Look who wants in on the class war: It’s the undead vs. the Teabaggers as hordes of pro-labor zombies roamed around Madison, Wisconsin over the weekend in search of some brains. Looking for high IQ dining anywhere near the Tea party-dominated statehouse was perhaps a poor idea for a zombie banquet…
Via Joe My God
You gotta hand it to him, Rick Santorum, that wacky wingnut Republican no-hoper presidential candidate, a man with even less of a chance of gaining the GOP nomination than, say, Newt Gingrich (or any of the rest of them for that matter), just won’t give up. Despite the fact that NO ONE, I mean NO ONE thinks he’s got a snowball’s chance in hot hot Hades of gaining traction with, you know, actual voters, Rick’s out there, fighting the good fight… or something. It’s hard to say what he’s really doing or what he thinks he’s accomplishing.
Could there be a less-inspiring, less-intelligent, less-attractive candidate than Rick Santorum? Of course there could be, never count out the GOP when it comes to scraping the bottom of the loony bin, but the odds are against a lesser contender turning up in this election cycle. Even Ron or Rand Paul have better chances of moving into the White House than Santorum—effectively none, of course—and yet like a buffoonish Energerizer Bunny, he just keeps on going. BUT WHY? WHO is urging him to run? What kind of people shows up at his campaign events? What’s his motivation to run for President in spite of overwhelming indifference?
Who the fuck knows? Michele Bachmann probably even thinks Santorum is a pinhead. What alternate conclusion could anyone, even a Republican, come to when faced with a statement like this one:
“The social security system in my opinion is a flawed design, period. But, having said that, the design would work a lot better if we had stable demographic trends. … The reason social security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.”
Mull that one over. Nope, Social Security’s problems have nothing to do with the fact that after $106,800 the wealthy don’t have to pay anything else into the fund. Repeal Roe v. Wade and America’s financial woes will magically right themselves…
I can’t even get a hard on to make fun of Rick Santorum anymore. Why let perfectly good mockery go to waste on a guy like him?
Via Wonkette
The GOP presidential primary just gets better and better all the time! Michele Bachmann? Newt? Haley Barbour? Rick “frothy mixture” Santorum? If this primary season wasn’t already shaping up to be an embarrassment of comedic riches, look at the latest kook to throw his tin-foil hat in the Republican ring. From the Wall Street Journal:
Remember Judge Roy Moore? He was the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice removed from office over the Ten Commandments monument he erected outside the state courthouse. Now, he’s about to jump into the presidential election in Iowa, GOP officials say.
Eight years after a state panel removed him from the bench over the commandments spat, and five years after he lost in the Republican primary in the Alabama governor’s race, the 64-year-old judge is preparing to launch a presidential exploratory committee and enter the Iowa fray, according to multiple Iowa GOP officials.
Below, Moore speaking at an anti-gay rally in Iowa. These guys are the best. Another Republican culture warrior no-hoper who’ll siphon off some bucks from the most reactionary radical right-types. Go get ‘em. tiger.
Via Joe.My.God
Above, Carlos F. Lam, former Indiana Deputy Prosecutor, now and forevermore, just an unemployable idiot!
The gods of Republican schadenfreude have once again smiled on America’s working class. However the events in this story took place so quickly that there was scarcely enough time for it to make the news nationally, so here’s a post-mortem on the dead as a doornail legal career of one utterly silly fellow, a former Indiana deputy persecutor prosecutor—and arch Republican buffoon—by the name of Carlos F. Lam.
Amidst the more than 50,000 emails sent to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker during the heat of the anti-union uprising, a two paragraph email from Lam, shall we say, stuck out like a sore thumb. In it, a PUBLIC OFFICIAL WHO ACTUALLY HAS A LAW DEGREE wrote:
“If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions’ cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions. Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and umbrella union organizations in the protests. Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos F. Lam.”
