This country is fucked up beyond repair. There’s an IQ stratification that’s as obvious at this juncture as oil and water not mixing. On one hand you have a bunch of know-nothing, pitifully stupid Republican morons who revere Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Fox News, meanness, mindless racism and IGNORANCE. On the other hand you have smart people, Democrats and nearly 100% of all non-whites. Am I missing ANYTHING?

I used to think that the jingoistic Tea bagger-types would eventually just burn themselves out and overstay their welcome, before dispersing again. I’ve revised that opinion, they aren’t going anywhere. How can a 21st century democracy function when the dumbest 20% of the nation’s electorate is cohering into such an easily manipulated voting bloc? Be afraid, very, very afraid. No good can come of this, none.

Look deep into this man’s eyes. What do you see there?

Via Charles Johnson at Little Greenfootballs. Photo by Paul Gentile

 
Just when you think that it’s not even possible that Sharron Angle, the Nevada nincompoop running on the Republican ticket against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, could say or do something even nuttier than she already has, a past incident from her “career” has come back to haunt her: In 1991, Angle, who says her Senate candidacy is divinely inspired (“a calling from God” as she put it!) was part of a group who successfully lobbied that a local high school football team in Tonopah, NV, not be able to have black football jerseys.

Why? Because the color black is “evil” of course! That’s right, it’s a thoroughly evil color!

From The Pahrump Valley Times:

Also opposing the black jerseys was another group including Angle, a member, if not its leader.

They argued against our charges wearing black on religious grounds.

I cannot quote scripture as they did to justify their point but the gist of their argument was that black as a color was thoroughly evil, invoking the supernatural and especially the devil may take from dictionary definitions and not from scripture .

Angle may or may not have thought this a political statement. But she became a high profile advocate of a specific religious position during her very first campaign.

Whichever argument prevailed, school administrators caved in and prohibited the Muckers from wearing the black apparel.

And here we see another side of the multi-faceted, one-woman lunatic fringe that is Sharron Angle: She’s a low IQ combination of Gladys Kravitz, the nosey, disapproving neighbor on Bewitched and a desert dumbass version of Abigail Williams, one of the accusers in the Salem Witch Trials!

And SHE is best the Republicans can do to run against the Democrat’s Senate Majority Leader??? A foaming at the mouth Christian Fundamentalist lunatic who wants to ban alcohol, abortion, leave the UN and do away with the EPA, the IRS, Social Security and Medicare? A mentally ill person? Why, YES, apparently she is!
 

 
Angle strove religiously against black jerseys (Pahrump Valley Times)

 
On Inauguration Day 1989, Washington DC-based club manager and booker Robert Egger opened the DC Central Kitchen in order to use job training, meal distribution, and supporting local food systems to help fight poverty, hunger and homelessness in the nation’s capital.

It was about five months after a certain repugnant blowhard named Rush Limbaugh took his show into national syndication. Last week, that blowhard had this to say about non-profit organizations:
 

 
Egger’s thoughtful response—after the jump—should encourage all you Dangerous Minds readers to donate to the DC Central Kitchen today…watch till the end…
 

 
There is a frightening/disturbing and almost funny (almost) must-read on the Mother Jones website about “Tea party causality” Rep. Bob Inglis, a soon-to-be-former Republican congressman from South Carolina. Inglis, who seems like a decent enough guy—and not a hypocrite or a demagogue like many GOPers—was forced out, losing the primary, 71 to 29 percent, to a Tea party-backed candidate:

“They were upset with me,” Inglis recalls. “They are all Glenn Beck watchers.” About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, “They say, ‘Bob, what don’t you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.’” Inglis didn’t know how to respond.

“I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.”

Imagine having to pander to that low IQ mob? To his credit, Rep. Inglis did not try, but look what it got him: the bum’s rush. What wins primaries for conservative Republicans is the very same thing that loses them in the general election. Only the committed, hardline types ever come out to vote in the primaries.* If a Republican wants the nomination, they have to run pretty far right candidacies.

Look at some of the positions Meg Whitman took here in California on immigration during the primary. Whitman had to appeal to the Orange County conservatives to win the GOP nomination because they’re a reliable voting bloc in the primary and in the general election, as well. But gimme a break, this Fall, those “winning” positions will become albatross-like liabilities in a state with as many Latino voters as California has. From what I can tell, the only thing Whitman’s over $100 million dollars have done for her public image with CA voters is to remind them that she is a billionaire who once hit one of her Ebay employees and that they don’t like the positions they heard her espousing during the primary. By contrast, former CA governor and current CA Attorney General, Jerry Brown, has spent under $400,000 and is still beating Whitman in a recent poll.

