TBogg: Sigh.
It is almost like the terrorists unleashed an unstoppable stupidity toxin into American airspace on 9/11. Yes, I know people like this have always existed. but in the good old days they at least had the decency to stay indoors gorging on Slim Jims and 84oz buckets of Mr. Pibb while watching Raymond reruns.
Fred Clark over at Slacktivist lays the righteous smackdown on the Liar Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, and it's a beautiful thing.
Perkins appeared on Meet the Press opposite David Boies in the wake of the Prop 8 decision a week or so ago. Boies made absolute mincemeat of Perkins' claims on camera:
"It's easy to sit around and debate and throw around opinions -- appeal to people's fear and prejudice, cite studies that either don't exist or don't say what you say they do. In a court of law you've got to come in and you've got to support those opinions. You've got to stand up under oath and cross-examination. And what we saw at trial is that it's very easy for the people who want to deprive gay and lesbian citizens the right to vote, to make all sorts of statements in campaign literature or in debates where they can't be cross-examined.
"But when they come into court and they have to support those opinions and they have to defend those opinions under oath and cross-examination, those opinions just melt away. And that's what happened here. There simply wasn't any evidence. There weren't any of those studies. There weren't any empirical studies. That's just made up. That's junk science.
"... A witness stand is a lonely place to lie. And when you come into court, you can't do that. And that's what we proved. We put fear and prejudice on trial, and fear and prejudice lost."
And that's where Fred starts going to town:
In response, the Liar Tony Perkins, unable to support his assertions because they were not true, simply reasserted them. To any reasonable observer, this was not credible and the Liar Tony Perkins was exposed, yet again, as the Liar Tony Perkins.
But reasonable observers are not the Liar Tony Perkins' target audience. "You can fool some of the people all of the time ..." Abraham Lincoln said, and the Liar Tony Perkins never stuck around to hear the rest. He had found his calling.
Go read the whole thing.
The RIAA and National Association of Broadcasters are trying to create a legal mandate for cell phones to have FM radios in them.
This is the modern communications equivalent of buggy-whip makers trying to get congress to force Henry Ford to bundle whips with the Model T. Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.
The Tea Party has apparently come out opposed to Net Neutrality, on the grounds that it's somehow an affront to freedom.
Can you see the corporate hands up those asses?
Radley "The Agitator" Balko points out just how little fact-checking happens on cable TV, and how brazen and shameless one can be in exploiting this fact. Wendy Murphy has made a career of being absurdly, obnoxiously wrong in ways that cannot be accidental -- and yet she continues to get invited onto shows where she can spew her bullshit. And she doesn't care. And she's not alone.
Some of you are probably already aware of Conservapedia, the Schlafly-backed counterpoint to the supposed "liberal bias" of Wikipedia.
Obviously, such an undertaking -- especially by folks who think the King James Bible needs to be retranslated to purge liberal bias -- is bound to be chock full of hilarity, but nothing I've seen there so far prepared me for their new crusade: Insisting that General and Special Relativity are Liberal Conspiracies.
I Am Not Making This Up.
Rachel Maddow pretty much destroys Fox and their embrace of the Sherrod controversy, and subsequent (and ongoing) blatant hypocrisy.
When the Brietbart injected this bullshit into the mediasphere, Fox couldn't contain their glee, and led the charge to get Sherrod dismissed. Their full court press was positively frothy. But we shouldn't be surprised that, once the whole thing blew up, and people saw the whole, unedited tape, and it became clear that Sherrod's speech was in no way racist, Fox changed their tune -- this time, tut-tutting that the Obama Administration had jumped the gun in firing Sherrod, and expressing outrage at anyone would rush to judgement without getting the facts straight.
We've been through years of this with the doofuses at Fox, but it still astonishes me that they are so craven and so clearly uninterested in actual journalism.
No, I'm pretty sure there isn't. (There's another rundown over at Scalzi's place, in case you weren't keeping up.)
Constance McMillen has showed some rural fucktards in my home state that bigotry is really expensive. McMillen, for her part, has moved down the road to Memphis.
Last month, Texas Lt. Gov. Dewhurst insisted publicly that Phoenix, Arizona was second only to Mexico City in kidnappings.
Some journalists investigated, and found that (as expected) this was horseshit, and then said so, which irked Dewhurst.
