We the sheeple......

Just a few reflections on the top stories in my local Courier-Journal today:
But first, a comment on the pictures which cover the top stories on pages 1-3. The first picture is of our own Rand Paul, further down the page are pictures of David Williams and Gov. Steve Beshear.
On page two is a picture of Senator Jim DeMint, and page 3 contains pictures of a menacing Representative Peter King of New York and clueless demagogue Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
Think about it, the top national stories are generated by three crazy tea baggers and a bigot. Locally, we're just petty.
The Rand Paul story is about how he and other tea bagger senators are threatening to block any legislation which does not address the alleged "debt crisis." DeMint's picture is from the same article.
The Williams\Beshear article is about state Senate leader David Williams being offended by a statement purportedly made by Beshear calling him and others "fat guys." Beshear denies it.
Turning to page three we have the phony hearings on "radicalized Islam" being led by King, who's picture shows him giving that crazed laser stare that looks, well, radicalized.
Then the final article on page three is the one of Wisconsin Governor Walker and his success in killing the public unions (that didn't support him in the election cycle-the ones that did were exempted).
I bring this up because three of the "stories" are bogus and the third is about pettiness. Well, other than the tsunami, that's today's news.
The debt crisis simply isn't a crisis. Its a long term problem which must be addressed, but it simply isn't a crisis, no matter how vehemently the tea partiers argue otherwise.
Paul Krugman speaks of the nuttiness today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/opinion/11krugman.html?_r=1&hp

The hearing on UnAmerican activities, oops, I mean Islamic radicalization, is chaired by Peter King, a strong supporter of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a radicalized group which terrorized Great Britain in the '80 and '90s. Mr. King has denied that the hearings are an effort to paint Muslims with a broad stroke as just another word for "terrorists," and he said in a statement on Wednesday that you got to look where terrorism comes from, and it always comes from radicalized Muslims. On Thursday, the FBI arrested the guy accused of planting a bomb in Seattle on a Martin Luther King day parade route. He was a neo-nazi, and I didn't see a turban on his arrest photograph.
Oh, and in support of the hearings, a fellow Republican Representative said he didn't see a problem with the hearings because "no one objected when they had hearings on the KKK."
I won't go into the Wisconsin story much as I have written about it before. Just to remark that the union busting efforts were not about a budget "crisis" as the unions had already acceded to the governor's demands for concessions before any of this started.
In sum, the nation's conversation has been shoved so far to the right that people are no longer able to ascertain what is a crisis and what isn't. Republicans who voted for two unfunded wars, massive tax breaks for the wealthy and corporate subsidies over the last two terms of George W. Bush and passively watched a budget surplus turn into substantial deficits have had a vision on the road to Damascus and are suddenly alarmed at the "crisis" before us. And it has nothing to do with that scary black Kenyan Muslim in the White House.
Sixty days ago they bullied the spineless Democrats to support the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy costing the treasury $700 billion over the next ten years, and now suddenly, the budget is in a crisis mode.
Thank God the Courier realizes there are two sides to every story!