Let’s beat up on Ron Paul

Ron Paul fans should be careful about what they wish for.

Last week on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did a segment on how the media’s been conspicuously avoiding coverage of the Quixotic Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. His supporters loved it, probably hoping that more coverage of Paul would mean more people getting on board with his campaign. But more coverage means more coverage of his crazier positions too, and there are a lot of them. During the 2008 Republican candidates’ “debates” (they’re kind of like debates in that people in suits stand at lecterns), the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they believed in evolution. Most of the candidates did so, including Ron Paul. Then John McCain said something goofy about how he helped Jesus dig the Grand Canyon, or something like that. Shortly afterwards, a video showed up on the internet of Paul telling a much smaller, conservative Christian audience that he doesn’t believe in evolution.

“I, um, I think there, that it’s a theory. The theory of evolution. And I don’t accept it. You know, as a theory. I think the creator that, that I know, uh, you know, created us, every one of us, created the Universe. And the precise time and manner and uh, and all. I just don’t think we’re at the point where anybody has absolute truth on either side.” -Ron Paul

So we’ve got two possible ways of reconciling these contradictory positions: Either Paul is an evolution denying creationist and he lies to the much larger national audience, or he accepts what we know about how we came to exist and lies to smaller groups of ideologically skewered constituents when he thinks nobody will notice. Neither of those possibilities make him look good, especially since he’s been trying to earn this label of consistency in his campaigns. And that’s not even the extent of Paul’s weird Christianity. In 2003, he wrote a pretty terrible essay called The War on Religion for his friend Lew Rockwell. Rockwell’s another supposed “libertarian” who’s worked closely with Paul for decades. But anyway, this essay just reiterates Bill O’Reilly’s War on Christmas screeds, but with even less literary skill. Check this out:

As we celebrate another Yuletide season, it’s hard not to notice that Christmas in America simply doesn’t feel the same anymore.

If you read it, you’ll find Paul loves him some passive tense. It makes attacking your perceived enemies so much easier when you don’t have to actually identify them. Literacy problems aside, Paul doesn’t even seem to have a basic grasp of the Constitution he claims to hold in such esteem. He moans and bitches about the “anti-religious elites” who want to “transform America into a completely secular nation,” as if America wasn’t a secular nation from the very beginning. Apparently Paul believes America’s founders just forgot to mention that America is a Christian nation anywhere in the Constitution, which is weird since he claims to respect them so much. But here’s my favorite part of his whinefest:

Most noticeably, however, the once commonplace refrain of “Merry Christmas” has been replaced by the vague, ubiquitous “Happy Holidays.” But what holiday? Is Christmas some kind of secret, a word that cannot be uttered in public?

This is the kind of lack of self-awareness you get in true religious zealots. I doubt it even needs to be said, but if not saying Christmas means that it’s a secret which can’t be uttered in public, then the same must be true of all other religious holidays at that time of year. A Jew could just as easily claim that saying either Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays is driving Hanukkah underground. But Paul is incapable of looking at this “War on Christmas” nonsense from any perspective (let alone a Jewish one) other than his own narrow one.

Paul’s often described as Liberterian. There’s a tiny bit of truth to that, since his policies certainly lean that way. But Paul has been a Republican since at least 1992. He ran for President on the Liberterian ticket in 1988, and since then he’s been working in politics as a Republican. In ’92, Paul endorsed and advised the campaign of the racist Nazi sympathizer Pat Buchanan, who went on to lose the nomination for the Republican Party to George H. W. Bush.

Besides being “liberterian,” the other sales pitch for Ron Paul For President, Inc. has been that although he’s extremely conservative on fiscal issues, he’s socially liberal. He wants to legalize pot, for instance. But when it comes down to it, he sticks to the (Republican) party line on culture war issues. If you check out his voting record, you’ll see his votes against allowing adoption for gay couples in Washington, DC, against same-sex marriage, against taxpayer funding for abortions, and for displaying the Ten Commandments in government offices and courthouses. So much for his being “not a typical Republican.”

Some of those votes go back a few years, so it’s probably also worth noting that Paul’s still hammering away at culture war issues on behalf of his fellow Republicans. He’s even just recently tried to portray his advocacy of government restrictions on abortion as if it were on liberterian grounds:

“There is something that precedes liberty, and that is life,” Paul said. “If we are to defend liberty … you have to understand where that liberty, and where that life comes from. It does not come from the government, it comes from our creator.”
Paul recalled somewhat graphic stories from his time as an obstetrics-gynecology resident to explain his opposition to abortion rights.