Prediction: Given a little over 90 days to completely turn the collective stomach of the electorate seems to be a challenge the Tea party is up for. As long as the Democrats don’t screw up on the “get the vote out” stuff, I don’t think there is much chance for the GOP to retake the House or Senate. Brown-nosing the Glenn Beck set is going to be met with disaster at the voting booth, mark my words. As many fucking idiots as there are in this country, they’re still (slightly) outnumbered.

*I don’t give a shit about the primaries, do you? I know, for sure, that no matter which Democrats are on the ballot in November, that they’ll probably get my vote. I’ve never voted for a single Republican candidate in my life and I doubt I ever will.

 
This is hilarious: A Republican congressional candidate and his wife are caught on videtape taking down his opponents signs, by his opponent’s son! Brilliant!

From The Pensacola News Journal:

The video showing District 1 candidate Greg Brown and his wife, Jennifer, removing Doug Broxson’s campaign signs has led to a Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office investigation.

The campaign shenanigans happened Saturday night when Broxson’s son, Jason Broxson, hid an infrared video camera, often used by hunters to track game, in some bushes at state roads 87 and 89, north of Milton.

Minutes after the camera was deployed, the Browns happened by and removed [the signs]. Jason Broxson hid in some bushes and watched as the couple took the signs.

“Honestly, we just got lucky that he happened to show up right then,” said Kevin Brown, Broxson’s campaign manager. “Lord only knows the odds of that.”

Kevin Brown, who is not related to Greg Brown, said the camera was set up because Broxson was having problems with his signs being stolen and vandalized.

 
Earlier this year, in a stunning verbal gaffe, South Carolina’s (soon to be former) Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer compared helping the poor to feeding stray animals, because they “breed”! Obviously a Republican, Bauer, a wealthy white man who flies small planes, later said he wasn’t saying those who receive government help “were animals or anything else.” (What were you trying to say, fuck wit?) Well, he lost his election bid yesterday, coming in DEAD LAST in a state where over 50% of all schoolchildren receive subsidized or free lunches from the government. Clearly his political instincts are shit. Just like his brains.

This is someone showing you the very stuff his black, immoral little soul is made of. From CBS News:

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer said during a town hall meeting, as the Greenville News reported over the weekend. “You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

As the Greenville News notes, more than half of the students in South Carolina participate in a program that allows them to get their lunch for free, or at a reduced cost.

Bauer later said he wasn’t saying those who receive government help “were animals or anything else.”

What an utterly contemptible ass-clown this guy is. This is the kind of comment that haunts you forever, hanging around your neck like a big, dumb, dead albatross. Google Andre Bauer for the rest of his life, and there future employers, voters and anyone else who cares enough about this twat to type his name into a search field will find people like me telling this story. It serves him right, but the thing is, look at him. Do you think there is a chance in Hell that Andre Bauer has a self-reflexive bone in his body? Not a chance. If he did he wouldn’t think this way in the first place. He got what he deserved yesterday from the voters of his state: the bum’s rush. Karma’s a bitch, Andre!

And more in politics from the hilariously funny great state of South Carolina: A random unemployed guy who no one seems to know much of anything about (update) wins Democratic senate primary: The mysterious Alvin Greene has become “an inspiration for random unemployed dudes everywhere,” as Gawker tells it. The chairwoman of the S.C. Democratic party speculated to the AP that “people who didn’t know either candidate and voted alphabetically may help explain Greene’s win.”

Random Unemployed Dude Wins South Carolina Democratic Primary (Gawker)

South Carolina’s Mysterious Dem Senate Candidate Likes Showing Sexy Pics to College Ladies (Gawker)

 
When your country is going Socialist play guitar about it! I love the pig/politician/pervert. Must be a godless Democrat! Via Christian Nightmares:

A video for Christian shredder Joe Horn’s anti-Obama, anti-Socialism scare tactic propaganda song “Freedom”

 
Simply stated, for someone running for office to have done something like this—repeatedly—that person probably should not be running for that office in the first place. But don’t you love how the Republicans keep bringing the funny? This is too good.

