Netanyahu to American Jews: Get Lost

Netanyahu to American Jews: Get Lost

By accepting Speaker Boehner’s invitation to address Congress, the Israeli leader has chosen to side with political forces opposed by many US Jews.

—By David Corn

 

Remy Steinegger /Flickr

It was not so shocking that House Speaker John Boehner would seek to undermine President Barack Obama and his attempt to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to deliver an address to Congress, in which Netanyahu will presumably dump on Obama’s efforts. Nor was it so shocking that Netanyahu, who apparently would rather see another war in the Middle East than a deal that allows Iran to maintain a civilian-oriented and internationally monitored nuclear program, agreed to mount this stunt two weeks before the Israeli elections—a close contest in which the hawkish PM is fighting for his political life. Certainly, Netanyahu realized that this audacious move would strain his already-ragged ties with the Obama administration and tick off the president, who will be in office for the next two years and quite able to inconvenience Netanyahu should he hold on to power. (Even Fox News talking heads acknowledged that Boehner’s invitation and Netanyahu’s acceptance were low blows.) But what was surprising was how willing Netanyahu was to send a harsh message to American Jews: Drop dead.

For the past six years, one big question has largely defined US politics: Are you for or against Obama? The ongoing narrative in Washington has been a simple one: The president has tried to enact a progressive agenda—health care, gun safety, a minimum-wage hike, climate change action, immigration reform, Wall Street reform, gender pay equity, expanded education programs, diminishing tax cuts for the rich—and Boehner and the Republicans have consistently plotted to thwart him. The GOP has used the filibuster in the Senate to block Obama initiatives and routine presidential appointments. The House Republicans have resorted to extraordinary means—shutting down the government, holding the debt ceiling hostage, ginning up controversies (Benghazi!)—to block the president. All this has happened as conservative allies of the Republican Party have challenged Obama’s legitimacy as president (the birth certificate) and peddled vicious conspiracy theories (he’s a Muslim socialist who will destroy the nation). Throughout the Obama Wars, one demographic group that has steadfastly stood with the president is American Jews.

Jews have voted for Obama in strong numbers. In 2008, Obama drew 74 percent of the Jewish vote (maybe up to 78 percent). In 2012, he won about 69 percent. Yes, there was a drop-off, but it was consistent with Obama’s decline within other constituencies. The second time around he was slightly less popular with everyone. Moreover, in the 2014 congressional elections, 69 percent of Jewish voters, according to one poll, voted for a Democratic congressional candidate. That survey found that 57 percent of American Jews approved of Obama’s performance as president—a much higher number than the 43 percent approval rating among the general population. As the Hill noted:

The clear conclusion is that despite Republican efforts to target Jewish voters and to paint the president as somehow anti-Israel, the Jewish vote is not up for grabs. In fact, there has been a remarkable consistency in the Jewish vote for Congress over the past three elections as measured by GBA surveys, including 66 percent for Democrats in 2010, 69 percent in 2012, and 69 percent in 2014.

And there’s this. The poll asked American Jews to cite two issues of importance to them. Only 8 percent mentioned Israel, which put this subject in 10th place, far behind the economy and health care. Another survey conducted earlier in 2014 showed American Jewish voters overwhelmingly supporting Obama and listing the economy and the growing gap between the rich and poor as their top issues. As the New York Times reported, “Concern about Israel or Iran ranked very low, even when respondents were asked for the second most important issue that would determine their vote for president.” The paper quoted Robert Jones, head of the Public Religious Research Institute: “We show no slippage in Jewish support for President Obama.”

It’s no news flash that American Jews tend to be liberal. In 2013, the Pew Research Religious and Public Life Project spelled out the obvious:

Jews are among the most strongly liberal, Democratic groups in U.S. politics. There are more than twice as many self-identified Jewish liberals as conservatives, while among the general public, this balance is nearly reversed. In addition, about seven-in-ten Jews identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party. Jews are more supportive of President Barack Obama than are most other religious groups. And about eight-in-ten Jews say homosexuality should be accepted by society.

And this Pew report noted that most Jews support Obama’s stance on Israel: “Obama receives higher marks from Jews by religion than from most other religious groups for his handling of the nation’s policy toward Israel. The strongest critics of Obama’s approach toward Israel are white evangelical Protestants, among whom just 26% approve of his performance in this area.”

By RSVPing to Boehner’s invitation, Netanyahu is choosing sides and embracing the folks whom most American Jews oppose. He is butting into US politics and enabling the never-ending Republican campaign to undercut a president widely supported by American Jews.

That is not good for Jews in the United States or Israel. Israeli politicians have long counted on Jewish support in the United States—and support from conservative evangelicals. Yet there have been signs that non-Orthodox American Jews are not all that happy with Netanyahu’s policies. A 2013 poll found that only 38 percent of American Jews believed that his government was “making a sincere effort to bring about a peace settlement” with the Palestinians. Close to half believed Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank was a bad idea. (Only 17 percent said it helped Israeli security.) That is, Netanyahu’s right-wing approach—even if supported by AIPAC and other American Jewish establishment outfits—was not popular with many American Jews.

And now Netanyahu is partnering up with Boehner to kick Obama in the teeth and sabotage one of the president’s top diplomatic priorities. He is essentially telling American Jews to get lost: I have no regard for the president you support and no regard for your own political needs and desires.

The leader of a foreign country ought to place his own assessment of national security imperatives first. But the relationship between the Israeli government and American Jews is an important and sensitive matter for both sides—and perhaps more so for Tel Aviv. After all, Israel, which receives about $3 billion in US aid annually, needs the United States more than vice versa. Yet Netanyahu has decided to snub American Jews and to insult the leader they strongly back. This speech might help Netanyahu in the Israeli elections; it could also backfire if Israeli voters decide to punish him for further weakening Israel’s special relationship with Washington. But Netanyahu’s scheming with Boehner against Obama could also end up alienating many American Jews from the Israeli government. By enlisting with Boehner, Netanyahu is conveying a brazen sign of disrespect for a community he and his country depend upon. What chutzpah.

Can’t Make This Up: Conservatives Now Say They Hate Spock After Obama Praises Character

Can’t Make This Up: Conservatives Now Say They Hate Spock After Obama Praises Character

Author: Jameson Parker

 

There is a popular belief among liberals that conservatives would stop breathing if President Obama came out in favor of air, and that may not be too far off.

After the tragic passing of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who had defined the role of one of pop culture’s most iconic science fiction characters, Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, there was universal praise of both actor and character from across the world. The remembrance was largely apolitical, with people on every part of the political spectrum paying respect. Some Republicans (erroneously) even tried to claim Spock and Nimoy as a conservative.

Then suddenly, everything shifted. Today, the group is disavowing Spock and arguing instead that he was an “appeasing arrogant jerk.” What happened? You can probably guess.

President Obama had marked the passing of Leonard Nimoy with a moving statement released by the White House:

“Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy.  Leonard was a lifelong lover of the arts and humanities, a supporter of the sciences, generous with his talent and his time.  And of course, Leonard was Spock.  Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed, the center of Star Trek’s optimistic, inclusive vision of humanity’s future.

I loved Spock.”

Loved?! As if on cue, conservatives have lined up to re-remember Spock as basically a pointy-eared version of what they believe Obama to be. Matthew Continetti, a writer for the conservative paper The Washington Free Beacon, summed up the sentiments with an astoundingly sad article titled “I Don’t Love Spock.”

“I am also a Star Trek fan, but I admit I was somewhat confused by my rather apathetic reaction to Nimoy’s death. And as I thought more about the president’s statement, I realized he identifies with the very aspects of the Spock character that most annoy me. I don’t love Spock at all.”

Mistaking his own apathy towards the death of a fellow person as a sign that he was “on to something,” Continetti details the various ways Spock – a half-Vulcan living and working in deep space in the 24th century – is too liberal to ever be loved by conservatives. Let’s just say his examples are, to borrow a phrase, highly illogical.

“Not only do Spock’s peacenik inclinations routinely land the Enterprise and the Federation into trouble, his “logic” and “level head” mask an arrogant emotional basket case. Unlike the superhuman android Data, a loyal officer whose deepest longing is to be human, Spock spends most of his life as a freelancing diplomat eager to negotiate with the worst enemies of Starfleet.”

Negotiating with the enemy may sound like a reasonable way to avoid intergallactic war to you, but to Continetti it marks the very essence of what makes Obama an ineffectual leader. He expects his Star Trek characters to be like Data, a literal robot, who is defined by his loyalty, not by Spock, a man defined by his intelligence. The comparison is clear: Aboard the USS Enterprise, Obama would probably pal around with aliens – illegal or not.

The article continues to ooze with cherry-picked examples of times Spock led the Enterprise crew astray (just like Obama is leading America astray, wink wink nudge nudge).

“If we accept Star Trek (2009) as canon then the “cool” and “level-headed” Spock is responsible for the destruction not only of his home world and the death of 6 billion Vulcans but of the entire Star Trek timeline that audiences have loved for almost 50 years. As usual, evil happens because Spock is too idealistic, too in thrall to a value-neutral conception of science, to consider the unintended consequences of his actions.”

Continetti, having thoroughly described all the ways he feels Spock is the worst, then indicts Obama for liking him. (Presumably, Continetti hates the millions of other people who expressed grief and paid tribute to Nimoy, however they aren’t the ones that Continetti has a burning, all-consuming antipathy towards.)

“And Obama likes this selfish jerk? The coolness the president so appreciates in Spock is a thin veneer over a remarkably arrogant and off-putting detachment from human suffering. Dr. McCoy, played by the charming DeForest Kelley, bitingly exposed this truth about Spock’s nature again and again. Discussing the Genesis Project in Wrath of Khan, for example, Spock lectures McCoy, “Really, Dr. McCoy. You must learn to govern your passions. They will be your undoing. Logic suggests—”

But McCoy won’t hear it—and he’s right. ‘Logic? My God, the man’s talking about logic; we’re taking about universal Armageddon!’”

Strange, when dealing with universal Armageddown, one might hope the people in charge can maintain a cool, logical view of things. Instead, Spock – and by extension, Obama – are criticized for it. For conservatives, the goal is always to go with the gut. It worked so well for George W. Bush.

Continetti concludes:

“It will take America some time to recover from the legacy of our Spock-loving president—though probably not as long as it will take my friends to stop laughing at me for writing this column.”

Mr. Continetti, you are being too humble. No, it is likely the entire galaxy that is laughing at you for writing this column.

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

Obama at Prayer Breakfast affirms right to be godless

Obama at Prayer Breakfast affirms right to be godless

President Barack Obama affirms the right of every person to reject faith in God, and to do so free from persecution and fear, while speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Speaking at the annual event Obama condemned those who seek to use religion as a rationale for carrying out violence around the world, declaring that “no god condones terror.”

Obama said that the “twisting and distorting” of faith is “not unique to one group or one religion,” noting that Christians also had a history of justifying atrocities in the name of Jesus.

Commenting on the current state of the world, Obama said:

We see sectarian war in Syria, the murder of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, religious war in the Central African Republic, a rising tide of anti-Semitism and hate crimes in Europe, so often perpetrated in the name of religion.

Obama reminded his audience of the deplorable history of Christianity, pointing out the horrors of the Crusades and Inquisition, as well as America’s racist past with slavery and Jim Crow:

And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.

In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

Perhaps most important, Obama affirmed the right of every person to reject faith in a god, free from persecution and fear:

… central to that dignity is freedom of religion — the right of every person to practice their faith how they choose, to change their faith if they choose, or to practice no faith at all, and to do this free from persecution and fear.