There he goes again with all this “creator” talk, while at the same time saying that abortion should be illegal. And for some reason his supporters will keep on claiming that he’s not like those other Republicans, oh no, not at all.

There are some ways in which Ron Paul is different from the rest, but those are mostly issues where he out-flanks his colleagues on the right. So while your Republican neighbor next door wants to reduce regulations and “cut some red tape,” Paul wants to just eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, and many more. While your average Republican might agree with Rick Perry’s crazy idea to just stop the printing of paper currency, Ron Paul would like to go back to the Gold Standard.

Speaking of the Gold Standard, it’s possibly revealing to go back and look at the arguments made for it when it was an issue – back when Dr. Paul was 728 years young. It turns out that there was a heavy emphasis on what they called “natural law.” That doesn’t mean the laws of physics. They had some strange ideas back then about natural hierarchies of elements, and it turns out that people with a lot of gold discovered that gold was at the top of that hierarchy. Nice coincidence, huh? They drew an analogy to a supposed natural hierarchy among humans with (surprise, surprise!) white males on top.

Ron Paul, seen here forced by the government to work with a black guy to save the Federal Reserve.

So in this way they argued that changing to paper money would be a horrible tragedy which would upset both this hierarchy of elements as well as the patriarchy, both of which were backed up by this “natural law.” It’s the worst of the worst of hippy nonsense – all the mindless worship of nature and the naturalistic fallacy without any of the socially enlightened impulses against sexism and racism.

Paul also had some race issues when someone working on one of his newsletters wrote some terribly racist stuff on his behalf. To be fair, that staffer was eventually fired. And if it were just a matter of just that instance, or if it were just his weird views on gold and “natural law,” or if it were just an early 90s gig with Pat Buchanan, or if it were just the fact that his supporters are overwhelmingly white, any one of those could be overlooked. But when you consider each of them, you start to get a very different picture of who Ron Paul is and what he’s all about. That should make most of his supporters uncomfortable, but that’s what they asked for when they wanted more coverage of him.

Wisconsin

The Republican governor of Wisconsin is trying to push through legislation which would strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights. You’ve probably heard about this by now.

In response, thousands of protesters have filled the streets of Madison. Here are some of them:

Good times. Anyway, Glenn Beck weighed in on the subject and did that random association thing he does. According to Beck, the Wisconsin public unions are collaborating with the Muslim Brotherhood because Midwest teachers, police officers, and other public servants have a lot in common with the Muslim Brotherhood, a group which (unfortunately for Beck’s conspiracy mongering) has only 15% public approval in Egypt.

Here’s how it works: See, in Egypt, they had demonstrations protesting against what the government is doing. And now in Wisconsin, you’ve got demonstrators  protesting against what the government is doing. Obviously the two groups must be in cahoots! For some reason, Beck doesn’t use this kind of brilliant analysis to compare protesting teabaggers with protesting Muslim extremists, even though they share much of the same ideology.

At this point, the only thing stopping Glenn Beck from being as much of a loon as Alex Jones is his refusal to get involved with 9/11 troofer bullshit.

Governor Walker claimed he needed to try to bust up public unions because of budget problems. We’re broke and the sky is falling so we need to cut benefits from skilled workers. It’s just how it’s got to be, because of the BUDGET. Ah, if only if weren’t for that budget, everyone who works for a living would get a retirement and decent health care and stuff like that. In fact there’s even a number associated with the budget problem. They are $137 million in debt. But then some people started investigating why there’s so much of a budget problem in Wisconsin. From One Wisconsin Now:

Republican Gov. Scott Walker plans to pay for $140 million in new special interest spending signed into law in January by extending the state’s long term debt in a “scoop and toss” refinancing scheme that will cost untold tens of millions of dollars in additional debt for Wisconsin.

In other words, the only reason they’re in so much debt is because now Walker has to pay off the corporations which helped him get elected. In order to do that, he has to redistribute the wealth from the working poor and the middle class to his extremely rich contributors. Apparently you only get to call it socialism or communism when you’re redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. When it’s the other way around – as it is in this case- it’s an “emergency budget measure” or some other such nonsense. Got that? Giving money to the poor = communism. Giving money to the rich = tough-minded pragmatism. That’s how conservatives think. Seriously.