"This is regrettably a new low for the Austin American-Statesman and for this particular group," Dewhurst told NPR. "It shouldn't be in the newspaper. It should be on the editorial page. I mean, for heaven's sake."
No, buddy, I don't think so. Fact-checking politicians is exactly what belongs on the FRONT page, right where the American-Stateman put it. We live in a world where it's astonishingly easy to do basic research; maybe you should try that before you go shooting your mouth off for political gain.
He totally nails it in Lara Logan, You Suck. In case you missed the context, Logan has become the de facto voice of "establishment" journalism that is shocked -- Shocked! -- that Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings included the damning and insubordinate comments that sank General McChrystal's career in his recent story.
Some choice bits:
Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn't mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here's CBS's chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that's killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag.
and
See, according to Logan, not only are reporters not supposed to disclose their agendas to sources at all times, but in the case of covering the military, one isn't even supposed to have an agenda that might upset the brass! Why? Because there is an "element of trust" that you're supposed to have when you hang around the likes of a McChrystal. You cover a war commander, he's got to be able to trust that you're not going to embarrass him. Otherwise, how can he possibly feel confident that the right message will get out?
True, the Pentagon does have perhaps the single largest public relations apparatus on earth -- spending $4.7 billion on P.R. in 2009 alone and employing 27,000 people, a staff nearly as large as the 30,000-person State Department -- but is that really enough to ensure positive coverage in a society with armed with a constitutionally-guaranteed free press?
And true, most of the major TV outlets are completely in the bag for the Pentagon, with two of them (NBC/GE and Logan's own CBS, until recently owned by Westinghouse, one of the world's largest nuclear weapons manufacturers) having operated for years as leaders in both the broadcast media and weapons-making businesses.
But is that enough to guarantee a level playing field? Can a general really feel safe that Americans will get the right message when the only tools he has at his disposal are a $5 billion P.R. budget and the near-total acquiescence of all the major media companies, some of whom happen to be the Pentagon's biggest contractors?
Taibbi makes another point:
[T]he reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she's like pretty much every other "reputable" journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she's supposed to be working for. I know this from my years covering presidential campaigns, where the same dynamic applies. Hey, assholes: you do not work for the people you're covering! Jesus, is this concept that fucking hard?
Go read the whole thing. Really. (HT: @wilw)
The new Texas GOP platform apparently includes provisions cementing their opposition to all porn, all adult-oriented businesses, sodomy, blow jobs, gay marriage, the Federal Reserve, the IRS, the income tax, anything to do with early childhood development programs, and (basically) the Supreme Court as well. Oh, and it cites the Bible as a reason to continue mollycoddling Israel.
There are two ways to interpret this.
It's possible that the GOP are genuinely interested in making all the planks of their platform come true, and that they really are this ignorant, mean-spirited, bigoted, and theocratic. If that's the case, we should run them all out of town on rails, because pretty much nothing in the platform is at all compatible with "land of the free, home of the brave."
On the other hand, a more likely scenario is that the powers that be in the GOP don't give a shit about any of this beyond using it to scare uneducated electorate into voting their way, and as a means to direct debate away from the actual agenda of the GOP -- i.e., protecting wealthy interests. I'd argue that this is even worse, because it means they're absolutely courting mob rule tactics in order to pursue antidemocratic goals, in which case they still ought to be run out of the state on rails.
In either case, progressive-minded voters statewide should insist that GOP candidates address this platform completely, explicitly, on every point, and as often as possible. Seriously.
Ol' man Mohney wonders about the protocol, and then ultimately spills the beans about a truly tedious and pretentious gal he dated back in the day.
I only remember her because he had the poor form to bring her to my apartment, whereupon her attitude produced near-immediate ridicule. And now, 20 years later, she's become -- per Mohney -- a "Sarah Palin-like figure" back in Aladamnbama, apparently poised for election to statewide office, complete with a web site boasting of her right-winger bona fides and (I kid you not) the fact that her daddy was a star quarterback at Bama, played for Bear, etc.
Granted, the state in question is Alabama. But still.
Salon writer Michael Lind takes on the absurd lost cause in the wake of my adoptive state's new textbook requirements:
By all means, let schoolchildren in Texas read Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address. But there should be more material from the Confederate side of the conflict than that. For generations, apologists for the Confederacy have claimed that secession was really about the tariff, or states’ rights, or something else -- anything other than preserving the right of some human beings to own, buy and sell other human beings.
