Republican Says Rape Pregnancies Are ‘God Putting One In You’

Funny Business West Virginia Republican Says Rape Pregnancies Are ‘God Putting One In You’

West Virginia Republican Says Rape Pregnancies Are ‘God Putting One In You’

James Schlarmann

Charleston, West Virginia — This week West Virginia Delegate Brian Kurcaba (R) made some eyebrows climb in the national media when he said that while “rape is awful” there is a potential upside to it. “What is beautiful is the child that could come from this,” said Kurcaba. The Republican’s comments are alarming to some for how commonplace they have become from within the party. Former Missouri congressman Todd Aiken famously tried to categorize the different forms of rape, infamously referring to it as “legitimate” or not. The party has fought hard against the notion that they are anti-woman, but Kurcaba’s recent commentary would seem to undercut their counter-arguments, and many in the party’s leadership would like their lower-state delegates to ratchet back the rhetoric.

One of Kurcaba’s colleagues in the West Virginia state congress however, came to his defense and offered his own take on the conundrum Republicans face when discussing rape. Delegate Randal Enkelsinne (R) came to Kurcaba’s defense when contacted by The Political Garbage Chute. “Of course the liberal lamestream media is going to pounce all over my colleague’s comments. We Republicans can’t say squat about a lady without getting pounced on.” Enkelsinne insisted that “there has been a fundamental shift in this country” and that “traditionally, men-folk were not only allowed, but encouraged to tell their women-folk what to do with their female who-who-dillies and no one batted an eyelash. Now it’s all ‘War on Women’ this and ‘my body, my choice’ that and ‘don’t lay your theocratic mitts on my uterus you backwards thinking jerkface.’ And I think our country is now lost morally because of it.”

Enkelsinne said that Kurcaba was “trying to convey that every cloud has a silver lining. It’s just that this cloud is a rape. Every rape cloud can have a baby as a silver lining.” When asked why he feels that a pregnancy resulting from the most violent and dehumanizing attack a woman can face in her lifetime could possibly be mitigated by being impregnated by their attacker and being forced by law to carry that baby to full term, Enkelsinne replied, “It’s all a matter of perspective. Sure, if you think of a rape as being only about the rape victim, I could see where you’d get the idea that there is nothing good about it. But women-folk just need to shift their perspective.”

We asked Enkelsinne what he meant by that and he said, “They just need to think of a rape baby as God putting one in you, is all. God works in mysterious, sometimes kinda rapey ways. I mean, it’s not like he asked for Mary’s consent before he put the Baby Jesus in her womb, right?”

In the wake of the 2012 electoral disaster for the Republican Party, the GOP’s top brass commissioned a report that was supposed to serve as a sort of autopsy, pointing to why they lost. One of the factors the report found was that the anti-abortion rhetoric put forth by some of their more ideologically extreme candidates turned-off a large portion of young, female voters. The party had hoped to get away from making commentary on rape as it pertains to abortion laws, and speak more generally about “the sanctity of life.” Kurcaba’s comments — and now Enkelsinne’s defense of Kurcaba’s comments — seems to undercut that hope.

Louisiana Governor and recent portrait pigment reductionist Bobby Jindal said in the wake of the 2012 debacle for his party that they needed stop being the “stupid party.” While it’s unclear whether West Virginia voters will take Kurcaba’s statements as stupid, it’s safe to say these are the kinds of comments Jindal was hoping his Republican counterparts in other states would stop making.

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who commissioned the Republican autopsy, was not immediately available for comment.

“Look,” Enkelsinne said as he was getting ready to end our phone interview with him, “we’ve tried abortion being legal for over forty years now. And sure, maybe the number of botched back-alley abortions has dropped, and sure maybe if we stopped deluding ourselves about teenage sex and pregnancies and gave them the tools and education to prevent getting pregnant in the first place there’d be an even lesser demand for abortions. But if we don’t live in a country where men can force a victim of rape or incest to carry the rapist’s baby to full term because we assign some mystical, divine constitutional rights to a parasitic life form that has no cognition, no sentient thought and cannot live outside its host organism’s body yet, we don’t live in America anymore.”

Obama’s Christian Right Critics Agree with Islamic State

Obama’s Christian Right Critics Agree with Islamic State

By Murtaza Hussain

In the furor over President Obama’s remarks last week at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he compared the rise of the Islamic State with the history of Christian extremism, it’s been lost that the president was carefully retreating from the idea that the U.S. is engaged in a grand civilizational war against Islam — a longstanding fallacy which many American politicians are apparently loath to abandon.

After the September 11th attacks in New York and Washington DC, then-President Bush made a memorable rhetorical choice to invoke the Crusades when describing the scope and nature of the coming American military response.

While the implications of such a statement were not evident at the time to many Americans, the same was not true abroad. French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine reacted with alarm, saying: “We have to avoid a clash of civilizations at all costs,” and cautioning that “one has to avoid this huge trap, this monstrous trap.”

Fast forward more than a decade and the “monstrous trap” Vedrine warned of has ensnared the United States. After spending trillions of dollars and killing hundreds of thousands of people in the name of a “War on Terror,” the U.S. today remains mired in a seemingly endless cycle of conflict with an expanding array of religiously-influenced militant groups. The “War on Terror,” paradoxically, has resulted in the problem of terrorism becoming more widespread and virulent than ever.

At least part of the reason for this is that many American officials have continued in Bush’s tradition of defining the U.S. conflict with extremist Middle Eastern groups as a grand civilizational and religious battle, thus playing in to the same sharply polarizing narrative those groups seek to promote.

In the immediate aftermath of Bush’s declaration of a new crusade, Osama bin Laden himself cited Bush’s words in an interview as proof that America was a broadly hostile civilization planning to establish hegemony over the Middle East. Today, both Islamic State’s Dabiq magazine and Al Qaeda’s Inspire have regular sections devoted in part to publishing similarly helpful quotes from hostile Western officials.

Even as he has continued many of his predecessor’s worst policies in the war on terror,  Obama appears to be aware of the self-defeating dynamic created by grandstanding about civilizational conflict. Speaking in a recent interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, the president said that while he recognizes the stated ideological motivations of many terrorists, he rejects the “notion that somehow that creates a religious war.”

Citing the overwhelming majority of Muslims who reject the actions of groups such Al Qaeda and ISIS, the President warned against providing “victory to terrorist networks by overinflating their importance.” He also described the Middle East and South Asia as “ground zero for needing to win back hearts and minds [of] young people,” and cautioned against using vague terms such as “radical Islam” which could alienate people in these regions even further.

At last week’s prayer breakfast, the president went on to caution attendees against getting on their “high horse” on the topic of religious extremism, and compared groups such as Islamic State with perpetrators of Christian religious violence from the Crusades up through slavery.

These reasonable comments have inflamed those still devoted to the narrative of clashing civilizations, who seem unconcerned about escalating the present conflict even further. Republican presidential hopeful and Fox News personality Mike Huckabee attacked Obama for his alleged hostility to “Christians [and] Jews in Israel,” as well as what he described as an “undying” support for American Muslims. Rep. John Fleming, a Louisiana Republican, explicitly accused Obama of “defending radical Islam” and suggested that he had referred to Islamic State members as “freedom fighters.”

Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, who has repeatedly and explicitly stated that the U.S. is in a “religious war,” has also criticized the President’s refusal to use religious terminology in defining the conflict, characterizing his decision as a conscious denial of reality. Alabama Republican Congressman Mo Brooks, for his part, suggested that Obama’s refusal to use terms like “Islamic terrorism” is likely “an unfortunate byproduct of the days when he was in a Muslim school.”

But in spite of these increasingly unhinged lamentations, Obama’s comparison of Islamic State to Crusaders and slave owners is not only accurate and historically sound, it makes practical sense as well.

Not only does such rhetoric help demonstrate a more rational and humane side of the U.S. to a generation of young Muslims, it also reinforces the message from Muslim leaders and clergy who have condemned terrorist groups for being radically out of step with Islam. Indeed, many who have defected from Islamic State or managed to escape from its prisons have described it as being markedly different from the exemplar of Islamic civilization it purports to be.

“Obama is right to not use terms such as Islamic terrorism, both for pragmatic reasons and also because it is not a very accurate way to describe this phenomenon,” said Arun Kundnani, a professor at New York University and scholar of terrorism and radicalization. “The more we learn about groups like Islamic State and see how out of step they are with mainstream Islamic beliefs, the more it becomes clear that religion for them more operates more as a form of militarized identity politics than as theology. Referring to them in religious instead of political terms gives them a legitimacy they would not otherwise have.”

With extremist groups like Islamic State waging a desperate battle to validate their narrative and claim the mantle of Islam, it’s bizarre to see American politicians essentially weighing in on their side. After over a decade of disastrously mirroring the rhetoric and behavior of extremists, the time has come to take a more reasoned approach.

Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP

Anti-halal campaigner sued over claims Islamic certification supports terrorism

Anti-halal campaigner sued over claims Islamic certification supports terrorism

New South Wales supreme court to hear case brought by head of Halal Certification Authority against Q Society and activist
Kirralie Smith, who runs the website HalalChoices, has been named in the defamation suit lodged by Mohammed El-Mouelhy.

Photograph: YouTube

Michael Safi
@safimichael

A prominent anti-halal campaigner and the “Islam-critical” Q Society are being sued for defamation over their claims the Islamic certification industry is corrupt and funds “the push for sharia law in Australia”.

Mohammed El-Mouelhy, the head of one of Australia’s largest certifiers, Halal Certification Authority, began proceedings in the New South Wales supreme court last month against senior members of the Melbourne-based Q Society and Kirralie Smith, who runs the website HalalChoices.

The statement of claim alleges that two videos featuring Smith, one recorded at a Q Society event, portray El-Mouelhy as “part of a conspiracy to destroy Western civilisation from within” and “reasonably suspected of providing financial support to terrorist organisations”.

He also claims that Smith alleges in one of the videos that El Mouelhy once accepted the fee to certify a company without carrying out an inspection and that he conducts his business in a “dishonest manner”.

El Mouelhy is named in both videos and Smith makes specific allegations about his conduct. His company’s logo flashes on screen in the first clip, a slick 32-minute explainer of Smith’s concerns with halal certification that has been viewed more than 60,000 times.

The landmark case could have implications for the anti-halal movement in Australia, which briefly became prominent last November when a South Australian dairy company came under pressure from anti-halal activists and ditched its Islamic certification – at the cost of a $50,000 contract.

Smith’s website, which outlines her concerns with halal certification and provides lists of certified products, is a lightning rod for the movement, which despite an active online presence has done little to persuade major food manufacturers to forgo halal fees.

The halal food industry is worth about $2.3tn worldwide and halal exports account for about two-thirds of Australia’s $10bn food export market.

The Australian Crime Commission, which last year completed an investigation into money laundering in Australia, has said it is “not aware of any direct links” between the industry and violent extremist groups.

The Q Society organised for Dutch firebrand MP Geert Wilders to tour Australia in 2013 and regularly holds events warning of the “Islamisation” of Australian society. It has links to the Reverend Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic party.

Q Society board members Debbie Robinson, Peter Callaghan and Ralf Schumann are also named in the suit, as is YouTube, which hosts the two videos.

El Mouelhy, who has run his Halal Certification Authority for more than two decades, said he brought the action because his integrity had been attacked.

“I don’t like anybody to malign me, I’m an honest person and I don’t see why anybody should say these things,” he said.

Robinson declined to comment, citing legal advice. Smith also did not comment on the case, but told Guardian Australia her website “is about providing information to consumers so they can make a choice”.

A directions hearing in the defamation case is scheduled for 20 February.

Right-Wing Evangelicals Claim ‘Good Christians’ Can’t Get PTSD

By Rob Shryock

Right-Wing Evangelicals Claim ‘Good Christians’ Can’t Get PTSD

On a Veteran’s Day broadcast, two of America’s most influential televangelists claimed that good Christians can’t get PTSD.

Kenneth Copeland, who is famous for pitching a fit [3] when a senator tried to investigate his nonprofits and for inspiring [4] a measles outbreak, said, “Any of you suffering from PTSD right now, you listen to me. You get rid of that right now. You don’t take drugs to get rid of it, it doesn’t take psychology; that promise right there [in the Bible] will get rid of it.”

Copeland’s guest, conservative revisionist historian David Barton, agreed, adding, “We used to, in the pulpit, understand the difference between a just war and an unjust war. And there’s a biblical difference, and when you do it God’s way, not only are you guiltless for having done that, you’re esteemed.”

Barton believes that anybody who behaves “biblically” during war can’t get PTSD. Unfortunately, there is a logical flip side to this statement: someone who has PTSD must have not been biblical in his actions, and thus he is ultimately responsible for his own PTSD.

Understandably, a lot of people are upset by Barton and Copeland’s assertion. Even the staunchly conservative Gospel Coalition [5] (TGC) and America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention [6] (SBC), made no bones about their distaste for Copeland and Barton, the former calling them “profoundly stupid,” the latter “callow and doltish.”

That’s an aggressive attack, especially given that a significant number of Christians, including leaders at SBC and TGC, share Barton and Copeland’s belief that mental illness can be cured by faith. A September survey [7] by LifeWay showed that fully 35 percent of Christians and 48 percent of self-identified evangelicals believe prayer alone can heal serious mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder.

The idea that major illnesses can be cured by prayer feeds the idea that mental illness is the fault of the ill. A 2008 survey conducted by Baylor psychology professor Matthew Stanford showed that 36 percent of mentally ill church attendees (and former church attendees) were told their mental illness was a product of their own sin, while 34 percent were told their illness was caused by a demon. Forty-one percent were told they did not really have a mental illness, and 28 percent were instructed to stop taking psychiatric medication.