Yesterday, in an attempt to delay or kill the proposed bill, Democratic state senators fled the state so that less than the necessary 3/5 wouldn’t be in attendance. Reporters tracked some of them down to a Best Western in Rockford, IL. Wonkette points out that that hotel has an awesome water park and a pub, so that makes it a win-win for the state senators who made it there.

Probably will have more on this later as it develops.

John Boehner is standing up for the stupid guy

The President of Republicans John Boehner went on the teevee this weekend to tell David Gregory that although he’s definitely not a birther, he doesn’t want to interfere with the right of Americans to believe stupid things by telling his supporters that they’re wrong about Obama’s place of birth and religion. From Politico:

When the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” asked Boehner whether he, as speaker of the House, had a responsibility to “stand up to that kind of ignorance,” Boehner told David Gregory: “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think. Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people.”

OK, got that? John Boehner is not interested in telling the American people what to think! He would never do such a thing. Right? Well, I decided to ask the Wikipedia to find out if that is actually true. Here are some things I found:

On May 25, 2006, Boehner issued a statement defending his agenda and attacking his “Democrat friends” such as Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Boehner said regarding national security that voters “have a choice between a Republican Party that understands the stakes and is dedicated to victory, and a Democrat Party with a non-existent national security policy that sheepishly dismisses the challenges of a post-9/11 world and is all too willing to concede defeat on the battlefield in Iraq.”

-

Each and every day, Israel’s very existence is at stake.

-

We need to look at the American people and explain to them that we’re broke,” Boehner said. “If you have substantial non-Social Security income while you’re retired, why are we paying you at a time when we’re broke? We just need to be honest with people.

-

A ban on taxpayer funding of abortion is the will of the people and ought to be the law of the land.  But current law – particularly as enforced by this Administration – does not reflect the will of the people.

-

Those are all quotes from the House Majority Leader literally telling the American people what they should think. And not only that, but he’s also told the American people what to think in regards to how to pronounce his own name. If I think his name is pronounced ‘boner,’ isn’t it my right to call him that? Apparently he’s not as against telling people what to think as it seems he is when it comes to birtherism. But why the special exception in that case? Let’s go back to Politico to find out:

Boehner denied that he is willing to let those misperceptions remain because they weaken and delegitimize Obama.

Oh no, of course not.

Midterms!

We wrote about them, but there might actually be some information we didn’t cover.

Tragically, our hero Alvin Greene lost. So there will be not be any of his action figures this Christmas. Why do Republicans hate Christmas so much?

Russ Feingold lost. Prop 19 failed. Allan Grayson lost.

But on the other hand, a lot of the worst candidates lost, too. The homeopath-endorser and anti-fluoride conspiracy theorist Sharron Angle lost. Homophobic bestiality enthusiast Carl Paladino lost. The anti-sex activist Christine O’Donnell lost. It looks like Joe Miller will lose to a write-in candidate. Art Robinson, who’s a denier of HIV and climate change, lost. The anti-abortion extremist Ken Buck lost. And Mark Reese or Racee or whatever his name is, he lost, too. His name’s too un-American, so I can’t pronounce it, let alone type it correctly.

So the Republicans have the House now, and the Democrats will keep the Senate. That’s what pretty much everybody predicted. It’s probably a mistake to think that this is a huge game-changer. The conservative / corporatist wing of the Democratic Party had, since 06, made what the actual numbers will be in the next Congress a reality in practice. So now the actual numbers will reflect the actual situation more accurately.

Paladino’s love/hate relationship with the press

These two tweets were twitterered one after the other this past weekend by Carl Paladino, or maybe his staff.

So why isn’t a NY Sun endorsement a kiss of death for Paladino? I’m no big fan of our one and only major local daily newspaper, but it certainly has more substance to it than the NY Sun. There are probably a lot more New Yorkers alienated by a Sun endorsement than locals here in Buffalo who are alienated by an endorsement from the News. It’s really our only newspaper. There aren’t any readers of the local competition to appeal to in this case because there is no local competition.

It’s unreasonable to expect consistency from a politician like Paladino, especially during the home stretch of a campaign. But seriously – one right after the other? How dumb do you have to be to not notice that? Dumb enough to vote for Paladino, I guess.