Obama also expressed his opposition to blasphemy laws around the world, so often used to intimidate and silence the critics of religious superstition:

Going forward, we will keep standing for religious freedom around the world. And that includes, by the way, opposing blasphemy and defamation of religion measures, which are promoted sometimes as an expression of religion, but, in fact, all too often can be used to suppress religious minorities.

In addition, Obama called the Dalai Lama a “good friend” and an inspiration for freedom, saying Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader was “a powerful example of what it means to practice compassion and who inspires us to speak up for the freedom and dignity of all human beings.”

Obama condemned those who seek to “highjack religion for their own murderous ends.” He called the Islamic State militants who have overtaken parts of Syria and Iraq and beheaded Westerners it has captured a “death cult.”

A full transcript of Obama’s remarks can be found here.

 

What Now, Teabaggers? President Obama Descended From 14 Revolutionary War Veterans — Which Makes Him More American than …Pretty Much Anyone

What Now, Teabaggers? President Obama Descended From 14 Revolutionary War Veterans — Which Makes Him More American than …Pretty Much Anyone

Posted by: Richard Rowe in Liberals in Action

Welcome to our latest meme article, on a meme that’s been circulating — we’d imagine about as sweetly as a cheap bottle of sour apple vodka — around conservative websites. Hilariously, the one unifying factor on pages that do dare post it seem a bit devoid of comments compared to most others. Imagine a fart in a room of Southern Ladies disguised by the sound of crickets chirping. Kind of like that. And for pretty good reason: Because it’s wrong.

For those who haven’t heard, that evil ferriner Kenyan Muslim has some pretty impressive credentials when it comes to lineage in United States history. As we all know, Obama’s father was a dark-skinned voodoo demon who performed a Muslim terrorist ritual in chicken blood to please his communist union masters. Also, Saul Alinsky. But his mother Ann Dunham was a down-home Kansas girl, a sixth cousin to Wild Bill Hickok.

Atop her Wild West blood though, Ann was predominantly English by ancestry. And that English portion of her family has been here for a long time — colonial times, as it turns out. Not just any colonials, either.

While the spirit of the meme above is correct, the number is wrong. As it turns out, The Islamist Kenyan directly descends from no less than 14 PEOPLE who fought (on our side) in the Revolutionary War. Or, if not fought directly, then at least provided vital services like Moses Teague (1718-1977), who supplied the American Army in North Carolina. Which might technically make him one of our nation’s first defense contractors. Obama is related to him through his son-in-law James Wellborn, a private in the American army. you can read about the rest here.

He’s also, ironically, related to two English kings, one of which being Edward I. Edward’s known largely for launching the Eighth and Ninth Crusades; Obama is his 22nd cousin. And so, bizarrely enough, is another political figure — none other than Obama’s first opponent, John McCain, who is also a 22nd cousin of Edward’s. We know. Weird.

So, 14 people who fought in the Revolutionary War, and a king who launched two Crusades to recapture the Holy Land; by your normal Republican standards, this guy should have been elected Jesus Christ by now.  Even Sarah Palin, who herself is related to 25 people who fought in the Revolutionary War, can’t claim a king who launched a freaking Crusade. Against Mooslems, no less.

But aside from also maybe having some technical claim to the throne of England, Obama is more locally (as the meme says) entitled to claim entry into the Sons of the American Revolution. Not to be confused with the Sons of Confederate Veterans (annual cross burning scheduled for April 15th), the SAR is a proud institution with a long history and about 30,000 members at present.

Indeed, when Washington bequeathed this land to the progeny of his people, there’s no doubt he was speaking pretty explicitly of Barack Obama. That also includes the sons and daughters of America’s slaves, many of whom were drafted into fighting for America during the Revolution. The children of those who fought for this country (black and white) are in no uncertain terms the direct inheritors of Washington’s legacy.

But you know who might not be?

Technically speaking, anybody whose entire families got here after the war was over. Which, if you’re counting, includes the vast majority of people in this country. Well, white people, anyway. Going by that standard, here’s a short list of people who are less American than Barack Obama; or, at least, those whose families weren’t here to fight in the Revolutionary War:

• Ted Cruz — Cuban and Canadian
• The Koch Brothers — Parents were Dutch Immigrants
• Glen Beck — Grandson of 19th century German Immigrants
• Marco Rubio — Cuban parents
• Sean Hannity — Grandson of 20th century Irish immigrants
• Bill O’Reilly — Grandson of 19th century Irish immigrants
• John Boehner — Grandson of 20th century German and Irish immigrants
• Mitch McConnell — Son of Irish Immigrants

And, of course, the Head Birther himself, the one, the only…

• “The” Donald Trump — Grandson of 19th century German and Scottish immigrants

Of all of these people, not a one had family in the United States before 1850 — let alone were descended from 14 different people who fought in the Revolutionary War. And that’s not counting the family of 15th century slave John Punch, to whom Obama is also related through Ann Dunham. In sum total, it’s probably fair to say that Obama’s family roots in the United States may run deeper than almost any president in history, aside from the ones who actually fought in the Revolution. Barry Hussein Soetoro, then, could pretty easily out-American most of his critics, including the Koch Brothers, Sean Hannity and Donald Trump.

But, he’s black. So, you know…none of that counts. Everyone knows white people who got here in 1930 are “more American” than dark people who have been here since 1650.

Still though, Barack can be out-Americaned by a few people. Including Sarah Palin, and yours truly, whose direct lineage includes two people who signed the Declaration of Independence, John Adams and George Washington himself. Then again, nobody in my family ever launched a Crusade.

Out-Christian THAT, Sarah!

Obama Is Closing The Vatican Embassy; and Other Right Wing Fairytales

No, Obama Is Not Closing The Vatican Embassy

BY JUDD LEGUM

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

The internet is ablaze with some fairly shocking news: Obama is closing the Vatican embassy! “Obama’s call to close Vatican embassy is ‘slap in the face’ to Roman Catholics,” proclaims the Washington Times, in an article that has attracted more than 2700 comments and was prominently featured on the Drudge Report. “OBAMA ‘INSULTS’ CATHOLICS IN VATICAN-EMBASSY SHUTDOWN,” reports WND. The Daily Caller piles on with “Catholics furious over Obama plan to close Vatican embassy site.” Breitbart reports that “the Obama administration is trying to diminish and discredit the Vatican’s role in the world because it’s pro-life, pro-family, and pro-religious freedom values is at odds with the Regime’s pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage stance.”

So you might be surprised to learn that, in fact, Obama is not closing the embassy — or diminishing U.S. diplomatic relations with the Holy See in any way.

There are no embassies for any country in Vatican City itself — there is simply no room. All countries locate their embassies in the city of Rome. The United States has decided to move its embassy from its current location — an unremarkable converted residence — to the same compound as the U.S. Embassy to Italy. It will have it’s own separate building and a separate entrance on a different street. The new building is actually a tenth of a mile closer to the Vatican than the old one. There will be no reduction in staff or activities.

This hasn’t stopped 5 former U.S. envoys to the Vatican — including James Nicholson, the former chair of the Republican National Committee — from protesting. Nicholson characterized the move as “a massive downgrade.” Raymond Flynn, the first ambassador under Clinton, told the National Catholic Review that “It’s not just those who bomb churches and kill Catholics in the Middle East who are our antagonists, but it’s also those who restrict our religious freedoms and want to close down our embassy to the Holy See.” Flynn “described the move as part of broader secular hostility to religious groups.”

The plans for the move actually started under President Bush, whose administration purchased the buildings adjacent to the U.S. Embassy to Italy.

The State Department says the move, which will actually occur in 2015, will save $1.4 million per year and allow for greater security.

Related articles

• Former Ambassador Compares Obama To People Who ‘Bomb Churches And Kill Catholics’ (thinkprogress.org)
• Fact Check: Obama is not planning ‘to close the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican’ (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
• No, Obama Isn’t Shutting Down the Embassy to the Vatican (phillymag.com)
• Jeb Bush – the ‘Smart One’ – Tweets Crazy Falsehood About the U.S. Embassy at the Vatican (thedailybanter.com)
• Republicans More Offended By Vatican Embassy ‘Closure’ Than The Vatican (talkingpointsmemo.com)
• Right-wing noise machine says Obama plans to close Vatican embassy (blogs.e-rockford.com)

Christian Militia Calls for Obama’s Assassination on Facebook

Christian militia calls for Obama’s assassination on Facebook

The Christian American Patriots Militia is openly callingfor the assassination of President Barack Obama on their Facebook page. The Christian militia calls Obama a “dictator,” and claims the “authority to kill Obama comes from the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution.”

According to a report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) dated Nov. 22, the U.S. Secret Service is aware that Everest Wilhelmsen, leader of the Christian American Patriots Militia, is calling for Obama’s assassination.

The Christian American Patriots Militia sent out a post to the more than 1400 members of their Facebook groupdeclaring the militia now has the “authority” to assassinate President Barack Obama:

“We now have authority to shoot Obama, i.e., to kill him,” Wilhelmsen wrote on the group’s Facebook page.

The following is an excerpt from the disturbing post, dated Nov. 19:

“The authority to kill Obama comes from the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution: He is levying war on the United States and aiding and comforting our foreign enemies – the 2nd Amendment gives us the right and duty (authority) to engage an enemy of the United States that does so with the design to reduce us under absolute Despotism. I would be very surprised, if Obama does not leave Washington DC today (Nov. 19th) … never to return, if he is not dead within the month.”

The group’s Facebook page claims Obama’s “rogues and thugs are in fact supplanting our Constitution with a communist Oligarchy of corrupt political and legal elites” and encourages “Christian American patriots” to “rise and fight vigorously to protect our nation and our posterity.”

The SPLC reports a spokesman for the Secret Service would not say if the Facebook post had prompted an investigation: “That’s not something we openly discuss,” the Secret Service spokesman said.

Yet one would hope a group of Christian extremists threatening to assassinate the President of the United States would merit close investigation by the Secret Service. After all, calling for the assassination of the President of the United States is a crime.

For more political news, information and humor see Left Coast Lucy on Facebook. For more news, information and humor relevant to atheists, freethinkers, and secular humanists, see Progressive Secular Humanist Examiner on Facebook. On Twitter follow Progressive Examiner.

Related articles

• Christian American Patriots Militia Openly Calls For Obama’s Assassination On Facebook (socialnewsdaily.com)
• ‘Christian American Patriots Militia’ Leader Threatens To Kill Obama (politicalblindspot.com)
• Christian American Patriots Militia leader: We now have authority to shoot Obama (rawstory.com)
• Militia nut openly calls for Obama’s assassination on Facebook (americablog.com)
• Man Who Claims Ties to ‘Christian American Patriot Militia’ Threatens Obama in Facebook Post (splcenter.org)

Obama Crushes the Neocons

Obama Crushes the Neocons

By Michael Tomasky

FOLLOWMore Stories by Michael Tomasky

The agreement signed with Iran on Sunday is a momentous step forward. Yet Republicans will try to subvert the success by playing to their Obama-hating base.

Well, the ayatollah appears to have lent his provisional support to the historic U.S.-Iran accord announced Saturday night. In a letter to President Hassan Rouhani, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said the deal “can be the basis for further intelligent actions.” Now we just need sign-off from our American ayatollahs. But the early indications are that the Republicans, eager to perform Bibi Netanyahu’s bidding—not that they needed a second reason to oppose something Barack Obama did—will do everything within their power to stop the thing going forward.