These numbers reveal an ingrained distrust of mental illness and the mentally ill. This distrust has a dramatic and negative impact on people’s lives, alienating them from their peers and causing them to question the validity of their own experience, a process that often causes Christians to leave their churches. One of the participants in Matthew Stanford’s study described his experience:

“I felt shunned at the church. A lot of the other members acted as though they didn’t want to get close to me. A lot of people were afraid of me. The pastor didn’t want anything to do with me. Therefore, I no longer attend any church at all. I watch church on TV. I am already paranoid; I didn’t need anyone keeping their distance from me. It makes me depressed to go to a regular church in person because of how I am treated.”

Stanford, a self-described, “very conservative, evangelical Christian” is quite critical of how his fellow Christians handle the issues surrounding mental illness, claiming that the mentally ill are “modern-day lepers”: treated as “unclean and unrighteous” and “cast out” from their communities.

Amy Simpson, another popular Christian voice who critiques mental health stigma in the church, echoes these sentiments. She wrote in her book, Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and the Church’s Mission, “The church allows people to suffer because we don’t understand what they need and how to help them. We have taken our cue from the world around us and ignored, marginalized and laughed at the mentally ill or simply sent them to the professionals and washed our hands of them.”

This widespread stigma has its genesis in an attempt to create a system called “Nouthetic” or “biblical” counseling, a system that was supposed to fix the damage psychiatry caused to Christianity. Biblical counseling had its genesis in the anti-psychiatry movements of the ’50s and ’60s, which united leftist intellectuals like Thomas Szasz with conservative Christians and fringe groups like Scientologists. The founder of biblical counseling was author Jay E. Adams, whom Stanford called the “Moses of the biblical counseling movement.”

Adams’ quintessential work, the 1970 Competent to Counsel, proposes that mental illness occurs not because one is “sick” but because one is “sinful.” Psychiatry, in attempting to treat a disease, is thus ineffective. This idea led Adams to create a method that addressed the sinful roots of mental illness and was based on scripture.

This method was Nouthetic counseling, which comes from the Greeknoutheteo, meaning “to admonish.” Adams believes in solving people’s mental health problems by “confronting” them over their lack of faith. He posits that the best way to deal with sin is to meet it head-on, bible in hand.

Adams’ methods were a product of their time. A negative attitude toward the mentally ill pervaded America in the ‘70s and ‘80s, embodied by the Reagan revolution, which stigmatized America’s homeless and destitute and blamed the downtrodden for their own plight. Meanwhile, Christians had come to distrust the secular world, which they believed was responsible for dissolving marriages, encouraging homosexuality and undermining the Christian faith. They wanted to set up their own institutions that would be separate from the secular world, and thus needed their own psychiatry. In this milieu, Jay Adams’ ideas found the perfect ground to grow in.

The philosophy introduced by Adams in Competent to Counsel birthed a movement, and Nouthetic counseling grew to become a discipline. Although Adams’ specific brand of Nouthetic counseling has gone out of style, biblical counseling, which builds on his ideas, is in.

Nowhere is biblical counseling more in vogue than the Southern Baptist Convention, which adopted a resolution on mental health last August that supported “research and treatment of mental health concerns when undertaken in a manner consistent with a biblical worldview.”

In fact, it was the boss of the SBC spokesman who called Barton and Copeland “callow and doltish,” Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president Russell Moore, who brought counseling into the SBC. In 2005, as the dean of theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Moore unmade the school’s trademark “Pastoral Counseling” program, which integrated psychology with theology, and replaced it with an Adams-inspired biblical counseling program.

While the SBC doesn’t agree with Adams on every issue, it hasn’t tried to hide his influence in its current curriculum. The resources page for SBTS’s Biblical Counseling department contains nearly 30 of Adams’ works, alongside works of conservative Calvinists like Sovereign Grace Ministries’s disgraced founder CJ Mahaney and megachurch pastor John MacArthur.

If the resources page is any indication, most of the people SBC considers adept biblical counselors also happen to be staunch theological conservatives. This is perhaps because anti-psychology tends to fit in with the conservative mindest: Matthew Stanford mentioned that in his personal experience, a significant number of pastors distrust psychology because they are angry the APA stopped calling homosexuality a mental disorder.

Stanford said, “They bring up homosexuality, and say ‘why did the APA take it out of the diagnostic manual?’ There’s this idea that psychology is legitimatizing sin, or saying it’s okay to sin.”

Perhaps this is what Moore was talking about when he claimed that, in a speech on SBTS’s new biblical counseling program, “There’s an ideology driving the research” of psychologists, or when he claimed that pastoral counseling failed “because it is so naive about the presuppositions behind secular psychologies.” Even if he isn’tspecifically talking about homosexuality, Moore thinks that psychology has inherent anti-Christian undertones.

This might hint at why Copeland and Barton felt the need to speak out against PTSD treatment on TV in the first place, and why the contemporary church is so prone to stigmatizing the mentally ill: seeking treatment for clinical depression, even being clinically depressed in the first place, can be construed as being anti-Christian. It can indicate that somebody has embraced the “psychiatric mindset” instead of trusting God with their mental illness. In this world, the mentally ill are not just stigmatized, they are suspected sinners.

See more stories tagged with:

evangelicals [8]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/belief/why-right-wing-evangelicals-claim-good-christians-cant-get-ptsd

Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rob-shryock
[3] http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/7403/kenneth_copeland_s_protectors/
[4] http://www.npr.org/2013/09/01/217746942/texas-megachurch-at-center-of-measles-outbreak
[5] http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2013/11/14/barton-and-copeland-the-bible-says-soldiers-should-not-suffer-from-ptsd/
[6] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/13/beck-historian-david-barton-bible-will-get-rid-of-ptsd-if-soldiers-are-gods-warriors/
[7] http://blog.lifeway.com/newsroom/2013/09/17/half-of-evangelicals-believe-prayer-can-heal-mental-illness/
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/evangelicals-0
[9] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

American Christian Taliban Threaten Humane Methodist Pastor

VERDICT: Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days To Renounce His Gay Children Or Be Defrocked

By Zack Ford

“VERDICT: Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days To Renounce His Gay Children Or Be Defrocked”

Rev. Frank Schaefer

CREDIT: UMC.org

On Monday, the United Methodist Church convicted Rev. Frank Schaefer on two counts against the Church for officiating his son’s same-sex wedding. On Tuesday, the impaneled jury determined his sentence: Schaefer is suspended for 30 days, and if it at the end of that time he has not renounced his support for marriage equality, he will be defrocked.

Schaefer, however, was unapologetic, refusing the invitation to “repent of your actions”:

SCHAEFER: [The Church] needs to stop judging people based on their sexual orientation. We have to stop the hate speech. We have to stop treating them as second-class Christians. […]

I will never be silent again. This is what I have to do. […]

I have to minister to those who hurt and that’s what I’m doing.

Three of Schaefer’s four children identify as gay.

After his sentence was announced, his supporters began overturning chairs in the courtroom, a reference to the biblical story of Jesus and the moneychangers.

Schaefer’s critics framed his actions as “breaking the rules” and “rebuking” the Church.

Update

Watch Rev. Schaefer’s remarks from after the sentencing, committing himself to being an “outspoken advocate” for the LGBT community. He also added that if a same-sex couple asked him to marry them in the next 30 days, he would do it:

 

Related articles

• VERDICT: Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days To Renounce His Gay Children Or Be Defrocked (thinkprogress.org)
• VERDICT: Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days To Renounce His Gay Children Or Be Defrocked (richarddawkins.net)
• VERDICT: Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days To Renounce His Gay Children Or Be Defrocked (secularnewsdaily.com)
• Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days to Renounce His Gay Children or Be Defrocked (readersupportednews.org)
• Methodist Pastor Has 30 Days to Renounce His Gay Children or Be Defrocked (dailyqueernews.wordpress.com)
• Hero Pastor Given 30 Days to Renounce His Gay Children or Be Defrocked (alternet.org)
• Pastor who performed gay wedding to learn fate (kansascity.com)
• Guilty verdict handed to United Methodist pastor involved in gay marriage trial; sanctions to be announced Tuesday (pennlive.com)
• Pastor expects to be defrocked after suspension (heraldonline.com)

World Nut Daily Continues To Defend George Zimmerman Amid Abuse Allegations

WorldNetDaily Continues To Defend George Zimmerman Amid Abuse Allegations

by Brian Tashman

WorldNetDaily’s Jack Cashill believes that the allegations of domestic violence against George Zimmerman are part of a big liberal media conspiracy, even though one of the claims occurred before the Trayvon Martin trial. In another WND story defending Zimmerman in the face of new accusations of abuse, Cashill claimed Zimmerman’s estranged wife and “his latest ‘victim,’ girlfriend Samantha Scheibe,” concocted their claims to garner media attention and “betrayed” Zimmerman by going to the police after he threatened them.

While Cashill thinks this is all the media’s fault, the Associated Press notes in 2005 “Zimmerman’s former fiancee filed for a restraining order against him, alleging domestic violence,” and in the same year “Zimmerman was arrested and accused of resisting an officer with violence.”

But maybe the media went back in time as part of the anti-Zimmerman conspiracy!

Between April 2012 and July 2013, Zimmerman’s life fell apart. He showed up at the trial dead-eyed, grossly overweight, and financially and emotionally bankrupt.

The local NAACP, with which he had worked on a civil rights case a year earlier, had betrayed him. The state of Florida had sacrificed him to the mob.

His president denied him. The media had rendered the mid-Florida ether so poisonous he could scarcely leave the house. His wife no longer loved him and was eager to tell the world about it.

Zimmerman’s acquittal settled nothing. The death threats amplified. The attorney general continued to hound him despite full clearance by the FBI more than a year prior. And the media cried “Injustice!”

“I still see sadness in his eyes,” said his brother Robert soon after the acquittal. “He was definitely not the same person I had seen a few days before the incident.”

In the last two years, Zimmerman has experienced more betrayal on more levels than most of us will in a lifetime.

Now, it appears that his latest “victim,” girlfriend Samantha Scheibe, was soliciting national media interviews weeks before their well-publicized dust-up.

Regardless of the circumstances, each misstep Zimmerman has made post-trial has left the media giddy. They seem to think it vindicates their utterly subversive rush to judgment.

The fact is that the Zimmerman they now happily trash is the Zimmerman they helped create. Whatever happens going forward, the blood is on their hands.

Related articles

• ‘Birther’ website: New violence charges against Zimmerman are liberal media plot (rawstory.com)
• Right wing media turns on George Zimmerman (thegrio.com)
• George Zimmerman’s girlfriend says he sent their homemade sex tape to her underage daughter (deathandtaxesmag.com)
• George Zimmerman Is In Trouble With Guns … Again (usnews.com)
• Zimmerman accused of choking girlfriend (msnbc.com)
• He’s A Pedo Too?!? George Zimmerman Allegedly Sent Freak Nasty Pics To His Girlfriend’s Young Daughter (bossip.com)
• No Isht Sherlock: George Zimmerman Juror Says He Deserves To Be In Prison (bossip.com)
• I’d hate to be a former Zimmerman juror today (salon.com)
• Conservatives still haven’t given up on George Zimmerman, movement hero (dailykos.com)
• Report: George Zimmerman arrested for domestic violence on girlfriend (rawstory.com)

Obama Removes God; Farcical Idiot Pond “Breitbart” Make Fools of Themselves, Yet Again

Breitbart “News” Beclowns Themselves Yet Again

Right wing journalism at its finest

By Charles  Johnson

I’ve taken a bit of a break from mocking the right wing idiots at  Breitbart.com lately, but this self-beclownment is so monumental it rivals Ben  Shapiro’s hilarious “Friends of Hamas” smear against Chuck Hagel, as Larry  O’Connor gets the vapors over President Obama’s recitation of an early version  of the Gettysburg address for a Ken Burns film: OBAMA  REMOVES ‘GOD’ FROM GETTYSBURG ADDRESS.

Then, six hours after the screaming anti-Obama headline comes the sheepish  update:

UPDATE: A text box now appears on the Ken Burns website learntheaddress.org which states: “Did you know there are five versions of the Gettysburg Address?  We asked President Obama to read the first, the Nicolay Version.” A  cached version of the same webpage from several days ago shows no such  reference.

Right, because O’Connor and the rest of the right wing crazysphere made such  a stink about this moronic fake outrage that Ken Burns needed to post a  clarification to stop the idiocy from spreading any further. Winning!

And speaking of clarifications, Larry — how about an update to your totally  wrong headline?

Related articles

• Christian Group, Ignorant of History, Complains That Obama Omitted ‘Under God’ from Gettysburg Address Video (patheos.com)
• Breitbart “News” Beclowns Themselves Yet Again (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• Time Traveling Obama Made Lincoln Remove ‘Under God’ From First Draft Of Gettysburg Address, Also Didn’t Even Kill Hitler (wonkette.com)
• Right flubs Gettysburg story – twice (msnbc.com)

10 Deranged Dispatches From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week

10 Deranged Dispatches From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week

Holier than the Pope himself, Palin and Buchanan take Francis to task.

Photo Credit: Jennifer A. Walz/Shutterstock.com 

It’s been a busy week for all manner of charlatans, religious and otherwise.

1. One-woman parade of idiocy, Sarah Palin: The Pope is too liberal; social programs are similar to slavery.

Sarah Palin was on book tour this week, telegenically spewing some of the stupidest nonsense we’ve heard since she announced she could see Russia from her house. We’d like to ignore her, but the fact is she’s hugely popular among a certain segment of the population, and her book about the “war on Christmas,” Good Tidings and Great Joy, is destined for best-sellerdom. Just don’t wish her “Happy holidays!” That is waging war, my friend.