According to the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism:
Carlos F. Lam submitted his resignation shortly before the Center published a story quoting his Feb. 19 email, which praised Walker for standing up to unions but went on to say that the chaos in Wisconsin presented “a good opportunity for what’s called a ‘false flag’ operation.”
At 5 a.m. Thursday, expecting the story to come out that day, Lam called his boss, Johnson County, Ind., Prosecutor Brad Cooper, and told him he had been up all night thinking about it. “He wanted to come clean, I guess, and said he is the one who sent that email,” Cooper said.
He came into the office and gave his resignation verbally, Cooper told the Daily Journal in Franklin, Ind. The resignation was announced after the Center’s initial story was published.
Email headers with detailed IP addresses suggested that the message was sent from Indianapolis.
Lam, an Indianapolis resident, at first told the Center he never wrote it.
Reached Tuesday by phone at the number listed on the email, Lam confirmed his email address matched the Hotmail address appearing on the Walker email, but said he had never written to Walker. “I am flabbergasted and would never advocate for something like this, and would like everyone to be sure that that’s just not me,” he said, after being read the email.
Except that it was him. And he SIGNED IT WITH HIS OWN NAME and even added his telephone number! And it came from his IP address! Of course it’s not him, why, a um, a UNION THUG must have sent it!!!!
Shit, these Republicans crack me the fuck up! How can someone able to pass the bar exam not realize this is a PREPOSTEROUSLY stupid thing to do???
From Mother Jones:
Lam wasn’t alone in proposing to undermine unions with sleazy tactics during the Wisconsin protests. The day after Lam sent his email, radio talk show host Mark Williams [former Tea Party Express leader] wrote a blog post urging his followers to cause trouble at a Sacramento solidarity event by wearing Service Employees International Union T-shirts and say outrageous things to embarrass the union. “If I do get the ‘in’ I am going to do my darnedest to get podium access and take the mic to do that rant from there,” Williams wrote. “With any luck and if I can manage the moments to build up to it, I can probably get a cheer out of the crowd for something extreme.” This, of course, was the same Mark Williams who infamously wrote a blog post in the voice of black slave who said that slavery was “a great gig.”
You expect such buffoonery from Williams. But from a deputy attorney general and a county prosecutor? All in all, it’s been a rough month or so for prosecutors in the great state of Indiana.
That last sentence, should you have already forgotten, refers also to disgraced Indiana state Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Cox, who wrote on his Twitter account that riot police should “use live ammunition” in the Wisconsin capital against union members and protesters. When Mother Jones reported on this matter on Feb. 23, Cox was fired from his job.As he should have been.
With all their new-found free time, Cox and Lam will have lots of time to consider the fact that career-wise, they’re both KAPUT in the legal profession. Who would hire lawyers THIS STUPID? An idiotic, loose cannon attorney is the last thing any respectable law firm requires. These stunts will follow them around on Google like shit on their shoes for the rest of their lives and I sure hope they’ve both got some INSANE debt from law school. Imagine what it must be like googling yourself and reading articles like this one calling you an abject moron and there are tens of thousands of them! And if either one of them is married, good luck holding onto your wife!
Indiana prosecutor Carlos F. Lam resigns after recommending Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker stage fake attack against himself (Post Crescent)
YES!!! It really looks like the dingbat MN Congresswoman from what must be the lowest IQ district in all of America—they elected her didn’t they? I rest my case—is going to, or has already, if you’ve been watching her behind the scenes moves, thrown her hat in the ring for the Republican Presidential nomination. CNN reports that she’s planning to form a national exploratory committee in June, if not earlier and she’s already making moves in Iowa (where her office could open as early as this weekend) New Hampshire and South Carolina. Comedians, lefty pundits and every single Democrat in the nation are praying to the gods of schadenfreude that Michele Bachmann makes good on her threat. Hell, the woman might even be able to keep the great Garrison Keillor from retiring!
Me? Lets just say, I think it will be good for democracy…. and leave it at that!