Republicans are more anti-gay than we’re anti-war

Back when opposition to the Iraq war started to gain steam, activists tried to pressure like-minded members of Congress to put an end to the whole thing by cutting off funding by voting against the annual Defense Authorization Act. Here’s how it would normally go:

Activists: Hey! Why are you voting for funding the war if you’re against it?

Politician: Well, even if we were to end the war we’d still need to fund a withdrawal. So it doesn’t make any sense to vote against defense funding if your goal is to stop the war.

Activists: *Grumble*

But now Republicans blocked the same Defense Authorization Act in order to delay the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. So when the politicians which the anti-war activists went after told us that it was political suicide to block defense spending in order to shape military policy, they were telling us a lie.

Today is the last big primary (masturbation) day, everyone!

Unfortunately I’m not supposed to vote today because New York state has something called closed primaries, which means that you have to be registered in the relevant party to vote. So I will be forced to do so using my “name.” The obvious choice for maximum hilarity is the communist / local yokel  Carl Paladino.

Another state with closed primaries today is Delaware. The Republican primary in Delaware for Joe Biden’s Senate seat is between Mike Castle and Christine O’Donnell. Castle is the normal (yet atypical for this year), moderate candidate which the party supports. So he’s a pretty appropriate choice for Biden’s seat since Biden was basically a moderate Republican while in the Senate.

O’Donnell is the teabagger candidate, and she’s against masturbation because of Matthew 5:27-8:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Here’s what O’Donnell said in her own words:

The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can’t masturbate without lust.

Please fap to this picture while reading this post, kthx -mgmt.

So it’s pretty clear that’s the verse to which she was referring. It’s the Sermon on the Mount, if you didn’t know. But it’s just too bad that she didn’t continue using the Bible to dictate her politics with the next few verses. Here’s Matthew 5:29-30:

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

This… well this might be a tough sell, even for the teabaggers. Or maybe not! Maybe Christine O’Donnell will win the primary tonight, and she will then introduce masturbation (no, not this kind) to the national stage inre: the 2010 mid-term elections. The next thing you know, they’d be running attack ads accusing each other of being too liberal on the issue of Biblical, guilt-induced self-mutilation. That. Would. Be. AWESOME!

And if you’re a Republican politician in Delaware, you better hope that’s what happens or else you might get yourself killed. Tom Ross, the chairman of the Delaware Republican Party, received a death threat via email saying that he deserved “a bullet in the head” for supporting Mike Castle instead of the hilarious anti-masturbation lady. This is definitely NOT TERRORISM though, well, just because.

UPDATE: O’Donnell has pulled it off and beat Mike Castle. She then cleaned up with a sock.

Sharron Angle and education

I really should’ve just devoted this space entirely to covering all of the kooky shit the Republican candidate for US Senate from Nevada Sharron Angle says and does, but now I’m way too far behind to possibly keep up. Each time her name appears in the news, I just think she can’t possibly get any crazier. But then she does.

Earlier in her campaign, Angle was for eliminating the Department of Education. She pretty quickly learned that taking this position (and others like it) was so unpopular that it boosted the campaign of someone as generally loathed as her opponent Harry Reid. So she deleted it from her website and got her lawyers to start yelling at Harry Reid for talking about it.

Her position’s pretty radical, but it’s based on a standard conservative position on federal v. state bureaucracies. From the National Review:

“Look, the Department of Education is a policy machine that sends down one-size-fits-all rules that fit no one,” Angle says. “Education works best when you have all of the stakeholders involved and working toward the same commitment. That happens best at the local level. Anything bureaucratically, administratively, these layers and layers — that just diminishes the involvement of the stakeholder. They feel like their voice isn’t being heard because there is too much of a loud clamor from the top.”

So it’s oversimplified, but that’s basically how conservatives attack federal programs like the DoE. See, it’s not that they’re necessarily against education in general. They just think it would function better if control were held at the state level. Well that’s how they’d like to frame it, at least.

Sharron Angle has a history of handling things at the state level since she’s been a State Senator for Nevada from 1999 through 2005. So we can test whether or not it’s true in her experience that education is best handled at the state level with her own experience in the state legislature. This would be a good way to test whether she actually follows her espoused conservative political philosophy, or if she’s just against any public funding of education be it on the state or federal level.