As Christian as she is, though, during an interview with CNN, Palin complained about Pope Francis. She’s taken aback by his liberal attitudes, she says. Taken aback by his unwillingness to go after the LGBT community and atheists, we suppose, and his sympathy for the lonely elderly, and unemployed youth. As Bill Maher said, Palin’s really going to be shook up when she finds out what Jesus said. Be sure to have tranquilizers available when she encounters the Sermon on the Mount.

Palin hopped right on that highly offensive bandwagon of equating the social safety net with slavery. “Our free stuff today is being paid for today by taking money from our children and borrowing money from China,” she said. “When that note comes due — and this isn’t racist so try it anyway, this isn’t racist — but it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due, right? We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.”

Insisting that you are not being racist when you’re comparing slavery to something far more benign is always a really convincing way to make people believe that you are in no way racist.

2. Pat Buchanan: The Pope is bordering on moral relativism. The horror!

Pat Buchanan is another conservative who is very upset that the Pope is not willing to use the Catholic Church to bully people anymore. Specifically, he misses license to bully atheists, women who use birth control and have abortions, and gay people. In his refusal to berate or convert atheists, and tell LGBT people that they are going to hell, Pope Francis is bordering on— cue music of dread — moral relativism.

Two of the statements that upset Buchanan the most: Pope Francis describing the attempt to convert people to Christianity as “solemn nonsense,” and saying that Christians should spend less time lecturing people than listening to them to “discover new needs.”

Why, that dastardly Pope Francis even acknowledged that people can be good no matter what their religious belief, or lack thereof. And he committed the cardinal sin (sorry, pun intended) of stressing helping the poor, rather than focusing on distractions like the gay lifestyle. As Buchanan wrote at Townhall on Friday, Pope Francis is leading “the Catholic Church to a stance of non-belligerence, if not neutrality, in the culture war for the soul of the West.”

A non-belligerent church?! What the hell?

3. Pat Robertson: Ask your gay son if he has been molested.

Ever the dispenser of sound parenting advice, 700 Club host, evangelical bigot par excellence Pat Robertson advised a caller to be “understanding” when talking to her gay son. By being “understanding,” he meant asking her son if the reason he is gay is because he was molested. Because that is always how people become gay.

“Is there a biological thing going on or has he been influenced — has a coach molested him?” Robertson asked the viewer who called in.

Either way, of course, the mother must immediately enroll her son in one of those gay conversion therapies; yes, the abusive form of pseudo-counseling that even ultra-conservative New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was forced to acknowledge should be illegal.

(h/t Right Wing Watch)

4. Sandy Rios: Gay-waiter-refused-tip story just a clever ruse to help ENDA.

No doubt you’ll remember the story two weeks ago of the Kansas City waiter who, in lieu of a tip, received a note from his oh-so-considerate Christian customers saying that, despite his superb service, they couldn’t let him share in their riches because they, and god, disapproved of his lifestyle. That story went viral, and even Bill Maher picked up on it, suggesting that if you want to be selfish and cheap, just do it. Don’t claim it’s for the worker’s own good.

Unfortunately, the behavior has spread, with another family refusing a tip this week to a server they assumed was a lesbian. They were even less nice about it, treating her rudely from the start, racking up a sizable bill and gleefully stiffing the hardworker, who happens to be an ex-Marine, out of her gratuity.

But wait, back up, this just in: Sandy Rios of the American Family Association says the first story was a ruse — a hoax staged by the tricky LGBT community to drum up sympathy for ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) to pass in the Senate.

“I smell a rat in this story,” Rios said. “I don’t believe a Christian couple wrote this note, I think it was a ruse because it was the week ENDA was being voted on.”

If only progressives were as willing to engage in dirty tricks and outright deception as ultra-conservatives. If only… hatred was something that was merely stagecraft.

5. Rafael Cruz: Atheism leads to sexual abuse of children.

Ted’s dad. At it again. Downloading his unique combo of spurious lies, bile and nonsense.

This week, speaking at a gathering of a group we must look into joining, OK2A, described on its website as “Oklahoma Premiere Second Amendment advocacy group,” Rafael Cruz said, straight up, that atheism leads to sexual abuse of children.

Here is the logic he laid out to the assembled gun-toting crazies: “If there is nothing, if there is no God, then we are ruled by our instincts.”

Atheism leads to moral anarchy, he said. “Do we know any politicians that have done that?” he asked the crowd.

“Hitler!” answered Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, who, coincidentally, was in the audience.

“Oh, we don’t have to go that far, Larry,” Cruz chummily replied. “Just go to Washington. Just go to the White House.” From there, it’s a short hop to sexual immorality, perversion and sexual abuse, Cruz concluded.

Follow?

6. Faux “Historian” David Barton: True Christian soldiers wouldn’t have PTSD.

Atheism is apparently a problem in the military, too. Because if soldiers were true Christians, they would not feel bad about killing enemies and sometimes non-combatants. They would not come home traumatized and have all these psychological problems.

Christian “historian” David Barton, the one who blamed Typhoon Haiyan on women having legal abortions, celebrated Veteran’s Day by criticizing veterans who feel at all guilty for what they do on the battlefield. If they read their Bible, he and televangelist Kenneth Copeland agreed on Believer’s Voice of Victory, they’d read in Numbers 32 that soldiers “shall return and be guiltless before the Lord” and that means that they wouldn’t have PTSD.

“You don’t take drugs to get rid of it, it doesn’t take psychology; that promise right there will get rid of it,” Copeland said.

When you go to war God’s way, Barton chimed in, “not only are you guiltless for having done that, you’re esteemed.”

So, get it together veterans!

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

7. Rand Paul: Obamafascists are coming for your donuts.

This is truly terrifying. Right-wing libertarian wackadoodle Rand Paul took to the microphone this week to warn Americans that the federal government is targeting donuts. That’s what he said: “They’re coming after your donuts!”

Way to scare people. First, Madam Dictator Michelle Obama tries to get kids to eat more vegetables and exercise; now, the FDA is banning trans fats. Give me obesity or give me death! Or both, as the case may be.

You know who libertarian Paul is not so libertarian about? Gubb’mint employees.

“I say we should line every one of them up. I want to see how skinny or how fat the FDA agents are that are making the rules on this,” he said in his rousing donut hysteria-invoking speech.

Donuts, as Esquire’s Charles Pierce pointed out, don’t need trans fats to be delicious. The two largest donut purveyors, Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts are making pretty tasty round pastries without them.

Credit where due, though: There’s no indication, yet, that Paul’s recent call to arms was plagiarized.

8. Rush Limbaugh makes deranged comments on Obamacare.

There have been a lot of deranged comments on Obamacare this week, including from theNew York Times when it idiotically compared the bumpy rollout of healthcare.gov to Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. Hmmm, website = hurricane. Thousands dead = millions potentially getting health insurance. Yep, that analogy works.

Actually, all kidding aside, it’s monstrous.

While arguably Rush Limbaugh is less influential than the Times, and perhaps a tad more right-wing, he was not to be outdone in the crazy Obamacare hysteria that ran rampant this week. Rush, of course, does not like women, or sluts as he calls them, who use birth control. And Obamacare making it easier for them to do so is one of the healthcare act’s greatest evils in his view. Because he cares so much about millennials and their virtue, Rush took it upon himself to warn them on Wednesday’s show not to fall into this trap. What Obamacare is really advocating is not safer sex, he says—it’s prostitution.

“If you like being promiscuous, you can keep on being promiscuous,” Limbaugh, friend of the young, said. “If you like being a prostitute, then have at it!”

And summing up for emphasis:

“If you like your risky, promiscuous lifestyle, you can keep it. That’s what Obama is promising.”

Wait, that sounds kind of good, Rush. Thanks!

(h/t: Media Matters)

9. Phyllis Schlafly: Calling all border agents—be on the lookout for polygamist Muslims.

In a world that made any sense, conservative mouther-offer Phyllis Schlafly would have long ago faded into irrelevance. Frankly, we had assumed she was dead by now, but she’s alive and kicking, and still getting airtime to broadcast her ignorance.

While the Eagle Forum founder has long been preoccupied with fighting feminism, she also wants to make sure that those really sexist Muslims with multiple wives are not being let into our country. Yes, immigration, the changing complexion of America, and what that means for the welfare rolls is very much on Schlafly’s increasingly enfeebled mind these days.

She expressed these concerns on a radio show called “Crosstalk” the other day, saying:

“I would like to know if our immigration authorities are letting in people who believe in polygamy. Polygamy is against our law. We’ve brought in thousands of Muslims — I want to know if they made them sign a pledge to assure they’re not bringing in a bunch of wives who will now go on our welfare. Nobody can answer that question; I can’t get any answers to that question.”

Luckily, a caller to the show had an answer. He asserted without an iota of doubt that the Obama administration was bringing in 40 to 50 million Muslims and that they will destroy our constitution and implement Sharia law.

On the bright side, Phyllis: feminism and Sharia law do not go well together. Time to make friends with the enemy of your enemy?

10. Louisiana official: Close the libraries so those Mexicans can’t learn English; build a jail instead.

Most immigration hardliners also believe that anyone who comes to this country damn well ought to learn English. No bilingual education, no chance of Americans ever rubbing elbows with people who don’t speak Amurrican.

But Lindel Toups, who sits on the Lafourche Parish City Council, is upset that Mexicans are trying to learn English, and he’d like to divert funding from libraries to a new jail because of that fact. Toups played down the importance of libraries in recent comments to the Tri-Parish TimesandBusiness News, by pointing out that the Spanish-language Biblioteca Hispana section helps Spanish-speakers learn English.

“They’re teaching Mexicans to speak English,” Toups said “Let that son of a bitch go back to Mexico.”

Libraries are apparently a great source of evil. “There’s just so many things they’re doing that I don’t agree with… Them junkies and hippies and food stamps [recipients] and all, they use the library to look at drugs and food stamps [on the Internet]. I see them do it.”

The citizens of Lafourche Parish are voting this week on whether to keep $800,000 in the library system or put it toward the $25 million needed for a new jail. That way, they might be able to avoid an increase in taxes.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Related articles

• 10 worst right-wing statements of the week – donut paranoia edition (salon.com)
• Pope Denounces Buchanan and Palin for Questioning his Agenda (newslo.com)
• 10 Deranged Dispatches From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week (bandannie.com)
• 10 Deranged Dispatches From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week (rinf.com)
• Pat Buchanan upset by Pope Francis: He is losing the culture war (rawstory.com)
• Bill Maher: Sarah Palin would prefer the Pope who quit while in office (video) (freakoutnation.com)
• Maher: If Palin thinks the Pope is too liberal, ‘wait until she sees what Jesus has been saying’ (rawstory.com)
• 10 Deranged Dispatches From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week (alternet.org)

The Cover Of Allen West’s New Book Is Terrific, We Can’t Wait To Laugh At The Mere Idea Of Reading It

The Cover Of Allen West’s New Book Is Terrific, We Can’t  Wait To Laugh At The Mere Idea Of Reading It

by Alex  Ruthrauff

Wow, how could this cover of Allen West’s probably terrible new book be any  better? More eagles, maybe, like a live one excreting digested fish sludge on  Allen West’s head. That’s good luck, we hear! Oh, it could be a Blingee! With  pictures of guns and dancing aliens smoking marijuana, yes!

Also wow: the title and subtitle. It’s generally considered bad form to  proclaim oneself to be something so lofty as a “Guardian of the Republic” unless  Princess Leia said you could, just like it’s bad form to be in the army and fire  your gun next to a prisoner’s head to scare him and get kicked out of the army  because of it, but just try and tell that to Allen West.

Even better is the subtitle “An American Ronin’s Journey to Faith, Family,  and Freedom.” We don’t know  much about ronins (sp?) but weren’t they dishonored goons, mercenaries, and  often criminals? It’s a strange word choice, but West’s co-author puts that down  to West’s “encyclopedic knowledge”:

Despite the unfamiliar word in the subtitle, Hickford said, “It’s not an  academic work. It’s definitely in his voice. Anyone who’s ever heard him speak  in person knows how conversational he is. His voice definitely comes through in  the book.

(Don’t worry, conservatives, Allen West’s book, the cover of which has Allen  West posed on an eagle-bedecked motorcycle, is “not an academic work.”)

“He writes the majority of everything,” [Hickford] said. “He has a very, very  strong voice and points that he wants to put across.” The editing process  typically involves “making it clear to the average reader. He has an  encyclopedic knowledge of history and military details, and sometimes for the  reader there’s an assumption that you know all those things.”

For example, Allen West might assume that you know he’s not an anti-Semite,  so he’ll just go ahead and use his very, very strong voice to yell that a female  staff member at his former PJ Media job was being a “Jewish American Princess”. It’s totally understandable.  Also totally understandable is why Allen West might want to sell some books: it  is because he lost his job for not being a terrible Jew hater, and he likes  money.

We look forward to the sequel: “The Not And Never King: An American  Footnote’s Journey to Realizing He Should Just Go Away.”

[Sun Sentinel / Wikipedia]

Read more at http://wonkette.com/534154/the-cover-of-allen-wests-new-book-is-terrific-we-cant-wait-to-laugh-at-the-mere-idea-of-reading-it#hR888HJLL38tC9Ye.99

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The Tea Party; Deluded Misfits, Vandals and Extortionists

The Tea Party is fixated on destroying what is salvageable and necessary

By Patrick White

We had out-of-town company over the weekend and planned a BBQ yesterday for them with a couple of our kids and their families. Since our weather has cooled we knew we needed to use our patio heater plus several other gas electric appliances most homes have. So far, so good.

