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I voted Republican for the very first time in my life today

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Oh no you dit-ten…

Oh yes I did!
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.05.2012
09:01 pm
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New Obama conspiracy theory causes wingnut vs. wingnut rift!

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“Red diaper baby” Barack Hussein Obama II plots world domination.

I’ve already blogged here about the zany new Obama conspiracy theory documentary Dreams From My Real Father which puts forth the ludicrous “theory” that President Barack Obama’s father was not a Kenyan goat herder but rather a radical journalist nearly four decades older than his mother who was also an amateur pornographer…

Now the film is causing a rift in the wingnut ranks as “birther queen” dingbat Orly Taitz (and current GOP candidate for one the US Senate seats for California!) accuses WorldNet Daily and author Jerome Corsi (who himself has a lot—everything—riding on the “birther” fantasy) of “working for” someone else. But who?

TPM’s Michael Lester has made a “trash compactor” cut of the film’s kooky highlights (see below).  It’s a doozy. Via TPM:

“Dreams From My Real Father,” a 97-minute film narrated by an Obama impersonator, weaves the narrative that Obama’s grandfather wasn’t a furniture salesman but an undercover CIA agent who convinced Barack Obama Sr. to marry his teenage daughter to hide the fact that she was impregnated by a 55-year-old communist named Frank Marshall Davis.

The fake Obama narrator sets up the tale as the “the story I would have told if I were being honest with you.” Built through archival black and white footage, the film’s disclaimer states that it includes “re-creations of probable events, using reasoned logic, speculation, and approximated conversations in an attempt to provide a cohesive understanding of Obama’s history.”

Using that disclaimer, the filmmakers assert that Obama had a nose job ahead of his 2004 run for Senate, that his mother posed for naked photos when she was five weeks pregnant with him and that Bill Ayers nurtured Obama’s career.

The film is produced by Highway 61 Entertainment, the same company behind “Farewell Israel,” “Atomic Jihad” and the mockumentaries “Elvis Found Alive” and “Paul McCartney Really Is Dead.” Director Joel Gilbert, who has spoken at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), writes columns for FamilySecurityMatters.org, a website run by Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy.

The film has been favorably reviewed by WND’s Jerome R. Corsi, who wrote an entire book arguing that Obama’s birth certificate is a fake and that he was really born in Kenya and ineligible to be president of the United States.

But the suggestion that Obama really was born in Hawaii and that his father was an American citizen has some conspiracy theorists upset. Birther queen Orly Taitz is troubled by the film because it undermines the theory that Obama’s father had to be a U.S. citizen for him to be a “natural born citizen” (a qualification which would have eliminated several other presidents). WND and Corsi, wrote Taitz, are “trying to kill the case by making up an American citizen father for Obama.”

“Who are they working for? What incentive did they get to do so? Please, tell Corsi and Farah to stop this. Enough and enough,” she wrote.

Wingnut vs. wingnut!

Taitz later posted this on her website:

JEROME CORSI IS DESTROYING THE CASE ON WHICH I WORKED FOR 4 YEARS 24/7/365. HE IS GRATUITOUSLY MAKING UP AN AMERICAN FATHER FOR OBAMA. WHAT IS HIS MOTIVATION TO DO SO? TELL WND AND CORSI TO STOP THIS.

 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Who’s your REAL daddy?’; The new Obama conspiracy theory, mind-rot at its finest

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.16.2012
11:03 am
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Why Conservatives and Liberals see the world differently

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How absolutely grand it is to have a great American institution like Bill Moyers back on our television airways? After reading about Moyer’s reasons for returning to the public sphere—he feels compelled to re-enter the national conversation at what he believes to be a dark and critical juncture in American civic life—I had been greatly anticipating Moyers & Company. So far, the series has not disappointed, with a discussion on crony capitalism with Reagan’s budget director David Stockman and ace financial journalist Gretchen Morgenson, and a conversation on “winner-takes-all” politics with Yale professor Jacob Hacker and Berkeley’s Paul Pierson. We’ve only got him for two more years—Moyers will retire again when he turns 80—but it’s great to see him back conducting these meaty, intelligent and engaged conversations. Moyers & Company is among the very best programming that PBS has to offer.

On the most recent show, Moyers interviewed University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who many DM readers might be familiar with from his 2008 TED talk on the moral values that liberals and conservatives hold the most highly and how this influences their politics, and from his book The Happiness Hypothesis.