One extremely funny thing to contemplate is “Who would be her running mate?” should she secure the nomination (in some fucked up parallel universe, I mean). Looking at the field of all possible candidates—and American electoral politics being what they are—it would almost assuredly be a male Republican. Which one of them would to craven enough to take a strap-on up the ass and be her bitch boy? Obviously, figuratively speaking, that would be a requirement for the job.
What’s next from the folks who gave us John Kline, Michele Bachmann and Erik Paulsen? You don’t wanna know… This one is fucking breathtaking.
I’m going to debut a new category on Dangerous Minds for this doozy: “Stupid or Evil?”
From Fight Back News:
St. Paul, MN – Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.
On March 15, Angel Buechner of the Welfare Rights Committee testified in front of the House Health and Human Services Reform Committee on House File 171. Buechner told committee members, “We would like to address the provision that makes it illegal for MFIP [one of Minnesota’s welfare programs] families to withdraw cash from the cash portion of the MFIP grant - and in fact, appears to make it illegal for MFIP families to have any type of money at all in their pockets. How do you expect people to take care of business like paying bills such as lights, gas, water, trash and phone?”
House File 171 would make it so that families on MFIP - and disabled single adults on General Assistance and Minnesota Supplemental Aid - could not have their cash grants in cash or put into a checking account. Rather, they could only use a state-issued debit card at special terminals in certain businesses that are set up to accept the card.
The bill also calls for unconstitutional residency requirements, not allowing the debit card to be used across state lines and other provisions that the Welfare Rights Committee and others consider unacceptable.
Buechner testified, “We’ll leave you with this. It is not right to punish a whole group because of the supposed actions of a few. You in this room could have a pretty rough time if that was the case. It is not right to stigmatize and dehumanize women living the hard life of trying to raise children while living 60% below the poverty level. It is not right to use racist, bumper-sticker hate to inflict human misery for political gain.”
These people are evil and stupid. What’s happening to this country that such bizarre people can make it into public office? THIS is what you get when you vote Republican or sit out the midterm elections.
Via Crooks and Liars
The man of mystery behind Christian Nightmares gives an interesting interview over email to Matthew Paul Turner of Jesus Needs New PR blog
For those of us who had to undergo a fundie detox at some point or another in our lives, the following should ring quite true:
MPT: Can you tell me a little about your childhood as it relates to faith?
CN: Hmm… as it relates to faith… I don’t know if I ever was a true believer, I was just too afraid not to believe. I was completely controlled by fear. So many of the sermons in church ended with, “If you were to walk out of here today and get hit by a car, do you know where you’d spend eternity?” I didn’t know, and it was petrifying! If they were right about this place called Hell—a place of complete and utter darkness, a never-ending lake of fire where lost souls are tortured for all eternity—then I was screwed if I was wrong. I didn’t have the guts to let my chips ride on that one, especially at such a young age. I think I tried to talk myself into believing, and I recited the Sinner’s Prayer, just to be on the safe side. But because in my gut I didn’t really believe, I was constantly doubting myself, and incredibly insecure and anxious. And then the pastor would regularly preach things like, “You say that you’re saved, but are you really saved? Did you really mean it when you asked the Lord into your heart? Are you really living for him?” It totally messed with my head. I’d think to myself, Well, I said the prayer . . . I thought that was all I had to do! I’m pretty sure I believed it in that moment . . . But what if I didn’t? I became really paranoid and terrified of death. And I must have asked Jesus into my heart thousands of times: Before I’d get into a car or on a plane (just in case we got into an accident), and every night before I’d go to bed (just in case, for some reason, I died in my sleep), to name just a few scenarios. It was crazy! But it was very real to me at the time. Needless to say, it didn’t do much to build up my confidence and self-esteem, and it shaped my personality and worldview in some pretty negative ways. It’s taken me years to reverse this, and I’m still not all the way there yet.
MPT: Did your church experiences involve any true-to-life “Christian nightmares”? Care to share a couple?