At the appointed time, I started setting up the patio heater and found a couple of bird’s nests I’d missed earlier, so I cleaned those out. But, as soon as I opened the propane tank I smelled gas…not a good sign, shouldn’t be a gas smell. I needed to find the leak since I’m not a fan of gas explosions.

I asked one of our kids (well, officially he’s one of our kids even though he’s about 46) to start the BBQ while I tried to find the gas leak.

Ok, leak fixed. Lit the pilot and turned the unit on, all is well and we’ll have heat soon. Then checked on the BBQ and, well, it wouldn’t start. I checked the pressure gauge I have on the unit and it showed about 50 percent full, but, well, it wouldn’t start. I put on my “one” spare (and full) tank and it lit, but the gauge was stuck at 50 percent. In the middle of this I was informed that the patio heater quit. Well, guess what…empty propane tank. In my mental calculations the day before, I thought that we had enough propane to use the heater. Wrong! Hint: don’t ask me to do mental calculations and deliver opinions on important things.

My wife told me that we were moving everything except the cooking inside. She also told me that she was using the microwave to melt butter and it shut off the kitchen lights, not once, not twice but three times! Never happened before!

Believe it or not, I made it through all that without turning the air blue…not even one little, tiny bad word. Ah, what fun am I?

Now, had I been a Teabagger, the BBQ, patio heater and microwave would all be in the creek and the kitchen lights would still be off. Because, you see, their position is to destroy not fix. Destroy the ACA, destroy the government, destroy voting and women’s rights, destroy, destroy, destroy.

Today our newspaper published a column titled, “Inarticulate republicans keep missing their audience” by Thomas Sowell. When we cut through the verbiage we really see that Thomas thinks it’s perfectly fine for republicans to use continuing resolutions (“CR” Thomas…he hates the use of the term “CR”) to manage the government. In my opinion, every time congress uses a CR they are telling the world that they can’t do their job and pass a budget. Back to Thomas…he refers to the ACA when he writes, “We are in the midst of a national crisis, immediately affecting millions of Americans and potentially affecting the kind of country this will become if ObamaCare goes into effect…” The bold and italics are mine, the “national crisis” belongs to Thomas. A national crisis? Affordable health care is a national crisis? Dismantling the government and using extortion to accomplish political goals isn’t a crisis? Thomas, what planet did you just visit?

In another column from today’s paper titled, Obamacare is Sick, But Worth Fixing”, Clarence Page gives us an opposing view and it seems that the ACA isn’t the crisis Thomas declares it to be. Any time a program is enacted by congress, any time a program is coded, there are going to be problems because it’s virtually impossible to anticipate every situation. Smart people move to correct the errors, congress doesn’t. Congress is the only organization I know that will use multiple cruise missiles to kill a single fly.

Republicans articulating their position? How do you convince people that slicing cheese by taking big swings with a splitting mall is the best way to accomplish the goal of getting smaller slices. It ain’t gonna happen. The Teabaggers are driving the republican train and they aren’t interested in governing, just destruction anyway they can get it and they are dragging the Republican Party down with them. How do you articulate that position Thomas?

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The Tea Party and the John Birch Society: Two peas in a pod?

The Tea Party and the John Birch Society: Two peas in a pod?

Even JFK was branded as being a Communist sympathizer and a traitor or America by the John Birch Society

In the days and hours prior to his assassination in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was the subject of an extremely vitriolic hate campaign organized by the Dallas based American Fact Finding Committee. That group, an extremist right wing outfit with ties to the John Birch Society, even went so far as to sponsor a full page ad entitled “Welcome Mr. President” in the Morning News (Dallas paper) on the day of his assassination. The ad expressed hostility to Kennedy and his administration’s policies. Also distributed during that time were pamphlets and posters designed to resemble FBI wanted posters, with Kennedy displayed as the criminal in question.

The portrait of Kennedy is above the red printed words “Wanted For Treason.” Below that are listed Kennedy’s seven treasonous “crimes” against the people of United States. The reverse features the same exact photos of Kennedy and is printed in Spanish. The poster displays normal folds, minor toning, a few staple holes and some tape reinforcement on the reverse (Spanish side) fold lines.

The image the JBS would like to project to the unknowing

The “Children of Corn” – How the JBS and the Tea Partiers have morphed into one body

A Supreme Court Justice was attacked by the JBS for ruling for the Civil Rights amendment

Martin Luther King Jr. was branded as being a Communist by the John Birch Society

The oh so obvious contradictions of the Tea Party. Selective Memory?

The Tea Party fringe groups who aren’t fearful of a violent confrontation with the government

Sarah Palin: Queen of the Tea Partiers?

The Tea Party doing what they do best…which is what again? Oh…spreading fear

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Ann Coulter Goes Off On Obama’s Gun Proposals: ‘Screw You! You Don’t Think We Care About The Children?’

Ann Coulter Goes Off On Obama’s Gun Proposals: ‘Screw You! You Don’t Think We Care About The Children?’

by Matt Wilstein

Sean Hannity invited Ann Coulter onto Fox News tonight to discuss President Obama‘s latest speech on gun violence reduction in Minnesota today.

The two began by mocking the recently-releasedphoto of Obama skeet-shooting, with Coulter saying she’s “waiting to see the photos of him taking birth control pills to show that he’s fighting the war on women.”

But what Coulter really wanted to talk about were the “lies” being propagated by the New York Times and President Obama: “If we want to do something to reduce these gun shootings all we have to do is for the American people to want to do something” about guns. She said that the real problem is that the ACLU and liberals are preventing any real action to happen surrounding the mentally ill.

She continued, “Connecticut, Aurora, Tucson. These are crazy people. Everything they are telling you that they can do about guns is a lie.”

Coulter claimed that Obama’s big plan is to “demonize people that are legal gun owners. And Obama, look at him. He cares about the children,” she said sarcastically. “Screw you! You don’t think we care about the children?”

Hannity brought it all back to the mainstream media, who he thinks are focusing too much on the guns issue and not enough on stories that could be detrimental to Democrats, like the Sen. Menendez prostitution scandal.

Finally, Coulter weighed in on the announcement of a Republican super PAC set up to protect incumbents from Tea Party challengers. She agreed that “we do have to be careful to get candidates who don’t say stupid things.”

Watch video below, via Fox News:

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Crazy Pamela Geller: Why Is America Being So Mean To Domestic Terrorists?!

THE TREE OF LIBERTY SEEMS WATERED ENOUGH GUYS!

Pamela Geller: Why Is America Being So Mean To Domestic Terrorists?

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Vision of loveliness Pamela Geller has taken a break from inciting crazy people to push Sikh dudes into the path of oncoming trains to wonder why West Point is being so mean to “loyal Americans” who just want to violently overthrow the United States government and/or kill some mud people! It is not like the oaths of office we just heard Barack Obama and Old Handsome Joe Biden swear include anything about enemies “foreign and domestic.” And our domestic terrorists loyal Americans just happen to be committing an average of 307 violent attacks per year lately, according to a new report from West Point! So what does Pamela Geller think of loyal Americans using violence to make their needs known?

“This is another appalling attempt to demonize loyal Americans and whitewash the Islamic threat,” Geller said. “West Point probably is working on orders from higher ups. Or else it has bought into the dominant PC culture.”

It’s true, Pamela Geller. Everyone knows that Timothy McVeigh was a loyal American, just watering that good old tree of liberty. And you couldn’t ask for nicer guys than the ones who shoot up temples if’n they are worshiped at by non-whites. West Point is a communist. Go to jail, West Point! Go directly to jail.

[Atlantic]

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The Return Of Right-Wing Pro-Gun Insurrectionism (This Time Featuring Hitler)

The Return Of Right-Wing Pro-Gun Insurrectionism (This Time Featuring Hitler)

What is it about President Obama’s inaugurations that bring out the craziest of the right-wing crazies?

Four years ago, Obama’s historic swearing-in sparked months’ worth of teeth-chattering paranoia, trumpeted by the conservative media, about how the new Democratic president posed a mortal threat to America and that drastic action might need to be taken.

In 2009, a far-right Newsmax columnist determined that a “military coup “to resolve the ‘Obama problem'” was not “unrealistic.” That’s about the same time Glenn Beck used his then-new program on Fox News to game out bloody scenarios for the coming civil war against the Obama-led tyranny. Note that the armed rebellion rhetoric was uncorked just weeks after Obama’s first cabinet had been confirmed.

Now, four years later as Obama’s second swearing-in approaches, the same misguided insurrectionist pageantry is back on display. (The fringe John Birch Society is probing the likelihood of “armed resistance” against the government — “an unlikely prospect, for now at least.”) And this time, Adolf Hitler stars in a leading role.

In fact, there’s a disturbing collision now underway featuring two signature, conservative paranoid fantasies. One holds that Obama is like Hitler; that he’s a tyrant ready to undo democracy at home. The other is that Americans need access to an unregulated supply of assault weapons in order to fight their looming insurrectionist war with the government.

In the last week we’ve heard more and more conservatives try to tie the two wild tales together: Obama’s allegedly pending gun grab will prove he’s just like Hitler, which will demonstrate the need for citizens to declare war on the government.

Ignoring nearly 250 years of our democratic history, conservative voices across the media landscape have been nodding their heads in agreement suggesting it’s only a matter of time before the United States resembles a tyrannical dictatorship that will be either fascistic or Stalinist in nature (or both, if the rhetorician feels no obligation to historical accuracy).

So much for the notion of American exceptionalism — “the conviction that our country holds a unique place and role in human history” — that conservatives love to preach.

The latest round of right-wing Obama panic was prompted by the Newtown, CT, school massacre. In its wake, Obama is reportedly ready to initiate efforts to curb gun violence, including possibly using executive orders. Simply the idea of instituting common sense gun reform, among other public policy issues, has sparked violent rhetoric about war and sedition early in the new year.

Fox’s Todd Starnes warned there would “a revolution” if the government tries to “confiscate our guns.” Fox News contributor Arthur Herman declared the U.S. is “one step closer” to a looming “civil war,” while fellow contributor Pat Caddell claimed the country was in a “pre-revolutionary condition,” and “on the verge of an explosion.”

And on his syndicated radio show last week, Sean Hannity speculated that tates will move to secede should the “radicalized, abusive federal government” continue on its current path, and that they’d be justified in doing so.

Who’s to blame? Obama and Hilter.

Fox News’ Dr. Keith Ablow insisted history’s filled with examples of leaders who confiscated guns as a precursor to “catastrophic abuses” of power: “One need look no further than Nazi Germany.” Fox’s Judge Andrew Napolitano made the same connection, while a Kentucky radio host compared firearm regulations to Nazi “yellow star” laws.

Then there was this from Matt Drudge:

That’s the hook for the latest insurrectionist rants: If Obama’s going to act like Hitler, then of course right-wing gun owners are going to wage war.

Appearing on Piers Morgan Tonight last week, and after admitting he didn’t know that Ronald Reagan had supported an assault weapons ban,  Breitbart.com editor Ben Shapiro stuck to his claim that the gun debate in this country is really about “the left and the right” because the right understands Americans have to arm themselves with assault weapons to defend against the United States government [emphasis added]:

SHAPIRO: I told you, why the general population of America, law abiding citizens, need AR-15s.
MORGAN: Why do they need those weapons?  SHAPIRO: They need them for the prospective possibility for the resistance of tyranny. Which is not a concern today, it may not be a concern tomorrow.
MORGAN: Where do you expect tyranny to come from?
SHAPIRO: It could come from the United States, because governments have gone tyrannical before, Piers.

MORGAN: So the reason we cannot remove assault weapons is because of the threat of your own government turning on you in a tyrannical way.
SHAPIRO: Yes.

The right is stockpiling weapons because the U.S. government might go Nazi and declare war on a portion of its own people. And when the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines unleash their unmatched firepower on citizens, “the right” intends to be fully armed with AR-15s to fight a war within the U.S. borders.

That is the reason the Second Amendment exists? It’s not for everyday self-defense, or to protect the rights of hunters and gun enthusiasts, , but to enable citizens to go to war with the U.S. government? To fend off  a “tyrannical” turn at home. At least  according to Shapiro’s keen take on history.

That’s what was “debated” on CNN last week. Not once but twice.

From conspiracy professional Alex Jones and his CNN harangue on January 7:

Hitler took the guns, Stalin took the guns, Mao took the guns, Fidel Castro took the guns, Hugo Chavez took the guns!” Jones ranted. “And I am here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!

We already knew from 2009 that far-right voices were fretting about the need for a citizen’s militia to stop Obama’s destructive ways. Now four years later, with gun control initiatives pending, the frantic rants have escalated and Obama’s fiercest critics are rationalizing their insurrectionist chants by comparing the president actions to those of Hitler. The comparison isn’t just offensive, it’s also inaccurate: the Nazis actually loosened restrictions on private gun ownership (except for Jews and other persecuted groups).

That kind of ugliness not only pollutes our public dialogue, it also gives comfort to gun radicals who embrace the rhetoric. In early 2009, fearing what a friend described as “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way,” conspiracy nut (and Alex Jones fan) Richard Poplawski lured three Pittsburgh policemen to his apartment, then shot and killed them at his front door.

All the right-wing chatter today about how Obama’s following Hitler’s lead by allegedly voiding the Second Amendment only adds fuel to an unwanted fire.

