Some words of wisdom for the Republican Party from last night’s Rachel Maddow Show:

“If you were the Republican Party, and you were going to give one of these groups of Americans veto power over who was going to be your presidential nominee…which of these groups would you [choose]? I mean, really? You’d give that power to the one at the very, very bottom, underneath the atheists? Really?”

In their hearts, they know she’s right…

But how does this explain why the Obama administration kowtows to the Tea party?
 

 
Over at Talking Points Memo they’ve got the summary of a very interesting new academic study done recently at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “Cultures of the Tea Party,” as the study is titled, uses polling data, and interviews with Tea party supporters at a gathering held in the state to provide a snapshot of the overall cultural attitudes of the movement.

The findings, represented on Monday at the American Sociological Association, purport that the defining attitudes of the Tea party sympathizers are “Authoritarianism, ontological insecurity (fear of change), libertarianism and nativism.” From TPM:

The study used polling of North Carolina and Tennessee, conducted by Public Policy Polling (D) in the Summer of 2010, and determined the cultural dispositions by measuring the responses of tea partiers to set questions. After PPP surveyed over 2,000 voters who were sympathetic to the Tea Party, researchers then reinterviewed almost 600 in the fall of 2010. Those interviews included everything from personality based queries like “Would you say it is more important that a child obeys his parents, or that he is responsible for his own actions?” to more political ones, like “Do you think immigrants who came into this country illegally but pay taxes and have not been arrested should be given the opportunity to become permanent legal residents?” The study also incudes interviews and short responses with ten participants at a Tea Party rally in Washington, NC.

“American voters sympathetic to the Tea Party movement reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration,” a statement accompanying the report reads, as the findings themselves point out a few disconnects between the what self-described members of the Tea Party say and their actual policy stances.

The report quotes one Tea Party activist as saying, “We don’t want the big government that’s taking over everything we worked so hard for…the government’s becoming too powerful… we want to take back what our Constitution said. You read the Constitution. Those values - that’s what we stand for,” but that sentiment is not reflected in the polling data from the surveys. From the report:

In our follow-up poll, 84% of those positive towards the TPM [Tea Party members] said the Constitution should be interpreted “as the Founders intended,” compared to only 34% of other respondents. Other respondents were also three times more likely not to have an opinion on the issue, highlighting the salience of the question for TPM supporters. Support for Constitutional principles is not absolute. TPM supporters were twice as likely than others to favor a constitutional amendment banning flag burning; many also support efforts to overturn citizenship as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment. That TPM supporters simultaneously want to honor the founders’ Constitution and alter that same document highlights the political flexibility of the cultural symbols they draw on.

The TPM supporters’ inconsistent views of the Constitution suggests that their nostalgic embrace of the document is animated more by a network of cultural associations than a thorough commitment to the original text. In fact, such inconsistencies around policy, whether on the right or left, highlight what many sociologists see as the growing importance of culture in political life. The Constitution - and Tea Party more generally - take on heightened symbolic value and come to represent a ‘way of life’ or a “world view” rather than a specific set of laws or policy positions.

This reminds me a lot of Canadian psychology professor Bob Altemeyer’s long-term study of cultural attitudes of conservatives, The Authoritarians, which is online in pdf format. Altemeyer’s studies reveal rightwing double standards, inconsistent beliefs, willful ignorance, misrepresentation of historical and scientific facts and bizarre justifications. It, too, is absolutely worth reading.

Quoting Altemeyer:

The second reason I can offer for reading what follows is that it is not chock full of opinions, but experimental evidence. Liberals have stereotypes about conservatives, and conservatives have stereotypes about liberals. Moderates have stereotypes about both. Anyone who has watched, or been a liberal arguing with a conservative (or vice versa) knows that personal opinion and rhetoric can be had a penny a pound. But arguing never seems to get anywhere. Whereas if you set up a fair and square experiment in which people can act nobly, fairly, and with integrity, and you find that most of one group does, and most of another group does not, that’s a fact, not an opinion. And if you keep finding the same thing experiment after experiment, and other people do too, then that’s a body of facts that demands attention.3 Some people, we have seen to our dismay, don’t care a hoot what scientific investigation reveals; but most people do. If the data were fairly gathered and we let them do the talking, we should be on a higher plane than the current, “Sez you!”

The comments thread at TPM is worth reading. I suspect that our thread here will be lively also!

 
Indiana state Republican Rep. Phil Hinkle, the hapless gay marriage opponent who made headlines earlier this month when he hired an 18-year-old rent boy via Craigslist using the email address from his legislative website, is resisting pressure from fellow Republicans to resign. Hinkle, who clings to the fig-leaf he’s not gay (why even bother with this nonsense?), has already been stripped of two committee chairmanships he held, but he’s not budging. Via The Indy Star:

State Rep. Phil Hinkle admitted Tuesday that he paid a young man $80 to have a good time. But Hinkle insisted he isn’t gay and doesn’t know why he did it.