ThinkProgress did some digging on this matter and found it to be the latter. In 2003, she was part of a vocal minority which temporarily blocked a funding bill to maintain the public schools. Not to spend more on public schools, you see, just enough to keep them functioning. Fortunately for Nevada’s schools, this attempt was later thwarted by the Nevada Supreme Court. But why did the Nevada Supreme Court need to get involved when 2010 Sharron Angle tells us that education funds handled at the state level works so well? Maybe we should ask the 2003 Sharron Angle.

But then again why a Sharron Angle in any time-space continuum want to fund education? More education is just going to make less people inclined to vote for her.

The Taliban is on the side of the anti-”Ground Zero Mosque” protesters

One of my first posts on this blog when I started it about a year ago quoted the Washington Independent on the issue of pre-emptive detention:

“We appreciate that the United States has security concerns about Yemen, but continuing to hold these men without charge is morally wrong, is in violation of court orders, and it’s handing al-Qaeda a recruiting tool,” said Letta Taylor, a researcher for Human Rights Watch…”

Later I wrote about Anwar al-Awlaki and how President Obama authorized his assassination, even if he’s found to be outside of any battlefield in which the US military is engaged. Here’s one of the problems I had with that policy:

And what’s more is that the perceived positive effects of such an assassination are pretty unlikely to actually happen. It’s not going to destabilize al Qaeda. If anything it’d give them a martyr and a recruiting mantra.

And later I wrote about a NY Times piece by Nicholas Krystoff on the cost and allocation of resources in the Afghanistan war:

Some other comparisons of costs really bring home the waste of the military occupation of Afghanistan. The money spent on deploying a single soldier there could be used to build 20 schools. A single cruise missile’s price tag is equivalent to 11 schools. And really, which is more corrosive to fundamentalist Islam: Cruise missiles that kill families and give recruiting slogans to al Qaeda, or education?

So there’s this recurring theme here. The policies which are based on this idea of a culture war between the Muslim world and the West are in the interests of the fringe elements of Islam which want to escalate this global conflict. Radical Muslim terrorist networks actually like it when US foreign policy fits with their demonization of all Americans. It gives their propaganda an element of truth which the average potential suicide bomber on the street can relate to. It bridges the gap between those with legitimate grievances regarding American foreign policy and our support for autocratic regimes in the Middle East and the committed religious fanatics who would hate the evil secular Americans no matter what. And now this same phenomenon of appeasing the terrorists by adopting short-sighted, emotionally-fueled, reactionary policies is applying to our domestic policies, specifically in the case of the Park 51 Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero. From Newsweek:

“By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor,” Taliban operative Zabihullah tells NEWSWEEK. (Like many Afghans, he uses a single name.) “It’s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.”

Zabihullah speculates about an increase in potential future attacks, but you don’t even need to depend on those kinds of predictions to see the effect this “controversy” is having on the Afghan public. Apparently the effect is already apparent:

Zabihullah also claims that the issue is such a propaganda windfall—so tailor-made to show how “anti-Islamic” America is—that it now heads the list of talking points in Taliban meetings with fighters, villagers, and potential recruits. “We talk about how America tortures with waterboarding, about the cruel confinement of Muslims in wire cages in Guantánamo, about the killing of innocent women and children in air attacks—and now America gives us another gift with its street protests to prevent a mosque from being built in New York,” Zabihullah says. “Showing reality always makes the best propaganda.”

Zabihullah’s coldness in how he reacts with joy to such atrocities definitely fits with the popular perception of how radical Muslims don’t care about human life. So it’s difficult to see why this connection is so rarely made, especially amongst US policymakers. Our enemies won’t be deterred by idiotic protesters trying to stop the community center of death. That just encourages them. They care more about the great mosque in the sky than they do about the average NYC Muslims looking for a place to go on Fridays, whom the radical Muslims view as too liberal, assimilated, and Americanized for their tastes anyways.

A tale of two nontroversies

I really don’t like getting caught up in the faux-controversies like the two I’m about to get caught up in. The way I understand it, controversies are supposed to involve two opposing positions, both of which are intellectually defensible by well-informed adults. These do not qualify by that definition, but the hypocrisy is just so glaringly obvious that it really needs to be pointed out. Here’s what I’m talking about:

1. The construction of an Islamic cultural center two-ish blocks from Ground Zero by a Muslim group, the leader of which worked with the Bush administration as an example of moderate Islam, and
2. A person named Laura Schlessinger on some primitive invention called “radio” said some very racist things to one of her callers.

