own. He usually does.
Rauch’s conclusion?
[B]y becoming George Wallace’s party, the GOP is abandoning rather than embracing conservatism, and it is thereby mortgaging both its integrity and its political future. Wallaceism was not sufficiently mainstream or coherent to sustain a national party in 1968, and the same is true today.
Conservatism is wary of extremism and rage and anti-intellectualism, of demagoguery and incoherent revolutionary rhetoric. Wallace was a right-wing populist, not a conservative. The rise of his brand of pseudo-conservatism in Republican circles should alarm anyone who cares about the genuine article.
I’m not sure how well this speaks to younger folks, but with the exception of Rauch’s downplaying of the race card in modern Republican politics, he’s dead on.
See also Frank Rich on The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged, in which he examines the inchoate radicalized right in more detail. John Avlon calls it the Return of the Confederacy.
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I didn’t know the FBI was seriously going through the files and trying to solve the over 100 unsolved civil rights killings still on the books from the ’60s.
“There’s maybe five to seven cases where we don’t know who did it,” said FBI Special Agent Cynthia Deitle, who is heading the bureau’s effort. “Some we know; others we know but can’t prove. For every other case, we got it.”
….Officials now believe, for example, that an Alabama state trooper killed an unarmed civil rights protester in 1965, a case that helped inspire the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to march in the state. In the deaths of two North Carolina men in police custody — one found in 1956 with a crushed skull and the other who refused medical treatment in 1960 after a heart attack — the agency concluded that there was no federal law it could use to pursue the cases.
Justice delayed is still justice. Let’s make sure these findings are widely distributed especially in the communities where racist criminals once ruled.
And maybe an appendix explaining how many of the cases the FBI had doped out in real time but sat on for fear of enabling Dr. King and his marchers? That’s a part of the story as well. Just like the examples this story is littered with of Civil Rights deaths now known to be domestic violence or crime related.
Let’s hear the whole story. It’s been fifty years and we deserve the truth. As one agent is quoted as saying:
“If we don’t correct history, then who’s going to go back through this? Who’s going to fix history to make it accurate?” she asked.
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That nasty local lady who hates Islamic charter schools is back in the Strib today. No link because no one from our side should link to liars. She’ll never grow or evolve and I’m tired of her.
Wave bye bye to the stupid, bigoted lady.
Seriously. Don’t go there. The Strib is protecting her comments so there’s nothing there worth bothering with.
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The PiPress keeps the Koua Fong Lee story going with a flashback to his trial and has an interesting revelation. Immediately after the trial the wife and mother of the victims called Phil Carruthers to say, “You guys still aren’t telling us what happened.”
Even the victims’ survivors understood that Lee was being held responsible for an accident the County could not explain.
Some recent critics in the comments have said that I’m acquitting Lee with no proof. No, I’m saying the poor fuck got convicted by persecutorial prosecutors who had no proof.
In this country you are innocent until proven guilty. Koua Fong Lee was convicted of murdering people despite the fact that the prosecutor couldn’t explain why or how.
Another Minnesotan’s story:
[N]ews of his conviction has led to reports of similar problems by drivers of older-model Camrys.
Judy Poss, of Silver Brook Township in Carlton County, said her 1996 Camry did the same thing to her a year and a half ago.
“I was traveling on Highway 33, going to go to the Cities, and the car accelerated just very fast and was going about 90 mph,” she said. “I pressed on the brakes so hard they were smoking.” It was about 40 or 50 seconds before she thought to shut the car off, and drifted to the side of the road.
“I’ve never been so afraid in my whole life.”
Lee’s accident happened very very quickly. His brakes didn’t have time to overheat so there was precious little physical proof. I’ve read everything but the trial transcript on this case and no one at Ramsey County ever appears to have subjected the car’s computer to any diagnostic tests.
This is also an important article for a name that gets mentioned. One that hasn’t come up in previous articles.
County Attorney Susan Gaertner said she would not oppose the inquiry [a re-examination of Lee's car which is still in a Ramsey County lot].
“We have a history in this office of reviewing past convictions to make sure we got it right,” she said, though there was “no indication (at trial) that sudden acceleration was an issue.
“We are open to listening to information to the contrary,” she said. “But it’s got to be facts and not speculation.”
Koua Fong Lee testified at trial that he thought he was slowing down, not speeding up, prosecutor Carruthers noted. However, experts estimated the car was going as fast as 90 mph when it hit the Oldsmobile that Saturday afternoon.
Bard Borkon, a lawyer from Bowman & Brooke in Minneapolis, notified Padden, Schafer and the county attorney in a letter last week that Toyota requests “that no one undertake any disassembly or other inspection of the vehicle without prior adequate notice to me so that Toyota representatives can be present.”
Gubernatorial candidate Susan Gaertner’s name has finally been attached to this scandal. And we now know that Toyota insists on being present if any auto-forensics are done. It’s hard to believe they want to be there to help given their past footdragging.
Toyota could do themselves an immense public relations favor if only they would embrace their failure and do everything in their power to find out what went wrong with Lee’s car. Now that the media is finally taking a serious look at these problems, the examples are piling up like Lexuses smashing into family station wagons.
Paramedics found Juanita Grossman with both feet still pressing the brake pedal.
Alert but critically injured, she said her 2003 Toyota Camry had inexplicably accelerated March 16, 2004, as she left a drive-through pharmacy, racing across a busy street and slamming into a jewelry store in Evansville, Ind.