That being the case, the education of schoolchildren in my state should include a reading of the Cornerstone Speech made by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, on March 21, 1861. With remarkable candor, Stephens pointed out that whereas the United States was founded on the idea, enshrined in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal," the new Confederacy was founded on the opposite conception:
The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically ... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Let the children of Texas compare what Stephens had to say about natural rights and human equality with Lincoln’s views on the subject, and contrast the ideals of the American and Confederate Foundings. That should make for interesting classroom discussions.
And more:
Toward the end of the war, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis came up with a plan. Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, they proposed to save the Confederacy by freeing and arming slaves. In "Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War," Bruce Levine quotes some typical responses. Brig. Gen. Clement H. Stevens: "If slavery is to be abolished then I take no more interest in our fight." Gov. Zebulon Vance of North Carolina: "Our independence is chiefly desirable for the preservation of our political institutions, the principal of which is slavery." Once it became clear that the only way to save slavery and anti-statism in the South was to abolish slavery and adopt statism, the malfunctioning Confederate Mind short-circuited completely.
Libtard patriarch Ron Paul's son Rand won the GOP Senate primary in Kentucky this week, which was a big damn deal considering how the GOP establishment lined up behind his opponent. Ordinarily, I'd be all over this despite being across the ideological aisle from either Paul, since pretty much any smack to the GOP is a good one in my book. However...
It turns out the younger Paul (and maybe the older; apples and trees and all that) has such a doctrinaire view of state power and private property that he, apparently, opposes the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that made it illegal to run a public business in a discriminatory way -- i.e., the provisions that made segregated lunch counters illegal. He won't come right out and say it, since it's clear what will happen if he does, but on Rachel Maddow he came very close despite tapdancing around her questions and throwing out gun-rights nonsequitors. I don't think his general election Democratic challenger is likely to miss this, and it seems like Paul is the sort of guy who doesn't see the implications of his position -- or how dramatically out of the mainstream they are, or how explosive that kind of revelation is likely to be. One of his lines in the Maddow interview was something like "I don't know why we're discussing a 40 year old law," but "how would you vote on legislation like X" is a perfectly legitimate question to put to a candidate; he won't get far with that kind of defense.
The video is long (about 20 minutes), but Maddow and Paul are able to have a respectful conversation about this despite Paul's clear unwillingness to answer Maddow's oft-repeated question with a straight answer.
USAToday: Tax bills in 2009 at lowest level since 1950.
Rampant homophobia is frequently an indicator of repressed homoerotic feelings. This time, it's Christian Right leader George Rekers, caught traveling with a Miami-based escort from rentboy.com. More here.
Get breast cancer? Prepare to get dropped.
The women all paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, none had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake.
They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.
Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information. [...]
That tens of thousands of Americans lost their health insurance shortly after being diagnosed with life-threatening, expensive medical conditions has been well documented by law enforcement agencies, state regulators and a congressional committee. Insurance companies have used the practice, known as "rescission," for years. And a congressional committee last year said WellPoint was one of the worst offenders.
But WellPoint also has specifically targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with the intent to cancel their policies, federal investigators told Reuters.
This is why we needed the HCR bill. This is why the bill won't be the last bill we need.
The Confederacy, the secessions that led up to it, and the Civil War which followed, were about slavery. It is offensive that apologists would seek to whitewash this or, worse yet, deny it outright. As one of the guys who first described the Civil War (accurately) as "treason in defense of slavery" puts it, "Having our patriotism and love for the United States questioned by people who lionize the worst traitors in American history is bloody irritating."
[...]
When confronted with words like "treason," Confederate apologists like to mention that the Founding Fathers committed treason against England, and suggest that we celebrate the Founders because they won. It's true that everyone likes a winner better, but that doesn't mean that the Confederates were freedom fighters and the moral equivalents of the Founders. The Founders fought for the freedom of all men, and even though they fell short of realizing that ideal, they wanted to expand freedom rather than restrict it.
By contrast, the ordinances of secession adopted by Alabama, Texas, and Virginia make particular reference to the status of the seceding states, including themselves, as states whose laws authorize the ownership of slaves. The declarations of secession accompanying some of those ordinances, authored by special conventions of the states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi, you'll see that they are all about slavery, expansion of slavery to the territories, return of fugitive slaves, and a refusal to submit to the lawful election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency because of his hostility to slavery. [...]