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• The Return of Right-Wing Insurrectionism (This Time Featuring Hitler) (readersupportednews.org)
• Gun Advocates Resort To Lies About Hitler To Push Their Agenda (addictinginfo.org)
• “Conservative Paranoid Fantasies”: The Return Of Right-Wing Insurrectionism, This Time Featuring Hitler (mykeystrokes.com)

Those Shameless Sandy Hook Truthers

Meet the Sandy Hook truthers

Conspiracy Theorists think they’ve found “absolute proof” that Newtown was a hoax. Have they no shame?

BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD

(Credit: Reuters/Eric Thayer)

Yes, there really are Newtown truthers.

But in the crazy world of Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, this one may be the worst yet. (Maybe you’ve already heard some of the others, like the one about fantasy ties between the gunman’s family and the LIBOR banking scandal and a related theory about the Aurora shooting and the “Dark Knight Rises.”) Most of the theories are really pieces of a larger meta-theory: that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, perhaps by the Obama administration, designed to stir demand for gun control.

In the latest angle, theorists think they have found “absolute proof” of a conspiracy to defraud the American people. “You reported in December that this little girl had been killed,” a reader emailed Salon in response to a story. “She has been found, and photographed with President Obama.”

The girl in question is Emilie Parker, a 6-year-old who was shot multiple times and killed at Sandy Hook. But for conspiracy theorists, the tears her family shed at her funeral, the moving eulogy from Utah’s governor, and the entire shooting spree are fake. Welcome to the world where Sandy Hook didn’t really happen.

There are dozens of websites, blog posts and YouTube videos extolling the Emilie Parker hoax theory. If you Google her name, the very first result is a post mocking her father for crying at a press conference after the shooting. One popular video, which already has 134,000 views, was made by the producers of a popular 9/11 Truther film. “Just as the movie ‘Operation Terror’ shows the 9/11 attacks were a made-for-TV event, so too were the mass shootings … There can be no doubt that Sandy Hook was a staged event,” the narrator intones. He goes on to say that the adults who participated in the media coverage of the shootings “should be prosecuted as accessories after the fact in a mass murder” — i.e., the parents whose children were murdered in the massacre should be thrown in prison.

The crux of the theory is a photograph of Parker’s sister sitting on President Obama’s lap when he visited with the victims’ families. The girl is wearing the same dress Emilie wore in a pre-shooting photograph of the family shared with media, so she must be Emilie, alive and well. “BAM! I cannot believe how idiot these people are [sic]… That’s her,” one YouTuber exclaims as he watches the two images superimposed on each other. (Apparently missed by these crack investigators is the possibility that the sister wore Emilie’s dress and that they look alike because they are sisters, after all.)

The supporting details to the hoax theory explanation are reminiscent of the arcana of any well-developed conspiracy theory. What about the car? What about the rifle? Why does someone off camera allegedly tell Parker’s father to “read the Card” (as in a cue card) before he goes on CNN? Why is he laughing? Who is the guy running into the woods? Why is there police audio referring to multiple shooters? Why does one boy who survived the shooting tell Dr. Oz it was like “a drill”? Why was the principal quoted by a local paper after she died? Why do some of the parents look like some of the victims of the Aurora shooting — are they “all actors”? All of these questions have simple explanations, but in each case, the theorists have sided more with less likely, but more nefarious possibilities.

One man has taken it upon himself to catalog all of the theories at SandyHookHoax.com. By way of credentials, creator Jay Johnson explains: “I am the only person in the world to solve LOST,” he writes (yes, the TV show).

In an email exchange with Salon, Johnson said he initially “wanted to help the kids express their feelings and memorialize the victims … But then I saw how the local paper interviewed the principal after she was dead, and I realized it was 99% odds another psychological operation that was going on,” he explained.

Noting that he started the website on “12/21/12” he explained, “since I am the New Age Messiah, with my Look Your Heart in the Mirror™ as the new revelation from the Goddess Tefnut, aka Ma’at, of Egypt, I thought the date was significant.”

But the hoax theory has even earned the backing for some presumably more credible sources. James Tracy, a tenured professor of communications at Florida Atlantic University, sparked controversy this week after he wrote a blog post suggesting the parents were “crisis actors.” “While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place — at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation’s news media have described,” he wrote.

Websites owned by Alex Jones, the conspiracy theory pundit who helped start the 9/11 Truther movement and has millions of readers, are a virtual one-stop shop for Sandy Hook “false flag” miscellanea. So far, mainstream conservative figures haven’t hopped on board, though Gun Owners of American head Larry Pratt told Jones this summer that he thought there was a good chance the Aurora massacre was perpetrated by government agents.

Then there’s just the downright bizarre subgenre of theories. One posting on the community forum of Jones’ website connects Sandy Hook and Emilie Parker to Satanism, postulating that the school was a “recruiting center” for the Church of Satan. There’s even a low-budget slasher flick called “Sandy Hook Lingerie Party Massacre” — could that be connected?

Whether there is a connection or not, we can count on the Internet’s conspiracy theorists to find one, even if it means denying the legitimacy of the mourning families’ grief.

Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon’s political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.MORE ALEX SEITZ-WALD.

Related articles

• Sandy Hook “Truthers” (geo-geek.blogspot.com)
• “BAM! I can’t believe how idiot these people are!” (cannonfire.blogspot.com)
• Internet crackpots believe Newtown massacre was staged, citing “absolute” Photoshop proof (boingboing.net)
• ‘Absolute Proof Sandy Hook Was Staged’ – ‘Newtown Truthers’ Hit A New Low (VIDEO) (addictinginfo.org)
• The worst Sandy Hook conspiracy theory yet (salon.com)
• Meet the Sandy Hook truthers (illuminutti.com)
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Christian Guest Calls Rape Victim “Evil,” Gets Reamed Out by Atheist Host

Christian Guest Calls Rape Victim “Evil,” Gets Reamed Out by Atheist Host

“Goodbye, you piece of shit!” host says to caller.

The below confrontation between an atheist host, Matt Dillahunty (who co-hosts “The Atheist Experince with Tracie Harris,) and his fundamentalist Christian caller revolved around the caller’s belief that everyone–because of the concept of universal sinfulness–is “evil” including a young rape victim.

The caller objected to the host’s calling a young rape victim “innocent” and declared her to be as evil as all humans, at which point Dillahunty excalimed “Goodbye, you piece of shit! You know what? I was a better Christian than you when I was a Christian, and still am.”

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• London’s First Atheist Church Opens Tomorrow (gawker.com)
• Matt Dillahunty & Tracie Harris show how to handle a Christian (freethoughtblogs.com)
• ‘Atheist Experience’ TV Host Shocked By Caller’s Statement About Child Rape (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)
• WATCH: Atheist TV Host Shocked By Caller’s Statement About Child Rape (huffingtonpost.com)
• Atheist TV host boots ‘piece of sh*t’ Christian for calling raped girl ‘evil’ (rawstory.com)
• ‘Black Atheists’ is Considered Segregation: O’RLY?! (blackatheists.wordpress.com)

Queen Birther Clownette Orly Taitz Makes Parody The New Reality

Birther Queen Orly Taitz Explains to Judge: She Is Pretty Much Thurgood Marshall, Yo

by snipy

Help! We are having trouble keeping track of all the crazy shit that weird melted plastic creature lawyer Orly Taitz has done. We need some sort of Orly Taitz tracker, or day planner, or iPhone app. Just last month, she lawsplained to us all that if a judge won’t force a private college to reveal The One’s transcripts, we are all living in Nazi Germany. Six months before that, she ran for Senate in California and released an amazing clip art YouTube horrorshow of a campaign video. She has filed lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit (oh, for fuck’s sake, use the Google. We’re not going to embed that many hotlinks back to Wonkette) with levels of insane ranging from epic to batshit. And the hits just keep on coming:

The 52-year-old lawyer-dentist-real estate agent from Laguna Niguel brought her years-long battle to oust Barack Obama from the presidency to a federal courtroom Thursday in Sacramento.

Her appearance was part of a last-minute bid to stop the counting of electoral college votes in Washington, D.C., that will pave the way for the president’s second inauguration Jan. 21.

She failed. Again.

We know, we know, gentle readers, that there’s nothing particularly crazy about this yet. Well, it would be crazy for yr Wonkette or a (hopefully) decent-sized chunk of our commentariat to decide to stop electoral vote counting, but it is pretty low-level nonsense for the best-looking birther. Confession time: we are totally burying the lede here because sometimes you have to build up to the very bestest parts.

First, there was the utterly delightful part of the hearing where the judge argued with her for an hour and told her “Your argument, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.” Judge whoever you are, we love you so hard right now. THEN there was the beautiful moment where the judge asked her (in our Orly Taitz fanfic, this judge part is spoken in a sort of breathless, pleading exasperation) “Why do you keep filing these lawsuits when they keep getting rejected?” In response, there was, perhaps, the best statement by a dentistlawyer in Law and Order: Special Birther Division history:

Taitz responded by comparing herself to Thurgood Marshall and his persistence in filing suits to fight segregation. She explained that one of the plaintiffs is a Republican elector for Mitt Romney, who came in second to Obama in November.

You know what? We got nothing. Reality has exceeded parody by SO FUCKING FAR now that the Editrix can likely get rid of us all, as Orly Taitz’ mere existence will provide enough material forever and ever.

[SacBee]

Read more at http://wonkette.com/495732/birther-queen-orly-taitz-explains-to-judge-she-is-pretty-much-thurgood-marshall-yo#LFKZPYSrX6mQUv6t.99

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• Birther Queen Orly Taitz Loses Another Court Case, Maybe Just Cause She’s Batshit Crazy?! (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
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• Orly Taitz’s Obama ‘birther’ claims rejected in court – again (sacbee.com)
• Orly Taitz Is The New Thurgood Marshall Now (tbogg.firedoglake.com)
• Birther Queen Orly Taitz Explains to Judge: She Is Pretty Much Thurgood Marshall, Yo (wonkette.com)

Warring Wingnut Warriors! | Far Right’s Continued Implosion

Wingnut Wars!

Dana Loesch Sues Breitbart Loons

Thanks to “wrenchwench”

How could a love so right go so wrong?

Tonight we have word of big trouble on the far right, as the Breitbrats begin fighting in earnest over the empire that Breitbart built: Talk Radio Host Dana Loesch Files Suit in St. Louis Against Breitbart.com.

I’ve been wondering why Loesch’s wingnut screeds haven’t been appearing there lately — now we know.

Conservative talk radio host and commentator Dana Loesch sued the owner of the conservative website Breitbart.com Friday, claiming that although her relationship with the news and opinion aggregating website had gone “tragically awry,” Breibart.cοm LLC refused to let her work for the company or anyone else, forcing her into “indentured servitude in limbo.”

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court here, seeks at least $75,000 in damages, as well as a judge’s declaration that her contract had expired.

The suit says that difficulties managing the Breitbart “media ‘empire’” or ideological conflicts or both had spiked the working relationship, creating a “increasingly hostile” work environment. When Loesch tried to terminate her work agreement in September, Breitbart refused and extended the agreement by a year, the suit says.

Here’s the legal document filed. Worth a chuckle!

View this document on Scribd

Related articles

• Wingnuts Turn On Ann Coulter (joemygod.blogspot.com)
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• Dana Loesch sues to escape from the “indentured servitude” that is Breitbart.com. (althouse.blogspot.com)
• Dana Loesch sues Breitbart.com LLC (politico.com)

The Latest Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory: Obama’s Third Term

Our Kenyan-born, secret Muslim president has apparently cooked up a sneaky plot to subvert the 22nd Amendment.

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

Probably not. benson./Flickr

Barack Hussein Obama is hatching a secret plot to pull off the ultimate power grab: securing himself a third term in the White House.

At least that’s the narrative being spun by right-wing conspiracy theorists, who seem to believe Obama is modeling his presidency after fictional Nixon in Watchmen.

Chart: Almost Every Obama Conspiracy Theory Ever

Among the main proponents of this theory—which comes in several different flavors—is Stansberry & Associates Investment Research, a publishing firm that hawks financial advice—and has a history of promoting dubious claims. Even before the president won reelection, the company began blasting out emails to subscribers of various conservative newsletters, warning of the coming third term of Obama. The emails went out as paid advertisements through the right-leaning Townhall.com, Newsmax, Human Events, and Gingrich Marketplace (a spokesman for Newt Gingrich and the vice president of Human Events both claimed this email blast was a mistake).

The emails alerted readers to a vague—and somewhat counterintuitive—theory: Some unspecified but major event will lead to an epoch of American economic prosperity. Because it will happen under Obama’s watch, he’ll claim full credit and receive an unprecedented boost in approval ratings, giving him a mandate to demand and subsequently obtain a third term. If you’re confused, below are screenshots of two of the emails:

---

These messages are accompanied by a slideshow titled “The Third Term — INSIDE: The Secret Plan to Retain Power Through 2020” and narrated by Stansberry & Associates founder Frank Porter Stansberry. It discusses how Obama will become American history’s greatest tyrant, responsible for implementing “the most terrifying socialist policies” the country has ever seen. “The Third Term” also highlights the company’s supposed track record of correctly predicting the future, and invites readers to check out their trading and investing services and other pricey products.

Stansberry has something of a checkered past when it comes the claims appearing in his newsletters and online videos. In 2010, he released a similar slideshow called “End of America” (77 minutes long), in which he predicted waves of violence and tumult across the United States and the impending implosion of the American economy—an argument that contradicts the premise of “The Third Term.” In 2003, the SEC filed a complaint against him for pushing false information via his financial newsletter. In 2007, Stansberry (and his investment firm, then called Pirate Investor) was ordered by a federal court to pay $1.5 million in civil penalties and restitution. Stansberry Research did not respond to a request for comment.