“It was like a car on a slingshot. She was slung across the street into that building,” said her son, Bill.
Grossman, 77, died six days after the accident at a local hospital. In the days before her death, she described a car with a mind of its own, racing forward as she sat helpless behind the wheel, her feet jamming the brakes without effect, her son said.
“First thing she said was, ‘My accelerator stuck,’ ” recalled her son. “She kept emphatically saying that the accelerator stuck on her.”
Reality overrides faith in technology. That anyone could be sitting in prison for the crime of having driven a Toyota is unspeakable.
On the day after Christmas 2009, Monty Hardy and three members of his church were proselytizing in a Dallas suburb, spreading their faith door to door. The four Jehovah’s Witnesses were traveling in Hardy’s 2008 Toyota Avalon about 30 mph on a residential street when the car suddenly accelerated, raced through a stop sign and left the road, crashing into a fence and tree and landing upside down in a small lake, according to a police report.
All four drowned.
Hardy, 56, and his wife had recently received a recall notice from Toyota; it said the car’s floor mats could cause the accelerator to stick. So the couple removed those mats and placed them in the trunk, said Randy Roberts, a Tyler, Texas, attorney who’s representing Linda Hardy in a planned lawsuit against the carmaker.
The couple had also taken the car into a dealership to have problems with its acceleration system examined, Roberts said.
Seriously, there isn’t room here for all the stories that are emerging. And in many cases no legal action was taken because Toyota’s no fault self-diagnosis meant taking on an international corporation determined to prevail in court. Reporters have now found evidence that 56 Americans have died in Toyotas/Lexuses that experienced sudden acceleration problems.
OK, one last story just for those who keep talking to me about the fucking brakes.
Noriko Uno left her Upland home on Aug. 28, 2009, to do some grocery shopping and deposit the latest receipts from the family’s sushi restaurant. Her errands were all within a mile of her home.
She was driving south along Euclid Avenue at about the 30 mph speed limit when her 2006 Toyota Camry suddenly sped up to nearly 100 mph. Witnesses reportedly told police that they saw the 66-year-old woman tearing along the eastbound lane of the suburban roadway, gripping the steering wheel, her face frozen in terror, trying to steer out of traffic and away from pedestrians.
The car struck a telephone pole and then careened into some shrubbery. It became airborne and came to rest after crashing into a large tree.
When emergency workers extracted her body from the wrecked vehicle on that Friday afternoon, they noted the hand brake had been pulled up in a last-ditch attempt to halt the speeding car.
Let’s deal with the facts, and not some irrational belief in perfected technology.
UPDATE: Thanks to this ABC video link from Tild, this discussion is now OVER. ABC has recreated the error and demonstrated that a computer malfunction can occur without any error being noted by diagnostic equipment.
Koua Fong Lee’s conviction needs to be vacated ASAP, and Ramsey County needs to begin figuring out how much they’re willing to pay him to avoid going to court where a jury could award tens of millions of dollars in response to the Kafkaesque nightmare Lee’s family has been put through.
No further information is needed. ABC has shown how Toyota’s computer malfunctions, and Ramsey County failed to ever prove Lee’s responsibility for the accident other than to ignore his account of the events so they could score a cheap victory with a jury that saw the bafflement of innocence as a refusal to take responsibility and accepted a mechanic’s clean bill of health as proof that Lee was a witch bad driver.
Koua Fong Lee should have never have gone to trial. This was a legal lynching by Luddite mechanics who refused to believe a computer could commit vehicular homicide.
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Ralph Nader on the underfunded, lax NHTSA and the climate of deregulation that helped Toyota avoid scrutiny.
Somewhat related: Susie Madrak on how corruption in Cali enabled tainted food to be shipped nationwide. (And you thought it was your fault that your heart suddenly accelerated….)
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Links:
The Strib more or less calls the GOP out for their absurdist participation in the summit, then gets ripped by commenters for being so slow to pick up on the obstructionism
5 myths about the USPS (I’m still livid over Obama’s backhanded comments about our postal service which is every bit as good as anything America does well, customer service at the counter being the obvious and frequent exception but one now driven by budget cuts and bogus privatization)
Mary Schmich: there are no child prostitutes (just abused children)
Dane Smith responds to Jason Lewis’s no facts “rebuttal”
I guess not paying bonuses to corporations who kill our troops is a start
A blistering video on why the media are to blame
I find it hard to mention copyright without using the word amok
Scott Horton on the missing emails (what Patrick Leahy says, and the consequences)
Rich’s article makes good points. Take it one step further – it’s time to exile Palin, Beck and their tea party friends to Canada, so that the rest of us can stop threatening to move there:
http://bit.ly/ahQTbl
(satire)
Dunno if you saw this video yet:
Expert Recreates Sudden Acceleration in Toyotas
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/video/testing-toyota-9914148
Frightening.
Toyota should have came forward with a full disclosure. Instead of waiting for a huge media blitz and tons of public pressure. I never seen so many car companies having recalls all at the same time. I had no idea my car was affected until I searched on http://www.carpedalrecall.com and found I had a bad Anti Lock control unit on my 2008 Pontiac G8 , So be careful
I wasn’t aware that there was a surge of recalls. (When you drive used cars you’re never contacted.) But it makes sense. Half the fight to keep Obama’s appointments from being confirmed has been to slow the reactivation of the inspection and regulatory processes that used to make this country safe for consumers.
Now that Bush Cheney is gone, we’re going to start finding out what’s really been happening with our cars, our wars, our finances, our lives.