In his upcoming book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Professor Haidt aims to explain what it means when the other side “doesn’t get it” to both sides. He makes some terrifically good points during his interview with Moyers, especially when it comes to explaining how “group think” and “the hive mind” work on both extremes of the political spectrum in America (and in other countries, too).

As you can see in this piece, Haidt’s research is fascinating indeed, but I found that some of his premises and conclusions were extremely unsatisfying. Some seemed downright counter-intuitive. Unhelpful. Don’t get me wrong, I think this entire interview is worthwhile, thought-provoking—even essential—viewing no matter which bit of the political spectrum you might fall on yourself, but the more or less false assumption that seems to be at the heart of Haidt’s work—that both sides have come to their positions through equally intellectually defensible routes—made my face scrunch up in in an expression that some might describe as a look of “liberal condescension.”

You could say that “Well, isn’t that just what he’s talking about? You’re a socialist, so of course you’d see it that way!” but even if that’s true, let me offer up Exhibit A in a lazy, half-hearted—yet utterly definitive—argument-ending rebuttal: Orly Taitz, WorldNetDaily and the whole birther phenomenon.

How is it “balanced” to give obviously unbalanced people the benefit of the doubt? What would even be the point of that exercise? What purpose would it serve to a social scientist? If someone’s political positions can’t be reconciled with actual facts, then their political opinions are absolutely worthless.

Try having a rational political discussion with a LaRouchie sometime! It can’t be done.

People who have difficulty grasping the complexity of the world they live in should not be seen as coming to the table as equals with people who are not as intellectually challenged! This seems self-evident, does it not? The birther phenomenon among Republican voters was never some fringe faction within the greater GOP. It still isn’t.

It would be a waste of time to try to catalog every instance of ill-informed right-wingers who can’t spell “moron,” vehemently protest policies that would actually benefit their own lives, and who think that every single word in the Bible is the infallible utterance of God himself, but at least in this interview (his book isn’t out yet) Haidt fails to demonstrate why stupidity, superstition and flagrant lies about established historical facts deserve intellectual parity alongside of opinions borne of widely accepted science, common sense and a commonly shared national history, as opposed to the made-up one the Reichwing subscribes to.

The age-old trusim of “There are two sides to every story and the truth is somewhere in the middle” is no longer the case when you’re having a “philosophical disagreement” with a Drudge Report reader or Fox News fan who lives in their own private Bizzaro World where there is no difference between facts and Rush Limbaugh’s opinon . Internet comments that invoke conspiracy theories about Frances Piven, ACORN, the Tides Foundation, George Soros, Saul Alinsky, Van Jones or that comically conflate “Socialism” with “National Socialism” are dead-giveaways of a stunted intelligence on the other end of the keyboard. Teabaggers who want to pressure school textbook publishers to remove any mention of the Founding Fathers being slaveholders or Christianists who argue that Creationism is as equally valid as Darwin’s evolutionary theories should not be in a position to influence policy and yet in many parts of the country this is exactly what is happening, to the detriment of the school systems, the intellectual growth of the students who will be ill-prepared for higher education, etc. Does Haidt truly feel that these people who deny history and science itself came to their positions honestly and rationally? And if he doesn’t feel that way, wouldn’t that admission require a caveat so huge as to at least partially invalidate much of his take-away?

I’m intrigued by what his research has found, I’m far less impressed by how he interprets it.

I get that Haidt’s thesis must be presented in a manner which bends over backwards not to appear partisan, but when it’s been shown that a statistically significant percentage of lower IQ children tend to gravitate towards political conservatism in adulthood (read “Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice” at Live Science) I feel like Haidt might missing the boat entirely: What if the REAL revelation at the heart of his research is that there’s an unbridgeable IQ stratification in America due to our shitty public schools, and the malign influence of the churches and talk radio/Fox News that may have already rendered this country basically ungovernable. (Jonathan Haidt regularly asks his audiences to raise their hands to indicate if they self-identify as “liberal” or “conservative” and notes that when he’s speaking to an audience of academics, that over 90% tend to call themselves “liberals”—is this merely a coincidence? I should think not!).

I respect what Haidt is attempting to do with his research, but ultimately, watching this, I saw so many flaws in his assumptions and methodology (at least as he explains it here, which I suspect is adequate) that I can’t help feeling that someone else is going to come along later and take up some of the more valid points of his work, discard the less impressive parts and get it right. He’s on to something in a big way, but I have deep reservations with much of what he concludes.