Other conspiracymongers who have recently jumped on the Obama-third-term-prophecy bandwagon are radio host Alex Jones—who has featured Stansberry on his show—and birtherism promoter and WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah. Over at the conservative forum Free Republic, commenters have ruminated on a related theory. In this scenario, Michelle Obama runs for president in 2016 and wins, thus allowing Barack to run the government as a shadow president. Among the first to prognosticate an Obama power grab was Rush Limbaugh, who was way ahead of the curve: He predicted a third Obama term in the summer of 2009, when the 44th president had just barely moved into the White House:

The third-term theory isn’t limited to the far right: Technorati writer Sreedhar Pillai has also mused about a possible third term, and Faheem Younus at the Washington Post‘s faith blog posted on why war with Iran could grant Obama a Roosevelt-like run.

It’s unlikely that this theory will gain much traction nationally (though the third-termers have achieved enough publicity to earn their theory derisive words from Chris Matthews on MSNBC). From a purely legal perspective, there are solid obstacles to the president achieving this alleged goal, mainly the 22nd Amendment. It plainly states:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

President Obama—who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade—likely knows this already.

“There is no  evidence to suggest Obama or his supporters are planning on staging a  coup. It’s a  right-wing fantasy cooked up to try to frighten Americans.”

But, just to double check, we asked a few experts about the Obama-third-term theory. “There is nothing in his tenure as president, nothing that we know of him, that indicates that Barack Obama is going to seek a third term,” David Adler, director of the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University, told Mother Jones. “Short of a military coup, the 22nd Amendment stands as an  insurmountable obstacle to a third-term president today, and there is no  evidence to suggest Obama or his supporters are planning on staging a coup. It’s a  right-wing fantasy cooked up to try to frighten Americans.”

As a thought experiment, if Obama and his political allies did want to take a stab at repealing the amendment (in a time of economic boom, or whenever), they’d be in for a political fight that would make passing the Affordable Care Act look like a stroll in the park. “As a practical matter, no constitutional amendment can occur without being supported by both major parties,” said Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale University. “Constitutional amendments require two-thirds of the House and Senate, and three-quarters of  the states to ratify. No party controls that much. That’s all you need to  understand. So, no, Barack Obama will  not be serving a third term.”

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and Bush-era FEC commissioner (and one of the nation’s foremost voter fraud crusaders), agrees: “I’m going to attempt to not laugh at this,” Von Spakovsky told Mother Jones. “I don’t like Obama’s policies, but even I don’t believe he would try to get a third term  in direct contravention of the 22nd Amendment. Particularly because he couldn’t. There is a constitutional prohibition as well as a practical one: When you submit an application in every state and in Washington, DC, to the state  election official to qualify to get on the ballot, they simply won’t accept an application from someone who violates the 22nd Amendment.”

Technically, it wouldn’t be unprecedented for an American politician to launch an effort to lengthen a term, or  seek an extra four years. Early in President Reagan’s second term, congressional allies attempted to find support for amending the Constitution to give him a  chance to potentially serve a third term. And when Nixon was in office, there was a proposal to expand presidential terms to six  years. Both initiatives were quickly abandoned.

As Von Spakovsky said, “This is not a realistic fear that anyone should have.”

Related articles

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• Gingrich email claims ‘Obama is going to win,’ frets about third term in 2016 (rawstory.com)
• Gingrich Marketplace Newsletter Says Obama Is Going To Win (addictinginfo.org)
• Obama took out Qaddafi so al-Qaida ‘could take over,’ says GOP rep (tv.msnbc.com)
• Gingrich supporters warned of a third Obama term (salon.com)
• The latest conspiracy theory: Obama will seek a third term (tv.msnbc.com)
• Errant Gingrich Email: ‘Obama Is Going to Win’ (abcnews.go.com)

Right Wing Cocoon Begins To Revolt Against Its Own Biased Media

MSNBC Making Moves Against Fox, While Right-Wingers Revolt Against Conservative Media

The downfall of Fox may be the story of the election.

Catholic Loon Sean Hannity, one of the Fox News channel’s strident crackpot conservative voices.

The big media story of the week continues to be the seeming implosion of the Fox News channel after its on-air talent’s refusal to acknowledge Obama’s lead, then victory, in the polls. The network’s  mishaps have made it a laughingstock, while rival network MSNBC just keeps growing.

The NYtimes reports on the way MSNBC has begun creeping up on the conservative news behemoth:

During Mr. Obama’s first term, MSNBC underwent a metamorphosis from a CNN also-ran to the anti-Fox, and handily beat CNN in the ratings along the way. Now that it is known, at least to those who cannot get enough politics, as the nation’s liberal television network, the challenge in the next four years will be to capitalize on that identity.

MSNBC, a unit of NBCUniversal, has a long way to go to overtake the Fox News Channel, a unit of News Corporation: on most nights this year, Fox had two million more viewers than MSNBC.

But the two channels, which skew toward an audience that is 55 or older, are on average separated by fewer than 300,000 viewers in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers desire. On three nights in a row after the election last week, MSNBC — whose hosts reveled in Mr. Obama’s victory — had more viewers than Fox in that demographic.

“We’re closer to Fox than we’ve ever been,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, who has been trying to overtake Fox for years. “All of this is great for 2013, 2014 to keep building.”

Just as interesting is the critique of Fox from within the conservative movement, particularly younger conservatives like Ross Douthat, who have had enough with the “bubble.”

Today, a story in POLITICO features Douthat and a bunch of young conservatives  scolding their elders for buying into the myths Fox perpetuates, and not finding other ways to reach the public:

And this, say next-generation Republicans, is where cocoonism has been detrimental to the cause.

The tension between the profit- and ratings-driven right — call them entertainment-based conservatives — and conservatives focused on ideas (the thinkers) and winning (the operatives) has never been more evident.

The latter group worries that too many on the right are credulous about the former.

“Dick Morris is a joke to every smart conservative in Washington and most every smart conservative under the age of 40 in America,” said Douthat. “The problem is that most of the people watching Dick Morris don’t know that.”

The egghead-hack coalition believes that the entertainment-based conservatives create an atmosphere that enables flawed down-ballot candidates, creates a cartoonish presidential primary and blocks needed policy reforms, and generally leave an odor on the party that turns off swing voters.

It even fosters an atmosphere in which there’s a disconnect with the ostensible party leaders.

Even big-ticket donors have bought into this disconnect, surrounding themselves with Fox news, talk radio and their “apocalyptic” vision. They entered the bubble wiilingly, right along with the party rank and file.

In the Washington Post, there’s a profile of Beth Cox, a member of the GOP faithful who personally bought into the bubble created by the conservative media–now she is devastated by what she sees.

She turned on her computer and pulled up an electoral map that she had filled out a few days before the election. She had predicted the outcome twice — once coming up with a narrow Romney win and once more with a blowout.

Florida: red.

Colorado: red.

Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin: all red.

Everything in her version of America had confirmed her predictions: the confident anchors on Fox News; the Republican pollsters so sure of their data; the two-hour line outside her voting precinct, where Romney supporters hugged and honked for her handmade signs during a celebration that lasted until the results started coming in after sundown. Romney’s thorough defeat had come more as a shock than as a disappointment, and now Cox stared at the actual results on her computer and tried to imagine what the majority of her country believed.

Cox recognized that much of the blame lay at her own party’s feet:

She blamed some of the divisiveness on Republicans. The party had gotten “way too white,” she said, and she hoped it would never again run a presidential ticket without including a woman or a minority. The tea party was an extremist movement that needed to be “neutralized,” she said, and Romney’s campaign had suffered irreparable damage when high-profile Republicans spoke about “crazy immigration talk and legitimate rape.”

Still, she is one of many who now believes the country is headed to hell in a handbasket.

It’s hard to imagine conservative media not taking the lucrative chance to capitalize on the fear and anger of people like Beth Cox. And if the party and media do change,  what will they replace the fearmongering with? Vague reassurances about “reaching out” are all we’ve got so far.

Related articles

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Insane Islamophobe Pamela Geller | Petraeus Resignation Is an Obama Plot to Put a Muslim in Charge of the CIA

Loony Pamela Geller: Petraeus Resignation Is an Obama Plot to Put a Muslim in Charge of the CIA

Just another stealth shariah plot by BHO

Thanks to:-  Charles Johnson

The right wing universe is now in full-bore conspiracy theory mode over the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus, just as I predicted. It’s a case study in the conservative movement’s decline into bad craziness; they’re all muttering darkly about cover-ups and hidden connections and “questioning the timing.”

One of the most brain-dead of the wingnuts, loony hateblogger Pamela Geller, has a typical post on the subject; for her it’s all part of the Islamic supremacist stealth shariah takeover of America, of course:

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS RESIGNS – Atlas Shrugs.

I do not believe it was the real reason was [sic] an extramarital affair. I believe it was Benghazi. He refused to be the fall guy. When did an affair ever stop a Democrat. If anything….

Perhaps one of Obama’s many Muslim Brotherhood advisors are on the shortlist to replace him.

Related articles

• CIA director Petraeus stands down – BBC News (bbc.co.uk)
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RAPE “that’s something God intended” GOP Senate Candidate Tells Women

 

GOP Senate Candidate Shouldn’t Tell Women God Wants Them To Have Babies From Rape

 

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Tuesday that when a woman becomes pregnant during a rape, “that’s something God intended,” and that she should not be able to get an abortion. Is this shocking to you?

Read More at: http://hollywoodlife.com/2012/10/24/richard-mourdock-abortion-rape-victims-god-intended-pregnant/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Tuesday that when a woman becomes pregnant during a rape, “that’s something God intended,” and that she should not be able to get an abortion. Is this shocking to you?

Read More at: http://hollywoodlife.com/2012/10/24/richard-mourdock-abortion-rape-victims-god-intended-pregnant/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

Would Desperate Rape Victims Seek Illegal Abortions? Joelle Gomez, executive director of the Women’s Center in Stockton, Cali., which counsels 4,000 rape victims a year, worries that raped women might seek unsafe abortions, as they did in the past. And as in the past, they might die from illegal abortions.

Read More at: http://hollywoodlife.com/2012/10/24/richard-mourdock-abortion-rape-victims-god-intended-pregnant/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

Will Women Have Any Rights? But Mourdock’s position is so extreme that it leads Gloria Feldt, the former President of Planned Parenthood, to believe that the “whole issue of women’s reproductive rights, isn’t about what God thinks, but about not seeing the ‘personhood’ of women.” “If you don’t have the right to own and control your own body, then other rights are meaningless,” she explains. “Also, would God really want women to be punished. It’s so cruel.”

Read More at: http://hollywoodlife.com/2012/10/24/richard-mourdock-abortion-rape-victims-god-intended-pregnant/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

Related articles

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• Meet The Mourdocks: The Other Republicans Pushing To Block Abortions For Rape Victims (thinkprogress.org)
• Richard Mourdock under fire for rape remarks (politico.com)
• GOP Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock Thinks Rape is, ‘Something God Intended’ (jezebel.com)
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• National Organization for Women Says Richard Mourdock is Romney Unmasked (politicususa.com)

Romney Grasps The Hand of Birther Lunatics | How Low Will Romney Sink With a Trump Anchor Around His Neck?

Romney Grasps The Hand of Birther Lunatics | How Low Will Romney Sink With a Trump Birther Anchor Around His Neck? To The Bottom?

Romney surrogate Trump takes another swing at proving his party has gone completely off the rails

Today appears to be the day the Republican Party goes out of their way to remind us all that yes, they are indeed completely nuts. Nearly lost in all the Mourdock news: Donald Trump’s latest Biggest Announcement Evah, which turns out to be very bold offer from Dr. Evil Trump to pay five million dollarsif Barack Obama releases the college transcripts that Trump is absolutely convinced will show that Barack Obama is really not very bright, and therefore never really got elected president, or maybe is in reality a shady character named Buford T. ForeignGuy who travelled from college to college, during those years, collecting bad grades and becoming president of the Harvard Law Review and such. As blockbuster stories go, this one ranks somewhere in the category of “I will pay somebody $5 million to come up with a blockbuster story for me. Or an average story. Or to merely validate my worn-out existence for a while longer.”A reminder: Mitt Romney has had to absolutely kowtow to this man. When last any non-Republican, non-reality-show watcher gave a damn about Donald Trump, Trump was deeply engaged in the publicity stunt of pretending he might possibly run for the presidency himself—a pretense that, Lord help us all, a goodly number of Republicans were actually excited about. Because Bachmann, Santorum, Gingrich, Cain and Ron Paul were not nearly crazy enough, or were crazy, but not in the right way, or merely because in the current era Republicans seem to not be able to tell the difference between a political contest and a three-ring-circus filled from bleacher to crowning flag with nothing but clowns. So here was Donald Trump, making a good Republican name for himself by (1) being rich and (2) stoking racist-premised theories about how the black president was probably not even a true American after all, and here was Mitt Romney, seeking his endorsement in front of a Trump-branded podium. Romney and Ryan then went on to happily use Trump as one of their many cash cows, holding private fundraising events with the clown, and saying nothing at all about Donald Trump’s sole political or campaign policy position, which was that the black man was unqualified for an ever-shifting set of reasons. The Republican Party did not need Donald Trump to push their little racist conspiracy theories, but Donald Trump became the self-declared king of them and, in exchange, holds the position he holds today.