The right wing’s reaction to the cultural center has largely been that it shouldn’t be built because it might hurt the feelings of New Yorkers and 9/11 victims’ families. There are some notable exceptions, like the Libertarian-style economist Grover Norquist and NYC mayor/billionaire media bigshot Michael Bloomberg. But for the most part the line has been that this offends some people and is opposed by popular opinion. Here is one example. Here is CNN making a big deal of poll numbers. And Twitter user Sarah Palin used the Twitter to explain why the “mosque” (which isn’t a mosque, actually) is very offensive and not at all politically correct and must be stopped somehow:

In other words, rights (and bills which outline them) have to be subordinate to popular opinion and political correctness. That’s what the opposition to this is all about. If it weren’t, then there’d be no need to continue the conversation beyond agreeing that they have the right to build it, because whether or not they should is completely irrelevant.

What’s weird about this is that whenever someone casually refers to America as a democracy, it’s always these same people – Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin and people like that – who nitpick the point by correcting them. America’s not a democracy, they say, because democracy means everything is decided by a majority vote. And if you really want to get that pedantic about it, then it’s a fair point, because America’s a republic. We make some decisions by majority vote, some are made by elected representatives, but some issues – rights, for instance – aren’t open to debate or discussion. It’s the job of the government to insure those rights for the citizenry. If this were a strict democracy, then a majority could vote to take away the rights of minorities (although, to be fair usually when someone says that we’re a democratic country, they mean by that that we have elections and free access to information and stuff like that, unlike totalitarian dictatorships).

There’s another inconsistency here, too. They don’t actually come out and use the term “politically correct,” but that’s the perspective they’re defending when they talk about how a cultural center at a former Burlington Coat Factory will offend people and therefore plans to build it should be halted. So you would think that when it came to another issue where the shoe is on the other foot, we should expect some consistency from Republicans on the question of rights v. political correctness.

But of course that’s not the case. When Laura Schlessinger went off on a crazy racist rant about how black (or “buhhh-LACK,” as she puts it) people  are overly sensitive and lack a sense of humor, Twitter user Sarah Palin used the Twitter to defend the radio host:

And this is almost verbatim what Schlessinger herself had to say about her situation. Apparently her First Amendment rights were taken away because her bosses decided to can her for being an ignorant hick. Also, none of her critics even said anything about government involvement inre: Schlessinger’s right to free speech as far as I know.

But even if we were to be generous and pretend that Schlessinger’s First Amendment rights were taken away (she said so on Larry King’s show, apparently without anyone in the government stopping her from doing so, but whatever), this is still a very clear double standard. You’d have to be blind not to notice it. In one case First Amendment rights need to be subjugated to the “will of the people” and cater to hurt feelings; and in the other First Amendment rights are precious and need to be defended regardless of how offended someone might be by someone else using them.

Here’s the best way to illustrate how obvious the double standard is: take any of the statements Gingrich, Palin, Limbaugh, or anyone like that made about Park 51. Then do a quick find/replace so that it’s appropriate to the Schlessinger story. And vice versa. This is what I got:

Schlessinger’s employers were teaching her a lesson in respect: This is not your place; it belongs to others. However pure your voice, better to let silence reign.
-Charles Krauthammer

In that case, Krauthammer would actually be correct if he said that. The airwaves Schlessinger broadcasted on actually were owned by others: her employers. But he was making an analogy with Park 51 in the original quote and there he’s wrong. The Cordoba Initiative purchased the property completely legally and followed every step of due process in approving the construction of the building with the local authorities. It doesn’t “belong to others” – it belongs to them.

Or how about this one:

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf: don’t retreat…reload! (Steps aside bc his 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence”isn’t American,not fair”)
-Sarah Palin

That would probably go over well, right? If Palin or literally anybody else tweeted to Rauf to “reload” and fight against the activists taking away his rights, what kind of reaction would you expect from Fox News? Is there any chance in hell they wouldn’t throw a gigantic week-long hissy fit over it?