Still, as I was saying before, this is some must-see TV. Most thinking people will find something of value here, for sure. If this is a topic that interests you, it’s a fascinating discussion.
 
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Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.06.2012
12:15 pm
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Republican birther kooks & Orly Taitz throw red-faced hissy fit in New Hampshire
11.30.2011
04:50 pm
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Wait, I thought the whole birther thing died out. No?

Maybe the Republicans in New Hampshire are just stupider than they are in the rest of the country?

Right Wing Watch reports that crazy lady Orly Taitz and half a dozen loony Republican legislators threw a red-faced group hissy fit when New Hampshire’s Attorney General Michael Delaney declined to review their “evidence” and kicked that can down to the state’s Ballot Law Commission.

In a mostly overlooked episode earlier this month, the so-called “Birther Queen” Orly Taitz appeared before the New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission to call for the removal of President Obama from the state’s presidential ballot. Taitz, the Soviet-born lawyer-dentist-real estate agent, has been on a multi-year mission to prove Obama is secretly Kenyan, and no amount of evidence will dissuade her. But she’s not alone – nine members of the NH state house signed on to her complaint.
 
It came as no surprise to see Taitz embarrassing herself in yet another venue, but I found it remarkable that there are still elected officials willing to lend their names to her effort. Then I watched the video of Taitz’s presentation and the angry antics of the state representatives supporting her, and it made more sense – they’re no better than Taitz.

 

 
Have a laugh at the expense of dumbshit GOP Rep. Harry Accornero who (STILL!) believes there is “overwhelming” evidence that Obama was not born in this country as he gets his panties in a twist with his incontinent anger towards the Ballot Law Commission asking them “Why don’t you rip up the Constitution and throw it out?” and telling them “You all should be accused of treason, and we’ll get people to do that.”

Oooooh, hollow threats from a Tea-brained birther moron. I’m sure the AG is quaking in fear over that one… Lawyers always love empty threats.
 

 
The Ballot Law Commision, of course, unanimously dismissed the complaint, causing several audience members to shout “traitors!” Then another Republican nutcase, Rep. Susan DeLemus, began berating NH Assistant Attorney General Matt Mavrogeorge. Repeatedly.

At one point Mavrogeorge and Assistant Secretary of State Karen Ladd locked themselves in an office “out of fear for their safety due to the aggressive behavior of the crowd that included several legislators.”

Regarding this preposterous incident, Attorney General Michael Delaney said, “No state employee should find himself in this situation, and I am asking the General Court to take whatever steps it deems appropriate concerning the standards of conduct exhibited by these elected officials.”

Via Granite State Progress/Right Wing Watch

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.30.2011
04:50 pm
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Hey, Californians: Vote, Baby Vote (And Stop Orly Taitz)!
06.08.2010
05:34 pm
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Attention California readers of Dangerous Minds: it’s primary day, so, like Deee-lite‘s Lady Kier says, vote, baby vote!  Especially you Republicans!  Only you can help put the brakes on the insanity that is Birther Queen, Orly Taitz, and her desire to clinch the GOP nomination for Secretary of State.  For those of you unfamiliar with this lawsuit-happy buddy of Michele Bachmann, here’s a snip from Salon:

Orly Taitz, who is a legitimately crazy person, is running for California secretary of state.  Taitz, a dentist and attorney, has dedicated her life to suing Barack Obama over and over again until he finally admits that he was secretly born in Kenya.  And she just might win the GOP nomination today.  Taitz’ opponent has apparently barely even campaigned, just relying on the fact that he’s running against a crazy person to win the nomination. (Taitz, meanwhile, has filed a number of suits against him, attempting to get him off the ballot because he was once a registered Democrat.)  But that might not be enough.

No, it “might” not.  As longtime GOP campaign strategist, Allan Hoffenblum, notes, “It will be a complete embarrassment if she wins, but these things can happen.”  Indeed, they can.  And as much as I’d love to witness the eruption of nuttiness that a Taitz win might trigger, that would pretty much sink the eventual GOP ticket (Republican Senate candidates Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore are doing whatever they can to flee her orbit), and, come November, California’s chances for political debate that somehow didn’t bring up, YET AGAIN, the notion of birth certificates.

So, regardless of your party of affiliation, if you’re a fan of democracy but a foe of idiocy, get thee to your local precinct (and if you Republicans are still on the fence, watch Taitz go batshit below)! 

 

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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06.08.2010
05:34 pm
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