But:
So if you are from the South, you have no need to apologize for the Confederacy. Even if your ancestors include men who fought and died for the Confederacy, this is not a matter which ought to cause anyone today to evaluate you as any different than anyone else. You are not your ancestors. You have to make your own choices, and one of those choices includes deciding whether or not to be proud of a Confederate ancestry. If I had Confederate soldiers among my ancestors (I don't think I do, but you never know) I'd say I respected their bravery, and that I understood why they might have thought they were fighting for their country. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. But at the end of the day, they were fighting for a morally indefensible cause and while I might prefer to remain silent about that, if forced I would have to admit that yes, I thought they were on the wrong side of the war.
Treason in defense of slavery is not a subject matter appropriate for any freedom loving people to celebrate. The Civil War had good guys and it had bad guys. The good guys were the ones who won.
TL;DR? The Civil War was unabashedly about two things: Treason and Slavery, both promulgated by the Confederates. The good guys won. EOT.
(Via Accordian Guy.)
How do you like your Obama tax cut?
By the way, remember that "47% of people don't pay Federal income taxes" cannard? Yeah, here's the rest of the story. Like pretty much everything else the nutbird loony right trots out as a "fact," it's hopelessly wrong (hint #1: it doesn't count payroll taxes).
Forty-seven percent.
That's the portion of American households that owe no income tax for 2009. The number is up from 38 percent in 2007, and it has become a popular talking point on cable television and talk radio. With Tax Day coming on Thursday, 47 percent has become shorthand for the notion that the wealthy face a much higher tax burden than they once did while growing numbers of Americans are effectively on the dole.
Neither one of those ideas is true. They rely on a cleverly selective reading of the facts. So does the 47 percent number.
More here, at Yahoo Finance, which finishes with this:
Obama has pushed tax cuts for low- and middle-income families and tax increases for the wealthy, arguing that wealthier taxpayers fared well in the past decade, so it's time to pay up. The nation's wealthiest taxpayers did get big tax breaks under Bush, with the top marginal tax rate reduced from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, and the second-highest rate reduced from 36 percent to 33 percent.
But income tax rates were lowered at every income level. The changes made it relatively easy for families of four making $50,000 to eliminate their income tax liability.
Here's how they did it, according to Deloitte Tax:
The family was entitled to a standard deduction of $11,400 and four personal exemptions of $3,650 apiece, leaving a taxable income of $24,000. The federal income tax on $24,000 is $2,769.
With two children younger than 17, the family qualified for two $1,000 child tax credits. Its Making Work Pay credit was $800 because the parents were married filing jointly.
The $2,800 in credits exceeds the $2,769 in taxes, so the family makes a $31 profit from the federal income tax. That ought to take the sting out of April 15.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.
Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”…
Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees -- children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said -- never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.
He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.
Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent … If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”…
Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.
Whoa:
Hold on to your hats. At a town hall meeting in Oklahoma City last week, staunch conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) defended House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, disparaged Fox News and told a constituent her fears about the health care law were unfounded.
When a woman in the audience asked Coburn if it was illegal for the government to jail citizens for not complying with the new health care law, Coburn responded by blaming TV news, and Fox News in particular, for that false rumor:
"The intention is not to put anybody in jail," Coburn said. "That makes for good TV news on Fox, but that isn't the intention."
Later, when his audience started to boo at the mention of Pelosi, Coburn stopped them.
"Come on now... how many of you all have met her? She's a nice person," Coburn said. "Just because somebody disagrees with you, doesn't mean they're not a good person."
"Don't catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody's no good," Coburn added.
Coburn urged audience members to widen their points of view by reading and watching different media outlets, not just the ones they agree with.
He will, of course, now be targeted by the Tea Partiers as a RINO, and sacked.
He's the principled conservative who, after watching the GOP decide to oppose HCR at all costs, posted a pretty accurate "I told you so" on his site a few days ago.
Frum was, at that time, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. He's since been dismissed. Cause and effect is left as an exercise to the reader.
"BREAKING: Blackwater wins a contract to guard Biden's F-Bomb making facility" (@lizzwinstead via @robotmess)
Apparently, Ann Coulter has been basically threatened with arrest unless she tones down her act for an appearance in Canada.