We shouldn’t get too carried away in praising this accord just yet. It’s only a six-month arrangement while the longer-term one is worked out. Those talks are going to be harder than these were, and it’s not at all a stretch to envision them collapsing at some point. Iran is going to have to agree to a regular, more-or-less constant inspection regime that would make it awfully hard for Tehran to be undertaking weapons-grade enrichment. It’s easy to see why they agreed to this deal, to buy time and get that $4.2 billion in frozen oil revenues. But whether Iran is going to agree to inspections like that is another question.

Still, it is indeed a historic step. Thirty-four years of not speaking is a long time. So it’s impressive that this got done at all, and even more impressive are some of the inner details, like the fact that Americans and Iranians have been in direct and very secret negotiations for a year. Rouhani’s election does seem to have made a huge positive difference—four of five secret meetings centered in Oman have been held since Rouhani took office, which seems to be a pretty clear indication that he wants a long-term deal to happen.

So this is potentially, I emphasize potentially, a breakthrough that could have numerous positive reverberations in the region—not least among them the virtual elimination of the chance that the United States and Iran would end up at war. And what a refutation of those harrumphing warmongers! I’d love to have had a tap on John Bolton’s phone over the weekend, or Doug Feith’s, or Cheney’s, and heard the combination of perfervid sputtering and haughty head shaking as they lament Obama’s choice.

Well, then, let’s compare choices. They chose war, against a country that never attacked us, had no capability whatsoever to attack us, and had nothing to do with the allegedly precipitating event, 9/11. We fought that war because 9/11 handed the neocons the excuse they needed to dope the public into supporting a unilateral war of hegemony. It has cost us more than $2 trillion now. It’s taken the lives of more than 100,000 people. It has been the author of the trauma of thousands of our soldiers, their limbs left over there, their families sundered. And on the subject of Iran, the war of course did more to strengthen Iran in the region than Obama could dream of doing at his most Machiavellian-Manchurian. Fine, the world is well rid of Saddam Hussein. But these prices were far too steep.

Then along came Obama in 2008, saying he’d negotiate with Iran. I’d love to have a nickel for every time he was called “naive” by John McCain or Sarah Palin (after the differences between Iran and Iraq were explained to her) or any of dozens of others (and yeah, even Hillary Clinton). I’d settle for a penny. I’d still be rich. You might think that watching this past decade unfold, taking an honest measure of where the Bush administration’s hideous decisions have left us, that some of them might allow that maybe negotiation was worth a shot.

Of course that will never happen. Marco Rubio was fast out of the gates Sunday, but he will be joined today by many others. Some will be Democrats, yes, from states with large Jewish votes. Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez have already spoken circumspectly of the deal (although interestingly, Dianne Feinstein, as AIPAC-friendly as they come, spoke strongly in favor of it). There will be a push for new sanctions, and that push will be to some extent bipartisan.

But the difference will be that if the Democrats get the sense that the deal is real and can be had, they won’t do anything to subvert it, whereas for the Republicans, this will all be about what it’s always about with them—the politics of playing to their Obama-hating base. But there’ll be two added motivations besides. There’s the unceasingly short-sighted and tragic view of what constitutes security for Israel, which maintains the conditions of near-catastrophe that keep just enough of the Israeli public fearful of change so that they perpetuate in putting people like Netanyahu in power, thus ensuring that nothing will ever change. And perhaps most important of all in psychic terms to the neocons, there is contemplation of the hideous reality that Obama and the path of negotiation just might work. This is the thing the neocons can’t come to terms with at all. If Obama succeeds here, their entire worldview is discredited. Check that; even more discredited.

Rouhani appears to be moving his right wing a bit. Ours, alas, isn’t nearly so flexible as Iran’s.

Related articles

• Obama Crushes the Neocons (thedailybeast.com)
• Obama Crushes the Neocons (kstreet607.com)
• Neocons let loose (msnbc.com)
• “The American Ayatollahs”: President Obama Crushes The Neocons (mykeystrokes.com)
• Obama Crushes the Neocons (theobamacrat.com)
• John Bolton: The Only Option in Iran Is War (motherjones.com)
• Obama and the Munich Katrinas (thedailybeast.com)

Can “Justice and Truth Win Out?” A heckler yells at Obama. Here’s what happened next…

A heckler yelled at Obama. Here’s what happened next…

US President Barack Obama arrives to speak on immigration reform in San Francisco, Nov. 25, 2013. | JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

At some point Congress will wake up and do it’s job.  I suspect it won’t be until we vote out the slackers (from both parties) in 2014….

MSNBC

Arguing “there’s no reason we shouldn’t get immigration reform done right now,” President Obama demanded on Monday for the umpteenth time that Congress pass his top legislative priority already.

So you can understand if he was a bit annoyed when, towards the end of his speech in San Francisco’s Chinatown, pro-immigration activists started heckling.

“Mr. President, please use your executive order to halt deportations for all 11.5 million undocumented immigrants in this country right now!” one protester yelled. As Obama tried to respond, the shouting continued: “You have a power to stop deportation for all undocumented immigrants in this country!”

“Actually I don’t,” Obama replied. “And that’s why we’re here.”

A month earlier, Senator Ted Cruz was interrupted by anti-deportation activists, whom he nonsensically accused of being “President Obama’s paid political operatives,” during a speech to a conservative conference. Immigration protesters have shadowed administration officials for years, popping up at Congressional hearings to target Janet Napolitano, who was in the audience for today’s speech, and even occupying Obama’s campaign offices in 2012.

These protesters are confronting a fundamental contradiction in Obama’s record: he’s made immigration reform his top second-term priority even as his administration has presided over record deportations.

After Senate Republicans filibustered the DREAM Act, which would grant legal status to young undocumented immigrants, activists slowly convinced Obama to halt deportations for undocumented youth until Congress came around. Now they’re demanding he do the same for the broader unauthorized immigrant community, or at the very least, for their parents and siblings who still face the threat of removal every day. After all, if you’re fighting to get them on a path to citizenship, why would you want to kick them out? These arguments are likely to get louder if immigration reform dies in the House.

The president, however, has argued that such a sweeping move would require a change to the law. He repeated the claim on Monday.

“What you need to know, when I’m speaking as President of the United States and I come to this community, is that if, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so,” he said Monday. “But we’re also a nation of laws. That’s part of our tradition.  And so the easy way out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our laws.”

Politically, Republicans don’t have an obvious way to exploit these tensions, but they are trying.

“Democrats are facing credibility problems, whether it is from Obamacare failures or massive deportations, that’s why you see the president’s approval ratings suffer,” Izzy Santa, who handles Hispanic outreach for the Republican National Committee, told MSNBC. “The fact is that Republicans continue to work on immigration reform, which is more than Democrats ever did when they controlled the White House and Congress.”

The RNC, which has backed efforts to pass immigration reform, may be able to tweak Obama a little over deportations. But the vast majority of Republicans in Congress are on record demanding even more aggressive deportations. The only House vote Republican leaders have allowed on the topic this year was an amendment by anti-immigration firebrand Steve King calling on the White House to deport DREAMers. It passed with almost unanimous Republican support.

It’s true Democrats didn’t pass immigration reform in Obama’s first two years, when Democrats briefly had 60 votes in the Senate. But for most of that session they were stuck at 59 votes and the only Republican willing to negotiate with them, Senator Lindsey Graham, backed out in a procedural dispute. Mitt Romney tried the exact same “Where was Obama?” argument with Latino voters in 2012, even as he advocated “self-deportation” in debates. It didn’t work.

Obama is doing his best to convince protesters which party to blame if reform collapses once again.

“Right now it’s up to Republicans in the House to decide if we can move forward as a country on this bill,” Obama said. “If they don’t want to see it happen, they’ve got to explain why.”

House Republican leaders have offered a variety of excuses lately as to why they haven’t come up with an immigration plan of their own. The schedule’s too tight, or they’re mad at the White House over health care, or Obama is secretly trying to kill immigration reform with unrealistic demands so Democrats win Latino voters.

The president’s goal this month has been to box them in by saying “yes” to their demands whenever possible. Speaker John Boehner doesn’t like the Senate’s bill? Fine, you can pass a bunch of smaller bills instead. They say I’m demonizing Republicans to scare them away from a bill? Well, I think the Speaker is just swell!

“The good news is, just this past week Speaker Boehner said that he is ‘hopeful we can make progress’ on immigration reform,” Obama said. “And that is good news. I believe the Speaker is sincere.  I think he genuinely wants to get it done.  And that’s something we should be thankful for this week.”

While Obama faces his own pressures, his refusal to back away from talks puts the onus on Boehner to prove his party can deal with the deportation issue at all. And right now there’s no consensus within the party as to whether the country should let any  undocumented immigrants remain, let alone get on a path to citizenship. Until they can start naming some demands, they’re for self-deportation by default.

Watch Obama and the hecklers:

Related articles

• The Heckler Games (msnbc.com)
• President Obama interrupted by former ASUC senator at immigration speech in San Francisco (dailycal.org)
• Dreamer heckles Obama on deportations at immigration reform speech(voxxi.com)
• Obama responds to heckler on immigration (miamiherald.com)

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• The Heckler Games (msnbc.com)
• Obama Tells Protesters He’d Stop Deportations by Himself If He Could (cnsnews.com)
• A heckler yelled at Obama. Here’s what happened next… (kstreet607.com)
• Obama’s Immigration Speech Was Interrupted by a Heckler on Stage with Him (thewire.com)
• Obama responds to heckler on immigration (miamiherald.com)
• Obama heckler has history of civil disobedience (news.yahoo.com)

How Obama’s Iran deal screwed up Homeland’s third season

How Obama’s Iran deal screwed up Homeland’s third season

 

Thanks a lot, Obama. (Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images, Kent Smith/SHOWTIME)

I am an avid Homeland fan, as is the POTUS.  I doubt that Homeland will be screwed behind the tentative Iran developments…

The Week

Saul Berenson’s grand scheme to assassinate an Iranian official as part of a CIA-orchestrated coup has been bettered by a simpler real-life option: Diplomacy

In a press conference less than 24 hours before Homeland aired the ninth episode of its uneven, Iran-focused third season, President Obama took the podium to offer a brief statement about a breakthrough deal on Iran’s nuclear program. The president described a diplomacy that had “opened up a new path toward a world that is more secure — a future in which we can verify that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful and that it cannot build a nuclear weapon. For the first time in nearly a decade, we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear program, and key parts of the program will be rolled back.”

That announcement comes at a strange time for Homeland, which has built a big following by depicting a harrowing post-9/11 political landscape that feels eerily plausible. And the show’s third season has been all about Iran. Homeland‘s vision of the U.S.-Iran relationship shares at least one compelling similarity to real life: The Western world is obsessed with whatever nuclear enrichment might be afoot. But otherwise, the events of this past weekend showcased a sharp contrast between Homeland‘s fiction and the facts of real-life U.S. diplomacy.

The Iran of Homeland‘s third season has fueled nuclear paranoia, and acting CIA director Saul Berenson’s agency has done everything possible to infiltrate this foreign power. As Sunday night’s “One Last Time” revealed, Saul wants to send Nick Brody, a Marine turned terrorist turned fugitive, to kill a high-ranking Iranian intelligence official. This assassination will allow another Iranian official (who the CIA has implausibly blackmailed into working with them) to assume a top position. Saul calls Brody’s target — the head of Iran’s revolutionary guard — “the single greatest impediment to peace” without explaining why. His plan to end a vicious cycle of violence is deploying an assassin. That plotline, brewing all of Homeland’s third season, paints a Manichean picture of U.S.-Iran relations: An unending cycle of terrorist violence, hatred, and confusion.