Does Mitt Romney—or any Republican, for that matter—care in the slightest that Trump is a rotten boil on the political landscape? Do they give a damn that the Republican brand has so thoroughly been reduced to pandering to the lowest common denominator of their base, all the rest of reality be damned? Of course not. No matter how big a fool this dimwitted, Palinesque publicity hound makes himself, Mitt Romney will still shake his hand, and Paul Ryan will still hold private fundraisers with the man.

Just like Mourdock. Just like Akin. And Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and the ridiculous Steve King, and Paul Ryan himself, the king of unicorn-based math and fleecing the poor to make the rich a bit fatter, and just like Mitt Romney himself, the poster child for the very sons of bitches that wrecked the economy by putting casinos within casinos, shoving those casinos in bigger casinos and claiming the whole thing was so goddamn patriotic and freedom-loving that you were practically un-American if you chastised them for it.

Welcome to the modern Republican Party. These are the people who are chosen not to be shunned, but to speak for the party, and guide the party, and raise money for the party, and appear on television for the party, and hold the reins of party leadership. Congratulations, Republican Party. Whatever depths of vapidity and grifting you might have been aiming for, I’d say you’ve managed to get there and then some.

Related articles

• Five Things Donald Trump’s “Big” Announcement Could Be (blogs.browardpalmbeach.com)
• Trump mocked on Twitter (politico.com)
• Opinion: Dumping Cold Water On Trump’s October Surprise (tampa.cbslocal.com)
• October Surprise: Gross Baboon Nominee Donald Trump Is An Orange-utan (imeanwhat.com)
• Donald Trump’s Big October Surprise Blows Up in Mitt Romney’s Face (politicususa.com)
• Donald Trump’s October Surprise is nothing (salon.com)

Further Revelations of Hypocrisy By “Family Values” Manslut Dinesh D’Souza | Pathetic Right Wing Two-Faced Deceiver Dinesh D’Souza

D’Souza Accused Obama of ‘Attacking the Traditional Values Agenda’ Just Before Sex Scandal Revelations

Submitted by Ariella

Last week, conservative pseudo-intellectual Dinesh D’Souza was featured on a conference call for Rick Scarborough’s 40 Days to Save America. D’Souza said Obama is “attacking the traditional values agenda” by supporting marriage equality and abortion rights, arguing that “Obama doesn’t like traditional Christianity because he identifies it with colonialism.” However, D’Souza’s rhetoric about “traditional morality” may be undermined by the fact that at a recent conference he reportedly shared a hotel room with a woman other than his wife, whom he introduced as his fiancée. D’Souza later admitted to getting engaged to his girlfriend even though he is still married, but denies sharing a hotel room with her at the conference.

Why is Obama on the social issues — and I’m thinking here of abortion, I’m thinking here of gay marriage — why is Obama so aggressive in attacking the traditional values agenda? I think the reason for it is because when Obama thinks about colonialism, about the British and the French who went abroad to conquer other countries, or earlier the Spanish and the Portuguese, I come from a part of India that was a Portuguese colony at one time, I think for Obama colonialism is identified not just with the soldiers but also with the missionaries. Remember it’s the missionaries that went alongside the conquerors, the conquistadors, came to the Americas and worked on converting the Indians and later missionaries went to China, India and Japan. So I think this is the problem, Obama doesn’t like traditional Christianity because he identifies it with colonialism. Obama’s own Christianity is more of a Third World liberation theology, a very different kind of Jeremiah Wright type philosophy, summarized in the idea that America is the rogue nation in the world.

Later, D’Souza said that politics are driven by a moral and spiritual divide that only God can change, grateful that we don’t have “an absentee God like Obama’s dad.”

Ultimately there’s a political divide in this country but underneath that is a moral divide, and underneath that is a spiritual divide. I think that the deepest problems facing America and the West in the end are not political, they are spiritual. This is why it makes sense even as we debate policy issues, even as we debate moral issues, to turn to the maker of the universe, this maker of the universe that isn’t just an absentee God like Obama’s dad, a kind of absentee father who got things going and then took off but a God who cares about each one of us and certainly about our country.

Update: In a recent interview with pastor Jack Hibbs, D’Souza reiterated his theory that Obama supports abortion rights and marriage equality because he has a “pathological hatred for traditional Christianity” because it is a symbol of colonialism and that Democrats are eager to discredit his film because if Obama’s worldview is understood, nobody will vote for him:

Update II: The Daily Beast is now reporting that D’Souza has resigned as president of The King’s College, the evangelical school he has led since 2010.

It was not immediately clear whether the board’s decision was driven by the allegations of the affair, or by dissatisfaction with D’Souza’s leadership that had been building at the college for months. At the meeting Thursday, [Chairman of the Board of Trustees Andy] Mills did not discuss the board’s conversation about D’Souza or give reasons for his departure. Representatives for the college did not respond to requests for comment.

According to several sources at the college, members of the King’s faculty and board alike had grown hostile to D’Souza’s presidency over what they saw as a failure to earn his reported million-dollar salary. D’Souza has spent much of the past few months promoting his documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, and his high profile in the media was seen as rarely benefitting the college. It may even have been seen as a detriment: According to a former staffer familiar with the college’s public relations, King’s employees have been explicitly tasked with disentangling D’Souza’s extracurricular activities from the college’s reputation. D’Souza became a non-presence on the college’s official Facebook page throughout 2012, which staffers say was no coincidence.

Related articles

• ‘Obama’s America’ filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza resigns from NY evangelical college (thegrio.com)
• Dinesh D’Souza Shared a Hotel Room With a Woman Who Was Not Mrs. D’Souza (observer.com)
• Why I Find Perverse Pleasure in the Sexual Peccadillos of Evangelical Leaders (brucegerencser.net)
• Big Love at King’s College: D’Souza’s Mistress Was Also Married (crooksandliars.com)
• Dinish D’Souza Championed Family Values Through Adulterous Tryst (politicususa.com)
• Shlockumentary Obama’s America | The Lunatic Ravings of Dinesh D’Souza A Sad, Pathetic Wingnut (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• The Fall of “Family Values” Hypocrite Dinesh D’Souza | Conservatives and Christians Living Their Lies (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)

Shlockumentary Obama’s America | The Lunatic Ravings of Dinesh D’Souza A Sad, Pathetic Wingnut

D’Souza’s Sad, Pathetic Wingnut Desperation To Tear Down President Obama

By Nicole Belle

On my weekly segment on the Nicole Sandler Show, Nicole jokes that I watch the Sunday shows so her listeners don’t have to. One of our C&L regulars, Mugsy, watches them too and is a very visible presence on Sundays. He also took upon himself the unenviable task to watch wingnut toadie Dinesh D’Souza’s cinematic claptrap “2016” so you don’t have to. Mugsy methodically broke down all the manipulations, gross deceptions, and blatant lies.

And there are so many….

The film starts out with D’Souza talking about himself and how different his life was growing up in his native India yet how differently he views the world today despite that. Then he proceeds to talk for the next 90 minutes about how life in Kenya… a country D’Souza admits Obama never lived in… must have shaped Obama’s attitudes about America. I find myself wondering, how is it that D’Souza can imagine himself to be so radically different despite having been raised in India (a former British colony), but President Obama’s entire world view is the product of a culture in which HE had never lived? Just one of the major inconsistencies in “Obama: 2016″.

Oh you silly liberal with working critical thinking skills…this is clearly not a movie for you.

D’Souza twice claims Obama “wants to turn the Falkland Islands over to Venezuela”, but a Google search turns up nothing other than President Obama choosing to “remain neutral on the subject of Falkland sovereignty, irking Great Britain.” I’m not even sure why this is suddenly an issue. But clearly, it’s just one more sign of President Obama’s deep hatred of anything connected to Great Britain. It’s not like the Falklands were ever involved in a war or anything, right?

For some odd reason, D’Souza suddenly concedes that Obama: “Increased NASA’s budget”, but “lowered their horizons from ‘a return to the moon’ to ‘reconciling with Muslims’.” (huh??? Yeah, read that as many times as you like, I promise it won’t make any more sense.) He returns to this point later towards the end of the film. See below. Here, D’Souza is clearly blaming Obama for the discontinuation of the Shuttle program, which was actually discontinued under the Bush Administration. In fact, the Obama Administration EXTENDED the Shuttle program by two missions

See, I don’t know that any actual facts will penetrate through this level of derangement. Mugsy did an amazing job, including clips from the film.

Go check it out, if for no other reason than to remind yourself that there is no lie too big, no project too stupid, no low too low for conservatives to stoop to smear the African American Democrat in the White House. Then give Mugsy thanks for watching that piece of excrement so you didn’t have to.

Related articles

• D’Souza’s Sad, Pathetic Wingnut Desperation To Tear Down President Obama (crooksandliars.com)
• The Fall of “Family Values” Hypocrite Dinesh D’Souza | Conservatives and Christians Living Their Lies (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• Big Love at King’s College: D’Souza’s Mistress Was Also Married (crooksandliars.com)
• Dinesh D’Souza Resigns Over Alleged Affair. UPDATE: Mistress Was Also Married (alan.com)
• Dinesh D’Souza Resigns From Post As President Of King’s College In New York (huffingtonpost.com)
• Dinesh D’Souza Shared a Hotel Room With a Woman Who Was Not Mrs. D’Souza (observer.com)
• Dinesh D’Souza, ‘Obama’ Filmmaker, Under Investigation For Illicit Relationship (huffingtonpost.com)

Is the Right-Wing Psyche Allergic to Reality? A New Study Shows Conservatives Ignore Facts More Than Liberals

Is the Right-Wing Psyche Allergic to Reality? A New Study Shows Conservatives Ignore Facts More Than Liberals

More evidence that conservatives tilted their views of the facts to favor their moral convictions more than liberals did, on every single issue.

This story was originally published at Salon.

Last week, the country convulsed with outrage over Missouri Republican Rep. Todd Akin’s false suggestion that women who are raped have a special bodily defense mechanism against getting pregnant. Akin’s claim stood out due to its highly offensive nature, but it’s reminiscent of any number of other parallel cases in which conservative Christians have cited dubious “facts” to help rationalize their moral convictions. Take the twin assertions that having an abortion causes breast cancer or mental disorders, for instance. Or the denial of human evolution. Or false claims that same-sex parenting hurts kids. Or that you can choose whether to be gay, and undergo therapy to reverse that choice. The ludicrous assertion that women who are raped have a physiological defense mechanism against pregnancy is just part of a long litany of other falsehoods in the Christian right’s moral and emotional war against science.

In fact, even as Akin reaped a whirlwind of disdain and disgust, a new scientific paper has appeared with uncanny timing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, underscoring what is actually happening when people contort facts to justify their deep seated beliefs or moral systems. Perhaps most strikingly, one punch line of the new research is that political conservatives, like Akin, appear to do this significantly more than political liberals.

In recent years, the field of moral psychology has been strongly influenced by a theory known as “moral intuitionism,” which has been championed by the University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Dealing a blow to the notion of humans as primarily rational actors, Haidt instead postulates that our views of what is right and wrong are rooted in gut emotions, which fire rapidly when we encounter certain moral situations or dilemmas—responding far more quickly than our rational thoughts. Thus, we evaluate facts, arguments, and new information in a way that is subconsciously guided, ormotivated, by our prior moral emotions. What this means–in Haidt’s famed formulation–is that when it comes to evaluating facts that are relevant to our deep seated morals or beliefs, we don’t act like scientists. Rather, we act like lawyers, contorting the evidence to support our moral argument.

But are we all equally lawyerly? The new paper, by psychologists Brittany Liu and Peter Ditto of the University of California-Irvine, suggests that may not actually be the case.

In their study, Liu and Ditto asked over 1,500 people about their moral and factual views on four highly divisive political issues. Two of them–the death penalty and the forceful interrogation of terrorists using techniques like water-boarding–are ones where liberals tend to think the act in question is morally unacceptableeven if it actually yields benefits (for instance, deterring crime, or providing intelligence that can help prevent further terrorist strikes). The other two–providing information about condoms in the context of sex education, and embryonic stem cell research–are ones where conservatives tend to think the act in question is unacceptable even if it yields benefits (helping to prevent unwanted pregnancies, leading to cures for devastating diseases).

In the experiment, the subjects were first asked about their absolute moral beliefs: For instance, is the death penalty wrongeven if it deters others from committing crimes? But they were also asked about various factual aspects of each topic: Does the death penalty deter crime? Do condoms work to prevent pregnancy? Does embryonic stem cell research hold medical promise? And so on.

If you believe some act is absolutely wrong, period, you shouldn’t actually care about its costs and benefits. Those should be irrelevant to your moral judgment. Yet in analyzing the data, Liu and Ditto found a strong correlation, across all of the issues, between believing something is morally wrong in all case–such as the death penalty–and also believing that it has low benefits (e.g., doesn’t deter crime) or high costs (lots of innocent people getting executed). In other words, liberals and conservatives alike shaded their assessment of the facts so as to align them with their moral convictions–establishing what Liu and Ditto call a “moral coherence” between their ethical and factual views. Neither side was innocent when it came toconfusing “is” and “ought” (as moral philosophers might put it).

However, not everyone was equally susceptible to this behavior. Rather, the researchers found three risk factors, so to speak, that seem to worsen the standard human penchant for contorting the facts to one’s moral views. Two those were pretty unsurprising: Having a strong moral view about a topic makes one’s inclination towards “moral coherence” worse, as does knowing a lot about the subject (across studies, knowledge simply seems to make us better at maintaining and defending what we already believe). But the third risk factor is likely to prove quite controversial: political conservatism.