Whether the Republicans want to be either the people who value hurt feelings and political correctness over Constitutional rights or the reverse, that’s up to them. It would just be nice to have a little consistency. At the very least they could try not to take such extreme and opposite ideological positions on the First Amendment in the span of a few days.

Kenya-controlled US Supreme Court rules against Orly Taitz

Last September, federal judge Clay Land of Georgia ordered the dentist / birther / internet troll Orly Taitz pay a $20,000 fine for violating Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Taitz of course realized that Clay Land was a communist fascist Maoist Muslim Marxist traitor and appealed. This appeal was denied by another al Qaeda Nazi posing as a federal judge, and on it went like that until Taitz started trolling members of the Supreme Court on ChatRoulette.

She first decided to go after Clarence Thomas, the most likely candidate to bring her case before the Court since he is also a bit of a crackpot. The way it works is that to get the Supreme Court to appeal your case, you have to convince one of the nine justices to introduce it to the Court. It’s kind of like how anyone can actually write the words of a piece of legislation, but they need at least one member of Congress to sponsor it.

In what was for him a rare moment of sanity, Justice Thomas sent Taitz’s e-mail to his spam folder and told her to STFU and pay her stupid fine already. After she made sure Thomas’ Hotmail account wasn’t hijacked by someone from /b/, Taitz decided to try her luck with Justice Alito. Normally when someone pesters a second justice after being denied by the first, the justice will just bring the case before the Court to spare the others, since a person like that (i.e. like Taitz) will probably just go individually to each and every member of the Court and troll them until they give in.

So that’s what Alito did and today they ruled that the fine would be upheld. So you might think that a patriotic American like Taitz would see that they had gone to the highest court in the country but that justice wasn’t on their side, right? Well, not so much. Like another similarly hypocritical douchenozzle, Taitz is appealing to the “international court of Human Rights,” an institution which appears to not even exist. There’s the European Court of Human Rights. And there’s the International Court of Justice. But there’s no such thing as the International Court of Human Rights. Taitz is now filing appeals to institutions which don’t even exist outside of her imagination.

Anthony Weiner gets real mad

There was a vote in Congress the other day on reimbursing health care expenses for those who volunteered in the clean-up effort on September 11, 2001. Republicans unsurprisingly tried to block it, citing something they didn’t like about the precise procedure used so as to not appear to be blocking aid for people who obviously deserve it – people who, as it turns out, Republicans love to hide behind whenever they get a chance to use them for their own political gain.

It seems like a pretty sneaky move. On the one hand, they have a political motive to stop the Democrat-led House from passing a bill almost any American would agree with. But on the other hand, they would have to do so in such a way that would not make them appear to be against the volunteer clean-up workers, even though they are.

Well Anthony Weiner (D-NY), who’s represented parts of Brooklyn and Queens since 1999, was NOT having any of that. And then he turned into Al Pacino. Check it out:

Sharron Angle’s prison rehab plan: Drink water, as long as it isn’t fluoridated

Sharron Angle is one of the funnier Republican challenger candidates. The other week she won her party’s primary for US Senate from Nevada, and now she’s set to run against Harry Reid in November. Lots of crazy shit she’s said and advocated has been reported on, and everyone is having a fun time with her kookiness. Many of these positions can be found on her own website, and I’ll cite additional sources too.

1. She wants to eliminate the Department of Education, basically because she thinks local school board members (i.e. local businesspersons with children) probably know more about education than people with actual expertise in it.
2. She is against gay marriage and works on legislation preventing it, because, in the words of her own website, she “recognizes the traditional family as the foundation of America’s society.” Translated, this means she is almost definitely a closeted, self-hating lesbian Seriously, does she really expect anyone to actually believe that she’s the one and only heterosexual on the planet who is VERY ANGRY about the gays getting married?
3. She wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare. The latter one is odd, seeing that the teabaggers who supported her were very upset about alleged cuts to Medicare in the recent health care reform bill.
4. She’s either a member of, or a strong supporter of the Oath Keepers, which is a group of conspiracy theorists/militia members who are vowing to stop the INTERNATIONAL NEW WORLD ORDER OF TOTAL GOVERNMENT OPPRESSION and who seem to be regularly charged with possessing illegal weapons, like napalm bombs. Now she’s getting into serious Alex Jones/Tim McVeigh territory.
5. Remember how General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove started the chain of events which eventually led to the destruction of all plant and animal life on Earth because he was paranoid about fluoride in the drinking water being a Communist conspiracy to weaken “our precious bodily fluids”" Well, in the real world, and 40something years later, an actual politician shares that same paranoia.
6. In the past she publicly advocated outlawing alcohol, which again is pretty strange for someone pretending to be “a ‘less government’ person.”
7. She has some ties to my friends at the Church of Scientology in the form of an appearance in a video for L. Ron Hubbard’s prison drug rehabilitation program.