How strange to have all that murky plotting offset, in the real world, by the first inklings of real dialogue, and an agreement cobbled together in Geneva to buy time and cooperation for something more permanent. In exchange for a reduction in sanctions, Iran will place limits on its much-feared nuclear program. Such news would be unthinkable in Homeland‘s world, and these real-life details mark a sharp contrast to the unsettled post-9/11 world that Homeland revels in.

The drama of Homeland is the drama of the bomber. The show can’t exist without that paranoia, not to mention that often ambiguous line between calm and violence, sanity and bipolar madness. Diplomacy is a distant dream in the world of Homeland. Enemy officials never call each other. Everything is built on backroom deals, blackmail, spying, trickery, and assassination. A deep moral guilt accompanies this battered landscape, as CIA agents like Peter Quinn question the stray causalities they leave behind. The lump-in-the-throat heartstopper of the early seasons revolved around Nick Brody’s rebellion against U.S. drone use and the innocent deaths drones cause.Homeland says the world is already damned, and everyone’s to blame for it.

But there’s a startling disconnect between news of Obama’s outreach, the tentative agreement, and the utter violence of the Iran of Homeland. Because what is Homeland’s Iran if not violent? The series has reached deep into this well of history (often true and troubling, of course), and its convenient thriller narrative in the show’s last several episodes. It assigned blame to Iran for a brutal bombing at Langley, killing more than 200 U.S. citizens. The show marketed this 12/12 attack as a second 9/11, the ghost of which always defines the dynamics at play in Homeland. The villainous Javadi isn’t just the mastermind of killings from afar, but the murderer of his own kin on American soil. Iran, as depicted on Homeland, is incapable of negotiation.

In a recent episode, Sen. Andrew Lockhart scoffs at the idea of blackmailing an Iranian official with knowledge of the official’s corruption. “Which in Iran just means it’s Tuesday,” the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman remarks, writing off the entire country as one of the U.S.’s “sworn enemies.”

“We fry Javadi’s ass publicly,” Lockhart demands, as he seeks to take down the Langley bombing mastermind who serves as an Iranian intelligence chief. This sort of trial strikes Saul as “short-sighted.” Saul would prefer having an asset within Iran, someone the U.S. can “control” to force regime change — the only acceptable option in his mind. (Note to Homeland: The U.S. did something kind of similar 60 years ago. Didn’t work out so well!) To Saul, if the U.S. seizes Javadi and tries him, Iran will inevitably replace Javadi with someone just like him. “And the attack that happened here happens again and again and again,” Saul tells the senator. All of this is fine for drama – but it also showcases the power of Iran in Western imagination, and the divergence between real Iran and TV Iran.

Really, that’s why it’s so bizarre to see this chilling, sinister vision of Iran contrasted with news of a deal crafted between Iran’s government and the U.S., Great Britain, China, Russia, France, and Germany. What would Saul say? Who did the CIA control within Iran to make this possible, Saul? Consider Saul’s explanation for killing an Iranian official and installing his blackmailed bomber in power:

Javadi won’t be just an intelligence source. He’ll be in control of the entire security apparatus. He can do something, something to break the logjam, something besides another war, something that’ll change the facts on the ground just enough, so two countries that haven’t been able to communicate for over 30 years except through terrorist actions and threats can sit down and talk. That’s the play, Carrie. Tell me it’s not worth your time.

Two countries that haven’t been able to communicate. What timing.

This is, of course, the popular conception of Iran, and a testament to how startling the weekend’s agreement really was. The deal blows past the action-movie fantasyland that CIA agents are about to plow into on Homeland. Don’t blame Showtime or Homeland‘s show runners for entrenching that vision of Iran, of course — the frames are certainly common enough. And for a show about U.S. intelligence officials, what better drama than conspiracies and assassinations? But for all the dense plotting of Homeland‘s third season, the real-life events of this weekend punctured Saul’s theories in a big way. It was a welcome dissonance.

Related articles

• It’s time for America to lay the Iranian bogeyman to rest | David Shariatmadari (theguardian.com)
• ‘Homeland’ episode 9 recap: One last time to be “the man you were”(theblaze.com)
• ‘Homeland’ Iran Plot to ‘Break the Logjam’ Parallels Real Life(thewrap.com)
• ‘Homeland ‘ Recap: Season 3, Episode 7 (usnews.com)
• Maybe if Obama Had Sold Illegal Arms to Iran, Then Republicans Would Call Him a Hero (kstreet607.com)

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• You: ‘Homeland’ recap: Iran op offers chance for redemption (latimes.com)
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Birther, Rush Limbaugh Fan Threatens the President, Gets Arrested

Birther, Rush Limbaugh Fan Threatens the President, Gets Arrested

An 81-year-old “birther” was arrested today and charged with threatening President Barack Obama’s life, according to federal court records.

Prosecutors allege that Elwyn Nels Fossedal was in a post office near his Wisconsin home last month when he announced, “If President Obama was here I would shoot him right there and kill him right now.”

When Secret Service agents confronted Fossedal about the threat—which was relayed to law enforcement by witnesses—he would not recant the statement and “repeated the threat using different words. He also made a number of additional threats towards the President,” according to a felony complaint.

[…]

Fossedal, a retired Pfizer employee, appears to be a “birther” based on comments he has posted online. A Rush Limbaugh fan, Fossedal has also called for Obama’s impeachment over the Affordable Care Act and declared that, “We need to throw the Muslim in the White House, OUT.”

In a funeral home obituary for his wife, Fossedal is reported as having resigned from the Lions Club International because the community service organization purportedly “would not allow the worship of Jesus Christ” so that it could “be accepted by Islamic Nations.”

thesmokinggun.com

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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?

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Sarah Palin Joins The “Just Like Slavery” Teabernacle Choir

Sarah Palin Joins The “Just Like Slavery” Teabernacle Choir

Posted by Mark

When republican critics get tired of calling President Obama a Muslim or a socialist or a Kenyan or a homosexual or a tyrant or a mad genius or an idiot figurehead or a Black Panther or a Wall Street lackey or lizard overseer, they generally just resort to comparing him to Adolf Hitler. However, lately a new unfounded and irrational insult has been working its way up the charts of the conservative hitlist, and has-been, half-term governor Sarah Palin is the latest to give it her rendition.

Palin: When that note comes due … and this isn’t racist … but it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.

 Palin was referring to the national debt, which she seems to believe is at risk of being sent to the International Collections and Captivity Corporation for redemption. While it was thoughtful of her to remind us that associating her remarks about the first African-American president with the historical scab of slavery isn’t racist, she nevertheless fails to grasp the intricacies of economics. But she does align herself with a growing congregation of noxious Tea Partiers who think that anything President Obama does that they don’t like is just like slavery. For instance…

• Rush Limbaugh: Well over 50% of the American people don’t want [Obamacare]. And the Republicans are like ‘well we can’t do anything about it. The law’s the law, It’s the law of the land.’ Well, so was slavery one time, the law of the land.
• Dr. Ben Carson: Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. […] In a way, it is slavery, because it is making all of us subservient to the government.
• Sen. Rand Paul: Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? You’re basically saying you believe in slavery.
• VA Atty Genl Ken Cuccinelli: “The founders knew how bad [slavery] was. We have other things in this country today and abortion is one of them.
• Former Rep. Allen West: He does not want you to have the self-esteem of getting up and earning, and having that title of American. He’d rather you be his slave.
• NH Rep. Bill O’Brien: And what is Obamacare? It is a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act.

Is this trend of comparing Obama’s agenda to slavery better than comparing him to Hitler? It’s a tough call. But many on the right may not mean it as an insult. There are some prominent conservatives who have publicly expressed their opinion that slavery was actually a pretty good thing. So perhaps this is just Palin’s way of complementing Obama.

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Fondly Remembering Obama’s Days As A Gay, Cocaine-Using Hustler

Fondly Remembering Obama’s Days As A Gay, Cocaine-Using Hustler

by Kyle Mantyla

While visiting Scott Lively’s “Defend The Family” website this morning, we spotted a rather intriguing headline posted in the “Latest News” section reading “Claim: Obama was a ‘gay’ teen favored by older white sugar-daddies.”

Obviously, we were professionally required to check that out and what we found was an interview conducted by crackpot preacher James David Manning with a woman named Mia Marie Pope, who claims to have been a classmate of President Obama’s back in Hawaii in the 1970s when he was a gay, cocaine using foreigner.

“He very much was within sort of the gay community,” Pope said. “And we new Barry as just common knowledge that girls were never anything that he ever was interested in … He would get with these older white gay men, and this is how we just pretty much had the impression that that’s how he was procuring his cocaine. In other words, he was having sex with these older white guys and that’s how he was getting this cocaine to be able to freebase”:

 

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This Week In Right-Wing Lunacy

Paranoia-Rama: This Week In Right-Wing Lunacy

Submitted by Miranda Blue

RWW’s Paranoia-Rama takes a look at five of the week’s most absurd conspiracy theories from the Right.

This week, we learn more about President Obama’s secret gay past and Michelle Obama’s poor spiritual housekeeping, find out the real reason for Terry McAuliffe’s victory in Virginia, and are duly warned about the consequences of health care coverage and U.N. treaties.

5. Obamacare Will Force People to “Suffer and Potentially Die”

Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert, Congress’ most creative conspiracy theorists, told the residents of a nursing home in Texas this week that the Affordable Care Act would cut Medicare benefits, causing people to “suffer and potentially die.”

Gohmert’s claim that the ACA “cut $716 billion from Medicare,” repeated frequently by Mitt Romney in his presidential campaign last year, glosses over the fact that the cuts in costs – also recommended by Rep. Paul Ryan – would not affect Medicare benefits .

4. The United Nations Will Snatch Homeschoolers and Kids With Glasses

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee revived consideration of the United Nations Conventions on Persons With Disabilities this week, a year after a right-wing scare campaign managed to prevent the Senate from ratifying the treaty.

Taking the lead in the effort to sink the treaty was Michael Farris, director of the Home School Legal Defense Association, who claimed that U.S. ratification of the treaty would allow the U.N. to “get control” of children with glasses or ADHD and even lead to the deaths of children with disabilities. Invited to testify at this week’s hearing, Farris tried to convince senators that ratifying the treaty – which is based on laws already in place in the United States – would in fact lead to an American ban homeschooling. His only evidence for this fear was a completely unrelated immigration case .

The many right-wing conspiracy theories about the CRPD have been handily debunked by the U.S. International Council on Disabilities, as well as by former Republican senators Bill Frist and Bob Dole.

3. Michelle Obama Invited Demons Into The White House

The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer was shocked to learn that First Lady Michelle Obama hosted a White House event this to celebrate Diwali.

By celebrating the Hindu festival, Fischer warned, the first lady was inviting “demons into the White House,” necessitating a “spiritual cleanse” of the building after Obama leaves office.

Fischer neglected to mention that George W. and Laura Bush had hosted the very same event. He did, however, later in the week provide a helpful how-to on how to rid a home of demonic spirits in case it ever comes to that.

