Noxious numbers: Palin’s handouts and racial overtures

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Alaska’s rank as the state with the most welfare recipients. At 6 percent, Gov. Sarah Palin’s state had nearly triple the U.S. average, according to the new U.S. Census.

Hey conservatives, whadda think of your golden girl now!?

$2,000,000

The total that blowhard South Carolina Sen. Joe Wilson raised in the six days after he shouted “You lie!” to President Obama during his speech on health care.

Hey conservatives, what would  you have contributed if he would have added “boy!”? (Which was asserted by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.)

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Unqoute” Vietnam protest sign

“Nixon: Pull out like your father should have.”

A friend of a friend who was at Vietnam War protests in the 1960s reminisced on humor in one particular sign.

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Two Tank Milestones – This is the 201st post; and September marks the beginning of the third year of this hacky expirement.

Tyranny with a different face

Amid false talk of weapons of mass destruction and unfounded links to September 11, anti-war critics enthusiastically called the Iraq War a bellicose effort for oil.

Now, about six years later, Chinese and British oil companies have signed contracts to extract oil when exploiting poor Iraqi people that live in the areas, according to the New York Times. Also, 10 more oil fields will be bit out this fall.

Capitalism advocates will hoist this up as a “free market” out from under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. But when Iraqi people remain poor and unemployed as multi-national corporations reap multi-billion profits it’s just tyranny with a different face.

The anti-war critics were right.

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Noxious number: No. 4

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The number of purple Brett Favre No. 4  jerseys spotted during a Sunday afternoon trip to the State Fair. I saw a few rubes wearing the new duds before I grabbed my first suds. So, at that point, my friends and I started keeping track over the course of a 6-hour stay at the Great Minnesota Get-Together.

In comparison, Adrian Peterson was the second most-frequent  jersey — and he only had a handful.

Can you say, “bandwagon?”

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Parallel example

Political campaigns in Lebanon are going to the highest bidder, The New York Times reported Thursday. Politicians are paying off voters to gain office.

A parallel example can be shown right here in the U.S. Take this sentence from the Times’ story as a starting point: 

“…Mostly the political machines work through local patriarchs known as ‘electoral keys,’ who can deliver the votes of an entire clan in exchange for money or services — scholarships, a hospital, repaved roads and so on.”

All you have to do is switch a few words – and roles – to make it relevant here.

“…Mostly the political machines work through local leaders known as ‘union bosses,’ who can deliver the votes of an entire group in exchange for money or services — a higher minimum wage, a bailout, and so on.”

Lebanon is extreme, but the U.S. showed similar tendencies with the dismissal of the public financing in the 2008 presidential election that turned it into another race for cash.

This is an loose example, the Tank admits, but a look in the mirror is necessary here. A key counterargument to my claim is that Barack Obama garnered support from a bunch of small donations from the middle class, but it was the big ticket endorsements of the AFL-CIO labor union and other left-leaning executives that propelled him to the Oval Office.

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