NOT the Brady Bunch

[font size="4"]White Supremacist Leader, Crew Nabbed In Fla. Terror Probe[/font]

by Nick R. Martin - May 8, 2012 - TPM Muckraker

The race war, he believed, was coming. So Florida white supremacist leader Marcus Faella instructed his followers over the past two years to prepare for it.

The preparations, according to law enforcement documents made public this week, included stockpiling weapons, experimenting with the creation of ricin and plotting some sort of “disturbance” on Orlando City Hall.

In a series of arrests that began on Friday, a joint terrorism task force that included the FBI and local police moved in on the Florida chapter of the white supremacist organization American Front.

They arrested Faella, his wife Patti Faella and eight other people on suspicion of a number of offenses, including hate crimes and training a paramilitary group. Prosecutors with the Ninth Circuit State Attorney’s Office said on Tuesday they were working on putting together felony charges for the 10 members.

Playa

I don't apologize, but I don't condone, either.



That's just how we rolled in the 40s.

I just read the saddest news of my life. Pirates didn't talk like pirates. Arrrr...... NO!!!

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[font size="4"]Avast, mateys: It turns out "pirate talk" is based on lies propagated by Disney[/font]

"There isn't much in the way of scientific evidence in regards to pirate speech," says historian Colin Woodard, author of The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down.

In fact, according to this article by National Geographic's Ker Than, many of the pirate phrases we're all familiar with can actually be traced back to the 1950s Disney movie Treasure Island, starring Robert Newton in the fictional role of pirate Long John Silver.

"Newton's performance — full of 'arrs,' 'shiver me timbers,' and references to landlubbers — not only stole the show, it permanently shaped pop culture's vision of how pirates looked, acted, and spoke," Woodard told Than.

Woodard explains, "Newton based his pirate talk in the film on the dialect of his native West Country in southwestern England, which just happened to be where Long John Silver hailed from in the Treasure Island novel.

"In the English West Country during early 20th century, 'arr' was an affirmation, not unlike the Canadian 'eh,' and maritime expressions were a part of everyday speech," {Woodard} said.

Presto! Zingo! Caption me!!

This is what I call it

The poetry of the animal kingdom

Do you know how I would kill a voter ID bill?

karate chop to the adam's apple.

I have an announcement

I think the "Santorum" joke is all played out.

I mean, if someone can come up with a new twist, good on ya. But where it's just repeating "surging" and "running" and "coming from behind" allusions to that substance that metaphorically resembles the former Senator, I just don't find it funny anymore. All the jokes about "Romney plans to smear Santorum with a Superpac," are graphic, but just not clever anymore. Again, my overwrought opinion only.

Perhaps it's just my refined upper class upbringing among the social elites of Gotham City, but in the short time that I had with my late parents (don't get me started!) they taught me there's a difference between good natured teasing among friends and the relentless taunting of others. As a child I often played with the children of the hired help when their parents brought them out to our stately family manor; and Mother always insisted that I treat them just as if they were as good as us. Good breeding and good character are best shown by one's generosity, she'd tell me during my alloted play-time.

And so I see a parallel with the constant state of personalized scorn directed toward Rick Santorum. I mean, it's not like Rick Santorum or his children read DU--their loss--but there's more victims that just the beset-upon when one devotes so much time and effort toward scorning others. It cultivates a smallness of temperament in us if we acculturate ourselves to always spewing potty-languages invectives at our political opponents. I don't argue that Republicans deserve better; culturally, they are a wellspring of ill-mannered hatreds and unpatriotic divisiveness. Rather, I argue that we owe it to ourselves not to sacrifice our liberality of character, that is, not to sink into the self-degrading hatreds that mar the moral characters of far too many conservatives.

Let me offer a flawed analogy, yet a comparison worthy of your consideration. As a concerned limosine liberal, I may believe in "getting tough" on al-Qaeda, but I do not condone the use of torture or the use of other tactics that betray the core values of egalitarian Americanism. We ought not sacrifice the moral high ground when fighting malreligious reprobates who dwell in moral gutters. We may remain unsullied when we adhere to our values throughout the fight, because the fight itself is a test of those values. Likewise, though not all Republican reprobates are of the malreligious stripe, when we conduct political fights against the incivility of Tea Partyism and neoconservatism and the tribal anti-progressivism of the political Right, we should strive to retain our liberality and generosity, no matter how tough we have to get with them.

We should bet angry, but not hateful, at the injustice they champion. We should hammer them with facts and truthtelling, but not cross the line into divisiveness or sectional chauvinism. We should fight their grotesque ideologies with reason and philsophy, but not erect counter-ideologes that prize a tribal conformity over fact and social cohesion. These are the social goals that most conservatives oppose--tolerance, unity, and compassion. We shouldn't sacrifice these values in the causee of defeating those who oppose them.

Don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong an occasional snicker at a naughty joke told at an opponent's expense. But the liberal spirit, I think, requires a social sense of moderation wherever we razz the other team. Conservatives I think of as wayward children of our shared national family--we seek to best them, but not destroy them. It's a fine line. I guess, I'm saying it's a little tougher being liberal. I think it's worth the effort. I think the glacial progress of building a more civil society requires us to leave room at the table, that after we trounce them in the next election, we make it easier for them to reclaim the civility they seem to scorn whenever a Democrat wins the White House.

As my old sensei Kirigi told me, "Choose your enemies wisely, for you may become them." If our group identity as Democrats is best defined by loathing our opponents, what will we have won when we win? What, my old chums, will we have lost in our victory?

Last night I dreamed that Mitt Romney adopted me as his 17th son

He renamed me "Squib Romney," which he apologized for, but said that that was the last remaining nonsensible monosyllabic grunt left in the English language that he could use for a boy's name and that it was not his fault that his terribly handsome nards could only issue forth the seeds of man-childs. But I kept complaining and so he said he'd check with the Osmonds and ask whether they had any unused male names left over that he could borrow, but all they had left were "Berubael" and "Jimmy". And then I started to float and I was on a city bus and it was being driven by Clint Eastwood and I asked him if he had the time. But he said, no, it was only half-time. And then I woke up.