2. Voter Fraud Won the Election in Virginia

Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli thinks that President Obama won reelection through organized voter fraud , so it’s no surprise that some of his supporters were ready to cry “voter fraud” when he lost the gubernatorial election on Tuesday to Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

A full week before election day, Virginia conservative commentator Dean Chambers laid out how he predicted McAuliffe would “steal” the election through voter fraud. Meanwhile, Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber spent Election Day tweeting about how Cuccinelli would need to win by 7 points “to get within the margin of Democrat fraud.” And after the results came in, the white nationalist site VDARE claimed that McAuliffe must have relied on “black voter fraud” because it was not “plausible” that African-Americans would “turn out for New York Irish American Pol running for Governor with the same enthusiasm that they voted for a Black for President.”

In 2008, Virginia officials prosecuted 39 cases of voter fraud out of 3.7 million votes cast, none of which involved voter impersonation, the alleged target of Virginia’s pending voter ID law.

1. Obama Procured Cocaine Through Older White, Male Lovers

We already knew that during his student days President Obama was married to his male Pakistani roommate, the union from which he still wears a secret gay Muslim wedding ring , but we learned today via anti-gay activist Scott Lively that the president’s secrets go much deeper.

Lively linked on his website to an interview between crackpot preacher James David Manning and a woman named Mia Marie Pope, who claims to have been a classmate of President Obama’s back in Hawaii in the 1970s.

Pope recalled how the future president was “very much within sort of the gay community” and “was having sex with these older white guys” in order to procure “cocaine to be able to freebase.”

Thanks to RWW

http://tinyurl.com/pdew673

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• Cuccinelli and Santorum – Misogynists in Action (mariopiperni.com)
• Wonkbook: Obamacare is alive, Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign for governor is dead. (washingtonpost.com)
• Republicans contemplate future after night of mixed electoral fortunes (theguardian.com)
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What’s Wrong With That Story About Obama Knowing That Your Health Care Policy Would Get Cancelled?!

More manufactured, fake outrage, from the Republican swill geyser

Here Is What’s Wrong With That Story About Obama Knowing That Your Health Care Policy Would Get Cancelled

By Igor Volsky

The NBC News investigations unit is reporting that “50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a ‘cancellation’ letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law” — a fact administration officials knew but kept from the public.

The cancellations are a result of so-called grandfather rules promulgated by President Obama’s Health and Human Services. The rule exempts health insurance plans in existence before March 23, 2010 — the day the Affordable Care Act became law — from many of the new regulations, benefits standards and consumer protections that new plans now have to abide by, but says that policies could lose their designation if they make major changes. From NBC:

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

This all sounds very ominous until you consider that the naturally high turnover rate associated with the individual market means that it’s highly unlikely that individuals would still be enrolled in plans from 2010 in 2014. In fact, the Obama administration publicly admitted this when it issued the regulations in 2010, leading Republicans like Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) to seize on the story in order to push for repeal of the grandfather regulations. Here is a story in The Hill from Sep. 22, 2010 pointing to this very same 40 to 67 percent range:

The debate was widely covered in the press, so it’s unclear what exactly the NBC investigation unit has uncovered.

The goal of grandfather regulations is to allow a consumer to keep their existing policies, while also ensuring that there are some basic patient protections built into these plans. If insurers make changes that significantly burden enrollees with lower benefits and increased costs they have to come into compliance with all consumer protections. Therefore, policies lose their grandfathered status if insurers cancel coverage when a person becomes ill, impose lifetime limits on benefits, eliminate all benefits for a particular condition and reduce the cap for covered services each year, among other changes. (In fact, in November of 2010, the federal government loosened some of these standards.)

So yes, individuals can keep the plans they have if those plans remain largely the same. But individuals receiving cancellation notices will have a choice of enrolling in subsidized insurance in the exchanges and will probably end up paying less for more coverage. Those who don’t qualify for the tax credits will be paying more for comprehensive insurance that will be there for them when they become sick (and could actually end up spending less for health care since more services will now be covered). They will also no longer be part of a system in which the young and healthy are offered cheap insurance premiums because their sick neighbors are priced out or denied coverage. That, after all, is the whole point of reform.

Update

 

Here is how Marilyn Tavenner — the head of CMS, the agency responsible for implementing the law — responded to questions about what she would tell an American who has received a cancellation notice during Tuesday’s health care hearing:

Related articles

• Obamacare scandal!!!! No. Just Republican talking points. (dailykos.com)
• Rash of Lazy, Sensational Reporting is Freaking People Out About Obamacare (billmoyers.com)
• Here Is What’s Wrong With That Story About Obama Knowing That Your Health Care Policy Would Get Cancelled (thinkprogress.org)

A Reminder Just How Not Racist, the “We’re Not Racist” Tea Baggers, Are Not Racist, Not

Tea Party Politician on Obama: “Assassinate the fucken nigger and his monkey children”

By Anomaly

Tea Party candidate and Libertarian Jules Manson just called for the assassination of President Obama and his children on Facebook, but I’m sure it was just a ‘misspeak’ (wink wink).

In an unnerving display of racism and violence today, this Ron Paul supporting libertarian, who ran for a seat on the City of Carson’s City council last march, and thankfully failed, wrote:

“Assassinate the fucken nigger and his monkey children”

What’s a fucken? Grammar ‘misspeaks’ aside, behold the world of Jules Manson (no relation to Marylin Mason, who apparently is a kinder, gentler person):

Manson posted his visceral diatribe on his Facebook wall apparently angry over the passing of NDAA, however, someone should enlighten him that 86 Senators passed that abomination of a bill, which makes vetoing it successfully problematic; more than 2/3rds of the Senate majority supported this bill. But hey, don’t let the facts stop the racist rhetoric. Manson removed his offensive (and illegal) post when hundreds of Facebook users poured out their outrage. At this point, Manson (and no, this is not bad satire) felt compelled to explain that he is not really a racist. No, really.

Examiner.com’s Michael Stone reports, “Manson argued that using the word “nigger” does not make him a racist.” Sane America would beg to differ.

Americans Against the Tea Party‘s Facebook page posted a screen capture of the offensive remarks and recived over a 100 angry and outraged comments in a little over an hour. The following is a small sample of those remarks:

sure hope the Secret Service and FBI get this creep, he is dangerous to everyone! We can thank the Republicans for this brand of extremism.

reported to secret service…who seemed interested enough to ask for the url and a screen shot

“And his monkey children” smfh. That part bothers me the most.

I’d like to see how Fox News will defend THIS!

I hope the FBI has seen what he has said and will be showing up at his door soon.

The best way to stick it to idiots like this is vote to re elect Obama and then Warren in 2016.

Manson will be running for Senate next year (I joke). The failed politician’s Facebook page has since been removed and he’s most likely in a fetal position on the floor sucking his thumb waiting for the Secret Service. Good luck on that.

Big thanks to Michael Stone

Related articles

• Tea Partyers shout racist slur at White House cops: “Looks like something out of Kenya” (americablog.com)
• Meet the Morons Behind the Racist Trayvon Halloween Costumes (gawker.com)
• Alan Grayson Slams Racist Tea Party: ‘If The Hood Fits, Wear It’ (addictinginfo.org)
• Even The Daily Show Was Shocked by This Racist GOP Leader’s Responses (gawker.com)

Paranoia-Rama: This Week In Right-Wing Lunacy

Paranoia-Rama: This Week In Right-Wing Lunacy

Submitted by Brian Tashman

We here at Right Wing Watch regularly observe how strange conspiracy theories and absurd right-wing nightmares percolate through conservative message boards and fringe websites all the way up to Fox News and the Republican Party, until they eventually become “mainstream.”

In a new feature, we’ll look at five of the week’s most absurd conspiracy theories and maniacal claims.

5. Satan Behind Sexual Misconduct Allegations Against Herman Cain

Herman Cain has finally put all those allegations of extramarital affairs and sexual harassment from different women to rest, saying that all of them were lying and are working the Devil. Cain told Real Clear Religion that Satan was behind the charges of sexual misconduct, several of which were made long before he even ran for president, as part of a plot to bring down his campaign, which he suspended before the Iowa caucus. After explaining how he was the real victim, Cain said that he now preaches about his experience in fighting the demonic spirits which supposedly manufactured the scandal.

4. Grover Norquist Is Palling Around With Terrorists

In an interview with Glenn Beck, Center for Security Policy head Frank Gaffney said that he saw terrorists meeting with Grover Noquist back when they shared an office in Washington, D.C. Rather than alert the authorities, apparently, Gaffney instead decided to wait over a decade to reveal Norquist’s terrorists allies. Norquist notes that on the date of his supposed meeting with terrorists, he wasn’t even in Washington.

Gaffney’s claims that Norquist is a terrorist fellow traveler are so farfetched that leaders of the American Conservative Union decided to kick Gaffney out of the annual right-wing summit CPAC, but that hasn’t stopped him from winning over Beck and other anti-Muslim zealots such as Jerry Boykin, David Horowitz and Pamela Geller. Cathie Adams of Eagle Forum has found even more definitive evidence that Norquist is a secret Islamic agent: “he has a beard.”

3. Obama Will Nuke Charleston

After the right-wing conspiracy that President Obama was planning to set off a nuclear bomb in Washington, D.C. and blame it on Syria, we now have gotten word that Obama has shifted his menacing plan to Charleston, South Carolina. Survivalists have been fretting about a secret plan to nuke Charleston that went awry after generals refused and, as a result, were swiftly fired by Obama.

This conspiracy theory follows claims made by Alex Jones of InfoWars, who cited comments made by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) about how Iran could give nuclear weapons to terrorists targeting US cities like Charleston, of an imminent false flag attack: “Graham is quite literally saying that if we do not launch a war with Syria, South Carolina may be nuked. And this ultimately reeks of yet another false flag being orchestrated by the United States government in order to send us into war, or at the very least a threat.”

2. Military, NFL Facing Feminization

Did you know that President Obama is personally selecting new hats for the Marines to make them look “feminine” and “French”? The New York Post story about Obama’s wretched plan to make male Marines seem “girly” was quickly picked up by Fox News, the Washington Times, Newsmax, all the news sources you’d expect not to do basic research to see if Obama was actually involved in uniform cover design process.

Shockingly, he wasn’t.

But maybe that was all a plot to take away attention from the “chickification” of the NFL, which Rush Limbaugh bravely exposed. “You don’t put the NFL in pink for a month!” Limbaugh said, referring to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, “I don’t think there’s any question, folks, that there is an attack on masculinity. And it’s not new. Basically the modern era of feminism, that’s what it is, is a critique against masculinity.”

1. Fainting Lady An Obama Plant

When a pregnant, diabetic woman nearly fainted during President Obama’s press conference in the Rose Garden, “Lady-Patriots” was on the case to expose her as an Obama plant! Naturally, Sarah Palin, Matt Drudge, and Fox News were happy to join the usual suspects like WorldNetDaily and InfoWars. “Lady Patriot” Sharon Scheutz foiled Obama’s false flag fainting to “take the focus off the disastrous website” and make people “feel warm and fuzzy for our hero President.”

“There are a lot of idiots out there,” she writes.

Indeed there are.
– See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/paranoia-rama-week-right-wing-lunacy#sthash.yu9jhdoP.dpuf

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Michele Bachmann’s End TIme

Michele Bachmann’s End TIme

By mario piperni

You’ve heard them all. Barack Obama is: a Muslim, a socialist, a communist, the anti-Christ and a Kenyan. And, as Fox News has repeatedly noted, Obama hates white people/America/Christmas/Israel and puppies. All this while ‘Barry’ pals around with terrorists and plots to take away your guns and bibles in his fervent attempt to usurp the Constitution and impose sharia law on America.