So now the wingnut website Human Events ran a campaign ad puff piece on her where they breathlessly reported unquestioningly that “attacks against [Angle] are unfounded.” Strangely enough, the way that they explain that the attacks are unfounded is just by admitting that Angle in fact holds the positions on which she is being attacked – positions which are obviously nuts, by the way.

Only one of the claims are kind of countered, and that’s the final one. In the article, she’s quoted as redirecting the focus of the methodology behind the supposed prison drug rehab program she advocates. From the completely normal and sane folks at Human Events, quoting Angle:

“This is a very intense potassium, calcium, vitamin, mineral regimen, with a hot rock sauna that sweats the toxins out. Those two protocols were developed by [the late Church of Scientology founder] L. Ron Hubbard, and they had to give him credit. But it is not Scientology, but rather natural homeopathic medicine.”

No, see – you guys just don’t understand! This isn’t some weird crackpot’s obvious pyramid scheme like Scientology! It’s homeopathy, which is totally legit and not at all a cultish belief or anything like that at all. Seriously.

I made a better lawn sign for Carl Paladino

A local teabagger is running for governor and a few people have picked up bumper stickers and lawn signs to support him. Or something. Here’s what it looks like:

The guy’s hand is covering it up, but it says “I’m mad as hell too, Carl.” The ones I have seen on a lawn and one or two pickup trucks just said “I’m mad too, Carl.” Saying “as hell” makes Jesus cry aborto-tears so the campaign dropped that vulgarity since they are so very concerned with stopping the spread of profanity.

So as a gesture of goodwill, I’m offering a new design:

How the right deals with Nazis vs. How the left deals with Nazis

A couple of weeks ago those teabagger people had their April 15 demos. They had been on their toes looking for infiltrators who would pose while carrying ridiculous signs so that the media would report on how crazy those teabaggers were. To be fair, there’s something to that fear because some blogger announced exactly that as a strategy, and he tried to organize people to that end.

But in this instance, what it looks like is that some honestly racist person decided to show up to protest big guvmint in a swastika shirt. So the Republican teabaggers decided he was a “crasher” and kind of sort of chased him out. So good for them, I guess.

I’m not so much interested in their paranoia or their willingness to believe he wasn’t really “one of them” with no evidence whatsoever. That’s kind of to be expected from those people. But what’s even funnier is how lame and weak their response to this guy was:

Oh no! He’s on NOTICE. Tsk, tsk…

I’m not a violent guy, and if I were in their shoes I’d probably try to talk to him for at least a minute before attacking, too. But sheesh… Talk about using kid gloves on an open fascist.

So that’s one case of how the right deals with Nazis. Basically they wag their fingers at them while calling them “Sir” and make sure the media sees them doing it. And then they let him stick around.

On the other hand:

Three men wearing Nazi garb sparked a brawl with approximately 50 people outside a hardcore punk concert in Philadelphia.
Witnesses said the men were mocked inside the Khyber club Friday night for sporting tattoos of Nazi symbols and wearing camouflaged combat pants, WWII-style coats emblazoned with SS emblems and Third Reich hats with Nazi insignias…
“One Nazi was caught right in the middle of 2nd street as punches, kicks, bottles, boots and blows rained down upon his prone and turtled body. He could be heard crying for help all up and down the block,” the Examiner report read. “The other two were caught nearby and beaten severely.”…
The Examiner reported that the fracas inspired Murphy’s Law to write and play an impromptu song called, “You Should Have Known Better,” prompting an uproarious response from concert-goers.

Unfortunately I cannot find video of the beating. And you better believe I looked.

To be fair, a punk show isn’t exactly a political gathering – but it’s pretty close to one. On the other hand, nobody in Murphy’s Law starting ranting about how the Nazis were plants from some other band’s fanbase. I guess they were confident enough that things would kind of work themselves out, which it seems they did. LOLenfreude.