From TPM:

An online news outlet in New York state has obtained dozens of emails, many of them racist and sexually graphic, which it reports were sent by Carl Paladino, the Tea-Party-backed Republican candidate for governor of New York, to a long list of political and business associates. One email shows a video of an African tribal dance, entitled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal,” while another depicts hardcore bestiality.

Paladino’s campaign manager, Michael Caputo, would not comment on specific emails, but acknowledged to TPMmuckraker that Paladino had sent emails that were “off-color” and “politically incorrect,” saying that few such emails represented the candidate’s own opinion. Caputo accused Democrats of wanting to change the subject from substantive issues to “having sex with horses.”

Um, I think it was you who gave them that particular “in” buddy! This is is hardly a good time to pull out the look what you made me do argument also! Why not blame Michael Steele?

Here’s a description of some of the emails:

• An October 2009 email with a photograph showing President Obama and the First Lady dressed in 70s-era blaxploitation pimp and prostitute costumes while attending a formal event at the White House.

• A December 2008 email showing a video of African tribesmen performing a traditional dance. The video is entitled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal.”

• A September 2009 email entitled, “Easy Steady Big Fella….XXXX,” with a photograph that graphically depicts a horse having sex with a woman.

• A January 2010 email, containing a hardcore pornographic video entitled “Miss France 2008 F[***]ing.”

• A July 2009 email showing a photograph of an airplane landing directly behind a group of black men. The caption reads: “Holy Sh*t. run ni**ers, run!”

Sez Paladino: “I’m going to be the same Carl I have always been. I’m not going out of my way to be blunt or politically correct or anything. I’m going to be me.”

Don’t ever change, Carl baby, don’t ever change…

 
Considering all of the ridiculous hyperbole from the Right—have any of you been watching Fox News?—David Frum, former speechwriter to President George W. Bush is the one character on either side who really nailed the political significance of what happened on Sunday: The Republican Party is toast!

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. [...]

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat. [...]

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

 
Waterloo (Frum Forum)

 
Is Sen. Jim Inhofe jealous of Sarah Palin’s starring role as pied piper to the idiot wing of the Republican party, or is he perhaps trying to position himself as a potential running mate for her in 2012? It’s hard to tell what the silliest Senator from Oklahoma was thinking, or if he’s really capable of much thinking at all. Witness what the witless Republican had waiting for him when he showed up in Copenhagen with his “message” of a Hollywood conspiracy that’s behind global warming:

Sen. Jim Inhofe flew across the Atlantic and ?

Apparently plenty damaged! This gorgeous graph shows a public largely deaf to the Republican message, except for the crazies, the birthers, the religious fanatics and the tea baggers. How do you recover from numbers like these? By next year? No way! I mean, not even a guy as oblivious to FACTS as Sean Hannity could spin this one positively! The Republican party has all but been abandoned except for the lunatic fringe!

There were many, many times during this, our Summer of Discontent when I despaired of seeing any substantive change in this country because of the loud-mouthed turnips at the town hall meetings egged on by the likes of Glenn Beck and his FOX News buddies, waving teabags and clogging up the television airways with stupidity on a nightly basis. But I kept my sanity by coming back to the incontrovertible fact that the Republicans have been basically out-flanked by population trends and the demographic zeitgeist is decidedly not with them moving forward.

It’s a toxic brand and it’s burning itself out with the hate and ignorance. Smart people do not want to hang around with idiots. And minorities are not welcome and never have been (as if).  Forty-somethings who cast their first vote for Reagan don’t want to be associated with these fools they have nothing in common with. It’s embarrassing to be Republican! The GOP’s adherents with brains mutinied a long time ago to the Libertarian Party, or became independents or even Democrats. The only ones sticking around are the low IQ buffoons with misspelled signs we see on FOX News shouting “ACORN!” and other nonsense.  Most of them are old and when they die off, they’re gone. Keep that in mind when you see these sad, nutty, angry idiots on TV next time. These people won’t be around forever. And when they’re gone, they will not be replaced.

And that is just the way it is. Nature is quite kind in that regard.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, progressive friends: No political party is immune from having a life-cycle and we’re about to see the end of the GOP’s. Good riddance, I say, I will piss on its grave.

Here’s an excerpt from a slightly less heated discussion about the above graph from Pollster:

The overall finding is simple—the GOP’s standing relative to the Democrats on both measures is worse than any opposition party in the sample. For instance, the Pew data show that the Republicans are currently viewed more negatively than any minority party in the previous four midterms in terms of both net favorables and the difference in net favorables between parties

The CBS results (not shown) are even more dramatic. In June, when the question was most recently asked, Republican net favorables were -30% and Democratic net favorables were 25%, which swamps the comparable results from the previous cycles.