He said that he understands why he’s being stripped of his committee chairmanships and that he won’t seek re-election. But he said he will not resign, despite House Speaker Brian Bosma’s call Tuesday to do so.

And he said he did nothing illegal with—or to—the young man and that he himself was the victim of a crime. But he said he would not file a police report.

—snip—

Hinkle’s version of what happened that night in Room 2610 at the JW Marriott hotel differs greatly from the version provided by the young man and his sister.

Kameryn Gibson, the 18-year-old who said he was looking for a “sugga daddy” in the Craigslist posting, told The Star that he tried to leave the room that night and called his sister Megan after Hinkle identified himself as a lawmaker. He also said Hinkle tried to keep him from leaving, exposed himself and then—after his sister arrived—offered them $100 cash, an iPad and a Blackberry to keep quiet.

Hinkle’s version: He never exposed himself and never offered anything to the Gibsons to keep quiet. Instead, he said, Kameryn Gibson stole those items when Hinkle was in the bathroom.

“These people,” Hinkle said, “are lying through their teeth.”

Kameryn and Megan Gibson stood by their story Tuesday.

 
Idiot, knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing preacher-man Damon Thompson leads a Christianist anti-gay hate rally for children.

“You may think you were born gay, but you cannot be born again gay!”

If Heaven is full of shitheads like Damon Thompson, who’d want to be stuck there for all of eternity?

Twisted and disturbing. You see the kid’s faces at the end. What kind of assholes would take their children to something like this?
 

 
Via Christian Nightmares

 
The day after the first leg of the Wisconsin recall elections, I thought the number of “We won!” emails coming from the various lefty and labor organizations I support seemed a little odd. Did we win? It sure didn’t look that way to me. If “we” would have won, the tallies would have been different, right?

Maybe they were half right. Wisconsin Democrats did, after all, oust two Republican senators in two of the very, very few successful recall races ever held in American history. Pity the other two races didn’t fall their way, but it’s certain that what happened in Wisconsin awakened an awful lot of people to what was going on in their state, the role of the Koch brothers in rightwing AstroTurf politics there and just how aggressive and vicious the GOP can get when they are in the majority in a legislative body.

The Republican majority now hinges on one vote in Wisconsin. Personally, I’d rate the glass more than half-full considering the power math of less than a year ago. There is little doubt that Democrats will retake the legislature next year.

The collective bargaining rights issue highlighted by the recall election in Wisconsin, as I’ve maintained here, has never been merely a statewide matter. It’s a national issue of great importance to the future of this country’s middle-class families. Wisconsin was the flash point. The first battle in a longer war.

When I stopped and thought about it, I realized what HAD been gained in Wisconsin and this is now coming much better into focus as Ohio Governor John Kasich and the Republican party seek to back-walk the deeply unpopular anti-labor bill SB 5—it’s not a law yet despite the GOP’s best efforts—and are asking Ohio Democrats and labor unions to withdraw a November referendum on it. The public opinion is decidedly against the Republicans and polling just a little over two months from the November 8 vote shows an overwhelming 54% to 36% gulf in favor of rejecting the bill.

With this much Republican blood in the water, why would Ohio Democrats be stupid enough to withdraw the referendum? AS IF the Republicans would ever pay them the same courtesy! It’s hilarious to watch Kasich say this shit! So craven! So… Republican.

So ridiculous!

I love watching a Republican grovel, don’t you?

Kasich and the Ohio Republicans have been knee-capped and they damn well know it. Working families across Ohio owe Wisconsin progressives their gratitude. We all do.

Good people of Wisconsin: You lit what might be a long fuse, as Rachel Maddow eloquently pointed out on her show last night:
 

 
The 1970 documentary Satanis: The Devil’s Mass is a goofy, occasionally fascinating, exploitation flick that takes us “behind the scenes” of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. It’s all rather silly and even though it contains plenty of nudity the overall effect is about as sexy as watching snails copulate.

The interviews with LaVey’s neighbors and followers are often hilarious. And LaVey oozes all of the smarmy charm of a used car salesman in a 5 dollar Halloween costume. This is sinema verite for the raincoat crowd.

NSFW unless you’re working in the anteroom of a cathedral in Hell.
 

 
Mother Jones found a video Michele Bachmann made during her time as a Christian education activist. In Guinea Pig Kids II, she warns of a Holocaust that will be brought on, she claims, by the U.S. public education system.