Michele Bachmann, determined to keep her ‘I’m a Total Idiot’ status all the way through to her own end time in Congress, proposes a new anti-Obama, made-up piece of nonsense to add to the mix. E.A. Blair explains.

___

On the 5 October broadcast of the Christian radio show Understanding the Times our favorite batshit crazy member of congress lied about the President again by saying that “Obama waived a ban on arming terrorists in order to allow weapons to go to the Syrian opposition. Your listeners, U.S. taxpayers, are now paying to give arms to terrorists including Al-Qaeda.”

Of course this is a lie. What the President actually did was let the U.S. Government “…provide or license, where appropriate, certain non-lethal assistance inside or related to Syria.”

However, ol’ Charlie Manson Eyes can’t, as usual, handle the truth. She let the lie roll on and on, laced with Christian gobbledegook:

“This happened and as of today the United States is willingly, knowingly, intentionally sending arms to terrorists. Now what this says to me, I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, as I look at the End Times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s End Times history. Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand. When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.”

Apparently the Representative of Vaccine Hysteria forgets the words of Genesis 9:11: “I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.” In other words, Yahweh ain’t gonna do no more what he did to Noah. That’s also why the first nine generations of the bible never saw a rainbow.

So now Bachmann has become an eschatologist (for those of you who are not theologically inclined, eschatology is the religious study of the end of the world), and claims that Obama is leading us into the end times. I guess she hasn’t heard that all good and true Christians are supposed to want the End Times, and to do everything they can to bring them about (this is the religious rationale for supporting Israel). Instead of hating President Obama, she should be supporting him.

Bachmann is in fine company. Thousands of people have predicted the end of the world, and sometimes, people actually paid attention and wrote these predictions down. Fortunately, these would-be prophets are about as right as Republicans when it comes to the future. I just looked out my front door, and, providing reality is not purely subjective, none of them have come true so far. I wonder what makes Bachmann think she can do any better than her predecessors. A partial list is given for your consideration (My source is Wikipedia; the snark is mine). I leave it as an exercise for the reader to pick the most plausible one.

634 BCE – Romans feared the city would be destroyed in the year 120 AUC. The first known round number prediction.

389 BCE – Romans again feared that the city would be destroyed in the year 365 AUC. Doomsayers also like the number 365.

33 CE – Jesus tells his Apostles that the End will come “within their lifetimes”. Since that didn’t happen, how true can the rest of the New Testament be?

66 CE – Essene Jews saw revolt against Rome as the end times battle.

365 – Hilary of Poitiers also bases his prediction on the number of days in a year.

400 – Martin of Tours says that the Antichrist had already been born. Someone should have told him that wouldn’t happen until 4 August 1961.

500 – Hippolytus of Rome, Sextus Julius Africanus and Irenaeus expects the end of the world on a round number (reinforcing a habit).

793 – Spanish Monk Beatus of Liébana says Christ will return on 6 April.

800 – Sextus Julius Africanus revises his date of 500 to 800, sticking with round numbers.

799–806 – Gregory of Tours calculates a date between 799 and 806. History records that he could never balance his checkbook, either.

992–995 – Various Christians decide that since Good Friday and the Feast of the Annunciation happen on the same day, something bad is going to happen, like when payday is on a Friday the 13th.

1000 – Pope Sylvester II expects the end of the world on a really nice round number.

1033 – Since the world didn’t end 1000 years after Christ was born, various Christians figures it would end 1000 years after his death.

1186 – John of Toledo predicts the end times based on astrology (a practice forbidden by the church and the Bible).

1260 – Joachim of Fiore says that the Millenium would begin sometime between 1200 and 1260. His descendants all now hold jobs scheduling cable TV installation appointments.

1284 – Pope Not-so-Innocent III predicts the end 666 years after the rise of Islam. 666 will come back to haunt doomsayers.

1290 – Joachim of Fiore’s followers, preparing for their hereditary careers, reschedule doomsday to 1290…and 1335.

1335 – Joachim of Fiore’s prediction fails again.

1346-1351 – Black Plague: still not the end – unless your immune system isn’t up to snuff.

1370 – Jean de Roquetaillade says that the Antichrist is already here and the Millennium would begin in 1368 or 1370. The Joachimites were jealous.

1378 – Arnaldus de Villa Nova: another Joachimite who doesn’t do any better than his leader.

1504 – Sandro Botticelli believes the end times have already begun, and that the Millennium would come along sooner or later. God must not have been paying attention.

1524 Feb 20 – London astrologers predict a second Great Flood on 1 February, apparently forgetting Genesis 9:11 (and the biblical prohibition against forecasting the future). 20,000 Londoners leave town and King Henry VIII takes the opportunity to expand the palace grounds over the now-vacant lots.

1524 Feb 20 – Astrologer Johannes Stöffler predicts the end on the basis of a planetary alignment in Pisces. It turned out to be a bit fishy.

1524–1526 – Thomas Müntzer says that these years are the start of the Millennium. His followers were killed by government troops and he was tortured and beheaded, meaning that he was partly right, just limited in his scope.

1528 – Johannes Stöffler fails again, his stars slowly setting.

1533 – Melchior Hoffman, a member of the same cult sect denomination as Müntzer says that 144,000 people would be saved, while the rest of the world would die by the eventual invention and consumption of fast food (death by frying).

1534 – Jan Matthys makes a cheesy forecast that the world would end on 5 April and only the city of Münster would survive.

1555 – Pierre d’Ailly says the end of the world would be in the 7000th year after creation. Another round number freak but with a different approach.

1585 – Michael Servetus claims, in his book The Restoration of Christianity, that the devil had taken over the Church and the council of Nicea in 325CE, and that the intervening years had been the expected Tribulation. No, Mike, it only seemed like a tribulation.

1600 – Martin Luther predicts the end no later than 1600…but he isn’t really sure. He was still trying to clean up after nailing his ninety-five feces to the church door in Wittenberg..

1624 Feb 1 – London astrologers fail again with their next flood.

1648 – Rabbi Sabbatai Zevi uses the kabbalah to predict the arrival of the Messiah, who is more than fashionably late.

1654 – Astronomer Helisaeus Roeslin bases his prediction on a 1572 Nova. Nobody knows how he got his hands on a time-traveling Chevrolet.

1654 – Bishop James Ussher publishes his calculation of the date of the Creation the night preceding 23 October 4004 BCE. His followers later assert that the world would end exactly 6000 years later.

1656 – Christopher Columbus had predicted in 1501 that the world would end in 1656.

1658 – Christopher Columbus later revised his 1501 prediction and regurgitated Pierre d’Ailly’s prediction with a different creation date. He said the world was created in 5343 BCE, and would last 7000 years. Remember, he also thought that he had reached India.

1666 – Rabbi Zevi, having failed to recognize the Messiah if he had, indeed come eighteen years earlier, tries again for 1666. Again, no soap.

1666 – The Fifth Monarchists get their undies in a bunch over a year with the numbers 666, 100,000 Londoners dying of plague and the Great Fire of London. Their descendants rename US highway 666 to U.S. Route 491 in 2003.

1688 – John Napier, mathematician and inventor of “Napier’s Bones”, an early mechanical calculator himself calculates the end for this year from information in the Book of Revelation

1694 – John Mason (Anglican priest), Johann Heinrich Alsted (German Calvinist minister) and Johann Jacob Zimmermann (German theologian and mathematician). A banner year for failed predictions everywhere.

1697 – Cotton Mather makes first American prediction.

1700 – John Napier, after his first prediction failed, maybe used his “Bones” calculator for a second try. He should have waited for Texas Instruments.

1716 – Cotton Mather tries again.

1736 – Cotton Mather proves a third time that he’s no better at eschatology than he was at theology.

1780 May 19 – Connecticut General Assembly think smoke from a forest fire and fog on a cloudy day was the skies turning dark, heralding the end of the world. And you thought the Republican Party didn’t get going until 1854.

1789 – Pierre d’Ailly’s revised 14^th-Century prediction said the Antichrist would be born in this year. No Antichrist, but the US Constitution did get ratified.

1792 – In two shaky predictions, the Shakers look for the end in both 1792 and 1794. So why was their furniture built to last?

1793–1795 – Retired sailor Richard Brothers keeps annoying people by insisting the Millennium will begin between 1793 and 1795.

1795 – While campaigning for the release of retired sailor Richard Brothers from an insane asylum, Nathaniel Brassey Haled says that the world would end on 19 November.

1836 – John Wesley, Methodist church founder says that Revelation 12:14 means that Christ would come sometime between 1058 and 1836. He was running out of time. Revelation 12:14 says, ” And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent.” Wesley was as batty as Bachman is.

1843 Apr 28 – The Millerites, followers of Adventist/Baptist preacher, predict the end on this day.

1843 Dec 31 – Millerites again.

1844 Mar 21 – William Miller cons the Millerites one more time

1844 Oct 22 – Millerites prove they can be fooled again – lack of doom and destruction become known as the “Great Disappointment”. Too bad all predictions don’t adopt the title.

1847 – George Ramp, founder of the Harmony Society, declares that Jesus will return before he died. It is 7 August, and he is on his deathbed. As it turned out, Jesus wasn’t the one doing the traveling.

1853–1856 – Crimean War thought to be Battle of Armageddon. Maybe Jesus was busy reading Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade.

1862 – Scottish minister John Chumming decides that since it was 6000 years since Creation, the world would had passed its “use by” date..

1874 – Charles Take Russell predicts Jesus would return. When nothing happens, Russell claims Jesus is here but “invisible”.

1881 – 15^th-century soothsayer Mother Shipton was quoted”The world to an end shall come, In eighteen hundred and eighty one”. A book of her “prophecies, published in 1862, was later proved to be a forgery, but this didn’t stop people from believing it. That volume is now use as the factchecking handbook at Fox News, whose followers also believe even when proven wrong.

1890 – Native American spiritualist Wovoka expects the end of the world on a somewhat round number. He’s late, as the Native Americans’ world ended in 1492.

1892 – Pyramidologist Charles Piazzi Smyth bases his research on the dimensions of the Great Pyramid and concludes that the End will happen sometime between 1892 and 1911. He goes into a deep depression when he discovers that his calculations should have been based on the pyramid of Sneferu. On being informed that the Giza pyramid had been built by space aliens and its dimensions actually encoded the directions to the home planet, his depression becomes fatal.

1901 – The Catholic Apostolic Church, founded in 1831, hold that the world would end when the last of its founders died. Since their main purpose was bringing The immediate Second Coming of Christ, it’s a wonder that the elders weren’t bumped off to hurry things up. The CAC is still in existence, but its members wonder why.

1910 – French astronomer Camille Flammarion says Halley’s Comet would poison the Earth’s atmosphere. People buy “Comet Pills” to counteract the poison.

1914 – Charles Take Russell mistakes a secular war (WWI) for Armageddon.

1918 – The International Bible Students Association hold that their church will be “glorified” in the spring on 1918. The students spend the entire summer in detention.

1920 – Jehovah’s Witless elder Raymond Franz says that the world will descent into anarchy in 1920. The anarchy arrived, but it remained confined to the Witlesses.

1925 – Seventh-day Adventist Margaret Rowen says the angel Gabriel told her the world would end at midnight 13 February (incidentally, a Friday). On 28 November the Grand Ole Opry debuts on radio, which amounts to the same thing. Gabriel was only off by 288 days.

1935 – Evangelist Wilbur Voliva says “the world is going to go ‘puff’ and disappear” in September. On the fifteenth, the Nuremberg Laws go into effect, making him one of the more accurate predictors in history.