Our Republic has a tendency towards noisey, content-free discourse nowadays, but (as Chomsky points out in the linked story) the US remains essentially unique in our nearly absolutist approach to free expression. This is a big deal, and it may be the most important freedom we have. I loathe Coulter and just about everything she stands for, but her views are protected speech, and she should be able to spew her vile invective without fear of arrest.
Of course, I'd prefer it if there were no market for her idiocy, but I'm not about to support censorship because I don't like her politics.
Here's a great letter that may help you stop looking like an organization led by douchebags.
His thoughts are pretty spot on, I think. A bit:
Basically, I find what passes for Democratic legislative strategy absolutely appalling. Decades from now, when they make the ponderous Oscar-bait movie about the struggle for health care (with Jaden Smith as Obama and two-time Academy Award winner Snooki as Speaker Pelosi), it will make for exciting twists and turns in the plot, but out here in the real world, you shouldn’t have to let your organization get the crap beat out of it in order to motivate those in it to do the thing everybody knows it wants to get done. What the Democrats have managed to do with health care isn’t a Pyrrhic victory — I’ll get to that in a moment — but it surely was taking the long way around: over the river, through the woods, down into the landfill, into the abattoir, across a field of rabid, angry badgers. Next time, guys, make it easier on yourselves.
That said, the Democrats were magnificently fortunate that, as incompetent as they are, they are ever-so-slightly less incompetent than the GOP, which by any realistic standard has been handed one of the largest legislative defeats in decades. The GOP was not simply opposed to health care, it was opposed to it in shrill, angry, apocalyptic terms, and saw it not as legislation, or in terms of whether or not health care reform was needed or desirable for Americans, but purely as political strategy, in terms of whether or not it could kneecap Obama and bring itself back into the majority. As such there was no real political or moral philosophy to the GOP’s action, it was all short-term tactics, i.e., take an idea a majority of people like (health care reform), lie about its particulars long enough and in a dramatic enough fashion to lower the popularity of the idea, and then bellow in angry tones about how the president and the Democrats are ignoring the will of the people. Then publicly align the party with the loudest and most ignorant segment of your supporters, who are in part loud because you’ve encouraged them to scream, and ignorant because you and your allies in the media have been feeding them bad information. Whip it all up until health care becomes the single most important issue for both political parties — an all-in, must win, absolutely cannot lose issue.
David Frum has many interesting things to say about today's vote. Go read it.
Apparently unable to marshall any actual arguments, tea partiers instead resorted to levels of name-calling that would be hilarious if they weren't so sad.
Or, at least, ignorant. The raving nutbird looney contingent on the Texas State Board of Education has managed to delete Thomas Jefferson and the entire Enlightenment from the state's textbook standards. Oh, and the whole idea of separation of Church and State.
Click through for more. It's really discouraging, but ultimately unsurprising.
In response to the bruhaha at the Washington Post, which included such erudite complaints as
One called me to complain about “promoting a faggot lifestyle.” Another complained about the photo in an e-mail to the two Post reporters who wrote Thursday’s story about the licenses: “That kind of stuff makes normal people want to throw up. People have kids who are being exposed to this crap. I will be glad when your rag goes out of business. Real men marry women.”
Your kids are not to blame for your politics. Your kids are not to blame for your decisions. Your kids are not to blame for any way in which you choose to live your life. Your kids are your kids, and they're people, and I know this is me saying this, childless whore, etc. And I'm not saying having children can't inform your worldview. I'm saying own your worldview as YOURS, instead of hiding behind your children's blankies and pretending you can't help yourself.
Jesus H. Gentle Cycle Christ, I hate this. Like, how are we to suppose this works, that you used to be a fair and decent person but then you had a kid and decided, "You know, white sheets look fucking good on me now!" You had a kid and then went, "Hmm, suddenly ladies kissing each other is just not on!" Bullshit. You always felt this way, and now you can justify it with somebody who is more into playing with blocks or reading comic books than realizing his parents are total assholes.
Problem is, he won't always be too into his own stuff to notice yours. So won't it be fun for junior to read someday that you used to be a good person and now you suck, and he was the line between before and after? And not only do you suck, but you're such a stupendous pussy that you can't even give yourself credit for the decision to suck, you've got to shove it off on him? Isn't that charming? Do these people listen to themselves?