CN: There was one Good Friday, when I was about 10 or 11-years-old, where I was forced to eat a heaping tablespoon of horseradish to get a better sense of “how much Christ suffered for you on that cross!” It was presented as “the least you can do considering all Jesus did for us!” That was pretty nightmarish, and ended with me hugging a toilet bowl.
I was also petrified of The Rapture, this idea that, at any moment, the Trumpet of the Lord could sound and all of the believers would get wisped up into Heaven, but that I might get Left Behind. Not only was I really scared and depressed by the idea that most of the people I knew might suddenly vanish and I’d be left to fend for myself, but I also thought that if that happened, then I would know that it was all true after all, and that my only chance of joining my friends and family up in Heaven would be to reject the Mark of the Beast, and then probably be beheaded (we’ve all seen those movies in church, right?). I became obsessed with The Rapture, really paranoid about it. There were many times when I thought that it had happened. I’d be talking with my mom in the kitchen or something, then turn around and she’d be gone, and I’d think to my self, Oh my God, this is it—it’s happened! And I’d yell out, “Mom? MOM?!!!” Of course, she’d just gone downstairs to fold laundry or something . . . I can laugh about it now, but I didn’t then.
Read the entire interview at Jesus Needs New PR.
Okay, admittedly I’m not in the habit of applauding the actions—or integrity—of Glenn Beck or anything the guy’s even remotely connected with. Clearly to readers of this blog, I have a rather low opinion of the man. I think Glenn Beck is bad for America because he fills the heads of ignorant people who aren’t sophisticated enough to be able to evaluate an information source, and who know nothing whatsoever about history, with shit. He fills their heads with shit. If Glenn Beck were hit by lightning, I would start believing in a loving, interventionist God concerned with America’s future.... but I digress.
It’s just hard for me to say this, I guess, uh, what I’m trying to say, but there is something on Beck’s news website, The Blaze, that demands to be read if you want to understand exactly what is going on with the “undercover NPR Muslim sting” video the rightwing is all up in arms about. I’m not kidding, it’s essential reading and it’s smart stuff. How (or why) this news analysis was financially underwritten by Glenn Beck, I really can’t say, but what Scott Baker wrote there, examining if the videos were edited in a misleading fashion along with Blaze video producer Pam Key, and what Emily Esfahni Smith wrote there about whether or not the means justify the ideological ends, where LYING is involved, I can find little fault with.
However, because writing something nice about Glenn Beck is difficult for me, I think I’ll just take the easy way out and quote Ken Layne posting on Wonkette:
Whenever that James O’Keefe guy puts out another heavily edited video against some liberal bogeyman, both the White House and the Washington/New York media quickly fire everyone involved — because the only rational way to deal with claims made by partisan pranksters is to simply punish anyone targeted. That’s why Shirley Sherrod was immediately fired by the White House while the Lame Stream Media nodded approvingly and only Wonkette bothered to look at the allegedly damning video closely enough to see that Breitbart’s crew had carefully edited it to make Sherrod sound like a raving racist. Likewise, the firing of NPR executive Ron Schiller and his CEO boss was cheered by the liberal media and got solemn nods from Democrats in Washington. Only Glenn Beck’s reporters at his website, The Blaze, bothered to watch the unedited footage and note that the various bombshells in the video were taken out of context (the opinions of others made to look like the opinions of Schiller, for example) and that Schiller’s pro-Republican statements were (obviously) all cut out of the video released by O’Keefe.
Here’s the unedited section with Ron Schiller discussing the opinions of a senior Republican lawmaker and a major GOP donor. While Schiller seems to agree with the characterization of the Tea Party people at the end of this anecdote, it’s obvious he is quoting Republicans uneasy with the teabaggers here:
There’s a lot more of this on The Blaze: eight sections of raw video with written commentary by a video producer from the website. She finds numerous instances of editing to make Schiller sound like he’s replying to completely different statements (a bemused reaction to something about restaurant reservations is made to look like a response to implementing sharia law worldwide), and she also finds sections where the audio has clearly been switched from another part of the video, as well as the complete removal of many instances of Schiller and his colleague praising either Republicans or the Fox News audience.