Bachmann’s co-star, Michael Chapman, get even more descriptive and paranoic , claiming in the video that “globalists’ were plotting to destroy Christian America by indoctrinating children with a morality that would lead to a second Auschwitz.

A conservative Christian group called the Maple River Education Coalition made and distributed Guinea Pig Kids II, the obscure conspiracy theory video starring Bachmann and Chapman, in 2002.
 

 
Via Mother Jones

 
I’m fascinated by the films of British documentarian Nick Broomfield. One of the pioneers of the “You get a documentary plus ME!” school in films like Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, Kurt and Courtney and Biggie & Tupac, the button-pushing Broomfield’s almost libelous directing techniques are both hilarious and riveting. I would never miss one of his films, which can be good sleazy fun (there is of course, another side of Broomfield’s work in socially-conscious films like Ghosts, Behind the Rent Strike and Battle for Haditha which I’m not addressing here).

One of Broomfield’s oft-used narrative tropes that I enjoy the most is when he knocks on the door of a subject’s home and when they aren’t there or refuse to talk to him, this is seen as evidence that they are hiding something. But he never comes right out and says that (libel laws being what they are) he usually just asks some form of this question pointedly right after we’ve seen a door slammed in his face or a security guard leading him away, “But what is ____ trying to hide?”

Nick Broomfield can be a gleefully immoral documentarian, which is why I was so tremendously pleased to find that the latest target of Broomfield’s patented style of hit and run filmmaking is none other than that snowbilly grifter herself, Sarah Palin! Broomfield’s Sarah Palin—You Betcha! is set to join Werner Herzog, Jessica Yu and Morgan Spurlock’s new films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

The film is supposed to examine Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, AK in detail and promises interviews with Palin’s parents, political associates and former brother-in-law. Broomfield told the Daily Mail:

“People are frightened to talk. Wasilla makes Twin Peaks look like a walk in the park. It’s a devout evangelical community – 76 churches with a population of only six thousand.”

And how many meth labs?

I’m just sorry that Broomfield wasn’t able to get El Duce on camera talking about Sarah Palin. (On a side note, about 20 years ago at a party for the Beastie Boys in Los Angeles, El Duce cheerfully told me that he had raped a friend of mine’s dog).

Below, in a clip released on YouTube, Nick Broomfield confronts Sarah Palin in public, in his signature Nick Broomfield style:
 

 
Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips is such a fucking idiot that I have, on more than one occasion, wondered if he was some sort of long-fuse “Yes Men” prank designed to embarrass and disgust current or would-be Teabaggers from having anything to do with the dying-off political movement. Just Google his name, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of examples of completely unintelligent, ill-informed, ignorant and just plain stupid things he’s said. Judson is a small-town jackass who puffs his chest out and says dumb shit like only land owners should be allowed to vote. What does he add to the conversation besides a hefty dollop of DUMB?

Here’s just the most recent example of what a complete buffoon this man is. Via Raw Story:

At a Wisconsin rally on Saturday, Judson Phillips, CEO of “Tea Party Nation”, one of the many tea party splinter groups, claimed that “the left” has “killed a billion people in the last century”.

According to Politico, Phillips and other speakers heated up the rhetoric around Tuesday’s historic recall elections, with one speaker referring to Democrats as terrorists who struck at a Republican “Ground Zero”. Vince Shmuki, leader of another tea party group, the Ozaukee Patriots said, “This is ground zero. You remember what the term ground zero means? We have been attacked.”

Earlier this week, Judson Phillips compared protesters who opposed Governor Scott Walker to Nazi storm troopers. On Saturday, he said, “I detest and despise everything the Left stands for. How anybody can endorse and embrace an ideology that has killed a billion people in the last century is beyond me.”

See what I mean? If Judson did not exist, it would be in the interests of the Democrats to “invent” him. If they weren’t so lame, the Democrats, I’d have added “and maybe they have” but this is Democrats we’re talking about.

Phillips made this statement at a sparsely-attended rally to support Republican State Senator Alberta Darling, who is in the fight of her political life trying to hold onto her seat against Democratic Representative Sandy Pasch. When they were making the speakers list for the rally, you have to wonder what the selection process criteria was that they decided to INVITE (and probably pay the travel and hotel costs) for a complete idiot like Judson Phillips. How is inviting a fool to say crazy shit that is then ridiculed all over the media and blogsphere in any way helpful to their cause?

Unless it IS helpful to their cause, of course, which is just too frightening to contemplate.
 

 
Below, Phillips makes a complete and utter fool of himself on Hardball with Chris Matthews when he decided to flap his lips about the Gabrielle Giffords murder attempt just after the shooting in Tucson. How dumb would you have to be to follow this goofball?