You wanna be a bigot? You wanna hate gay people? You wanna wax redneck in the pages of the Post about faggot lifestyles and shoving things down people's throats? YOU DO THAT THEN. You just go do it. You go and do that all on your own, slick. You go and do that because YOU want to do it, you stupid motherfucker. You go and do that because you've taken a good long hard look in the mirror and decided that writing pissy letters to the paper about how you don't like reality anymore is the best way to spend your time. You do that because being a bigot is what you want to be.
Leave your children out of it.
(Via TBogg.)
One reason for the current non-debate over health care reform is that the Republicans and Democrats are playing different games. Democrats, and President Barack Obama especially, are playing Jeopardy. Republicans are playing Family Feud.
On Jeopardy, facts matter. On Family Feud, all you need to know is what 100 morons might've told some pollster.
More:
At the recent health care reform "summit," Republican leaders made it clear that they're not interested in playing Jeopardy. That would be a losing proposition against President Ken Jennings. Obama was eager to show that he really does have the right answers -- cost containment, near-universal coverage, lower premiums, better quality care, deficit reduction. All of that is well covered in the plan he's pushing and any attempt to challenge him on the facts would be doomed.
So the GOP has decided to play a different game -- to switch from Jeopardy to Family Feud. That way it's not about the facts, or about what works, or about the actual effect of actual policies on actual people. In the subjective guessing-game of Family Feud, none of that matters. Family Feud is all about perceptions -- about what those hundred people surveyed think or guess or dimly remember having heard something about.
And the Republican Party -- with tons of financial support from their allies in the health insurance lobby -- have been working very hard for many years now to make sure that those hundred people surveyed have a distorted, confused and mostly ass-backwards perception of the facts.
This is how you play Family Feud politics:
Step One: Redefine the facts. If a policy works, claim it doesn't. If it will lower premiums, say it will raise them. If it would reduce the deficit, claim it will bankrupt the country. Obfuscate. Distract. Confuse. Lie. Lie some more. Throw random nonsense at the wall -- death panels! -- and see if any of it sticks. Don't be troubled by contradiction or worried about consistency. It's perfectly fine to simultaneously propose eliminating Medicare while posing as its defender. That's absurd and confusing, but confusion is the whole point here. Confusion is good. If those hundred people surveyed aren't completely confused, then you haven't succeeded in rigging the game.
Step Two: Poll, poll and poll. Hire Frank Luntz. Poll some more. This is all you can afford care about. Family Feud politics isn't about ideology, principle, values, good government, effectiveness, solutions, reality, facts, science or truth. It's about perception and the shaping of that perception by any means necessary. Obsessively polling and recalibrating the message and then re-polling is the only way to be sure that you're shaping perception in a winning way. Keep this up until the polls show that the confusion and disinformation sown in Step One have taken root among the hundred people surveyed.
Step Three: Cite the polling data. Call it that: polling data. The word "data" there makes it sound kind of like you give a damn about facts or reality or truth-telling. You don't -- you mustn't if you intend to win this game -- but you need to sound like you do. Argue that the polling data proves that the right answer is unpopular and therefore wrong. Argue that the facts are contrary to the will of the people. Argue that it would be undemocratic, tyrannical even, to insist on the right answer when the majority clearly disagrees. If you do this properly, you can congratulate yourself for being a champion of the very people you're screwing over and even get some of them to thank you for robbing them blind.
Here's an excellent translation between what liberals are saying, and what the Teaparty retards hear.
From CBS:
BAD: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk.
WORSE: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk AFTER LEAVING A GAY BAR.
WORSER: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar WITH ANOTHER MAN IN THE CAR.
WORST: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a MARRIED state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.
WORSTER: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a married, REPUBLICAN state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.
WORSTEST: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a married, Republican state senator from Southern California WITH A HISTORY OF OPPOSING GAY RIGHTS was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.
Really, the jokes just write themselves.
Congressional Democrats grow a pair or two. Reid: GOP Should Stop Crying About Reconciliation.
"Realistically, they should stop crying about reconciliation as if it's never been done before," Reid advised the GOP. It's been done in almost every Congress. And they're the ones who used it more than anyone else."
Reid then rattled off a list of Republican legislative achievements that were pushed through the Senate. "Most of the stuff in the Contract for America was done with reconciliation; tax cuts, done with reconciliation; Medicare [prescription drug benefits], done with reconciliation," said Reid.
A Pennsylvania college student was detained recently by TSA because he had Arabic language flash cards with him.
The following exchange took place between George and a TSA supervisor who questioned him:
TSA Supervisor: You know who did 9/11?