There were pretty much only two news sources to pick this up from, Wonkette and The Blaze. What does it say about the rest of the media (no matter their supposed bias or supposed lack of one) who gave this story and that dweeby, sleazeball James O’Keefe a pass, AGAIN???
Hell, isn’t it obvious why Andrew Breitbart stayed away from this stinker? Yes it is, because James O’Keefe is a lying sack of shit and Breibart knows it. A sleazy non-entity who should be treated as one! Why wasn’t it Salon or The Nation or MSNBC who looked into this video, first? Shouldn’t the name James fucking O’Keefe have caused anyone to sit up an notice on the Left??? It took Glenn Beck’s crew to get the truth out? Yes, it did! I did wake up in Bizarro World again, didn’t I?
But the truth will out in the weirdest places sometimes. Good on Scott Baker, Blaze video producer Pam Key and Emily Esfahni Smith for having the courage and journalistic integrity to out one of their own, or perhaps they don’t count clown boy James O’Keefe as one of their own. You know, a real investigative journalist.
Anyone looking at the edited version of the Project Veritas video would be concerned about the conduct and views expressed by the NPR representatives. But should we also be concerned about the deceptive nature of some of the video’s representations? Some will say no — the end justifies any means, even if unethical. Others may be bothered by these tactics and view similar projects with a greater degree of skepticism.
In our posting yesterday on the ethics of undercover journalism, we found a range of views. One interesting view is held by Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard. Barnes believes it is always wrong for a journalist to lie: “It‘s dishonest for anyone in journalism to pretend to be someone they’re not.”
But Barnes also believes this applies only to journalists. “This rule doesn’t apply to folks outside the profession,” he told The Blaze. Barnes views the O’Keefe production as a “political hit job and a quite clever and successful one at that.”
Barnes may not realize that O’Keefe describes his work as “investigative journalism,” and thus by Barnes definition — unethical.
And that is only on the issue of going undercover. But even if you are of the opinion, as I am, that undercover reporting is acceptable and ethical in very defined situations, it is another thing to approve of editing tactics that seem designed to intentionally lie or mislead about the material being presented.
As you might expect, the comments on THIS ONE are fascinating and to be fair, all over the place. That’s not typical of what I’ve seen on the boards there at all.
One of the posters (“CaptainKook”) even writes
“O’Keefe is, ultimately, lying to YOU when he publishes these faked edited and dishonest scam videos. WHY whould you willingly choose to believe a guy who YOU KNOW IS LYING TO YOU???”
This is a very good, penetrating question not just for far right conservatives who cheer the likes of James O’Keefe and Lila Rose on even knowing that they are basically liars who they happen to agree with, but to the left who let them get away with it just long enough for their version of heavily edited reality to become the de facto truth.
I mean James O’Keefe lying, right? Who’d have thunk it?
That the answer was Glenn Beck’s crew at The Blaze is as surprising to me as it probably is to you, too. But there it undeniably is.
You can’t explain that!
Some people see vast devastation and the human toll, others, like Christian author Tim LaHaye see an opportunity for self-promotion!
Tim LaHaye, the best-selling author of the “Left Behind” series of Bible prophecy novels, was one of many visiting the island of Maui who had to be evacuated to upper floors of the Marriott Hotel today.
He said being caught in the crossfire of the fourth largest earthquake in modern history helped prepare him for two prophecy conferences he was scheduled to address in Hawaii.
“The Bible tells us in Matthew 24 that one of the signs of the last days – one of the birth pangs to occur – is an increase in earthquake activity and intensity,” LaHaye told WND. “We’re seeing that happen here. It’s not just earthquakes, but hurricanes and all kinds of natural disasters.”
Give it a fucking break, asshole! At least for a day or two, huh?
Via (where else?) World Net Daily