In short, there’s no question that the GOP party brand is in worse shape than any opposition party in recent memory.

Assessing the GOP brand

The Nation excerpts Max Blumenthal’s new book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party. (Blumenthal is the journalist that uncovered the video of Sarah Palin being anointed by Kenyan “witch hunters.”)

The jacket copy makes it sound like a pure winner. Might have to order this one:

Republican Gomorrah is a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal and sordidmess from the dark heart of the forces that now have a leash on the party. It shows how those forces are the ones that establishment Republicans-like John McCain-have to bow to if they have any hope of running for President. It shows that Sarah Palin was the logical choice of a party in the control of theocrats. But more that just an expose, Republican Gomorrah shows that many of the movement’s leading figures have more in common than just the power they command within conservative ranks. Their personal lives have been stained by crisis and scandal: depression, mental illness, extra-marital affairs, struggles with homosexual urges, heavy medication, addiction to pornography, serial domestic abuse, and even murder. Inspired by the work of psychologists Erich Fromm, who asserted that the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture of personal crisis has defined the radical right, transforming the nature of the Republican Party for the next generation and setting the stage for the future of American politics.

The Nation’s excerpt focuses on the damage done to developing minds by batshit insane Republican home-school programs, focusing on school shooter (and Crowley/OTO enthusiast) Matthew Murray.

A few miles down the road from Colorado Springs [a home to James Dobson’s Focus on the Family], in the quiet bedroom community of Eldredge, a deeply disturbed young man named Matthew Murray followed the unfolding debacle at New Life Church [once under the stewardship of Pastor Ted Haggard] with an interest that bordered on obsession. Murray, a sallow-faced, bespectacled 24-year-old, had been indelibly scarred by a lifetime of psychological abuse at the hands of his charismatic Pentecostal parents. Murray’s mind became crowded with thoughts of death, destruction, and the killings he would soon carry out in the name of avenging what he called his “nightmare of Christianity”...

Murray lurched to the polar opposite edge of his parents’ fanatical faith, replacing their Bible as his inspiration with the writings of Aleister Crowley, a flamboyant, self-proclaimed Satanist. The fin de si?ɬ

Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell has, perhaps, just a teensy weensy bit of a right-wing authoritarian streak in him, what do you think? Well, McDonnell seems to think he’s going to get away with “re-branding” himself as a moderate. Although he’s trying to back peddle furiously to disassociate himself from his own words—good luck with this one, buddy—let’s hope the VA Democrats really stick it to this jerk in the general election. From The Washington Post:

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master’s thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as “detrimental” to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.” He described as “illogical” a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

The 93-page document, which is publicly available at the Regent University library, culminates with a 15-point action plan that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families—a vision that he started to put into action soon after he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

During his 14 years in the General Assembly, McDonnell pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper, including abortion restrictions, covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family. In 2001, he voted against a resolution in support of ending wage discrimination between men and women.

In his run for governor, McDonnell, 55, makes little mention of his conservative beliefs and has said throughout his campaign that he should be judged by what he has done in office, including efforts to lower taxes, stiffen criminal penalties and reform mental health laws.

—snip—

He argued for covenant marriage, a legally distinct type of marriage intended to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce. He advocated character education programs in public schools to teach “traditional Judeo-Christian values” and other principles that he thought many youths were not learning in their homes. He called for less government encroachment on parental authority, for example, redefining child abuse to “exclude parental spanking.” He lamented the “purging of religious influence” from public schools. And he criticized federal tax credits for child care expenditures because they encouraged women to enter the workforce.

“Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of nonparental primary nurture of children,” he wrote.

He went on to say feminism is among the “real enemies of the traditional family.”

There’s more! Oh yes, there is more…

‘89 Thesis A Different Side of McDonnell Va. GOP Candidate Wrote on Women, Marriage and Gays

She’s baaaack… Minnesota congresswoman and escaped mental patient, Michelle Bachmann continues to bring the crazy. They should probably institute an IQ test for potential candidates for Congress to weed the complete crackpots out, but what can you do? This lady was duly elected by the people of her district, TWICE. I guess that dumb people need representation, too and I do hope that her fellow opponents of health care for all our citizens take her advice. From The Minnesota Independent:

Bachmann was joined by North Carolina