1936 – Herbert W. Armstrong (Garner Ted’s daddy) says only his followers, members of the Worldwide Church of God would be saved. Present-day Tea Partiers say the same thing.

1941 – Some Jehovah’s Witnesses which broke off from the Bible Student movement, predict Armageddon for this year. Apparently the students didn’t learn.

1943 – Herbert W. Armstrong wrong again (just like the Tea Party).

1954 – The UFO cult Brotherhood of the Seven Rays told by leader Dorothy Martin that the world will be flooded on 21 December. She directs her followers to divest themselves of all worldly goods and wait for rescue from space. On 22 December, her followers quit.

1959 – 2nd Prophet of the Branch Davidians Florence Houteff predicts the apocalypse from Revelation will be on 22April. This causes a split in the group, ultimately leading to David Koresh. There was an apocalypse, but not for another thirty-four years. And thirty-six years.

1962 Feb 4 – Jeane Dixon with more astrological nonsense, says a planetary alignment will destroy the Earth. She forgets to explain why previous alignments hadn’t already done so.

1967 Aug 20 – George Van Tassel predicts Soviet nuclear strike. He is supposedly channeling an alien named Ashtar, later revealed to be ALF.

1967 – People’s Temple founder Jim Jones foretells a nuclear war. Eleven years later he tries another way.

1969 – Charles Manson tries to start it himself.

1972 – Herbert W. Armstrong swings and misses for strike three.

1973 – Children of God leader David Berg says that Comet Kohoutek will crash and burn up the world sometime between 11 and 21 January. Kohoutek ended up disappointing both Berg and comet watchers.

1975 – Three times was not a charm for Herbert W. Armstrong. Like the Tea Party, he never learns from his mistakes.

1975 – Nine years previously the Jehovah’s Witnesses publication ran an article that claimed that the fall of 1975 would be 6,000 years after creation, and, therefore, the end, shortchanging Pierre d’Ailly by 1,000 years. They also aren’t any more accurate than d’Ailly. Strike three.

1981 – Calvary Chapel founder Chuck Smith predicts the baby boomers will be the last generation. The boomers’ parents wish their generation had been the last.

1982 Mar 10 – John Gribbin says Jupiter’s gravity will tear the Earth apart. Like Jeane Dixon, he fails to explain why previous alignments hadn’t already done so.

1985 – Minister Lester Sumrall writes a book titled I Predict 1985. The next year, he publishes a book titled Oops 1986.

1988 – Former NASA engineer Edgar C. Whisenant writes 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988 explaining that the Rapture of Revelation will occur between 11 and 13 September 1988.

1988 – On 3 October, Edgar C. Whisenant: realizes he should have postponed publication.

1989 Edgar C. Whisenant’s book is sold with 1988 scratched out and 1989 written in magic marker.

1990 – New Age guruess Elizabeth Clare Prophet, getting carried away with her name, says a 12-year-long nuclear war will start on 23 April. She has her followers to build a shelter filled with food and weapons. Eight years later, she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

1990 – Pat Robertson publishes The New Millennium, which insists destruction will occur on 29 April 2007.

1991 – Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson says the Messiah will arrive at Rosh Hashana. It turns out that the sound of the coming was just a badly tuned shofar.

1991 – Louis Farrakhan mistakes the Gulf War for the Battle of Armageddon.

1993 – David Berg, unfazed by his survival of Comet Kohoutek, gets it wrong again.

1994 Sep 6 – Harold Camping tries for the first time.

1994 Sep 29 – Harold Camping: strike two.

1994 Oct 2 – Harold Camping: strike three. He’s no better than Armstrong, the Witlesses or the Tea Party.

1995 Mar 31 – Harold Camping proves he’s no better than the Millerites.

1996 – Psychic Sheldon Nidre foresees the arrival of angels in 16 million space ships. He fails to explain why angels need to ride in UFOs.

1997 Mar 26 – Marshall Applewhite and Heaven’s Gate suicides. Proof that stupidity should be the national sport.

1997 Oct 23 – James Ussher, who calculated the time, day and year of the creation, says this would be the end (6000 years after creation).

1998 – Taiwanese cult leader Hon-Ming Chen, says God will come to Earth in a flying saucer at 10:00 am on 31 March. Not only that, but – Surprise! Surprise! God would look exactly like Hon-Ming Chen! How convenient! Supposedly, Chen would be “translated to heaven” so he wouldn’t be mistaken for a deity. On 25 March God was to appear on channel 18 on every TV set in the US. On 25 March, channel 18 in my hometown ran a Gilligan’s Island marathon.

1999 – In a banner year for End Times predictions, The Amazing Criswell says “lights out” would be on 18 August. He had also predicted that Plan 9 From Outer Space .would be a blockbuster hit and the breakout movie of 1959.

1999 – Language maven Charles Berlitz has the what, but not the how. He does say that it may involve nuclear devastation, asteroid impact, pole shift, other earth changes or sloppy enunciation.

1999 – After failing to be recognized as a deity last year, Hon-Ming Chen predicts a nuclear war.

1999 – Yale University President Timothy Dwight IV sees Christ’s millennium beginning.

2000 – Many expect the end of the world or horrible disasters (Y2K) to greet New Years’ Day on another round number, including Isaac Newton, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, Edgar Cayce, Sun Myung Moon Johnathan Edwards and the thousands of saps who built bunkers and hoarded MREs. Lester Sumrall publishes I Predict 2000.

2007 – Pat Robertson’s 1990 prediction for 29 April, like everything else he says, is wrong (What? People still listen to this senile old fart?). Nothing is mentioned on The 700 Club.

2008 – Starting up the Large Hadron Collider on 10 September will produce micro black holes that will eventually swallow the Earth. Construction delays postpone doomsday until 30 March 2010. After several years of operation, no holes yet.

2008 Nov 4 – Barack Obama (the Antichrist) elected President of the US. Republican and fundie heads explode, their world ends.

2009 – Tea Party starts a five-year whine that having a Kenyan Muslim Socialist Fascist liberal tyrant commie member of a radical Black Christian church in the White House means the United States, if not the whole world, is doomed.

2011 May 21 – Harold Camping rides again.

2011 Oct 21 – Harold Camping proves you can’t keep an old fool down. Claims that the May date was just the judgement and this date would be the end.

2012 – José Luis de Jesús, founder of Miami’s Growing In Grace International Ministry, says that governments and economies will collapse on 30 June and he and his followers will gain the ability to fly and walk through walls. Since 1 July 2012, de Jesús has been in a coma due to head injuries sustained trying to fly through a wall.

2012 Nov 6 – Obama re-elected; fundies shocked that he hasn’t revealed his horns, tail and pitchfork. Some suspect that he has no reflection.

2012- Various gullible idiots, not content with one mythology’s failed predictions, turn to misinterpreting the religion of the Mayans, about which most of them know nothing, and, spurred by a really crappy movie, decide the world will fall apart on 21 December. Other than the death of Iron Butterfly bassist Lee Dorman, nothing significant happens that day.

2012- Warren Jeffs, the Fundamentalist Mormon leader, wants something to look forward to other than a life+20-year prison sentence, declares the end on 23 December..

2012- Eight days later, Warren Jeffs blames his prediction’s failure on his followers’ “lack of faith”.

2013 Oct 1 – Government enacts Affordable Care Act; Republicans shut down government in hopes of ending the world. Shocked to find out that the rest of the world doesn’t care.

2013 Oct 7 – Michele Bachman blames the end times on President Obama, not realizing that as the Antichrist, he plays a vital role in the Second Coming.

2020 – Jeane Dixon tries again. After the failure of her 1962 prediction, she settled on a date when she knew she probably wouldn’t be around to be embarrassed by it.

5,000,000,000 – Various scientists anticipate the sun will expand into a red giant and engulf the Earth. That’s hard to argue with.

5.000.000.001 – The Tea Party blames the death of the sun on President Obama.

-E.A. Blair

___

The Michele Bachmann source photograph is a Creative Commons licensed image from photographer Gage Skidmore.

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The Tea Party As A Religion

The Tea Party As A Religion

Dishheads know I believe that you cannot understand the current GOP without also grasping how bewildered so many people are by the dizzying onset of modernity. The 21st Century has brought Islamist war to America, the worst recession since the 1930s, a debt-ridden federal government, a majority-minority future, gay marriage, universal healthcare and legal weed. If you were still seething from the eruption of the 1960s, and thought that Reagan had ended all that, then the resilience of a pluralistic, multi-racial, fast-miscegenating, post-gay America, whose president looks like the future, not the past, you would indeed, at this point, be in a world-class, meshugganah, cultural panic.

When you add in the fact that the American dream stopped working for most working-class folks at some point in the mid 1970s, and when you see the national debt soaring from the Reagan years onward, made much worse by the Bush-Cheney years, and then exploded by the recession Bush bequeathed, you have a combustible mixture. It’s very easy to lump all this together into a paranoid fantasy of an American apocalypse that must somehow be stopped at all cost. In trying to understand the far-right mindset – which accounts for around a quarter of the country – I think you have to zoom out and see all of this in context.

Many of us found in Barack Obama a very post-ideological president, a pragmatist, a Christian, and a traditional family man, and naively ;believed that he could both repair the enormous damage done by the Bush-Cheney administration and simultaneously reach out to the red states as well. I refuse to say the failure is his. Because he tried. For years, he was lambasted by the left for being far too accommodating, far too reasonable, aloof, not scrappy enough, weak … you know the drill by now. In fact, he was just trying to bring as much of the country along as he could in tackling the huge recession and massive debt he inherited at one and the same time, and in unwinding the 9/11 emergency, and in ending two wars and the morally and legally crippling legacy of torture (about which the GOP is simply in rigid denial).

Obama got zero votes from House Republicans for a desperately needed stimulus in his first weeks in office. So I cannot believe he could have maintained any sort of detente with the Republican right, dominated by the legacy of Palin, rather than McCain. But the healthcare reform clearly ended any sort of possibility of coexistence – and the cold civil war took off again. The first black president could, perhaps, clean up some of the mess of his predecessor, but as soon as he moved on an actual substantive change that he wanted and campaigned on, he was deemed illegitimate. Even though that change was, by any standards, a moderate one, catering to private interests, such as drug and insurance companies; even though it had no public option; even though its outline was the same as the GOP’s 2012 nominee’s in Massachusetts, this inching toward a more liberal America was the casus belli. It still is – which is why it looms so large for the Republican right in ways that can easily befuddle the rest of us.

But it is emphatically not the real reason for the revolt. It is the symptom, not the cause. My rule of thumb is pretty simple: whenever you hear a quote about Obamacare, it’s more illuminating to remove the “care” part. And Obama is a symbol of change people cannot understand, are frightened by, and seek refuge from.

That desperate need for certainty and security is what I focused on in my book about all this, The Conservative Soul. What the understandably beleaguered citizens of this new modern order want is a pristine variety of America that feels like the one they grew up in. They want truths that ring without any timbre of doubt. They want root-and-branch reform – to the days of the American Revolution. And they want all of this as a pre-packaged ideology, preferably aligned with re-written American history, and reiterated as a theater of comfort and nostalgia. They want their presidents white and their budget balanced now. That balancing it now would tip the whole world into a second depression sounds like elite cant to them; that America is, as a matter of fact, a coffee-colored country – and stronger for it – does not remove their desire for it not to be so; indeed it intensifies their futile effort to stop immigration reform. And given the apocalyptic nature of their view of what is going on, it is only natural that they would seek a totalist, radical, revolutionary halt to all of it, even if it creates economic chaos, even if it destroys millions of jobs, even though it keeps millions in immigration limbo, even if it means an unprecedented default on the debt.