In the study, Liu and Ditto report, conservatives tilted their views of the facts to favor their moral convictions more than liberals did, on every single issue. And that was true whether it was a topic that liberals oppose (the death penalty) or that conservatives oppose (embryonic stem cell research). “Conservatives are doing this to a larger degree across four different issues,” Liu explained in an interview. “Including two that are leaning to the liberal side, not the conservative side.”

There is a longstanding (if controversial) body of research on liberal-conservative psychological differences that may provide an answer for why this occurs. Conservatives, Liu notes, score higher on a trait called the need for cognitive closure, which describes a feeling of discomfort with uncertainty and the need to hold a firm belief, a firm conviction, unwaveringly. Insofar as a need for closure pushes one to want to hold coherent, consistent beliefs–and makes one intolerant of ambiguity–it makes sense that wanting to achieve “moral coherence” between one’s factual and moral views would also go along with it. Conservatives, in this interpretation, would naturally have more conviction that the facts of the world, and their moral systems, are perfectly aligned. Liberals, in contrast, might be more conflicted–supportive of embryonic stem cell research, for instance, but nourishing doubts about whether the scientific promise we heard so much about a decade ago is being realized.

In documenting an apparent left-right difference in emotional reasoning about what is factually true, the new paper wades into a growing debate over what the Yale researcher Dan Kahan has labeled “ideological asymmetry.” This is the idea that one side of the political spectrum, more than the other, shows a form of biased or motivated assessment of facts–a view that Kahan rejects. Indeed, he recently ran a different study and found that liberals and conservatives were more symmetrical in their biases, albeit not on a live political issue.

The question of why some researchers find results seeming to support the left-right asymmetry hypothesis, even as others do not, remains unresolved. But the new paper by Liu and Ditto will surely sharpen it. Indeed, Kahan has already weighed in on the paper, acknowledging that it provides evidence in support of asymmetry, but observing that in his view, the evidence againstasymmetry from other research remains more weighty.

The upshot, for now, is that it’s hard to deny that all people engage in goal-directed reasoning, bending facts in favor of their moralities or belief systems. But–to butcher George Orwell–it may also be true that while all humans are biased by their prior beliefs and emotions, some humans are more biased than others.

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including “The Republican War on Science” (2005). His next book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality,” is due out in April.

Related articles

• Study: Right twists facts (salon.com)
• Chris Mooney – Is the Right-Wing Psyche Allergic to Reality? A New Study Shows Conservatives Ignore Facts More Than Liberals (prn.fm)
• Conservatives Twist Facts To Support Preconceived Moral Notions, New Study Finds (failedmessiah.typepad.com)
• Friday Night: Chris Hedges and Jonathan Haidt on Corporations, Liberals, and Conservatives (jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com)
• Study: Right Twists Facts (ken_ashford.typepad.com)

GOP Delegate Claims Disabled Children Are God’s Curse

GOP Delegate Bob Marshall Claims That Disabled Children Are God’s Punishment for Abortion

After his remarks set off a national controversy, Marshall tried to claim that he had somehow been misunderstood:

A story by Capital News Service regarding my remarks at a recent press conference opposing taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood conveyed the impression that I believe disabled children are a punishment for prior abortions. No one who knows me or my record would imagine that I believe or intended to communicate such an offensive notion[.] I regret any misimpression my poorly chosen words may have created[.]

But the video speaks for itself. Marshall explicitly stated that he believes God punishes women who have abortions by giving them disabled children. And then he backed up his claim with what he evidently considered to be evidence (and the gentleman to his left nodded in agreement).

Marshall is entitled to his offensive views, but he should not run from them.

It’s worth noting that Marshall has a history of saying offensive things – or being ‘misinterpreted.’

He said this about abortion in the case of rape: “[T]he woman becomes a sin-bearer of the crime, because the right of a child predominates over the embarrassment of the woman.”

And he said this about contraception: “[W]e have no business passing this garbage out and making these co-eds chemical Love Canals for these frat house playboys in Virginia.”

Marshall was not the only one at last week’s press conference to say something completely ridiculous and offensive, or as Marshall calls it – creating a ‘misimpression.’

Rev. Joe Ellison said he agrees with Pat Robertson’s comments that Haitians brought the recent devastating earthquake on themselves by striking a deal with the Devil and practicing voodoo:

From a spiritual standpoint, we think the Dr. Robertson was on target about Haiti, in the past, with voodoo. And we believe in the Bible that the practice of voodoo is a sin, and what caused the nation to suffer. Those who read the Bible and study the history know that what Dr. Robertson said was the truth.

And let’s remember. These guys aren’t just some sideshow attraction in Virginia’s state capital. They hold sway with top Virginia Republicans, including Gov. Bob McDonnell, and are making gains in their war on the reproductive rights of Virginia women

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• GOP and its hard right turn on women’s issues (themoderatevoice.com)
• Full GOP platform statement on abortion (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
• GOP Platform To Call For Ban On Abortion With No Exemptions For Rape, Incest (huffingtonpost.com)
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Mitt Romney The Nutty Mormon Conspiracy Theorist

Mitt Romney Pushes “They’re Taking God Off Our Money” Conspiracy Theory in Virginia

Today, The Hill reports that at a campaign stop in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Mitt Romney was quoted as saying the following:

Mitt Romney weighed in for the first time on the Democratic platform initially removing the word ‘God,” saying that was something he would never do.

Mitt Romney, stumped.

Romney began a campaign appearance in Virginia Beach, Va. on Saturday by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before turning to the platform controversy.

‘That pledge says ‘under God,’ and I will not take God out of our platform,’ Romney said to cheers. ‘I will not take God off our coins, and I will not take God out of my heart.’

Is Mitt Romney still spreading a conspiracy theory from 2007, when e-mail rumors were circulating that “In God We Trust” was to be omitted from new U.S. dollar coins? A theory which Snopes found to be false? New U.S. dollar coins were designed with the motto “In God We Trust” omitted.

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Rise of Far Right Extremism In America

Sikh worshippers in Wisconsin raise an American flag before a service commemorating the victims of a mass shooting. A gunman who identified himself as a white supremacist went on a rampage during a Sikh service at Oak Creek, killing six people.

AP

Rise of far right in US aided by ‘perfect storm’

Omar Karmi

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WASHINGTON // Heated political rhetoric, economic hardships, changing demographics, anti-Islamic fervour and the first African-American president have all contributed to a “perfect storm” for the proliferation of extremist groups in America that some civil-rights groups are warning could become more violent.

Related

• ■ Gunman who killed six in US Sikh temple in ‘white supremacist’ band
• ■ Fight over Oklahoma Sharia ban loomed well before 9/11
• ■ Islamophobia increases since 9/11
• ■ ‘Post-racial’ US still far from being colour blind

The past two months have seen at least a dozen violent incidents involving religious establishments across America, including the massacre of six worshippers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Most of the other incidents involved mosques and Islamic institutions. A mosque in Missouri was burnt to the ground, shots were fired at an Islamic school in Illinois and six other Islamic institutions were targeted in apparent acts of vandalism.

An Arab Christian church in Dearborn, Michigan, a Jewish holocaust memorial in New York and a synagogue in Florida were also vandalised.

If those acts suggest actions of the extreme political right, violence has also gone the other way. Last Wednesday, a man opened fire inside the Washington, DC, headquarters of a Christian conservative group, reportedly upset at its opposition to same-sex unions. A security guard was wounded.

Some fear more violence. Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil-rights group that tracks extremists in America, said the Milwaukee killings did not surprise observers, who had been expecting some kind of copy-cat attempt after the shootings and bombings in Norway last July when Anders Breivik killed 77 people.

“I think we are at a very dangerous moment. There’s a kind of perfect storm of factors favouring the development of [extremist] groups and accompanying domestic terrorism.”

The SPLC has documented a nearly 70 per cent increase in the number of American extremist groups since 2000 and an “extraordinary” expansion – from 149 in late 2008 to 1,274 in 2011 – of so-called patriot movements, often loosely aligned anti-government groups that sometimes form armed militias.

Patriot militants were behind a string of domestic terrorism plots in the 1990s, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.

The expansion coincides with the term of Barack Obama, the first African-American in the White House, but it is not necessarily a classic racist reaction, Mr Potok said. Rather, America’s First Family is visceral evidence of the fact that the country’s demographics are changing – 2011 was the first year in the United States in which non-white birth rates exceeded white birth rates, according to the US Census Bureau.

“Every white supremacist in America knows the census bureau has predicted that non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority in America by the year 2050.”

America’s slow recovery from its worst economic downturn since the depression of the 1930s and rhetoric that previously belonged on the fringe gaining more traction have also provided fertile ground for extremists, Frank Meeink, a former neo-Nazi and author of a memoir, The Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, said in a recent interview.

Mr Meeink joined skinhead gangs in the late 1980s. He said he sees many parallels between now and when Bill Clinton, another socially progressive Dempcratic president on civil-rights issues, took office in 1993 during an economic slump.

The difference, he said, is that rhetoric that used to belong to neo-Nazi groups has become more mainstream and is particularly evident in the language of the Christian Right and the Tea Party, where, he said, some of his former associates had ended up.

“The new lingo is calling everything ‘socialist’.And it’s almost the same as how neo-Nazis used to talk about Jews taking over the government.”

Adding fuel to the situation is the fact that unrestrained political rhetoric is seemingly becoming increasingly common in public places.

In New York City, for instance, posters citing “19,250 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01. It’s not Islamophobia, it’s Islamorealism” went up last Friday and will be visible for another three weeks.

Buses in San Francisco bear posters proclaiming: “In a war between the civilised man and the savage, support the civilised man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad”.

Both are paid for by the American Freedom Defence Initiative, run by Pamela Geller, best known for her role in the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy in 2010 and part of a coterie of what Mr Potok described as “professional Islamophobes and the politicians willing to shill for them”.

The controversy over plans for an Islamic centre near the site of the World Trade Center in 2010 ushered in a year when anti-Sharia legislation began to appear in state legislatures across the country and congressional hearings into the “radicalisation” of America’s Muslims – which took place in early 2011 – were announced.

The same year also saw a 50 per cent spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes, according to FBI statistics, bucking a steady decline since 2002 when passions had settled after the attacks of September 11.

Robert Sellers, a professor at the Logsdon school of theology in Texas, warned of a “culture of Islamophobia” at the annual Baptist World Congress in late July.

“I trust that none of us wishes to sin against our neighbours by spreading fear and stereotypes,” Mr Sellers said, according to the Baptist Center’s Ethics Daily website.

Extreme rhetoric has an effect, Mr Potok said.

“When people make completely unsubstantiated and incredibly demonising statements about entire groups of people, they can’t be surprised when those people are subjected to criminal attacks

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• Institutionalized Islamophobia in US (nation.com.pk)
• Simran Jeet Singh: Another Sikh Murdered In Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Searching For a Cause (huffingtonpost.com)
• White Supremacist Committed Murders at Sikh Temple (lawprofessors.typepad.com)
• Gunman in Sikh temple attack was white supremacist (sacbee.com)
• Sikh temple shooter said to be white supremacist (washingtontimes.com)
• Sikh Temple Shooter Said to Be White Supremacist (usnews.com)
• Wisconsin Sikh temple holds first Sunday service since gunman killed 6 worshippers (democraticunderground.com)
• U.S.: Muslim Americans reach out to Sikhs (ionglobaltrends.com)
• The Threat Within: Racists In The Ranks (jeffwinbush.com)
• Nazi extremists infiltrate US military (rt.com)
• http://www.salon.com/2012/08/15/dhss_right_wing_terror_blind_spot/
• http://www.salon.com/2012/08/07/wade_michael_page_islamophobia_unleashed/
• http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/08/u-s-political-leadership-critical-to-fighting-rising-islamophobia/
• http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/13/sikh-temple-shooting-returns-attention-to-military-s-white-power-problem.html
• https://theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/jewish-hatemonger-pamela-geller-linked-to-murder-crime-and-corruption/
• https://theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/pamela-geller-professional-hatemonger-freaks-out/
• https://theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com/category/pamela-geller-hatemonger/

Arnold Schwarzenegger | Extreme Right Wing Ideological Purge

Arnold Schwarzenegger vs. the Wingnuts

Extremists demanding far right ideological purity

Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger calls out the ideological extremists who dominate today’s Republican Party: California’s GOP Should Take Down Its Small Tent.

I’ve been writing my memoirs recently, and looking back at how I came to my political identity has reminded me that this election cycle marks my 44th year as a Republican. I can’t imagine being anything else.

That’s why I am so bothered by the party’s recent loss of two up-and-coming Republicans: San Diego mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher, currently a state assemblyman, and former assemblyman and current Congressional candidate Anthony Adams, both of whom left the party to become independents. On the one hand, I respect their standing up for principle. On the other, I hate to see them go.

I’m sure they would have preferred to remain Republicans, but in the current climate, the extreme right wing of the party is targeting anyone who doesn’t meet its strict criteria. Its new and narrow litmus test for party membership doesn’t allow compromise.

I bumped up against that rigidity many times as governor. Not surprisingly, the party wasn’t always too happy with me. But I had taken an oath to serve the people, not my party. Some advisors whose opinions I respect urged me to consider leaving the party and instead identify myself as a “decline to state” voter. But I’m too stubborn to leave a party I believe in.

Related articles

• Arnold Schwarzenegger vs. the Wingnuts (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• Schwarzenegger: ‘Extreme Right Wing’ Of Republican Party Has Litmus Test That ‘Doesn’t Allow Compromise’ (mediaite.com)
• Schwarzenegger; Republican Party Too Narrow And Rigid (alan.com)