George: Osama bin Laden.
TSA Supervisor: Do you know what language he spoke?
George: Arabic.At that point, the TSA supervisor held up George’s flash cards—which had words such as "to smile" and "funny" and on them—and said: "Do you see why these cards are suspicious?"
Tom "Racist As I Wanna Be" Tancredo kicked it off with an open appeal for literacy tests as a condition of suffrage, a tactic well known to my home state.
The opening-night speaker at first ever National Tea Party Convention ripped into President Obama, Sen. John McCain and "the cult of multiculturalism," asserting that Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."
The speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., told about 600 delegates in a Nashville, Tenn., ballroom that in the 2008 election, America "put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House ... Barack Hussein Obama."
Jesus.
This takedown at the Economist over his spirited and illogical defense of DADT is a complete and unalloyed delight.
This week, the Supreme Court put our democracy up for sale. FAIL.
His lips are moving. Seriously, how is it that Mr 9/11 Rudy G can say such crap with a straight face? Given that this is at least the second Republican functionary to insist that no terror attacks happened on Bush's watch, I think it's clear that this is a talking point being pushed by the GOP leadership. It's not possible that these people have forgotten about 9/11, anthrax, and Richard Reid. They Are Lying in a deliberate attempt to bamboozle the American people. Pay attention.
(That Rudy eventually recanted doesn't excuse this crap.)
Take a peek at his email of the year, in which a DoJ trial attorney discusses our detention policies in general and a particularly egregious one in particular, in which a US interrogator said to a detainee:
There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.
The attorney continues:
This was not a statement pulled from the transcripts of the Nuremburg trials, nor archival evidence taken from reports smuggled out of one of Stalin’s gulags. This was a statement made by an agent of this government less than 7 years ago to a detainee. The enormity of that is nearly incomprehensible.
But even worse – far worse – is the fact that the government would nevertheless still seek to convict based on the resulting confession.
The word for this is obscene.
Our cousin, disgraced former congressman Chip Pickering (R - jackass), is apparently the sort of doofus who gets in fights with youth soccer coaches. Nice.
Or, at least, evil is still being perpetuated in our name. We can tell, because government hacks are still insisting that they can't be held accountable for kidnapping an innocent Canadian and ending him to Syria for torture:
Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent. A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal's McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he's 17 years old. In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was "rendered" -- despite his pleas that he would be tortured -- to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured. He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured. Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing.
[...] [T]he U.S. Government has never admitted any wrongdoing or even spoken publicly about what it did; to the contrary, it repeatedly insisted that courts were barred from examining the conduct of government officials because what we did to Arar involves "state secrets" and because courts should not interfere in the actions of the Executive where national security is involved.
Just so we're clear: This is the "there are no checks and balances," imperial executive POV. They get to do what they want, and nobody gets to second-guess them. Down this path lies all sorts of abuses, and it absolutely must be stopped. Mr. Arar cannot be alone; he's the unlikely guy who escaped the nightmare of extraordinary (and illegal) rendition. Someone needs to go to jail over this, but it's increasingly likely that no one will.
And that's very, very bad.
Porn star Stormy Daniels (apparently a Baton Rouge native) is running against family-values escort-patron David Vitter for one of Louisiana's Senate seats. Don't miss the Q&A. (SFW.)
New York City now has an "Openly Heathen" council member - and he's a Republican. Fortunately, he insists that his faith will not drive his political agenda, so he's ahead of many Republican Christians already.
(Hat tip: Some Other Jackson Lawyer.)
Last night, he spent eight glorious minutes on a Glenn Beck parody that was pitch fucking perfect. Set aside the time and watch.
Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.
The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.
The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments -- which substitute for or supplement medical treatments -- on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against "religious and spiritual healthcare."
How about we just limit it to scientifically valid treatments? How would that be?
Gawker: Americana That Barack Obama Has Made Un-American as measured by right-wing response, in addition to winning international prizes, includes:
and
Related: What if Deep Impact were to happen now?
A few days ago, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL 08) spoke in Congress describing the GOP health plan as "Don't get sick, but if you do, die quickly."
His colleagues across the aisle were apparently annoyed, and some demanded an apology.
So he gave one:
NewsMax is running a column advocating a military coup.
UPDATE: That link is dead; here's another.
Check 'em out, in their own words.