This is a religion – but a particularly modern, extreme and unthinking fundamentalist religion. And such a form of religion is the antithesis of the mainline Protestantism that once dominated the Republican party as well, to a lesser extent, the Democratic party.

It also brooks no distinction between religion and politics, seeing them as fused in the same cultural and religious battle. Much of the GOP hails from that new purist, apocalyptic sect right now – and certainly no one else is attacking that kind of religious organization. But it will do to institutional political parties what entrepreneurial fundamentalism does to mainline churches: its appeal to absolute truth, total rectitude and simplicity of worldview instantly trumps tradition, reason, moderation, compromise.Francis Wilkinson has studied the scholarship of Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, authors of The Churching of America 1776-1990. He wrote a passage yesterday that resonated with me:

An important thesis of the book is that as religious organizations grow powerful and complacent, and their adherents do likewise, they make themselves vulnerable to challenges from upstart sects that “impose significant costs in terms of sacrifice and even stigma upon their members.” For insurgent groups, fervor and discipline are their own rewards.

Right now, the Republican Party is an object of contempt to many on the far right, whose adamant convictions threaten what they perceive as Republican complacency. The Tea Party is akin to a rowdy evangelical storefront beckoning down the road from the staid Episcopal cathedral. Writing of insurgent congregations, Finke and Stark said that “sectarian members are either in or out; they must follow the demands of the group or withdraw. The ‘seductive middle ground’ is lost.”

In other words, this is not just a cold civil war. It is also a religious war – between fundamentalism and faith, between totalism and tradition, between certainty and reasoned doubt. It may need to burn itself out – with all the social and economic and human damage that entails. Or it can be defeated, as Lincoln reluctantly did to his fanatical enemies, or absorbed and coopted, as Elizabeth I did hers over decades. But it will take time. The question is what will be left of America once it subsides, and how great a cost it will have imposed.

(Photos: from a Tea Party rally, Ken Cucinnelli, far right candidate for governor of Virginia, and Michele Bachmann, apocalyptic prophet, by Getty Images.)

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America’s Christian Right Call for Military Takeover and Martial Law

Joyner: ‘Our Only Hope Is A Military Takeover’

by Kyle Mantyla

On yesterday’s episode of “Prophetic Perspective on Current Events,” Rick Joyner declared that democracy in America has failed and that the nation might not last even to the end of President Obama’s term, warning that we are heading for a tyranny from which we can only be saved by a military takeover.

“There’s no way our republic can last much longer,” Joyner said, adding that “we’re headed for serious tyranny” because the electoral system is so broken that the leaders we need who can save this nation will never win office.  That is why “our only hope is a military takeover; martial law”:

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Report on Hate and Extremism

New SPLC Report on Hate and Extremism

The Year in Hate and Extremism – By Mark Potok

Capping four years of explosive growth sparked by the election of America’s first black president and anger over the economy, the number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment “Patriot” groups reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012, while the number of hard-core hate groups remained above 1,000. As President Obama enters his second term with an agenda of gun control and immigration reform, the rage on the right is likely to intensify.

The furious reaction to the Obama administration’s gun control proposals is reminiscent of the anger that greeted the passage of the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 ban on assault weapons supported by another relatively liberal Democrat — Bill Clinton. The passage of those bills, along with what was seen by the right as the federal government’s violent suppression of political dissidents at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in the early 1990s, led to the first wave of the Patriot movement that burst into public consciousness with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The number of Patriot groups in that era peaked in 1996 at 858, more than 500 groups fewer than the number active in 2012.

For many, the election of America’s first black president symbolizes the country’s changing demographics, with the loss of its white majority predicted by 2043. (In 2011, for the first time, non-white births outnumbered the births of white children.) But the backlash to that trend predates Obama’s presidency by many years. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of hate groups rose from 602 to more than 1,000, where the count remains today. Now that comprehensive immigration reform is poised to legitimize and potentially accelerate the country’s demographic change, the backlash to that change may accelerate as well.

While the number of hate groups remained essentially unchanged last year — going from 1,018 in 2011 to 1,007 in 2012 — the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) count of 1,360 Patriot groups in 2012 was up about 7% from the 1,274 active in 2011. And that was only the latest growth spurt in the Patriot movement, which generally believes that the federal government is conspiring to take Americans’ guns and destroy their liberties as it paves the way for a global “one-world government.” From a mere 149 organizations in 2008, the number of Patriot groups shot up to 512 in 2009, jumped again to 824 in 2010, and then skyrocketed to 1,274 in 2011 before hitting their all-time high last year.

Now, in the wake of the mass murder of 26 children and adults at a Connecticut school and the Obama-led gun control efforts that followed, it seems likely that that growth will pick up speed once again.

More: The Year in Hate and Extremism

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Obama Murders George W. Bush’s Dog In Cold Blood

Obama Murders George W. Bush’s Dog In Cold Blood

 Author:   Bruce Myron Danus

Today, Flags will be flown at half-mast. It is a day that will live in infamy. Horrible crimes have been commited all across America, yet none stands out more clearly than the fact that our “President” is a cold-blooded murderer.

That’s right, “President” Barrack Obama has gone into a tribal rage and murdered Barney Bush, the beloved former First Dog. The picture above clearly shows Obama going into his crazy Sub-Saharan Tribal hunting rage and murdering Barney, fortunately, the Secret Service was able to rescue Barney away from Obama before he turned that poor animal into a meal fit for a Kenyan because we all know that Obama has eaten many dogs in the past. You can not deny photographic proof.

While this is possibly the most tragic event to have happened since the Chinese bombed Pearl Harbor, it does have a happy side to it. “President” Obama is currently working on banning all guns from the law-abiding citizens of America, allowing only illegal Mexicans and sin-skinned gang bangers/cracked coke cane and marijuanas dealers to own them. Now, however, we have proof that guns are only a problem when they are operated by the darker sub-species of humanity. Now we need to petition the Senate to ban all non-whites from owning anything that can be used as a weapon. If even the “President” of our great Country can’t control his tribal rage, and will murder an innocent creature in cold-blood, we must protect ourselves against this threat.

Senator August Weisz has already added a bill in the Idaho State Senate to ban non-Whites from owning weapons and putting ridiculously large wheels on any vehicle not made for off-roading. The rest of the Nation needs to follow his lead, or this Great Country will fall. This is the thanks that we get for bringing these types to America, giving them jobs and a place to live, and taking them from the jungles where they had to fear for their lives at every moment due to lion attacks. I guess the old saying is true, “You can take the tribal types from the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the tribal types”.

We must work together to end this senseless violence and pass this new law. Join with me to ban all Non-Whites from owning weapons. This should actually be a Worldwide law, but we will need to start with America, because the rest of the World follows our lead.

God bless you all, and have a safe day.

Justice Department Paper on Drones Leaked

An Air Force RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle as reported by ABC News.

NBC News reportedly obtained and subsequently published a previously confidential Justice Department white paper concerning the use of deadly drone strikes on American citizens. The paper addresses guidelines and circumstances for executing such strikes.

Human rights advocates are concerned the guidelines are poorly defined and leave far too much room for interpretation. This creates a situation, they claim, conducive to ill advised and otherwise unlawful assassinations and executions. Concern is also being voiced that officials are publicly averting from discussion of such loosely defined procedures while implementing their use behind closed doors.

Contrastingly, those who support the policies outlined in the paper argue that such measures are required in order to enable the Justice Department to act in timely and effective manners. Severe circumstances call for severe measures, they suggest.

Meanwhile, John Brennan, nominated by President Obama to direct the Central Intelligence Agency, will soon appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss his nomination. Brennan has acted as Obama’s chief counterterrorism consultant while serving as Deputy National Security Advisor and Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. He is credited with designing what have come to be known as US drone assassination programs. The drone projects are reported to be controversial and complex, largely consisting of circumstances unknown to the American public.

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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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Bush Lackey Deflates Catholic Sean Hannity’s Right Wing Absurdities

Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey Deflates Hannity’s Claim That Obama’s Actions Are Unconstitutional

http://mediamatters.org/video/2013/01/16/bush-attorney-general-michael-mukasey-deflates/192293

 

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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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Crackpot Glenn Beck Salivates at Prospect of Civil War

Beck Provides More Insights into Obama’s Looming Civil War

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla

Earlier today we posted a clip of Glenn Beck warning that President Obama was trying to foment civil war in America and it was a topic he returned to on his radio broadcast this morning, explaining that since the moment Obama took office, he has been systematically pushing conservatives in an effort to get them to react violently while simultaneously constructing a narrative that blames conservatives for everything bad in the world, which will justify his crack down in response to the violent rebellion that he has intentionally provoked.

Then, just for good measure, Beck threw in some talk about Nazi death camps while proclaiming that he stands on the side of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Jesus:

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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.

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• Internet crackpots believe Newtown massacre was staged, citing “absolute” Photoshop proof (boingboing.net)
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Obama Antichrist | The Apocalypse is Nigh!

Erik Rush: Obama Bringing About the Apocalypse

SUBMITTED BY Brian Tashman

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/292341_Obama_Antichrist_%7C_The_Apocaly

Conservative columnist Erik Rush continues to test the boundaries of Poe’s Law in his latest column which argues that President Obama is part of a communist government-media-law school conspiracy that is bringing about the End Times:

At present, the snapshot looks like this: There is a dedicated communist residing in the White House in the form of one Barack Hussein Obama (This is probably not even his given name, but we won’t go there right now). Many conditions conspired to bring this about, and to keep Obama in power.

Part of it had to do with the cult of personality, particularly concerning his ethnicity. Part of it had to do with patriotic and otherwise engaged Americans having capitulated to the dictates and erroneous interpretations of American law proffered by communist academics and lawyers; this gave rise to the rise of progressive and Marxist thought and policies in America, which should have been addressed with extreme prejudice 70 years ago.

A starry-eyed press, indoctrinated into liberal-socialism by communist journalism school professors, have become no less than a state propaganda bureau. Thus, the press as most of us understand it, no longer exists. We can count on their doing all they can to aid Obama and the mission of the radical left in the foreseeable future. The most harmful realm in which they currently operate is that of nondisclosure, whereby they are withholding vast amounts of information concerning the criminality of this administration from the public, and the degree of power it continues to criminally usurp and coalesce.

…

Many Americans have wondered why, like the press, GOP leaders are also withholding vast amounts of information concerning the criminality of this administration from the public. Whether they are too well-sated and disconnected to care, or they are deliberately running interference for congressional socialists, it still spells complicity.

I don’t often go out on the limb of religious doctrine, but you have to admit that in the aggregate, this all lends credence to Armageddon dogma, whether one subscribes to the Millennialist view, of if one merely accepts the Book of Revelation (there being a difference). If one recognizes neither, there’s still the dystopian science fiction atrociously-oppressive government scenario. Interpreting it as politics as usual would be, in my view, a form of desperate denial.

Whether the individual American, apprised of these facts, determines to become a full-blown prepper in response to it, or to set aside a revolver with one bullet in the chamber, the days of sitting on the sidelines are over, like it or not.

Sorry if you though the Mayan end-of-the-world thing would be our “easy out…”

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• 2012 Apocalypse, the Rapture and Other Millennial Delusions (alternet.org)
• Obama Antichrist | The Apocalypse is Nigh! (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)